Bonnie and Clyde

Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut Barrow a.k.a. Clyde Champion Barrow were American criminals who traveled the central United States with their gang during the Great Depression, robbing and killing people. At times, the gang included Clyde's older brother Buck Barrow and his wife Blanche, Raymond Hamilton, W. D. Jones, Joe Palmer, Ralph Fults, and Henry Methvin. Their exploits captured the attention of the American public during the "Public Enemy Era", between 1931 and 1935. Though known today for his dozen-or-so bank robberies, Barrow preferred to rob small stores or rural gas stations. The gang is believed to have killed at least nine police officers and several civilians. The couple were eventually ambushed and killed by law officers near the town of Sailes, in Bienville Parish, Louisiana. Their reputation was revived and cemented in American pop folklore by Arthur Penn's 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, in which they were played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Even during their lifetimes, their depiction in the press was at considerable odds with the hardscrabble reality of their life on the road, especially for Bonnie Parker. She was present at a hundred or more felonies during the two years she was Barrow's companion, but she was not a machine gun-wielding killer as depicted in the newspapers, newsreels, and pulp detective magazines of that time. Gang member W. D. Jones later testified he could not recall ever having seen her shoot at a law officer. Bonnie's reputation as a cigar-smoking gun moll grew out of a playful snapshot police found at an abandoned hideout. It was released to the press and published nationwide. Parker did chain smoke Camel cigarettes, but she never smoked cigars. Historian Jeff Guinn writes that the hideout photos led to Parker's glamorization and the creation of legends about the gang: John Dillinger had matinee-idol good looks and Pretty Boy Floyd had the best possible nickname, but the Joplin photos introduced new criminal superstars with the most titillating trademark of all—illicit sex. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were wild and young, and undoubtedly slept together. Bonnie Parker: Bonnie Elizabeth Parker was born in Rowena, Texas, the second of three children. Her father, Charles Parker, was a bricklayer who died when Bonnie was four. Her mother, Emma (Krause) Parker moved her family to her parents' home in Cement City, an industrial suburb now known as West Dallas. She worked as a seamstress. Her maternal grandfather, Frank Krause, came from Germany. As an adult, her fondness for writing found expression in poems such as "The Story of Suicide Sal" and "The Trail's End" (known since as "The Story of Bonnie and Clyde"). In her second year in high school, Parker met Roy Thornton. They dropped out of school and were married on September 25, 1926, six days before her 16th birthday. Their marriage, marked by his frequent absences and brushes with the law, was short-lived. After January 1929, their paths never crossed again. However, they never divorced, and Bonnie was wearing Thornton's wedding ring when she died. Thornton was still in prison when he heard of her death. He commented, "I'm glad they went out like they did. It's much better than being caught." In 1929, after the breakdown of her marriage, Parker lived with her mother and worked as a waitress in Dallas. One of her regular customers in the café was postal worker Ted Hinton, who would join the Dallas Sheriff's Department in 1932. As a posse member in 1934, he participated in her ambush. In the diary she kept briefly early in 1929, Parker wrote of her loneliness, her impatience with life in provincial Dallas, and her love of talking pictures. Clyde Barrow: Clyde Chestnut Barrow was born into a poor farming family in Ellis County, Texas, near Telico, a town just southeast of Dallas. He was the fifth of seven children of Henry Basil Barrow and Cumie T. Walker. They migrated, piecemeal, to Dallas in the early 1920s as part of a wave of resettlement from the impoverished nearby farms to the urban slum known as West Dallas. The Barrows spent their first months in West Dallas living under their wagon. When father Henry had earned enough money to buy a tent, it was a significant improvement for the family. During his lifetime, it was rumored that Clyde was a psychic. Clyde was first arrested in late 1926, after running when police confronted him over a rental car he had failed to return on time. His second arrest, with brother Marvin "Buck" Barrow, came soon after, this time for possession of stolen goods (turkeys). Despite having legitimate jobs during the period 1927 through 1929, he also cracked safes, robbed stores, and stole cars. After sequential arrests in 1928 and 1929, he was sent to Eastham Prison Farm in April 1930. While in prison, Barrow used a lead pipe to crush the skull of another inmate, Ed Crowder, who had repeatedly sexually assaulted him. This was Clyde Barrow's first killing. Another inmate took the blame, however. Barrow convinced another inmate to use an axe to chop off two of Barrow's toes in order to excuse him from working hard labor in the fields; Barrow would walk with a limp for the rest of his life as a result. Unbeknownst to Barrow, his mother successfully petitioned a release for him, six days after his intentional injury. Paroled in February 2, 1932, Barrow emerged from Eastham a hardened and bitter criminal. His sister Marie said, "Something awful sure must have happened to him in prison, because he wasn't the same person when he got out." A fellow inmate, Ralph Fults, said he watched him "change from a schoolboy to a rattlesnake." In his post-Eastham career, Barrow chose smaller jobs, robbing grocery stores and gas stations, at a rate far outpacing the ten to fifteen bank robberies attributed to him and the Barrow Gang. His favored weapon was the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle (called a BAR). According to John Neal Phillips, Barrow's goal in life was not to gain fame or fortune from robbing banks, but to seek revenge against the Texas prison system for the abuses he suffered while serving time. First meeting: Several accounts describe Bonnie and Clyde's first meeting, but the most credible version tells that Bonnie Parker met Clyde Barrow on January 5, 1930 at Clarence Clay's (a friend of Clyde) house at 105 Herbert Street. Parker was out of work and was staying in West Dallas to assist a female friend with a broken arm. Barrow dropped by the girl's house while Parker was in the kitchen making hot chocolate. When they met, both were smitten immediately; most historians believe Parker joined Barrow because she was in love. She remained a loyal companion to him as they carried out their crime spree and awaited the violent deaths they viewed as inevitable. The Spree- 1932: Early jobs, early murders: After Barrow was released from prison in February 1932, he and Ralph Fults assembled a rotating core group of associates. They began a series of small robberies, primarily of stores and gas stations; their goal was to collect enough money and firepower to launch a raid of liberation against Eastham prison. On April 19, Bonnie Parker and Fults were captured in a failed hardware store burglary, where they intended to steal firearms, in Kaufman, Texas, and subsequently convicted and jailed. While Parker was released in a few months after the grand jury failed to indict her, Fults was prosecuted and tried; he served time and never rejoined the gang. On April 30, Barrow was the driver in a robbery in Hillsboro, Texas, during which the store's owner, J.N. Bucher, was shot and killed. When shown mugshots, the victim's wife identified Barrow as one of the shooters, although he had stayed outside in the car. It was the first time in the crime spree that Barrow was accused of murder. Parker was held in jail until June 17, where she wrote poetry to pass the time. When the Kaufman County grand jury convened, it declined to indict her, and she was released. Within a few weeks, she reunited with Barrow. On August 5, while Parker was visiting her mother in Dallas, Barrow, Raymond Hamilton and Ross Dyer were drinking alcohol at a country dance in Stringtown, Oklahoma, when Sheriff C.G. Maxwell and his deputy, Eugene C. Moore, approached them in the parking lot. Barrow and Hamilton opened fire, killing the deputy and gravely wounding the sheriff. This was the first time Barrow and his gang killed a lawman; eventually, they reached a total of nine. On October 11, they allegedly killed Howard Hall at his store during a robbery in Sherman, Texas, though historians have considered this unlikely since 1997. W. D. Jones had been a friend of the Barrow family since childhood. Only 16 years old on Christmas Eve 1932, he persuaded Barrow to let him join the pair and leave Dallas with them that night. The next day, Jones was initiated when he and Barrow killed Doyle Johnson, a young family man, while stealing his car in Temple, Texas. Less than two weeks later, on January 6, 1933, Barrow killed Tarrant County Deputy Sheriff Malcolm Davis when he, Parker and Jones wandered into a police trap set for another criminal. The total murdered by the gang since April was five. 1933: Buck joins the gang: On March 22, 1933, Buck Barrow was granted a full pardon and released from prison. Within days, he and his wife Blanche had set up housekeeping with Clyde, Parker and Jones in a temporary hideout at 3347 1/2 Oakridge Drive in Joplin, Missouri. According to family sources, Buck and Blanche were there to visit; they tried to persuade Clyde to surrender to law enforcement. Bonnie and Clyde's next brush with the law arose from their generally suspicious—and conspicuous—behavior, not because they had been identified. The group ran loud, alcohol-fueled card games late into the night in the quiet neighborhood. "We bought a case of beer a day", Blanche would later recall. The men came and went noisily at all hours, and Clyde discharged a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) in the apartment while cleaning it. No neighbors went to the house, but one reported suspicions to the Joplin Police Department. The lawmen assembled a five-man force in two cars on April 13 to confront what they suspected were bootleggers living in the garage apartment. Though taken by surprise, Clyde was noted for remaining cool under fire. He, Jones, and Buck quickly killed Detective McGinnis and fatally wounded Constable Harryman. During the escape from the apartment, Parker laid down covering fire with her own BAR, forcing Highway Patrol sergeant G. B. Kahler to duck behind a large oak tree while .30 caliber bullets struck the other side, forcing wood splinters into the sergeant's face. Parker got into the car with the others. They slowed enough to pull in Blanche Barrow from the street, where she was pursuing her dog Snow Ball. The surviving officers later testified that their side had fired only fourteen rounds in the conflict, but one hit Jones in the side, one struck Clyde and was deflected by his suitcoat button, and one grazed Buck after ricocheting off a wall. The group escaped the police at Joplin, but left behind most of their possessions at the apartment: items included Buck and Blanche's marriage license, Buck's parole papers (three weeks old), a large arsenal of weapons, a handwritten poem by Bonnie, and a camera with several rolls of undeveloped film. The film was developed at The Joplin Globe and yielded many now-famous photos of Barrow, Parker and Jones clowning and pointing weapons at one another. When the poem and the photos, including one of Parker clenching a cigar in her teeth and a pistol in her hand, went out on the newly installed newswire, the obscure five criminals from Dallas became front-page news across America as the Barrow Gang. The poem "Story of 'Suicide Sal'" was an apparent backstory. For the next three months, the group ranged from Texas as far north as Minnesota. In May, they tried to rob the bank in Lucerne, Indiana and robbed the bank in Okabena, Minnesota. Previously they had kidnapped Dillard Darby and Sophia Stone at Ruston, Louisiana, in the course of stealing Darby's car; this was one of several incidents between 1932 and 1934 in which they kidnapped lawmen or robbery victims. They usually released their hostages far from home, sometimes with money to help them return home. Stories of such encounters made headlines, as did the more violent episodes. The Barrow Gang did not hesitate to shoot anyone, lawman or civilian, who got in their way. Other members of the Barrow Gang known or thought to have committed murders included Raymond Hamilton, W.D. Jones, Buck Barrow and Henry Methvin. Eventually, the cold-bloodedness of their killings soured the public perception of the outlaws, and led to their ends. The photos entertained the public, but the gang was desperate and discontented, as described by Blanche Barrow in her account written while imprisoned in the late 1930s. With their new notoriety, their daily lives became more difficult, as they tried to evade discovery. Restaurants and motels became less secure; they resorted to campfire cooking and bathing in cold streams. The unrelieved, round-the-clock proximity among two couples, plus a fifth-wheel, in one car gave rise to vicious bickering. So unpleasant did it become that W.D. Jones, who was the driver when he and Barrow stole Dillard Darby's car in late April, used that car to leave the others. He stayed away throughout May and up until June 8. On June 10, while driving with Jones and Parker near Wellington, Texas, Barrow missed warning signs at a bridge under construction and flipped their car into a ravine. Sources disagree on whether there was a gasoline fire or if Parker was doused with acid from the car's battery under the floorboards. Parker sustained serious third-degree burns to her right leg so severe the muscles contracted and caused the leg to "draw up". Near the end of her life, Parker could hardly walk; she either hopped on her good leg or was carried by Clyde. After getting help from a nearby farm family and kidnapping two local lawmen, the three outlaws rendezvoused with Blanche and Buck Barrow. They hid in a tourist court near Fort Smith, Arkansas, nursing Parker's burns. Buck and Jones bungled a local robbery and killed Town Marshal Henry D. Humphrey in Alma, Arkansas. With the renewed pursuit by the law, they had to flee despite Parker's grave condition.