Public Enemies (58 page)

The papers reflected law-enforcement priorities. Hoover allowed an agent or two to track sightings of Bonnie and Clyde, but never treated the case seriously. While the FBI mobilized every office in pursuit of Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde merited a posse of four men.
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Both hunters and prey stayed on the move. After murdering three law-enforcement officers in a span of five days in early April, Clyde, Bonnie, and Henry Methvin had fled north into Kansas, then circled back to Texas to see their families. They dropped Methvin in Wichita Falls and sent him ahead to arrange the rendezvous. On the train into Dallas, Methvin rode with a pair of Texas Rangers who couldn’t stop talking about Bonnie and Clyde. Downtown, he walked to the Sanger Hotel to find Clyde’s sister Nell, who worked in a shop there; it was the same hotel where Hamer stayed when in Dallas. Unable to locate Nell, Methvin went to the Parkers’ house, gathered up family members, and drove to the meeting point east of Dallas, near the town of Mount Pleasant.

That night, lying on blankets by their cars in an isolated meadow, the Barrow and Parker families made their strongest arguments yet to persuade Clyde and Bonnie to leave the country. If you won’t surrender, Mrs. Parker begged, go to Mexico. Run for the border. Clyde turned their arguments against them. If they went to Mexico, he said, they would never see their families again. “Seeing you folks is all the pleasure Bonnie and I have left in life now,” he said. “Besides each other, it’s all we’ve got to live for. Whenever we get so we can’t visit our people, we might as well die and be done with it. We’re staying close to home, and we’re coming in as long as we’re alive.”

Clyde then unveiled his plan. They had been visiting the Methvins over in Louisiana, he said. They had seen a house they could buy. Bonnie wanted to fix it up, mend the roof, maybe put up lace curtains. Once they were settled, all the families could come to Louisiana and visit them. Mrs. Parker just shook her head. Everyone knew how this would end. After a while all the serious talk grew tiresome. Clyde spent much of the evening leafing through clippings and cartoons from the Dallas papers, laughing.

From Dallas they returned north. Running low on money, Clyde drove to his favorite Iowa hunting grounds in search of a bank. On Monday, April 16, Clyde and Henry Methvin robbed the First National Bank in Stuart, Iowa, just five miles west of Dexter, the town where Buck Barrow had been killed the previous July. From Iowa Clyde drove south, picking up Joe Palmer in Joplin, where Palmer had returned after becoming separated from the others after the Easter Sunday shoot-out. From Joplin they drove south to Louisiana, where Bonnie and Clyde hoped to vacation at the Methvins’ home. Ivy Methvin, who was now talking regularly with Sheriff Henderson Jordan, had other ideas. Deathly afraid of Clyde, he suggested a better place for them to stay.

It was during this visit, at the Methvins’ urging, that Clyde and Bonnie began bunking in the house they had mentioned to their parents, an abandoned home ten miles south of the town of Gibsland. Locals called it the John Cole house, after its last owner, who died of tuberculosis there with his wife and two daughters four years earlier. It was a four-room, unpainted wooden house at the end of a dirt road in the pines, two rooms on each side of an open-air hallway. There were a few pieces of furniture and a tin roof, but water dribbled in when it rained. It was such a wreck the Cole family left it vacant, but for Bonnie and Clyde it was their first home, and it seemed like heaven.

How they came to claim the house isn’t clear. Clyde told his family he rented or purchased the house from the Cole family. A local historian, Carroll Rich, maintains that Clyde and Bonnie moved in without the family’s knowledge. Years later, John Cole’s son, Otis, told Rich that he visited the house when a friend told him squatters had moved in. Otis Cole said he walked up to the house one afternoon and found Ivy Methvin sitting on the front porch, drunk. Cole could see two other people moving around inside. When Methvin asked him where he could find some more bootleg whiskey, Cole said, “I don’t fool with that stuff,” and hurried off. He asked no more questions.
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Soon, however, word spread that the “squatters” were none other than Bonnie and Clyde. Carroll Rich, a Bienville Parish native, paints an evocative picture of how the stories filtered through the pines; there was nothing romantic about Bonnie and Clyde in these tales, nothing free or rebellious or heartwarming. They were murderers, modern-day bogeymen whose approach could mean only death.

As Rich recalled:

If Clyde realized that people knew he was in the area, he showed no signs of worry. In those days Bienville Parish seemed mired in the nineteenth century. The country people scraped by on dusty farms or driving rickety logging trucks. For most there were no phones, no indoor plumbing, no movie theaters, and no newspapers; many couldn’t read. On those moist spring evenings in 1934, stories of Bonnie and Clyde spread like the morning fog that crept in from the swamps.

People whispered that they had been seen at the crossroads store at Sailes, stopping to buy cheese and crackers and a cold Coca-Cola. There was the man in sunglasses who parked his big Pontiac outside area farms, asking to buy a chicken to fry; it was Clyde, they had no doubt. A share-cropper swore he saw Clyde and Bonnie on a quilt spread on pine needles beneath the trees, their naked bodies moving rhythmically. Maybe these tales were concocted, maybe not. For the moment no one said a thing to the law. No one wanted to be murdered in their beds.

Bonnie and Clyde’s springtime idyll did not last long. Their money was running low, and by Friday, April 27, they were back on the road.
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After stopping in Memphis, Clyde drove north, cutting across Arkansas and Missouri and driving into Kansas. On Sunday afternoon, April 29, they reached Topeka, where they cruised neighborhood streets in search of a car that struck Clyde’s fancy. They found it at 2107 Gable Street, a spanking new cordova-tan Ford V-8 Deluxe, sitting in a driveway. They stole it and headed toward northwestern Iowa, where they drove through greening fields looking for a bank to take. On May 3, Clyde led Methvin and Joe Palmer into the bank at Everly, Iowa, while Bonnie waited in the car. It was a disappointing haul, about $700.

Afterward, on May 4 or 5, they dropped Palmer off in Wichita and drove to Joplin, where Clyde scribbled a letter to his mother, telling her he was heading back to Louisiana. But if Clyde thought he could put off seeing the families for a few weeks, Bonnie had other ideas. She begged him to take her to Dallas to see her mother. On Sunday, May 6, they drove past the Barrow filling station and tossed out a bottle; inside were instructions to meet them four miles east of Dallas that night. It was a warm night, with a soft breeze, and Bonnie sat outside with her mother on a blanket talking for two hours. They looked through pictures Bonnie had brought: Clyde and Palmer in jaunty spring suits, arms around Bonnie; Clyde looking tough, a rifle across his knees.

“Mama,” Bonnie suddenly said, “when they kill us, don’t let them take me to an undertaking parlor, will you? Bring me home.”

Mrs. Parker seized Bonnie’s wrist. “Don’t Bonnie,” she said. “For God’s sake.”

Bonnie smiled. “Now, Mama, don’t get upset,” she said. “Why shouldn’t we talk it over? It’s coming. You know it. I know it. All of Texas knows it. So don’t let them keep me at the undertakers. Bring me home when I die. It’s been so long since I was home. I want to lie in the front room with you . . . sitting beside me. A long, cool, peaceful night together before I leave you. That will be nice and restful.”

She put her finger on a photo of Clyde holding her. “I like this one,” she said. “And another thing, Mama. When they kill us, don’t ever say anything ugly about Clyde. Please promise me that, too.”

Before leaving Bonnie gave her mother a new poem, hugged her, and promised to return in two weeks. Then she slid into the Ford beside Clyde and they drove east, and vanished. There would be no sign of them for two weeks, no confirmed bank robberies, no letters, no word of their whereabouts, then or now. They seem to have driven through Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee, but even that is conjecture.

What is known is that on Monday evening, May 21, Clyde drove them back to their ramshackle new home in Bienville Parish, the tan Ford bumping along the rutted back roads deep into the towering pines. Everyone was happy to be back, especially Henry Methvin; he kept saying how much he wanted to see his parents. They were all dirty and exhausted, sick of bathing in streams and sleeping in the car; Bonnie said she hadn’t slept in a real bed since the shoot-out at Dexfield Park the previous summer. Now they had a home, such as it was, and Clyde was eager to spread out and rest, maybe do some fishing and hunting.

He would never get the chance. Frank Hamer was waiting.

 

 

 

Of all the American legends that arose from the War on Crime, few are burdened with as many conflicting viewpoints as the story of the trap Frank Hamer laid for Bonnie and Clyde. When it was over, Hamer would give his own version of events. In 1979, in a book published two years after his death, the Dallas deputy Ted Hinton would give a contradictory account; and each of the half-dozen or so books published on Bonnie and Clyde over the last forty years has devised its own story of those fateful days in the Louisiana backwoods; no two are the same. Many believe Henry Methvin betrayed Bonnie and Clyde. Others say this was a canard concocted later to keep the younger Methvin out of jail.

In the end, for all the myths and half-truths that swirl around the events of those humid Louisiana days, the facts are surprisingly clear. They can be found in a set of musty court papers from Methvin’s 1936 trial for the murder of Constable Cal Campbell, and in newly discovered FBI documents and statements from members of Hamer’s posse. Taken together, these papers suggest that the key figure in the plot was not Hamer. It was the Bienville Parish sheriff, Henderson Jordan.

Jordan was a prototypical backwoods sheriff, an easygoing, sun-burned fellow in a fawn-colored Stetson. Afterward he rarely spoke of what had happened, and never gave a detailed public interview on his role in the affair. But in 1958, shortly before his death, he consented to discuss it with his nephew, a history professor named Glenn Jordan. In this interview, Jordan traced the genesis of Bonnie and Clyde’s demise to early March, after their first visit to the Methvins’ shack. Whether it was Henry Methvin or his father who initiated the idea, the two men were of one mind on the proposal the elder Methvin took to one of their neighbors, a man named John Joyner: if the state of Texas would pardon the younger Methvin for his crimes, the Methvin family would betray Bonnie and Clyde. Ivy Methvin sent Joyner to make the proposal to Sheriff Jordan in Arcadia, fifty miles east of Shreveport.

As Sheriff Jordan told the story, he knew Henry Methvin had been in some kind of trouble in Texas. But he initially had no idea that he was traveling with Bonnie and Clyde:
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At a roadside clearing late one night, Ivy Methvin told the sheriff that his son had escaped from prison with the help of Bonnie and Clyde and was now traveling with them. As Methvin described it, the trio had begun visiting his home in February, about two weeks after the prison break, and had dropped by a time or two afterward. They arrived without notice, stayed several days, and then disappeared. Ivy Methvin was deathly afraid of Clyde. He was certain he would get his son killed.

As Jordan remembered the conversation:

Jordan told Methvin he had no power to make such a deal, but would think about who might. Jordan spent several days mulling Methvin’s offer before telephoning the FBI office in New Orleans, where he was passed to an agent named Lester Kendale. The two men had several conversations, and at some point the FBI man suggested they meet with Hamer. According to testimony at Methvin’s 1936 trial, the meeting occurred at an isolated roadside clearing in Bienville Parish.
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In attendance were Sheriff Jordan, Agent Kendale, Hamer, the Dallas deputy Bob Alcorn, and Methvin’s intermediary, John Joyner.