Public Enemies (47 page)

The FBI’s assistant director, Hugh Clegg, who had arrived from Washington that day to supervise the hunt for Dillinger, ordered every available man to surround 1835 Park Avenue. By midnight they had every exit covered. The building was quiet. The only light came from a single apartment downstairs. An agent knocked on its door, saying he was looking for someone who had just moved into the building. A man said everyone there had been living there at least six months. They were working people and most had children. To the FBI men, it looked like a dead end. Assistant Director Clegg returned downtown, leaving a group of agents to watch the building. With daylight a new group arrived. They watched the building’s occupants come and go. None looked familiar. There was no activity they could see in Apartment 4.

Finally, late that afternoon, Clegg decided to raid Apartment 4. After positioning men around the building, he and a trio of agents armed with submachine guns crept to the door and knocked. As Clegg described the raid, “[We] knocked on the door and a man about 45 to 50 years of age came to the door; upon opening the door machine guns were punched right in his stomach and he was ordered to ‘stick ’em up’; he did not stick ’em up, but seemed to be amused. His wife, a small woman, was quite excited and wanted to shoot [the agents]. No shooting was done. There was a little girl in the place.”
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It was the wrong apartment. Not for several days would agents learn that Dillinger’s hideaway was downstairs. It didn’t matter. Dillinger had left the building at 6:00 the previous night, about five hours before the delirious Eddie Green revealed where he was hiding.

 

 

Frank Hamer arrived in Dallas that Monday with Manny Gault, a highway patrolman who was being assigned to the case. Clyde’s trail was already cold, but Hamer had a hunch, and the next day he took the Dallas deputies Bob Alcorn and Ted Hinton and pursued it.

From what he had deduced, Hamer could see that Clyde tended to head north whenever there was trouble in Dallas. Tuesday morning the lawmen headed up Highway 77 to Sherman and began showing photos of Bonnie and Clyde to gas station attendants. By Wednesday afternoon they had reached the busy Oklahoma county seat of Durant, where they became mired in noontime congestion. The two cars were stopped in traffic when, according to Ted Hinton, Alcorn noticed a car coming toward them. To their amazement, it was Bonnie and Clyde.

“Here they come!” Alcorn yelped.

Clyde’s car passed directly beside them. Hinton drew his gun, but Alcorn shook his head. They were too hemmed in by traffic: they were under orders not to start any firefight where civilians could be shot. As Hinton watched Clyde’s car disappear, he pulled over and flagged down Hamer. Together the two cars managed to extricate themselves from traffic and sped off in pursuit, but by then Clyde was gone.
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On Thursday afternoon, April 5, Alcorn and Hinton checked in with their office and learned that Bonnie had been sighted in a Texarkana drugstore. The four lawmen raced southeast, reaching Texarkana around dusk. There they learned that Clyde had been sighted at a lunch stand five miles north of town. By the time they reached the lunch stand the couple had been seen driving across the Index Toll Bridge ten miles north without paying the toll. The bridge led into southeastern Oklahoma.

 

 

Clyde drove through the night in a pounding rain, heading past Tulsa into the state’s far northeast corner. After midnight he turned off Route 66 outside the town of Commerce, cruised down a dirt road a quarter mile and parked for the night. It was a remote spot, located between two industrial mines, ten minutes from both the Kansas and Missouri borders. Bonnie and Clyde curled up with blankets in the front seat and fell asleep. Henry Methvin slept in the back.
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The next morning they woke to find that their parking spot had become a mud hole. Clyde got up first, stepped out into the road, and stretched. A cattle buyer named J. W. Cox drove by and saw him. Clyde waved. A half hour later Cox returned down the road, noticed Clyde still there, and, thinking he needed a tow, jotted down the Ford’s license plate number. He drove into Commerce and found the police chief, a lean thirty-seven-year-old named Percy Boyd, at the barbershop. Thinking the parked car might be a crew of rowdy drunks—he’d had several such calls in recent weeks—Boyd asked the town constable, a soft-spoken sixty-year-old named Cal Campbell, to drive out with him and take a look.

The two officers pulled up in front of Clyde’s car a few minutes after nine. Bonnie and Methvin were still asleep, but Clyde saw them coming, jumped behind the wheel of the Ford, and slammed it into reverse. Boyd and Campbell had just stepped out of their car when the Ford spun its wheels backward down the muddy road. Boyd began to run after it, but it outdistanced him. Clyde got only a hundred yards when the car slid into a ditch, its rear wheels sinking in the mud.

Boyd and Campbell were running back toward their car when Clyde leaped from the Ford, a Browning automatic rifle in his hands. “Look out, Percy!” Campbell yelled as Clyde opened fire. His first bullets whizzed over the lawmen’s heads; he may have been trying to frighten them off. Boyd and Campbell drew pistols and returned fire. Clyde hunched down and fired back at them. One of his bullets struck Boyd a glancing blow to the head, and he fell, dazed. Back in the car, Methvin awoke and grabbed a rifle. He scrambled out the passenger-side door, took aim at Campbell, and fired. One of his bullets hit Campbell square in the chest, tearing a bloody hole in his midsection. Campbell dropped to his knees, rose for a moment, then fell backward, dead.

“Bring ’em up,” Clyde said to Methvin.

Methvin walked toward the fallen Boyd, who was moaning in the mud. “Get up and come with me,” Methvin said.

Boyd rose, his hands in the air, and walked toward the Ford, Methvin behind him, covering him with the rifle. Together the three men tried to push the Ford out of the muddy ditch. It was no use. Clyde took his rifle, stood in the road, and began flagging down passing vehicles. He forced several drivers to help extricate his car.

“Boys,” he said at one point, covering the men with his rifle, “one good man has already been killed, and if you don’t obey orders, others are liable to be.” After ten minutes nearly a dozen men were pushing and pulling the Ford in the mud, but the car remained mired until Clyde stopped a truck and forced the driver to attach a chain to the Ford’s bumper. In a minute, the Ford was free. Clyde motioned for Chief Boyd to get in the back. He was going with them.

They drove north, eluding pursuit, and crossed into Kansas. Clyde struck up a conversation with the wounded Boyd, stopping at one point to bandage the chief’s head wound. At nightfall they stopped at a store in Fort Scott. Methvin hustled inside, emerging a few minutes later with four plates of food and an evening newspaper that blared headlines of the shoot-out. “I’m sorry about shooting the old man,” Clyde said quietly. After that he fell silent.

Just north of Fort Scott they let Boyd out on the roadside. Clyde handed Boyd a ten-dollar bill and shook his hand. “Take this for the bus and be sure to see a doctor,” he said.

“Bonnie,” Boyd said. “What do you want me to tell the press?”

Bonnie thought a moment. She had long been irked by the repeated tendency of Southwestern newspapers to reprint the infamous photo taken at Joplin the previous year of her posing with a cigar.

“Tell them I don’t smoke cigars.”

 

 

Dillinger had left St. Paul just hours before the FBI surrounded his hideaway. The bullet wound in his left leg bandaged, he drove Billie south into Iowa, then east across Illinois and on into central Indiana. A few hours after agents raided the apartment building at 1835 Park Avenue, Dillinger coasted to a stop in a field behind his father’s farm outside of Mooresville. It was a little after midnight on Friday, April 6, just hours before Bonnie and Clyde took Percy Boyd hostage in Oklahoma.

Amazingly, the FBI still had not placed the Dillinger farm under surveillance. The Cincinnati SAC, Earl Connelley, whose territory covered central Indiana, hadn’t joined the hunt for Dillinger until Hoover’s directive earlier that week. One of the Bureau’s best investigators, Connelley was an intense World War I veteran with a pencil mustache who had joined the Bureau in 1920 and worked at Hoover’s side during the 1920 raids. He had been a SAC since 1927, and after running offices in Seattle, St. Louis, and New York, had taken over Cincinnati the previous year. Already Connelley’s men had fanned out across Ohio and Kentucky, checking dozens of leads. But he didn’t have enough agents to maintain stakeouts. He had asked for more.

The first inkling twenty-year-old Hubert Dillinger had of his half-brother’s return came when he walked into his father’s house Friday morning. Dillinger leaped from behind a door, pointed a finger at him, and said, “Stick ’em up!” There were hugs and smiles; both Hubert and his father were happy to see him. Dillinger introduced Billie as his new wife, “Anne,” and seemed at pains to persuade them they were married; he repeated it several times. Dillinger had parked his Hudson in a barn out back, and after breakfast Hubert went out and helped him remove the tires, clean them, and paint them black.
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When darkness fell Dillinger announced that he and Hubert were going on a quick trip. They would be back by daylight, Dillinger assured Billie. Sliding into the Hudson, Hubert drove them east across Indiana into Ohio. On the way Dillinger described in detail his escapes from Crown Point and St. Paul. When Hubert asked if he was surprised at Herbert Youngblood’s behavior at Crown Point, Dillinger sighed and said, “You know how a nigger is.”
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Around midnight they reached the farm of Pete Pierpont’s parents outside the town of Liepsic. Hubert stayed in the car while Dillinger ran in and gave the Pierponts some money to cover legal fees. They stayed barely fifteen minutes. On the drive back to Mooresville, Dillinger fell asleep. About three that morning, as they passed Noblesville, east of Indianapolis, so did Hubert. The Hudson sideswiped a pickup truck carrying a load of horseradish, careened off the highway and smashed through a wire fence, coming to rest in a small woods. The car was a wreck, but neither Dillinger was hurt. The horseradish truck was demolished. Its driver, a man named Joe Manning, limped over to Dillinger’s car in time to see Dillinger remove the front and rear license plates; Hubert waved Manning off, saying they were okay.

Dillinger removed his submachine gun from the car and wrapped it in a blanket, then took Hubert and struck out across the fields. They walked about three miles, until they reached a road. At that point Dillinger told Hubert to hitchhike to Indianapolis, fetch another car, and come back for him. He pointed to a haystack and said he would hide inside it until Hubert’s return.

By the time a state patrol car arrived at the wreck site, both Dillingers were long gone. But a submachine gun clip was found in their car. The officers, their suspicions aroused, phoned Matt Leach when they returned to their posts later that morning. As it happened, two FBI agents were in Leach’s office. They all drove out to inspect the wreckage. The car’s engine number was relayed to Cincinnati, which checked it with St. Paul. To the surprise of almost everyone in the FBI, who assumed Dillinger was still in Minnesota, the number matched that of a car “Carl Hellman” had purchased two weeks before.
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Leach ordered roadblocks thrown up all across Central Indiana.

Suddenly the FBI’s focus swiveled to Indianapolis. Earl Connelley set up his headquarters at the Spink Arms Hotel. He asked Hoover for ten more men, and all that weekend agents arrived at the Indianapolis airport, trickling into Connelley’s headquarters in ones and twos. For the first time FBI agents began studying Dillinger’s family in earnest. By Saturday afternoon Connelley and his men had identified the homes of John Dillinger, Sr., Dillinger’s sister Audrey Hancock, and the Indianapolis filling station where Hubert worked. Until he could arrange watchposts, Connelley established a regular circuit that agents could drive to watch them all.

While FBI men poured into Indiana that Saturday, Hubert returned to the farm with Dillinger, who had spent several nervous hours inside an itchy haystack. If he was worried the FBI knew he was back in Indiana, Dillinger gave no sign. He lay down on the living room couch to rest his wounded leg, the submachine gun resting beneath his blanket. What he needed was a new car. Around ten he gave Hubert some money and sent him into Indianapolis with Billie to get one. They bought a new Ford for $722 and stored it in a Mooresville garage.

Dillinger was lying on the living room couch, laughing aloud while reading of his exploits in a pile of newspapers his father had saved, when family members began to arrive that morning after church. His beloved sister Audrey, who had raised him, was the first to arrive, along with her husband, Emmett, their teenage daughters, a plate of fried chicken, and three coconut-cream pies, her brother’s favorite. Dillinger walked outside when they came up the driveway, trading kisses with all the women. A little later two of Audrey’s sons, Norman and Fred Hancock, drove up as well.

Though the Dillingers were not by nature demonstrative, it was a warm reunion, with quick hugs and arms slung across shoulders. There was sadness, too, an unspoken acknowledgment that this might be the last time any of them saw “Johnnie.” To Audrey’s relief, her brother seemed unchanged by life on the run. He had the same easy smile, and was always ready with a quip. Everyone watched Billie closely. She was quiet. Audrey thought she had a hard face. There seemed to be a scar beneath her pancake makeup. Again, Dillinger said they were married.

With children in the room, they didn’t talk about Dillinger’s exploits at first. They clung to mundane details: a cousin’s trip to Texas in search of work, Hubert’s job at the gas station. While the adults caught up, Dillinger’s favorite niece, eighteen-year-old Mary Hancock, gave him a manicure; when she bumped his leg, she saw him wince. At one point Audrey’s husband, Emmett, took Dillinger aside and asked him what had happened at Crown Point.