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The FBI’s assistant director, Hugh Clegg, who had arrived from Washington that day to supervise the hunt for Dillinger, ordered every available man to surround 1835 Park Avenue. By midnight they had every exit covered. The building was quiet. The only light came from a single apartment downstairs. An agent knocked on its door, saying he was looking for someone who had just moved into the building. A man said everyone there had been living there at least six months. They were working people and most had children. To the FBI men, it looked like a dead end. Assistant Director Clegg returned downtown, leaving a group of agents to watch the building. With daylight a new group arrived. They watched the building’s occupants come and go. None looked familiar. There was no activity they could see in Apartment 4.

Finally, late that afternoon, Clegg decided to raid Apartment 4. After positioning men around the building, he and a trio of agents armed with submachine guns crept to the door and knocked. As Clegg described the raid, “[We] knocked on the door and a man about 45 to 50 years of age came to the door; upon opening the door machine guns were punched right in his stomach and he was ordered to ‘stick ’em up’; he did not stick ’em up, but seemed to be amused. His wife, a small woman, was quite excited and wanted to shoot [the agents]. No shooting was done. There was a little girl in the place.”7

It was the wrong apartment. Not for several days would agents learn that Dillinger’s hideaway was downstairs. It didn’t matter. Dillinger had left the building at 6:00 the previous night, about five hours before the delirious Eddie Green revealed where he was hiding.

Frank Hamer arrived in Dallas that Monday with Manny Gault, a highway patrolman who was being assigned to the case. Clyde’s trail was already cold, but Hamer had a hunch, and the next day he took the Dallas deputies Bob Alcorn and Ted Hinton and pursued it.

From what he had deduced, Hamer could see that Clyde tended to head north whenever there was trouble in Dallas. Tuesday morning the lawmen headed up Highway 77 to Sherman and began showing photos of Bonnie and Clyde to gas station attendants. By Wednesday afternoon they had reached the busy Oklahoma county seat of Durant, where they became mired in noontime congestion. The two cars were stopped in traffic when, according to Ted Hinton, Alcorn noticed a car coming toward them. To their amazement, it was Bonnie and Clyde.

“Here they come!” Alcorn yelped.

Clyde’s car passed directly beside them. Hinton drew his gun, but Alcorn shook his head. They were too hemmed in by traffic: they were under orders not to start any firefight where civilians could be shot. As Hinton watched Clyde’s car disappear, he pulled over and flagged down Hamer. Together the two cars managed to extricate themselves from traffic and sped off in pursuit, but by then Clyde was gone.8

On Thursday afternoon, April 5, Alcorn and Hinton checked in with their office and learned that Bonnie had been sighted in a Texarkana drugstore. The four lawmen raced southeast, reaching Texarkana around dusk. There they learned that Clyde had been sighted at a lunch stand five miles north of town. By the time they reached the lunch stand the couple had been seen driving across the Index Toll Bridge ten miles north without paying the toll. The bridge led into southeastern Oklahoma.

Clyde drove through the night in a pounding rain, heading past Tulsa into the state’s far northeast corner. After midnight he turned off Route 66 outside the town of Commerce, cruised down a dirt road a quarter mile and parked for the night. It was a remote spot, located between two industrial mines, ten minutes from both the Kansas and Missouri borders. Bonnie and Clyde curled up with blankets in the front seat and fell asleep. Henry Methvin slept in the back.9

The next morning they woke to find that their parking spot had become a mud hole. Clyde got up first, stepped out into the road,