In August 1932, outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow arrived in Carlsbad, New Mexico, looking for a place to hide. They had good reason to disappear. Days earlier, in Stringtown, Oklahoma, Clyde and Raymond Hamilton had shot two lawmen at a rural dance. Deputy Sheriff Eugene Moore was killed, and Sheriff C.G. Maxwell was seriously wounded.
The entire region was searching for them. Bonnie had an aunt living near Carlsbad, Nellie Parker, who stayed on a farm a few miles outside town. The farm seemed perfect for what Clyde needed: family, seclusion, and distance from the heat of Texas and Oklahoma. The three moved in for a few days.
The problem was the car. Clyde was driving a stolen Ford V8, and in 1932 Carlsbad, stolen cars drew attention. When Clyde and Hamilton drove into town to get ice, that government farm attracted the notice of local authorities. Word reached the Eddy County Sheriff’s Office about a suspicious car at the Stamps farm.
But something else was working against them too. Nellie Stamps was frightened by the men her niece had brought into her home, and she alerted authorities herself. Either way, the result was the same. A lawman headed to the farm to inquire about the car.
That lawman was Deputy Joe Johns. On the morning of August 14, 1932, Joe Johns left the Stamps farm in his car. He went there alone. He had done this kind of thing many times. There were always strange cars around, and the locals were suspicious of them.
Johns was an experienced officer. He had served as chief of police for Eddy County and held six different public offices in his lifetime. He had ambitions. A car with out-of-state plates at a local farm seemed routine.
Johns stopped and looked at the Ford. He peered through the windows and saw the back seat. The back seat told him this was not routine at all. It was full of rifles and pistols.
Johns went up to the house and knocked. Bonnie answered. Johns asked who owned the car parked outside. Bonnie answered calmly and politely. She told him it belonged to two young men, that they were getting dressed, and that she would send them out right away.
That was the signal to the men inside that the law was at the door. Inside, Clyde and Hamilton were caught off guard. Their guns were hidden in the trunk, out of Johns’s reach. Clyde searched the house and found a rifle in a closet. Then he and Hamilton moved around the side of the house quickly and jumped Johns before the deputy could react.
Johns tried to run. Clyde fired a warning shot. The bullet came close enough to knock his hat off his head. Hamilton took the deputy’s pistol, and within seconds, the lawman who had come to ask questions was a prisoner of the Barrow gang.
They worked quietly and fast. They disabled Johns’s car so no one could follow. They cut the phone lines to the Stamps house so no one could call ahead. Then they put Joe Johns in the car, not in the trunk, and drove off.
The trip took nearly twenty hours. They took Johns from the New Mexico road and headed toward Texas, roughly toward San Antonio, hundreds of miles to the southeast. Johns later described the ride in detail. He said he was squeezed in the back seat between Clyde Barrow and Raymond Hamilton. Bonnie sat on Hamilton’s lap and kept a pistol pointed at his ribs.
The car was loaded with rifles and pistols. Johns noted they did not have machine guns at that time. He was guarded the entire time so he could not reach for any of those firearms. He said he was sure they would have shot him if he moved. They had already shot his hat off.
The trip was not smooth for the gang. According to Johns, they suffered seven flat tires along the way, slowing them down and stretching the journey. They took turns driving, with one watching him while the other drove. At one point, they tried to steal another car to replace their worn-out Ford, but the attempt failed.
There was one moment Johns never forgot, because it nearly cost lives back in Carlsbad. Clyde and Hamilton were angry at Nellie Stamps for reporting them to the authorities. They talked about going back to kill her. But Johns talked them out of it. Years later, he said that was exactly what happened, that the outlaws wanted to return and kill Bonnie’s aunt, and he argued against it until they gave up the idea.
Joe Johns spent most of a day and a night with three of the most wanted people in the Southwest, not knowing where they were taking him or whether they would let him live. While Johns was riding in the Ford, something happened behind him that turned the story upside down.
Two truck drivers found a body on the side of the road, about 90 miles from El Paso. The body was headless. News spread quickly, and the conclusion seemed obvious: a deputy from New Mexico had been kidnapped by the Barrow gang, and now a headless body had been found on the road they were believed to have taken. Authorities connected the dots and decided the gang had killed Joe Johns and dumped his body.
A massive manhunt was launched for the killer of the deputy, who was still alive at that moment, sitting in the back seat of a car with some killers. It took more investigation to clear up the case. The body was not Johns at all. It was a passing traveler, unrelated to the kidnapping, found by chance in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But for a while, the official story was that Joe Johns had lost his head. Someone had cut it off. Johns himself did not learn about it until later. The newspaper later reported he was confused by the stories of his death, because when he arrived somewhere, people said, “Hey, you’re supposed to be dead.” He looked at them and said, “Well, I’m not.”
He had spent those hours fearing for his life inside the car, unaware that people outside had already buried him in their minds. Near San Antonio, the gang finally stopped. They had threatened to kill him several times during the ride, but according to his account, Bonnie talked them out of it and let him go unharmed.
Before they left, they asked Johns if he had enough money to get back to Carlsbad. If he did not, they said, “We’ll get you some money real quick.” Then they left him on the road and drove off. Johns was released about 15 miles outside the city limits. He walked to the nearest house, about a mile away, and from there went to the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office. Then he returned home.
So the dead man came back. Not because he had actually died, but because some thought he had. The ones who kidnapped him remained on the run. Joe Johns outlived them all by decades. He later served as mayor of Eddy County, then chief of police in Carlsbad, then county treasurer and tax assessor. He lived into the 1970s and died at age 84 from injuries sustained in a car accident.
At his death, his obituary still referenced that day in 1932, noting that the former deputy had been held captive by Bonnie and Clyde.