Bonnie and Clyde

"You've read the story of Jesse James, 

of how he lived and died.

If you're still in need;

of something to read, 

here's the story of Bonnie and Clyde."

-Excerpt from The Trails End, written by Bonnie Parker

Bonnie and Clyde. Bank robbers, murderers, lovers. 

Their's is a very popular story. Star-crossed lovers, a whirlwind romance, short lives filled with turmoil, bank robberies, murders, police chases, doomed to end in tragedy. Hollywood took their story and ran with it, glamorizing their lives.

But does anyone know the true story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow? 

Bonnie Elizabeth Parker was born on October 1, 1910 in Rowena, Texas to Charles and Emma Parker, the youngest of 3 children.

Bonnie Elizabeth Parker

Her father died when she was 4 and her mother moved the family to Cement City, an industrial suburb in Dallas. 

Bonnie was one of the top students in her highschool, winning top prizes in spelling, writing, and public speaking.

In her second year of highschool, Bonnie met Roy Thornton. The two dropped out of school and got married on September 25, 1926, only six days before Bonnie's 16th birthday. 

(Bonnie and Roy)

Bonnie apparently got a tattoo on her thigh of two hearts, with her and Roy's names written inside.

Despite the fact that Bonnie seemed to be very in love with Roy, their marriage was short lived. While they never actually divorced, Roy left often, and eventually went to prison, leaving Bonnie discontent, disgruntled, and alone.

In several of Bonnie's diary entries, she writes how 'blue' she is, and tried to distract herself with shows and friends.

When she was 19, Bonnie met Clyde, and her undoing began.

Clyde Barrow was born March 24, 1909 in Elis County, Texas, to Henry and Cumie Barrow. They were a poor family, so moving to Dallas in the early 1920s only made sense, since other poor farming families were doing the same.

Clyde Chestnut Barrow

In the first few months of living in Dallas, the Barrow family had to live in a wagon, so when they bought a tent to live in, it was a big step up.

Clyde's first run in with the police was when he failed to return a rental car on time, in 1926. It was his first time being arrested. It was the beginning of a long and terrible time.

The second time Clyde was arrested was when he and his brother, Marvin 'Buck' Barrow, were caught with stolen turkeys.

Clyde had several legitimate jobs between 1927-1929, but for some reason, he lived a life of crime, cracking safes, robbing stores, and stealing cars, although he certainly seemed to have no need, as his father ran a gas station and Clyde himself held respectable jobs.

There are several different versions of Bonnie and Clyde's first meeting, but the most credible one seems to be that in January of 1930, Bonnie was at her girlfriend's house, helping her out because she had a broken leg or arm, and also because Bonnie really seemed to need something to do to keep her mind off of her imprisoned husband. The story goes that Clyde dropped by unannounced while Bonnie was in the kitchen making hot chocolate. When the two saw each other, they fell instantly in love, which is probably the biggest reason that Bonnie willingly followed Clyde into the arms of death.

After having been arrested in 1928 and 1929, Clyde was sent to Eastham Prison Farm. While there, Clyde witnessed many horrors, which hardened him into a monster. 

It was in Eastham that Clyde committed his first murder, beating to death a fellow inmate who apparently assaulted him sexually on several occasions.

During his time in jail, Bonnie and Clyde wrote letters back and forth to each other, telling each other how much they missed one another, and Bonnie tried to convince Clyde that he could be a good man if he wanted to.

"I want you to be a man, honey, not a thug. I know you are good, and I know you can make good."-Bonnie to Clyde during his stay in Eastham.

Clyde was paroled in February of 1932, but he was not the same man going in as he was coming out. According to his sister, Marie, "Something awful sure must have happened to him in prison, because he wasn't the same person when he got out." 

Ralph Fults, another inmate of the prison, said that he turned from a "schoolboy to a rattlesnake".

Clyde tried to keep a job for a little while. He tried to do as Bonnie asked, to be a "man, not a thug", but every time something happened, the police would go straight to Clyde and question him, making him loose job after job. After a time, he gave up and jumped into his life of crime.

Clyde and Ralph Fults, along with several other associates began a series of small thefts, mostly from gas stations, planning on eventually launching a raid on Eastham Prison and freeing the prisoners.

On April 19, Bonnie and Ralph were caught during an attempted burglary of a hardware store. Bonnie spent her time writing poetry. She was released a few months later, but Ralph stayed jailed and never rejoined the gang.

When Bonnie was released, it was only a matter of weeks before she rejoined Clyde.

On August 5th, while Bonnie was visiting her mother in Dallas, Clyde, Raymond Hamilton, and Ross Dyer were at a country dance in Stringtown, Oklahoma, drinking. 

When a Sheriff and his Deputy approached them in the parking lot, they open fired, killing the deputy and badly wounding the sheriff. It was the first murder of a lawman.

On Christmas Eve in 1932, W.D. Jones, a 16 year old boy who had been friends with Clyde's family since childhood, begged to be allowed to come with Bonnie and Clyde as they left Dallas that night, and join their gang, known as the Barrow Gang. The very next day, W.D. had already committed his first murder when he and Clyde killed a young man in the process of stealing his car.

On March 22, 1933, Buck Barrow, Clyde's brother, was granted a full pardon from prison, and within a few days he and his wife, Blanche, had joined the rest of the Barrow gang in a temporary hideout in Joplin, Missouri. According to the family, Buck and Blanche were going merely to visit Bonnie and Clyde in an attempt to persuade Clyde to surrender to the police.

That is not what happened though.

Bonnie and Clyde were not a quiet couple. Blanche later recalled that they "bought a case of beer a day". They held very loud card games, late into the night, the men came and went noisily, no matter what hour of day or night, and at one point a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) went off while Clyde was cleaning it.

The police assembled a 5 man team, not expecting to meet of with the already infamous Bonnie and Clyde, as their identity had not been discovered. Actually, the police were there to investigate because of complaints filed by the neighbors, who were used to living in a quiet neighborhood until Bonnie and Clyde showed up.

What followed was a horrific shoot out. Although the Barrow Gang was taken by surprise, Clyde was noted for being calm during a shooting, and was becoming known for being a better shot than most of the lawmen. Detective McGinnis was killed, and Constable Harryman was fatally wounded. Bonnie fired a few rounds of her own, forcing the other men to take cover, before she jumped in the car. 

During the retreat, the gang slowed down only long enough to pull Blanche, who was chasing her dog down the street, into the car, and then drive away.

Since they weren't expecting the attack, the gang had left behind a lot of their personal items, including an undeveloped roll of film.

On this film were the iconic pictures of Bonnie and Clyde that we know today. They posed with their BARs, and in one photo, Bonnie jokingly pretends to be smoking a cigar, although later on she swears that she never smoked cigars, only cigarettes, and she was only pretending in the picture. 

The Joplin Globe got hold of these pictures and published them, giving Bonnie and Clyde the image that many still see today.

It's a common idea that Bonnie had seduced Clyde into a life of crime, and that she was kind of the leader of the gang, although letters and family accounts seem to suggest that Bonnie was a sweet woman, and her love of Clyde is what ruined her. 

Quite often, when a lawman got in the way of a robbery, the Barrow gang would kidnap them, take them far away from the city they were stealing from, often give them some money, and then send them on their way. But that was not always the case. They still did not hesitate to shoot anyone who got in the way, lawman or civilian.

Many people see the lifestyle lived by these outlaws to be glamorous. Dangerous, yes, but also thrilling to the extreme.

In reality, theirs was a desperate lifestyle. With their fame came a difficulty that they had previously not encountered on this scale. The everyday things were getting more and more difficult. How could criminals such as them go into a restaurant, hotel, or grocery store without being recognized? Their faces were consistently plastered to the front of the newspapers, along with accounts of the murderous acts they had committed. Any fondness the public may have had for them was slipping away.

Eating and bathing had to been done around the campfire and in cold creeks. With two couples and a fifth wheel constantly together in one small car, fighting was bound to occur, and often. The fighting got so bad that W.D, who was the wheel-man during the theft of Dillard Darby's car, used the same vehicle to put some distance between himself and the fighting couples, and successfully managed to stay away from them for about a month.

On June 10th, Clyde, Bonnie, and W.D were together, when Clyde accidentally flipped their car into a ravine. Nobody is quite sure if there was a gasoline fire, or if acid from the battery poured onto her leg, but either way, Bonnie obtained 3rd degree burns on her right leg. The burn was so bad that the muscles contracted and her leg drew up. Near the end of their lives, Bonnie could barely walk, and often hobbled or had to be carried around by Clyde.

The three obtained help from a local farm in attending to Bonnie's leg. They had to kidnap two lawmen, and afterwards, they ran back into Blanche and Buck. They all hid in a tourist court near Fort Smith in Arkansas, nursing Bonnie's leg. Then Buck and W.D attempted to rob a store, and ended up killing the town Marshal, and again the Barrow Gang had to run from the law, despite Bonnie's severe condition.

On July 18th, 1933, the gang checked into a tourist court south of Platte City, Missouri. The gang rented the two brick cabins, which were adjoined by a garage. 

Blanche was in charge of renting the cabins, and drew attention to the gang when she registered three guests and Neal Houser the owner of the cabin's saw 5 people getting out of the car, which was backed 'gangster style' into the driveway, making it easier for a quick getaway. The next day, Blanche ordered 5 plates of food for supposedly three people, which she paid for in coins instead of paper money. He also noticed that there was newspapers taped up in all the windows of the cabins, and even Blanche's clothes seemed suspicious to him, as she was wearing tight riding breeches, which was not the typical garb of women in the area. Mr. Houser, being highly suspicious, brought the group to the attention of Captain William Baxter of the Highway Patrol.

When Clyde and W.D went into town and bought bandages, crackers, cheese, and atropine sulfate, the druggist alerted the Sheriff, who had been told to keep a look out for these supplies, as this is something they would need to treat Bonnie's leg. The cabins were put under watch and back up was called in, including an armored car.

Another shoot out was inevitable, but the lawmen's Thompson submachine guns were no match for Clyde's BAR over the distance they were shooting. The Gang made their getaway when a stray bullet hit the horn on the armored car and the lawmen thought it was a signal for a ceasefire.

Although the Gang made it away again, they weren't entirely unscathed. Buck had a bullet wound in the side of his head and Blanche was nearly blinded from glass fragments in both eyes. Things began to look grim for the Barrow Gang.

Five days later, and the Gang is stationed at an abandoned amusement park near Dexter, Iowa. 

The bullet wound in Buck's head is so bad that Clyde and W.D decide to go ahead and dig a grave for him. When the bloody bandages that the gang are leaving are noticed by the locals, they assume it can only be the Barrow Gang, and once more the law is breathing down their necks and they find them selves under fire.

Clyde, Bonnie, and W.D escaped on foot this time, but Buck is shot in the back, and he and Blanche are captured. Buck died 5 days later of pneumonia after surgery.

For the next 6 weeks, Bonnie, Clyde, and W.D stray from their usual path, going as far west as Colorado, north as Minnesota, and southeast as Mississippi. They maintained a low profile, only committing small thefts so they could eat. They restocked their weapons when W.D and Clyde broke into an armory in Illinois, obtaining 3 BARs, handguns, and ammunition.   

In early September, they decided to risk going home to see their families. W.D parted ways with them so he could go see his mother in Houston. He was arrested there, without incident, and returned to Dallas.

Throughout the Autumn, Clyde committed several small thefts with some local accomplices while his family and Bonnie's family attended to Bonnie's several medical needs.

Bonnie and Clyde narrowly escape capture once again as they were headed to see family members near Sowers, Texas. Clyde sensed a trap, so he kept driving past his family's car, where local law enforcement were lying in wait. The lawmen open fired when they realized that they were going to keep driving, leaving the family members in dangerous crossfire, although none of them were injured. A single bullet entered the car as they drove away, hitting both Bonnie's leg and Clyde's. They escaped into the night.

The following week, a Dallas Grand Jury delivered a murder indictment against Bonnie and Clyde for the murder of Tarrant County Deputy, Malcom Davis. This was Bonnie's first warrant for murder against her.

On January 16th, 1934, Clyde finally made the raid against the Texas Department of Corrections that he had so long been planning, in the infamous "Eastham Breakout". The Texas prison system received national publicity from this, making them look bad. It seemed that Clyde had finally exacted the revenge that had burned inside him for so long against the Texas Department of Corrections for the horrors that had befallen him during his prison stay.

During the jailbreak, a prison inmate shot and fatally wounded prison officer Major Joe Crowson. As Crowson was dying, struggling for life, prison Chief Lee Simons swore to Crowson that all who were involved in the prison break would be hunted and killed.

The Texas Department of Corrections contacted a man named Captain Frank A. Hammer, former Texas Ranger. He accepted the position of Texas Highway Patrol and the task of hunting down Bonnie, Clyde, and the Barrow Gang.

Staring on February 10th, Frank Hammer became the shadow of Bonnie and Clyde, living out of his car, studying their every move.

On April 1, 1934, Clyde and Henry Methvin, another member of the Barrow Gang, killed two Highway Patrolmen, H.D Murphy and Edward Wheeler.

An 'eye-witness' claimed the Bonnie and Clyde fired the fatal shots, and the story got immediate widespread coverage before it was able to be discredited. Henry Methvin later confessed that he fired the first shot, assuming that Clyde probably wanted the officers killed. He also admitted that Bonnie had approached the officers with the intention of helping them, not ending their lives as many discredited 'eye-witnesses' claimed. Of course, after the initial shot, Clyde did join in the fight, firing shots at Murphy. It's likely that Bonnie was asleep in the back of the car and didn't even join in the fight.

The story only got bigger and more blown out of proportion as the days went on. One farmer claimed to have seen Bonnie laugh as Murphy's head 'bounced like a rubber ball' on the ground. One report says that they found a cigar with 'tiny teeth marks' in it, which people assumed must have belonged to Bonnie. Things got even worse when Murphy's fiance walked into his funeral several days later wearing her bridal gown. While the press ate these stories up at first, the 'eye-witnesses' constantly changing stories discredited them in the end, but not in time for Bonnie and Clyde. They went from low to lower in the public's eyes, and were now a hated enemy, especially Bonnie. The people cried for blood.

A $1000 rewards went out for the bodies of the Bonnie and Clyde. Texas Governor Ma Ferguson was as angry as the public and added another $500 to the reward. Now there was a reward for especially Bonnie, since everyone believed it was her who so callously shot Murphy.

Hostility towards them grew even worse a few days later when Clyde and Henry killed an 80 year old widower and father, and kidnapped police chief, Percy Boyd. They released Boyd in Kansas, giving him a clean shirt, a few dollars, and a request from Bonnie that he tell they world that she did not smoke cigars.

May 23, 1934, a rural road in Bienville Parish, Louisiana saw the end of Bonnie and Clyde.

The fiery lovers were seen in broad daylight in car, and were shot by four Texas Officers. The official report states that Clyde had stopped to talk the Henry's father, who had been planted earlier that morning, in an attempt to force their car into the lane closer to the waiting ambush. 

Clyde was shot in the head and immediately died. One of the shooters recalls hearing Bonnie scream as she realized that Clyde was dead, and then the shooting began in earnest. 

The officers emptied all of the several guns they each had, continuing to shoot even after the car had stopped moving after running into a ditch. Many of the several shots would have been fatal.

The official coroner's report states that there were 17 separate entrance wounds on Clyde's body and 26 on Bonnie's, including several head shots on each. The lawmen wanted to take no chances with those who they considered to be some of the most dangerous, ruthless, coldhearted criminals in the country.

Bonnie and Clyde had wished to be buried side by side, but Bonnie's family would not allow it. Instead, they intended to bring Bonnie home, but the mobs surrounding the Parker's house made it impossible. More than twenty-thousand people attended Bonnie's funeral. Apparently, flowers came from everywhere for her funeral, and allegedly some cards from Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger.

Clyde was buried next to his brother Marvin. The brothers share a single granite headstone with their names on it, and a four word epitaph that Clyde specifically requested to be put on his headstone.

"Gone but not forgotten."

Clyde was a man who could have been good, according to Bonnie, but who chose a life of crime, thinking that he had no way out. Driven by hatred and a lust for revenge, Clyde was a man turned murderer. Nobody will ever know if he chose his life of crime because he loved it, or because he hated it, or simply because, but what we see from his life is that he was a foolish boy, turned into a hard man by circumstance. Perhaps he loved Bonnie, perhaps he used her, although he didn't seem to be very caring.

Bonnie was a young woman whom life played a particularly cruel joke on. She went from bad to worse as she fell in love with first on man who betrayed her trust and was locked up, and then she fell in love with another man who betrayed her trust, getting her locked up, injured, and eventually killed. We may never know what drove Bonnie into the arms of Clyde Barrow, if perhaps she had an attraction to danger, or if Clyde seduced her into a cruel, miserable life, but what we do know is that Bonnie was a very foolish girl who seemed to just want to be loved by a man.

Together, Bonnie and Clyde struck terror and hatred into the hearts of the American public. Their story is one that is 'gone but not forgotten'. The tales of their insane, whirlwind romance has been made into a Hollywood drama, but it should really be taken as a warning, if to nobody else, to young women who find themselves seduced by a possibly dangerous man.

In the words of Bonnie herself, 

"To few it'll be grief, 

 to the law a relief, 

 but it's death for Bonnie and Clyde."