Bonnie and Clyde

Bonnie Parker grew up in “Cement City” in West Dallas after her father died in 1914. She was an honor student who liked writing poetry and reading romance novels; at four feet ten inches and eighty-five pounds, the Handbook of Texas notes, she hardly looked like a future legendary criminal. Clyde Barrow’s family moved to Dallas in 1922. He was first arrested in 1926 for stealing a car and committed a string of robberies in and around Dallas over the next four years. Their crimes unfolded during the Great Depression, and they were later compared with the era’s other famous criminals, such as John Dillinger and Al Capone.

Parker met Barrow in January 1930, shortly before he was jailed. She smuggled a pistol into his cell, which he used to escape; he was recaptured in Middletown, Ohio, and sentenced to fourteen years at hard labor. To avoid work on a state prison farm, he had another convict chop two toes off his left foot. In February 1932 Barrow was paroled, and he and Parker — joined at times by bank robber Raymond Hamilton, Clyde’s brother Buck, and Buck’s wife Blanche — began a series of violent holdups.

The gang robbed stores, filling stations, and small banks in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Missouri, and beyond, and killed lawmen and civilians along the way. In April 1933 police raided their hideout in Joplin, Missouri; two lawmen died, and the gang escaped but left behind film from which many of the famous photographs of the couple came. Buck Barrow was killed and Blanche captured after another shootout in Platte City, Missouri.

In January 1934 the couple attacked the Eastham Prison Farm in Texas to free Raymond Hamilton and Henry Methvin, and a guard was killed. The head of the Texas prison system and the governor then hired former Texas Ranger captain Frank Hamer to track them down. On Easter Sunday 1934 two highway patrolmen were gunned down near Grapevine, Texas, and on April 6 a constable was killed in Commerce, Oklahoma. Hamer and his officers, working with an FBI agent, found the gang through Methvin’s father’s farm near Arcadia, Louisiana, and set a roadside trap. On May 23, 1934, at 9:15 a.m., Bonnie and Clyde drove into it and were killed.

The bodies were taken to Arcadia and then to Dallas, where they were put on public display. Thousands came to see the bodies and the bullet-riddled car of the “legendary lovers,” and amid public clamor the two were buried in their families’ burial plots.

Barrow and Parker were sometimes later portrayed as latter-day Robin Hoods, and their story became the basis of more than half a dozen movies. The most famous, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, caused controversy for its frank and unprecedented depiction of violence; the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther attacked it, while Newsweek’s critic publicly reversed his own negative review. The film earned ten Academy Award nominations, won two, and was later ranked among the greatest American films by the American Film Institute.

Historians stress the gap between legend and reality: despite their glamorous image, the Handbook of Texas calls them ruthless killers who showed little remorse — small-time criminals whose largest haul was only $1,500.