Texas Depression-era Desperadoes (True Crime) by Haile Bartee

Author:Haile, Bartee [Haile, Bartee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2014-01-21T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

The End of the Road

Two weeks after the Eastham breakout, Lee Simmons was still at a loss as to how such an embarrassing escape could have happened on his watch. He had no plausible explanation for the rising chorus of critics that in his eyes looked more like a lynch mob with each passing day. The way the thin-skinned general manager of the state penal system saw it, the recent public pillorying of the Dallas County sheriff was a testimonial dinner compared to what the press and politicians were putting him through.

But the one question the beleaguered prison boss did not waste time thinking about was who to blame for the blow to his reputation. Lack of evidence be damned, it had to be Clyde Barrow, and he would get him no matter what.

That was the promise Simmons made to Major Crowson, the mortally wounded “high rider.” Although doctors rated his chances of recovery at slim to none, Crowson hung on for eleven days. Before he died, he named Joe Palmer as his killer, saying he “didn’t give me a dog’s chance,” and made Simmons swear he would to send him to the chair. The GM told him he could count on it, but his mind was on Clyde Barrow.

The one thing Simmons knew for certain was that local cops with their limited resources were no match for the Barrow Gang. It would take a group of experienced and ruthless lawmen capable of tracking Bonnie and Clyde and eliminating them once they had the fugitives in their sights. No capture, no arrest, just a shoot-to-kill execution.

Frank Hamer, the legendary Texas Ranger, was not Lee Simmons’s first choice to lead the manhunt, and for good reason. He had to sell the governor on his idea of a no-quarter posse, and Miriam Ferguson detested Hamer as much as he despised her and her husband, Jim, the impeached ex-governor removed from office in 1917. After “Ma,” Texas’s first female chief executive, was elected to a second term in the fall of 1932, Hamer opted for early retirement rather than give Mrs. Ferguson the satisfaction of firing him in the housecleaning of the khaki corps that had been a key component of her campaign.

Before Simmons even brought Hamer’s name up in his private meeting with the governor, he admitted that he had exhausted the short list of prospects. Two other qualified candidates had turned him down flat because the task entailed killing a woman. He left “Ma” Ferguson’s office with a unique “Special Escape Investigator for the Texas Prison System” commission and sufficient funds for a manhunt that might take months.

Why was forty-nine-year-old Frank Hamer the only man for the job? With fifty-three confirmed kills in his thirty-year career, he was the most prolific killer in Texas history. Hamer had shot to death more men than John Wesley Hardin, Bill Longley, Ben Thompson, Clay Allison or any other gunfighter in the blood-soaked nineteenth century.

Hamer’s philosophy was as chilling as it was simple. He liked to tell raw Ranger recruits, “We’re here to enforce the law, and the best way is a .

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