Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [127]
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.bl 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.”10 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.”11
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.bm Moreover, Clyde’s choice of language is telling: the words he spoke to Worley were precisely