The Top 5 Most Notorious Outlaws (14 page)

Burroughs, Bryan.
Public Enemies.
New York: The Penguin Press, 2004

Gorn, Elliott J.
Dillinger’s Wild Ride.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2009

Kennedy, David.
Freedom From Fear.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2001

Potter, Claire Bond.
War on Crime.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998

Powers, Richard Gid.
G-Men.
Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983

“You’ve heard of a woman’s glory

Being spent on a “downright cur”

Still you can’t always judge the story

As true, being told by her.” – Bonnie Parker, “The Trail’s End”

Bonnie and a 1932 Ford V-8 B-400 convertible sedan. The picture was found by lawmen in Joplin while the Barrow Gang was on the run.

Bonnie Elizabeth Parker was born on October 1, 1910 in Rowena, Texas to parents who were a typical middle-class American family of that era. Bonnie was the middle child of the family, along with Buster, who was older than Bonnie, and Billie Jean, who was born two years later. When Bonnie was four, her father Charles died, leaving Bonnie’s mother Emma a poor widow with three young children.  In order to survive, she left Rowena and moved in with her parents in a Dallas suburb known as Cement City.  

From all appearances, Bonnie was a happy, well-adjusted child who did well in school.  She won several academic honors in high school and was particularly adept at writing and public speaking. America would soon learn all about her writing abilities, as the outlaw spent some of her time writing poems about her exploits, including the prophetic “The Trail’s End,” better known as “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde”.

In her sophomore year, Bonnie met a rough character named Roy Thornton.  Much to her family’s dismay she left high school and married him on September 25, 1926, days before her 16th birthday.  Not surprisingly, the marriage proved to be a disaster, as Thornton spent much of his time dodging the law and often left his very young wife on her own for days at a time.  Bonnie left him in January of 1929 but never filed for divorce.  Though Bonnie would forever be associated with another man, she was wearing Thornton’s wedding ring when she died, and by that point Thornton was in jail himself. Though they were no longer together, he had followed his wife’s exploits with interest and told a reporter ruefully, “I’m glad they went out like they did. It’s much better than being caught.” Thornton would be killed in an attempted prison escape in 1937.

Thornton

Following her separation from Thornton, Bonnie moved back in with her mother and took a job as a waitress in Dallas.  She was a pretty girl at that time.  She had an oval face and fair skin, which she accented by bright lipstick.  She wore her auburn hair bobbed and curled on the ends.  Her thin figure (her wanted poster said she was 5 foot 5 inches tall and weighed only 100 pounds) was well suited for the short, flapper style dresses of the 20s.

One of her most frequent customers was Ted Hinton, a postal worker who would soon join the Dallas Sheriff’s Office and, just a few years later, fire some of the bullets that killed her. But that day was still a few years off, and Bonnie was just a friendly young waitress trying to survive in a seedy part of Dallas. She briefly kept a diary during these early years and her turbulent marriage to Thornton, in which she wrote a nearly heart wrenching account of her loneliness, still so young and yet already feeling used up by life:

Dear Diary,

Before opening this year’s diary I wish to tell you that I have a roaming husband with a roaming mind. We are separated again for the third and last time. The first time, August 9-19,1927; and the second time, October 1-19, 1927; and the third time, December 5, 1927. I love him very much and miss him terribly. But I intend doing my duty. I am not going to take him back. I am running around with Rosa Mary Judy and she is somewhat a consolation to me. We have resolved this New Year’s to take no men or nothing seriously. Let all men go to hell! But we are not going to sit back and let the world sweep by us.

January 1, 1928. New Year’s nite. 12:00 The bells are ringing, the old year has gone, and my heart has gone with it. I have been the happiest and most miserable woman this last year. I wish the old year would have taken my past with it. I mean all my memories, but I can’t forget Roy. I am very blue tonight. No word from him. I feel he has gone for good. This is New Years Day, Jan. 1. I went to a show. Saw Ken Maynard in The Overland Stage. Am very blue. Well, I must confess this New Years nite I got drunk, trying to forget. Drowning my sorrows in bottled hell.

January 2, 1928. Met Rosa Mary today and we went to a show. Saw Ronald Coleman and Vilma Banky in A Night Of Love. Sure was a good show. Saw Scottie and gave him the air. He’s a pain in the neck to me. Came home at 5:30. went to bed at 10:30. Sure am lonesome.”  

Her only way out of these feelings of despair lay in regular visits to the local movie theater, where, lost in the dark, she could indulge in dreams of a better, more exciting life. She mentioned some of the movies she saw, including
Framed
(starring Milton Sills),
Afraid to Love
(starring Clive Brook and Florence Vidor),
Marriage
starring (Virginia Valli), and
The Primrose Path
(starring Clara Bow).

“They call them cold-blooded killers

They say they are heartless and mean

But I say this with pride, I once knew Clyde

When he was honest and upright and clean.

But the laws fooled around and taking him down

and locking him up in a cell

‘Til he said to me, “I’ll never be free,

So I’ll meet a few of them in hell.” – Bonnie Parker, “The Trail’s End”

Clyde Chestnut Barrow was born on March 24, 1909 in Ellis County, Texas, joining four older siblings born to Henry Basil and Cumie Walker Barrow.  The senior Barrows were poor farmers and would go on to have seven more children before moving, a few at a time, to West Dallas, something of a slum, during the early 1920s.  The family was so poor that they spent their first few months in town living under their wagon while saving up money to buy a tent.

In 1926, Clyde, longing to experience the way the “other half” lived, rented a car for a joy ride around the countryside.  The problem was, he decided not to return it.  His mugshot from that incident shows a young, clean cut looking boy of 16, with dark eyes and slightly pointed ears.  It looks more like it belongs to a kid running for class treasurer than a future murderer.  However, the class treasury was not the money that Clyde wanted to control.

Before many months passed, Clyde was arrested again when he and his brother Buck stole some turkeys.  They were not convicted, probably due to their poverty and age, and they soon obtained paying jobs. Nevertheless, they persisted in augmenting their meager honest earnings by stealing cars and robbing stores.  As a result, Clyde was arrested several more times until, in April 1930, he was eventually sent to Eastham Prison Farm.  Eastham had a reputation throughout the state for its dangerous conditions and heavy workloads.  It was designed to punish hardened male criminals by making them spend most of their waking hours working in the hot Texas sun.

For Clyde, it wasn’t the hot days that were the problem; it was the dark nights when his cellmate would repeatedly rape him.  When he could take the abuse no longer, he beat the man to death, thus committing his first murder at the age of 21.  By the time he got out of prison the following year, his own sisters barely recognized the hardened criminal their brother had become. His sister Marie later noted, “Something awful sure must have happened to him in prison, because he wasn’t the same person when he got out.” That was seconded by Ralph Fults, an inmate at Eastham, who said Clyde changed “from a schoolboy to a rattlesnake.”

“The road was so dimly lighted

There were no highway signs to guide

But they made up their minds if all roads were blind

They wouldn’t give up ‘til they died.

The road gets dimmer and dimmer

Sometimes you can hardly see

But it’s fight man to man, and do all you can

For they know they can never be free.”

In January 1930, Bonnie lost her job at the diner and left her mother’s house to stay with a friend in West Dallas who had a broken arm and needed help around the house.  One day, while she was in the kitchen making hot chocolate, there was a knock at the door.  Her friend called for the person to come in, and Clyde Barrow stepped into the cramped little living room.  Coming out of the kitchen to see who was visiting, Bonnie came face to face with the man of her dreams.  Though not yet a hardened criminal, Barrow already had a number of crimes under his belt, and he would soon be sent away to Eastham.  While he was gone, Bonnie remained faithful to him, building up in her mind a fantasy of the romantic adventures the two of them would enjoy when he got out.

Thus, she ready to join what became known as “The Barrow Gang,” which Clyde formed soon after leaving Eastham in February 1932.  Armed with an M1919 Browning Automatic Rifle, Clyde was soon out robbing small grocery stores and gas stations.  His goal, along with that of his friend Ralph Fults, was to gather enough money and guns to stage a retaliatory raid on Eastham Prison, whom Clyde held responsible for his sexual assaults and other mistreatment. If they could break out other prisoners, all the better.

Bonnie soon earned her place in the group, being captured on April 19 after a failed burglary against a hardware store.  She was kept for a few months in Kaufman County jail in Texas until June 17, when the grand jury decided not to indict her because of her youth and previous clean record.  Instead, they released her with a stern warning to stay out of trouble in the future.  Instead, she quickly returned to Clyde and a life of crime.    

However, Ralph Fults, who had been arrested with her, had been convicted and given a much longer sentence.  He was never involved with the gang again, but Bonnie and Clyde carried on without him.  By this time, Clyde was wanted for the murder of J. N. Bucher, the owner of a store he robbed in Hillsboro, Texas, on April 30, 1932.  In actuality, Clyde was probably an accomplice who waited behind the wheel of the getaway car during that robbery, but he would have plenty of blood on his hands soon enough.