Bonnie and Clyde are perhaps the most romanticized outlaws of all time.
They caught the attention of the media during the Great Depression, and though the tide
eventually turned, they forever left their imprint on pop culture and the public consciousness.
Here's the truth about Bonnie and Clyde.
Bonnie and Clyde wanted to be famous, and they eventually got their wish, appearing
in pop culture over and over again, even today.
In 1937, Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us, retold a fictionalized version of the Bonnie
and Clyde story.
The book would inspire three movies in the next three decades.
Another film, Gun Crazy, told a different version of the story in 1949 and later in
1992 when it was remade with Drew Barrymore, as did 1958's The Bonnie Parker Story.
In 2011, Bonnie and Clyde came to Broadway in a musical, although this was far from the
first bit of music they inspired, the most famous being Beyoncé and Jay-Z's 2002 collaboration
"03 Bonnie and Clyde."
The pinnacle of Bonnie and Clyde in pop culture, however, is still the 1967 movie starring
Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, simply titled Bonnie and Clyde, with the final scene featuring
their bloody death at the hands of lawmen being a game-changer for future films.
While reviews were mixed at the time, the film would go on to influence cinema for decades,
just like the real Bonnie and Clyde.
While Clyde was the hardened criminal of the pair, Bonnie was still an accomplice and eventually,
the law caught up with them both.
In March 1932, she was present at a botched robbery where Clyde managed to get away; Bonnie
was captured and put in a Texas jail until her case went before a grand jury.
Clyde's separate trip to prison had involved backbreaking hard labor and assault.
Bonnie's was nothing like that, but the months in lockup still changed her.
While inside, Bonnie wrote poetry, using "gangster" lingo that she mostly got from trashy novels
and the movies.
When Bonnie's mother read the poems, she noticed the change in her child's mindset, and it
allegedly terrified her.
The poems indicated that nothing was going to tear Bonnie away from Clyde.
It wasn't until June that the grand jury met and decided there was no way a woman would
participate in a crime voluntarily.
Since Bonnie must have been under some kind of duress, she was released.
Then she proved them wrong by voluntarily rejoining Clyde and his gang of criminals
within weeks.
Bonnie's poetry was a habit she kept up even between committing crimes, and some of those
poems still exist today, providing a fascinating insight into what she thought about her lifestyle
and her partner.
The Story of Suicide Sal, written in 1932, is framed as a story about a good girl who
falls in love with a "professional killer" who teaches her all about the "underworld".
Sal and her man run around with each other for a year, about the same amount of time
Bonnie and Clyde had been together at that point.
Sal ends up in prison after a botched robbery while her partner escapes, followed by Sal
eventually getting out of jail and killing the guy.
But the most famous of her poems was written in 1934, which is now known as The Story of
Bonnie and Clyde.
In the poem she compares them to Jesse James and says it was the law being unfair to Clyde
that put them on their path.
It's also clearly spelled out that she knew they were going to die together.
According to the book My Life with Bonnie and Clyde, written by Clyde's sister in law
Blanche Barrow, there was a point when Clyde wanted to go straight.
"You all right Clyde?"
"We need to stop."
After he was paroled from Eastham prison, he worked at his parents' service station
and even left Texas for a job in Massachusetts to try and escape his criminal past.
While the innocent period didn't last, the Barrow and Parker families didn't give up.
Clyde's brother Buck was paroled from prison on March 22nd, 1933, and within days, there
was a family reunion of sorts in Joplin, Missouri.
Buck and Blanche met up with Bonnie and Clyde, and the consensus seems to be that Buck's
goal was to get Clyde to surrender.
However if this was the case, he had little chance of success.
The group lived together in an apartment for 12 days, laying low, drinking, and acting
almost normal.
Of course, that couldn't last, and the reunion ended with a shootout with police after neighbors
reported the group for being too loud.
Bonnie and Clyde are often mentioned in conjunction with their gang, but according to the website
Heart of Texas Tales, it was only a gang in the loosest sense.
The eight male members were never together as one cohesive group, instead committing
crimes in twos or threes over time.
The various people who could lay claim to being part of the Barrow Gang saw very different
ends.
Bonnie and Clyde were shot to death in an ambush.
Buck and Blanche were captured by police and Buck, who'd been shot seven times that same
month, died five days later of pneumonia after surgery.
His wife would serve six years in prison and live until 1988.
Member Raymond Hamilton was Public Enemy Number 1 from 1934 to 1935 and would be sentenced
to 362 years in prison, eventually receiving the death penalty.
W.D. Jones was caught and sentenced to 15 years but only served six.
The last survivor of the gang was Ralph Fults, who spent nine years in prison before turning
his life around.
Bonnie and Clyde absolutely knew how their end was going to come.
If they turned themselves in, they would get the electric chair, and if they were caught,
whoever found them was going to shoot to kill.
So they just kept running around doing crimes, waiting for the inevitable violent end.
One of their crimes in 1933 was stealing a fancy new Ford.
The owner, H. Dillard Darby didn't know who the bad guys were or he might have thought
twice, but he got in another car with a female friend to chase them down.
The foolhardy attempt ended with the pair kidnapped by the outlaws before Bonnie decided
to spare their lives, thinking it was hilarious that Darby was an undertaker.
"Hey hey, what do you do anyhow?"
"I'm an undertaker."
She joked that maybe he'd work on her and Clyde soon.
Less than a year later, he actually would.
Bonnie and Clyde were very good at staying one step ahead of the law, but they knew it
couldn't last forever.
As their violent crimes racked up and public opinion turned against them, the law was slowly
closing in.
The groups came together in a hail of gunfire on May 23rd, 1934, in Black Lake, Louisiana.
In April, the FBI learned that Bonnie and Clyde had been visiting that area of the state.
The big break came in May, when the FBI discovered Bonnie and Clyde had been at a gang member's
house for a party on the 21st and were planning on returning again in two days.
Lawmen from Louisiana and Texas worked together to set up an ambush on the side of the road.
The Texas State Historical Association says that as their car drove past the hidden lawmen
that morning, Bonnie and Clyde were gunned down with over 160 bullets.
They died instantly.
Bonnie was holding a sandwich, cigarettes, and a machine gun, while Clyde was clutching
a revolver.
Modern America is still as obsessed with Bonnie and Clyde as it was during their lifetimes.
Clyde was, of course, a vicious murderer, and Bonnie was his willing accomplice.
But it seems anything connected with them is fair game to stick in a museum or make
a buck off of.
Roadside America lists no fewer than 35 locations connected to the criminals on their "Bonnie
and Clyde Bloody Adventure Trail."
While some are a bit more obscure, the actual Bonnie and Clyde Death car, now located in
a casino in Primm, Nevada, is regularly a popular attraction and as of 2019, you can
stay in the Joplin apartment the gang hid out in for almost two weeks as it's now an
Airbnb.
But not everyone wants to honor them.
In 2020, The Dallas Morning News reported that the current owner of the service station
owned by Clyde Barrow's father wanted to tear the old building down because he'd have felt
gross about making a memorial to a couple that unquestionably murdered multiple people.
A fair point, but The West Dallas Landmark Commission disagreed and started the process
to make the building an official landmark, over the owner's objections.
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