Snow lay thick on the streets of St. Paul that Friday afternoon when a woman named Daisy Coffey walked up the white-marble stairway of the Federal Courts Building and entered the FBI’s offices in Room 203. The SAC, Werner Hanni, and his men were focused on the Bremer case, but Hanni stepped away long enough to take her statement. Mrs. Coffey, who said she managed the Lincoln Court Apartments on South Lexington Avenue, told Hanni she was suspicious of the couple renting Apartment 303. Her new tenants, “Mr. and Mrs. Carl P. Hellman,” had frequent guests, always used the building’s rear door and kept their blinds lowered till 10:30 each morning. Hanni was unimpressed. “She says that she just has a feeling that there is something mysterious and questionable” about the Hellmans, he wrote in a memo.

  After Mrs. Coffey left, Hanni handed her statement to a pair of young agents, Rosser L. “Rusty” Nalls and Rufus Coulter.bx Later that day the two drove uptown and showed Mrs. Coffey photographs of the only men the St. Paul office was interested in, Karpis and the Barkers. Mrs. Coffey couldn’t identify any of them. But she had taken down Mr. Hellman’s license plate number. Returning downtown, Agent Nalls ran a check and found the car registered to a Carl Hellman in North St. Paul. But when he called the post office for Mr. Hellman’s address, he found there was none. The name appeared to be fictitious.

  The Lincoln Court was a three-story red-brick building; out back was a paved alley with a residential neighborhood beyond. That night Nalls and Coulter cruised through the alley and parked on a side street. They could see that the blinds in Apartment 303 were lowered. It seemed a normal thing to do; otherwise anyone could see right in. In the space beneath the shades they could see a man and a woman moving around inside the apartment. After three hours they returned downtown and reported they had seen nothing out of the ordinary.

  Nonetheless, they returned the next morning at 9:00 to question the occupants of Apartment 303. Inspector William Rorer, who remained in St. Paul supervising the Bremer case, decided they needed a police escort. Agent Coulter volunteered to find a patrolman while Nalls drove ahead to establish surveillance. Nalls reached the building just before ten and parked beside it. A few minutes later he watched as two women left the back entrance. They walked to a parked car, talked to a man inside, and then drove off. As a matter of routine, Nalls wrote down their descriptions. Not till later would anyone realize he had seen Opal Long, Pat Cherrington, and John Hamilton. They were heading out for breakfast and grocery shopping. Nalls didn’t recognize them.

  At 10:15 Nalls saw Agent Coulter and a policeman drive up and disappear inside the building. A minute or two later Nalls watched as a thin man drove up in a green Ford sedan, got out, and walked inside. Agent Nalls was still sitting in his car a few minutes later, watching the front entrance, when he saw Agent Coulter running toward him across the building’s snowy front yard, holding his pistol. Coulter turned and exchanged gunshots with the thin man who was chasing him.

  Agent Coulter and a sixty-five-year-old St. Paul detective named Henry Cummings had stood before the door of Apartment 303, waiting for someone to answer their knock. After a long minute, the door opened a few inches. A woman peeked out over a chain. Detective Cummings identified himself and asked to speak with Carl.

  Billie forgot Dillinger’s alias.

  “Carl?” she said. “Carl who?”

  “Carl Hellman.”

  Billie gathered her senses. “He’s just left and won’t be back till this afternoon,” she said. “Come back then.”

  “Are you Mrs. Hellman?” Cummings asked.

  Billie nodded.

  “We’ll talk to you then,” he said.

  “I’m not dressed,” Billie said. “Come back this afternoon.”

  “We’ll wait until you dress,” Coulter said.

  Billie said it would take a second. She closed the door. Coulter heard a second latch close inside.

  Dillinger was still in bed when Billie ran toward him.

  “It’s the cops!” she said. “What should I do?”

  Dillinger jumped out of bed and began dressing. “Keep your shirt on,” he said, “and get some things into the large bag.”

  As Billie tossed clothes into their bag, Dillinger opened a dresser drawer and lifted out the parts of his submachine gun. Then he walked toward the door. Outside, Coulter and Detective Cummings waited in the hallway. Coulter didn’t like this. “We’ll have to call for some help,” Coulter whispered. “You can go call or I will.”

  “Who do you want?” Cummings asked. “Your department or ours?”

  “I want to get our department,” Coulter said.1

  Coulter trotted downstairs to the manager’s office to phone the office. When he returned upstairs, Cummings was still standing in the hallway. Together they waited, nine more minutes by Coulter’s estimate.

  It was then that Homer Van Meter, having parked his green Ford outside, appeared at the head of the third floor’s rear stairwell. He sensed trouble the moment he saw the two outside Dillinger’s door. His head lowered, Van Meter walked right up to the two lawmen, shouldered past them, and stepped to the head of the front stairwell. Then he stopped. “Is your name Johnson?” he asked Coulter.

  “No,” Coulter said.

  As Van Meter headed down the front stairwell, Coulter stepped forward and said, “What’s your name?”

  Van Meter turned and stopped on a landing. “I’m a soap salesman,” he said.

  “Where are your samples?” Coulter asked.

  “Down in my car.”

  Coulter asked if he had any identification.

  “No. But I have down in my car.”

  Van Meter disappeared down the stairs. After a moment, Coulter decided to follow him. He walked down to the lobby and peered outside. The “soap salesman” was gone. Coulter had just turned to walk back upstairs when he saw Van Meter crouched in the shadows of the basement stairs, a pistol in his hand.

  “You want this, asshole?” Van Meter asked. “Here it is!”

  As Van Meter raised his gun to fire, Coulter leaped backward, crashing through the front door. He turned and ran across the snowy yard, and Van Meter gave chase, firing wildly, his shots throwing up little explosions of dirty snow. In the calm of a St. Paul Saturday morning the gunshots sounded unreal—pop, pop, pop—like firecrackers. As Coulter raced across the snow, he pulled his pistol, wheeled, and returned fire. Van Meter ran back into the building.

  Up in Apartment 303, Billie begged Dillinger not to start a gunfight. But the minute he heard shots, Dillinger raised his submachine gun and fired a burst through the door. He opened the door a few inches, stuck the Thompson gun’s muzzle outside and began firing down the hallway. Detective Cummings flattened himself into an alcove as bullets whizzed by his chin. The moment Dillinger stopped shooting, Cummings ran down the front stairs. Inside the apartment, Billie came out of the bedroom and found Dillinger smiling. Thin shafts of sunlight stabbed into the room through the holes he had blasted in the door.2

  “Keep your shirt on,” Dillinger repeated when Billie begged him not to fire again. “You’re coming with me. Snap that suitcase together and follow along.” Dillinger stepped to the door and fired another burst of bullets down the hallway. Billie followed, lugging his heavy suitcase with two hands; there were more guns inside.

  Outside, chaos had engulfed the neighborhood. Cars were stopped, and people were leaning out of windows. Recognizing Coulter’s assailant as the man from the green Ford, Agent Nalls pointed out his car, and Coulter promptly shot out one of its tires. Nalls ran toward a drugstore to telephone for reinforcements.

  Neither agent thought about the building’s rear entrance. It was from this door that Billie and Dillinger emerged; Van Meter sprinted out the same door a minute later. Dillinger, in a light-gray suit and no tie, walked casually down the alley, carrying the Thompson gun close to his right leg. He handed Billie the car keys and took the suitcase, watching over his shoulder as he walked.3 Billie hurried ahead to the garage where they stored their black Hudson and backed the car out. Dillinger threw the suitcase into the backseat and got in. Billie stomped the accelerator, and the Hudson roared down the alley. “Slow down! Slow down!” Dillinger ordered. “You’ll attract attention.”

  None of the FBI agents and St. Paul police who descended on the neighborhood had any idea who was doing the shooting. One agent telephoned Washington to say the suspects didn’t match the descriptions of anyone in the Barker Gang. Not until two hours later, when agents finally stormed Apartment 303, did the FBI realize who it had found. Inside, amid an arsenal of pistols and submachine guns and drawerfuls of men’s suits and ladies undergarments, they found three photos. One showed a baby boy, another a teenager. The third was a Navy sailor with a crewcut and a familiar crooked grin. It was Dillinger. Fingerprints taken from a Listerine bottle confirmed it. And from the drops of blood agents found in the hallway outside, they guessed he had been hit.

  In the getaway car blood reddened Dillinger’s pant leg. He had been hit by a ricochet, one of his own bullets. It struck high on his left calf, a “through and through” just below his knee. As sirens sounded over St. Paul, Dillinger told Billie to head to the apartment of Eddie Green, the redheaded jug marker. He needed a doctor.

  Green directed them to an office building in downtown Minneapolis, and a doctor named Clayton May. May was a forty-six-year-old general practitioner whose practice included fifty-dollar abortions and treating the venereal diseases rampant in St. Paul’s underworld. When Green said he had a friend injured in the explosion of an illegal still, May followed him outside. Dillinger was sitting in the backseat with Billie. They drove to an apartment complex on the south side, where the doctor treated his shadier clients. Billie threw an arm around Dillinger and helped him limp into a first-floor apartment.

  Dr. May later insisted that Dillinger had threatened his life, but in fact the roll of cash the outlaw was carrying was all the persuasion Dr. May needed. The wound wasn’t serious. They bandaged it and applied a mercury solution to clean it. Dr. May told Dillinger to rest; he would need several days to heal. He gave him a tetanus shot and left. In time Dillinger drifted to sleep.

  Outside Dallas, Texas Easter Sunday, April 1 3:30 P.M.

  As the FBI scrambled to find Dillinger that morning, Bonnie Parker sat stroking a white rabbit beside a car parked north of the Dallas city limits, on an unpaved stretch of road overlooking Texas State Highway 114. The rabbit was a gift for her mother. Clyde was stretched out across the backseat, trying to take a nap. Henry Methvin was pacing. After an extended visit with Methvin’s family in Louisiana, they had picked up the ulcer-plagued Joe Palmer in Joplin and sent Palmer into Dallas to alert their families to their arrival.

  At about three-thirty, Bonnie glanced up and saw a trio of motorcycle policemen passing north on the highway below them. They were state troopers. As Bonnie watched, two of the men, spotting the Ford parked alone on the hillside, slowed, then turned around, heading toward the entrance to the dirt road where Bonnie and Clyde waited.

  According to the version of events Clyde told his family, Bonnie walked back to the car and roused him. He stepped out with a sawed-off shotgun. Methvin was already standing by the car, cradling a Browning automatic rifle. As Clyde told the story, he said to Methvin, “Let’s take ’em.”4 Clyde claimed he meant to take the officers hostage, just as he had a half-dozen times before.

  Methvin misunderstood. The two patrolmen, E. B. Wheeler, twenty-six, and a twenty-two-year-old rookie named H. D. Murphy, who was on his first day of duty, were just coasting up to the parked Ford, their sidearms still holstered, when Methvin raised his rifle and fired a burst of bullets directly into Wheeler’s chest, killing him. Murphy stopped his motorcycle and began to grab for a sawed-off shotgun. When Clyde saw him go for the gun, he fired three shots, killing Murphy as well. A passing motorist watched as the three then leaped into the Ford and drove off.

  The Dallas County sheriff, Smoot Schmid, immediately announced that Clyde had done the killing. “He’s not a man,” Schmid said. “He’s an animal.” Governor Ferguson announced $500 rewards for the arrest of Clyde and his unidentified co-assassin.

  Frank Hamer arrived in Dallas the next morning.

  As initial reports of the St. Paul gunfight crossed his desk that Sunday, Hoover was apoplectic. Nothing about this made sense: Why had two men conducted a raid, and why was one of them a member of the notoriously corrupt St. Paul police? Why were his men armed with pistols instead of machine guns? Why wasn’t he told of the raid beforehand? And why, above all, had his men let Dillinger get away?by In a phone call with Purvis, Hoover condemned the St. Paul office for “their atrocious bungling of the raid yesterday.” From now on, Hoover said, all information on Dillinger—no matter how trivial—was to be relayed to headquarters. And, as Hoover repeated to agents in St. Paul, police were never to join FBI raids again, unless agents “were short of equipment, like machine guns or gas guns.”5

  The St. Paul shoot-out had a galvanizing effect on Hoover. From the tone of his memoranda, he seemed amazed that Dillinger had the temerity to actually fire on his men. Then and there, Hoover decided to make Dillinger’s apprehension the Bureau’s highest priority. That Tuesday he ordered all offices to give Dillinger precedence “over all other pending cases.” New agents poured into St. Paul. Cots were arranged in the FBI office and at the post office, where the men grabbed catnaps between calls.

  Monday night they got their first break. The Lincoln Park’s manager, Mrs. Coffey, telephoned the St. Paul office with a tip. Her husband had found the address of one of Dillinger’s visitors, the man who had exchanged shots with Agent Coulter; he rented an apartment at 2214 Marshall Avenue. Agents had the building surrounded within an hour. By daylight there was no sign of Dillinger or any other suspects, but the manager identified a man who matched the description of Coulter’s assailant. He lived in Apartment 106. The unit had been rented two weeks earlier by another man, who gave his name as D. Stevens. The manager hadn’t seen either man for days.

  The apartment’s windows were closed; from the outside it looked vacant. Betting their suspect was too smart to return, agents had the manager unlock the apartment at 7:30. Inside they found what was clearly a bank robber’s lair: a Thompson submachine gun stock, a two-foot dynamite fuse, road maps and airline schedules, license plates, three notebooks filled with getaway maps, and bullets—lots and lots of bullets. After dusting for fingerprints and collecting stray receipts and laundry tags, everyone but two junior agents returned downtown.

  A few hours later, just before noon, the two agents were pacing the apartment, submachine guns in their hands, when they heard a key enter the front latch. The agents leaped to the door just as a startled “negress”—as an FBI report termed her—stepped into the apartment and found herself facing the muzzle of a Thompson gun. She said her name was Lucy Jackson. She was a maid. She said her sister had asked her to clean the apartment. The sister, whose name was Leona Goodman, was sitting in a car outside. The two agents brought her in.

  The story Leona Goodman told the FBI would prove as important as any the Bureau heard all year. She said she worked for a man she knew as “Mr. Stevens”; as agents were to learn later, “Mr. Stevens” had arranged for Mrs. Goodman to clean the homes of a series of major criminals, from Van Meter to Frank Nash to Harry Sawyer. Just that morning, Mrs. Goodman said, Mr. Stevens had visited her home, handed her a key, and asked her to clean out this apartment. She was feeling sickly, so she had asked her sister to do it. She had promised to pack some clothes into a tan suitcase and bring it to her house. Mr. Stevens had promised to come for the bag later that day.

  The agents took Mrs. Goodman downtown, where the tan suitcase was emptied and refilled with stacks of Wanted posters. Inspector Rorer approached Ed Notesteen, the agent who had manned the infamous kitchenette viewing post during Verne Miller’s Halloween escape in Chicago, and told him to take Mrs. Goodman, the bag, and two agents back to Mrs. Goodman’s home to await the arrival of the mysterious “Mr. Stevens.” As he left, Notesteen asked Inspector Rorer what to do if he appeared. According to Agent Notesteen’s memorandum on the day’s events, Rorer’s reply struck him as unusual: “Shoot him.”

  By early afternoon, Notesteen and the other two agents had taken up positions in Mrs. Goodman’s faded clapboard house, located on a quiet street in a black neighborhood. From the tone of his memos, it’s clear that Notesteen wasn’t comfortable with the setting or his orders. Agent George Gross, who sat in a window with a submachine gun across his lap, noticed several suspicious cars driving by.bz Notesteen called Inspector Rorer and asked for reinforcements; a little later he was relieved to see several agents driving nearby streets. While on the phone, Notesteen pointedly asked Rorer to restate his orders. It all depended on Mrs. Goodman’s identification of “Mr. Stevens,” Rorer said. “If she says that’s the man,” he said, “kill him.”6

  As the afternoon wore on, Notesteen paced from room to room. This wasn’t right. They didn’t have the first clue who “Mr. Stevens” was. He could be a real estate agent. He could be anyone. And Notesteen had orders to shoot him on sight. Notesteen repeatedly asked Mrs. Goodman, who sat in the kitchen, whether she could be certain if she saw Mr. Stevens. “I’ll know him,” she assured him.

  Three hours passed. Then, about five-thirty, Agent Gross saw a green Terraplane sedan coasting to a stop outside. “There’s a car,” he said. “It’s stopping across the street.”

  A man in an overcoat jumped out of the car and in three or four long strides was at the kitchen door. Mrs. Goodman saw him coming. She opened the door, shoved the suitcase outside, and slammed the door in her visitor’s face without a word.