Bonnie Parker (October 1, 1910 – May 23, 1934) and Clyde Barrow (March 24, 1909 – May 23, 1934) were well known outlaws, robbers and criminals who, with their gang, travelled the Central United States during the Great Depression. Their exploits captured the attention of the American public during what is sometimes referred to as the "public enemy era" between 1931 and 1934. Though known today for his dozen-or-so bank robberies, Barrow in fact preferred to rob small stores or rural gas stations. The gang is believed to have killed at least nine police officers and committed several civilian murders. They were eventually ambushed and killed in Louisiana by law officers. Their reputation was cemented forever in American pop folklore by Arthur Penn's 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde .
Believed at the time to be a full participant in the gang's crimes, Parker's role has since been a source of controversy. While gang members W. D. Jones and Ralph Fults said they never saw her fire a gun and described her role as logistical,Jones also told investigators that she had fired a pistol at officers "two or three times" when he was deposed under arrest in 1933. By 1968, his recollection was that "during the five big gun battles I was with them, she never fired a gun. But I'll say she was a hell of a loader." Youngest Barrow sister Marie made the same claim: "Bonnie never fired a shot. She just followed my brother no matter where he went." Parker's reputation as a cigar-smoking gun moll grew out of a gag snapshot found by police abandoned at a hideout and released to the national press; while she did chain-smoke Camel cigarettes, she was not a cigar smoker.
Author Jeff Guinn, in his 2009 book Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde , explains that it was just these very photos that launched the outlaws' appeal: "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 young and unmarried. They undoubtedly slept together — after all, the girl smoked cigars.... Without Bonnie, the media outside Texas might have dismissed Clyde as a gun-toting punk, if it ever considered him at all. With her sassy photographs, Bonnie supplied the sex-appeal, the oomph, that allowed the two of them to transcend the small-scale thefts and needless killings that actually comprised their criminal careers."
Beginnings
Bonnie Parker
Bonnie Elizabeth Parker was born in Rowena, Texas, the second of three children. Her father, Charles Parker (? – 1914), a bricklayer, died when Bonnie was four, prompting her mother, Emma Krause Parker (c.1886 – 1946), to move with the children to West Dallas, where they lived in poverty. An honor roll student in high school where she excelled in creative writing, she won a County League contest in literary arts, for Cement City School, and even gave introductory speeches for local politicians.
On September 25, 1926, less than a week before her sixteenth birthday, Parker married Roy Thornton, whose good looks and smart clothes caught her schoolgirl's eye. The marriage was short-lived though, and in January 1929 they separated and never saw each other again. They never divorced, however, and Parker was wearing Thornton's wedding ring when she died. His reaction to his wife's death was, "I'm glad they went out like they did. It's much better than being caught."
Jimmy Fowler, writing about Parker in 1999 for the Dallas Observer , noted that "although the authorities who gunned down the 23-year-old in 1934 conceded that she was no bloodthirsty killer and that when taken into custody she tended to inspire the paternal aspects of the police who held her ... there was a mystifying devolution from the high school poet, speech class star, and mini-celebrity who performed Shirley Temple-like as a warm up act at the stump speeches of local politicians to the accomplice of rage-filled Clyde Barrow."
Clyde Barrow
Clyde Chestnut Barrow was born in Ellis County, Texas, near Telico, a town just south of Dallas. He was the fifth of seven children, from a desperately poor farming family that emigrated, piecemeal, to Dallas in the early 1920s as part of a wave of resettlement from the impoverished nearby farms to the impoverished urban slum known as West Dallas. It was a place of flimsy shanties and tent cities, piles of garbage and teeming open sewers, swarming insects and rampaging epidemics. The Barrows had neither shanty nor tent: they spent their first months living under their wagon. When father Henry had earned enough money to buy a tent, it was a major step up for the family.
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, his luck ran out and he was sent to Eastham Prison Farm in April, 1930. While in prison, he was sexually assaulted repeatedly for over a year by a dominant inmate, whose skull he eventually fractured with a length of pipe. It was Clyde Barrow's first killing.
Paroled in February 1932, Barrow emerged from Eastham a hardened and bitter criminal. His sister Nell remembered a conversation with sister Marie about the new parolee: "There's a new air about him — a funny sort of something I can't put my finger on.... I'm afraid he's not going to go straight." Marie was blunter: "Something awful sure must have happened to him in prison, because he wasn't the same person when he got out." Associate Ralph Fults was there, inside "The Walls" with Barrow, and said he watched him "change from a schoolboy to a rattlesnake."
In his post-Eastham career, he focused on smaller jobs, robbing grocery stores and gas stations, at a rate far outpacing the mere ten to fifteen bank robberies attributed to him and the Barrow Gang. Barrow's 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
There are a number of versions of the story describing Bonnie's and Clyde's first meeting, but the most credible version indicates that Bonnie Parker met Clyde Barrow in January 1930 at a friend's house. Parker was out of work and was staying in West Dallas to assist a girlfriend with a broken arm. Barrow dropped by the girl's house while Parker was supposedly in the kitchen making hot chocolate. They did not meet, as legend has it, while she was a waitress.
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. Her fondness for creative writing found expression in poems such as "The Story of Suicide Sal" and "The Trail's End" (aka "The Story of Bonnie and Clyde").
The spree
1932: Early jobs, early murders
During Buck Barrow's time in jail in 1932, Clyde Barrow, Raymond Hamilton and a rotating core group of associates participated in small robberies, primarily of stores and gas stations. In April, Bonnie Parker was captured in a failed hardware store burglary in Kaufman, Texas, and subsequently jailed. On April 30, Barrow was the wheelman in a robbery in Hillsboro, Texas, during which shopkeeper J. N. Bucher was shot and killed. When shown mugshots, the victim's wife identified Barrow as one of the shooters, even though he had stayed outside in the car; it was his first murder accusation. Meanwhile, Parker remained in jail until June 17, when the Kaufman County grand jury convened, 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, Hamilton and Ross Dyer were drinking alcohol at a country dance in Stringtown, Oklahoma, an act then illegal under Prohibition. 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; it was the first killing of a lawman by Barrow and his gang, a total eventually amounting to nine officers killed. Another civilian was added to the list on October 11, when storekeeper Howard Hall was killed during a robbery of his store in Sherman, Texas. The take: twenty-eight dollars and some groceries.
W. D. Jones had been a friend of the Barrow family since childhood, and though he was only 16 years old on Christmas Eve 1932, he persuaded Barrow to let him join up with the pair and ride out of Dallas with them that night.
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