W. D. Jones

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. Jones ran with Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker for eight and a half months, from Christmas Eve 1932 to early September 1933. He and another gang member named Henry Methvin were consolidated into the "C.W. Moss" character in the film Bonnie and Clyde (1967). "Moss was a dumb kid who run errands and done what Clyde told him," Jones later said, "That was me, all right." Early life 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. 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. 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.