My Life with Bonnie and Clyde (4 page)

When Blanche was still a teenager, her mother forced her to marry a man named John Callaway. Callaway was apparently much older than Blanche and well acquainted with her mother. To close friends Blanche speculated that her mother thought Callaway had some money, enough anyway to perhaps acquire some it for herself by offering her daughter as part of the deal. The only thing Blanche got from the marriage, however, was abuse, both physical and emotional. Although seeing the arrangement initially as a means to freedom and independence, she quickly found it to be otherwise. Among other things, the experience left her unable to bear children.
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Blanche endured the marriage for a while, and then ran away, apparently to West Dallas, a poor, and at the time unincorporated, neighborhood across the Trinity River from the city. By this time, December 1929, Blanche Caldwell Callaway had acquired a young friend named Emma Lou Renfro, who may have been hiding Blanche from her husband and family.
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Callaway had a sister living in Dallas, and Blanche, still a teenager, no doubt feared being tracked down.
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American women in the 1920s, especially underage women, had little recourse against abusive spouses. This might account for the fact that Blanche waited until 1931 to surface and seek a divorce from Callaway. By then, however, she had also met another man.

According to Clyde Barrow’s youngest sister, Marie, Blanche was living at the home of a friend, “On Borger, near the railroad tracks.” One source indicates that Blanche was walking in West Dallas one day when she passed a young man. At some point, she and the young man struck up a conversation. The date was November 11, 1929. Their subsequent friendship developed quickly into deep affection and love. His name was Marvin Ivan Barrow. His friends called him Buck, but Blanche referred to him as Daddy.
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Just after midnight on November 30, 1929, less than three weeks after meeting Blanche, Buck was shot following a burglary in Denton, Texas, and arrested. He was tried and sentenced to four years in the Texas State Penitentiary. He began serving his sentence on January 14, 1930. In a letter written home two days later, Buck asked that Blanche write to him. (See Appendix C.) Apparently, she wrote to him often, but on March 8, 1930, less than two months after his delivery to the penitentiary system, Buck escaped from the Ferguson prison farm, near Midway, Texas, and returned to Dallas. More than a year later, following the finalization of her divorce from her first husband, Blanche married Buck Barrow. The date was July 3, 1931.
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It has been stated that Blanche was initially ignorant of Buck’s criminal activities and that she did not realize he was an escaped convict. But that is hard to believe; she had to have known of his arrest on November 30, 1929. Buck’s mother knew all along that her son had gone to prison and had subsequently escaped. In her unpublished manuscript, Cumie Barrow wrote, “When Buck escaped from the pen, he came by here and got Blanche (who was staying here) and they went off some place in a car. I think it was in a rooming house someplace, where they hid for awhile.” This suggests that Blanche Barrow knew more than she admits in her own memoir. Still, whatever the extent of Blanche’s initial knowledge of the nature of Buck’s freedom, she, along with Buck’s mother, eventually persuaded Buck to turn himself over to prison authorities, finish out his term, and start over again with a clean record. On December 27, 1931, Buck traveled to Huntsville, Texas, and surrendered to a group of very surprised prison officials.
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Buck Barrow served his remaining term and was issued a pardon by Governor Miriam Ferguson. He was released from prison on March 22, 1933, and reunited with his young wife the following night. Within a few days, Clyde Barrow paid a visit to Buck and Blanche. The meeting was strained and tense. By this time, Clyde in the company of his girlfriend, Bonnie Parker, and a young man from West Dallas named W. D. Jones, was widely sought for a number of crimes ranging from auto theft to murder.

Clyde immediately began pressing Buck and Blanche to help him raid Eastham, the notorious Texas prison farm. Both Clyde and Ralph Fults had begun plotting the break-in while they were still convicts serving time there. Although mistaken in thinking that the plan was hatched to free criminal cohort Raymond Hamilton (Hamilton would not arrive at Eastham until August 1933, after Buck Barrow was dead and Blanche was in police custody), Blanche knew well of Clyde’s desire to raid Eastham. And she was not eager to get involved with her brother-in-law. Still, Buck pressed the point. Eventually he and Blanche arrived at a very tenuous compromise. They would not help with the raid, but they would meet again with Clyde, Bonnie, and W. D. They would even try to convince Clyde to give himself up, even though both thought it futile.
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Thus, it was with some apprehension on the part of Blanche that on Wednesday, March 29, 1933, she and her husband took to the road, meeting Clyde first in Oklahoma, and then proceeding with him to Joplin, Missouri. Blanche was evidently hopeful enough about the visit to bring her camera with her, to record the images of those she could not otherwise see with any frequency.
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Nevertheless, it would be there, in Joplin, that her fears became reality, changing her life forever.

On April 13, 1933, the day before Buck and Blanche were to return to West Dallas, six lawmen arrived at the garage apartment occupied by the Barrow brothers. A gunfight erupted. Two officers were killed and in their haste to escape, the fugitives left most of their belongings behind—including Buck’s pardon papers and marriage license and Blanche’s camera. Now he and Blanche were on the run with Bonnie and Clyde and their friend W. D. Jones.

In her diary, Blanche describes graphically the scene left in the wake of the bloody shoot-out. In a subsequent interview, she told of helping move the body of one of the slain officers so Clyde could get the car out of the garage.
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Nevertheless, that was not the end of the story.

On July 19, 1933, a posse descended on Platte City, Missouri, and surrounded the tourist cabins occupied by the Barrow brothers. Again, a gunfight ensued and again the gang escaped. But this time Buck was mortally wounded, and Blanche was struck in the forehead with a bullet fragment and in one of her eyes with razor-sharp shards of glass.

Buck and Blanche Barrow near Crockett, Texas, 1931. (Courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

Seeking refuge in an abandoned amusement park near Dexter, Iowa, the gang camped out for four days after their escape from Platte City. Buck drifted in and out of consciousness while Blanche, her vision greatly impaired, tried to nurse his wound. Then on July 24, 1933, just before dawn, another posse engaged the gang. Bonnie, Clyde, and W. D., all wounded, escaped. Buck and Blanche were captured—Blanche calling, “Don’t die, Daddy,” as she was separated from Buck. Five days later, he was dead.

Blanche was tried in Platte City, Missouri, on a charge of assault with intent to kill and was sentenced to ten years in the state penitentiary at Jefferson City. She began her memoir shortly thereafter.
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Less than a year later, on May 23, 1934, she heard of the deaths of Bonnie and Clyde. She told reporters that she was glad they died together. In 1935, while seated in a federal courtroom with numerous other defendants (including a heavily manacled W. D. Jones), Blanche received an additional sentence of one year and one day for harboring Bonnie and Clyde; the extra time was to be served concurrently with her Missouri sentence (meaning her total sentence remained ten years).

Bonnie and Clyde on a road between Marshall, Texas, and Dallas, 1933. (Courtesy of L. J. Hinton)

By then, she had become close friends with Holt Coffey, the sheriff of Platte City, Missouri. Coffey was the officer who had launched the unsuccessful attempt to surround the Barrow brothers in 1933, the same officer Blanche was convicted of assaulting. With his help, along with that of a friendly FBI agent and the wife of a Missouri governor, Blanche’s prison experience was made as comfortable as possible. It was certainly nothing to compare to the sadistic brutality suffered by her brother-in-law Clyde in the Texas penitentiary. In a letter to her mother, Blanche mentioned that she and the other female inmates were “not behind bars” and that they were allowed to make many of their own decisions, within prison regulations, of course.
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One negative side to Blanche’s sentence was the eventual loss of her injured eye. Initially, doctors were confident the eye could be saved, but a number of serious complications resulted in its loss.

Blanche was a model prisoner throughout her time in prison.
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Indeed, she received an early release due to good behavior. On March 24, 1939, Blanche Barrow walked out of the Missouri State Penitentiary and went home to her father in Garvin, Oklahoma.

Chronology