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Bonnie Parker’s comfortable childhood ended with the death of her bricklayer father when she was four, and her mother had to raise 3 children, living in a neighborhood on the edge of Dallas that was filled with criminals. She was a violent, exhibitionist, cute child, who beat up boys, but it was nothing strange in a rough neighborhood. She was married by the time she was sixteen, and worked as a waitress, sometimes buying meals for people down on their luck. Tired of her husband’s disappearances, she kicked him out when she was eighteen. Like countless others, Bonnie lost her job during the Depression.

Clyde Barrow (5”6’) was the son of a poor tenant farmer with eight children, and his parents struggled to survive so he had little if any supervision, and he never received enough clothes or food. In fact, the family was so poor that Clyde and his older sister Nell were often shipped off to other relatives to reduce the family’s burden. It was a bleak existence, and his only pleasure were the rare trips to the town’s tiny movie house, where he loved watching movies about cowboy outlaws, such as the James Younger gang. Clyde quit school as soon as he could, and worked in a series of menial jobs, while building a file of minor criminal offences at the same time. He planned to marry a girl named Anne but her parents forced her to call it off, and he lived with another girl named Gladys for a while but it ended too. Clyde and his brother Buck graduated to robbery and stealing cars, but one robbery went bad and Buck got five years in jail.

Bonnie met Clyde through a friend, and brought him home to meet her mother, but he was arrested the next day. This would have ended most relationships but Bonnie’s love was true, so she regularly wrote him letters and visited him in jail. Her letters show that she was consumed by a vision of a happy, law-abiding future with him, yet she allowed Clyde to convince her to smuggle him a gun. He then broke out of jail but he managed to get arrested again within a week after robbing a dry cleaning company and a railroad company’s offices.

Clyde was sentenced to 14 years in the state penitentiary, where conditions were harsh, and convicts worked all day on a farm. The living quarters were so overcrowded that even the forty guards had to live in a single room with only one toilet. The unsanitary conditions drove prisoners to escape, and there were 302 successful breakouts during the year that Clyde was transferred there, including his brother Buck. A new prison governor took charge just before Clyde arrived, and he enlarged the prisoners’ quarters, introduced fresh fruit and vegetables, and restrained the previously brutal prison guards. Despite having grown up on a farm, Clyde hated the forced labor. In fact, he loathed prison so much that he persuaded another prisoner to chop off two of his toes with an axe, but the warden still kept him on the work farm until he was paroled. For someone who had never been disciplined in his life, even as a child, prison life was a shock, and Clyde developed a hatred of law enforcement officials, according to Ralph Fults, who he met in the prison.

Meanwhile, Buck had escaped and married a nice woman, who convinced him to give himself up. Clyde was paroled just as Buck returned to prison, and Bonnie, Bonnie’s mother and Clyde’s sister hoped he would get a decent job. Unfortunately, not even Clyde’s terror of prison could make him stomach the drudgery of regular work. He gave up his job and along with Bonnie and Ralph Fults, committed a robbery that ended with both Fults and Bonnie in jail, where she wrote the poem “Suicide Sal.” The bleak nature of the poem showed that she had realized that Clyde would not go straight and that she would not leave him.

Teaming up with another friend, Raymond Hamilton, Clyde robbed the owner of a gas station and jewelry store, John Boucher, in Hillsboro on April 27, 1932. Boucher was killed during the robbery, but Clyde claimed that he wasn’t responsible, which may be true since he later robbed another two gas stations without killing anyone. However, while the killing was probably due to a jittery trigger finger, it meant that Clyde had stepped over the line separating robbery from murder, and that they were the targets of a well-organized pursuit.

A couple of months in jail gave Bonnie a more serious outlook on life but she went back to Clyde, knowing that he was still robbing. After one robbery, Clyde, Hamilton and a third man were driving through Oklahoma on August 5, 1932, and drinking heavily when they decided to stop at a local dance near Stringtown. The third man started dancing, while the other two stayed in the car drinking. This made the local sheriff and his deputy suspicious, so they went over to the car. Clyde and Hamilton panicked and started firing, killing the deputy and wounding the sheriff. They tried to drive away but the sheriff fired at them, and the car crashed. When the outlaws began shooting into the crowd, several of the dancers picked up the officers’ guns and shot back. The three men finally stole another car and escaped but this does not sound like the reactions of hardened professional killers, more like drunk, jumpy young men with guns. From that point on, surrender was no longer an option since Clyde knew that he would get the electric chair for killing a police officer.

While Clyde was an incompetent with a twitchy trigger finger, he had become a skilled driver with an encyclopedic knowledge of the roads in Texas and nearby states, as well as the stamina to drive hundreds of miles in a single day. He had acquired such a fondness for the speed and reliability of the Ford V-8 that he wrote a letter to Henry Ford praising his cars. Police only had V-6 cars at the time, so it was hard to keep up with him, while a lack of cooperation between different law-enforcement agencies helped them elude capture. The state police were underpaid, under trained, and could not cross state lines. The city police could not enter county districts, and the departments had little desire to work together.

Shortly after the disaster at Stringtown, the couple parted with Raymond Hamilton, possibly because they got on each other’s nerves. Aside from a few big robberies, they made money to live the good life by robbing grocery stores and gas stations. During one robbery, a shop owner named Howard Hall was killed when he threatened Clyde with a meat cleaver, and Clyde fled with the loot of $28. Despite Clyde’s denials to his family, the police found his fingerprints in the store. Actually, Clyde only admitted to killing police officers, probably because killing shop keepers was not very heroic, and would have meant acknowledging that he was a clumsy thief with a taste for killing.

Hamilton was arrested after boasting about his criminal exploits to a waitress whose boyfriend was a cop. Hamilton received a total sentence of 263 years, and returned to Hunstville penitentiary. Clyde vowed to free him, and needing another member, he enlisted W.O. Jones, a sixteen-year old who had hero-worshipped him as a child. Once again, the little gang managed to be both pathetic and tragic. They tried to steal a car belonging to a salesman named Doyle Johnson, but were unable to get it to start so they were pushing it when Johnson tried to stop them. In the struggle, Clyde shot him in the neck, and Johnson soon died from the wound. A trap set at the home of Hamilton’s sister in West Dallas ended with deputy Malcolm Davis lying dead from a shotgun blast to the chest. By this time, Bonnie and Clyde’s numerous escapes had made them famous.

Soon after, they captured a policeman who was chasing them for speeding, and took him for a ride but let him live. Barrow’s sister asked Clyde how he felt after he killed a man, and he replied “like I always felt-sick inside, sick and cold and weak-and a sort of dull wishing that I’d never been born,” which I suspect was the wish of the families of the people he had killed.

Buck was finally released in March 1933, and apparently wanted to stay out of jail but also wanted to see Clyde, which was a dangerous contradiction for a recently released ex-convict. The two couples met in Joplin, Missouri, and enjoyed blissful domestic harmony for about two weeks until the money ran out, which prompted Clyde to commit more robberies. Unfortunately, the neighbors were suspicious about the number of guns in the apartment. The five police officers who came to check it out on the afternoon of Thursday, April 13, 1933 were not expecting such heavy resistance, and one died on the spot, while another died of his wounds. Blanche freaked out, and ran screaming into the street. While it is not clear if Buck had met Clyde to reform him or to join him, it was a moot point after that. They escaped, leaving two more families without breadwinners, but the police found Bonnie’s poetry and pictures of them. The pictures were published, making them famous across the country, but they could not move around in public anymore, so they were always driving from state to state, camping by the road, bathing in streams with someone constantly on guard. This situation did not improve relations among this collection of emotionally disturbed violent people.

They also robbed the First State Bank in Okabena, Minnesota, in order to replenish their funds, managing to shoot their way out past the enraged townspeople without killing anyone. It was also probably their most profitable robbery, $2,500.

Like many other gangsters, they missed their families and took great risks to see them. Clyde regretted getting Buck involved, and both mothers had aged dramatically. However, Bonnie refused to leave her man, even though she knew they would probably get killed. After a family rendezvous in late May, Buck and Blanche took off to visit her parents in Missouri. While traveling to Oklahoma in early June, Clyde, Bonnie and W.O. had a bad accident when Clyde ran the car off the road to avoid a bridge that was closed for repairs. Bonnie was horribly burned and in such pain that she begged Clyde to shoot her. Bonnie’s survival was due to the assistance of two farmers who helped get her out of the burning car. One of the farmer’s wives tended to Bonnie but became suspicious when Clyde refused to allow her to call an ambulance. The farmer’s generosity was rewarded by Jones panicking and shattering the hand of his daughter-in-law with a shotgun blast when she came in to the house. The other farmer had already called the police but the outlaws captured the sheriff and marshal sent to arrest them. Fortunately for the lawmen, Clyde managed to control his trigger finger for once, and the two lawmen survived the encounter. Clyde nursed Bonnie back to health, remaining by her bedside night and day.

Buck and W.D. robbed a Piggly Wiggly on June 23 but witnesses recorded both their license plate and the direction they were going. An attempt to set up a roadblock was not well organized, and the outlaws were able to shoot their way out, killing the town marshal in the process. Knowing that posses were looking for them, the gang shifted hideouts, and also managed to steal armor piercing Browning rifles from a National Guard armory.

When Bonnie had healed enough to travel, the gang robbed three gas stations on July 18, and then holed up at the Red Crown Tavern, in Platte City, near Kansas City, Missouri. Employees at the tavern became suspicious, and called the police, who waited until all of the customers had left. Although the police were not sure if they were the Barrow gang or even criminals, they took no chances and arrived with steel shields and an armored car. Despite their precautions, several people were wounded in the shootout, as were Blanche and Buck. The gang made it to Dexter, 25 miles west of Des Moines, Iowa, but a local farmer noticed them, and contacted the police. A huge posse was formed, made up of the local law, deputized vigilantes, police from Des Moines and National Guardsmen, and the sheriff positioned men around the camp and at road blocks. The trap was sprung on the morning of July 24, but Clyde, W.D. and Bonnie managed to shoot their way out, with the badly wounded Buck covering them. Both Blanche and Buck were captured, and Buck lived long enough to see his family when they arrived, dying on July 29, while Blanche got ten years in prison.

Both Clyde and W. D. had been wounded during the escape, but Clyde was still able to rob a car at gunpoint. Bonnie recovered, but she was badly scarred and couldn’t walk on her own. W.D. quickly ditched them, but was caught by the police on November 15 in Houston, and sang like a canary, claiming that he had been forced into a life of crime. Bonnie and Clyde visited their families frequently during the fall without being caught because the police never thought to keep the parents under surveillance until a farmer living near the meeting area tipped off Sheriff Schmid about the meetings. An ambush set up by Schmid on November 22 failed, although both Clyde and Bonnie were wounded again.

After they healed up, Bonnie and Clyde, along with Hamilton’s friend James Mullen, helped their old acquaintance, Raymond Hamilton and several other prisoners break out of Eastham Farm, Clyde’s alma mater, in January 1934. A prison guard wounded during the escape died the next day. Originally, only Hamilton and his accomplice Joe Palmer were supposed to be freed, but three more prisoners, Henry Methvin, Hilton Baybee and J.B. French, came along, although Baybee and French were soon dropped off. With the backing of Texas governor Miriam Ferguson, prison warden Lee Simmons persuaded former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer to hunt them down, so Hamer gave up his $500 a month salary with an oil company for $180 a month.

Clyde had won a very public victory against the prison system that he hated, and was once again a gang leader. Hamilton got his new girlfriend Mary O’Dare to join the group, and Mullen left, expecting to be rewarded later for helping to break Hamilton out. The enlarged gang armed themselves by robbing another National Guard Armory on February 19, and the guns were used to hold up a bank in Lancaster, near Dallas, a week later. It apparently was not a large bank since they are believed to have made off with only a few thousand dollars. Clyde and Hamilton argued over how to divide the money, and whether to stay small-time (Clyde) or rob banks ( Hamilton). The six outlaws lived the good life at Terre Haute, Illinois during March, buying tailored clothes and eating in good restaurants, but Hamilton and his girlfriend left the gang after a few days.

The Dallas police had become so frustrated in their lack of success in catching Bonnie and Clyde that they concocted a plan to trap their car on the road and run them over with a gravel mover during the outlaws’ next family visit but it proved to be too impractical.

Hamilton robbed another bank, and wrote a letter to the assistant DA in Dallas, criticizing Clyde as a common thief. When the letter was published in Dallas newspapers, Clyde sent Palmer to look for Hamilton, since he planned to kill him, but that was too much for Palmer, and he left the gang. When Clyde heard that Hamilton had robbed another bank, he set a trap near Hamilton’s favorite hideout on April 1, but two motorcycle policemen appeared for a routine search, and were killed, although Clyde later claimed that he had only meant to capture them, but Methvin had panicked. On April 6, the outlaws’ car was stuck, and they waved guns to force a truck driver to pull them out of the mud. A passing motorist saw the scene, called the police, but when two policemen showed, 63 year old Cal Campbell was killed and Percy Boyd was taken hostage after a shootout. They kept Boyd with them for a day, and even took him on a picnic. The police finally caught Hamilton on April 25, who said “I’m Raymond Hamilton and I don’t intend to give you any trouble. I’m just fresh out of ammunition, money, whiskey and women. Let’s go to jail.” Bonnie wrote another poem “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde,” where she clearly accepted that they would end up dead.

Hamer had teamed up with Dallas deputies Ted Hinton and Bob Alcorn, and Manny Gault, and they had learned that the outlaws had visited Henry Methvin’s farm in Louisiana several times, so along with the local sheriff and deputy, they staked out a road near Methvin’s farm, waiting for Bonnie and Clyde to come by. Two nights and one day later, Methvin’s father passed by, so they handcuffed him to a tree to stop him from warning the outlaws, and made his truck look like it had a flat tire. The plan worked, the outlaws showed up, stopped to see if Methvin’s father needed help, and were killed by a hail of bullets from six guns. Methvin agreed not to report their violating his civil rights when Hamer promised leniency for his son. Part of the deal was that Methvin would not publicly deny that his family had betrayed Bonnie and Clyde. The officers swore to never reveal that they had tied up Methvin’s father to use him as a decoy, and no one did until the last survivor, Ted Hinton, revealed it in his 1979 autobiography.

People quickly heard about the deaths and rushed over, swamping the police and tearing souvenirs from the bodies. Every time the truck towing the car with the bodies stopped, people, including schoolchildren, swarmed over it to rip away parts of Bonnie’s dress, upholstery or place their hands in the blood, which is just a little sick. Despite promises of huge rewards, Hinton and Alcorn each got only $200. Lee Simmons made sure that Ray Hamilton and Palmer got the electric chair for the murder of a prison guard. Methvin got life as agreed. Actually, Palmer and Hamilton escaped with several other prisoners on July 22, but both were recaptured within a year, although Hamilton became famous for robbing banks.

About 30 of Bonnie and Clyde’s relatives had to spend time in jail as punishment for harboring known criminals, ranging from 30 days for the mothers to a year for Bonnie’s sister Billie and Hamilton’s girlfriend O’Dare. The lawmen who finally hunted down and killed the outlaws immediately became popular heroes, although there was also a fair amount of criticism of the law officers for having ambushed criminals in cold blood. Each of their funerals was attended by 30,000 sympathizers and curiosity seekers.

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Related Movies:

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Directed by Arthur Penn, starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway
During the middle of the Depression, a small gang of bank robbers in the mid-West go on a crime spree but as they become more famous, the police make greater efforts to hunt them down. (please click here to read the review)

Further Reading:

Treherne, John. The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000.

The book is dedicated to the pair’s 12 victims, so it is not a sympathetic portrayal. Frequent comparisons are made to the James-Younger gang, both gangs traveled a lot, and killed roughly the same number of people, but the James-Younger gang stole way, way more money. A well-organized, well-researched account, but it suffers from a bit too much psycho-analysis.

Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34. Bryan Burrough, New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.

The author grew up listening to stories about Bonnie and Clyde, and decided to write the book because there was no single history of that period, partially because the FBI files had only been released in the late 1980s. His access to previously sealed FBI files means that the story is as much about the evolution of the FBI as it is about the gangsters themselves. It is a superb, one-stop look at that brief period where outlaws seemed to roam free. Ignoring the easy approach of dividing the book into several sections that focus on individual gangs, the story is told in chronological order, which might appear confusing to some readers but serves to show how interrelated the events were. Most of the gangs knew each other and their paths crossed more frequently than I would have thought, which may help to explain why the FBI was so confused in the beginning. Burrough’s attention to detail is impressive, he shows what happened to the main FBI agents, the surviving outlaws who ended up in prison, and their various girlfriends and accomplices. What is odd is that once the War on Crime was over, no one really talked about it. The agents rarely told their families, while the families of the outlaws often preferred to move forward and leave their tainted past behind them.

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