Bonnie Parker (1910–1934) and Clyde Barrow (1909–1934) were notorious and celebrated spree criminals who participated in a series of bank robberies between 1932 and 1934. Coming at the height of America’s fascination with crime during the early years of the Great Depression, the legend of Bonnie and Clyde was given further definition as the two were romanticized as young lovers. The growth of photography contributed to their fame, particularly when a series of pictures taken by the outlaws were printed in papers all over the country.
Clyde Barrow was born on March 24, 1909, near Dallas, Texas. He and his older brother Marvin (“Buck”), who would later play a central role in the famous gang, came from a very poor family and during their adolescence began to get in trouble, stealing cars and engaging in other nonviolent crimes. After several arrests, Barrow was sent to prison in 1930. After suffering serial sexual assaults at the hands of another prisoner, Barrow beat his assailant to death. As this killing was deemed in self-defense, it did not impact his sentence and he was released in early 1932. By all accounts, during his two years in prison Barrow became a different person; he became angry and cynical. According to one of his fellow inmates, he changed “from a schoolboy to a rattlesnake” (Pluck 2013).
Bonnie Parker was born on October 1, 1910, in Rowena, Texas, although she moved with her mother to the suburbs of Dallas following the death of her father. She excelled in school but dropped out to get married several weeks before her sixteenth birthday. The marriage didn’t last, and Parker moved back in with her mother, with whom she lived until she met Barrow in early 1930. The specifics of their first meeting have been lost, although it was probably through a mutual friend. Barrow must have made an impression. Despite the fact that he was sent to jail for two years, after their meeting Parker stayed loyal and even tried to sneak a gun to Barrow during a visitation. Within three months after his release, Parker was arrested during a failed attempt to steal guns from a hardware store. Barrow organized a group of confederates who, over the next two years, would help him rob banks and stores. In April 1932, a storeowner was killed during a robbery, the gang’s first recorded murder. In August, Barrow and several gang members killed a deputy in Oklahoma, their first cop killing. By the end of the year, sixteen-year-old W. D. Jones had joined the group. Jones, along with Bonnie, Clyde, Buck, and Buck’s wife Blanche, made up the group involved in the most well-known part of the crime spree, which ran from April 1933 to May 1934.
It was in the spring of 1933 that the legend of Bonnie and Clyde really began to gain traction, and the gang began to distinguish itself in the consciousness of an American people largely distrustful of authority. Following Buck’s release from jail, the gang hid out in Joplin, Missouri, until a gun battle with police on April 13 left two law enforcement officials dead. Included among the materials the gang left behind was a series of photographs, including iconic pictures of Parker striking a variety of poses, holding a gun and smoking a cigar. Once published in newspapers, these photographs humanized the gang, and a poem written by Parker—“The Story of Suicide Sal”—served to romanticize them. A sense of fatalism permeated this poem, as well as the final stanza of “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde,” which Parker later mailed to newspapers:
Some day they’ll go down together;
And they’ll bury them side by side;
To few it’ll be grief,
To the law a relief
But it’s death for Bonnie & Clyde.
Due to daily newspaper coverage following in the wake of the Joplin shootout, the Barrow Gang soon became a national fascination. As Blanche noted in her diary, after Joplin it was difficult for the members of the gang to avoid being recognized.
By the end of 1933, Parker and Barrow were known to be responsible for many of the unsolved bank and store robberies in the Midwest, and the dragnet was beginning to close in. The Bureau of Investigation (later to become the Federal Bureau of Investigation) became involved when a car that had been stolen by the gang in Oklahoma ended up in Michigan. A bottle of prescription medication belonging to Parker’s aunt was found in the car, and before long the Barrow gang had been traced not only to the drugstore, but also to a series of armed robberies. The gang’s tactic of committing a crime in one state and then fleeing into another nullified the power of local and state law enforcement. However, this tactic would not work with the Bureau, which enjoyed cross-state jurisdiction. As Parker, Barrow, John Dillinger, and other criminals found to their detriment during 1934, J. Edgar Hoover was determined at all costs to increase the power and visibility of his organization. Once a case had been federalized due to the gang’s transportation of a stolen vehicle across state lines, Hoover was willing to throw incredible staff and monetary resources into an investigation, particularly with a criminal group that was beginning to attract attention, and whose successful capture would make headlines.
More banks were robbed and more lawmen killed, resulting in a frenzy of media coverage that nearly rivaled that of Dillinger and his exploits. As their pictures were posted everywhere, and due to an increase in mobilization from state and federal law enforcement agencies, the gang began to experience setbacks. Parker was badly injured during a car accident, Buck was shot in the head during a fierce gun battle (and eventually died of his wounds), and Blanche was captured. Running low on gang members, Barrow broke his friend and four others out of Eastham State Prison in Waldo, Texas. One of the freed prisoners, Henry Methvin, would go on to become instrumental in the ambush that would eventually kill both Parker and Barrow.
Frank Hamer, a retired Texas Ranger, had been hired by the Texas Highway Patrol to stop the gang at all costs. Although Hamer’s mandate only applied to the state of Texas, neighboring states gave him free rein to discharge his duties in pursuit of bringing the gang to justice. A piece of information turned up by the Bureau of Investigation in mid-April signaled the beginning of the end. The gang was eventually tracked to the relatives of Henry Methvin, and a deal was made to spare the latter if Methvin’s father would help set up an ambush. On the morning of May 23, 1934, near Sailes, Louisiana, Parker and Barrow pulled over to the side of the road to speak with Methvin’s father. All six members of Hamer’s posse emptied their firearms into the car at nearly point blank range; Barrow was shot seventeen times and died instantly, while Parker was shot twenty-six times and died a few seconds later. Two members of the posse had been chosen because they knew the criminal duo by sight. One of the two, Ted Hinton, had known Parker during the time he patronized the Dallas café where she worked prior to meeting Barrow.
As many of their exploits occurred in the more rural areas of the Midwest, Parker and Barrow were not, at the time, as renowned as John Dillinger, who was killed in Chicago only two months later. Together with Dillinger the Barrow Gang represented the high point of America’s fascination with gangsters during a twenty-year period that ran from the rise of Al Capone in the late 1920s through the slaying of Bugsy Siegel following World War II. Parker and Barrow were young, in love, and appeared in a series of photographs that gave personality to their story. Their legend continued to grow following their death, eventually surpassing that of Dillinger and all other between-the-war gangsters save perhaps only Capone. They came to be the model for the “killer couple,” the benchmark for comparison in famous cases from the 1950s (Starkweather and Fugate) and the 1990s (Bernardo and Homolka), although it should be noted that these other couples killed out of compulsion or deviance instead of during the course of a robbery.
Although it has been more than eighty years since their deaths, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow remain culturally relevant today. Their car, replete with multiple bullet holes, is a tourist attraction at a Nevada casino, and the town of Gibsland near the final ambush site holds an annual festival. The duo has been the subject of numerous songs, including ones by Mel Tormé and Belinda Carlisle. And in the ultimate example of the power of popular culture to revitalize and even change the course of such a legend, Parker and Barrow are now most often referred to by their first names, in large part due to the success of Arthur Penn’s 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde.
Andrew Howe
See also Boles, Charles E. “Black Bart”; Bonney, William “Billy the Kid”; Capone, Alphonse “Scarface”; Dillinger, John; James, Jesse; Outlaw Heroes
Further Reading
Burrough, Bryan. 2004. Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34. New York: Penguin Press.
Guinn, Jeff. 2009. Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Parker, Emma Krause, Nell Barrow Cowan, and Jan I. Fortune. 1968. The True Story of Bonnie and Clyde. New York: New American Library.
Pluck, Thomas. 2013. “Adios, Bonnie and Clyde.” CriminalElement.com. April 29. http://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/2013/04/adios-bonnie-and-clyde-thomas-pluck. Accessed August 24, 2015.
Treherne, John. 1984. The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde. New York: Stein and Day.