The names Bonnie and Clyde have entered the public consciousness as a shorthand for a passionate couple who care only about each other, to the detriment of the world around them. Everyone knows the highlights of the true-crime saga: Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut Barrow were a criminal couple who headed their own gang of outlaws in the 1930s.
The couple’s short, violent lives have been romanticized and mythologized thanks to numerous movies and books that cover their criminal careers. The two famously died during a police ambush in Louisiana in the May of 1934, but it was what happened before their deaths that made them legends in their own time. The two were both born into poor families and did little of note before meeting one another in 1930.
After they got together, the two became inseparable and committed numerous bank robberies and murders. They regularly clashed with law enforcement and recruited a sizable gang of outlaws to help them carry out their crimes. They also adored attention from the public and would regularly pose for pictures and taunt the police. The couple seemed to know at the time that they were living out lives that would become legendary.
Bonnie Parker
Bonnie Parker was born in 1910 in Rowena, Texas. Her father died when she was four, and her mother moved the family to West Dallas following his passing. Parker married classmate Roy Thornton shortly before her 16th birthday, but the two didn’t stick together long. They never actually divorced, but Parker left him in 1929 and moved back in with her mother. Strangely enough, she still had her wedding ring from Thornton when she and Barrow were ambushed by the police five years later.
Parker worked as a waitress in Dallas in 1929, moving back in with her mother to save money. At the time, she reportedly kept a diary where she wrote on topics including her loneliness and her desire to become a photographer. This writing talent would later serve her well as an outlaw, as she wrote several poems about her relationship with Barrow and had them published in newspapers.
One interesting fact from her time in Dallas as a waitress is that she had a regular customer named Ted Hinton. He’d join the Dallas County Sherriff’s Department in 1932 and would eventually go on to be a member of the posse that would fatally ambush Bonnie and Clyde.
Clyde Barrow
Clyde Barrow was born in 1909 in Ellis County, Texas. He had a much more troubled childhood than his future partner-in-crime, frequently clashing with the police and going in and out of prison. In 1926, when he was 17, he was arrested for keeping a rental car for too long. He was arrested again when he was 19 after he and his brother Buck were caught in possession of stolen livestock.
After leaving prison, he first met Bonnie Parker in 1930.
The two were fast friends and spent all of their free time together before Barrow landed himself in trouble once more, getting arrested over stealing a car. Upon being sent to prison in 1930, Barrow encountered a significantly more brutal experience. He was reportedly assaulted by another inmate and retaliated by attacking the man with a lead pipe. According to Barrow, this was his first murder.
When Barrow left prison, his friends and family noticed that something in him had changed. He went from being a “schoolboy” to being a “rattlesnake,” according to fellow inmate Ralph Fults. When he reunited with Parker, he suggested the two set out on a quest to raid the prison where he’d been kept. Some historians believe that Barrow wasn’t interested in fame or fortune; they argue that he simply wanted revenge against a world that he felt had wronged him.
The Start of Something Bloody
Bonnie and Clyde were reportedly immediately in love upon their first meeting. Barrow is said to have bumped into Parker by chance when he visited the home of a friend she was staying with. Parker was in the kitchen making hot chocolate when Barrow dropped by to say hello to his friend, and the two were smitten with each other from the moment they met. Once Barrow was released in 1932, he contact Parker and asked for her help in getting revenge on Eastham Prison.
Parker, Barrow, and Fults all worked together in this era to rob various convenience stores and gas stations to drum up the funds for their planned raid. Fults and Parker were arrested in April 1932 while robbing a hardware store in Kaufman. While Parker only stayed in jail for a few months, Fults was indicted and served hard time. Parker passed the time in prison by writing poetry.
Once she was released from prison, the gang’s crimes escalated. Barrow and his friends murdered two police officers, Sheriff C.G. Maxwell and Deputy Eugene C. Moore, in August of 1932. In December of that year, Barrow’s friend WD Jones joined the gang, and the three set out from Dallas on a quest to punish the world for treating them poorly.
The Barrow Gang
In 1933, Barrow’s brothers Buck and Blanche joined Clyde in his hideout in Joplin, Missouri. The new home was in an otherwise quiet neighborhood, and the men’s loud partying and raucous card games drew suspicion from the neighborhood. Neighbors never went to the house, but they alerted the police to what they expected was illegal activity.
The police presumed that the residents of the home were moonshiners engaged in the unlawful production of alcohol and sent a five-man task force to arrest them. Barrow and his brother opened fire when they saw police officers, resulting in the deaths of Detective Harry L. McGinnis and Constable J. W. Harryman. While the gang fled the area, they left behind several belongings at the safe house, including a camera with undeveloped film.
When the police had this film developed, they inadvertently stoked the myth of Bonnie of Clyde. The pictures included images of the outlaws posing with their weapons and pointing them at one another, striking images that resonated with the public. The concept of a group of young, attractive outlaws who flagrantly battled the police and went where they pleased fascinated many members of the public.
On the Run
The following two years consisted of a nonstop circuit in which the Barrow Gang outran police and abused several weaknesses present in interstate law at the time. Police officers weren’t allowed to pursue fugitives across jurisdictions, which lead to Barrow and his gang robbing banks and stores that were near state lines. Once they had the loot in hand, they’d flee to a neighboring state to evade law enforcement.
Given that these crimes took place before police kept two-way radios in their squad cars, it was difficult for law enforcement to track the gang once they changed jurisdictions. Once Barrow and Parker fled across the state lines, they could safely vanish into the countryside before emerging elsewhere to hit the next target. Understandably, these failings would later be addressed by the introduction of two-way radios into police cars and the development of more sophisticated law enforcement pursuit techniques.
Things began falling apart for the crew in the summer of 1933 when they were identified by locals in Platte City, Missouri. When a shopkeeper called the police, the gang got into a brutal gunfight with law enforcement officers, and Buck was struck in the head by a bullet. While he survived the injury for a short time, the police found the gang’s hideout again, and Buck died after being captured.
Final Run and Ambush
The Texas Department of Corrections finally contacted former Texas Ranger Captain Frank Hamer to help bring down Bonnie and Clyde in the early months of 1934. He began tailing the gang and got a feel for their movements, and planned an ambush along with five other law enforcement officers. The posse was waiting for Bonnie and Clyde on May 21 in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, knowing the two would pass through shortly.
The posse waited for two days before finally spotting the couple’s car, jumped out of the bushes, and unloaded an unbelievable amount of firepower into the vehicle. The two doomed outlaws had been non-fatally struck by numerous bullets in the years before the ambush, but Hamer’s posse reportedly hit them with enough precise firepower that any given shot would have been fatal. Hamer would later express regret for having to shoot a woman but noted that Parker wouldn’t have hesitated to shoot the posse if they’d failed to hit her first.
The two were immortalized by the striking photos and surprisingly well-written poetry Parker left behind at their various hideouts. Films based on their lives have cemented them in the popular imagination. Everyone loves an outlaw story, after all. But was their short-lived crime spree really all that romantic, or was it a harrowing and selfish rampage by a pair of rebels without a cause?
