W. D. Jones

In the early morning hours of August 20, 1974 Jones accompanied an acquaintance to a friend's home where she thought she would be given a place to sleep. The friend did not allow her in, an altercation ensued, and at 3:55 a.m. the friend shot Jones three times with a 12-gauge shotgun. "The man told police that Jones was a 'nice' person when sober but that he knew of Jones' reputation and was afraid of him." He was buried on August 22 at Brookside Memorial Park in Houston.

Jones and the sheriff agreed that he would be tried as an accessory to Clyde Barrow's January 6 murder in Dallas of Deputy Davis, which would protect him against extradition to Arkansas for the June 23 shootout on Highway 71 in which Marshal Humphrey was killed. "They tried me for killing a sheriff's man at Dallas," Jones told Playboy in 1968. "Clyde done it, but I was glad to take the rap. Arkansas wanted to extradite me, and I sure didn't want to go to no Arkansas prison. I figure now that if Arkansas had got me, one of them skeletons they've dug up there might have been me."

In 1968 Jones described his life on the run with Bonnie and Clyde in a colorful interview with Playboy magazine and spoke here and there to young people warning them away from the life of crime. Later in the year he filed a petition against Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, charging that the filmmakers, who had never contacted him, had maligned his character by implying that he had played a role in the betrayal of Barrow and Parker. Nothing came of the filing.

Jones lived the rest of his life in Houston, for many years next door to his mother. He married, but his wife died in the mid-1960s. He became addicted to pain-killing drugs. After 1967, the year Arthur Penn's romanticized film ignited a new generation's interest in the Barrow Gang, his arrests made the local news. Jones said of Bonnie and Clyde, "[It] made it all look sort of glamorous, but like I told them teenaged boys sitting near me at the drive-in showing: 'Take it from an old man who was there. It was hell.'" Local TV reporters had brought him to see the film.

In February 1935 Jones and nineteen other family members and associates of Barrow and Parker were defendants in the federal government's test-case trial en masse for "harboring." He received the maximum sentence for harboring, two years, applied to run concurrently with his Texas sentence. After six years in the Huntsville penitentiary he was paroled.

Jones was in the Dallas County jail on the morning of May 23, 1934, when Barrow and Parker were ambushed and killed on the Sailes-Gibsland road in north Louisiana. When reporters crowded in to tell him the news, he said, "I admit that I am relieved," and shook his head.

On the night of January 6, 1933 in Dallas, the three stumbled into a trap set for another criminal and 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. Though in his confession to police, Jones said that he was starting the motor while Parker fired her pistol out the passenger window, but 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's murder as part of an arrangement with Dallas County Sheriff R.A."Smoot" Schmid.

Jones was a combatant in the April 13, 1933 Joplin shootout with law officers in which Constable Wes Harryman and motor detective Harry McGinnis were killed by shotgun. Police estimated that this shootout lasted about one minute, from first shot to last. The most serious injury to the Barrows was to W.D. Jones. He was struck in the left side, possibly by a shot fired through the garage's glass window by Detective McGinnis or through the still-open garage door by Officer Harryman's only fired round, though Officer Kahler of the Missouri State Highway Patrol, recalling the battle in 1980, said that he himself shot Jones below the right shoulder blade, many seconds after the two fatally wounded officers were down. The Barrows fled westward; they stopped once at a gas station for aspirin and rubbing alcohol. They moved Jones into the front seat and wrapped him in the blanket that usually covered the guns; Parker pried open his wound with knitting needles and poured rubbing alcohol into it. In the Texas Panhandle, somewhere near Shamrock or Amarillo, they pulled over to examine their wounds. "Clyde wrapped an elm branch in gauze and pushed it through the hole in my side and out my back. The bullet had gone clean through me so we knew it would heal."

It is possible that Barrow coached Jones on what to say if he was ever arrested, or that the two of them agreed on a basic theme for Jones's official story: that Clyde, Bonnie and Buck had done all shooting and robbing and that W.D., a minor child, was an unwilling member of the gang, forced to ride with them at gunpoint, unconscious with fear or trauma most of the time, and chained to trees and car bumpers at night. Jones may or may not have had Barrow's blessing to blame every serious transgression on those who had nothing to lose, but on November 18, 1933, he relayed to Dallas police just such a story.

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, "entertained" older men, and collected license plates for LC Barrow’s brothers (Clyde and Marvin “Buck” Barrow) to use on cars they stole; 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. On Christmas Eve 1932, Clyde Barrow and his friend Bonnie — already on the run, 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. 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. According to Jones, Barrow used this report to make sure Jones didn't leave the gang. Jones was indicted for Johnson's murder by a Bell County grand jury, but was not tried.

At his trial the following October all state witnesses recommended against the death penalty. Jones was convicted of a crime codified in 1931, "murder without malice." Though the district attorney and the prosecuting attorney recommended a sentence of 99 years, on October 12 the jury handed down a sentence of fifteen years.

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. 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. Both boys had big brothers named Clyde; William's brother Clyde drove his wife and Marvin Barrow's girlfriend Blanche across the country to Tennessee in the summer of 1930 to see Marvin while he was on the lam. 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.

When William 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. His father and sister died in the same hour, his oldest brother two nights later, all of pneumonia (frequently the coup de grâce delivered by that strain of flu). Tookie Jones and four of her sons survived.

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. He and another gang member named Henry Methvin were consolidated into the "C.W. Moss" character in the film Bonnie and Clyde (1967). "Moss was a dumb kid who run errands and done what Clyde told him," Jones later said. "That was me, all right."

Marie Barrow, born in 1918, remembered Jones as being the same age as her brother LC, who was born in 1913, and that therefore he was not a minor in 1933. She may have confused Jones's birthday with Ray Hamilton's, May 21, 1913. In 1950 Jones filled out Social Security forms stating that he was born May 12, 1916, the same date he gave Dallas police in his November 1933 confession; in 1968 he told Playboy he was 16 on Christmas Eve 1932 and that Clyde Barrow was seven years older than he. A news article noting an arrest in September 1973 gives his age as 59. His death certificate gives his age as 58 and lists his birthday as May 15. Since he filled out his Social Security forms himself, while a relative filled out his death certificate, it would be safe to assume that his birthday is May 12 — however, May 15, 1916 is the date on his gravestone. (NOTE added February 2015) — According to the 1920 federal census of Van Zandt County, Texas, J.Z. (James) and Tookie Jones were parents of the following children: Garrison – age 16; Slennie – age 13; Clyde – age 10; Herbert – age 7; and W.D. – age 3. (Another son, Roy Lee, was born in 1920, after the census information was taken). This supports W.D. Jones' claim of 1916 as his year of birth. He was listed as three years old as of January 15, the day the census enumerator visited.

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. William was their second youngest child. After postwar cotton prices collapsed they gave up trying to farm, and circa 1921–22, in the same wave that brought the Barrow family and hundreds of other poor families from the country to the unwelcoming city, the Joneses settled in the industrial slum of West Dallas. It 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 William, then about five, first met Clyde Barrow, then age 11 or 12.