William Daniel ("W.D.", "Bud", "Deacon") Jones (May 12, 1916 – August 20, 1974) was a member of the Barrow Gang, whose spree throughout the southern Midwest in the early years of the Great Depression became part of American criminal folklore. Jones ran with Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker for eight and a half months, from Christmas Eve 1932 to early September 1933. A sketch of his role in the gang, blended with one of a later gang member, Henry Methvin, was consolidated into the "C.W. Moss" character in the film Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Of the character in the movie, Jones said: "Moss was a dumb kid who run errands and done what Clyde told him. That was me, all right.""Riding with Bonnie and Clyde."
In 1974, Jones was fatally shot during an altercation in Houston, Texas. He was 58 years old.
Early life James Zeberdie Jones (1883–1923) and Tookie (née Garrison) Jones (1884–1971) were sharecroppers in Henderson County, Texas with six children: five sons and a daughter. W.D. was their second youngest child. After postwar cotton prices collapsed they gave up trying to farm, and circa 1921–22 the Joneses settled in the industrial slum of West Dallas, in the same wave that brought the Barrow family and hundreds of other poor families from the country to the unwelcoming city.West Dallas Neighborhood Development Corporation, Nov. 28, 2000. West Dallas Environmental History. The Texas Senate. Most homes in West Dallas remained without the most basic amenities, and the streets remained unpaved until 1952, when the city of Dallas incorporated it. Phillips pp. 43, 312, 331 fn.4. West Dallas was a maze of tent cities and shacks without running water, gas or electricity, set on dirt streets amid smokestacks, oil refineries, "plants, quarries, lagoons, tank farms and burrow pits" on the Trinity River floodplain. It was while his family was living in the squatters' camp under the Oak Cliff Viaduct that W.D., then about five, first met Clyde Barrow, then age 11 or 12.
When W.D. was six years old his entire family was stricken by what was probably Spanish flu, which lingered after the 1918 pandemic in pockets of the United States where unhealthy conditions prevailed.The Great Pandemic: Texas The Great Pandemic: The United States in 1918–1919 US Department of Health and Human Services His father and sister died in the same hour,"Father and child die of pneumonia." Dallas Times-Herald, January 28, 1923. Bonnie and Clyde's Hideout his oldest brother two nights later,"G.P. Jones Dies." Dallas Times-Herald, January 30, 1923. Bonnie and Clyde's Hideout all of pneumonia, which was frequently the coup de grâce delivered by that strain of flu."Bacterial Pneumonia Caused Most Deaths in 1918 Influenza Pandemic." NIH News, August 19, 2008. National Institutes of Health Tookie Jones and four of her sons survived.
Jones grew up illiterate. Before or after the illness that devastated his family, he got partly through the first grade. He recalled that he left school to sell newspapers.Barrow p. 235 fn. 25. He had been friends with LC Barrow, the youngest son of his mother's friend Cumie, since their families' first days in West Dallas. The Joneses and the Barrows were close: when Marvin “Buck” Barrow was to stand trial in San Antonio for car theft, Tookie and her two youngest boys accompanied the Barrows and their two youngest children as they traveled by horse and wagon, 300 miles south, to attend.Guinn pp. 39, 147. The 600-mile trip took three weeks each way. The families picked cotton and fruit at farms along the way to earn money to feed themselves. Guinn p. 39.
Both boys had big brothers named Clyde. W.D.’s brother Clyde drove his wife and Buck Barrow’s girlfriend Blanche across the country to Tennessee in the summer of 1930 to see Buck while he was on the lam.William Daniel Jones known as W.D. Blanche Barrow Official Website The Barrows, too, had been hit by disease in the West Dallas camp: Clyde, his father and his younger sister Marie were hospitalized by something so severe that years later Clyde was rejected by the Navy due to its lingering effects.Guinn pp. 28, 33.
Barrow Gang 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.Phillips p. 338, fn.91. 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.Beaumont, Texas mugshot. FBI file 26-4114 Section Sub A pp. 54–55. "The car we had torn up belonged to a bootlegger who had hired us to deliver his liquor. We got to pulling on a bottle and just hooked 'em with the liquor and the bootlegger's car." "Riding with Bonnie and Clyde." On Christmas Eve 1932, Clyde Barrow and his friend Bonnie — already on the run,Barrow was wanted for the April 30 murder of John N. Bucher in Hillsboro, Texas, the October 11 murder of Howard Hall in Sherman, Texas, and the August 5 murder of Deputy Eugene C. Moore and wounding of Sheriff C.G. Maxwell in Stringtown, Oklahoma, and for a number of robberies. Guinn pp. 111-39; Ramsey pp. 51–80. Police had been aware that Bonnie Parker was traveling with him since August 14, when her aunt in Carlsbad, New Mexico identified her so. Guinn p. 137; Ramsey 66–67. 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.In his statement to police Jones recalled that he was drunk when Bonnie and Clyde drove away with him and that he had no intention of staying with them longer than overnight; Guinn at page 147 postulates that he begged to come along.
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.Ramsey p. 80. According to Jones, Barrow used this report to make sure Jones wouldn’t dare leave the gang. Jones was indicted for Johnson's murder by a Bell County grand jury,The Dallas Morning News, January 23, 1934. but was not tried.After his arrest in November 1933 Jones gave his version of the events of Christmas Day 1932 to Dallas County police. Although his story did not match a single eyewitness account, it satisfied investigators that he and Barrow had been the two men involved. This exonerated an old Barrow partner, Frank Hardy, who had already been tried once for the murder but had met with a hung jury and was about to be tried again. "Prisoner Says Barrows Killed At Least 6 Men." Associated Press. Unknown newspaper, November 25, 1933. Bonnie and Clyde Joplin Shootout Documents p. 72.
On the night of January 6, 1933 in Dallas, the three stumbled into a trap set for another criminal. Barrow killed Tarrant County Deputy Malcolm Davis, shooting him point-blank in the chest with a 16-gauge shotgun. Jones and Parker were waiting in the car for Barrow and were as startled as the neighbors were when gunfire broke out. Jones "grabbed a gun and began blasting the landscape." Parker shouted to him to stop, that he might hit someone, and she circled the car around the block to catch up with Barrow.Descriptions of the night of Jan. 6: Parker pp. 106–07; Phillips pp. 115–21; Ramsey p. 90.
In his confession to police, Jones said that he was starting the motor while Parker fired her pistol out the passenger window. Thirty-five years later, he told Playboy 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." In October 1934, Jones was tried and convicted as an accessory to Deputy Davis' murder as part of an arrangement with Dallas County Sheriff R.A."Smoot" Schmid.Guinn p. 243; Phillips p. 309.
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.Persell had watched their car slowly cruising the downtown area and suspected an imminent car theft. He stopped them on a bridge, which made Barrow suspect that more police were lying in wait on the other side. They released him unharmed six hours later and fifty miles away, but kept his Russian-made, custom-grip gun, which was next seen in the roll of photographs recovered at Joplin, in one picture hooked over the hood ornament of their latest stolen V-8, in another tucked into Barrow's waistband as Parker holds a shotgun on him and reaches to take it. "Riding with Bonnie and Clyde"; Guinn pp. 157–59; O'Brien, Mike. "Book follows bloody trail of Bonnie, Clyde across Ozarks," Springfield News-Leader, January 4, 2004. The photographs: Ramsey pp. 108–13. Persell moved on with his life and never spoke much about the incident, though it came up again decades later, when he let his granddaughters bring him to school for show and tell. "Bank Robbers Bonnie, Clyde Kidnapped Policeman in 1933." Rootsweb: Local History. Originally published in the Springfield Leader-Press, Oct. 10, 1999. Twice in early spring, they dressed up and photographed each other and their gun collection beside the road.Many of these photographs—"the Joplin rolls"—are reproduced at Ramsey pp. 108–13. The camera was a Kodak, "probably a No. 2A Folding Autographic Brownie"; Blanche Barrow was convinced it was hers. Barrow p. 227 fn.10. 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.Though Parker's pose for this snapshot was a comic exaggeration of every gun-moll cliché she could think of, the newspapers selected it to represent the "Bonnie Parker" for whom alert readers should be on the lookout. The picture shocked and titillated the public and branded Parker for the rest of her life and beyond as "Barrow's cigar-smoking gun girl." Inspired, crime magazines and newspapers across the country fleshed out the cartoon characterization of Parker to such a distorted degree that a year later, in April 1934, when their last kidnap victim asked her, "What shall I tell [the papers], Bonnie?" she chose to say, "Tell them I don't smoke cigars." (On page 39 of Ted Hinton's 1977 as-told-to memoir Ambush is the revelation that Parker actually was holding a rose in her teeth, and that the Joplin Globes art department had painted in a cigar.) Dallas County Deputy Sheriff Ted Hinton recalled that the "brazen pride""Photographs the Bandits Left Behind." Fragments of unknown newspaper, possibly the Joplin News-Herald. April, 1933. Bonnie and Clyde Joplin Shootout Documents pp. 92, 118, 134, 247. displayed in the pictures made law enforcement officers that much more determined to catch them.