Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [153]
Outside Dallas, Texas Easter Sunday, April 1 3:30 P.M.
As the FBI scrambled to find Dillinger that morning, Bonnie Parker sat stroking a white rabbit beside a car parked north of the Dallas city limits, on an unpaved stretch of road overlooking Texas State Highway 114. The rabbit was a gift for her mother. Clyde was stretched out across the backseat, trying to take a nap. Henry Methvin was pacing. After an extended visit with Methvin’s family in Louisiana, they had picked up the ulcer-plagued Joe Palmer in Joplin and sent Palmer into Dallas to alert their families to their arrival.
At about three-thirty, Bonnie glanced up and saw a trio of motorcycle policemen passing north on the highway below them. They were state troopers. As Bonnie watched, two of the men, spotting the Ford parked alone on the hillside, slowed, then turned around, heading toward the entrance to the dirt road where Bonnie and Clyde waited.
According to the version of events Clyde told his family, Bonnie walked back to the car and roused him. He stepped out with a sawed-off shotgun. Methvin was already standing by the car, cradling a Browning automatic rifle. As Clyde told the story, he said to Methvin, “Let’s take ’em.”4 Clyde claimed he meant to take the officers hostage, just as he had a half-dozen times before.
Methvin misunderstood. The two patrolmen, E. B. Wheeler, twenty-six, and a twenty-two-year-old rookie named H. D. Murphy, who was on his first day of duty, were just coasting up to the parked Ford, their sidearms still holstered, when Methvin raised his rifle and fired a burst of bullets directly into Wheeler’s chest, killing him. Murphy stopped his motorcycle and began to grab for a sawed-off shotgun. When Clyde saw him go for the gun, he fired three shots, killing Murphy as well. A passing motorist watched as the three then leaped into the Ford and drove off.
The Dallas County sheriff, Smoot Schmid, immediately announced that Clyde had done the killing. “He’s not a man,” Schmid said. “He’s an animal.” Governor Ferguson announced $500 rewards for the arrest of Clyde and his unidentified co-assassin.
Frank Hamer arrived in Dallas the next morning.
As initial reports of the St. Paul gunfight crossed his desk that Sunday, Hoover was apoplectic. Nothing about this made sense: Why had two men conducted a raid, and why was one of them a member of the notoriously corrupt St. Paul police? Why were his men armed with pistols instead of machine guns? Why wasn’t he told of the raid beforehand? And why, above all, had his men let Dillinger get away?by In a phone call with Purvis, Hoover condemned the St. Paul office for “their atrocious bungling of the raid yesterday.” From now on, Hoover said, all information on Dillinger—no matter how trivial—was to be relayed to headquarters. And, as Hoover repeated to agents in St. Paul, police were never to join FBI raids again, unless agents “were short of equipment, like machine guns or gas guns.”5
The St. Paul shoot-out had a galvanizing effect on Hoover. From the tone of his memoranda, he seemed amazed that Dillinger had the temerity to actually fire on his men. Then and there, Hoover decided to make Dillinger’s apprehension the Bureau’s highest priority. That Tuesday he ordered all offices to give Dillinger precedence “over all other pending cases.” New agents poured into St. Paul. Cots were arranged in the FBI office and at the post office, where the men grabbed catnaps between calls.
Monday night they got their first break. The Lincoln Park’s manager, Mrs. Coffey, telephoned the St. Paul office with a tip. Her husband had found the address of one of Dillinger’s visitors, the man who had exchanged shots with Agent Coulter; he rented an apartment at 2214 Marshall Avenue. Agents had the building surrounded within an hour. By daylight there was no sign of Dillinger or any other suspects, but the manager identified a man who matched the description