Terri Jo Ryan

Special to the Tribune-Herald

Waco’s law enforcers have seen many a hoodlum from the days of the town’s founding in 1849. One of the most notorious was Clyde Barrow (1909-1934) — half of the infamous gun-slinging duo Bonnie and Clyde.

On Oct. 16, 1929, Barrow was arrested in the company of two wanted men, William Turner and Frank Hardy, at the Roosevelt Hotel in Waco.

Barrow had been arrested before in Waco, for attempted car theft, in 1926 as a juvenile delinquent. He spent two days bawling in jail, according to Tales of Badmen, Bad Women, and Bad Places, by Charley F. Eckhardt.

He managed to avoid jail time then, so he tried the waterworks again: Weeping before the chief of police, Hollis A. Barron, Barrow claimed Turner and Hardy had picked him up while hitchhiking and he was unaware of their reputations. Turner and Hardy went along with Barrow’s story of being an innocent bystander, and Barrow was released.

Three months later in Dallas, Barrow, 20, met 19-year-old cafe waitress Bonnie Parker (1910-1934). The romance began, and the pair terrorized the Southwest for four years, robbing banks and stores and gunning down 13 civilians and lawmen along the way.

Barron nabbed him in connection with five car thefts and two burglaries in Waco in March 1930. While awaiting trial, Barrow and two others escaped from the McLennan County Jail, thanks to a gun smuggled in by Bonnie Parker — strapped to her thigh, the story goes. The prisoners got as far as Ohio when they were recaptured a week later, netting Barrow an additional 14-year sentence on top of his other charges.

He was sent to Eastham Farm in the Texas Prison System. Based on a sympathy campaign by Barrow’s mother, Cumie Barrow, Texas Gov. Ross Sterling granted his release in February 1932 — but not before Barrow had asked a fellow inmate to chop off two toes on his left foot during a work detail in order to avoid having to work in the cotton fields.

For another two years, Bonnie and Clyde were “free,” but hunted. They met their fate on May 23, 1934, in a hail of bullets from lawmen in an ambush near Sailes, Bienville Parish, La.

Sources: HistoryBuff .com; The Face of Death by Mark Bishop, (2003); Handbook of Texas Online; The Handbook of Waco and McLennan County, Texas, edited by Dayton Kelley (1972).