“There is a law against murder, too,” Estill shot back.

  “Then why don’t you observe it?” Piquett asked. “Why don’t you [just] stand Dillinger against a wall and shoot him down? There’s no need to throw away the state’s money on this kind of mockery . . . Your Honor, even Christ had a fairer trial than this!”

  Estill was about to shout something back when Judge Murray told both attorneys to calm down. Piquett apologized to the court and motioned to Estill. “Bob and I respect each other,” he said.

  “He’ll be putting his arm around you soon,” Murray quipped. Laughter rippled through the courtroom. After more desultory argument, the judge gave Piquett a month: Dillinger’s trial would begin on March 12. Estill pouted. “Your Honor,” he said, “why don’t you let Mr. Piquett take Dillinger home with him, and bring him back on the day of the trial? You’ve given him everything else he has asked for.”

  Dillinger sat through it all wearing his trademark grin. As the handcuffs were reapplied for his return to the jail, he leaned over to Piquett and whispered, “Atta boy, counsel.”5

  The agent Hoover selected to supervise the Bremer case was William Rorer, the handsome World War I veteran who had arrested Machine Gun Kelly. Rorer, now promoted to inspector, arrived in St. Paul on Saturday, February 10, the day after Dillinger’s hearing. After reading over reports that day, he interviewed Bremer at his home on Sunday.

  They got off to a bad start. The two men repaired to the sunporch, where Rorer emphasized it would be necessary for Bremer to tell him everything he knew. Again Bremer bridled, saying he had already told Pop Nathan everything. Rorer said it was obvious he hadn’t. “Who said I haven’t told the truth?” Bremer demanded.6 In that case, he went on, he wouldn’t say anything at all. Rorer reminded him of the duty he owed the government and the American people.

  “To hell with duty,” Bremer said.

  The meeting broke up when the young bank president stormed from the room in tears. In Washington, Hoover had no sympathy for Bremer. He was ready to take dramatic action. For several days he had considered issuing a statement criticizing Bremer for failing to cooperate with the Bureau. Nathan asked him to hold off, but Hoover sent a draft to Cummings anyway. Beginning with a lecture on a victim’s duty to help capture his kidnappers, it noted that “in spite of the cooperation of the Special Agents of this Department’s Bureau of Investigation in restraining their activities to permit the safe return of Mr. Bremer, his cooperation has not yet been of a type that should be expected . . . Neither temerity, nor fear, nor indifference will excuse the lack of full, wholesome, wholehearted effort and cooperation.”

  Monday morning, when Bremer arrived at the Bureau’s office for further questioning, Rorer read him the statement. It had a dramatic impact. Suddenly Bremer began remembering things. That morning, and in interviews every day that week, his memory sprang vividly to life. The kidnappers let him smoke Chesterfields, he said; no, there was no state stamp on the box. He remembered the wallpaper in the room where he had been held, and the red flower design on the serving dishes. He said he had been driven about eight hours away.

  Bremer’s change in attitude coincided with the discovery of a trove of evidence. The afternoon after his release, agents had taken Walter Magee and retraced the route he had taken to deliver the ransom money. On Highway 55 south of Zumbrota, Magee pointed out the rise where he had seen the red lights. Scrambling up the grassy embankment, agents found three heavy brass lamps and a swinging lantern; all were then wrapped in cellophane and sent to Washington for analysis.

  Agent Sam McKee, meanwhile, drove to Portage, Wisconsin, where the sheriff was holding what he considered a suspicious set of gasoline cans. There were four five-gallon jugs and a funnel. The sheriff took McKee out to see a farmer named Reuben Grossman, who had found them. Grossman said he had first seen the cans the night Bremer was released, lying on the side of a dirt road just off Route 16. The next morning they were still there, so he picked them up and returned them to his garage. It crossed his mind they might be connected to the Bremer case, Grossman said, so he called the sheriff. McKee took the cans and the funnel and sent them to Washington. Within days they had the word. A single fingerprint had been identified, on one of the gas cans.

  It belonged to Dock Barker.

  Kansas City, Missouri Monday, February 12

  While the FBI scrambled to learn about the Barkers, the Kansas City Massacre investigation was going nowhere. Hoover harangued the Kansas City and Oklahoma City offices to keep him informed of their efforts. “I have been particularly embarrassed by your failure to keep this office advised concerning developments in the Floyd case,” Hoover wrote to the new Oklahoma City SAC, Dwight Brantley. “I receive more information from private parties in New York City concerning the handling of this matter in Oklahoma than I do from you.”bh

  Two agents were still working the case full-time, and their contrasting theories led to friction. A new man, A. E. “Gyp” Farland, was debriefing inmates at Leavenworth who knew the Barkers. He argued in a January 29 memo to Hoover that the Bureau “has been wrong as to the identity of those who assisted Verne Miller in the Kansas City Massacre.” Farland argued that Fred Barker and Alvin Karpis were almost certainly Miller’s partners. Other agents disagreed.

  Hoover read the memo in anger. Farland’s theory looked half-baked, and it underscored the meandering nature of the investigation. Hugh Clegg followed up. “I telephoned Acting Agent in Charge M. C. Spear at Kansas City,” Clegg wrote Hoover that afternoon, “and told him [you] were very much displeased with the reported lack of vigor in this investigation of the Kansas City Massacre case; that it appeared that they had let this case fall by the wayside and it was being handled intermittently by any one of a number of agents and it was not being pursued vigorously toward a logical conclusion.”

  Spear briefed Clegg on the office’s contrasting theories of the case. “I informed Spear that the various theories they might develop had no bearing on the case,” Clegg told Hoover, “that it was not the policy of agents of the division to get into disputes over theories; that we were seeking the facts, whatever they might be, and that he should not tolerate any friction in the office.”

  Hoover erupted. “This must stop at once,” he scrawled on Clegg’s memo. “See that a sharp letter is sent K.C. re such bickering. It must stop at once.”

  At Hoover’s instruction, a single new agent, Harold Anderson, was ordered to review the massacre file from top to bottom.bi The files themselves, which filled two four-drawer cabinets, were a mess. It took ten days for Anderson to get them organized. But what he discovered when he did was startling. In one drawer he found a sheaf of fingerprint photos taken from Verne Miller’s house. The prints, lifted from beer bottles in Miller’s basement, had been checked against those on file in the Kansas City office but had never been forwarded to Washington, which kept a national file of fingerprints. It was a blunder, and Anderson realized there would be hell to pay.

  That Monday morning the fingerprints were forwarded to Washington for examination. Hoover’s wrath was immediate; he demanded to know why the prints had languished in the files for seven months. “It appears,” a Kansas City agent wrote Hoover, “that in the excitement in connection with this investigation at that time shortly after the massacre happened, [the fingerprint file] was overlooked.”

  Anderson’s search of the files generated a dozen new leads. He went to work even as the FBI laboratory, already busy on the Bremer case, began analyzing the beer bottles for fingerprints.

  That same Monday, Louis Piquett returned to Crown Point. Rumors persisted that John Hamilton was preparing to raid the jail to free his partner. Sheriff Holley had asked that Dillinger be moved to the prison at Michigan City. Dillinger pleaded with Piquett to block the move. “Quit worrying,” Piquett said. “You’re not going to Michigan City.”

  In Judge William Murray’s chambers, Piquett listened as Sheriff Holley argued that the prison was the only place they could guarantee Dillinger could not escape. Piquett easily short-circuited her request with a sly bit of

  “There isn’t anything wrong with it,” Mrs. Holley said. “It’s the strongest jail in Indiana.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Piquett said. “But of course, I don’t want to embarrass Mrs. Holley. I appreciate that she’s a woman, and if she’s afraid of an escape—”

  “I’m not afraid of an escape,” the sheriff said. “I can take care of John Dillinger or any other prisoner.”

  That pretty much did it, but just to make sure, Piquett said he would file for a change of venue if Dillinger were transferred. Judge Murray clearly didn’t mind the press attention he was receiving as Dillinger’s judge, and it was all he needed to hear. He ruled that the prisoner would remain in Crown Point.

  Piquett returned to the jail three days later, on Thursday, February 15. For the first time he brought his investigator, Art O’Leary. Piquett was planning to send O’Leary to Florida to establish their alibi; Dillinger was claiming he had still been in Daytona Beach when eyewitnesses put him at the East Chicago bank robbery.

  “Wait a minute,” Dillinger said as they rose to leave. “I’m gonna give you a note for Billie.”

  Piquett and O’Leary looked at the folded note on the drive back to Chicago. Dillinger had drawn a floor plan of the Crown Point jail and a suggestion to Hamilton as to how he could break him out. The note instructed Hamilton to dynamite a corner of the jail, then use blowtorches to cut through the steel walls into the cell block where Dillinger would be waiting.7 O’Leary let out a low whistle. It was the first hint they had that Dillinger had no intention of standing trial. The note frightened both men. It was a ridiculous scheme, one that would no doubt get everyone involved killed. Nevertheless, after some debate, Piquett passed it to Frechette, who got it to John Hamilton.

  Hamilton, however, was in no shape to help anyone; he was still recuperating from the bullet wounds he had suffered in East Chicago a month before. He had been holed up in a Chicago apartment ever since, tended to by Pat Cherrington. In desperation he contacted the one yegg he thought he could trust, their old friend Homer Van Meter. Van Meter was in St. Paul, where as fate would have it, he had just reunited with that most unstable of Depression-era outlaws, Baby Face Nelson.

  In the wake of the Eastham raid, Clyde Barrow had a new gang for the first time in seven months, and from all appearances he was determined it would be his ticket into the criminal elite: finally, he would become a bank robber. It’s possible banks intimidated Clyde. Even when he worked with partners in the past, he had kept to jewelry stores and gas stations. But if Clyde now viewed himself as a Dillinger-like figure commanding a band of seasoned yeggmen, he was deluding himself, as soon became apparent. The problem was his new partner, Raymond Hamilton. The cocky, needling Hamilton had an ego to rival Clyde’s, and he wasn’t taking a backseat to anyone.

  What little is known of those first weeks after the Eastham raid comes mostly from Joe Palmer, one of the convicts who escaped alongside Hamilton. Recaptured in Paducah, Kentucky, in August 1934, Palmer narrated a patchy version of events before dying in the electric chair. According to Palmer, a thin, jug-eared murderer who suffered from bleeding ulcers and various chronic stomach problems, he and three other prisoners stayed with Bonnie and Clyde after the raid: Raymond Hamilton; a double murderer named Hilton Bybee; and an acne-scarred twenty-one-year-old Louisiana kid named Henry Methvin.

  After forming in Dallas, this five-person group drove east to Louisiana to visit Henry Methvin’s parents in a remote section of Bienville Parish, east of Shreveport. In Shreveport they bought clothes and guns. Afterward they headed north, intending to rob a bank in Iowa, which soon became Clyde’s favorite hunting ground. Tensions within the group broke to the surface after they robbed the bank at Rembrandt, in the northwest corner of Iowa, on January 25, eight days after the Eastham raid. It was an uneventful in-and-out affair; the take came to $3,800. According to Palmer, he was too sick to take part, and stayed behind in the getaway car with Bonnie. Still, Clyde insisted Palmer receive an equal share. Hamilton objected, but Clyde won the argument. It wouldn’t be their last: a clear rift was developing between Hamilton and the others. Perhaps sensing the explosive situation, Hilton Bybee left the gang after the Rembrandt robbery; he was arrested five days later in Amarillo.bj

  The bickering continued as the gang returned south through Missouri a few days later. They had almost reached Joplin when Palmer and Hamilton began arguing in the backseat. According to Palmer, he called Hamilton a “punk blabbermouth braggart.” Afterward, Hamilton simmered as Palmer threw a blanket over his head and fell asleep on the rear floorboard. According to Palmer, Clyde, who was driving, saw Hamilton take out his pistol, as if to shoot Palmer. Clyde reached back and slapped Hamilton in the face, losing control of the car in the process. They careened into a ditch, damaging the car’s left wheel.bk Palmer thanked Clyde for saving his life but wanted nothing more to do with Hamilton. He prevailed upon Clyde to leave him at Joplin’s Conner Hotel. Clyde promised to return in several weeks.8

  If the gang left Missouri, it soon returned, because on February 12 Bonnie and Clyde were involved in a gunfight there. According to the next day’s Springfield Press, it began that morning when a Springfield woman spotted a man stealing her car from a driveway on East Walnut Street. An alert was broadcast, and a little before noon the stolen car was spotted passing through Galena, south of Springfield, then again in Reeds Spring, west of Branson.

  Clyde was lost. Outside Reeds Spring, he picked up a hitchhiker, a forty-year-old farmer named Joe Gunn, pointed a pistol at him, and ordered him to guide them to Berryville, across the state line in Arkansas. Gunn climbed into the backseat beside Hamilton and Henry Methvin, who were perched atop a pile of automatic rifles and thousands of bullets. Gunn had been in the car barely five minutes when Clyde spotted a roadblock ahead. It was the Reeds Spring city marshal. Clyde turned onto a dirt road, found it was a dead end, and returned toward the roadblock. “We’ve gotta let ’em have it, boys,” Clyde said, stopping the car.9

  Clyde snatched up an automatic rifle, jumped onto the road, and, along with Hamilton and Methvin, opened fire on the roadblock. As they did, another police car appeared behind them. Inside were two Springfield deputies. Hamilton wheeled and fired behind him. Clyde emptied his automatic rifle at the roadblock twice. Each time, Gunn noticed, he handed the rifle to Bonnie to reload. The gang’s firepower was overwhelming, and within minutes both sets of lawmen withdrew to call for reinforcements. Bonnie, Gunn recalled, appeared “delighted.” Hamilton hopped into the backseat wearing a wide smile. “I sho’ tried to kill that fucker back of the car,” he said.

  The gang headed across the Arkansas border, eventually stopping eight miles south of Berryville. According to Gunn, who was let out of the car, Clyde leaned over, tweaked Bonnie’s nose, and said, “There’s no use carrying this dead weight, baby.” Gunn trudged back north to give his account to the Springfield newspaper that afternoon.

  From Arkansas, Clyde drove the group to Dallas, where he and Hamilton began studying several banks in the area. On Monday night, February 19, believing they needed still more firepower, they burglarized a National Guard Armory at Ranger, Texas, west of Fort Worth, carting out armloads of Browning automatic rifles, Colt .45s, and thousands of bullets. They ferried it all back into Dallas.

  It was during this period, between February 12 and early March, that Bonnie and Clyde experienced one of the stranger episodes of their careers. Hamilton was lonely, and in Dallas he managed to reunite with a heavily made-up piece of trouble named Mary O’Dare, the nineteen-year-old wife of a jailed friend.bl It was the first time another woman had joined the gang since Blanche Barrow, and while Bonnie had tolerated Blanche, she loathed Mary O’Dare. Almost everyone connected to the gang did. By all accounts O’Dare was immature, a sarcastic, gossipy girl who couldn’t understand why Bonnie and Clyde preferred sleeping in the car and bathing in ice-cold creeks to staying in a nice hotel. Raymond Hamilton’s brother Floyd termed O’Dare a “gold digger” and a “prostitute” who wore enough makeup to “grow a crop.”10 Behind her back, Clyde and Bonnie called her “The Washerwoman.”

  O’Dare was with the gang when Clyde and Hamilton agreed on a bank to take, the R. P. Henry and Sons Bank in the town of Lancaster, twenty-five miles south of Dallas. On Tuesday morning, February 27, after leaving the women in their Ford north of the city, the two men took Henry Methvin and drove to Lancaster, stepping onto the sidewalk by the bank’s side entrancea few minutes before noon. Clyde’s behavior that day suggests his ambition to become a first-tier bank man. Gone were the wrinkled, dusty suits he usually wore. That day he wore a smart checkered overcoat and a matching Stetson. Hamilton wore a tailored overcoat of his own. They left Methvin in the car.

  There were five people in the lobby when Clyde walked in, pulled out the sawed-off shotgun from beneath his coat, and said, “Everybody on the floor.” An elderly man named Brooks didn’t understand.

  “What?” he asked. “What are we doing?”

  A WPA laborer named Ollie Worley, who had just cashed a paycheck for $27.00, said, “We have to get on the floor.”

  Brooks remained standing.

  “Say, old man,” Clyde said. “You’d better get down.”

  “Please,” a bank executive said.

  It took another minute of prodding for the elderly man to take his place on the floor. As he did, Hamilton walked behind the teller cages, scooping cash into a sack. He led a teller into the vault, grabbing bricks of cash from the shelves, then emerged, ready to leave. At that point, a funny thing happened. While Hamilton was inside the vault, Clyde had snatched the $27.00 from Ollie Worley’s hand. As they left, he turned to Worley. “You worked like hell for this, didn’t you?” Clyde asked, motioning to the money in his hand.