Jeff Guinn Read online
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Copyright © 2009 by 24 Words LLC
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Photography credits can be found on Photographic Insert.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Guinn, Jeff.
Go down together: the true, untold story of Bonnie and Clyde / Jeff Guinn.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Parker, Bonnie, 1910–1934. 2. Barrow, Clyde, 1909–1934.
3. Criminals—United States—Biography. I. Title.
HV6245.G79 2009
364.15‘52092273—dc22
[B] 2008053342
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-5718-0
ISBN-10: 1-4165-5718-0
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
In memory of Max Lale,
an historian who inspired me,
and in honor of Cissy Stewart Lale,
a mentor and friend who still does.
Contents
Prologue
BEFORE
1. Henry and Cumie
2. The Devil’s Back Porch
3. Clyde
4. Bonnie
5. Dumbbells
6. The Bloody ’Ham
7. Decision
THE BARROW GANG
8. A Stumbling Start
9. Bonnie in Jail
10. Murder in Stringtown
11. Clyde and Bonnie on the Run
12. The Price of Fame
13. Raymond and W.D.
14. “It Gets Mixed Up”
15. The Shootout in Joplin
16. Shooting Stars
17. Disaster in Wellington, Murder in Arkansas
18. The Last Interlude
19. The Platte City Shootout
20. The Battle of Dexfield Park
21. Buck and Blanche
22. Struggling to Survive
23. The Eastham Breakout
24. Hamer
THE HUNT
25. The New Barrow Gang
26. Hamer on the Trail
27. The Methvins Make a Deal
28. Bloody Easter
29. Hamer Forms a Posse
30. Another Murder
31. The Letters of April
32. The Noose Tightens
33. Final Meetings
34. A New Line of Work
35. Haven
36. The Beginning of the End
37. “Do You Know Any Bank Robbers?”
38. The Setup
39. The Ambush
40. “Well, We Got Them”
AFTERWARD
41. Consequences
42. The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde
Note on Sources
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Photographic Insert
GO DOWN TOGETHER
Prologue
If it had been raining twenty miles west of Dallas on April 1, 1934, H. D. Murphy probably wouldn’t have become the most famous dead motorcycle cop in America. Officers of the Texas Highway Patrol usually didn’t take their two-wheelers out in inclement weather. But on this sunny Easter Sunday Murphy and two partners, Polk Ivy and E. B. Wheeler, were on holiday duty, cruising on their motorcycles along two-lane Texas Highway 114 near the town of Grapevine. It was considered onerous to be working on Easter, but not particularly hazardous. On a day like this the trio might nab a few speeders, or perhaps help motorists stranded by car trouble. It was the twenty-four-year-old Murphy’s first day on motorcycle patrol. He was tagging along with veteran officers Ivy and Wheeler. Ivy rode a few yards ahead of the other two.
Up to the moment he was gunned down, this was a particularly good time in H. D. Murphy’s young life. In twelve days he was to marry Marie Tullis, his twenty-year-old girlfriend. They’d just found an inexpensive furnished apartment to rent. Until the nuptials, Murphy was living at the YMCA. Marie had purchased her wedding gown. In spite of the current terrible times—Americans were still reeling through the Great Depression—Murphy seemed destined for a happy life. He had a secure job with a steady income and a loving fiancée who was about to become his wife. For most twenty-four-year-old men in 1934 America, that was as good as it got.
At about 3:30 in the afternoon, Murphy and Wheeler were still lagging behind Ivy when Wheeler spied a flashy black Ford V-8 with yellow wire rim wheels parked off Highway 114 on a narrow side road. The car could have been there because it had broken down, in which case whoever was in it might need assistance. Wheeler gestured for Murphy to follow him as he turned off to make a routine check. Polk Ivy, apparently oblivious, kept riding ahead. Wheeler and Murphy clearly didn’t expect trouble. They both had shotguns, but neither pulled his weapon from the harnesses by the seats of their motorcycles. Murphy’s shotgun wasn’t even loaded. He had the shells in his pocket. The patrolmen rolled up to the Ford; two men in nice suits stood beside the car, and there was a woman sitting inside it. Wheeler and Murphy had no idea they were in the presence of the country’s most notorious criminals.
Twenty-four-year-old Clyde Barrow and twenty-three-year-old Bonnie Parker had come to the area for a holiday get-together with their families, who lived in the slum known as West Dallas. Clyde and Bonnie realized the local police would be on the lookout for them—it was well known that they frequently ran the risk of visiting loved ones on special occasions—so they had decided to meet the other Barrows and Parkers out in the isolated countryside. Earlier in the day, Clyde had dispatched henchman Joe Palmer to hitchhike into West Dallas and tell the families to rendezvous off Highway 114 outside Grapevine as soon as possible. Meanwhile, he and Bonnie took long naps in their parked car and enjoyed a pleasant break from their normally frantic lives on the run. Bonnie also spent some time sitting on the grass and playing with the Easter gift she intended to give her mother that day—a live white rabbit that Bonnie had named Sonny Boy.
Thanks to newsreels at movie theaters and photos transmitted to newspapers through the recent magic of wire services, most Americans believed they knew exactly what Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker looked like. The young couple loved to strike dramatic poses for the cameras that they carried along with their guns, and some of these pictures had fallen into the hands of lawmen who made them available to the media. So the nation became familiar with nattily dressed Clyde brandishing a menacing Browning Automatic Rifle, and with Bonnie assuming unladylike postures on the bumpers of stolen cars. The most famous photo showed Bonnie with a cigar dangling from the corner of her mouth, a particularly eye-catching image in a time when most respectable women would discreetly puff cigarettes in private. Thanks to the media, Clyde and Bonnie had quickly come to be considered the epitome of scandalous glamour. But in person Clyde was short and scrawny, and Bonnie’s looks were ordinary. They were both crippled, Clyde from cutting off two of his own toes in prison and Bonnie as the result of a car wreck nine months earlier in which her right leg was burned so badly that bone was visible in several places. She hopped now rather than walked. Clyde often had to carry her. They had little in common with the glittering images of themselves that mesmerized the public. So as the two patrolmen approached the Ford, Wheeler and Murphy were relaxed rather than on guard. There seemed to be nothing threatening about these two strangers or the stocky young fellow who was with them.
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But people had a way of dying around the Barrow Gang, and that Easter Sunday proved to be no exception. Clyde Barrow had never intended to kill so many people. Of the seven men who’d died directly by his hand to date—he’d been erroneously blamed for two other murders—only two killings had been premeditated. The first was in 1931, when Clyde used a lead pipe to crush the skull of a fellow inmate who’d repeatedly raped him on a Texas prison farm. The second came six weeks before H. D. Murphy died outside Grapevine, when Clyde helped Joe Palmer murder a guard who’d abused Palmer in prison. Otherwise Clyde always preferred to run rather than fight. Previously he’d even taken lawmen as temporary hostages rather than engaging in unnecessary shootouts, and he always released them unharmed. That was his intention when Wheeler and Murphy rode up. While Bonnie remained in the Ford with Sonny Boy, Clyde turned to twenty-two-year-old Henry Methvin, the third Barrow Gang member present, and muttered, “Let’s take them.”
But Henry, an escaped con who’d joined the gang ten weeks earlier, misinterpreted his boss’s instructions. Henry was always prone to violence, all the more so when he had been drinking. On this Easter afternoon he and Bonnie, a borderline alcoholic, had indulged themselves with whiskey. As usual when he was out in public, Clyde had abstained. Tipsy and mean to begin with, Henry leveled a rifle he’d been concealing behind his back and shot E. B. Wheeler at point-blank range. The veteran patrolman died instantly. Murphy fumbled for his shotgun and the shells in his pocket. Clyde, furious with Henry but resigned to finishing what his partner had foolishly started, shot Murphy. The rookie fell to the ground, badly wounded but not dead. Once again, Henry Methvin overreacted. He stood over the fallen Murphy and fired several more shots into his body. Then he jumped into the Ford with Clyde and Bonnie, and the trio fled. Clyde, at the wheel as usual, cursed Henry while he drove away at breakneck speed, heading northeast toward the Oklahoma state line. This was one of Clyde’s regular tricks—lawmen from one state in pursuit of criminals had no jurisdiction in any other.
Back outside Grapevine, officers gathered at the site of the shooting. Wheeler was dead on the scene, and Murphy died soon afterward. One particularly gregarious witness, who claimed to have watched the whole thing from his farmhouse porch several hundred yards away, swore that two men shot down the patrolmen, and then the woman with them fired more shots into the fallen Murphy while her victim’s head bounced off the ground like a rubber ball. His false statement, combined with less colorful testimony from a couple who’d been driving by on the highway and several other bits of evidence, convinced the authorities that Wheeler and Murphy had become the Barrow Gang’s latest victims. They said as much to the reporters who swarmed to the scene, and these journalists gladly printed every shocking allegation.
Depression-era readers were desperate for entertainment, and stories about the Barrow Gang invariably boosted newspaper and magazine circulation. Many Americans considered cops and bankers to be their enemies. Although Clyde and Bonnie were never criminal masterminds or even particularly competent crooks—their two-year crime spree was as much a reign of error as terror—the media made them seem like they were, and that was enough to turn them into icons. Celebrities reflect their times and cultures: from the spring of 1932, when the newly formed Barrow Gang pulled its first holdups, through May 23, 1934, when a posse led by the only lawman in America who was as famous as they were led the ambush that killed them, Clyde and Bonnie came to epitomize the edgy daydreams of the economically and socially downtrodden. Resentful of their own powerlessness and poverty, Barrow Gang fans liked the idea of colorful young rebels sticking it to bankers and cops. Clyde and Bonnie were even better than actors like Jimmy Cagney who committed crimes onscreen, because they were doing it for real.
But as historian Iris Chang noted in an interview a generation later, “Celebrities are really distractions for the general public, first created, then most often destroyed, consumed, for our amusement.” Up to April 1, 1934, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker provided distraction for most Americans. Their victims in robberies and shootouts were generally perceived as part of a faceless Them who in some sense deserved what they got. But the stories following the shootings in Grapevine emphasized the death of H. D. Murphy—his partner E. B. Wheeler got at most fleeting mention. There were articles about brokenhearted Marie Tullis, who wore her wedding gown to her fiancé’s funeral, and descriptions of the apartment she and Murphy had been about to share. Bonnie Parker had been regarded as the sexy companion of a criminal kingpin. Overnight, she was newly perceived as a kill-crazy floozy who laughed as she finished off an innocent rookie patrolman and simultaneously ruined the life of the sweet young girl who’d been about to marry him. The vicarious love affair between Americans and the Barrow Gang was over. Having been entertained by Clyde and Bonnie for many months, the public now turned on them. It was time for the couple to get its comeuppance. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker still had seven weeks to live, but during those weeks they would be more reviled than celebrated. Their destruction, their consuming, had begun.
BEFORE
“Americans have fought one war to win their
independence and another to preserve the Union.
Now they face a new war, between the men who possess
more than they have earned and the men who have
earned more than they possess.”
—FORMER PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT IN 1910, THE YEAR OF CLYDE BARROW’S BIRTH
CHAPTER 1
Henry and Cumie
Clyde Barrow’s father, Henry, never had much luck in life, and the hard times started for him right out of the womb. There is some question about his birthplace and date—it seems most likely he was born to shoemaker Jim Barrow and his wife, Marie, in Pensacola, Florida, on January 10, 1873—but there is no doubt Henry was sickly from birth. The chills and fever he suffered regularly as an infant continued to plague him as an adult. No record exists of a doctor diagnosing the illness—which might have been recurrent malaria—and prescribing treatment. Sick babies lived or died in those days and Henry lived, barely. A tall, skinny boy, he staggered through early childhood. The first day Henry attended school he collapsed before noon, was taken home in a buggy, and never went back again. Throughout his life, he was completely illiterate.
Henry’s mother apparently died in 1884. Afterward, Jim Barrow decided to make a fresh start in a new location with an equally new vocation. With sons Henry and Frank in tow, he moved from Pensacola to Grimes County in East Texas, where he set himself up as a farmer by renting a small plot of land and cultivating cotton. Tenant farming, in those years, had several attractions. Crop prices were decent, and landowners with extensive acreage were usually glad to have some of it tilled by renters who would pay a portion of their annual harvest or profits in return for a place for their families to work and live. The most fortunate tenant farmers would string together several good years and eventually save sufficient money to buy land of their own. And as long as weather and economic conditions were favorable, the renters had the satisfaction of being their own bosses, beholden to no one but themselves, their independence baptized with their own sweat.
Jim apparently remarried in Texas—Henry would eventually claim two half-brothers, Ed and Jim, as well as Frank—and expected, as farming fathers did in that age, that his children would pitch in as unpaid laborers. Henry did, though his continuing health problems made him a sporadic contributor. East Texas was less swampy than the Florida Panhandle, so the episodes of illness weren’t as frequent. He found he liked farming just fine, but there was something else he soon came to love better.
Horse racing was a popular recreation in the East Texas backwoods. A man with a fast horse and a willingness to wager could make tidy sums. Henry had the willingness but not the fast horse, and as the son of a tenant farmer it wasn’t likely he would ever have one. The only horses on Jim Barrow’s place were bred to pull a plow. Henry still dreamed of someday owning his own racehorse rather than pla
cing wagers on someone else’s. He spent his limited leisure time at the races, watching and dreaming, and making small bets the few times he had any money. He was pulled in once by the local law on some unspecified racing-related charge. Nothing came of it—Henry was never convicted of anything in his life—but the brief brush with alleged crime alarmed devout Baptist Jim Barrow enough that he decided it was time to take his teenaged boy in hand.
Jim, by the standards of the day, would never have been considered a particularly strict parent. All country children expected to receive occasional whippings, usually some stinging lashes on the calves or hands or rear with thin switches cut and trimmed specifically for that purpose. Corporal punishment was as much a part of a farm childhood as chores. Henry would say later that his father “seldom if ever” whipped him, and even in this moment when Jim felt Henry was teetering on the abyss of unredeemable sin he still talked to his son rather than hit him. From that moment on, Jim decreed, Henry would attend church and Sunday School regularly, so that he would be constantly reminded of the difference between right and wrong. Gambling or anything else to do with horse racing was the first major step toward total dereliction. Henry, a dutiful son, did as he was told. He stopped going to the races and started going to church.
Soon afterward, Henry followed his father’s example in another way. Denied his goal of owning a fast horse, Henry now set his sights on at least owning his own land. Starting from scratch, he couldn’t afford the tools necessary for tenant farming, so when Henry was about sixteen he moved to nearby Nacogdoches and took a job in a sawmill to earn enough money for a grubstake. He didn’t intend to spend the rest of his days turning out lumber and obeying somebody else’s orders about what work to do and when to do it. The sawmill was just a jumping-off point.
Nacogdoches wasn’t a particularly big town, and sometime in late 1890 Henry made the acquaintance there of teenager Cumie Walker. Like Henry, Cumie was the child of a farming father, and the two also shared similar beliefs in the value of hard, honest work. But in almost every other way, they were different.