Public Enemies (38 page)

Anderson’s search of the files generated a dozen new leads. He went to work even as the FBI laboratory, already busy on the Bremer case, began analyzing the beer bottles for fingerprints.

 

 

That same Monday, Louis Piquett returned to Crown Point. Rumors persisted that John Hamilton was preparing to raid the jail to free his partner. Sheriff Holley had asked that Dillinger be moved to the prison at Michigan City. Dillinger pleaded with Piquett to block the move. “Quit worrying,” Piquett said. “You’re not going to Michigan City.”

In Judge William Murray’s chambers, Piquett listened as Sheriff Holley argued that the prison was the only place they could guarantee Dillinger could not escape. Piquett easily short-circuited her request with a sly bit of

“There isn’t anything wrong with it,” Mrs. Holley said. “It’s the strongest jail in Indiana.”

“That’s what I thought,” Piquett said. “But of course, I don’t want to embarrass Mrs. Holley. I appreciate that she’s a woman, and if she’s afraid of an escape—”

“I’m not afraid of an escape,” the sheriff said. “I can take care of John Dillinger or any other prisoner.”

That pretty much did it, but just to make sure, Piquett said he would file for a change of venue if Dillinger were transferred. Judge Murray clearly didn’t mind the press attention he was receiving as Dillinger’s judge, and it was all he needed to hear. He ruled that the prisoner would remain in Crown Point.

Piquett returned to the jail three days later, on Thursday, February 15. For the first time he brought his investigator, Art O’Leary. Piquett was planning to send O’Leary to Florida to establish their alibi; Dillinger was claiming he had still been in Daytona Beach when eyewitnesses put him at the East Chicago bank robbery.

“Wait a minute,” Dillinger said as they rose to leave. “I’m gonna give you a note for Billie.”

Piquett and O’Leary looked at the folded note on the drive back to Chicago. Dillinger had drawn a floor plan of the Crown Point jail and a suggestion to Hamilton as to how he could break him out. The note instructed Hamilton to dynamite a corner of the jail, then use blowtorches to cut through the steel walls into the cell block where Dillinger would be waiting.
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O’Leary let out a low whistle. It was the first hint they had that Dillinger had no intention of standing trial. The note frightened both men. It was a ridiculous scheme, one that would no doubt get everyone involved killed. Nevertheless, after some debate, Piquett passed it to Frechette, who got it to John Hamilton.

Hamilton, however, was in no shape to help anyone; he was still recuperating from the bullet wounds he had suffered in East Chicago a month before. He had been holed up in a Chicago apartment ever since, tended to by Pat Cherrington. In desperation he contacted the one yegg he thought he could trust, their old friend Homer Van Meter. Van Meter was in St. Paul, where as fate would have it, he had just reunited with that most unstable of Depression-era outlaws, Baby Face Nelson.

In the wake of the Eastham raid, Clyde Barrow had a new gang for the first time in seven months, and from all appearances he was determined it would be his ticket into the criminal elite: finally, he would become a bank robber. It’s possible banks intimidated Clyde. Even when he worked with partners in the past, he had kept to jewelry stores and gas stations. But if Clyde now viewed himself as a Dillinger-like figure commanding a band of seasoned yeggmen, he was deluding himself, as soon became apparent. The problem was his new partner, Raymond Hamilton. The cocky, needling Hamilton had an ego to rival Clyde’s, and he wasn’t taking a backseat to anyone.

What little is known of those first weeks after the Eastham raid comes mostly from Joe Palmer, one of the convicts who escaped alongside Hamilton. Recaptured in Paducah, Kentucky, in August 1934, Palmer narrated a patchy version of events before dying in the electric chair. According to Palmer, a thin, jug-eared murderer who suffered from bleeding ulcers and various chronic stomach problems, he and three other prisoners stayed with Bonnie and Clyde after the raid: Raymond Hamilton; a double murderer named Hilton Bybee; and an acne-scarred twenty-one-year-old Louisiana kid named Henry Methvin.

After forming in Dallas, this five-person group drove east to Louisiana to visit Henry Methvin’s parents in a remote section of Bienville Parish, east of Shreveport. In Shreveport they bought clothes and guns. Afterward they headed north, intending to rob a bank in Iowa, which soon became Clyde’s favorite hunting ground. Tensions within the group broke to the surface after they robbed the bank at Rembrandt, in the northwest corner of Iowa, on January 25, eight days after the Eastham raid. It was an uneventful in-and-out affair; the take came to $3,800. According to Palmer, he was too sick to take part, and stayed behind in the getaway car with Bonnie. Still, Clyde insisted Palmer receive an equal share. Hamilton objected, but Clyde won the argument. It wouldn’t be their last: a clear rift was developing between Hamilton and the others. Perhaps sensing the explosive situation, Hilton Bybee left the gang after the Rembrandt robbery; he was arrested five days later in Amarillo.
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The bickering continued as the gang returned south through Missouri a few days later. They had almost reached Joplin when Palmer and Hamilton began arguing in the backseat. According to Palmer, he called Hamilton a “punk blabbermouth braggart.” Afterward, Hamilton simmered as Palmer threw a blanket over his head and fell asleep on the rear floorboard. According to Palmer, Clyde, who was driving, saw Hamilton take out his pistol, as if to shoot Palmer. Clyde reached back and slapped Hamilton in the face, losing control of the car in the process. They careened into a ditch, damaging the car’s left wheel.
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Palmer thanked Clyde for saving his life but wanted nothing more to do with Hamilton. He prevailed upon Clyde to leave him at Joplin’s Conner Hotel. Clyde promised to return in several weeks.
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If the gang left Missouri, it soon returned, because on February 12 Bonnie and Clyde were involved in a gunfight there. According to the next day’s
Springfield Press,
it began that morning when a Springfield woman spotted a man stealing her car from a driveway on East Walnut Street. An alert was broadcast, and a little before noon the stolen car was spotted passing through Galena, south of Springfield, then again in Reeds Spring, west of Branson.

Clyde was lost. Outside Reeds Spring, he picked up a hitchhiker, a forty-year-old farmer named Joe Gunn, pointed a pistol at him, and ordered him to guide them to Berryville, across the state line in Arkansas. Gunn climbed into the backseat beside Hamilton and Henry Methvin, who were perched atop a pile of automatic rifles and thousands of bullets. Gunn had been in the car barely five minutes when Clyde spotted a roadblock ahead. It was the Reeds Spring city marshal. Clyde turned onto a dirt road, found it was a dead end, and returned toward the roadblock. “We’ve gotta let ’em have it, boys,” Clyde said, stopping the car.
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Clyde snatched up an automatic rifle, jumped onto the road, and, along with Hamilton and Methvin, opened fire on the roadblock. As they did, another police car appeared behind them. Inside were two Springfield deputies. Hamilton wheeled and fired behind him. Clyde emptied his automatic rifle at the roadblock twice. Each time, Gunn noticed, he handed the rifle to Bonnie to reload. The gang’s firepower was overwhelming, and within minutes both sets of lawmen withdrew to call for reinforcements. Bonnie, Gunn recalled, appeared “delighted.” Hamilton hopped into the backseat wearing a wide smile. “I sho’ tried to kill that fucker back of the car,” he said.

The gang headed across the Arkansas border, eventually stopping eight miles south of Berryville. According to Gunn, who was let out of the car, Clyde leaned over, tweaked Bonnie’s nose, and said, “There’s no use carrying this dead weight, baby.” Gunn trudged back north to give his account to the Springfield newspaper that afternoon.

From Arkansas, Clyde drove the group to Dallas, where he and Hamilton began studying several banks in the area. On Monday night, February 19, believing they needed still more firepower, they burglarized a National Guard Armory at Ranger, Texas, west of Fort Worth, carting out armloads of Browning automatic rifles, Colt .45s, and thousands of bullets. They ferried it all back into Dallas.

It was during this period, between February 12 and early March, that Bonnie and Clyde experienced one of the stranger episodes of their careers. Hamilton was lonely, and in Dallas he managed to reunite with a heavily made-up piece of trouble named Mary O’Dare, the nineteen-year-old wife of a jailed friend.
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It was the first time another woman had joined the gang since Blanche Barrow, and while Bonnie had tolerated Blanche, she loathed Mary O’Dare. Almost everyone connected to the gang did. By all accounts O’Dare was immature, a sarcastic, gossipy girl who couldn’t understand why Bonnie and Clyde preferred sleeping in the car and bathing in ice-cold creeks to staying in a nice hotel. Raymond Hamilton’s brother Floyd termed O’Dare a “gold digger” and a “prostitute” who wore enough makeup to “grow a crop.”
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Behind her back, Clyde and Bonnie called her “The Washerwoman.”

O’Dare was with the gang when Clyde and Hamilton agreed on a bank to take, the R. P. Henry and Sons Bank in the town of Lancaster, twenty-five miles south of Dallas. On Tuesday morning, February 27, after leaving the women in their Ford north of the city, the two men took Henry Methvin and drove to Lancaster, stepping onto the sidewalk by the bank’s side entrancea few minutes before noon. Clyde’s behavior that day suggests his ambition to become a first-tier bank man. Gone were the wrinkled, dusty suits he usually wore. That day he wore a smart checkered overcoat and a matching Stetson. Hamilton wore a tailored overcoat of his own. They left Methvin in the car.

There were five people in the lobby when Clyde walked in, pulled out the sawed-off shotgun from beneath his coat, and said, “Everybody on the floor.” An elderly man named Brooks didn’t understand.

“What?” he asked. “What are we doing?”

A WPA laborer named Ollie Worley, who had just cashed a paycheck for $27.00, said, “We have to get on the floor.”

Brooks remained standing.

“Say, old man,” Clyde said. “You’d better get down.”

“Please,” a bank executive said.

It took another minute of prodding for the elderly man to take his place on the floor. As he did, Hamilton walked behind the teller cages, scooping cash into a sack. He led a teller into the vault, grabbing bricks of cash from the shelves, then emerged, ready to leave. At that point, a funny thing happened. While Hamilton was inside the vault, Clyde had snatched the $27.00 from Ollie Worley’s hand. As they left, he turned to Worley. “You worked like hell for this, didn’t you?” Clyde asked, motioning to the money in his hand.

“Yes sir,” Worley said. “Digging ditches . . .”

“Here,” Clyde said, thrusting the money at Worley. “We don’t want your money. We just want the bank’s.”
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Among the dozens of eyewitness accounts of Clyde’s behavior, this exchange is unique. If Worley’s memory is to be believed—he related the story to the Dallas historian John Neal Phillips in 1984—it is perhaps the only time Clyde ever expressed anything approaching an altruistic impulse toward one of his victims.
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Moreover, Clyde’s choice of language is telling: the words he spoke to Worley were precisely the same words newspapers reported Dillinger using six weeks earlier when robbing the First National Bank of East Chicago. The incident, along with his tailored clothing and uncharacteristically polite behavior that day, suggests that Clyde was adoptingDillinger as a role model, that at the very least he was aware of Dillinger’s exploits and was attempting to emulate his successes. It’s not a reach to suggest that Clyde craved the adulation Dillinger enjoyed and was altering his behavior in hopes of attracting something similar.

But any dreams Clyde had that he and Hamilton could forge a criminal enterprise to rival Dillinger’s were dashed that same day. Speeding out of Lancaster, they picked up the girls and headed north toward Oklahoma. Clyde drove; Hamilton and O’Dare sat in the backseat with Henry Methvin. At one point, Hamilton began to divide their take, which totaled about $4,000, into three parts.

Suddenly Mary O’Dare said, “What about me?”

“You get nothing,” Clyde barked.

As Clyde later told the story to his family, he watched Hamilton closely in the rearview mirror as he divided the money. He claimed he saw Hamilton slide a wad of bills into O’Dare’s hand. At this point, he stopped the car, confronted Hamilton, and searched him, finding an extra $600. It is certainly a dramatic anecdote, perhaps too much so to be believed. But whatever occurred that day, it marked the end of the Barrow-Hamilton partnership. Some versions of the story state that Bonnie and Clyde separated from Hamilton and O’Dare right there, on the highway.