By age 15 or 16, W.D. Jones was known to the local police. He hung around the Barrows' service station on
Eagle Ford Road and collected license plates for LC’s older brothers Clyde and Buck to use on cars they stole. He was picked up in Dallas at least once "on suspicion" of car theft and was arrested with LC in
Beaumont, Texas for car theft. On Christmas Eve 1932, Clyde Barrow and his friend Bonnie — already on the run, and glamorous outlaws to W.D. — stopped by home. Barrow was between assistants, and he and Parker brought Jones along with them when they left. The next afternoon in
Temple, Texas, in a botched attempt at stealing a car, Jones or Barrow shot and killed the car's owner, grocery clerk Doyle Johnson, a 27-year-old new father. Newspaper accounts reported that the fatal shots came from the passenger side of the car. According to Jones, Barrow used this report to make sure Jones wouldn’t dare leave the gang. but was not tried. '' magazine, "As far as I know, Bonnie never packed a gun.... during the five big gun battles I was with them, she never fired a gun." After the murder of Malcolm Davis, Barrow, Parker and Jones lay low. They drove through the hills of
Missouri and
Arkansas and may have wandered as far east as
Tennessee. They made news only on the night of January 26, when they kidnapped
Springfield, Missouri police officer Thomas Persell. Twice in early spring, they dressed up and photographed each other and their gun collection beside the road. They saw how their pictures came out at the same time as thousands of newspaper readers: in April the rolls of film were captured by police, developed, and published. The playful pictures brought unintended consequences, particularly one of Bonnie Parker squinting defiantly at the camera, her foot planted on the bumper of a stolen car, a gun at her outthrust hip and a cigar hanging from her mouth. Dallas County Deputy Sheriff
Ted Hinton recalled that the "brazen pride" displayed in the pictures made law enforcement officers that much more determined to catch them. The three returned to Dallas on March 24 or 25 and learned that on March 23, Clyde's older brother
Buck had been pardoned from
Huntsville penitentiary. On the night of March 25 they surprised Buck and his wife
Blanche at Blanche's mother's home and persuaded Buck to vacation with them in strategically located
Joplin, Missouri.
Joplin, Missouri , recalling the battle in 1980, said that he shot Jones below the right shoulder blade, many seconds after the two fatally wounded officers were down. The Barrows fled westward. They stopped once at a gas station for aspirin and rubbing alcohol. They moved Jones into the front seat and wrapped him in the blanket that usually covered the guns. Parker pried open his wound with knitting needles and poured rubbing alcohol into it. In the
Texas Panhandle, somewhere near
Shamrock or
Amarillo, they pulled over to examine their wounds. "Clyde wrapped an elm branch in gauze and pushed it through the hole in my side and out my back. The bullet had gone clean through me so we knew it would heal." The unexpected viciousness of the apartment dwellers' response, the haul of weaponry recovered, and especially the rolls of film they left behind made the Barrow Gang suddenly wanted and recognized far beyond Texas. In their immediate descriptions of the gun battle, the police officers remembered only two shooters, whom they named as Clyde and Buck Barrow. No witness remembered a third man. From the Joplin photos, police variously identified him as Buck Barrow,
Pretty Boy Floyd and Hubert Bleigh.
Ruston, Louisiana Two weeks later on April 27, in the middle of a car theft in
Ruston, Louisiana, still not recovered from his Joplin wounds and perhaps tired of the constant bickering in the car as well as afraid for his life, Jones disappeared from the gang. A fictionalized version of the Ruston car theft and subsequent kidnapping is the
Gene Wilder-
Evans Evans segment in
Bonnie and Clyde. According to his statement to Dallas police November 18, "[T]hey [the Barrow brothers] put me out of the car to steal a Chevrolet automobile for them. I saw this was my chance to escape and I jumped in this car and made my getaway and came back to Dallas, Texas." The car he stole in Ruston was found 130 miles away, at the edge of the
Mississippi River, in the eastern
Arkansas railroad town of
McGehee. Clyde didn't want to believe that the docile W.D. had deliberately abandoned the gang, but to Buck it was obvious, and a relief, that "the kid" had. Jones made his way back to Dallas and spoke with Mrs. Barrow at least once while he was there. In late May the gang sent Blanche to Dallas to bring money and news to the families. Barrow instructed her to bring Jones with her to their rendezvous. When Blanche passed this request on, both mothers were polite, but demurred. Mrs. Barrow told Blanche faintly that "she did not know if he wanted to go with Clyde or not". LC and Mrs. Parker at least pretended to try to find him. Barrow arranged at least one more meeting, expressly asking his mother to find and return Jones then, but to no avail. On June 8 or 9 he and Parker drove into Dallas and picked him up themselves. In his statement to Dallas police Jones said, "[A]bout two o'clock in the afternoon.... I was walking along the road intending to go down to
the lake and to go to a dance at the Five Point Dancehall that night. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow drove up from behind me and stopped. They were in a
V8 Coupe....They spoke to me and told me to get in the car and I got in. They asked me if I wanted to go with them, and I told them I did not, and Clyde said I was going anyway, and I did." After this, even when the five-person gang had two cars, "Clyde always wanted W.D. to be in the car with him."
Wellington, Texas On the night of June 10, racing to meet Buck and Blanche in Oklahoma, Barrow was driving too fast to notice a detour sign at the bridge over the
Salt Fork of the Red River outside
Wellington, Texas. "Suddenly the road disappeared." The car sailed into the air, turning over as it went, and crashed into the dry riverbed, rolling several times and coming to rest on its side. Battery acid poured onto Bonnie Parker, eating away the flesh of her right leg as she screamed and struggled. A farm family came to their aid, but quickly contacted police; "Bonnie told me I fired a shotgun there which wounded a woman in the hand." Barrow and Jones kidnapped the responding officers, Sheriff George Corry and Marshal Paul Hardy, to make their escape. "Bonnie never got over that burn. Even after it healed over, her leg was drawn under her. She had to just hop or hobble along." Barrow, who limped himself, accommodated the new delays, expenses and detours her disability created in his life without hesitation, and while she healed he or Jones carried her wherever she needed to go. The gang holed up in a tourist cabin in
Fort Smith,
Arkansas, tending Parker, unable to move on until she recovered — or died — from her catastrophic injury. "She'd been burned so bad none of us thought she was gonna live. The hide on her right leg was gone, from her hip down to her ankle. I could see the bone at places."
Fayetteville, Arkansas With Barrow's attention focused on Parker, the problem of acquiring food and rent money fell to Buck and Jones. On June 23, as the two were fleeing the scene of a clumsy grocery store robbery fifty miles away in
Fayetteville, they crested a hill southbound on
Highway 71 and smashed into the back of a slower moving vehicle. The driver climbed out of his car and grabbed two rocks; the Barrows jumped out of their car, Buck with a shotgun and Jones with a
BAR. Town Marshal Henry Humphrey The next month, Deputy Salyers drove 500 miles to a hospital in
Perry,
Iowa, to get a final statement from the dying Buck Barrow. Barrow admitted to Salyers that he had murdered Marshal Humphrey, and that he and the man with him — who he finally confessed was "Jack Sherman"— had been shooting to kill them both. Officer Humphrey's pistol was found in the Barrows' debris at Dexfield Park. In November, Jones told police that he had been stunned in the car crash and his memory of any ensuing action was hazy, but he was confident that only Buck was shooting. He remembered standing in the highway looking for a gold ring he had lost. However, the following February at the harboring trial, Jones read a statement in which he said both he and Buck had killed Humphrey.
Platte City and Dexfield Park On July 20 around 1:00 a.m, thirteen lawmen led by Sheriff
Holt Coffey, protecting themselves from expected machine gun fire with metal shields, advanced on the double cabin at the
Red Crown Tourist Court in
Platte City, Missouri. In the ensuing firefight Buck Barrow was shot in the head as he and Blanche ran to get inside the garage. Jones had started the V8's engine but was afraid to open the garage door, then was afraid to help Blanche drag Buck inside. During the night of July 24, 1933 nearly one hundred law officers,
National Guardsmen and interested, armed, mostly deputized citizens — some with dates — crept up to the edges of the field, and as the sun rose a new shootout began. Parker, Barrow and Jones were badly wounded. Buck, unable to run, was shot six more times, and he and Blanche, who would not leave him, were captured. "Half stumbling, half swimming," Gesturing with an empty pistol he commandeered a car from a farmer and the trio escaped. They kept driving. Throughout August they plied the back roads from Nebraska to Minnesota to Mississippi, pausing in only the smallest towns to steal fresh cars and money for gas and food. They slept in the cars, parked in remote fields or woods or in ravines. The following winter, Barrow observed that he had not slept in a bed or even changed his clothes since his brother Buck was killed. Near the end of the month Barrow and Jones rebuilt the gang's security by robbing the armory at Plattville, Illinois of more BARs, handguns and ammunition. Jones was as loyal a subordinate as Clyde and Bonnie could have hoped for, but he did not want to accompany them into death or even any farther into pain and fear. They were aware that Jones wanted to leave them. Nevertheless, Jones stayed until Barrow and Parker were well enough to take care of themselves without help. "I left Clyde and Bonnie after they was healed up enough to get by without me.... I'd had enough blood and hell." This may have been the story Clyde and Bonnie told. According to W.D. Jones, they were forty miles outside of
Clarksdale, Mississippi on the night in early September when he saw a way to escape. They had just stolen a new car and Barrow had given him $2.12 to fill its tank. Jones put in a few gallons, then drove ahead as if to find a secluded place to stop and change cars. But when he was out of Barrow's sight he turned down a country road, turned off the car's headlights, and sped up. After a few miles he left the car and fled for his mother's home in
Houston.
Arrest and sentence Jones kept a low profile after his return to Houston, picking cotton and digging vegetables on area farms to support himself. On November 16, 1933, he was arrested without incident in Houston by Dallas County deputies Bob Alcorn and Ed Caster, who drove him to the Dallas County jail. An acquaintance in Houston had identified him to police as the mystery Barrow accomplice. or that the two of them agreed on a basic theme for Jones's official story: that Clyde, Bonnie and Buck had done all the shooting and robbing and that W.D., a minor child, was an unwilling member of the gang, forced to ride with them at gunpoint, unconscious with fear or trauma most of the time, and chained to trees and car bumpers at night. Jones may or may not have had Barrow's blessing to blame every serious transgression on those who had nothing to lose, but on November 18, 1933, he relayed to Dallas police just such a story. Dallas county possession of an important Barrow Gang member was an ace up the sleeve for the politically ambitious Sheriff Schmid, who kept Jones a secret for ten days, perhaps hoping Clyde Barrow would try to storm the jail and break Jones out. Jones for his part insisted that he was grateful to be safely behind bars. On the night of November 22 the sheriff and his deputies Alcorn, Caster and
Hinton bungled an ambush of Barrow and Parker in
Sowers, Texas, on the outskirts of Dallas. The Dallas press jeered loudly — even the newsboys hawked the story as "Sheriff escapes from Clyde Barrow!" — until Schmid put W.D. Jones on display. Wide-eyed and "shaking with fear," Jones met the press. His deal with Sheriff Schmid was apparent in the sensational headline, "Saw Clyde Shoot Deputy." Jones and the sheriff agreed that he would be tried as an accessory to Clyde Barrow's January 6 murder in Dallas of Deputy Davis, which would protect him against extradition to Arkansas for the June 23 shootout on Highway 71 in which Marshal Humphrey was killed. "They tried me for killing a sheriff's man at Dallas," Jones told
Playboy in 1968. "Clyde done it, but I was glad to take the rap. Arkansas wanted to extradite me, and I sure didn't want to go to no Arkansas prison. I figure now that if Arkansas had got me, one of them
skeletons they've dug up there might have been me." At his trial the following October all state witnesses recommended against the death penalty. Jones was convicted of a crime codified in 1931, "murder without malice." Though the district attorney and the prosecuting attorney recommended a sentence of 99 years, on October 12 the jury handed down a sentence of fifteen years. In February 1935 Jones and nineteen other family members and associates of Barrow and Parker were defendants in the federal government's test-case trial
en masse for "harboring." He received the maximum sentence for harboring, two years, applied to run concurrently with his Texas sentence. After six years in the
Huntsville penitentiary he was paroled. ==After the Barrow Gang==