True Crime Chronicles: A member of the Barrow gang pulled the trigger on the automatic weapon that killed Campbell
On the morning of April 6, 1934, spring rain had turned the back roads west of Commerce, Oklahoma, into a slick clay trap. A Ford sedan carrying Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker, and Henry Methvin sat mired near the Lost Trail Mine, on a lane running west off Highway 66 just beyond the Northeast Oklahoma railroad tracks. Guns were stacked in the car in plain view. A passing motorist saw them, refused to stop long enough to be drawn in, and drove into town to find Commerce Police Chief Percy Boyd.
Boyd did not go alone. He called for Ottawa County Constable William Calvin Campbell, known everywhere as Cal, a sixty-year-old widower who lived with his daughter Iva McBee less than a mile from the mine road.
Campbell had been born December 14, 1873. He had spent roughly forty years in the Commerce country, helped lay the Northeast Oklahoma railroad toward Columbus, Kansas, worked about four years for the State Highway Department, and for the last four years had worn a constable’s badge for Division 2 of the Ottawa County Sheriff’s Office, the post that covered Commerce.
His wife, Edna Jane Allen Campbell, had died about thirteen years earlier, ten days after the birth of their youngest daughter, Fern. He left two sons in Commerce, Carl and James, and five surviving daughters: Elsie Monroe and Ruth Calkins in Los Angeles, Iva McBee and Frances Thornton in Commerce, and Fern on Miami Rural Route 2. One child had died in infancy. Brothers lived in Beatrice, Nebraska; Joplin, Missouri; and Commerce. A sister lived in Chicago.
The two officers drove south on Highway 66 and west to the reported car. The time was about 9:30 a.m. What followed was reconstructed from Boyd’s later statements, from the physical evidence on the road, and from the 1935 and 1936 Ottawa County murder record that named Methvin as a principal.
When Boyd and Campbell stopped and stepped out, the Ford began backing. It traveled about a hundred yards and dropped into a ditch, stuck again. A man came out of the car with a Browning automatic rifle and opened fire. The other man followed. Campbell was hit in the abdomen near the left hip. The round tore through the center of his body and severed his spine.
He died in the road, almost at once. Three spent cartridges were later found in his revolver. Boyd’s pistol was recovered as well. Both men had returned fire. Boyd took a wound along the side of the head, a graze that sent blood down his face and chest and dropped him. Three holes marked the left side of the officers’ car. Two holes marked the fugitives’ windshield. An empty machine gun clip and a shotgun shell lay in the mud.
C. M. Dodson heard the shooting, jumped into a truck, and drove toward the mine. He arrived as the three were trying to take a vehicle from Clarence Robinson’s yard. Seeing Dodson, they forced him at gunpoint to chain his truck to their sedan and pull them free. Boyd, still bleeding, was being steered into the seat.
The blond woman in the car was smoking a cigarette. The sedan came out of the hole facing east. The driver spun it west and fled. About three miles farther, near the Timber Hills farm, the same car met farmer A. N. Butterfield and his brother, themselves stranded in the road.
One of the men climbed out and shouted that they had just killed two men and were in a hurry because the law was after them. They helped shove the farm car aside and kept on toward Chetopa, Kansas. Posse reports that afternoon placed the sedan about nine miles west of Chetopa, pointed toward Coffeyville.
Early newspaper descriptions guessed at Raymond Hamilton as the second man.
The second man was Henry Methvin, twenty one years old, born April 8, 1912, in Louisiana to Ivan “Ivy” Methvin and Avie Stephens, sprung from the Eastham prison farm on January 16, 1934, during the raid in which Clyde Barrow freed Raymond Hamilton and killed a guard.
The gang kept Boyd. They drove him through Oklahoma and across the Kansas line and held him about fifteen hours before putting him out near Fort Scott, at Mangle Corner. They gave him a clean shirt to replace the one soaked with his own blood and a little money.
Parker, who had tended the head wound in the back seat, asked him to tell the public she did not smoke cigars. The cigar image that had followed her since the Joplin photographs of 1933 was a prop. Boyd later said that after the three bought a newspaper and understood that Campbell was dead, they apologized for the killing.
He identified Barrow and Parker without hesitation. He never learned Methvin’s name. The first murder warrant therefore named Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker, and John Doe.
The Commerce shooting came five days after Easter Sunday, April 1, 1934, when Texas Highway Patrolmen Edward B. Wheeler and H. D. Murphy were killed near Grapevine. That double killing had already turned public feeling. Commerce finished the turn.
Campbell was a sixty-year-old widower and father left dead in a muddy county road.
Contemporary papers counted him as the ninth officer slain in the Barrow gang’s run. The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial later listed eight other officers killed by the gang between 1932 and 1934: Joe Crowson, Deputy Malcolm Davis, Constable J. W. Harryman, Marshal H. D. Humphrey, Detective Harry McGinnis, Deputy Eugene Moore, Patrolman H. Murphy, and Patrolman Edward Wheeler.
Campbell was the last documented lawman the gang killed. Historian James R. Knight later wrote that after Commerce, Bonnie Parker was treated in the public mind as a trigger puller on the same footing as Clyde, and that whatever thin chance of clemency she might have had was gone. The Dallas Journal ran a cartoon of an empty electric chair reserved for the pair.
Campbell’s body lay in state at Iva McBee’s house, the house that had been his home. Mayor J. R. Grimes asked Commerce businesses to close from 2 until 3 o’clock on Tuesday, April 10, 1934. Services were held that afternoon at the Christian Church. The Rev. C. C. Cockrum officiated. Hal Mitchelson’s undertaking company of Commerce handled the burial in the Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery in Miami, Ottawa County,
The manhunt that followed was already national. Texas Ranger Frank Hamer had been on the pair since February. The Methvin family farm near Gibsland, Louisiana, became the hinge. Ivan Methvin, harassed by officers and bargaining for his son, helped set the May 23, 1934, ambush on a Bienville Parish road.
Barrow and Parker died in the stolen car without returning effective fire. The Texas arrangement that grew out of that betrayal kept Methvin off the Grapevine murder papers. It did not touch Oklahoma.
In September 1934, Ottawa County Sheriff Dee Walters, a deputy, and Percy Boyd took Methvin from the Caddo Parish jail in Shreveport. Methvin signed extradition waivers and rode north to Miami to face murder, shooting with intent to kill, and kidnapping.
The information charged that on April 6, 1934, acting conjointly with Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker and with a premeditated design to kill Cal Campbell, he shot Campbell with a Browning automatic rifle. The first trial, in March 1935 before District Judge Ad V. Coppedge, ended in a hung jury. The second trial produced a verdict on September 20, 1935: guilty of murder, punishment death.
Judgment was entered October 2, 1935. While in county jail Methvin and another prisoner tried to rush jailer Tom Armstrong, a Seneca Cayuga man, with a concealed knife. Armstrong overpowered them. Another inmate held the second prisoner until Methvin was locked down.
On the stand Methvin admitted he had been in the Ford. He said he had been asleep in the back seat, woke to gunfire, and that Barrow or Parker, not he, fired the shot that killed Campbell. Oklahoma law treated a person present and aiding as a principal even if another pulled the trigger.
On September 18, 1936, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals in Methvin v. State, 60 Okla. Crim. 1, 60 P.2d 1062, affirmed the conviction and modified the sentence from death to life imprisonment, noting his role in the capture of Barrow and Parker. He was paroled March 20, 1942. He drifted back into small trouble in Louisiana and was struck and killed by a train at Sulphur on April 19, 1948, while intoxicated. No competent evidence ever established that the train death was revenge.
Who fired the round that cut Campbell down has never been settled as a matter of ballistics. Boyd could not name the second man in 1934. Methvin denied the shot. Later local accounts sometimes said it was never known.
The legal answer Oklahoma gave was narrower and harder: Methvin was there, the three acted together, and presence with the Browning and the flight was enough. Campbell remains on Panel 55-E of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial. A marker stands at Commerce City Hall, 618 Commerce Avenue, raised sixty-seven years after the shooting.
The road west of the tracks is ordinary now. On April 6, 1934, it was wet enough to hold a stolen Ford, and that was all the Barrow gang needed to make a sixty year old constable the last officer they killed.
