Anniversary of Barrow crime spress nears, Celina Record

Anniversary of Clyde Barrow’s Celina crime spree nears Lisa Ferguson, lferguson@starlocalmedia.com Apr 14, 2016 Just after midnight on April 21, 1932, three young men made their way to Celina’s downtown square intent on stealing guns and ammunition from a local hardware store. One of those men was Clyde Barrow. The heist that occurred 84 years ago in Celina is little more than a footnote in the murderous, bank-robbing saga of Barrow and his cohort Bonnie Parker, which spread across Texas and several other states before the dangerous duo was killed during a law-enforcement ambush in Louisiana in 1934. In fact, you’ll be hard-pressed to find many Celina residents who even know that Barrow and members of his gang (sans Parker, who was jailed in Kaufman County at the time) had once struck here. At least, that’s what a pair of authors who penned books about the criminal’s career said they discovered while conducting research in the city years ago. During the early 1980s, “I remember walking around down (on the square) and stopping several people that I thought would be old enough to remember it,” recalled John Neal Phillips, author of “Running With Bonnie and Clyde: The Ten Fast Years of Ralph Fults” (University of Oklahoma Press, 1996). Phillips said hardly anyone recalled the incident during which Barrow, Ted Rogers and Johnny Russell also kidnapped four local residents. According to numerous published reports, two of the men were sitting outside the Nelson Hotel building at West Walnut Street and North Ohio Street when they were approached by the city’s night watchman, Floyd C. Perkins. Around the same time, Celina Mayor S.M. Francis emerged from nearby City Hall (the building that now houses Celina’s Economic Development Corp. and Main Street offices). One of the outlaws drew a gun and stole Perkins’ service weapon. They began walking him and the mayor west on the sidewalk. Perkins was injured when one of the men delivered a blow to his head with the butt of a pistol. Francis and Perkins were then marched east toward the railroad tracks and loaded into a boxcar sitting empty nearby. Before long, the thugs encountered another pair of citizens – identified in a Celina Record article published later that day as Carl Patrick and Byron Douglas – who were also promptly put into the boxcar. “They didn’t go to Celina to abduct anyone,” Dr. T. Lindsay Baker, author of “Gangster Tour of Texas” (Texas A&M University Press, 2011), explained of Barrow and his cohorts. “It was just their convenience that there was a boxcar … that was not locked that they could put people in as a temporary calaboose.” Barrow, Rogers and Russell eventually proceed toward West Pecan Street where Patrick & Seitz hardware was located. While in an alleyway adjacent to the hardware store, the threesome inadvertently broke into the business next door, Choate Pharmacy, whose space is now inhabited by Papa Gallo’s restaurant. “In all of the excitement or whatever, they got the doors mixed up,” Phillips said, noting that the crooks stole nothing from the pharmacy. “They just backed out and they went next door.” Once inside Patrick & Seitz (the location of which is where Papa Gallo’s patio dining area now sits), they successfully stole weapons and ammunition. Before leaving town, Phillips said, the gang also pilfered the keys from the patrol vehicle of Deputy Sheriff Frank “Dutch” Stelzer, who was unable to apprehend the crooks. “He just had to sit there and watch (their) car disappear into the night,” he said. It is reported that Barrow had been collecting weapons he intended to use later that year during a raid on the Eastham Prison Farm near Huntsville, where he had previously served time. That raid was temporarily thwarted when law enforcement officers began catching members of the Barrow Gang – all except for Clyde that is. The weapons from the Celina burglary were recovered the day after the crime when the Denton County Sheriff’s Office got a tip that gunshots had been heard in an area near Lake Dallas where, unbeknownst to law enforcement, members of the Barrow Gang had been hiding out. “They were practicing with their new firearms,” Baker said. Officers arrived and Barrow escaped during the commotion. Two other members of the gang who had not been involved in the Celina burglary were arrested. “Clyde slipped off and got up on the highway and commandeered a car and got away completely,” Phillips said. With his gang torn apart, Barrow was forced to hold off on the Eastham raid until January 1934. Ultimately, he broke five prisoners out of the facility. Four months later, Barrow and Parker met their legendary demise in a hail of gunfire. However, the pair’s notorious legacy lives on. They have been the subject of numerous books, documentaries and an Academy Award-nominated film. At the time of the Celina burglary, “No one would have known who Clyde Barrow was,” Phillips said, as his celebrity-like status wasn’t established until later in his criminal career. “In fact, there was no `Bonnie and Clyde’ until the last few days before they were killed” because newspaper accounts often omitted Parker’s name, he explained. “It was always `Barrow and girl,’ if at all. ... The fact that they were killed together was the thing that sealed the deal.” Nevertheless, Baker said Barrow’s connection to Celina makes the city “a really nice destination for heritage tourists … who want to walk over those crime scenes and experience them for themselves.”