In January, 1930, Bonnie Parker met Clyde Barrow in West Dallas, TX. She was a cute little flapper with a violent streak; he was a petty criminal hoping to become a big-time bank robber. They fed each others delusions, and each ended up the worse for the constant fantasy diet. If there had been such a thing as a psychological weather report that January, the announcer would have solemnly declared that two tropical depressions had just come together to form a hurricane.
Bonnie Parker Goes to Jail
Bonnie, Clyde, and buddy Ralph Fults were the first official “Barrow gang.” They didn’t get very far; involved in a shootout with a posse in Mabank, Texas, Clyde gallantly ran away while Bonnie and Fults were taken into custody. Bonnie was so angry she spit in a bystander’s eye. In jail, she wrote a poem called “The Story of Suicide Sal,” which told the mawkish tale of a gangster girl who takes the fall for her man, kills him when he gets a new moll, and gets gunned down herself.
On the Road with Clyde Barrow
The grand jury failed to indict Bonnie, and she promised her mother she‘d never see Clyde again. A few weeks later, she was back with Clyde and Raymond Hamilton; who teamed up to rob post offices, gas stations, and the occasional small bank. For no discernable reason, the pair also shot up a small dance in a lumber town, killing Officer Gene Moore and seriously wounding Sheriff Maxwell of Stringtown, Oklahoma.
At that point, Bonnie decided that they could never turn themselves in, but would have to go down in a blaze of bullets. It would be a beautiful, bloody end, a quixotic justification of their pointless and peripatetic lives. Throughout 1932 and ’33, Bonnie traveled with Clyde.
Bonnie never called the shots, though several sources claim she fired quite a few. She held guns on hostages, and occasionally pointed one at Clyde during their fairly frequent lovers’ spats. Even her staunchest supporters admitted she was at least “a hell of a loader,” her prowess making it considerably easier for the Barrow gang to outgun the police. Clyde always made all the major decisions, however, including what escape routes to use and when to back out of a heist. The gang went through constant permutations; many criminals found Clyde a little too trigger-happy for their tastes.
Sixteen-year-old W. D. Jones rode with them for a time; so did Clyde’s older brother Buck and his wife Blanche. Buck ended up getting shot by police in Dexfield Park, Iowa; his wife was sentenced to ten years. W. D. ran off, sick to death of the dirty, desperate way of life. The Barrow gang murdered eleven victims during their crime spree, including six police officers.
Bonnie’s Life with the Barrow Gang: Poetry on the Lam
Bonnie wasn’t a typical gun moll. Unlike Baby Face Nelson’s loyal wife, Helen, she didn’t cook or clean. She did dress well, and always had a little case with some moisturizer and perfume in it. But she liked to drink moonshine and sleep until early afternoon; when she finally woke up, jigsaw puzzles, playing cards, and pocket flasks filled her idle hours. Clyde had a little camera, and he snapped photos of her with a gun on her hip and a cigar clenched between her teeth. It sure made her mad when the newspapers took those silly pictures seriously. After all, she smoked Camel cigarettes, never cigars.
Of course, her poetry needed plenty of polishing. She dashed off a long series of verses titled “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde,” which explained how Clyde was a really nice person who started committing crimes because the law kept harassing him. The last stanza described a romantic vision of the outlaw pair dying together and being buried side by side.
Sometimes she and Clyde had fistfights and screaming matches, but the rancor dissolved quickly. Occasionally the fights concerned Clyde’s desire to turn himself in on the condition that Bonnie would be allowed to go free. Bonnie adamantly refused; if one of them went down, so must the other. They had to go down in death together; any other fate just wouldn’t be poetic.
The Death of Bonnie Parker: Bonnie & Clyde Ambushed
After the Kansas City Massacre, a melee that left two police officers, a police chief, and one Federal agent dead, J. Edgar Hoover declared War on Crime, focusing in on bringing down major bank robbers like John Dillinger. Although Dillinger held amateurish shoot-’ em-up types like the Barrow gang in contempt, Bonnie and Clyde were included in the FBI’s sweeping mandate to wipe out all “rats” and “their dirty, filthy, diseased women.”
In June, 1933, Bonnie was nearly killed in a car wreck; for the rest of her short life, she would walk with a severe limp and suffer considerable pain. About one year later, Bonnie and Clyde were traveling with escaped convict Henry Methvin, whom they’d sprung from Eastham Prison Farm in a daring dawn raid that left one guard dead. To obtain leniency for his role in the Barrow gang’s murder of two Texas Highway Patrol officers, he and his parents set the couple up for an ambush led by Texas Ranger Frank Hamer.
According to several sources (including Hamer), Bonnie was about seven months’ pregnant at the time. The last letter she wrote to her family mentioned that she’d like to survive just one more spring to see the flowers bloom again.
Henry Methvin gave the Barrows the slip, and hid out at his brother’s. A few days later, on May 23, Henry’s father, Ivy, parked his truck by the side of a road, and removed a wheel from it. In the bushes, a posse of six men waited with firearms at the ready. Some clutched Browning automatic rifles capable of firing twenty rounds per minute. Clyde had always favored the Browning, too.
The trap closed on the rats like a charm: Clyde slowed his V-8 Ford to see if Methvin needed help. The posse opened fire. Bonnie screamed once, absorbed between twenty-five and thirty bullets, and slumped over against Clyde’s lifeless form. Frank Hamer later said that the sight of her heavily mutilated body made him sick. The New York Times solemnly notified its readers that “Barrow and woman” had finally met their richly-deserved doom.
Bonnie died just as her poem had predicted, but she wasn’t buried alongside Clyde. Her mother, stating that Clyde had taken Bonnie in life but would not have her in death, interred her daughter all the way across town from the Barrow family plot. Bonnie lies in Dallas’s Crown Hill Memorial Park, beneath a hedge that buds anew every spring.
Readers seeking information on Bonnie Parker's early years may enjoy “Bonnie Parker of Bonnie and Clyde: Childhood and Youth.”
Sources
Burrough, Bryan, Public Enemies, New York: Penguin, 2004.
Schneider, Paul, Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend, New York: Henry Holt, 2009.
“Hell of a loader” quote from Schneider, footnote, p. 218; J. Edgar Hoover’s "rats" and "diseased women" quotes from epigraph.
“Barrow and woman” quote from Pearson, Patricia, When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence, New York: Penguin Putnam, 1997, p. 178.
Amy Sillup - I have a B.S. in Chemistry from Delaware Valley College and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. I have worked as a ...
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