Bonnie and Clyde, page 6
Though Clyde rarely drank, preferring to remain clear-headed, he and his friends were probably enjoying some bootleg whiskey that night. Dyer joined the dance, while Clyde and Raymond mostly stayed by the car, parked behind the band.
Atoka County sheriff Charles Maxwell and undersheriff Eugene Moore stopped by, in part because the sheriff wanted a ride in Moore’s brand-new Chevrolet. At some point, Sheriff Maxwell noticed the outsiders Clyde and Raymond and headed over to see what they were up to. Some say he saw them drinking.
Either way, he approached them with a warning: “Consider yourselves under arrest.”
He had barely gotten the words out when Clyde and Raymond both opened fire. Maxwell was struck six times before he fell, hit in the chest, arm, leg, wrist, and side. Though badly injured, he was still alive and managed to get off some shots himself. Moore came to his aid and was shot once in the chest, dying on the spot.
As the sound of gunfire rang out over the music, partygoers screamed and ran. Lights exploded from whizzing bullets. The band jumped from the stage to hide. Dancers ducked under tables and into bushes, calling out for friends.
Later, True Detective Mysteries, one of the many popular, cheap, and highly sensational magazines of the time, caffeinated the drama: “Young women screamed and fainted at the sight of the bleeding officers. Their escorts, pale with anger and horror, were forced to stand by helplessly as the butchery went on.”
Clyde and Raymond managed to speed off, and men at the dance pursued them, the magazine said. “Car lights shone like meteors as they swung in behind the fleeing desperadoes and dashed through the night at a speed so terrific that death lurked in every turn of the wheels.”
None of the real news accounts, however, mentioned a serious chase. In truth, Clyde and Raymond jumped into their car and tried to speed away, but a tire caught on the edge of a ditch and the car rolled over.
In the chaos, they managed to escape on foot and steal a nearby car.
Before they got out of Oklahoma, that car lost a wheel, sending it careening to a stop. Spotting a farmhouse nearby, a barefoot Clyde banged on the door, saying they needed a car to get an injured woman to the hospital. Mamie Redden said later that Clyde “put up such a pitiful story” that her twenty-year-old son, Haskell Owens, agreed to take him in the family car.
Once Owens was behind the wheel, Clyde put a gun to his side, forcing him to head in a different direction. Seeing her son turn the wrong way, Redden said, “caused me so much worry I could just feel every hair on my head standing straight up.”
After a while, that car broke down, too, and Owens managed to run off into the night. (Owens lived to age ninety-one, but after that frightening experience, his wife, Ruth, said, “he never answered the door at night.”)
Clyde and Raymond stole yet another car, and somehow, before the scorching summer sun had come up, they were back near Dallas.
The next day, Clyde sent a friend to pick up Bonnie from her mother’s house and together, they hit the road. By then, posses were swarming at least five southeast Oklahoma counties, using bloodhounds and volunteers to search for the unknown killers in the foothills near the Kiamichi Mountains. All they found were abandoned cars.
Law enforcement got a break on Sunday when they arrested a man who had boarded a bus toward Dallas. Though he gave another name, it was Dyer, who was also from West Dallas. Initially Dyer denied any involvement—but later, he seemed to have lots to say. By early the following week, Dallas newspapers reported police had “definite information” about who the two shooters were.
Four Dallas police detectives and two Dallas County deputy sheriffs, armed with machine guns and sawed-off shotguns, were assigned to track Clyde and Raymond.
Dyer tried to warn them that the men wouldn’t be easy to catch. The pair was well armed and had vowed to shoot anyone who tried to arrest them. Clyde also had boasted that he would visit his Dallas family whenever he wanted, even if that meant using his gun to get in and out.
Clyde and Raymond had promised to “fight to the death,” Dyer said. They would never surrender.
But law enforcement officials told the Dallas’s Daily Times Herald that they expected arrests “would be accomplished before the end of the week.” They would no doubt come to regret that boast.
EUGENE C. MOORE, 1901-1932, AND SHERIFF CHARLES MAXWELL
Undersheriff Eugene Moore with his daughters a few years before he died.
Eugene Moore, just thirty-one when he died, was the husband of Minnie and the father of three small children: an infant boy and two daughters, ages seven and three.
Moore’s father had once been a prosperous rancher and farmer but had lost it all during the Depression. So Moore became an undersheriff to feed his family. He was remembered as a man who was well liked and widely respected.
Moore’s son, Russell, said later that his family moved in with his mother’s parents after his dad died. She got a job, but making ends meet was difficult.
Still, he said, “the roughest thing for me was growing up without a father.”
Sheriff Charles Maxwell slowly recovered from his wounds, though he was left disabled. His granddaughter recalled that, years later, a bullet remained visible in his thigh.
Sheriff Charles Maxwell, circa 1930.
8
CARLSBAD, N.MEX., AUGUST 14, 1932.—
There’s lots of untruths to these write-ups;
They’re not so ruthless as that;
Their nature is raw;
They hate all the law—
The stool pigeons, spotters, and rats.
—Bonnie Parker, “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde”
BONNIE SUGGESTED they head to New Mexico.
In 1932, local police couldn’t pursue criminals—even suspected murderers—across city, county, or state lines, though that would change in a few years. Maybe Clyde and Raymond could cool off west of Texas.
Clyde, Bonnie, and Raymond went to visit Nellie Parker Stamps, Bonnie’s aunt on her father’s side, near Carlsbad, New Mexico, about five hundred miles from Dallas. Initially, Aunt Nellie was happy to reunite with her niece, whom she hadn’t seen in many years.
She was less sure about the two fellows with Bonnie, who were introduced to her as Bonnie’s husband, “James White,” and their friend “Jack Smith.” The young men seemed to have an unusual amount of cash with them, and they were driving a fancy new Ford V-8 Coupe that no country person could afford.
Worried, Aunt Nellie let the local sheriff’s office know of her concern.
On a Sunday morning in mid-August, Deputy Sheriff Joe Johns knocked on the door of the farmhouse. Bonnie answered.
“Whose Ford is this?” Johns asked.
Bonnie told him it belonged to the men, who were getting dressed. She promised they would be out in a minute.
Inside the house, Clyde and Raymond began to scramble. Getting dressed was code for trouble outside. But there was trouble inside, too: their guns were locked in the car so they wouldn’t scare Nellie and her husband, Melvin, and they couldn’t get to them. Finally, they discovered a shotgun in a closet and, snatching what they could of their valuables, exited from the back of the house.
Johns was studying their car with his back to the men. Clyde and Raymond snuck up on him and, with the shotgun readied, ordered Johns to get his hands up. The sheriff didn’t dare reach for his own gun, especially after one of his attackers fired a warning shot into the ground.
The men ordered the sheriff into the car, and Clyde, Raymond, and Bonnie joined him. Aunt Nellie dropped to her knees, begging them not to hurt the deputy. “They told her to shut up,” Johns said later, “but they did say they wouldn’t hurt me.”
Then, without so much as a wave good-bye, they tore down the road.
The sudden kidnapping sent the region into a frenzy. A desperate search was launched for Johns with fifty officers from five New Mexico and Texas counties. An airplane scanned the landscape from above. Worried that the kidnappers were headed to Mexico, another two hundred and fifty men joined in to help law enforcement.
The fears grew more urgent when word got around that the deputy might have been grotesquely murdered. The shotgun warning blast had apparently blown Johns’s hat off. But when the tale was repeated, it was said Johns’s head had been shot off. That version of the rumor caught fire.
Later that day, a dead man was discovered ninety miles northeast of El Paso, Texas, and several newspapers ran frightening headlines saying the deputy had been found decapitated. The victim turned out to be someone else.
In fact, Johns was on the wildest ride of his life to the central part of Texas. Clyde sped along the muddy, unpaved roads at sixty miles an hour or more, weaving around traffic and knocking off more than one bumper as he swerved around cars.
Johns was nervous that any officers looking for them might open fire on all of them. So the deputy directed his driver through map-dot West Texas towns like Kermit, Monahans, and Crane to avoid bigger metropolises like Odessa.
During the day, it rained heavily, turning the roads into a slippery, mucky mess. At one point, Johns said, the car hit a huge wet pothole, spraying a thick layer of goo on the windshield. Rather than stop, Clyde opened his door and leaned out, still keeping his foot firmly on the gas as he pushed the speed to seventy miles an hour.
During the ordeal, the kidnappers patched several flat tires, and once left Raymond and Johns in some weeds while Clyde and Bonnie went to buy gasoline and oil. Raymond held a gun to the deputy’s side during most of the trip, and from time to time, one of them would threaten to kill their hostage.
LEGEND HAS IT: THE FORD V-8
The Ford V-8, introduced on March 31, 1932, was a revolutionary car.
Previously, only really expensive automobiles had the zippy eight-cylinder engines. But under the careful eye of Henry Ford, engineers developed a cheaper version that could be made as a single block instead of in two pieces.
Ford introduced more than a dozen models, including two-door, four-door, and convertible options, with prices often between $500 and $600, or about $8,800 to $11,000 today.
The cars were meant to hold two passengers in the front and three in the back, though they were skinny by today’s standards. A 1932 V-8 convertible sedan was six inches narrower than a 2017 Ford Fusion, making it cozy even for slender people.
The innovative and speedy Ford V-8 came in many styles, including two-door, four-door, and convertible.
Many drivers confidently left their keys in the car or failed to lock the steering column after parking, which allowed the car to be started without a key. There were door latches, too, but cars were often left unlocked.
Early V-8s held up to fourteen gallons of gas. But with fuel prices at 18 cents a gallon, or more than $3 a gallon in today’s dollars, many Depression-era drivers put in only a little gas at a time—a likely reason Clyde often ran out of fuel. In addition, the first V-8s drank oil, wore out pistons, and broke down often.
Even paved roads of the day were rough, and flat tires were common. V-8s came with a spare tire, but drivers also could patch flat tires on the spot, inflating the repaired tire with an air pump.
While the car’s average top speed was seventy-eight miles per hour, it could go ninety for several miles before the engine overheated. That was fast enough to outrun just about any other car on the road.
Johns feared he might die. “I wasn’t nervous,” he said, “but kind of half resigned to it, but with the determination that I would take every chance offered to battle them should the time actually come for the end.”
After the sun went down, they stopped for a break. Clyde and Raymond took a nap while the woman they called only “Honey” kept watch. At one point, she asked Johns how he liked being a criminal.
This was his first experience, Johns told her.
“You’ve had just 24 hours of it now,” she said, “and we get 365 days of it every year.”
That was a bit melodramatic. They had been on the road only since the morning and at most, Bonnie had been on the run less than two months and Clyde only a few months longer.
Later, a rested Clyde and Raymond told Johns they had tried to quit but couldn’t.
“They said the law wouldn’t let them,” Johns said. And they told him, “if we ever get caught, it’s the electric chair for us”—his first indication that they might be experienced killers.
Finally, right before the sun came up, they stopped several miles outside of San Antonio and let Johns out. They had been on the road about twenty hours and none of them had eaten. The trio kept Johns’s gun but made sure the deputy had enough money to get home. Their final words weren’t exactly fond ones. “You shore have caused us a lot of trouble, sheriff,” Clyde told him.
Johns replied that Clyde had caused him a little trouble, too, and “not a little worry.”
His kidnapper scoffed. “You haven’t been bothered much,” Clyde said as he pulled away.
Johns made his way to the home of an oilman, who fed him and gave him a ride to the local sheriff’s office. From there, he called his own office, reassuring the sheriff that his head was still attached and he was fine, despite “pretty rough” treatment.
Clyde, Bonnie, and Raymond continued on their endless day. Before letting Johns go, Clyde had searched for a fresh car to steal but wasn’t able to find what he wanted in San Antonio.
When possible, Clyde preferred to steal Ford V-8s for their powerful flathead engine and the reinforced steel body, which could block many bullets.
That afternoon, they were more than one hundred miles to the southeast, in Victoria, Texas, when they spotted the wife of a refinery manager drive her new Ford V-8 into the garage.
Minutes later, she and her husband saw a man drive off with it. The couple alerted the sheriff’s department, which soon had a report of a driver heading toward Houston, following a Ford coupe. Apparently, Clyde and Raymond figured two cars were better than one.
The sheriff’s office quickly notified the nearby counties. In Wharton, roughly halfway between Victoria and Houston, officers blocked a bridge on the highway and set up an ambush. One would turn on a flashlight if he saw the cars, allowing his colleague to prepare to shoot.
As Clyde approached the bridge, he saw a light. Almost instinctively, he slammed on the brakes and turned the car around, racing in the other direction. Raymond was a little slower to respond, and by the time he had made a U-turn, bullets were flying his way. Still, both cars escaped relatively unscathed.
When they had gotten far enough away, the trio abandoned the car they had driven from Carlsbad. Raymond clambered into their newer acquisition, leaving license plates and Johns’s gun behind, and the three hightailed it back to their hideout in an abandoned farmhouse west of Dallas.
On August 19, the Wharton County sheriff sent a letter to Dallas police asking for photos of Clyde C. Barrow, Raymond Hamilton, and “Bonnie Parker Alias Bonnie Thornton Alias Bonnie Smith.”
“Some of our boys had a little fun with that bunch last eveing [sic], they took two shots at one of our Deputies,” the sheriff wrote. In a later letter, the sheriff accused Clyde and Raymond of trying to kill a deputy, apparently the one who had been the lookout.
Bonnie wouldn’t be widely known for some months. But after participating in the New Mexico kidnapping and Wharton escape, she was quickly becoming a regular member of the Barrow gang.
LEGEND HAS IT: THE BONUS ARMY
Clyde and Bonnie’s rough summer of 1932 was largely of their making. But it was a long, miserable summer as well for many others across the United States for reasons out of their control.
More than twelve million people were now unemployed, up from just one and a half million in 1929. Excluding farm workers, roughly one in three Americans who wanted to work couldn’t find a paying job. Shantytowns of scrap and cardboard-box shelters sprang up on the edges of every big city, like the campgrounds in West Dallas, but much bigger.
Over the late spring and summer, an unusually large shantytown took root in Washington, DC—a camp of unemployed veterans of World War I, desperate for some help from the US government.
Calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, or the Bonus Army for short, the veterans wanted immediate payment of bonus money that they were supposed to receive in the distant future for their service. An estimated 25,000 men, along with some women and children, set up camp in May and June in and around the capital city.
After Congress failed to reach an agreement to pay the veterans, President Herbert Hoover grew impatient. Food in the camps was in short supply and the conditions were increasingly unsanitary. On July 28, after the veterans briefly clashed with police, he ordered the military to evict the vets and their families.
General Douglas MacArthur, accompanied by Major Dwight D. Eisenhower and Major George S. Patton, guided tanks and more than two hundred troops to two camp settlements. Tear gas grenades were hurled onto the grounds, driving out occupants and setting their flimsy shelters on fire.
The cold-hearted attack on hungry, destitute men who had fought for their country would burn an ugly memory into the minds of the American public and create a stew of distrust, resentment, and anger at authority. It also made it easier for brash outlaws to seem like folk heroes to everyday people.
