Late on a balmy summer night 75 years ago, a dark Ford sedan rolled to a halt at the Red Crown, a combination service station, tavern and café at the junction of U.S. 71 and a state road north of Kansas City. The business also had two guest cabins, available for $4 a night. There, in the rolling countryside of Platte County, the driver and his four passengers hoped to recover quietly from a grueling journey.
No such luck. They would have to shoot their way out.
They were the Barrow gang – leader Clyde Barrow, companion Bonnie Parker, brother Buck Barrow, and Buck’s wife, Blanche. Along for the ride was W.D. Jones, a longtime friend of Clyde’s. For months they had driven the highways and back roads of middle America, fleeing the law for past crimes and breaking more laws as they went. When they needed a car, they stole one. When they needed cash, they held up stores and service stations. When they needed a place to spend the night, they rented rooms if cash was available and camped in the country if it was not.
They trekked unendingly across the country, passing from jurisdiction to jurisdiction to elude the law. To make their trail hard to follow, the gang drove in great loops, motoring from their native Texas through Missouri and Oklahoma, Iowa and Minnesota, Arkansas and Louisiana.
The Barrows and other gangsters were much in the columns of newspapers and on the minds of Americans in the early 1930s. The availability of automatic weapons and fast automobiles helped outlaws defy poorly equipped local authorities. In Kansas City only one month before, emboldened hoodlums had ignited the Union Station massacre when they tried to free a convict.
The Barrow gang changed over time, but two members were constant -- Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. The five-member group that roomed at the Red Crown in Platte County on July 18 had been together since late March 1933, when Buck Barrow was released from a Texas prison.
At first, he and Blanche joined Clyde, Bonnie and W.D. Jones in Joplin, Missouri, where they rented an apartment. There they spent days inside and nights robbing stores until the law became suspicious and tried to arrest them. In April 1933, the gang shot its way out, leaving two dead officers behind.
Afterward, the gang kidnapped an undertaker and his fiancee in Louisiana, held a Barrow family get-together near Dallas, wrecked their vehicle in the Texas panhandle and killed a town marshal in northwest Arkansas. Now the subject of national attention in the newspapers and among law enforcement, the Barrow gang continued wandering. Just before arriving at the Red Crown, they had been in Iowa, holding up three service stations.
The Red Crown, named for the brand of gasoline it originally sold, was built in 1931 to take advantage of the traffic along U.S. 71. It lay about 20 miles northwest of downtown Kansas City and five miles southeast of Platte City.
The gang member who needed rest the most was Bonnie Parker. She had been severely burned in June, when the Barrow vehicle crashed into a stream bed in the Texas panhandle. She was still recovering in late July, and the gang hoped a stay at the Red Crown would help. They checked in about 10 p.m. on July 18.
But if privacy was what they wanted, they were sloppy about protecting it. On July 19, Blanche Barrow drove to a drugstore in Platte City to buy medical supplies to treat Bonnie. She wore a riding habit she had purchased in Texas, which drew the attention of the regulars at the drugstore’s soda fountain.
At the Red Crown, these new residents stayed mostly inside their cabins, behind closed doors and windows even as temperatures reached the mid-80s on July 19. Blanche made most of the purchases and paid mostly in coin.
To reach Monroe Dodd, e-mail mdodd@kcstar.com
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