On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1934, two young men on motorcycles stopped beside a black Ford V8 parked on a dirt road off Highway 114 near Grapevine, Texas. They wore official police uniforms and shiny badges. One of them, H. D.
Murphy, was twenty-two years old. It was his first day on the motorcycle patrol. His fiancée, Marie Tolles, had a wedding dress hanging in her closet and an apartment they were supposed to move into the following week. He had not even loaded his weapon that morning.
His bullets were still in his pocket. Neither officer made it back to the paved road. Two bodies on Easter Sunday, one of them on a man’s first day of work. And that double murder was not even the most significant event of the week.
Five days later, another body was found. A sixty-one-year-old constable and father of eight from Commerce, Oklahoma, killed by gunfire in a muddy ditch. Three murders in less than a week. The American public blamed two people, whose names you already know: Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the Depression-era outlaw couple Hollywood romanticized so heavily that they got a full feature film in 1967 starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.
They were certainly violent and reckless. They killed at least nine law enforcement officers between them. Nobody here will tell you Bonnie and Clyde were victims. But the legend handed you a myth.
Here is what actually happened. There was a third person in that car on Easter Sunday. A third person in the mud outside Commerce. A man who likely pulled the trigger first in both incidents.
When it was all over, when justice finally caught up with him, this man traded in the two people who had broken him out of prison, who had given him his freedom, and bought his own life with theirs. Then he walked away. His name was Henry Methvin. Born April 8, 1912, in rural Louisiana.
A farm boy, thin and unremarkable, the kind of person you would not remember even if you stopped to fill your gas tank next to him. By age nineteen, he had slashed a fifty-six-year-old man’s throat in a Texas oil field. By twenty-two, he was riding with the most wanted couple in America. By thirty-six, he was drunk on a railroad track in Sulfur, Louisiana, where a Southern Pacific train cut him in half.
This is the story of how a Louisiana farm boy became the most dangerous member of a gang the public did not even know he belonged to. How he took part in at least three murders in six days and let two other people carry the blame for ninety years. And how he betrayed the only people who ever trusted him. Henry Methvin grew up on a family farm outside Ashland, Louisiana, in Bienville Parish.
Pine trees, red dirt, a place where your closest neighbor was a fifteen-minute drive away, and your entertainment options were church or trouble. Henry chose trouble. His father, Ivan Methvin, ran a small operation. Henry was the middle child, present but overlooked, and he seems to have decided early that he would not settle for simply being there.
By 1930 he was eighteen, working the oil fields of Rusk, Texas. One night he got into a dispute with a fifty-nine-year-old worker named Charles Hines. Henry’s solution was to cut Hines’s throat the way you would dress a deer. Hines survived.
Henry was arrested two hours later while driving Hines’s own car. He was sentenced to twelve years in the Texas state prison system. He ended up at Eastham Prison Farm in Huntsville, Texas. There he met his mentor: a young man from Dallas named Clyde Barrow.
Clyde had already been in and out of the system. He knew the guards, the roads, and most importantly, he had Bonnie Parker waiting outside with a plan. On January 16, 1934, Bonnie and Clyde showed up at Eastham to break out a specific prisoner, Raymond Hamilton. They smuggled weapons inside.
A guard was killed, another wounded. In the chaos, five prisoners escaped. Henry Methvin was not on the guest list. He saw an open door and ran through it.
The escapees were told to go back, but Clyde welcomed Henry. “You can ride with us,” he said. Clyde Barrow gave Henry Methvin his freedom. He gave him a seat in the car and a life outside those walls.
Henry would repay that debt in the most spectacular way imaginable. The gang operated as a fast, disciplined unit, hitting small-town banks and armories across rural Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. The strategy was speed: plan, break in, grab the money, escape, switch cars, drive until the tires wore out. But they could never stop moving.
Every night was a different ditch, a different motel, a different stretch of highway. You cannot build anything running that fast. On February 19, 1934, barely a month after the prison break, Henry joined Clyde and Hamilton in stealing military weapons from the National Guard armory in Ranger, Texas, including Browning automatic rifles. Eight days later, they used those guns to rob a bank in Lancaster, Texas.
The take was $4,138, roughly the price of a decent used truck. They committed a federal crime and risked their lives for that. Two forces were closing in on Henry. One was Frank Hamer, a former Texas Ranger, six-foot-three, built like a fence post that learned to fight.
Hamer was hired specifically to track Bonnie and Clyde. He was patient in a way that was almost unsettling. The other pressure came from inside the car. Raymond Hamilton split from the gang after a falling out with Clyde.
Now there were only three: Bonnie, Clyde, and Henry. On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1934, near Grapevine, officers Edward Bryan Wheeler, twenty-six, and H. D. Murphy, twenty-two, spotted the parked Ford and stopped to help.
Here the story divides. In his sworn statement to the FBI, Henry Methvin claimed he slept in the car all day while Bonnie played in the grass with a pet rabbit. Witnesses told a different story. They said Methvin panicked and shot Wheeler first with a stolen Browning automatic rifle.
Then Clyde shot Murphy, whose bullets were still in his pocket. On April 6, their car got stuck in the mud near Commerce, Oklahoma. They tried to flag down passersby at gunpoint. Constable Cal Campbell, sixty-one, father of eight, and Chief of Police Percy Boyd responded.
Campbell was killed. Boyd was shot in the head but survived. Remarkably, the gang released Boyd, gave him a few dollars, and Bonnie asked him to tell the press that she did not smoke cigars. Three officers dead in six days, and Bonnie was worried about her public image.
Henry should have disappeared that week. He did not. He was an idiot. Instead, Henry Methvin and his father Ivan made a deal.
If Henry helped set up Bonnie and Clyde, Texas would grant him a pardon for his escape and his role in the crimes. Ivan agreed to be part of the trap. The man who got Henry out of prison, who gave him a seat in the car and called him a partner, was about to be repaid. It cost exactly 130 bullets.
On May 23, 1934, on a dirt road near Sailes, Louisiana, not far from where Henry grew up, Ivan Methvin’s lumber truck was parked on the road, raised on a jack as if he had a flat tire. Frank Hamer and his posse hid in the brush while Ivan was tied to a tree. Whether Ivan participated willingly or under duress depends entirely on who you ask. Bonnie and Clyde came down the road in their Ford V8.
Clyde slowed when he spotted Ivan’s truck. The ambush began. In less than twenty seconds, more than 130 rounds tore through the Ford. Clyde took about seventeen bullets, Bonnie about twenty-five.
Henry Methvin was not in the car. His father had told him not to go with them that morning. He knew. On August 14, 1934, Texas Governor Miriam Ferguson signed a pardon for Henry Methvin.
But Oklahoma was not part of that deal. On December 20, 1935, he was convicted of the murder of Constable Cal Campbell and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to life in 1936. He was paroled in 1942.
Eight years for a murder that left eight children fatherless. A memorial to Cal Campbell was not erected in front of Commerce City Hall until 67 years after his death. Henry Methvin did nothing with his second chance. In November 1945, he was jailed for fighting and carrying a shotgun.
In October 1946, he was arrested for attempted robbery and drunk driving near Shreveport, Louisiana. Same man, same impulses, same inability to see beyond the next five minutes. E. W.
Wheeler was buried in Fort Worth. He was twenty-six. H. D.
Murphy was buried the following week, his fiancée wearing the white dress. Cal Campbell’s eight children grew up without him. Percy Boyd carried a bullet scar on his head for the rest of his life. Frank Hamer returned to private life and did not speak much about the ambush.
Bonnie Parker was twenty-three. Clyde Barrow was twenty-five. On April 19, 1948, in Silver, Louisiana, a Southern Pacific train stopped at its usual scheduled time at four o’clock. When the train moved, a thirty-six-year-old man who was drunk tried to crawl across the tracks.
The train cut Henry Methvin in half. The sheriff confirmed it to the press: Henry Methvin, the man who was with Barrow and Parker. He was buried in Social Spring Cemetery in Hall Summit, Louisiana. There are theories about whether it was truly an accident, but no one was ever arrested.
The storybooks got part of it right. Bonnie and Clyde were killers. But Hollywood turned Henry Methvin into a composite character in the 1967 film and effectively erased him from the narrative. The bigger distortion is the ending.
The story is supposed to be about two outlaw lovers who died together in a hail of gunfire. The real ending is about the man who was not in the car. The man who put him there. The man who got a pardon, walked out of prison, and then crawled drunk across a railroad track fourteen years later.
The most dangerous person in the Barrow Gang was never the one people feared. It was the one nobody remembered.