My Life with Bonnie and Clyde (30 page)

A page from one of Blanche Barrow’s scrapbooks. Left to right: Ralph Fults, Blanche Barrow, Raymond Hamilton. (Courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

One of Blanche Barrow’s scrapbooks contains a page dominated by a photograph of herself, flanked by pictures of Ralph Fults and Raymond Hamilton.

Blanche also tried to find out the fate of W. D. Jones, whom she had heard nothing about since the split-up in Dexfield Park, Iowa. As late as December 1934 she was still wondering about him. “Guess the poor little innocent thing is free,” she wrote her mother. “He should be in his mother’s arms with a diaper on.”
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Unbeknownst to Blanche at the time, Jones was serving a fifteen-year sentence for “murder without malice” in the January 6, 1933, death of Tarrant County Deputy Sheriff Malcolm Davis. It would be a long time before he was in his mother’s arms again.

Within two months of the above-mentioned letter, however, Blanche Barrow would have a chance to see W. D. Jones, if not actually speak with him. On February 22, 1935, she and Jones and twenty other defendants went on trial in Dallas, Texas, on federal charges of harboring Bonnie and Clyde. Harboring a federal fugitive was a relatively new criminal offense at the time and the “Barrow-Parker harboring trial,” as it came to be known, was the government’s initial test case. Five of the defendants, including Blanche Barrow, entered guilty pleas. Jones and the others took their chances with the court. In the end, all were convicted and the sentences ranged from one hour to two years. Blanche received a year and a day for harboring Bonnie and Clyde. The added sentence was to run concurrently with her Missouri conviction, meaning she would actually serve no extra time. It was part of the deal for her plea of guilty. Jones got the maximum, two years. But his sentence would also run concurrently with his other conviction, despite the innocent plea. Soon he and Blanche were back in their respective cells.
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Throughout 1936 and 1937, help came to Blanche Barrow from an unexpected source, Wilbur Winkler. Winkler had been married to Buck’s older sister Artie. He co-owned the beauty shop in Denison, Texas, that was managed by Artie and where Blanche worked while Buck was in prison. However, the fact that Blanche’s former employer, and husband of her sister-in-law, had begun working on her case probably came as a bit of a surprise because by then Winkler and Artie had divorced. In fact, by July 1937 Artie had long since left Denison and Winkler was remarried. The breakup, at least from Winkler’s point of view, vacillated between annoyance and fondness. In a letter to Blanche, Winkler complained of his former wife’s successful attempts to extract money and quit claim deeds from him, then stated that he felt sorry for her, and implied that he still loved her, though warily. In another letter he wrote in a self-effacing manner: “’A’ is married again, you know . . . guess anything was better than I.” Regardless, Winkler
had been writing letters to a number of Missouri officials in Blanche Barrow’s behalf and Blanche was very pleased. “He [Winkler] sure has come to the front for me and I sure do appreciate it,” she wrote her mother.
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In letters to Missouri governor Guy Parks, as well as to Paul Rentz, commissioner of the Department of Penal Institutions for the State of Missouri, and J. M. Sanders, chairman of the State of Missouri Board of Probation and Parole, Winkler offered to pay all of Blanche Barrow’s medical expenses related to treating her eye injury, to give her a job when she was released from prison, and to pay all of her travel and clothing expenses from Missouri to Texas. Winkler also asked both men to read the book
Fugitives
for proof of Blanche Barrow’s innocence.

The latter statement seems to support the argument that some aspects of the portrayal of Blanche Barrow in that book, supposedly authored by Nell Barrow Cowan and Emma Parker but actually ghosted by Dallas reporter Jan Fortune, may have been fabricated to help Barrow’s chances for a parole and to deter any future prosecution. This is particularly clear considering Blanche Barrow’s rather candid statements made during interviews with the editor concerning her clear complicity in a series of petty robberies perpetrated with her husband before his voluntary return to prison in 1931. Moreover, regarding the image of Blanche charging off down that street in Joplin, screaming and crying (as even Blanche herself writes in her own memoir), it is more than likely that it too was a fabrication, especially since no other eyewitness accounts support the story.

In his letters to Blanche Barrow, Winkler seems deeply interested in helping her return to her pre-prison career as a beautician. He offered to contact the Texas Board of Cosmetology on her behalf and inquire as to whether she needed to keep renewing her beautician’s license each year, or if she could just pay a flat fee to cover a span of years. He also asked if she was aware of a new product, “’machineless’ pads for giving permanents.” He offered to send her some samples to practice with, writing that he thought it was a wonderful invention.

Blanche Barrow’s father was also working for her release, supplying names of potential employers that might provide his daughter with a job. A job was one of the main criteria for parole but such was not easy to obtain in the depths of the Great Depression.

Although President Roosevelt won re-election by an enormous margin in 1936, taking all but two states, the luster of the New Deal was beginning to fade. Recession and unemployment continued to linger, indeed showing
few signs of ever receding despite the implementation of so many innovative relief programs beginning during the famous “Hundred Days” three years earlier. And although the industrial North was still reeling from the dire economic picture, it was independent farmers who were suffering the most, subsisting on less than 60 percent of their 1929 income. Then in 1936, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Agricultural Adjustment Act was unconstitutional. The economic relief to farmers that was supplied by the AAA was thus eliminated just as raging dust storms steadily increased across the Plains states, eroding topsoil from the Dakotas to Texas. Resentment, fear, and violence frequently swelled within the ranks of an increasingly desperate working class.
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Demonstrations by independent farmers across the nation and the destruction of truckloads of milk by dairy operators continued to disrupt the produce industry. In 1937, a number of strikes by thousands of workers at General Motors and U.S. Steel resulted in the recognition of the exclusive right of unions to negotiate contracts, wages, and working conditions with company management. Still, the feeling persisted that bankers, business moguls, and politicians were the consummate villains of the Great Depression. The notion was reinforced in 1938 with the formation of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and its immediate investigation of trade unions, Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), and even the Campfire Girls. HUAC was seen by many as the tool of big business, and much public protest was raised against it, but to no avail.
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In the prevailing climate, it was difficult enough for ordinary citizens to find work, much less convicted felons with the last name of Barrow. Despite help from people like Wilbur Winkler and others—including Platte County (Missouri) Sheriff Holt Coffey and even Katherine Stark, wife of the governor of Missouri—Blanche Barrow remained an inmate until March 25, 1939. On that date, a conditional commutation of her ten-year prison term became effective.
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“Badman Barrow’s Widow Quits Cell” read the headlines. The conditions set forth in the commutation included breaking no laws, associating with no person “of questionable character,” nor “frequenting places of ill-repute.” Blanche Barrow was also forbidden the use of alcohol and narcotics, and she had to submit a written report signed by her sponsor or a law enforcement official listing her whereabouts, employment information, and wages. She was required to submit such a report monthly until March 1941.
Blanche Barrow was also specifically ordered to leave Cole County, Missouri, and never return, an order she could easily comply with. Indeed, Blanche Barrow would have no difficulty with any aspect of the commutation. According to Warden J. M. Sanders, she had been a “model prisoner,” which accounted largely for the commutation—time off with good behavior. Despite her later assertion that her early release came about as a result of friends like Sheriff Coffey and an agent with the Department of Justice Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Blanche Barrow walked out of prison because of her demeanor while she was incarcerated there, although such friendships certainly did not hurt.
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Regardless of the exact nature of her release, when freedom finally came for Blanche Barrow she found herself stepping into a world that was in many ways vastly different from the one she had left five and a half years earlier. As the decade of the 1930s progressed there was less focus on crime and rampaging outlaws in the news media and more emphasis on the darkening world situation. That is not to say, however, that criminal activity waned, but by 1939 many of the more notorious gangsters and outlaws like John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, the Barkers, Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, and all the others who made such “good copy” for reporters, had either been killed, imprisoned, or executed.
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In other news that broke during the years Blanche spent inside prison walls, Germany’s president, Paul von Hindenburg, died and Adolph Hitler, already chancellor and dictator, assumed the German presidency as well, thus erasing any semblance of democracy. In addition, Italy and Ethiopia went to war over possession of Somalia. In 1935, the federal Works Progress Administration was organized, the Social Security Act was signed into law by President Roosevelt, and Huey P. Long, U.S. Senator from Louisiana, was assassinated in Baton Rouge. In 1936, Germany invaded the Rhineland, dust storms raged across the American Plains states, and civil war erupted in Spain.

In 1937 the world’s largest dirigible, Germany’s
Hindenburg
, exploded and crashed in a fiery heap near Lakehurst, New Jersey; aviatrix Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific Ocean while trying to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe by air; and the recently enacted federal minimum wage act, challenged by business interests, was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1938, Germany invaded Austria and ceded part of Czechoslovakia; Italy declared Libya an Italian possession; and the Japanese army pushed
further into China. In Spain, the bloody revolution led by Generalissimo Francisco Franco expanded, threatening to topple the republican government. Although the United States remained neutral in the Spanish conflict, many Americans volunteered to fight against Franco’s fascist revolutionaries. Nearly 50 percent of those volunteers died in Spain.

Blanche and her father. (Courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

In 1939, the year of Blanche Barrow’s release from the Missouri State Penitentiary, Spain fell to Franco, Japan continued to ravage China, and Germany invaded Poland, touching off World War II.
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Blanche Caldwell Barrow was released from the Missouri State Penitentiary on March 24, 1939, the day before her conditional commutation was to officially go into effect. She left immediately for Garvin, Oklahoma, as specified in the terms of her commutation, where she moved in with her father. It is thought by some that she later stayed with her half-sister Lucinda Hill, and perhaps even Buck Barrow’s older sister Artie.
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Just six days after Blanche Barrow’s release, a writer from Sherman, Texas, named Frank E. Bronaugh wrote a letter to her proposing that she write
“a long account . . . of the intimate, detailed experiences of your life, all about how you came to know Buck Barrow, to marry him, and the unfortunate events that led up to your arrest and of your experiences in prison . . . the longer the better.” Bronaugh offered to pay Blanche twenty-five dollars for the story, which was to be published in some unspecified “fact magazine.” He stated that he had recently made a similar deal with Alice Davis, the mother of Floyd and Raymond Hamilton, for the stories of her two sons.
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