Bonnie and Clyde

Bonnie and Clyde

Bonnie Elizabeth Parker (October 1, 1910 – May 23, 1934) and Clyde Chestnut Barrow also known as Clyde Champion Barrow. (March 24, 1909 – May 23, 1934) were American criminals who traveled the central United States with their gang during the Great Depression, robbing people and killing when cornered or confronted. Their exploits captured the attention of the American public during the "Public Enemy Era," between 1931 and 1935. Though known today for their dozen-or-so bank robberies, the duo most often preferred to rob small stores or rural gas stations. The gang is believed to have killed at least nine police officers and several civilians. The couple were eventually ambushed and killed by law officers near Sailes, Bienville Parish, Louisiana. Their exploits were revived and cemented in American pop folklore by Arthur Penn's 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde.

Even during their lifetimes, their depiction in the press was at considerable odds with the hardscrabble reality of their life on the road, especially for Bonnie Parker. While she was present at one hundred or more felonies during the two years she was Barrow's companion, she was not the cigar-smoking, machine gun-wielding killer depicted in the newspapers, newsreels, and pulp detective magazines of the day. Gang member W. D. Jones later testified he could not recall ever having seen her shoot at a law officer, and the cigar myth grew out of a playful snapshot police found at an abandoned hideout. It was released to the press and published nationwide. While Parker did chain smoke Camel cigarettes, she never smoked cigars.

 

According to historian Jeff Guinn, the hideout photos led to Parker's glamorization and the creation of legends about the gang. He writes

Bonnie parker

Bonnie Elizabeth Parker was born in Rowena, Texas (south of Abilene and southwest of Dallas), the second of three children. Her father, Charles Robert Parker (1884 – 1914), was a bricklayer who died when Bonnie was four. Her mother, Emma (Krause) Parker (1885 – 1944) moved her family to her parents' home in Cement City, an industrial suburb now known as West Dallas, where she worked as a seamstress. As an adult, Bonnie found expression writing poems such as "The Story of Suicide Sal" and "The Trail's End" (known since as "The Story of Bonnie and Clyde").

In her second year in high school, Parker met Roy Thornton. They dropped out of school and were married on September 25, 1926, six days before her 16th birthday. Their marriage, marked by his frequent absences and brushes with the law, was short-lived. After January 1929, their paths never crossed again; however, they never divorced, and Bonnie was wearing Thornton's wedding ring when she died. Thornton was still in prison when he heard of her death. He commented, "I'm glad they went out like they did. It's much better than being caught."

 

In 1929, after the breakdown of her marriage, Parker lived with her mother and worked as a waitress in Dallas. One of her regular customers in the café was postal worker Ted Hinton, who was to join the Dallas Sheriff's Department in 1932. As a posse member in 1934, he would participate in her ambush. In the diary she kept briefly early in 1929, Parker wrote of her loneliness, her impatience with life in provincial Dallas, and her love of talking pictures.

Clyde barrow

Clyde Chestnut Barrow was born into a poor farming family in Ellis County, Texas, near Telico, a town just southeast of Dallas. He was the fifth of seven children of Henry Basil Barrow (1874 – 1957) and Cumie Talitha Walker (1874 – 1942). The family migrated, piecemeal, to Dallas in the early 1920s as part of a wave of resettlement from the impoverished nearby farms to the urban slum known as West Dallas. The Barrows spent their first months in West Dallas living under their wagon. When father Henry had put together enough money to buy a tent, it was a significant improvement 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 Buck, 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, he was sent to Eastham Prison Farm in April 1930. While in prison, Barrow used a lead pipe to crush the skull of another inmate who had sexually assaulted him repeatedly. This was Clyde Barrow's first killing, though another inmate already serving a life sentence took the blame. Barrow convinced another inmate to use an axe to chop off two of Barrow's toes to avoid hard labor in the fields; he would walk with a limp for the rest of his life as a result. Without his knowledge, Barrow's mother had successfully petitioned a release for him, six days after his intentional injury.

In 1930, Barrow escaped Eastham Prison Farm, using a weapon Parker had smuggled to him. Shortly after, he was recaptured and was sent back to prison. Later, paroled on February 2, 1932, Barrow emerged from Eastham a hardened and bitter criminal. His sister Marie said, "Something awful sure must have happened to him in prison because he wasn't the same person when he got out." A fellow inmate, Ralph Fults, said he watched Clyde "change from a schoolboy to a rattlesnake."

In his post-Eastham career, Barrow chose smaller jobs, robbing grocery stores and gas stations, at a rate far outpacing the ten or so bank robberies attributed to him and the Barrow Gang. His 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.