At about 9:15 on the morning of May 23, 1934, a Ford V8 came speeding down Louisiana Highway 154 south of Gibsland. Six law officers hidden in the roadside brush, some of whom had been waiting for nearly two days and were close to giving up, heard the car approaching. They had been staked out on the road because they expected the driver to stop at a truck parked along the shoulder. The driver was Clyde Barrow.
Beside him sat Bonnie Parker. As the Ford slowed, Deputy Oakley fired the first shot, and the rest of the posse opened fire almost simultaneously. Approximately 130 rounds were discharged into the vehicle. Clyde Barrow was struck immediately and died instantly; witnesses reported hearing Bonnie Parker cry out before she, too, was killed.
The chase that had dominated headlines across the American Southwest was over. Bonnie Elizabeth Parker was born in 1910 in Rowena, Texas. Her father, a bricklayer, died when she was four, and her widowed mother moved the family to the industrial West Dallas area, where she worked as a seamstress. Bonnie was a bright, creative girl who loved performing and dreamed of becoming an actress.
She wrote poetry, and two of her poems, including The Story of Bonnie and Clyde, would later become famous. In September 1926, just days before her sixteenth birthday, she married Roy Thornton, a troubled young man frequently in legal trouble. The marriage collapsed quickly, though they never formally divorced. When Bonnie died, she was still wearing the ring he had given her.
Thornton, then in prison, reportedly said he was glad she had not been caught, and he later died in 1937 during an escape attempt from Huntsville State Prison. Clyde Chestnut Barrow was born in 1909 into a poor farming family near Telico, Texas. The Barrows moved to Dallas in the early 1920s, and in their first months there they lived under their wagon until they could afford a tent. Clyde’s first documented trouble with the law came in late 1926, followed by an arrest with his brother Buck over stolen turkeys.
Over the next few years he worked at legitimate jobs but also broke into safes, robbed small businesses, and stole cars. In January 1930, he met Bonnie Parker through a mutual friend. Their connection was immediate, but it was interrupted when Clyde was arrested for auto theft and sent to the McLennan County Jail in Waco. Bonnie smuggled a firearm to him, and he escaped in March 1930.
Recaptured a week later, he was transferred to Huntsville State Prison and eventually assigned to the East Prison Farm. His time in prison changed him profoundly. He suffered serious mistreatment, including sexual abuse, and was involved in a confrontation with another inmate who died as a result; another prisoner claimed responsibility and shielded him from formal charges. In late January 1932, desperate to avoid the harsh physical labor of the prison farm, he had two of his toes removed, either himself or with the help of another inmate.
He walked with a limp for the rest of his life. Ironically, his mother had already petitioned for his early release, and he was freed just six days later, in February 1932. His sister later said something terrible must have happened to him in prison because he was not the same person when he returned home. A fellow inmate observed that Clyde had changed from a schoolboy to a rattlesnake.
After his release, Clyde teamed up with Ralph Fults and committed a series of robberies, mostly of small groceries and gas stations rather than banks. Their long-term goal was to gather equipment for an attack on East Prison, which Clyde deeply resented. In April 1932, Bonnie and Fults were arrested trying to break into a hardware store in Kaufman, Texas, to obtain firearms. Bonnie was held for months but ultimately released when the grand jury declined to indict her.
Fults was convicted and never rejoined the group. Within weeks of her release, Bonnie reunited with Clyde. On April 30, 1932, Clyde served as the getaway driver during a robbery in Hillsboro in which store owner J. N.
Booker was killed. On August 5, 1932, Clyde and another associate, Raymond Hamilton, fired on a sheriff and deputy at a country dance in Stringtown, Oklahoma; Deputy Eugene C. Moore was killed and Sheriff C. G.
Maxwell seriously wounded. That incident marked the first time a law officer died in contact with the Barrow group. A few months later, sixteen-year-old W. D.
Jones, a longtime family friend, joined them on Christmas Eve 1932. The following day, in Temple, Texas, Jones and Clyde were involved in the death of Doyle Johnson while trying to take his car. On January 6, 1933, Tarrant County Deputy Malcolm Davis died after the trio walked into a law enforcement trap intended for another suspect. What followed was a string of shootings and deaths that escalated with terrifying speed.
In March 1933, Buck Barrow was pardoned and released from prison. He and his wife, Blanch, joined the group at a hideout in Joplin, Missouri. According to family accounts, they had come to visit and to try to convince Clyde to turn himself in. The group drew attention in the quiet neighborhood with loud card games, heavy drinking, and men coming and going at odd hours.
On April 13, 1933, believing the residents were bootleggers, local police sent a five-man team to investigate. The Barrow brothers and Jones responded with gunfire. When it was over, Detective Harry McGinnis and Constable J. W.
Harman were dead. The gang escaped, but they left behind almost all their belongings, including weapons, Buck’s parole papers, a handwritten poem by Bonnie, and a camera with undeveloped film. When local photographers developed the film, the images showed Bonnie, Clyde, and Jones posing with guns in staged mock scenes. One photograph, of Bonnie with a cigar in her mouth and a pistol in her hand, was sent over national news wires.
The Barrow gang was suddenly front-page news across the country. Over the next three months, the group traveled widely. In May 1933, they robbed a bank in Okabena, Minnesota, and carried out several kidnappings. They took Dillard Darby and Sophia Stone while stealing Darby’s car in Ruston, Louisiana.
But the gang often treated their captives almost courteously, releasing them far from home and sometimes giving them money to get back. These odd gestures made headlines just as their bloodier crimes did. In June 1933, near Wellington, Texas, Clyde missed warning signs at a bridge under construction and drove off the road into a ravine. Accounts differ on whether Bonnie’s injuries came from gasoline or battery acid, but historians agree she suffered severe third-degree burns to her right leg.
The injury was so serious that her leg contracted and her mobility was greatly reduced. For a time, she could barely move on her own and either hopped or had to be carried. The group took Sheriff George Corry and City Marshal Paul Hardy hostage for a time before leaving them handcuffed to a tree near Erick, Oklahoma. They met up with Buck and Blanch and hid in a tourist court near Fort Smith, Arkansas, while Bonnie’s burns were treated as best circumstances allowed.
During this period, Buck Barrow and W. D. Jones carried out a robbery in Alma, Arkansas, that resulted in the death of Town Marshal Henry D. Humphrey.
Despite Bonnie’s condition, the group was forced to keep moving. On January 16, 1934, Clyde helped organize the escape of several prisoners from East Prison, including Raymond Hamilton and Henry Methvin. During the breakout, Barrow gang member Joe Palmer fatally wounded Major Joe Crowson, who died a few days later. The audacity of the raid reflected badly on Texas authorities, and prison chief Lee Simmons reportedly vowed that everyone involved would eventually be found and dealt with.
The Texas Department of Corrections reached out to retired Texas Ranger Captain Frank Hamer and convinced him to take on the pursuit. Hamer was a tall, powerfully built, reserved man known for his strict sense of right and wrong and for a career that included numerous high-profile confrontations. Official records credit him with involvement in incidents in which 53 people died, and he himself had been wounded 17 times in the line of duty. By May 1934, Clyde Barrow had 16 active warrants against him across four states.
Hamer, who had begun tracking the couple on February 12, studied their travel patterns and discovered they moved in a large circular route through five Midwestern states, relying on crossing state lines because local officers generally could not pursue outside their jurisdictions. Hamer believed the gang would soon reconnect with Henry Methvin’s family in Louisiana. The posse consisted of six officers: Hamer, Ted Hinton, Bob Alcorn, and B. M.
Gault from Texas, and Sheriff Henderson Jordan and Deputy Prentice Morel Oakley from Louisiana. On May 21, they learned that Bonnie and Clyde were expected to visit the Methvin home. The posse set up an ambush along Louisiana Highway 154, just south of Gibsland. The officers hid in the roadside brush and waited through the entire day of May 22 without seeing the couple.
By the next morning, they were nearly ready to abandon the stakeout. Methvin had agreed to park his truck along the road, hoping Clyde would stop to speak with him and bring the Ford close enough for the concealed posse to act. Moments later, the Ford V8 appeared and slowed at the sight of the truck. The officers opened fire while the car was still moving.
Both Bonnie and Clyde were killed instantly. The injuries they suffered that day would have been fatal regardless of the medical care available at the time. Bonnie and Clyde had wished to be buried next to each other, but Bonnie’s family refused, and her mother was unable to bring her body home because of the enormous crowd surrounding the Parker residence. More than 20,000 people attended Bonnie’s funeral on May 26.
Floral arrangements arrived from across the country, some carrying cards claiming to be from outlaws such as Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger. The Dallas newspapers alone had sold an estimated 500,000 copies covering the end of the couple’s run. Bonnie was first buried in Fishtrap Cemetery and later moved in 1945 to Crown Hill Cemetery in Dallas. Clyde’s funeral was private and held at sunset on May 25.
He was buried in Western Heights Cemetery in Dallas beside his brother Buck. The two brothers share a single granite headstone engraved with the epitaph Clyde himself had chosen: Gone but not forgotten.