Tender Murderers Read online

  Belle, on her own now, became the famed “Bandit Queen,” leader of a gang of horse thieves and cattle rustlers operating out of Indian territory in Oklahoma. Among the many lovers or common-law husbands Belle brought to her bed during that period were Bruce Younger, cousin of her first love, Cole, and a whole string of galoots with monikers like Bluford “Blue” Duck, Jim French, and Jack Spaniard.

  In 1880, she reportedly forced Bruce Younger to marry her at gunpoint. The happy couple lasted three weeks, after which he took off for points unknown, and she married Sam Starr, a handsome long-haired Indian, and gained the name that was to make her famous. Sam was twenty-three, she was about thirty-two. Belle reclaimed her kids, who'd been living with their grandparents all this time, and the new family settled down in a ranch on Arkansas Indian territory, fifty miles west of Fort Smith. She named her new home Younger's Bend, after the love of her life, Cole Younger, and had a piano shipped in. The couple lived happily, visited from time to time by old friends like Jesse James.

  At this point Belle was “discovered” by the Eastern press. The dudes and tenderfeet back East were hungry for tales of the Wild West, and a glamorous bandit queen was just their meat. Penny dreadfuls–cheap pulp adventure books that actually cost a whole dime–about Belle were being published by the dozens, and one-act plays about her were performed all over the country. Belle, who had a flair for the dr amatic, actually played herself in one performance at the Sebastian County Fair in Fort Smith, Arkansas. So much was being written about “the petticoat terror of the plains” that it's impossible to separate fact from fiction. One story had her in prison after a bank robbery, and charming the jailer into letting her go. In another tale, enraged after Blue Duck lost $2,000 in what Belle decided was a crooked poker game, she drew a gun on the players and made off with $7,000.

  This much is true: Belle dressed in black velvet, rode sidesaddle, and was a crack shot with her .45-caliber revolver, which Cole Younger had given to her and which she wore strapped to her hip in an elaborate holster. She was also a lousy mother. She punished her son by horsewhipping him, and broke up a planned marriage between daughter Pearl and the boy she loved, deciding that the boy wasn't good enough for her. Maybe she just didn't want them to turn out like their no-good mom.

  If Belle and Sam were living happily, they also, of course, were living a life of crime. They were arrested at least three times: for horse theft, selling whiskey to Indians, and robbing several farms, a case in which Belle, up to her old tricks, disguised herself as a man but was identified by several eye witnesses. Belle was even convicted once and sent to prison for nine months by “hanging judge” Isaac C. Parker.

  Sam was usually in even more trouble than Belle, and while he was on the lam from the law, Belle took another lover, John Middleton, nine years younger than she and wanted for arson and murder. Most of her various lovers and husbands seem to have committed at least one murder, so it's a wonder that, in all the literature about Belle, she isn't called a killer. It seems impossible that Belle could have lived her guntotin', hard-shootin' life without killing anybody, even by accident, and my conclusion is that her nineteenth-century biographers chivalrously declined to sully their heroine's reputation with accusations of murder.

  A portrait of the Bandit Queen

  John Middleton didn't last long. His body was found washed up on the banks of the Poteau River, and although the killer was never found, historians don't rule out a jealous Sam Starr. Sam himself didn't last much longer. In 1886, he and a deputy sheriff named Frank West killed each other in a shootout. Belle didn't stay in mourning for long, and by 1887, she had hooked up with another cute Indian, Bill July, at twenty-four almost half her age. They lasted two years, but Belle's time was drawing to a close.

  In 1889, Bill was wanted on a horse-theft charge (surprise!). Belle convinced him that there was no real evidence against him, and if he surrendered to the authorities at Fort Smith, the case would be thrown out of court. The couple set out for Fort Smith together. Halfway there they separated, Bill going the rest of the way alone, Belle visiting some friends along the way. Belle dined with her friends and departed for home, still nibbling on a piece of cornbread.

  She never made it.

  The next day, daughter Pearl found Belle's riderless horse in the yard. Alarmed, she rode out to search for her mother and found her lying face down along the road back to Younger's Bend. She had been ambushed and shot in the back, two days befor e her forty-first birthday. The murderer was never caught, but popular opinion rests on one Edgar Watson, a neighbor who was wanted for murder (surprise, surprise!) in Florida. During an argument with him, Belle had rashly threatened to give him up to the law.

  Belle was buried in her favorite black velvet dress, clasping her revolver–Cole Younger's gift–to her breast. The coffin was lined in matching black velvet and trimmed in white lace. Pearl commissioned a gravestone that featured her mother's favorite mare, Venus, and these words:

  Shed not for her the bitter tear,

  Now give the heart to vain regret

  Tis but the casket that lies here,

  The gem that filled it sparkles yet.

  And Belle's star does indeed still sparkle, in scores of legends, stories, and films, as it has for over a century. About a year befoe her death, Belle gave an interview to a journalist from the Fort Smith Elevator, which included this understatement: “I regard myself as a woman who has seen much of life.”

  The Movie

  Actually, you'd expect to find more movies about America's infamous lady bandit. Although Belle played a peripheral role in many a Western, I could only track down three movies featuring her name in the title, and one of them, Belle Starr's Daughter, is about Pearl avenging her mom's death. Unlike the film's heroine, played by Ruth Roman, the real Pearl didn't do so well, becoming first a prostitute and then a madame.

  Elizabeth Montgomery played Belle in a 1980s movie made for TV, but good luck finding that. Easier to track down in your more complete video stores is Lina Wertmuller's 1967 spaghetti Western, The Belle Starr Story. Don't look for authenticity in this one, but Italian bombshell Elsa Martinelli, as a bandit queen with mod raccoon eye makeup and black leather pants is a hoot. In one scene, she even wears hip-hugging pantaloons.

  Best of the lot is Gene Tierney's 1941 flick simply called Belle Starr. In her wildest dreams, Belle never looked this good, and the scriptwriters have mixed Sam Starr up with Quantrill, but who cares? The film is shot in early Technicolor, and if you can find it on late-night TV, I give it two thumbs up.

  Bonnie Parker

  “Tell Them I Don't Smoke Cigars”

  What can you say about a girl who wasn't even five feet tall, weighed 90 pounds, wrote poetry, and died young, riddled with bullets and with a machine gun in her lap?

  Bonnie Parker grew up in the depressingly named Cement City, Texas. She was a cute'n'perky little thang, acting in school plays and singing with the choir at First Baptist Church, and she loved to write. She was a romantic. In another location, at another time, she might have become a writer of romances, another Danielle Steele, but the poor kid was doomed by the place and the age she lived in. Like true Texas white trash, Bonnie quit school at sixteen to marry a handsome no-account named Roy Thornton, who had a roving eye and, anyway, wound up in the slammer. To no one's surprise, despite the fact that Bonnie had Roy's name tattooed above her right knee, the marriage didn't last. The couple never did get officially divorced, but by the time Bonnie was riding with the infamous Barrow Gang, legal marriage was the least of her problems.

  Bonnie was a researcher's dream come true. She kept a diary! In December 1927, she wrote:

  Before opening this year's diary, I wish to tell you that I have a roaming husband with a roaming mind. We are separated again for the third and last time. . . . I am running around with Rosa Mary Judy and she is somewhat of a consolation to me. We have resolved this New Year's to take no men or nothing seriously. Let all men go to hell!
/>   Bonnie tried to forget her sorrows in movies–she went almost every day–but comparing her bleak existence in hardscrabble Cement City to the glamour on the silver screen made her even more miserable. Some of her diary entries:

  January 1, 1928

  I went to a show. Saw Ken Maynard in The Overland Stage. Am very blue. Well, I must confess this New Year's nite I got drunk. . . . Drowning my sorrows in bottled hell!

  Jan. 2, 1928

  Met Rosa Mary today and we went to a show. Saw Ronald Coleman and Vilma Banky in A Night of Love. Sure was a good show. . . . Sure am lonesome.

  Jan. 12, 1928

  Went to a show. Saw Florence Vidor and Clive Brook in Afraid to Love. Sure was good. Blue as hell tonight.

  Jan. 13, 1928

  Went to a show. Saw Virginia Vallie in Marriage. Not a thing helps out though. Sure am blue. . . . Why don't something happen? What a life!

  “Something” happened in 1929. It was the first year of the Great Depression, and seventeen-year-old Bonnie was a waitress. She'd been working at Marco's Cafe in downtown Dallas, where she often “forgot” to charge the gaunt-faced unemployed men who tried to forget their troubles for a half-hour, hunched over a cup of hot java and a slice of pie. Marco's probably would have gone bankrupt anyway, and when it closed, she moved on to the American Cafe, a block from the Dallas County courthouse. The cute little strawberry blonde was a hit with the customers, and among the men who showed up at the American Cafe, possibly hoping for more than a cuppa joe from the pert waitress, was a young cop named Ted Hinton. In later life he would recall that she'd confided to him that “she wanted to be a singer . . . or maybe an actress or poet.”

  But the fates had another future planned for Bonnie, and, although the two would meet again some day, that future didn't include Ted Hinton. Bonnie met the man she'd spend the rest of her life with at a girlfriend's house just before Christmas 1929. His name was Clyde Chestnut Barrow, and he was wanted by the law.

  Clyde was one of eight kids from a family that was often homeless when he was younger. While he was still a teenager, Clyde and his big brother Buck earned the nickname “The Terrible Barrows” by hanging out in pool halls and committing various minor crimes. One night they stole an entire safe from the Motor Mark Garage, loaded it into their flivver, and promptly crashed the car into a lamppost. Clyde escaped the pursuing cops, but Buck was caught, arrested for burglary, and sent to prison. The night after his brother's arrest, Clyde was back at it, burglarizing a store in Waco, along with some pals.

  Clyde had slicked-back brown hair, and the ladies liked him. He liked to brag to them about the lawless exploits he'd gotten away with, but it was only a matter of time before the authorities decided to investigate Clyde and his gang of toughs. He was arrested on February 12, 1930, and sent to the Waco County courthouse to await trial. Bonnie inundated her sweetie with letters:

  February 14, 1930

  Sugar, when you do get out, I want you to go to work, and for God's sake, don't get into any more trouble. . . . Sugar, when you get clear and don't have to run, we can have some fun.. . .

  Honey, I sure wish I was with you tonight. I'm so lone-some for you, dearest. . . . Sugar, I never knew I really cared for you until you got into jail. And honey, if you get out o.k., please don't ever do anything to get locked up again. If you ever do, I'll get me a r ailroad ticket fifty miles long and let them tear off an inch every thousand miles, because I never did want to love you. . . .

  Bonnie visited Clyde in prison and smuggled in a gun. Her brown-haired “sugar” and his cellmate, Frank Turner, escaped that night. Texas now being too hot for them, they headed for Illinois in a series of stolen cars, committing petty crimes for small cash along the way. It was only a matter of time before Clyde was caught again and sent back to the Waco County slammer for a speedy trial. Sentenced to an infamous Texas prison farm, rife with ghastly working conditions, beatings, and homosexuality, Clyde got out of that one by arranging an “accident” in which he lost two toes. He was out on parole and limping into Bonnie's arms by February 1932. And this time, Bonnie was “with him for good.

  Well, not quite for good. A month after Clyde was released, after one of their first attempted burglaries, Bonnie was arrested. Awaiting trial in a Kaufman, Texas, prison cell, feeling deserted by Clyde, who didn't dare contact her for fear of the law, she composed and wrote down the first of her two now-famous poems, “The Story of Suicide Sal.” Bonnie's poems are folk poetry, written by someone who was obviously familiar with bluegr ass ballads and popular pulp fiction, and she has an excellent sense of rhythm and rhyme. Three months later, Bonnie was acquitted for lack of evidence, and this time, for the reunited lovers, it was “till death do we part.”

  While Bonnie had been rotting in her jail cell, Clyde, in a botched robbery, accidentally killed his first man. It was too late now for Bonnie's admonishments not to get into any moe trouble. She and her man started down a road that could have only one end. Teaming up with various henchmen at various times, the Barrow Gang, as they were dubbed by the newspapers of the day, cut a swath through the South, the West, and the Midwest, robbing whatever was robbable, from trains, gas stations, and groceries to banks, making spectacular getaways in fast stolen cars, and killing too many cops during their shootouts with the law. Bonnie was as guilty as the others. She was a crack shot and proud of it, and when the bullets were flying, nobody really could say who was responsible for hitting whom. Bonnie justified all of this: it was their lives or hers and her “sugar.”

  In March 1933, Buck got out of jail and joined the gang, dragging along his pretty but unwilling red-haired wife, Blanche, and her little white doggie, too. Blanche was more of a liability than a help. The two couples rented a furnished apartment, attempting a vacation from crime, but in April, cops, tipped off by neighbors who'd seen the Barrow boys unloading their arsenal, converged on the place. The Barrow Gang and the law exchanged fire, and two cops fell dead. Blanche, in a fit of hysteria, screamed and fled. The gang made it to their garage and piled into their car, with Clyde, as usual, at the wheel. He floored the gas pedal and the car burst through the garage straight into the gaggle of cops, who leaped out of the way to avoid being run over. Stopping only long enough to snatch Blanche, who stood across the street, still screaming, her little white dog tucked into her pocket, Clyde performed another of his miraculous escapes.

  Back in the apartment, the cops found rolls of film that yielded the famous photo of Bonnie in a stylish sweater set, squinting into the sun, her strawberry blonde hair tucked into a beret, her dainty feet in MaryJanes, leaning on the bumper of a car, a gun in her hand and a cigar in her mouth. She was only playing tough–she and Clyde loved to clown for their Kodak Brownie box camera–but the newspapers had a field day, pinning every unsolved crime on the pair. They called Bonnie a “hard, straight-shooting, boasting female gangster” and Clyde's “cigar-smoking, quick-shooting woman accomplice.” Bonnie hated it, and once, after they kidnapped an Oklahoma police chief, took him on a wild ride, and then released him in Kansas, she asked him to pass the word to the press: “Tell them I don't smoke cigars.”

  Bonnie and the famous cigar

  Bonnie had become a romantic figure; she should have loved it. The dirt-poor Depression years spawned many an outlaw, from Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson to John Dillinger. All were glorified and romanticized by the American public, but none had a girlfriend who was a gun-toting outlaw in her own right like Bonnie.

  The truth is, Bonnie and Clyde were losers, though you'd never know it from the publicity they got. Times were hard, money was scarce, and the Barrow Gang often survived on nickels and dimes gleaned from cash registers in down-and-out mom'n'pop stores. Their bank robberies were singularly unsuccessful. From one bank they made off with the spectacular sum of $80, and they broke into another bank only to find that it was empty, having folded weeks before. They slept in their cars, in open fields, or in a succession of dinky motel rooms. Only Clyde's deat
h-defying, escape-artist driving got them out of their various close calls with the law.

  Through it all, Bonnie and Clyde managed to stay nattily dressed, as can be seen in their photos. Clyde favored sharp pinstriped suits and snap-brimmed hats. Bonnie liked to wear red. And through it all, they tried to see their families when they could, though this often meant hurried rendezvous in fields and forests, too soon broken up by the appearance of a patrol car.

  After their spectacular escape from the law in April 1933, things started to go wrong for the Barrow Gang. Driving down the highway toward a ravine, they missed a sign warning that a bridge was out. Too late, Clyde jammed on the brakes, but the car spun and turned over into the water below. Bonnie tumbled from the car and was pinned under it, just as a fire started in the engine. Clyde and the gang managed to drag her free just before the car exploded, but she was badly cut and burned. A nearby farm family took them in, but the farmer couldn't help noticing the arsenal that spilled out of the car, and he tipped off the cops. Clyde loaded the semi-conscious Bonnie into the farmer's car and pulled off another Houdini-esque escape. They hid out at a tourist camp and stole a doctor's car, gaining his bag full of painkillers, gauze, and dressings. Miraculously, Bonnie survived and started to heal.

  It got worse on the evening of July 18, 1933, when the gang rented two cabins at the Red Crown Tourist Camp near Platte City, Missouri. The night clerk took one look at the three heavily armed men half-carrying the woman with a bandaged leg and phoned the highway patrol. Police Capt. William Baxter remembered that Bonnie Parker had been badly hurt in an auto accident the month before, and gathered together his own county cops and the Platte City police department. The next night, an army of lawmen in armored cars bore down on the tourist camp, and this time they were ready. The cops met Clyde's and Buck's guns with a barrage of bullets that tore the little cabins apart. Two bullets pierced Buck's skull. Blood pouring down his face, he fell into Blanche's arms. Carrying Bonnie, Clyde led the gang into the garage and their car, and once more drove hell-bent for leather, straight through the assembled cops. As the car sped away, a couple of cops shook off their state of shock long enough to shoot through the auto's rear window, right where Blanche sat with Buck in her lap. She screamed as shards of glass pierced her right eye, blinding her.