Ep. 68: Bonnie & Clyde, Part 2: The Chase
Wise About Texas
Ken Wise
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 21 April 2019
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Bonnie & Clyde were on the run for two years. They committed small time thefts but big time murders. They were killers, pure and simple. They drove fast and far, laid low, and had help all over their territory. But they always came home. Over 1000 men from various law enforcement agencies, including the new FBI, couldn’t catch them. So we needed one Texas Ranger, and that man was Frank Hamer. Hamer, his friend and fellow Ranger Maney Gault, along with two Dallas deputy sheriffs, tracked the outlaws and set them up to get what they had coming. The posse did in a few weeks what the rest of the country couldn’t do in two years. They got justice. Hear about the chase and dramatic end to the crime spree of Bonnie & Clyde in the latest episode of Wise About Texas.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Howdy and welcome to Wise About Texas, the award-winning Texas history podcast. |
| 0:12.8 | I'm your host Ken Wise and I want to thank you for tuning in today for some Texas history. |
| 0:17.5 | This is part two of the two-part episode on the infamous gangsters Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. |
| 0:26.0 | In part one, we covered several of their crimes, their murders, a couple of their gang members, |
| 0:32.0 | and we ended with the violent prison break |
| 0:34.3 | they orchestrated at the East Ham Prison Farm in East Texas. To remind everyone a |
| 0:39.1 | little bit about that, Bonnie and Clyde staged a prison break that freed inmates Raymond Hamilton, Joe Palmer, Henry Methven, and Hilton and Bybee. |
| 0:49.0 | They killed one guard and wounded another. |
| 0:52.0 | The head of the Texas prison system at the time was Lee |
| 0:54.3 | Simmons and he was mad. So he devised a plan. With the cooperation of Governor Ma Ferguson, |
| 1:00.7 | he would create the position of special investigator for the Texas |
| 1:04.8 | prison system. He would fill this position with the best manhunter he could think of. |
| 1:09.2 | It had to be somebody who had a proven record as a tracker and a detective. It had to be |
| 1:14.7 | someone with the intelligence to anticipate the Barrow Gang's next move. And it had to be |
| 1:20.6 | someone with the ability to do what he knew and everyone knew |
| 1:25.3 | would have to be done when they finally caught Bonnie and Clyde. |
| 1:29.9 | Bonnie and Clyde had proven over and over, but they were willing to shoot first. |
| 1:35.0 | The man Simmons chose had to shoot faster. |
| 1:39.0 | He had to be the toughest, deadliest man in the gunfight that was sure to come, and Lee Simmons knew just who |
| 1:47.0 | to call. |
| 1:48.0 | Frank Hamer was born on March 17th, 1884 in Fairview, Texas. He grew up on a ranch in San Saba County. He cowboyed on various ranches in West Texas and joined the Texas Rangers in 1906. |
| 2:08.0 | He was in and out of the Rangers working on the border and other hotspots at the time. |
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