W. D. Jones

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.

William Daniel ("W.D.", "Bud", "Deacon") Jones (May 12, 1916 – August 20, 1974) was a member of the Barrow Gang, whose crime spree throughout the southern Midwest in the early years of the Great Depression became part of American criminal folklore.

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, which was frequently the coup de grâce delivered by that strain of flu.

Tookie Jones and four of her sons survived.

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.

After postwar cotton prices collapsed they gave up trying to farm, and circa 1921–22 the Joneses settled in the industrial slum of West Dallas, in the same wave that brought the Barrow family and hundreds of other poor families from the country to the unwelcoming city.

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.

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.

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.

Jones ran with Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker for eight and a half months, from Christmas Eve 1932 to early September 1933.

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.

On the night of January 6, 1933 in Dallas, the three stumbled into a trap set for another criminal.

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.

In his confession to police, Jones said that he was starting the motor while Parker fired her pistol out the passenger window.

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.

After the murder of Malcolm Davis, Barrow, Parker and Jones Lay Low.

They drove through the hills of Missouri and Arkansas and may have wandered as far east as Tennessee.

They made news only on the night of January 26, when they kidnapped Springfield, Missouri police officer Thomas Persell.

He and another gang member named Henry Methvin were consolidated into the "C.W. Moss" character in the film Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

Of the character C.W. Moss in the movie, Jones said: "Moss was a dumb kid who run errands and done what Clyde told him. That was me, all right."