Jeff Guinn Read online

  As Bonnie was leaving, Clyde passed her a note scratched out on rough tablet paper. It included a helpful map of the Turner house, with the hiding place of the revolver clearly noted. Underneath the chart, he had scribbled, “You are the sweetest baby in the world to me. I love you.” Bonnie cherished those scrawled words. Four years later, Cumie Barrow found the note tucked carefully in the pocket of a purse Bonnie had left at the Barrows’ shack.

  Bonnie went to the Turners’ house. As Clyde had promised, Turner’s parents weren’t home. She went inside and looked for the gun, but Clyde had gotten the map wrong and the weapon wasn’t where she thought it would be. Nervously, she poked under bureaus and beds until she found it.

  Then came the problem of how, exactly, she could smuggle it into the county jail. Her purse would be routinely searched. The revolver was too bulky to be stuck in her boot, and it was too heavy to conceal under a hat. She finally buckled an extra belt under her dress to hold the gun. Unless she was subjected to a thorough body search—and the county jailors hadn’t subjected her to one on her previous visits—she could smuggle it in to Clyde. If the guards weren’t watching closely, once they were together she could reach inside her dress, loosen the concealed belt, and pull out the gun. From there, she had no idea what would happen besides Clyde’s instructions that she should leave quickly. Sometime after the escape he would find a way to come back for her.

  When she returned to the jail that evening, Bonnie had a scary moment when the guard on duty didn’t want to let her back in. She’d already had her daily visit, he said, so she should come back tomorrow. But Bonnie persuaded him, and it was easy after that. There was very little supervision—having been assessed a relatively light sentence for minor crimes, Clyde wasn’t considered much of a flight risk. Bonnie passed him the gun and hurried back to her cousin’s house to wait, though she wasn’t sure for what.

  Clyde and William Turner involved a third prisoner in their plan. Emery Abernathy was being held in the county jail on charges of burglary and bank robbery. The trio were locked in adjacent second-floor cells. About 7:30 in the evening, assistant county jailor Irving Stanford and turnkey Huse Jones were on duty. Turner called down that he was sick. Stanford went to check. Turner said he was nauseated, and asked for some milk to settle his stomach. It wasn’t an unusual request. The guards and prisoners at the jail were on reasonably good terms. Bringing Turner some milk was less trouble and a lot more pleasant than mopping up vomit. When Stanford returned with a small bottle and opened Turner’s cell door to hand it to him, Abernathy brandished the gun and ordered the jailor to hand over his keys. They undoubtedly warned Stanford that if he made a sound before they were out of the building they’d come back upstairs and kill him. Then they locked the jailor in one of the cells and hurried down the staircase. Jones was doing paperwork at his desk, and they took him by surprise. Barrow, Turner, and Abernathy again chose not to use their gun. Instead of shooting Jones, they told him to stay silently at his desk for five minutes, and disappeared through the jail door that opened onto Waco’s adjacent Sixth Street.

  The moment they were gone, Jones jumped up and ran after them. They hadn’t been smart enough to take his sidearm, and when Jones spotted the trio running down the street he drew his pistol and began shooting at them. Downtown Waco at night was not jammed with pedestrians. The fugitives were pulling away from their pursuer, and all Jones’s shots missed. Abernathy turned and snapped off a shot of his own despite being well out of range. Someone heard Abernathy’s shot and telephoned the police. Within minutes, they were on the scene, but the escapees weren’t.

  Clyde’s auto-stealing skills worked to their advantage. Within blocks of the jail, he hot-wired a car and the three hopped in. They drove a short distance to the north end of town and swapped the first stolen vehicle for a better one. The choice of the second car was fortuitous. It had been loaned to Dr. William Souther by a friend, and when Souther went outside about 8 P.M. and found it missing, he assumed the friend must have come by and picked it up. Accordingly, Waco police thought the fugitives were still driving the first car, and their initial emergency bulletins to authorities in the counties surrounding Waco gave the wrong information. It was eight the next morning before Souther finally contacted the Waco cops.

  Clyde, Turner, and Abernathy used that twelve-hour head start to drive west. It appears their only initial plan was to get as far away from Waco as they could. As they traveled, they kept switching cars. Vehicles presumably stolen by them were reported all the next day in a westbound pattern—Lampasas, Goldthwaite, Brownwood.

  Clyde was too busy running to send any word to Bonnie. She fretted at her cousin’s house from Tuesday night until Thursday morning, when the Waco Times-Herald plastered its front page with articles, photos, and editorials about the jail break. By then the police had connected enough dots for the main headline to read, “Trio Leaves Trail of Stolen Cars,” with sub-headlines noting the fugitives were heading west. The newspaper made it clear that the breakout hadn’t been engineered by criminal masterminds. Because of his youth, Clyde in particular was singled out for ridicule. An editorial sneered, “Schoolboy Barrow, Willie Turner and Emery Abernathy are at large this morning. But they’ll be back. They haven’t the brains to stay free. It’s the dumbbell in them that brings them back.”

  Bonnie may have been offended on her boyfriend’s behalf, but her reaction to the stories was mostly relief. The paper mentioned that the fugitives had somehow gotten a gun smuggled into their cells, but there was nothing that even remotely linked Clyde’s female visitor to it. She had, apparently, pulled it off, and now Clyde was going to promptly send for her or even come back to fetch her. Then their exciting new lives would begin.

  Except Clyde didn’t come that day, and there was no word from him. On Wednesday night Bonnie decided to wait for Clyde back in Dallas. She and her Waco cousin had become frightened when two strange men came up the sidewalk and pounded on the front door. Bonnie thought it was the police coming to arrest her after all. The young women huddled in a back room and didn’t answer the door. The men finally went away. Later, Bonnie wondered if they might have been sent by Clyde to bring her to him. But for the moment she was convinced that the cops were watching her every move and might be planning to pick her up. So at four on Thursday morning, fearful of showing her face on the bus or train, she had her cousin drop her off by the highway. Bonnie hitchhiked back home.

  When she got there, Bonnie didn’t tell Emma about the jailbreak. She ran out the next morning to get the early editions of the Dallas newspapers just in case there was a story about Clyde. As another day passed with no word from him, Bonnie’s jumpiness evolved into near-hysteria. Maybe Clyde wasn’t ever going to come back for her. Had she been cruelly used and discarded? Finally, four or five days after the breakout, a telegram arrived from Nokomis, Illinois. Clyde’s message was brief. He was all right. He’d be in touch. Bonnie was thrilled. Then the bad news came.

  From West Texas, Clyde, Turner, and Abernathy had driven north out of the state, stealing cars as they went. It was a sensible ploy. By the time local police had bulletins out about one missing automobile, the fugitives had swapped it for another. They ended up in the southwest corner of Ohio, just above Cincinnati and south of Dayton in the small village of Middletown. They needed money, and the local train depot seemed like a good target. On the afternoon of March 17, Clyde wandered into the station and asked for a train schedule. He was new to this sort of banditry, and his clumsy attempts to case the joint caught the attention of a ticket agent, who took down the license number of the latest car the trio was using. It didn’t allay the agent’s suspicions when they parked nearby for the rest of the afternoon.

  After dark, Clyde and his partners first broke into a dry cleaner’s and then into the office of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad at the depot. Their take was around $60. Anxious to get out of town, they followed unpaved roads into the countryside. They got lost and soon had no idea whe
re they were and which direction to drive in. They gave up for the night and slept in the car.

  The next morning the robberies were reported and the station agent gave the license number of the suspicious vehicle to the police. Harry Richardson and George Woody, two members of the Middletown force, had just recorded the plate when they saw a car with that license coming past the depot. It was the Texas fugitives, who’d become completely turned around and inadvertently returned to the scene of the crime. The cops jumped in their patrol car and pursued them. Woody started shooting, and the three escapees abandoned their vehicle to flee on foot. Richardson cornered Turner in an alley and arrested him. Abernathy was picked up an hour later.

  Clyde almost got away. As he had in Denton, he hid under a house for hours. In the early afternoon he emerged and stole another car. Middletown patrolman Tom Carmody spotted him and gave chase. Clyde was winning his desperate race when he turned down a dead-end street. He left the car and started running, but was hemmed in. Just before Carmody took him into custody, Clyde pitched the gun from Waco into a nearby canal.

  Clyde told the Middletown police his name was Robert Thomas. He claimed he was seventeen and from Indianapolis. He then launched into a preemptive confession to petty crimes around Cincinnati, obviously hoping to be slapped on the wrist as a youthful offender and not held until word could reach Middletown from Waco about the three McLennan County fugitives. Unfortunately for Clyde, Turner and Abernathy had already admitted they were escaped Texas felons—in an effort to protect Clyde, they claimed he was a hitchhiker they’d recently picked up—and the Middletown cops were in the process of contacting the McLennan County sheriff’s office. A wire soon arrived from Waco with descriptions of all three escapees, and Clyde was sunk.

  On Friday, March 21, McLennan County sheriff Leslie Stegall arrived in Middletown to take custody of the three escaped prisoners. The Waco Times-Herald was jubilant. “Baby Thugs Captured” was the banner headline, and an accompanying editorial noted that the “baby dumbbells” had proven they deserved the derogatory nickname. Getting turned around and driving right past the very cops who were looking for them? How stupid could crooks be? Clyde, at least, got a little grudging praise. A sub-headline noted, “Barrow, the Youngest of the Trio, Makes Most Spectacular Attempt to Escape Capture.” A Waco reporter even made the trip up to West Dallas to interview Cumie. Marie, eavesdropping, recalled that her mother “had quite a bit to say on the matter.” Cumie blamed Clyde’s old criminal running buddy Frank Clause for everything—she swore his bad example had lured her innocent young son into sin. Cumie added that she was afraid the escape would prejudice the Waco court against Clyde and result in a longer sentence.

  When Clyde, Turner, and Abernathy arrived back in Waco, they were marched in chains from the train station to the county jail. The three escapees were confined to new maximum security cells on the third floor. Clyde wouldn’t be able to persuade Bonnie to help him in another escape attempt.

  Even if jailhouse security hadn’t been tightened, Bonnie wouldn’t have been there to try again. After learning about Clyde’s recapture from the Dallas papers, Bonnie decided not to travel south to Waco. She’d found another job as a waitress and, besides, the whole jailbreak experience had upset her. Some degree of disillusionment was inevitable. Bonnie had imagined herself as the glamorous companion of a dashing young fugitive. Instead, she was the humiliated girlfriend of a bumbling baby dumbbell. She didn’t break up with Clyde, but she didn’t rush to be at his side before his new trial, either.

  Criticism in the local paper had left Judge Richard Munroe wrathful when Clyde and Turner appeared before him for the second time. Abernathy, who had yet to stand trial, was with them. The Times-Herald noted that Munroe had become “hard-boiled,” and in the process of sentencing Clyde to serve his full fourteen years in prison, and Turner to serve forty, the judge tongue-lashed the trio.

  “I think it would be a good thing to save you boys from the [electric] chair, eventually, to send you up for long terms,” Munroe lectured them. “You are liable to go around here shooting a peace officer—if you can shoot straight. You keep breaking into houses, and some of these days you’re going to either get shot or shoot somebody else. With the records you’ve got, you’d probably get the chair when you were tried.”

  Turner was gone the next day, shipped off to Kansas to serve a three-year term for robbery there before being returned to Texas to begin his forty-year sentence in that state. Clyde stayed in the county jail until the moratorium on sending new prisoners to Huntsville was lifted several weeks after his sentencing.

  On the morning of April 21 the One Way Wagon showed up in Waco to transport Clyde to the state prison. Prison records indicate that when he arrived and was processed in Huntsville, his height was five feet, five and one-half inches, and he weighed 127 pounds. Clyde gave his date of birth as March 24, 1912, making him eighteen rather than twenty. It was a calculated lie. The younger he claimed to be, the more likely prison officials might be to grant him some kind of easy work assignment. Clyde listed his middle name as “Champion” rather than “Chestnut”—even on such a nerve-wracking occasion, his sense of humor remained intact—and he claimed that Bonnie Parker was his wife. That would allow him to exchange mail with her. Prisoners could only communicate through letters with immediate family members. Despite her mother’s ongoing pressure to dump Clyde for someone else, Bonnie was still being faithful. She had finally gone to Waco to see him shortly before he was taken away to state prison. They apparently argued during the visit, because on April 19 Clyde sent her a letter apologizing for being jealous, claiming he couldn’t help it. “Just be a good little girl and always love me,” he pleaded.

  Clyde was initially an occasional boarder in Huntsville rather than a full-time inmate. During the rest of the spring and all of the summer of 1930 he was shipped back and forth across the state to face various charges. One, in Houston, was for the July 1929 murder of a twenty-year-old named Buster Gouge. Frank Clause was also suspected in the killing. The charge was specious—until he used William Turner’s revolver in his Waco jailbreak, Clyde never committed an armed criminal act. Clyde was quickly returned to Huntsville after the Houston grand jury found insufficient evidence against him. But the hearing did inspire future generations of Houston historians to erroneously claim that Clyde Barrow began his infamous killing spree in their hometown.

  In the late summer of 1930, Clyde was sent back to Waco to face additional robbery charges. None stuck, but while he was back in the McLennan County jail he learned what his work assignment in state prison would be.

  In Huntsville, prisoners were officially segregated only by race. A petty thief could be thrown into a work detail with a pack of convicted killers. But usually common sense prevailed. Youthful, first-time offenders were often kept inside the Walls, the main prison unit. Work there usually trained prisoners in job skills like printing or animal husbandry that might lead to post-incarceration employment. Repeat offenders mostly drew assignments to one of the several working farms located in or around Huntsville. The most callous, dangerous cons found themselves on the prison’s Eastham cotton farm thirty-five miles northeast of the main buildings. Here, on 13,000 acres of swampy bottomland adjacent to the Trinity River, they performed backbreaking labor under the supervision of guards hired for their ability to maintain order at any cost.

  Short, scrawny Clyde Barrow had just turned twenty. His Middletown misadventures were evidence that he was anything but a cool, calculating criminal. Before his conviction, Clyde had been a commendable employee for several Dallas companies. He was an obvious candidate for a job inside the Walls where he could put his previously demonstrated work skills to good use, serving his time productively and in relative safety.

  But some anonymous prison official decided otherwise. It was almost certainly a capricious decision. Despite the press he’d received in Waco as one of the baby dumbbells, Clyde hadn’t built up any sort of adversarial reputa
tion with lawmen on a state level. Over the past several years, crop production on the prison farms had taken a nosedive. Possibly more new inmates than usual were being assigned to work on them as a result.

  No matter why it happened, around the middle of September 1930, Clyde got news that would have terrified even the most hardened Texas con. He was assigned to Eastham Prison Farm, the filthiest hellhole in the entire corrupt Texas criminal justice system.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Bloody ’Ham

  On the night of September 17, 1930, Bud Russell parked the One Way Wagon outside the McLennan County jail. In Texas, the vehicle and its driver were equally notorious. Russell was a tall, taciturn man who made his living transporting prisoners from rural and city lockups to state prison facilities. Escape from his custody was considered practically impossible. Any prisoner who talked back, let alone seemed to be considering a run for it, was calmly informed by Russell that he would be wrong to “think you’re tougher than me.” The words were uttered with such calm certainty that few dared cross him. The .44 on Russell’s hip and his double-barreled shotgun reinforced the message. But his reputation among convicts was notable for fairness as well as fearsomeness. Everyone who cooperated with him—and almost all the prisoners being transported did—was treated with stern courtesy. In Russell’s thirty years of service to Texas, he drove an estimated 3.9 million miles through forty-five states and Mexico and Canada, transporting 115,000 convicts. Only one escaped.

  The One Way Wagon was as intimidating as the man who drove it. Essentially, it was a massive cage mounted on the long bed of a truck. The cage was constructed of black boiler plate and steel mesh. Prisoners loaded in it were chained to each other by the neck. There was just enough length in the chain between them to allow everyone to sit down along two hard, flat benches. In Waco the next morning, there was an audience as the prisoners to be transported were brought under guard from the county jail. Wherever Russell made his jail pickups, townspeople would gather around to enjoy the spectacle. Convicts were brought out, collars and chains were adjusted around their necks, they were shackled together, and then, caterpillar-like, they climbed up into the cage. It made for some free entertainment.