The Barker family included brothers Herman, Lloyd, Arthur ("Doc"), and Fred, the sons of Ma Barker. Growing up impoverished in a sharecropping family, all the boys soon turned into hardened criminals, robbing banks and killing without provocation. Doc was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1920 after murdering a night watchman. Herman committed suicide on August 29, 1927, after being badly injured in a shootout with police in Wichita, Kansas, following the robbery of the Newton Ice Plant in Newton, Kansas, with Charles Stalcup and Porter Meeks.