W. D. Jones - After The Barrow Gang

After The Barrow Gang

"There's a bullet in my chest, I think from a machine gun, birdshot in my face and buckshot in my chest and right arm." "When I tried to join the Army in World War Two after I got out of prison, them doctors turned me down because their X-rays showed four buckshot and a bullet in my chest and part of a lung blown away".

Jones lived the rest of his life in Houston, for many years next door to his mother. He married, but his wife died in the mid-1960s. He became addicted to pain-killing drugs. After 1967, the year Arthur Penn's romanticized film ignited a new generation's interest in the Barrow Gang, his arrests made the local news. Jones said of Bonnie and Clyde, " made it all look sort of glamorous, but like I told them teenaged boys sitting near me at the drive-in showing: 'Take it from an old man who was there. It was hell.'" Local TV reporters had brought him to see the film.

In 1968 Jones described his life on the run with Bonnie and Clyde in a colorful interview with Playboy magazine and spoke here and there to young people warning them away from the life of crime. Later in the year he filed a petition against Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, charging that the filmmakers, who had never contacted him, had maligned his character by implying that he had played a role in the betrayal of Barrow and Parker. Nothing came of the filing.

"'I've never lived it down,' he said of his outlaw days. 'I've tried but I guess I never will.'"

In the early morning hours of August 20, 1974 Jones accompanied an acquaintance to a friend's home where she thought she would be given a place to sleep. The friend did not allow her in, an altercation ensued, and at 3:55 a.m. the friend shot Jones three times with a 12-gauge shotgun. "The man told police that Jones was a 'nice' person when sober but that he knew of Jones' reputation and was afraid of him." He was buried on August 22 at Brookside Memorial Park in Houston.