Indianapolis, Indiana Thursday, May 10

  It was another lazy spring afternoon at the Dillinger filling station on LaSalle Street. Outside, a little boy on a bicycle traced circles in the dirt. Dillinger’s cousin, Fred Hancock, was waiting on a customer at 3:45 when he noticed the stranger standing by a kerosene drum in one corner of the yard. Hancock didn’t recognize the man, who was unshaven and wore overalls, a sleeveless jacket, and rimless eyeglasses. When the customer left, the stranger stepped over to the station window and rapped on the glass. Hancock looked the man in the eyes and was startled: it was Dillinger. In a parked car across the street, an FBI man named Whitson saw the stranger, too.

  Dillinger handed the package to Hancock. In it were four smaller packages containing $1,200 in small bills: $300 for his father, $300 for Hancock’s mother Audrey, and $100 each for Hancock and Hubert Dillinger. Tell my father, Dillinger told Hancock, that if anything happens to me, he should give some of the money to Billie. Then Dillinger left.

  Agent Whitson watched as the stranger crossed LaSalle Street and walked toward Washington Street. Glimpsing a deep cleft in the man’s chin, Whitson got out of his car and decided to follow him. The man walked quickly, reaching the corner of Washington Street about thirty yards in front of Whitson. Whitson trotted up to the intersection and turned the corner—nothing. The man was gone. Whitson walked up and down the street, peering into parked cars. Nothing. After a bit he walked back to his car, wrote up the incident in his notebook, and dismissed it from his mind. The man was probably a bum.cs

  Dillinger’s legend was growing. By mid-May, though there had been no confirmed sighting of him since Little Bohemia three weeks before, most American newspapers were carrying daily stories of the manhunt, the Chicago papers three and four a day. Seemingly every Dillinger sighting, no matter how nonsensical, was grounds for a new article.

  “Mr. Dillinger,” a Chicago Tribune columnist noted at the height of the hysteria, “was seen yesterday looking over the new spring gloves in a State Street store in Chicago; negotiating for a twelve-cylinder car in Springfield, Illinois; buying a half-dozen sassy cravats in Omaha, Nebraska; bargaining for a suburban bungalow at his home town of Mooresville, Indiana, and shaking hands with old friends; drinking a glass of soda water in a drugstore in Charleston, South Carolina; and strolling down Broadway swinging a Malacca cane in New York. He also bought a fishing rod in a sporting-goods store in Montreal and gave a dinner at a hotel in Yucatán, Mexico. But, anyhow, Mr. Dillinger seems to have kept very carefully out of London, Berlin, Rome, Moscow, and Vienna. Or at least if he did go to those places yesterday he was traveling [incognito].”17 Time magazine noted, “If John [Killer] Dillinger has really been at all the places he was reported to have been in the last month, he must leap along the central plains like a demented Indian’s ghost.”18

  Much of the press treated the manhunt as a rollicking adventure story. In its May 7 issue, Time portrayed it as a board game set in a Midwestern “Dillinger Land”; GAME STARTS HERE, read the notation above Crown Point. The Time spread went out of its way to categorize Dillinger as an all-American anti-hero. “Great Desperadoes from little urchins grow,” it read. “When John Dillinger was 10 he, like Tom Sawyer, was a poor country boy. Sometimes he may have dreamed of being another Abe Lincoln or Jesse James . . . [but not] that he would achieve a great unwritten odyssey: Through the Midwest with a Machine Gun.”

  The tone of this and other articles suggested that Dillinger was a harmless Roadrunner pursued by a hapless federal Wile E. Coyote. Not surprisingly, children ate it up. When a Boy Scout named Richard Neff visited the Indiana governor’s office, a reporter asked what he thought of Dillinger. “Personally,” the boy said, “I’m for him.” When he glimpsed the governor’s look of amazement, the boy stammered, “Err . . . I mean, I’m always for the underdog.”19

  That underdog quality, underscored by the widely published photos and interviews at Crown Point, struck a chord in a country in which many felt slighted by the government. In Chicago and New York moviegoers applauded when Dillinger’s face appeared in newsreels. Detective magazine polled theater owners and found Dillinger was drawing more applause than Roosevelt or Charles Lindbergh. “In point of popularity,” its editor wrote, “they ranked in that order, Dillinger first, President Roosevelt second, and Colonel Lindbergh third, thereby actually making this notorious thief, thug, and cold-blooded murderer the outstanding national hero of the hour!”

  As his fame grew, Dillinger’s name was inevitably drawn into political debate. He was already a favorite in the London tabloids, and in Germany a Nazi newspaper used him to argue in favor of sterilizing criminals everywhere. In Washington, Attorney General Homer Cummings employed Dillinger’s name to urge passage of a half-dozen anticrime measures, including one that made it a federal crime to kill a federal agent, a law Hoover had been seeking for years. The measures passed the House of Representatives on May 5 even as several Republican senators continued criticizing the FBI. The pressure on the Roosevelt administration was growing. “Looks like if the Democrats don’t get Dillinger [they] may lose this fall’s election,” Will Rogers wrote.

  The President himself got involved. Without mentioning Dillinger by name, Roosevelt urged radio listeners to cooperate with the authorities to wipe out gangsterism. “Law enforcement and gangster extermination,” he said, “cannot be made completely effective while a substantial part of the public looks with tolerance upon known criminals, or applauds efforts to romanticize crime.”

  Every day brought new Dillinger sightings, almost all of them spurious. On May 4, after Louis Piquett made a joshing comment to a reporter, there was a flurry of articles that Dillinger was heading for England; Canadian, British, and American authorities searched dozens of transatlantic ships in vain. Every morning Purvis’s men shuttled out to a new town to check a new sighting; every night they returned to the nineteenth floor, exhausted and depressed. Two agents looked into the Fostoria robbery, but returned unpersuaded it was Dillinger’s work; not for two more months would the FBI confirm it was. One of the stranger reports agents repeatedly checked was that Dillinger was receiving coded messages from a pirate radio station. Despite dozens of similar tips, the FBI was never able to find such a station.

  Purvis’s best hope remained the stakeout at the Audrey Russ home in Fort Wayne. For the agents who pulled rotating assignments there, it was a nightmare. The problem was Mrs. Russ, who possessed, as one agent put it, “a mean and avaricious disposition.” In one memo, Agent John T. McLaughlin described her as “demented.” At various times Mrs. Russ accused agents of spitting on her floors, scratching her grand piano, and shooting out a window. The agents paid her $2.50 a day rent until Mrs. Russ demanded and received three dollars. “[H]er whole desire seemed [to be] to secure as much money from the agents as possible, and furnish them the least amount of food,” Agent McLaughlin complained. As the days wore on with no sign of Van Meter or Dillinger, the agents began to suspect Mrs. Russ had concocted the story of Dillinger’s visits in order to lure wealthy government boarders .20

  In Mooresville, Earl Connelley’s men kept the Dillinger farmhouse under round-the-clock surveillance, but no one thought Dillinger would return there now. In desperation Purvis sent agents to interview anyone who had ever known Dillinger, including William Shaw, his teenage partner from the previous summer, and Mary Longnaker, the Dayton woman he romanced. Other agents began rounding up Baby Face Nelson’s boyhood pals and some of Tommy Carroll’s old girlfriends. None had anything useful to offer. For the moment Purvis had nothing. Nothing at all.

  For two weeks Dillinger and Van Meter remained in their portable hideaway, the red truck. When they needed a bath, or just got tired of the truck, they ducked into a tourist camp. At one point they spent several nights in a cottage outside Crown Point. They were still living in the truck when Dillinger reestablished contact with Art O’Leary on May 19. O’Leary drove to a tavern on the outskirts of Chicago and waited until Dillinger drove up after nightfall. He followed the truck until it eased to the side of the road at a remote site.

  Dillinger was sick. By O’Leary’s estimate, his temperature was 104. O’Leary hopped into the truck and they idly drove the back roads, Dillinger driving and talking, while Van Meter remained in the back, peering out the windows with his machine gun. Dillinger’s mood had grown bleak. He needed a doctor but was afraid to visit anyone he didn’t know. He asked about Billie Frechette, whose harboring trial was under way in St. Paul, and about the cosmetic surgery he still wanted Piquett to arrange. When they returned to O’Leary’s car, he asked him to return the next evening with medicine and cough syrup.

  The next night O’Leary brought Dillinger his cough syrup and a pint of whiskey. Both Dillinger’s health and his mood were improved, and his spirits lifted further when O’Leary handed him a note from Frechette, who remained in a St. Paul jail cell. In it, O’Leary recalled, Billie beseeched Dillinger not to attempt her rescue. She would only be killed. She promised to do her time in prison and meet him afterward. Dillinger appeared moved. He handed O’Leary a letter for Billie, plus $600 in cash for Piquett. Afterward O’Leary opened and read Dillinger’s note. In it Dillinger expressed his love for Billie, offered again to rescue her and asked to die in her arms.21

  While the nation thrilled to stories of Dillinger’s exploits, another, far less public pursuit was under way in the Southwest. Inexorably, Frank Hamer was closing in on Bonnie and Clyde.

  The two manhunts were a study in contrasts. Newspapers from Chicago to London treated Dillinger as an international phenomenon, bringing in psychologists and sociologists to render opinions on his significance, but northern journalists all but ignored Bonnie and Clyde. Though they remained front-page news in Dallas, the couple’s crimes typically rated no more than five or six paragraphs in the New York and Chicago papers. Sunday features on Dillinger in places like Pittsburgh and Buffalo carried sidebars introducing readers to Clyde or Pretty Boy Floyd; both were treated as minor-league outlaws, gas-station bandits doing battle with hick sheriffs. Bonnie was seldom mentioned at all; her fame would be largely posthumous. No one, not even their fellow public enemies, gave Bonnie and Clyde respect.

  The papers reflected law-enforcement priorities. Hoover allowed an agent or two to track sightings of Bonnie and Clyde, but never treated the case seriously. While the FBI mobilized every office in pursuit of Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde merited a posse of four men.ct

  Both hunters and prey stayed on the move. After murdering three law-enforcement officers in a span of five days in early April, Clyde, Bonnie, and Henry Methvin had fled north into Kansas, then circled back to Texas to see their families. They dropped Methvin in Wichita Falls and sent him ahead to arrange the rendezvous. On the train into Dallas, Methvin rode with a pair of Texas Rangers who couldn’t stop talking about Bonnie and Clyde. Downtown, he walked to the Sanger Hotel to find Clyde’s sister Nell, who worked in a shop there; it was the same hotel where Hamer stayed when in Dallas. Unable to locate Nell, Methvin went to the Parkers’ house, gathered up family members, and drove to the meeting point east of Dallas, near the town of Mount Pleasant.

  That night, lying on blankets by their cars in an isolated meadow, the Barrow and Parker families made their strongest arguments yet to persuade Clyde and Bonnie to leave the country. If you won’t surrender, Mrs. Parker begged, go to Mexico. Run for the border. Clyde turned their arguments against them. If they went to Mexico, he said, they would never see their families again. “Seeing you folks is all the pleasure Bonnie and I have left in life now,” he said. “Besides each other, it’s all we’ve got to live for. Whenever we get so we can’t visit our people, we might as well die and be done with it. We’re staying close to home, and we’re coming in as long as we’re alive.”

  Clyde then unveiled his plan. They had been visiting the Methvins over in Louisiana, he said. They had seen a house they could buy. Bonnie wanted to fix it up, mend the roof, maybe put up lace curtains. Once they were settled, all the families could come to Louisiana and visit them. Mrs. Parker just shook her head. Everyone knew how this would end. After a while all the serious talk grew tiresome. Clyde spent much of the evening leafing through clippings and cartoons from the Dallas papers, laughing.

  From Dallas they returned north. Running low on money, Clyde drove to his favorite Iowa hunting grounds in search of a bank. On Monday, April 16, Clyde and Henry Methvin robbed the First National Bank in Stuart, Iowa, just five miles west of Dexter, the town where Buck Barrow had been killed the previous July. From Iowa Clyde drove south, picking up Joe Palmer in Joplin, where Palmer had returned after becoming separated from the others after the Easter Sunday shoot-out. From Joplin they drove south to Louisiana, where Bonnie and Clyde hoped to vacation at the Methvins’ home. Ivy Methvin, who was now talking regularly with Sheriff Henderson Jordan, had other ideas. Deathly afraid of Clyde, he suggested a better place for them to stay.

  It was during this visit, at the Methvins’ urging, that Clyde and Bonnie began bunking in the house they had mentioned to their parents, an abandoned home ten miles south of the town of Gibsland. Locals called it the John Cole house, after its last owner, who died of tuberculosis there with his wife and two daughters four years earlier. It was a four-room, unpainted wooden house at the end of a dirt road in the pines, two rooms on each side of an open-air hallway. There were a few pieces of furniture and a tin roof, but water dribbled in when it rained. It was such a wreck the Cole family left it vacant, but for Bonnie and Clyde it was their first home, and it seemed like heaven.

  How they came to claim the house isn’t clear. Clyde told his family he rented or purchased the house from the Cole family. A local historian, Carroll Rich, maintains that Clyde and Bonnie moved in without the family’s knowledge. Years later, John Cole’s son, Otis, told Rich that he visited the house when a friend told him squatters had moved in. Otis Cole said he walked up to the house one afternoon and found Ivy Methvin sitting on the front porch, drunk. Cole could see two other people moving around inside. When Methvin asked him where he could find some more bootleg whiskey, Cole said, “I don’t fool with that stuff,” and hurried off. He asked no more questions.22

  Soon, however, word spread that the “squatters” were none other than Bonnie and Clyde. Carroll Rich, a Bienville Parish native, paints an evocative picture of how the stories filtered through the pines; there was nothing romantic about Bonnie and Clyde in these tales, nothing free or rebellious or heartwarming. They were murderers, modern-day bogeymen whose approach could mean only death.

  As Rich recalled:Country children shivered to hear old folks speculate on who had come to the piney woods, and at night when families sat rocking on front porches, they looked across a cornfield . . . and wondered whose yellow carlights were moving under the trees. Sometimes when cousins came to spend Friday night, as many as five children slept in one bed, the older children telling Bonnie and Clyde stories late into the night, stories of policemen shot in the face, of fat sheriffs tied up and bleeding, crying for mercy, tales designed to make the younger ones whimper with fright and weariness and finally fall into uneasy sleep.23

  If Clyde realized that people knew he was in the area, he showed no signs of worry. In those days Bienville Parish seemed mired in the nineteenth century. The country people scraped by on dusty farms or driving rickety logging trucks. For most there were no phones, no indoor plumbing, no movie theaters, and no newspapers; many couldn’t read. On those moist spring evenings in 1934, stories of Bonnie and Clyde spread like the morning fog that crept in from the swamps.

  People whispered that they had been seen at the crossroads store at Sailes, stopping to buy cheese and crackers and a cold Coca-Cola. There was the man in sunglasses who parked his big Pontiac outside area farms, asking to buy a chicken to fry; it was Clyde, they had no doubt. A share-cropper swore he saw Clyde and Bonnie on a quilt spread on pine needles beneath the trees, their naked bodies moving rhythmically. Maybe these tales were concocted, maybe not. For the moment no one said a thing to the law. No one wanted to be murdered in their beds.

  Bonnie and Clyde’s springtime idyll did not last long. Their money was running low, and by Friday, April 27, they were back on the road.cu After stopping in Memphis, Clyde drove north, cutting across Arkansas and Missouri and driving into Kansas. On Sunday afternoon, April 29, they reached Topeka, where they cruised neighborhood streets in search of a car that struck Clyde’s fancy. They found it at 2107 Gable Street, a spanking new cordova-tan Ford V-8 Deluxe, sitting in a driveway. They stole it and headed toward northwestern Iowa, where they drove through greening fields looking for a bank to take. On May 3, Clyde led Methvin and Joe Palmer into the bank at Everly, Iowa, while Bonnie waited in the car. It was a disappointing haul, about $700.

  Afterward, on May 4 or 5, they dropped Palmer off in Wichita and drove to Joplin, where Clyde scribbled a letter to his mother, telling her he was heading back to Louisiana. But if Clyde thought he could put off seeing the families for a few weeks, Bonnie had other ideas. She begged him to take her to Dallas to see her mother. On Sunday, May 6, they drove past the Barrow filling station and tossed out a bottle; inside were instructions to meet them four miles east of Dallas that night. It was a warm night, with a soft breeze, and Bonnie sat outside with her mother on a blanket talking for two hours. They looked through pictures Bonnie had brought: Clyde and Palmer in jaunty spring suits, arms around Bonnie; Clyde looking tough, a rifle across his knees.

  “Mama,” Bonnie suddenly said, “when they kill us, don’t let them take me to an undertaking parlor, will you? Bring me home.”

  Mrs. Parker seized Bonnie’s wrist. “Don’t Bonnie,” she said. “For God’s sake.”