The Top 5 Most Notorious Outlaws (15 page)

“Now Bonnie and Clyde are the Barrow Gang,

I’m sure you all have read

how they rob and steal and those who squeal

are usually found dying or dead.

There’s lots of untruths to these write-ups

They’re not so ruthless as that

Their nature is raw, they hate all law

Stool pigeons, spotters, and rats.”

In August 1932, Bonnie left the gang long enough to visit her mother in Dallas, and while she was gone, Clyde, along with Raymond Hamilton and Ross Dyer, attended a barn dance just across the Texas state line in Stringtown, Oklahoma.  They were sitting outside the dance, drinking, when Stringtown Sheriff C. G. Maxwell and his deputy, Eugene Moore, approached them to find out what they were doing.  Though there is no evidence to indicate that either man knew anything about who they were, Barrow still saw a uniform, and that’s all it took.  He and Hamilton fired on both men, killing Moore.  Though Maxwell was seriously injured, he was able to survive the attack and describe the two shooters.  

High with a sense of having struck out against authority, Barrow quickly attacked again, this time killing a storekeeper who didn’t give up the $28 in his cash register quickly enough.  This October 11 robbery, which took place in Sherman, Texas, was yet another example of the escalating violence in the gang’s tactics.

On Christmas Eve 1932, 16 year old W. D. Jones became the youngest member of the Barrow gang.  A family friend for years, Jones already had a criminal record and naturally looked up to the bad boy Clyde and wanted to be like him.  He rode out of Dallas with them that night, and in an interview with Playboy decades later, he described what happened on Christmas Day.

I had got with Clyde and Bonnie the night before in Dallas. Me and L. C., that’s Clyde’s younger brother, was driving home from a dance in his daddy’s old car. Here come Bonnie and Clyde. They honked their car horn and we pulled over. I stayed in the car. L. C. got out and went back to see what they wanted. Then he hollered at me, “Hey, come on back. Clyde wants to talk to you.” Clyde was wanted then for murder and kidnaping, but I had knowed him all my life. So I got out and went to his car.

He told me, “We’re here to see Momma and Marie.” (That’s Clyde’s baby sister.) “You stay with us while L. C. gets them.’’ I was 16 years old and Clyde was only seven years older, but he always called me “Boy.”

Them was Prohibition days and about all there was to drink was home-brew. That’s what me and L. C. had been drinking that Christmas Eve and it was about all gone. Clyde had some moonshine in his car, so I stayed with him, like he said, while L. C. fetched his folks. They lived just down the road in back of the filling station Old Man Barrow run.

After the visiting was over, Clyde told me him and Bonnie had been driving a long ways and was tired. He wanted me to go with them so I could keep watch while they got some rest. I went. I know now it was a fool thing to do, but then it seemed sort of big to be out with two famous outlaws. I reckoned Clyde took me along because he had knowed me before and figured he could count on me.

It must have been two o’clock Christmas morning when we checked into a tourist court at Temple. They slept on the bed. I had a pallet on the floor.

Next morning, I changed two tires on that Ford Clyde had. Clyde really banked on them Fords. They was the fastest and the best, and he knew bow to drive them with one foot in the gas tank all the time. We went into town and stopped around the comer from a grocery store.

Clyde handed me an old .41-caliber thumb buster and told me, “Take this, boy, and stand watch while I get us some spending money.” Later, I found out that gun wouldn’t shoot because there was two broken bullets stuck inside the chamber. I had to punch them out with a stick.

I stood outside the store while Clyde went in. Bonnie was waiting in the car around the corner. After he got the money, we walked away toward Bonnie. Now, the blocks in them days was longer than they are now; and before we got halfway back to the car, Clyde stopped alongside a Model A roadster that had the keys in it. I don’t know if he’d seen something over his shoulder that spooked him or what. But he told me, “Get in that car, boy, and start it.” I jumped to it. But it was a cold day and the car wouldn’t start. Clyde got impatient. He told me to slip over and he’d do it. I scooted over. About then an old man and an old woman run over to the roadster and began yelling, “That’s my boy’s car! Get out!” Then another woman run up and began making a big fuss. All the time, Clyde was trying to get it started. He told them to stand back and they wouldn’t get hurt. Then the guy who owned it run up. Clyde pointed his pistol and yelled, “Get back ‘ man, or I’ll kill you.” That man was Doyle Johnson, I learned later. He came on up to the car and reached through the roadster’s isinglass window curtains and got Clyde by the throat and tried to choke him.

Clyde hollered, “Stop, man, or I’ll kill you.” Johnson didn’t move, and Clyde done what he had threatened. About then he got the car started and we whipped around the corner to where Bonnie was waiting. We piled into her car and lit a shuck out of town.

It all seemed pointless then as to why Clyde wanted that car. I’ve thought about it since, and I figure he must have wanted the laws to think we was in Johnson’s car. Of course, he didn’t have no way of knowing he was gonna have to kill Johnson.

We headed out of town toward Waco. A mile or two down the road, Clyde pulled over and said, “Boy, shinny up that pole and cut them phone wires. We don’t want no calls ahead.” I done it and we went on.

As I look back, cutting them phone wires was slick. That was about all you had to do to cut off the law in them days. There wasn’t no two-way radio hookups like now; and when a police used them long-distance phone wires to call the next town, it run up expenses. Them was hard times and even towns didn’t have much to spend. There wasn’t as many laws then, either, and they just couldn’t catch up with Clyde in them V8 Fords he drove. Ted Hinton and Bob Alcorn, the Dallas lawmen I come to know a year later, told me Clyde was about the best driver in the world. They said them Fords and Clyde’s driving was what kept him and Bonnie free them two years. Hell, I knowed that. I rode with him. He had me drive some when he was tired, but Clyde stayed behind the’ wheel when the heat was close. He believed in a nonstop jump in territory — sometimes as much as 1000 miles —whenever it got hot behind. He and Bonnie didn’t in- tend to ever be taken alive. They was hell-bent on running till the end, and they knowed there was only one end for them. Sometimes I thought Clyde liked the running. He dreaded getting caught, but he never give up robbing to work for a living. I reckon Clyde just didn’t want to work like other folks. For one thing, he never liked getting his hands dirty.

27 year old Doyle Johnson was a new father who was on his way home for Christmas dinner. Though Jones claimed Clyde shot Johnson, accounts of the shooting claimed the firing came from the passenger side, implicating Jones. According to Jones, those accounts gave Clyde all he needed to ensure Jones had to stay with the gang, and Clyde told the youngster, “Boy, you can’t go home. You got murder on you, just like me.”

Regardless of who pulled the trigger, the pair stole Johnson’s car and drove it to Tarrant County, where, two weeks later, they killed Deputy Sheriff Malcolm Davis. Like Doyle Johnson, Davis was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had been staking out a quiet part of town waiting for another wanted criminal when Clyde and Jones came upon the scene accidentally. The murder of Deputy Sheriff Davis was Clyde’s 5th killing since his February 1932 release, and he had been involved in the grave wounding of another officer as well.  

1931 mugshot of 15 year old William Daniel Jones. Jones and his friend L.C. Barrow were arrested after stealing and crashing a car.

In late March 1933, Clyde’s brother Buck was finally released from prison after having been given a full pardon by the governor of Texas.  He and his wife, Blanche, moved in with Bonnie, Clyde and Jones at 3347 ½ Oakridge Drive in Joplin, Missouri.  They lived a quiet life and might well indeed have escaped notice and arrest but for the group’s insistence on regularly hosting noisy card games that went until all hours of the night and were fueled by the newly legalized beer available with the end of Prohibition. The group routinely went through as much as a case of beer each evening, and during one particularly rowdy party, Clyde accidentally shot off his rifle, causing the neighbors to complain to the local police force.  

Buck and Blanche Barrow

Believing that they were only dealing with a bunch of rowdy citizens, five police officers surrounded the garage apartment on April 13, 1933, but when they called for those inside to come out with their hands up, everyone except Blanch came out shooting.  They killed Detective McGinnis on the spot, while Constable Harryman later died of his wounds.  Then, with Bonnie providing cover fire, the men jumped in the car and got it started.  They swung by to grab Bonnie and then headed down the street after Blanche, who had gone after Snow Ball, her little white dog.  

The Joplin hideout

When the dust settled, one officer had a face full of splinters from wood thrown at him by Bonnie’s shooting, one officer was dead, another was dying and two had escaped uninjured.  Of the gang, young Jones was the most seriously injured, having been shot in the side.  Buck was bleeding from where a ricocheted bullet grazed him and Clyde had a bullet hole in his suitcase.

What the group left behind proved to be much more important to the legend than anything they took with them.  The police found confirming evidence of all involved, including Buck and Blanche Barrow’s marriage licens,e as well as his three week old parole papers.  They also found a significant collection of guns and a camera with several rolls of undeveloped film.  Most interesting of all, they found the poem “Suicide Sal,” which had been written by Bonnie.

16 year old W.D. Jones posing

Because they had no photo lab of their own, the police took the film to the local paper,
The Joplin Globe
, for development.  As a result, a full page story soon ran featuring a cigar smoking Bonnie holding a pistol, Clyde and Buck playing around while pointing guns at each other, a host of other salacious pictures of the two couples, and Bonnie’s poem “Suicide Sal.”  The newly formed newswire service picked up the story, and “The Barrow Gang” became front page news all over the country. Jones explained the origins of the photos that made the gang famous: