", "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.

[2] 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.

[1] When William was six years old his entire family was stricken by what was probably Spanish flu,[1] which lingered after the 1918 pandemic in pockets of the United States where unhealthy conditions prevailed.

[3] His father and sister died in the same hour,[4] his oldest brother two nights later,[5] all of pneumonia, which was frequently the coup de grâce delivered by that strain of flu.

"[20] 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.

The playful pictures brought unintended consequences, particularly one of Bonnie Parker squinting defiantly at the camera, her foot planted on the bumper of a stolen car, a gun at her outthrust hip and a cigar hanging from her mouth.

[24] Dallas County Deputy Sheriff Ted Hinton recalled that the "brazen pride"[25] displayed in the pictures made law enforcement officers that much more determined to catch them.

[26] Jones was a combatant in the April 13, 1933 Joplin shootout with law officers in which Constable Wes Harryman[19] and motor detective Harry McGinnis[19] were killed by shotgun.

"[33] The unexpected viciousness of the apartment dwellers' response, the haul of weaponry recovered,[34] and especially the rolls of film they left behind made the Barrow Gang suddenly wanted and recognized far beyond Texas.

A fictionalized version of the Ruston car theft and subsequent kidnapping is the Gene Wilder-Evans Evans segment in Bonnie and Clyde.

"[43] On the night of June 10, racing to meet Buck and Blanche in Oklahoma, Barrow was traveling too fast to notice a detour sign at the bridge over the Salt Fork of the Red River outside Wellington, Texas.

A farm family came to their aid, but quickly contacted police; "Bonnie told me I fired a shotgun there which wounded a woman in the hand.

"[47] Barrow, who limped himself,[48] accommodated the new delays, expenses and detours her disability created in his life without hesitation, and while she healed he or Jones carried her wherever she needed to go.

The gang holed up in a tourist cabin in Fort Smith, Arkansas, tending Parker, unable to move on until she recovered — or died — from her catastrophic injury.

On June 23, as the two were fleeing the scene of a clumsy grocery store robbery fifty miles away in Fayetteville, they crested a hill on Highway 71 and smashed into the back of a slower moving vehicle.

[50] Town Marshal Henry Humphrey[19] of Alma and Crawford County Deputy Sheriff Ansel M. "Red" Salyers were also on Highway 71, driving toward Fayetteville to investigate the grocery store robbery.

Barrow admitted to Salyers that he had murdered Marshal Humphrey, and that he and the man with him — who he finally confessed was "Jack Sherman"— had been shooting to kill them both.

[53] In November, Jones told police that he had been stunned in the car crash and his memory of any ensuing action was hazy, but he was confident that only Buck was shooting.

[54] On July 20 around 1:00 a.m, thirteen lawmen led by Sheriff Holt Coffey,[55] protecting themselves from expected machine gun fire with metal shields, advanced on the double cabin at the Red Crown Tourist Court in Platte City, Missouri.

Clyde drove them north two hundred miles, running for a long time on flats, then rims, the floor of the car sloshing with Buck's blood.

[56] During the night of July 24, 1933 nearly one hundred law officers, National Guardsmen and interested, armed, mostly deputized citizens — some with dates[57] — crept up to the edges of the field, and as the sun rose a new shootout began.

Throughout August they plied the back roads from Nebraska to Minnesota to Mississippi, pausing in only the smallest towns to steal fresh cars and money for gas and food.

[62] Near the end of the month Barrow and Jones rebuilt the gang's security by robbing the armory at Plattville, Illinois of more BARs, handguns and ammunition.

[1] It is possible that Barrow coached Jones on what to say if he was ever arrested,[67] or that the two of them agreed on a basic theme for Jones's official story: that Clyde, Bonnie and Buck had done all the shooting and robbing and that W.D., a minor child, was an unwilling member of the gang, forced to ride with them at gunpoint, unconscious with fear or trauma most of the time, and chained to trees and car bumpers at night.

[69] On the night of November 22 the sheriff and his deputies Alcorn, Caster and Hinton bungled an ambush of Barrow and Parker in Sowers, Texas, on the outskirts of Dallas.

"[72] Jones and the sheriff agreed that he would be tried as an accessory to Clyde Barrow's January 6 murder in Dallas of Deputy Davis, which would protect him against extradition to Arkansas for the June 23 shootout on Highway 71 in which Marshal Humphrey was killed.

[21][75] In February 1935 Jones and nineteen other family members and associates of Barrow and Parker were defendants in the federal government's test-case trial en masse for "harboring."

"[77] "When I tried to join the Army in World War Two after I got out of prison, them doctors turned me down because their X-rays showed four buckshot and a bullet in my chest and part of a lung blown away".

[79] After 1967, the year Arthur Penn's romanticized film, Bonnie and Clyde, ignited a new generation's interest in the Barrow Gang, his arrests made the local news.

Later in the year he filed a petition against Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, charging that the filmmakers, who had never contacted him, had maligned his character by implying that he had played a role in the betrayal of Barrow and Parker.