Public Enemies (39 page)

This is unlikely. In a story Bonnie told her mother, she suggested that the final break came several days later, during a nightmarish trip the gang took north into the Midwest. They drove as far as Indiana, where the men bought sharp new suits, hats, and overcoats, the girls purchased dresses, and everyone attended a movie or two; it’s tempting to suggest Clyde was drawn to Indiana because it was Dillinger’s territory, but the gang’s precise itinerary is unknown.

All during the trip O’Dare bickered with everyone, even the monosyllabic Methvin. As Bonnie told it, the final straw came after a furious argument she had not with O’Dare, but with Clyde. Bonnie didn’t explain the argument, but it was bad enough she stomped off in tears, swearing she was “going home to mama.” Afterward, Bonnie said, O’Dare tried to sympathize with her.

“I wouldn’t put up with him,” O’Dare said. “I’d fix him.”

“I’m going home,” Bonnie said. “I simply hate him.”

“I’d fix him before I left,” O’Dare said.

“I’m going to,” Bonnie said. “You wait and see.”

“I’d poison him,” O’Dare said.

The suggestion startled Bonnie. “Poison him?” she said. “Poison Clyde?”

“Well, just dope him then,” O’Dare said. “Then, while he’s out, you can take his roll and beat it. Boy, think of the good time you could have on that money.”

“If I hadn’t been so mad at Clyde,” Bonnie told her mother, “I believe I’d have slapped her. But that finished me up with [O’Dare]. I told Clyde and he told Raymond that if [she] stuck around, it was all off. They split up right there and we came back to Texas with Henry.”
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Given Bonnie’s penchant for melodrama, Mary O’Dare may or may not have suggested poisoning Clyde; whatever she did was bad enough that, according to Joe Palmer, Bonnie, Clyde, and Methvin later discussed killing her. The dissolution of the gang marked the last time Clyde ever worked with Raymond Hamilton.

Afterward, the two couples returned separately to the Dallas area. Hamilton teamed up with his brother to rob a string of Texas banks. Clyde had enough money for the moment and consented when Henry Methvin, now falling into W. D. Jones’s old role as Clyde’s gofer, asked to visit his parents in Louisiana. One afternoon in early March, deep in the pines east of Shreveport, Clyde drove them down a rutted dirt road to the shack of Methvin’s parents, Iverson and Ava Methvin. “Ivy” Methvin was a grubby drunk in overalls; Ava didn’t talk much.

Even so, there was something about the area that appealed to Clyde. Over the course of several lazy days at the Methvin place, he and Bonnie took long walks into the pines. The area was impossibly isolated, with few paved roads, no large towns to speak of, and no police in sight. Few of the back-country shacks had running water or indoor plumbing, much less radios or telephones. Clyde told Bonnie he liked the feel of the area. There was a lake nearby with largemouth bass. Both Bonnie and Clyde were exhausted. Neither had slept in a bed since the shoot-out at Platte City eight months before. At some point, Clyde suggested that maybe they could find a shack of their own nearby. They could fix it up, use it as a vacation spot. Bonnie liked the idea of a little house in the woods, just the two of them. It seemed perfect.

 

 

It wasn’t perfect. What Bonnie and Clyde didn’t know, as they explored the woods of northern Louisiana, was that for the first time in two years they had attracted a professional pursuer, and he was already driving the Louisiana back roads looking for them.

He had been hired by Lee Simmons, the man who headed the Texas prison system. Simmons wanted revenge for the raid on his work camp, and if the FBI and the Dallas County Sheriff were too uninterested or inept to bring in Bonnie and Clyde, he was determined to do it himself. On February 1, fourteen days after the Eastham jailbreak, Simmons visited the governor’s mansion in Austin and explained his idea to the governor, Mildred “Ma” Ferguson. Beside the governor sat her husband, the former governor Jim Ferguson, whose impeachment on corruption charges two years earlier had led to his wife’s decision to run for office on the slogan “Two Governors for the Price of One.” Simmons told the Fergusons he wanted to hire someone to eradicate Clyde Barrow. When the governor asked who he had in mind, Simmons said, “Frank Hamer.”

He didn’t need to say much more. Everyone in Texas knew of Frank Hamer. Hamer was a Lone Star legend, a cantankerous forty-nine-year-old former Ranger who had spent much of his law-enforcement career chasing cattle rustlers and exchanging gunfire with Mexican bandits on the Rio Grande. A big man, six-foot-two, just over two hundred pounds, Hamer was seen as the walking embodiment of the “One Riot, One Ranger” ethos, a stereotypically quiet loner who bridled at authority, shot first, and asked questions later. Long a darling of the Texas press, he was the kind of celebrity lawman who befriended movie stars, in Hamer’s case the silent-film actor Tom Mix. He was also a friend and contemporary of several current and former FBI men, including the San Antonio SAC Gus Jones. After a series of minor controversies, including the dismissal of one case for an illegal search, Hamer left the Rangers in November 1932. Any number of reasons were given for his departure, but the Rangers had become increasingly politicized and ineffective, and Hamer was no fan of Ma Ferguson and her corrupt husband. He had reluctantly taken a security job with a Houston-based oil company.

Sitting in the governor’s office, Simmons was surprised to learn that whatever bad blood existed between Hamer and the governor, the Fergusons would not object to his hiring. “Frank is all right with us,” Mrs. Ferguson said. “We don’t hold anything against him.”
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Leaving the mansion with a sheaf of written authorizations in his briefcase, Simmons drove to Hamer’s Austin home and explained his proposal. Hamer would work alone, in secret. No one but Simmons and the governor would know what he was doing. Hamer’s sole objective would be to bring in Bonnie and Clyde, dead or alive. No politics, no bureaucracy, no one looking over his shoulder. “How long do you think it will take to do the job?” Hamer asked.

“That’s something no man could guess,” Simmons said. “It might be six months; it might be longer. Probably it will take you thirty days to get your feet on the ground before you start to work. No matter how long it takes, I will back you to the limit.”

“Well, if that’s the way you feel about it, I’ll take the job,” Hamer said.

Simmons made only one suggestion. “Captain,” he said, “it is foolish for me to try to tell you anything; but in my judgment, the thing for you to do is put them on the spot, know you are right—and then shoot everybody in sight.”

Hamer didn’t respond to the suggestion, but it stuck in his mind. The next day he got to work. Little is known of his first weeks on Bonnie and Clyde’s trail. For the rest of his life, he never described his pursuit in detail. In the only lengthy interview he ever gave on the subject, with the Texas Ranger historian Walter Prescott Webb, Hamer spoke in general of how he studied both Bonnie and Clyde:

On February 10, two days before Bonnie and Clyde’s shoot-out at Reeds Spring, Missouri, Hamer climbed into his black V-8 Ford and headed to Dallas. There he debriefed W. D. Jones, who had been captured that November, and also Jimmy Mullins, who had been arrested and interrogated by the Dallas authorities and the FBI. Hamer also made the first of several visits to the Dallas FBI office, where he talked with the agent assigned to the case, Charles Winstead. Bonnie and Clyde were low priorities for the Bureau, but Winstead had been cruising East Texas for several months chasing tips on the pair. He believed he had found one of their cars outside the town of Gilmer, east of Dallas. On another occasion he and a sheriff had discovered a suitcase full of clothes that relatives had left for them in a creek bed near Athens.
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The FBI declined to get more deeply involved, but Hamer had more luck with Smoot Schmid, the Dallas County sheriff. Schmid agreed that his two deputies, Bob Alcorn and Ted Hinton, would work with Hamer. The three men had several long talks, plotting strategy, then drove east together. An examination of Clyde’s wanderings showed his affinity for the triangle of country between Dallas, Joplin, and Shreveport, and after his initial research Hamer began contacting law-enforcement friends there, especially in East Texas, where Clyde had family.

He first struck their trail at Texarkana. From there he followed signs of the pair to the western Louisiana town of Logansport, then north to Keatchie, where they had purchased gasoline, then on to Shreveport, where Clyde bought pants, underwear, gloves, and an automatic shotgun. Hamer found one of their camps on the Wichita River, near Wichita Falls, Texas, where he traced a sales receipt to a store in Dallas where Bonnie bought a dress.

“But the trail always led back to Louisiana,” Hamer told Walter Prescott Webb. It was there, on February 17, after only a week of travel, that Hamer claimed, “I located their hideout.” This may have been wishful thinking, or even braggadocio; Hamer’s ego was sizable. He gives no detail of the supposed hideout, only to say that it was in a parish where he could not trust the sheriff. “And so it was arranged to have Barrow’s hideout moved into a parish where the officers were more reliable.” How this could have been arranged Hamer doesn’t say. But, he goes on, “in a comparatively short time the hideout was established in Bienville Parish at a place well known to me.”

Bienville Parish was the home of Henry Methvin’s parents. Hamer said he cruised the dirt roads there for several days before reaching out to the local sheriff, a tall, laconic man named Henderson Jordan. As it happened, their timing was perfect. Jordan had just been approached by a neighbor who brought a message from the Methvin family. If a deal could be struck for Henry Methvin’s pardon, Ivy and Ava Methvin were prepared to betray Bonnie and Clyde.

Baby Face Nelson’s three-man gang reassembled in St. Paul in the last week of February. Spring meant the opening of bank season. The cat roads would soon be passable, and Nelson sat down with Harry Sawyer’s favorite jug marker, a red-haired ex-con named Eddie Green, to map a plan of attack. It was Green who had identified the string of banks the Barkers had robbed in 1932 and early 1933. For the spring of 1934, Green had targeted three banks for the Nelson Gang, one in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and two in Iowa, at Mason City and Newton. The problem was manpower. Everyone agreed they needed more than three men. But with the arrests of Harvey Bailey and so many others, the pool of experienced yeggs in St. Paul was dwindling; no one was eager to hire strangers.

A solution came with the strange phone call from John Hamilton asking if Nelson’s gang might be able to free Dillinger from the Crown Point jail. By all accounts, Nelson was intrigued by the idea. Hamilton had suggested they smuggle Dillinger a gun. Nelson didn’t know how. But he knew someone who did. Alvin Karpis had once told him of having smuggled a gun to Harvey Bailey in a Kansas jail; the gun was discovered, but at least they managed to get it inside. Using Harry Sawyer as an intermediary, Nelson sent word to Karpis in Chicago.

Karpis drove up from Chicago with Dock Barker for the meeting, a little irritated that Nelson wouldn’t explain what it was about. When darkness fell they drove out to the river cliffs, pulled up to Jack Peifer’s elegant restaurant-casino, The Hollyhocks Club, and left their car with the valet. In an upstairs office they found the Nelson Gang.

“So,” Karpis asked, “what do you guys want?”

“You can go ahead and explain to him if you want,” Nelson said to Van Meter.

“You go ahead, Jimmy,” Van Meter said.

Nelson smiled. “Hey, you remember when you guys robbed that bank in Fort Scott, Kansas?”

“Yeah, I remember it,” Karpis said. “What about it?”

“Well, you remember Bailey was in jail there, and when he got took, they shook his cell down and they found a .45 automatic in the mattress? You probably were the one that got that gun brought in there to him, wasn’t you?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact,” Karpis said. He explained how he had planned an escape, but had given up in the face of tight security.

“How did you go about getting that gun in there and why wasn’t Bailey able to use the damn thing?” Nelson asked.

Karpis explained that Bailey was watched too closely. “Why do you ask? What’s going on?”