Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [128]
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.
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.”12
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