Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [96]
It almost worked. Sheriff Schmid was along one evening when they spotted Clyde driving with Bonnie. When Schmid flashed the signal, Hinton edged the truck onto the road. But other cars materialized around him. Rather than take the chance of injuring passersby, Hinton stopped. He could follow the car only with his gaze as it drove out of sight.aw
Outside Dallas, Texas Wednesday, November 22
After two months working their sources, Alcorn and Hinton finally hit pay dirt just before Thanksgiving. The tip came to Hinton. A dairy farmer who lived near the town of Sowers, fourteen miles northwest of Dallas, called to say he had seen Clyde parked on a section of State Highway 15 beside his farm.ax He described how Clyde blinked his headlights, a sign for a car carrying the Barrow and Parker families to pull up alongside. The tip sounded good, and it apparently wasn’t the only one Hinton received. Though he never divulged his source, someone—apparently close to the Barrow family—told Hinton there was a meeting that Wednesday night.
An animated discussion ensued when Alcorn and Hinton broke the news to Sheriff Schmid. The deputies insisted on ambushing Clyde. He had sworn never to be taken alive, they said; there was no way to bring him in—except dead. But Schmid, intoxicated by the idea of photographers snapping his picture alongside a handcuffed Clyde Barrow, insisted on attempting to capture him. It was an argument the deputies couldn’t win. They thought Schmid wanted to be the next governor.
As the sun set that evening, two nights after Dillinger’s robbery at Racine, the three lawmen and another deputy parked their cars a half-mile from the purported meeting site, then hiked back and took positions in a ditch about seventy-five feet from the spot where the farmer claimed to have seen Clyde. About half past six, as darkness set in, a car approached. It pulled up on the road and stopped. In the gloaming, the officers could just make out the Barrow and Parker families.
At 6:45, as the four lawmen watched from the weeds, they heard the sound of a V-8 engine approaching from the north. A moment later a Ford hove into view. Clyde was driving. Later he would say he had a bad feeling that night. He started to drive on past, but when he was roughly seventy-five feet from the officers’ hiding place, Sheriff Schmid suddenly popped up out of the ditch. “Halt!” he shouted.
The sheriff had initiated his plan; now Hinton and Alcorn carried out theirs, opening fire on the oncoming Ford. The bullets pounded into the driver’s-side door, Hinton’s submachine gun doing much of the damage. As Clyde struggled to control the car, three of the Ford’s tires burst. The windshield and windows shattered. Bullets tore into the steering wheel, shearing off chunks of it in Clyde’s hands. Strips of the interior dangled from the ceiling over his head.
Clyde floored the accelerator, and the wounded car wobbled forward down the gravel road, crested a hill, and passed from sight. The car containing the Barrow and Parker families drove off, leaving Schmid and his deputies alone, powerless to give chase. “It’s my fault, boys,” Schmid said after a moment. “I should have listened to you fellas.”
Clyde knew he couldn’t get far driving on three flat tires. Four miles south he spied an oncoming Ford coupe and swerved in front of it, forcing the car into a ditch. Clyde leaped from the car, a shotgun in his hand, and yelled at the Ford’s driver, “Get out of there!”
Neither the driver, Thomas R. James, nor his friend Paul Reich replied. Clyde placed the shotgun against the glass of the driver’s-side window, tilted it upward, and pulled the trigger; the resulting blast blew a hole in the Ford’s roof. James and Reich tumbled out the