Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [196]
Afterward, on May 4 or 5, they dropped Palmer off in Wichita and drove to Joplin, where Clyde scribbled a letter to his mother, telling her he was heading back to Louisiana. But if Clyde thought he could put off seeing the families for a few weeks, Bonnie had other ideas. She begged him to take her to Dallas to see her mother. On Sunday, May 6, they drove past the Barrow filling station and tossed out a bottle; inside were instructions to meet them four miles east of Dallas that night. It was a warm night, with a soft breeze, and Bonnie sat outside with her mother on a blanket talking for two hours. They looked through pictures Bonnie had brought: Clyde and Palmer in jaunty spring suits, arms around Bonnie; Clyde looking tough, a rifle across his knees.
“Mama,” Bonnie suddenly said, “when they kill us, don’t let them take me to an undertaking parlor, will you? Bring me home.”
Mrs. Parker seized Bonnie’s wrist. “Don’t Bonnie,” she said. “For God’s sake.”
Bonnie smiled. “Now, Mama, don’t get upset,” she said. “Why shouldn’t we talk it over? It’s coming. You know it. I know it. All of Texas knows it. So don’t let them keep me at the undertakers. Bring me home when I die. It’s been so long since I was home. I want to lie in the front room with you . . . sitting beside me. A long, cool, peaceful night together before I leave you. That will be nice and restful.”
She put her finger on a photo of Clyde holding her. “I like this one,” she said. “And another thing, Mama. When they kill us, don’t ever say anything ugly about Clyde. Please promise me that, too.”
Before leaving Bonnie gave her mother a new poem, hugged her, and promised to return in two weeks. Then she slid into the Ford beside Clyde and they drove east, and vanished. There would be no sign of them for two weeks, no confirmed bank robberies, no letters, no word of their whereabouts, then or now. They seem to have driven through Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee, but even that is conjecture.
What is known is that on Monday evening, May 21, Clyde drove them back to their ramshackle new home in Bienville Parish, the tan Ford bumping along the rutted back roads deep into the towering pines. Everyone was happy to be back, especially Henry Methvin; he kept saying how much he wanted to see his parents. They were all dirty and exhausted, sick of bathing in streams and sleeping in the car; Bonnie said she hadn’t slept in a real bed since the shoot-out at Dexfield Park the previous summer. Now they had a home, such as it was, and Clyde was eager to spread out and rest, maybe do some fishing and hunting.
He would never get the chance. Frank Hamer was waiting.
Of all the American legends that arose from the War on Crime, few are burdened with as many conflicting viewpoints as the story of the trap Frank Hamer laid for Bonnie and Clyde. When it was over, Hamer would give his own version of events. In 1979, in a book published two years after his death, the Dallas deputy Ted Hinton would give a contradictory account; and each of the half-dozen or so books published on Bonnie and Clyde over the last forty years has devised its own story of those fateful days in the Louisiana backwoods; no two are the same. Many believe Henry Methvin betrayed Bonnie and Clyde. Others say this was a canard concocted later to keep the younger Methvin out of jail.
In the end, for all the myths and half-truths that swirl around the events of those humid Louisiana days, the facts are surprisingly clear. They can be found in a set of musty court papers from Methvin’s 1936 trial for the murder of Constable Cal Campbell, and in newly discovered FBI documents and statements from members of Hamer’s posse. Taken together, these papers suggest that the key figure in the plot was not Hamer. It was the Bienville Parish sheriff, Henderson Jordan.
Jordan was a prototypical backwoods sheriff, an easygoing, sun-burned fellow