Bonnie and Clyde were American outlaws. The couple engaged in a murderous crime spree that swept across the rural towns of the Midwest and the Southwest United States during the Great Depression . The Great Depression was a worldwide economic slump of the 1930’s. Bonnie and Clyde were believed to be responsible for more than a dozen murders. Nevertheless, their Depression-era exploits were often romanticized and later came to be told in movies and fiction.
Clyde Chestnut Barrow (1909-1934) was born on March 24, 1909, in Telico, Texas, to poor tenant farmers. He and his older brother, Marvin Ivan “Buck” Barrow, committed petty crimes before graduating to car theft and burglary.
Bonnie Elizabeth Parker (1910-1934) was born on Oct. 1, 1910, in Rowena, Texas. Parker was a 19-year-old married restaurant waitress when she met 20-year-old Clyde Barrow in January 1930. In February 1930, Barrow was arrested on a warrant for past crimes and sent to jail. He escaped in March 1930 after Parker allegedly smuggled a gun to him. Barrow was recaptured a week later. He was sentenced to 14 years at the Eastham Prison Farm in Lovelady, Texas.
Conditions at Eastham were so harsh that Barrow asked another inmate to chop off two of his toes, hoping to be transferred to the Huntsville, Texas, prison, where his brother was doing time. He was not transferred, but he was granted an early parole in February 1932. He walked with a slight limp for the rest of his life.
From 1932 to 1934, Bonnie and Clyde committed a number of robberies, burglaries , car thefts, and kidnappings . They were involved in at least 13 murders, including those of two police officers in Joplin, Missouri, and a sheriff in Stringtown, Oklahoma. Parker and Barrow stole cars and robbed banks, grocery stores, and gas stations from Michigan to Louisiana and Missouri to New Mexico. But the amounts they managed to steal were usually less than $100 and sometimes as little as $5 or $10. In addition to Barrow and Parker, the Barrow Gang, as they came to be called, usually included such members as Buck Barrow; his wife, Blanche; and various others, such as Raymond Hamilton, William Daniel Jones, and Henry Methvin.
The public at first glorified Bonnie and Clyde for several reasons. For example, the Barrow Gang was known for kidnapping people and taking them for long rides but then releasing them unharmed. In addition, Bonnie Parker wrote poetry, and two of her poems were published in newspapers. Nevertheless, as the murders and other crimes increased, public opinion began to turn against them.
On July 29, 1933, Buck Barrow was fatally wounded and Blanche was captured during a shootout with police in Iowa. Jones was captured in Houston, Texas, in November 1933. Parker and Barrow went into hiding with Methvin near Sailes, Louisiana, not far from the home of Methvin’s parents. But Methvin’s father secretly made a deal with the local authorities in exchange for pardoning his son. On May 23, 1934, a six-man posse led by former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer ambushed and killed Parker and Barrow as the couple sat in a stolen Ford just outside of Sailes.
