Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [200]
Methvin’s irritating pleas only highlighted the debate over what to do if Bonnie and Clyde appeared. Jordan insisted they give the pair a chance to surrender. Hamer wouldn’t hear it. “Hamer and I had argued about that for days,” Jordan recalled twenty-five years later. “I wanted to step out in the road and demand their surrender, but Hamer said that if I did, I was a dead man.” Jordan didn’t care. As dawn broke, he was still determined to give the outlaws one last chance.
The sun rose. Hamer had been dwelling on how they could bring Clyde to a stop; they couldn’t easily shoot him if he whizzed by at fifty miles an hour. He told Methvin to park his truck in the road. They took off the left-front tire and placed the truck on a jack. If Clyde did drive by, Hamer wagered, he would stop to help out.
Seven o’clock came, then eight. A logging truck and a car or two passed. “After each car passed, Methvin would run over to us and beg us to call the whole thing off,” Jordan remembered. “Each time, I would patiently listen to him and then firmly send him back to his place on the road beside his truck. At one point I told him that if he did not get back to his truck and do what he was told to do, Bonnie and Clyde would not get the chance to kill him because I would.”
By nine they were debating whether to pack it in. Someone said give it another half hour. For a few minutes they went back to slapping mosquitoes and flicking at tics. Then, at 9:15, came the high-pitched whine of a car. It was approaching from the east at high speed. Everyone peered down the road. They saw it as it crested a rise: a tan Ford. Each of the men squinted at the car as it approached down the incline. “This is him,” Hinton whispered. “This is it. It’s Clyde.”
Bob Alcorn waited another moment till he could make out the driver’s face.
“It’s him, boys,” he said.
No one knows where Bonnie and Clyde spent their last night together. It almost certainly wasn’t the John Cole house, given their approach that morning from Gibsland. At 8:00 A.M. Clyde pulled up in front of Canfield’s Café, where he and Bonnie ate a light breakfast of donuts and coffee. Bonnie wore the same red dress she had been seen wearing off and on for days, Clyde a blue silk suit and a tie. They ordered sandwiches to go, and as they returned to the car to drive to the John Cole house, Bonnie began to eat hers. Clyde kicked off his shoes and placed his sunglasses on the dashboard. 28
Eight miles south of Gibsland, they crested a rise and spotted Ivy Methvin standing beside his truck, which was jacked up in the road. Bonnie put her sandwich down, and placed it on the magazine spread across her lap. Beneath the magazine was a Colt .45. Clyde took his foot off the accelerator and let the Ford coast to a stop beside Methvin’s truck. Clyde turned his head to the right, toward Methvin and his truck, away from the six guns that were aimed directly at his head.
“Hey,” Clyde said to Methvin.
Just then Methvin doubled over as if in pain and stepped away. Twenty feet to Clyde’s left, hidden in the brush, Sheriff Jordan was just about to put down his gun and yell something—halt, surrender—he wasn’t sure what. Just then Clyde took his foot off the brake for a moment, and the Ford began to ease forward.
The moment the car moved, Jordan’s deputy, Prentiss Oakley, fired. In a split second each of the five other posse members fired. Bonnie screamed “like a panther,” Jordan remembered. The first bullets tore into Clyde’s head and shoulders. His foot left the brake and the car began to roll forward. But the shooting didn’t stop. On and on it went, a never-ending barrage, bullet after bullet, more than 150 in all, tearing into the car and their bodies as the Ford rolled forward. The car came to a stop against the embankment thirty yards down the road.
And then, silence. Hinton ran up to the driver’s-side