About 9:30 a.m. on Friday, April 6, 1934, Commerce police chief Percy Boyd and constable Cal Campbell, acting on a tip, went to investigate a suspicious vehicle at the side of a road on the southwest edge of town. The driver of the suspect automobile, later identified as Clyde Barrow, rammed his car into reverse and started back down the road “wide open,” but the new Ford V-8 veered into a ditch and got stuck in the mud.
Campbell and Boyd got out of their car and started toward the stranded vehicle. When Campbell noticed that the occupants of the car were brandishing weapons, he drew his pistol and opened fire. Barrow and another man, later identified as Henry Methvin, leaped out of the stranded Ford carrying automatic rifles and started running toward the lawmen, firing as they came. Campbell got off three shots before he was killed in the hail of bullets. Boyd, who managed to fire his weapon four times, was also knocked off his feet but received only a flesh wound.
After the shooting stopped, Barrow ran toward a nearby farmhouse, while Methvin walked toward Boyd and ordered him to get up. The chief made a joke as he got to his feet, which seemed to put the gunman in a good mood.
Barrow and his sidekicks forced Boyd and three other men who happened by to try to get their vehicle unstuck, but it remained mired in the mud, Finally, a man in a truck came and pulled the Barrow vehicle out of the mud. Barrow forced Boyd into the back seat of the car beside Methvin, then took the wheel and sped away to the west, with Bonnie Parker in the passenger's seat cradling a shotgun.
Upon learning of the shooting, lawmen hurried to the scene of the incident, where they found Campbell already dead. A posse quickly formed and gave chase after the outlaw vehicle. Authorities tentatively identified the villains as the Barrow gang, and a manhunt throughout the entire region, with officers from several different agencies participating, was soon launched.
Meanwhile, Clyde took Chief Boyd on a pell-mell flight toward Chetopa, Kansas, and along the back roads of southern Kansas until they finally reached Fort Scott in the early to mid-afternoon. During his captive ride, Boyd noticed a whole cache of automatic rifles and other weapons in the vehicle.
In Fort Scott, the fugitives first learned that the 60-year-old Campbell had died when they bought a newspaper with headlines about the shooting. At first Clyde said he was sorry “the old man” was killed but that he “had to do it.” Later, though, he and the other gang members laughed about the shooting.
During Boyd's unwelcome tour of southeast Kansas, Bonnie told him that the photo showing her smoking a cigar, which had been reprinted in newspapers across the country in recent months, was taken purely as a joke. She had borrowed the cigar from Clyde just for the photograph, and all the publicity about her smoking cigars was “bunk.” She wanted Boyd to let it be known that she was not “a cigar addict.”
During Boyd's unwelcome tour of southeast Kansas, Bonnie told him that the photo showing her smoking a cigar, which had been reprinted in newspapers across the country in recent months, was taken purely as a joke. She had borrowed the cigar from Clyde just for the photograph, and all the publicity about her smoking cigars was “bunk.” She wanted Boyd to let it be known that she was not “a cigar addict.”
About ten o’clock Friday night, Barrow drove around Fort Scott looking for a car to steal but failed to find one that suited him. Shortly afterward, the gang drove southeast of town about nine miles and let Boyd out unharmed in the wee hours of Saturday morning, April 7. After enlisting help, Boyd was taken back to Fort Scott, where he was treated at a hospital for his minor injuries and released. The next day, he told the story of his misadventures with the Barrow gang to newspapers. Boyd said the gangsters “treated [him] fine," and he thought his and Campbell’s shootout with the Barrow gang probably would not have happened if the constable hadn’t fired first.
Meanwhile, Bonne and Clyde wound their way through the dragnet and escaped to Texas. They were killed the next month in Louisiana.
