Public Enemies (29 page)

At police headquarters, officers weren’t exactly scrambling to join the action. The bank had suffered a series of false alarms, and Officer Chester Boyard figured this was one more. He grabbed two men, strolled to a squad car, and drove to the bank. A few minutes later, Boyard was first out of the car in front of the bank. The moment he entered the lobby, he heard a voice yell, “Stick ’em up.” Before he could react, one of the robbers—later identified as Russell Clark—leveled a submachine gun at him and took his pistol. Sergeant Wilbur Hansen was next through the door, his submachine gun pointed toward the floor. From the back of the bank Pierpont shouted, “Get that cop with the machine gun!”
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Makley, who was covering the lobby, turned and fired. A bullet grazed Officer Hansen’s right hand and scorched a flesh wound in his side. He pitched forward, stunned. A woman fainted, slithering to the floor like a shrugged-off overcoat. A vase of flowers crashed down. Makley stepped over and tried to wrench Officer Boyard’s pistol from its holster. It wouldn’t come free. He took a moment to unbutton the holster and take the gun. Outside, the third officer ran for help.

Gunsmoke was rising inside the lobby. Outside, a crowd was beginning to form. The manager of Goldberg’s Shoe Store, four doors north of the bank, jogged down to investigate. Officer Boyard made eye contact through the front door and vigorously shook his head. The man then stepped onto a window ledge and peered into the bank. Makley saw him and fired a burst from a submachine gun, sending the man scrambling for cover and glass crashing out into Main Street.

Dillinger was finishing inside the vault. He glanced out a back window. It was a long drop to the parking lot below. “We’ll have to shoot our way out the front!” he yelled. He waved his gun at Grover Weyland and three woman tellers hiding under a counter, beckoning them to come forward. When Weyland tarried, Pierpont slapped him, sending his eyeglasses skidding across the floor. Weyland glared. “If you didn’t have that gun in your hand, you wouldn’t have that much guts,” he said.
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At that point another policeman walked into the lobby. “Come right in and join us,” Dillinger quipped.

“What the hell’s going on?” the man asked.

Officer Boyard shook his head and the man went quiet.
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Each of the five robbers selected a hostage or two, and together they headed out the front door. So many people had gathered on the sidewalk, however, that the gang literally had to push their way through the inquisitive crowd. A number of onlookers, noticing Officer Boyard, assumed he had taken the gang members hostage and crowded forward to get a look. “Get back! Get back!” people yelled.

As the crowd began to part, two detectives burst around a corner twenty yards away.

“Mack!” Pierpont cried.

Makley turned and fired a burst from his submachine gun. The detectives took cover in the Wylie Hat Shop.

The crowd lingered on the sidewalk even as the scrum of gang members and their hostages inched east toward the lakefront and their waiting car. Several hostages melted into the crowd. At least one passerby found himself briefly taken hostage. It was chaos. As the gang reached the parking lot, Pierpont again spied the two detectives peering down an alley to the south. “There’s that fellow with the gun again,” Pierpont snapped to Makley. “Get him!”

Makley loosed a volley down the alley, and the detectives dived into the rear entrance of the Liberal Clothing store, showers of dust and asphalt erupting at their heels. When they reached the car, Dillinger slid behind the wheel. “C’mon, Mr. President, you’re going with us,” Pierpont said to Weyland. He turned to a teller named Anna Patzke and said, “And you in the red dress.” The two hostages took positions on the running board beside Dillinger. Officer Boyard stood opposite them.

Dillinger sped away, the car whizzing past two running police officers. Weyland waved his arms as they passed, indicating they should not shoot. With Hamilton reading the git, Dillinger drove west across town, running two red lights before sagging into a traffic jam. They told Boyard to beat it and pulled the two remaining hostages inside the car, not wanting to attract attention.

The traffic jam cleared after a moment, and within minutes they were driving on dirt roads into the yellowing fields of the Wisconsin countryside. They stopped to change license plates, then again to fill up at a gasoline cache they had left. When Mrs. Patzke said she was cold, Pierpont lent her his coat. He gave Weyland his hat. Tensions ebbed. Dillinger’s mood, in fact, turned buoyant. They kept to the cat roads, passing several farms. At one point they passed an old man on a tractor. “Hi, Joe,” Dillinger hollered with a wave.

Finally they pulled into a glade and tied the hostages to a tree. Pierpont plucked his hat off the bank president’s head, and with that they were off.

The gang was back in Milwaukee by day’s end. Mary Kinder was waiting when they walked in, Dillinger kidding Pierpont about lending Mrs. Patzke his new coat. The take came to roughly $5,000 each.

By nightfall, as posses spread across southern Wisconsin in a vain attempt to track the robbers, reporters and police from Milwaukee to Indianapolis descended on Racine. One of Matt Leach’s men was there, and the Dillinger Gang’s responsibility was quickly confirmed. Asked what Dillinger was like, Grover Weyland told reporters the gang had been “genial.” At one point, he said, one of the robbers in the getaway car—later identified as Makley—had cursed, and Dillinger had told him to cut it out, because of the presence of a lady in the car.

This kind of small courtesy was becoming a Dillinger hallmark. Like most of his peers, Dillinger was an avid reader of his own press clippings, and one suspects this penchant for niceties had less to do with good manners than with an increasing awareness of his own public image. Dillinger knew how the public tended to celebrate daring bank robbers, and he craved its adulation. He got it. Just as Pretty Boy Floyd had aroused populist sentiment in dust-bowl Oklahoma, Dillinger was quickly perceived by many Midwesterners as a force of retribution against moneyed interests who had plunged the nation into a depression. Letters of support began popping up in Indiana newspapers.

“Why should the law have wanted John Dillinger for bank robbery?” read one. “He wasn’t any worse than bankers and politicians who took the poor people’s money. Dillinger did not rob poor people. He robbed those who became rich by robbing the poor. I am for Johnnie.”

And this was only the beginning.

 

 

By mid-November there had been no confirmed sighting of Bonnie and Clyde for three months, not since they were seen fleeing the bloody shoot-out at Dexfield Park, Iowa, on July 24. No one knows where they hid, but anecdotal evidence suggests they spent several weeks with cousins of Clyde’s who lived on farms deep in the East Texas pines. Distant Barrow relatives, several of whom were interviewed by a band of schoolchildren for a class project decades later, remembered an incident during this period in which Bonnie attempted to learn how to fire a pistol and nearly shot off one of her toes.

Wherever Bonnie and Clyde were hiding, only two men were actively pursuing them. A Dallas FBI agent, Charles Winstead, poked around where he could, but the pull of other cases kept him from the chase full-time. In the FBI’s absence the manhunt, such as it was, fell to the Dallas county sheriff, Smoot Schmid, who handed the case to a veteran investigator named Bob Alcorn. That fall Alcorn began working with a young deputy named Ted Hinton; both had met Bonnie during her waitressing days in downtown Dallas, and both knew Clyde and his old west Dallas haunts.

By October Alcorn and Hinton were reasonably certain Bonnie and Clyde were hiding somewhere in the countryside outside of Dallas. Worried they would be seen, the two law-enforcement agents refrained from systematic surveillance of the Barrow and Parker families. Instead they worked their sources, panning for tips on Clyde’s whereabouts, and spent endless days and nights cruising county roads around the city, parking on hillsides and staring at traffic; on one occasion they thought they saw Clyde’s Ford and gave chase, but the V-8 in question outran their squad car. Realizing they needed a more powerful vehicle, Hinton prevailed upon the Ben Griffin Motor Company to loan him a fast new Cord sedan: if anything could catch Clyde Barrow, the salesman promised, it was the Cord.

Late one night, on a hillside overlooking Duncanville, Hinton was sitting behind the wheel of the Cord, watching cars pass; there were reports that members of the Barrow family had been seen in the area. Suddenly Alcorn pointed at a passing Ford and barked, “That’s him!” Hinton shoved the car into first. “Get going!” Alcorn snapped. Rolling onto the blacktop, Hinton shoved the car into second gear, but he shoved too hard. The linkage ripped; the car sagged and died.

The deputies returned the Cord and leased a powerful Cadillac limousine. Driving one night on Loop 12 in far east Dallas, Hinton thought he saw Clyde in a passing Ford. Hinton floored the accelerator, but the Ford was too fast. Within minutes it outdistanced them and disappeared into the night. Back went the limousine. At this point, the two frustrated deputies were ready to try anything. Looking for something that might stop Clyde, they prevailed upon an excavating company to lend them a massive gravel-moving truck. The idea was to trap Clyde. Alcorn would sit in a squad car on a stretch of road where Clyde had been seen. When Alcorn saw him pass, he would flash a signal to Hinton in the gravel truck. Hinton would then drive into the road, blocking it or smashing into the side of Clyde’s Ford.

It almost worked. Sheriff Schmid was along one evening when they spotted Clyde driving with Bonnie. When Schmid flashed the signal, Hinton edged the truck onto the road. But other cars materialized around him. Rather than take the chance of injuring passersby, Hinton stopped. He could follow the car only with his gaze as it drove out of sight.
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After two months working their sources, Alcorn and Hinton finally hit pay dirt just before Thanksgiving. The tip came to Hinton. A dairy farmer who lived near the town of Sowers, fourteen miles northwest of Dallas, called to say he had seen Clyde parked on a section of State Highway 15 beside his farm.
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He described how Clyde blinked his headlights, a sign for a car carrying the Barrow and Parker families to pull up alongside. The tip sounded good, and it apparently wasn’t the only one Hinton received. Though he never divulged his source, someone—apparently close to the Barrow family—told Hinton there was a meeting that Wednesday night.

An animated discussion ensued when Alcorn and Hinton broke the news to Sheriff Schmid. The deputies insisted on ambushing Clyde. He had sworn never to be taken alive, they said; there was no way to bring him in—except dead. But Schmid, intoxicated by the idea of photographers snapping his picture alongside a handcuffed Clyde Barrow, insisted on attempting to capture him. It was an argument the deputies couldn’t win. They thought Schmid wanted to be the next governor.

As the sun set that evening, two nights after Dillinger’s robbery at Racine, the three lawmen and another deputy parked their cars a half-mile from the purported meeting site, then hiked back and took positions in a ditch about seventy-five feet from the spot where the farmer claimed to have seen Clyde. About half past six, as darkness set in, a car approached. It pulled up on the road and stopped. In the gloaming, the officers could just make out the Barrow and Parker families.

At 6:45, as the four lawmen watched from the weeds, they heard the sound of a V-8 engine approaching from the north. A moment later a Ford hove into view. Clyde was driving. Later he would say he had a bad feeling that night. He started to drive on past, but when he was roughly seventy-five feet from the officers’ hiding place, Sheriff Schmid suddenly popped up out of the ditch. “Halt!” he shouted.

The sheriff had initiated his plan; now Hinton and Alcorn carried out theirs, opening fire on the oncoming Ford. The bullets pounded into the driver’s-side door, Hinton’s submachine gun doing much of the damage. As Clyde struggled to control the car, three of the Ford’s tires burst. The windshield and windows shattered. Bullets tore into the steering wheel, shearing off chunks of it in Clyde’s hands. Strips of the interior dangled from the ceiling over his head.

Clyde floored the accelerator, and the wounded car wobbled forward down the gravel road, crested a hill, and passed from sight. The car containing the Barrow and Parker families drove off, leaving Schmid and his deputies alone, powerless to give chase. “It’s my fault, boys,” Schmid said after a moment. “I should have listened to you fellas.”

Clyde knew he couldn’t get far driving on three flat tires. Four miles south he spied an oncoming Ford coupe and swerved in front of it, forcing the car into a ditch. Clyde leaped from the car, a shotgun in his hand, and yelled at the Ford’s driver, “Get out of there!”

Neither the driver, Thomas R. James, nor his friend Paul Reich replied. Clyde placed the shotgun against the glass of the driver’s-side window, tilted it upward, and pulled the trigger; the resulting blast blew a hole in the Ford’s roof. James and Reich tumbled out the far side, glass cuts on their faces. They stood by the car, hands above their heads. Bonnie ran to the Ford and got in. But Clyde couldn’t find the ignition switch. “Where’s the key?” he demanded.

“You’re so smart,” James snapped. “Find it yourself.” A moment later Clyde did, and he drove the coupe off into the Texas night.

 

 

All that autumn Hoover fended off attempts from Midwestern lawmen and editors to draw the FBI into pursuing the Dillinger and Barrow gangs. His position only hardened in mid-November when the Bureau was dealt devastating blows on back-to-back days in the War on Crime’s two major cases, the Hamm kidnapping and the Kansas City Massacre.