Donna Fielder

Red Boyd is alive and still excited about his long-ago meeting with infamous outlaws Bonnie and Clyde.

He called me after my column ran last week, excited to see his story in the newspaper.

It was a great tale about him as a 13-year-old newspaper delivery boy who stumbled over the pair of outlaws around Lewisville Lake.

The lake, Denton and surrounding small towns played a much larger role in the saga than I realized, since the pair is mostly known as West Dallas outlaws who roamed several states robbing grocery stores and banks and killing lawmen and a few hapless civilians along the way.

I spent Monday on a comfortable tour bus with my friend Sherry, riding from place to place and learning fascinating details from John Neal Phillips, assistant professor of art at the Southeast campus of Tarrant County College. He wrote a book called Running With Bonnie and Clyde in 2002 told from the perspective of gang member gone straight Ralph Fultz.

This year is the 75th anniversary of the deaths in a stolen Ford V-8 down a dirt road in Louisiana. Legendary lawman Frank Hamer engineered an ambush, and the unsuspecting pair took between 25 and 30 bullets apiece that day from half a dozen men who hid in the bushes waiting for them. They had no intention of trying to take them alive.

Clyde had shot his way out of many a tight spot and he’d killed nine lawmen along the way. He certainly needed killing. Still, it wasn’t the most heroic day in the annals of law enforcement, to my mind.

Bonnie wasn’t a vicious killer, Phillips told us. She never shot anyone and mostly stayed in the car when Clyde and his friends were robbing and stealing. She was a woman in love who would do anything for her man, even die with him.

Clyde was arrested for the first time in Denton, and Denton police shot his brother Buck through the legs that night of Oct. 29, 1929. They had burglarized a filling station on Elm Street, but they didn’t get far with the safe they stole.

The Barrow gang, which included Ralph Fults, decided to rob two banks on the Square at once on April 11, 1932. (Phillips says they were on the southwest end of the Square, but I suspect, given the reference to nearby Austin Street, that it actually was the southeast corner.) Fults decided to walk around the Square, just to make sure. Something caught his eye on the north side. According to Phillips, all the cars were parked facing in, except one. That Chrysler, which looked to be armor-plated, held two men. Fultz recognized them. They were Texas Rangers Tom Hickman and M.T. “Lone Wolf” Gonzuales. Even the Barrow gang didn’t want to tangle with those two sureshots, so they got out of town.

Sherry and I traveled to parts of Dallas we never would have otherwise dared go on Monday. We saw a “safe house” where Clyde killed a lawman on the porch. We saw a marker near Grapevine where Clyde and another man killed two highway patrolmen on motorcycles who stopped to see if someone was having car trouble. The troopers died not knowing which rattlesnake den they had poked. For one of the troopers, it was his first day on the job.

We saw Bonnie’s and Clyde’s graves, in different parts of Dallas. Bonnie’s mother wouldn’t let her be buried near the man who ruined her life. We learned the Belo Mansion, built by the founder of the A.H. Belo Corporation that owns the Record-Chronicle, was a funeral home at that time and Clyde’s funeral took place there. Ten thousand people attended, Phillips said. I figure half of them were cops looking to arrest the other half.

The tour left me with mixed feelings. Clyde was a child of the Great Depression. He and his family lived under the Houston Street Viaduct with thousands of other homeless families. He was a barely 17-year-old burglar sent to the toughest unit of the worst state penal system in America (according to research conducted at that time). Beatings and torture were everyday occurrences there, and he was raped.

When he was released, he got a job and swore to go straight. But the Dallas police visited the business every day, dragged him to the station on “suspicion” and harassed him, Phillips said. His boss got tired of the police coming around every day and fired him. That was the end of his gainful employment, and he evolved into the criminal who kept an arsenal of stolen guns in his car and used them as needed to stay out of prison.

Bonnie and Clyde are not American folk heroes. They are not to be admired. I’m not looking for excuses. But we can learn something from them and maybe figure out how to keep someone like them from evolving again. And that’s worth spending a day on a bus tour.

DONNA FIELDER can be reached at 940-566-6885. Her e-mail address is dfielder@dentonrc.com .