W. D. Jones - With The Barrow Gang

With The Barrow Gang

By age 15 or 16 W.D. Jones was known to the local police. He hung around the Barrows' service station on Eagle Ford Road and collected license plates for LC's brothers to use on cars they stole; he was picked up in Dallas at least once "on suspicion" of car theft and was arrested with LC in Beaumont, Texas for car theft. On Christmas Eve 1932, Clyde Barrow and his girlfriend Bonnie — already on the run, and glamorous outlaws to W.D. — stopped by home. Barrow was between assistants, and he and Parker brought Jones along with them when they left. The next afternoon in Temple, Texas, in a botched attempt at stealing a car, Jones or Barrow shot and killed the car's owner, a 27-year-old new father, grocery clerk Doyle Johnson. Newspaper accounts reported that the fatal shots came from the passenger side of the car. According to Jones, Barrow used this report to keep him with him and Parker. Jones was indicted for Johnson's murder by a Bell County grand jury, but was not tried.

On the night of January 6, 1933 in Dallas, the three stumbled into a trap set for another criminal and Barrow killed Tarrant County Deputy Malcolm Davis, shooting him point-blank in the chest with a 16-gauge shotgun. Jones and Parker were waiting in the car for Barrow and were as startled as the neighbors were when gunfire broke out. Jones "grabbed a gun and began blasting the landscape." Parker shouted to him to stop, that he might hit someone, and she circled the car around the block to catch up with Barrow. Though in his confession to police, Jones said that he was starting the motor while Parker fired her pistol out the passenger window, thirty-five years later he told Playboy magazine, "As far as I know, Bonnie never packed a gun.... during the five big gun battles I was with them, she never fired a gun." In October 1934 Jones was tried and convicted as an accessory to Deputy Davis's murder as part of an arrangement with Dallas County Sheriff R.A."Smoot" Schmid.

After the murder of Malcolm Davis, Barrow, Parker and Jones lay low. They drove through the hills of Missouri and Arkansas and may have wandered as far east as Tennessee. They made news only on the night of January 26, when they kidnapped Springfield, Missouri police officer Thomas Persell. Twice in early spring they dressed up and photographed each other and their gun collection beside the road. They saw how their pictures came out at the same time as thousands of newspaper readers: in April the rolls of film were captured by police, developed, and published. The playful pictures brought unintended consequences, particularly one of Bonnie Parker squinting defiantly at the camera, her foot planted on the bumper of a stolen car, a gun at her outthrust hip and a cigar hanging from her mouth. Dallas County Deputy Sheriff Ted Hinton recalled that the "brazen pride" displayed in the pictures made law enforcement officers that much more determined to catch them.

The three returned to Dallas on March 24 or 25 and learned that on March 23, Clyde's older brother Buck had been pardoned from Huntsville penitentiary. On the night of March 25 they surprised Buck and his wife Blanche at Blanche's mother's home and persuaded Buck to vacation with them in strategically located Joplin, Missouri.