Jeff Guinn Read online

  Russell had stopped the day before in Dallas, so there were already several convicts in his charge when he began loading the Waco prisoners on the morning of the 18th. Clyde Barrow didn’t give him any trouble. Even if he had planned to, there was no opportunity. Russell knew his business. Clyde was efficiently shackled by the neck and loaded onboard. The cage was padlocked and Russell threw the truck into gear. Waco spectators didn’t see anything out of the ordinary that morning.

  As soon as the One Way Wagon started rolling southeast toward Huntsville, Clyde began asking if anyone had been on the Eastham farm. Nineteen-year-old Ralph Fults, sitting on the bench directly across from Clyde, said he had. In fact, he’d escaped from there six months earlier. He’d just been recaptured, and was on his way back to Eastham. Clyde wanted details about their mutual destination, and couldn’t have liked what Fults told him. The Eastham guards, Fults said, killed their charges for two reasons—not working, and running. Unsuccessful first escapes only merited beatings, but second failed attempts earned a bullet to the back of the head. Fults knew an unpleasant welcome back to prison would be waiting for him, painful but hopefully not lethal.

  “They can do any damned thing they want to,” Fults told his anxious new acquaintance, adding that there was an Eastham farm graveyard “full of guys who thought otherwise.” Fults’s first impression of Clyde wasn’t positive. He wondered how long the skinny little kid could survive at Eastham. Even the toughest cons there were in constant fear for their lives.

  That was, in fact, the intention. The philosophy of the Texas prison system in 1930 was not based on the concept of rehabilitation. The value of an individual inmate’s life was negligible. If conditions were horrible enough, any scarred, emaciated inmate who survived his sentence would provide a useful object lesson to potential lawbreakers he met after his release.

  For decades there had been sporadic public outcry and legislative investigations concerning inhumane prison conditions. Just nine months before Clyde Barrow was hauled off to Eastham, Texas governor Dan Moody and a group of elected state officials toured the main Huntsville prison and most of the adjacent work farms. Their primary concern was overcrowding—at just over five thousand prisoners, the system had about one-third more inmates than it was designed to handle. Governor Moody hoped additional furloughs and paroles might alleviate some of the problem. But there were also criticisms of overcrowded hospital units, merciless punishments bordering on torture, inadequate food, and, ominously, growing concern that prisoners might have too much idle time in which to concoct escape plans or other mischief. Additionally, the prison system farm units, like farms everywhere in Texas, had begun operating at deficits. The state prison board was instructed to make immediate changes.

  In March 1930, board member Lee Simmons agreed to become general manager of the prison system. His concept of reform involved squelching the complaints of the reformers, particularly in the area he referred to as “discipline.” Simmons proclaimed himself a proud proponent of “corporal punishment in the home, in the schoolroom, in the reformatory, in the penitentiary,” adding, “in most cases, firm discipline, fair treatment and plenty of work to keep everybody busy will keep the riotously inclined out of mischief.” He especially endorsed frequent use of “the bat,” a leather strap anywhere from eighteen inches to three feet long and three to five inches wide with a long handle. Greased for maximum velocity and striking power, it would be used to lacerate the bare back, buttocks, and thighs of recalcitrant prisoners spread-eagled face down on the ground. Fellow inmates would be assigned to hold the victim’s arms and legs; other convicts would be ordered to form a circle and watch. Every blow from the three-ply leather bat tore skin, ripped into muscle, and drew copious amounts of blood. Sometimes the whippings were interrupted so sand could be poured into the victim’s open wounds. The limit was twenty lashes, but inmates swore the guards administering the beatings never bothered to count and routinely went far beyond the proscribed number. The prisoner being beaten almost invariably screamed, lost control of his bowels and bladder, and finally passed out. Most inmates witnessing the beatings, Simmons believed, would remember them and comply with any orders rather than suffer one themselves. After the beatings, convict witnesses were required to line up and closely inspect the bloody bat as an added means of intimidation. There were even claims from some surviving inmates that they were ordered to lick it.

  When the One Way Wagon arrived at the main prison facility in Huntsville, Clyde and Fults spent a few days locked up there before being sent over to Eastham. In the interim, Simmons welcomed Fults back by ordering him to “ride the barrel,” another form of punishment popular among the guards. After being handcuffed, Fults was made to straddle a pickle barrel. This was, as designed, impossible to do for very long. Fults’s legs soon went numb, and attempts to shift his weight from one foot to another resulted in a fall off the barrel. He was hauled up by the guards and stood back up on the barrel. The punishment continued all of one night and well into the next day. Simmons believed any prisoner escapes reflected badly upon him, and punished recaptured cons accordingly.

  From there, Fults and Clyde were transported to Eastham Prison Farm about thirty-five miles away. They were assigned to Camp 2, which differed from Camp 1 only in that it was more lightly wooded, offering additional room for fields of cotton and corn. Together, the two camps usually had between four and five hundred convicts available to work the land. Its operation was a direct legacy of the antiquated Texas “convict lease” system. An 1871 law passed by the state legislature decreed that any convicted felon was considered “a slave of the state,” human property to be disposed of as prison administrators deemed appropriate. That resulted in prisoners being leased to railroads, sawmills, coal mines, and wealthy farmers, who gained workers for a dollar a day each without any inconvenient rules about how to feed, shelter, and punish them. Families of prisoners and social reformers gradually raised a storm of protest, and in 1912 all convict leases were terminated. But by then, the prison system had acquired over seventy thousand acres of farmland, and the prisoners were simply transferred over to perform the same slave labor, under the same cruel circumstances, for the state.

  Eastham Prison Farm was named for the family that originally owned the property. The sumpy river bottomland was perfect for raising cotton and corn. The property was isolated enough to make it difficult for prisoners to escape on foot. There was a river to cross, and the farm bloodhounds were renowned for their relentless tracking ability. Those who did run were almost inevitably caught and sent back. In 1929, the year before Clyde arrived, there had been 302 escape attempts from Eastham and the other prison system facilities. Two hundred and ninety-eight of the escapees, including Fults, were immediately or eventually recaptured.

  At Eastham, the guard-to-prisoner ratio was one to eight. The farm’s manager, B. B. Monzingo, had been fired for mistreatment of inmates by the pre-Simmons administration. Simmons, though, hired him back and placed him in charge of Eastham, where checks and balances on treatment of prisoners were nonexistent.

  Clyde learned this as soon as he arrived on the farm. Monzingo walked up to the new batch of inmates, picked out one at random, and smashed him in the face with a stick. As his victim fell to the ground, the manager ordered the rest of the startled arrivals to run, not walk, out to the fields and start working. All inmates were required to run to and from their work stations each day. Some of the fields were as much as two miles away, but distance didn’t matter. Obeying orders to run did. The farm’s heavily armed guards were mounted. They had no trouble keeping up, and were quick to strike stragglers.

  As Clyde and Fults sprinted ahead of the guards, Clyde wanted to know why Monzingo had administered the beating. Fults told him it was psychological, a way to cow new prisoners into complete submission. It didn’t work on Clyde. He muttered to Fults that nobody better try that crap on him.

  Field work at Eastham was exhausting. The crops had to be constantl
y weeded and picked. Workdays lasted ten hours. On Saturdays, prisoners could knock off a half-hour early to bathe. Sundays were supposedly days of rest, but during harvest months they were spent in the fields. Fults and Clyde found themselves assigned to woodpile duty. They spent their workdays swinging double-bladed axes under the supervision of guards with shotguns. Before each day’s near-endless labor exhausted them completely, they talked as they chopped, and learned more about each other. Both came from large, close families. They had mutual admiration for Jesse James and Billy the Kid. Clyde told Fults about a girl he loved named Bonnie.

  Mealtimes were a disappointment to Clyde. The noon break out in the fields lasted only five or ten minutes, just enough to gulp down a crust of dry corn bread and a cup of water. Food on the prison farms was notoriously bad. Breads and cereals made from the same dried corn fed to farm livestock were common fare. Sometimes there would be vegetables—peas, turnip greens, or potatoes. Any scant helping of meat for supper was boiled into a leathery state. Near-raw, rancid bacon was frequently on the menu. There were no overweight convicts on Eastham Prison Farm.

  Nor were many inmates well rested. At night they were marched back to a concrete dormitory; there were small administrative offices in the front, along with a dining area and kitchen. The dormitory itself was blocked off by a line of steel bars sunk into the concrete floor. Behind the bars, bunk beds were stacked close together. Farther to the back were the toilets and showers, which were not cleaned on any regular basis. While the inmates shouldered each other for the smallest bit of space, the guards relaxed upstairs in larger second-story rooms. The two floors were connected by a spiral staircase. If there was a disturbance downstairs, the off-duty guards descended with rifles in hand. If shouted warnings failed to be effective, they started shooting through the bars, high over the prisoners’ heads at first, then progressively lower until the commotion stopped. The far walls inside the cage were pocked with bullet holes.

  The guards rarely had to step in. Every prison dormitory area was supervised by a team of building tenders, usually the biggest and strongest convicts in the facility who were most feared by the other inmates. Building tenders received a few special privileges, including extra rations and the right to carry clubs or even knives, but the real attraction of the job was being able to manhandle anyone they wanted. What they did to keep order in their barred fiefdoms was of little interest to the guards, farm managers, and prison administrators.

  On Clyde’s first night in the Camp 2 dorm, he listened while other cons whispered to Fults that he had more punishment coming for his escape. The guards had drawn straws, Fults was told, with the winners getting the privilege of beating him up. The next morning, a half-dozen of them clubbed Fults with gun barrels and kicked him with their sharp-toed boots. Throughout the assault, Clyde stood glaring at his friend’s assailants, and made a point of helping Fults to his feet after the guards had enough of their bloody fun. Fults was impressed. By openly sticking with him, Clyde had caught the guards’ attention—one of them asked if he wanted any of it, too. But loyalty clearly meant more to the kid than personal safety. Clyde not only tended to Fults’s bruises, he immediately began planning revenge. Someday he and Fults would be released from prison, he swore, and after that they would put together a gang, raid the farm, and free all the convicts there. Fults found himself caught up in Clyde’s enthusiasm. At the very least, it gave them something to occupy their minds while they slaved away on the woodpile.

  But Fults soon began to wonder if Clyde would even live to leave Eastham. Ten hours a day of hard labor clearly pushed him to his physical limits. Constant harassment and inadequate nourishment drained even the toughest convicts on the farm, and short, scrawny Clyde wasn’t very strong to begin with. Worse, in Fults’s opinion, was Clyde’s attitude toward the guards and their harsh, condescending ways. Prisoners successfully served out their sentences on the farm by learning to quietly accept whatever poor treatment they received. The idea was to blend in, to be so passive that the guards and building tenders hardly noticed you. Clyde did the opposite. He’d scowl when given orders, and talk back when silence was by far the more practical response. Beatings resulted. Nell Barrow recalled that on one visit to see her brother, both Clyde’s eyes were blackened. Everything about prison galled him. Clyde, who craved control, was under the complete domination of others.

  That even extended to his friendship with Fults. Simmons and Monzingo feared that Fults would attempt another escape, and had the guards constantly monitor him. Other inmates understood it was dangerous to be seen socializing with Fults. Anyone talking to him even briefly was suspected of planning a breakout. Within days of his return to Eastham, fellow convicts avoided Fults whenever possible. Only Clyde was constantly at his side. Simmons and Monzingo assumed the duo were plotting together. Late in 1930 when a Camp 2 inmate suspected of being an informer suffered a near-fatal accident—a freshly chopped tree fell on him—they were certain Clyde and Fults had cut it down with just that intent. And, years later, Fults admitted that they had.

  A week after the informer was injured, guards came up to where Fults and Clyde were working on the woodpile and led Clyde away. When Fults returned to the Camp 2 dormitory that night, all Clyde’s possessions were gone from beside his bunk. Anxious to separate Fults from his only remaining friend among the inmates, Simmons and Monzingo had transferred Clyde to Camp 1. A new enemy was waiting for him there.

  Ed Crowder was a monster, a hulking brute who was even more likely than other Eastham building tenders to enforce his will with his fists. Crowder had been named a building tender for precisely that reason. His own prison record was far from exemplary. Sentenced in 1926 to fifteen years in prison for robbery and illegally transporting bootleg liquor with his brother Sid, Crowder escaped from the Walls a year later and was recaptured after just a few days of freedom. In 1929, he made another brief escape from one of Huntsville’s less oppressive working farms. That got him assigned to Eastham’s Camp 1, where among even the most hardened, violent criminals in the entire state prison system he stood out as especially fearsome. That led to his appointment as a building tender. Standing over six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds, he was physically imposing, and so long as the inmates under his nightly supervision didn’t cause trouble in the dormitory, the Camp 1 guards didn’t care about Crowder’s penchant for preying on the smallest and weakest of his charges.

  In late 1930, Crowder was twenty-nine. His escape attempts had expanded his original sentence to ninety-nine years, and even in the current overcrowded conditions there wasn’t going to be any furlough or parole for him. He was on Eastham Prison Farm for life, so he had no incentive to rein in his brutal appetites. When skinny little Clyde Barrow was placed in his section of the dorm, Crowder pounced.

  Then as now, sodomy was not uncommon among prisoners. Huntsville records show a few inmates were occasionally punished for homosexual acts, but for the most part it was accepted. Those who did it might be ridiculed by other prisoners—there was complete lack of privacy on the prison farms. Everyone knew what everyone else was doing, and with whom. Gossip about couplings offered some diversion for work-weary farm inmates. But those relationships were by mutual consent. When Ed Crowder got his huge hands on Clyde Barrow, Clyde didn’t consent to anything. It didn’t matter to Crowder. He terrorized Clyde, frequently beating him into submission and then raping him, certainly in the hearing and probably in view of the other prisoners in the Camp 1 dorm. If Clyde screamed or cried out for help, no one responded. The guards couldn’t be bothered, and the rest of the inmates were undoubtedly glad Crowder was raping Clyde instead of them.

  The pain must have been awful for Clyde, but the humiliation was worse. Proud Clyde Barrow, the cocky clotheshorse from West Dallas who’d stolen cars and robbed safes at will, the happy highwayman who laughed in the faces of “the laws” when they tried to catch him, the smooth-talking Romeo who’d wooed and won a pocket-sized blond Juliet named Bo
nnie Parker, was reduced to being Ed Crowder’s prison bitch. Other Camp 1 prisoners, desperately needing someone to feel superior to, made certain he heard whispers about how he was probably enjoying it. Then there was Crowder himself, violating his victim at will and gloating about it.

  This was the ultimate degradation, and it went on for almost a full year. Clyde couldn’t stand it. It wasn’t his nature to meekly submit. Aubrey Scalley, another building tender in the Camp 1 dormitory, hated Crowder almost as much as Clyde did. The reason for the Scalley-Crowder feud is unknown, but over time Scalley encouraged Clyde when the twenty-year-old muttered promises to murder Crowder. Scalley was serving a life term as a habitual criminal and promised Clyde that if he killed Crowder, Scalley would claim responsibility. But the risk would be entirely Clyde’s. If he failed to finish off his rapist, Crowder would undoubtedly tear him apart. Scalley wouldn’t interfere on Clyde’s behalf if that happened.

  But Clyde didn’t intend to fail. He had no compunction about killing Crowder. All alone, with the odds terribly against him, he put together a rudimentary but lethal plan. On October 29, 1931, he concealed a length of lead pipe in his pants leg as he came in from the fields. That night in the dormitory, after the other prisoners had gone to their bunks, Clyde walked to the toilet and shower area in the back of the room. Crowder, seizing the apparently easy opportunity, followed. When his rapist was within reach, Clyde brought the pipe down on Crowder’s head in a savage blow, fracturing his skull and killing him. Scalley had been lurking nearby. He rushed up and, after giving himself a superficial cut on the ribs, began stabbing a homemade shiv into Crowder’s corpse. The guards heard shouting and rushed into the dormitory cage. It seemed clear that Ed Crowder had lost a knife fight to Aubrey Scalley. Scalley confessed to the killing. The subsequent investigation was cursory. Scalley’s only weapon was the shiv, and no one seemed to wonder if another convict might have been involved even when Crowder’s death certificate, signed by Monzingo and the prison doctor, listed his cause of death as “knife wounds and fracture of the skull.” If Scalley wanted to take full responsibility for the killing, that just made everybody’s job simpler.