Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [130]
Hamer didn’t respond to the suggestion, but it stuck in his mind. The next day he got to work. Little is known of his first weeks on Bonnie and Clyde’s trail. For the rest of his life, he never described his pursuit in detail. In the only lengthy interview he ever gave on the subject, with the Texas Ranger historian Walter Prescott Webb, Hamer spoke in general of how he studied both Bonnie and Clyde:
I interviewed many people who knew him and studied numerous pictures of him and [Bonnie]. I knew the size, height, and all the marks of identification of both Clyde and Bonnie. But this was not enough. An officer must know the mental habits of the outlaw, how he thinks, and how he will act in different situations. When I began to understand Clyde Barrow’s mind, I felt that I was making progress . . . Before the chase ended, I not only knew the general appearance and mental habits of the pair, but I also had learned the kind of whiskey they drank, what they ate, and the color, size, and texture of their clothes.
On February 10, two days before Bonnie and Clyde’s shoot-out at Reeds Spring, Missouri, Hamer climbed into his black V-8 Ford and headed to Dallas. There he debriefed W. D. Jones, who had been captured that November, and also Jimmy Mullins, who had been arrested and interrogated by the Dallas authorities and the FBI. Hamer also made the first of several visits to the Dallas FBI office, where he talked with the agent assigned to the case, Charles Winstead. Bonnie and Clyde were low priorities for the Bureau, but Winstead had been cruising East Texas for several months chasing tips on the pair. He believed he had found one of their cars outside the town of Gilmer, east of Dallas. On another occasion he and a sheriff had discovered a suitcase full of clothes that relatives had left for them in a creek bed near Athens.14
The FBI declined to get more deeply involved, but Hamer had more luck with Smoot Schmid, the Dallas County sheriff. Schmid agreed that his two deputies, Bob Alcorn and Ted Hinton, would work with Hamer. The three men had several long talks, plotting strategy, then drove east together. An examination of Clyde’s wanderings showed his affinity for the triangle of country between Dallas, Joplin, and Shreveport, and after his initial research Hamer began contacting law-enforcement friends there, especially in East Texas, where Clyde had family.
He first struck their trail at Texarkana. From there he followed signs of the pair to the western Louisiana town of Logansport, then north to Keatchie, where they had purchased gasoline, then on to Shreveport, where Clyde bought pants, underwear, gloves, and an automatic shotgun. Hamer found one of their camps on the Wichita River, near Wichita Falls, Texas, where he traced a sales receipt to a store in Dallas where Bonnie bought a dress.
“But the trail always led back to Louisiana,” Hamer told Walter Prescott Webb. It was there, on February 17, after only a week of travel, that Hamer claimed, “I located their hideout.” This may have been wishful thinking, or even braggadocio; Hamer’s ego was sizable. He gives no detail of the supposed hideout, only to say that it was in a parish where he could not trust the sheriff. “And so it was arranged to have Barrow’s hideout moved into a parish where the officers were more reliable.” How this could have been arranged Hamer doesn’t say. But, he goes on, “in a comparatively short time the hideout was established in Bienville Parish at a place well known to me.”
Bienville Parish was the home of Henry Methvin’s parents. Hamer said he cruised the dirt roads there for several days before reaching out to the local sheriff, a tall, laconic man named Henderson Jordan. As it happened, their timing was perfect. Jordan had just been approached by a neighbor who brought a message from the Methvin family. If a deal could be struck for Henry Methvin’s pardon, Ivy and