Volume 17 , Issue 32

Recalling the Real Bonnie & Clyde

The writer, Alanna Nash, of this Kansas City Times article, "Recalling the Real Bonnie & Clyde," was a 1972 graduate of Stephens College. Her interest in the Bonnie and Clyde era stemmed from a research paper when did while at Stephens.

Found on Newspapers.com

Since the days of Jesse James, Missouri had been a favorite hideout for criminals and desperados. The Ozarks played host to notorious outlaws: Belle Starr, the James Boys, the Daltons, Jake Fleagle, Ma Barker and pretty Boy Floyd, to name a few. But perhaps the most famous outlaws vacationing in the Ozarks were Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Bonnie and Clyde spent a lot of time in southwest Missourii - in Carthage, Neosho, Oronogo, Springfield and Joplin. The biggest raids of their careers were in Missouri - Joplin and Platte City. The popular motion picture of 1967, "Bonnie and Clyde," showed both of those battles. It was near Platte City that clyde's brother, Buck, received a fatal head wound, and the latter's wife, Blanche, part blindness in one eye.

It was in Joplin that outlaws found their favorite "cooling-off" spot as a strategically located area easily accessible from Texas, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma. During Prohibition it was bootlegging headquarters, and only 50 miles away were the untamed Cookson Hills. It was in Joplin that Sgt. G. B. Kahler of the Missouri Highway Patrol, then living in Springfield, tangled with Bonnie and Clyde, Buck and Blanche and their 17 year old accomplice W. D. Jones. Sergeant Kahler, along with three other men with personal connections with Bonnie and Clyde, remembered the outlaws not as the film depicted them - likable, kindhearted folks forced into a life of crime - but as bloodthirsty, ruthless killers.

Before April 13, 1933, Bonnie and Clyde were not widely known in Missouri law officers. They had records only in Texas and Oklahoma, but before that day was over, they would become public enemies known across the nation.

At 2:30 p.m. Troopers Kahler and W. E. Grammar, accompanied by two Joplin city detectives, Harry McGinnis and Tom DeGraff, and J. W. (Wes) Harryman, the Shoal Creek Township constable, pulled up to a rented stone bungalow in Freeman Grove to check out a report that three men and two women were running in and out at all hours of the night, as Kahler remembers. They had two or three cars with different state licenses.

Checking out the registration for the Kansas plate, Kahler found that the occupants of the bungalow had registered with the gas department under a different name than they had used for the license plate, and under a still different name with the telephone company and another with the light department.

The night before, there had been a robbery in Neosho. The description of the robbers matched that the neighbors had given us of the occupants of this house. The city detectives were going to check the house and Grammar and I were to check the car out back. We were in the lead car. WE saw three men standing on the sidewalk when we drove up. The garage doors were open. When we got up close to them, they started closing the doors.

"Just about this time, another car with the two city detectives and the constable pulled in next to us, and the constable got out. He started in the garage and they shot him in the chest with buckshot, blowing a big hole through him. McGinnis got out to knock the glass out of the garage door. When he put his hand up, they stuck a shotgun through the crack of the door and shot his arm off, just above the elbow.

"The garage door swung back toward me and I could see the barrel of a gun and a man's hand sticking out. I started shooting through the door at him. He was shooting at the other city detective. I thought I hit him because he dropped the gun. Just about that time, another man swung out of the door and opened up on me with a Browning machine rifle. The first burst out of that rifle hit the wall by me. The sand and cement chips hit me in the side of the face and neck. I thought about half my head was gone when it hit me."

Asked how the film's version of the Joplin battle compare to the real one, Kahler said, "The film showed the house to be a vine-covered, wooden place, and it didn't look like that at all. The building was Carthage stone, a 2-story, with the apartment upstairs and garage down. The stairway was inside the garage. It was a new building, as opposed to that old motel-looking place in the film. It didn't follow very closely what actually happened. I was amused at the way they depicted the place."
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