On May 23, 1934, a six-man posse hidden in the bushes along a Louisiana highway heard a vehicle approaching at high speed. As the Ford V8 slowed near their position, the officers opened fire, firing roughly 130 rounds into the car. Clyde Barrow was killed instantly by a bullet to the head, and Bonnie Parker, seated beside him, was also riddled with bullets. The ambush ended the criminal careers of the couple who had become the most infamous outlaws of the Depression era.
Bonnie Elizabeth Parker was born in 1910 in Rowena, Texas, the second of three children. Her father, a bricklayer, died when she was just four years old, and her widowed mother moved the family to Cement City, an industrial suburb of West Dallas, where she worked as a seamstress. As an adult, Bonnie wrote poetry, including a piece that later became known as “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde. ”
In high school, Bonnie met Roy Thornton, and on September 25, 1926, just days before her 16th birthday, the couple dropped out of school and married.
The marriage was brief, and although they never divorced, their paths never crossed again after January 1929. Bonnie returned to Dallas to live with her mother and worked as a waitress, where a postal worker named Ted Hinton was one of her regular customers. Hinton later joined the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department in 1932 and eventually became a member of the posse that would hunt down Bonnie and Clyde. Clyde Barrow was born in 1909 in Ellis County, Texas, southeast of Dallas, to a poor farming family.
He was the fifth of seven children born to Henry and Cumie Walker Barrow. The family moved to Dallas in the early 1920s, part of a larger migration from rural areas to the city, and initially lived under their wagon in West Dallas until they saved enough money to buy a tent. Clyde was first arrested in late 1926 at age 17 after fleeing when police confronted him about a rental car he had failed to return on time. Soon after, he was arrested along with his brother for possession of stolen turkeys.
Between 1927 and 1929, Clyde held some legitimate jobs but also cracked safes, robbed stores, and stole cars. He met Bonnie, then 19, through a mutual friend in January 1930, and the two spent considerable time together over the following weeks. Their romance was interrupted when Clyde was arrested and convicted of auto theft. He escaped from a prison farm using a weapon Bonnie had smuggled to him, but was quickly apprehended and returned to prison.
While incarcerated, Clyde was repeatedly sexually assaulted, and he retaliated by attacking and killing his tormentor with a pipe, crushing his skull. Although it was his first murder, another inmate serving a life sentence claimed responsibility. Clyde’s mother had successfully petitioned for his release without his knowledge, and on February 2, 1932, he was freed from Eastham prison, a hardened and bitter criminal. “Something awful must have happened to him in prison,” his sister Marie said, “because he wasn’t the same person when he got out.
” Fellow inmate Ralph Fults described the transformation more bluntly: Clyde changed “from a schoolboy to a rattlesnake. ”
After his release, Clyde and Fults began a series of robberies targeting stores and gas stations to amass money and firearms for an eventual attack on Eastham prison. On April 19, 1932, Bonnie and Fults were apprehended during a failed burglary of a hardware store in Kaufman, where they intended to steal guns. Bonnie was released after a few months when a grand jury failed to indict her.
Fults was tried, convicted, and sentenced, and never rejoined the gang. On April 30, Clyde served as the getaway driver in a Hillsboro robbery during which store owner J. N. Booker was shot and killed.
Though Clyde had remained inside the car, Booker’s wife recognized him from police photographs as one of the shooters. On August 5, 1932, Clyde, Raymond Hamilton, and Ross Dyer were drinking moonshine in the parking lot of a country dance in Stringtown, Oklahoma, when Sheriff C. G. Maxwell and Deputy Eugene Seymour approached them.
Clyde and Hamilton opened fire, killing Moore—the first of nine law enforcement officers Clyde and his gang would murder—and severely injuring Maxwell. W. D. Jones, who had known Clyde’s family since childhood, joined Bonnie and Clyde on Christmas Eve 1932 at age 16, and the three fled Dallas that night.
On Christmas Day, Jones and Clyde murdered Doyle Johnson, a young family man, while stealing his car in Temple. On January 6, 1933, Clyde killed Tarrant County Deputy Malcolm Davis when he, Bonnie, and Jones wandered into a police trap set for another criminal. By April, the gang had killed five people. Clyde’s brother Buck was granted a full pardon and released from prison on March 22, 1933.
He and his wife Blanche joined Bonnie, Clyde, and Jones in a temporary hideout at Oak Ridge Drive in Joplin, Missouri. In the quiet neighborhood, the group played loud, alcohol-fueled card games late into the night. On April 13, police assembled a five-man team to confront suspected bootleggers at the address. The Barrow brothers and Jones opened fire, killing Detective Harry L.
McGinnis and fatally wounding Constable J. W. Harriman. The group escaped Joplin but left most of their belongings behind, including books, parole papers, a large arsenal of weapons, a handwritten poem by Bonnie, and a camera with undeveloped film.
The gang robbed a bank in Okabena, Minnesota, in May after a failed attempt in Lucerne, Indiana. They also kidnapped Dillard Darby and Sophia Stone in Ruston, Louisiana, while stealing Darby’s car, one of several incidents in which they abducted police officers or robbery victims between 1932 and 1934. They usually released their hostages far from home, sometimes with money to help them return. The gang shot anyone who got in their way, whether police officer or innocent civilian.
The cold-blooded nature of their murders eventually opened the public’s eyes to the reality of their crimes. On June 10, 1933, while driving near Wellington, Texas, Clyde failed to see warning signs at a bridge under construction, and the car flipped into a ravine. Bonnie was injured and could not walk, either hopping on her good leg or being carried by Clyde. They enlisted the help of a nearby farm family before kidnapping Collinsworth County Sheriff George Corry and city marshal Paul Hardy, chaining them to a tree outside Erick, Oklahoma.
Buck and Jones then robbed a bank and murdered Alma, Arkansas Town Marshal Henry D. Humphrey, even as Bonnie remained in critical condition. In July 1933, the gang stayed at the Red Crown Tourist Court south of Platte City, Missouri. Clyde and Jones went shopping for bandages, crackers, cheese, and atropine sulfate to treat Bonnie’s injured leg.
The druggist contacted Sheriff Holt Coffey, who placed the cabins under surveillance. Law enforcement in Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas had warned Coffey to watch for strangers seeking such supplies. Captain Baxter was contacted, and reinforcements from Kansas City, including an armored car, were requested. At 11 p.
m. , Sheriff Coffey led officers to the cabins. The gang evaded the law once more in the ensuing gunfight, but Buck had been wounded by a bullet that blasted a large hole in his forehead, exposing his injured brain, and Blanche was nearly blinded in both eyes by glass fragments. On July 24, the gang camped at Dexfield Park, an abandoned amusement park near Dexter, Iowa.
After locals noticed their bloody bandages, officers determined the campers were the Barrow gang. Local police and about 100 spectators surrounded the group, and the Barrows were soon attacked. Clyde, Bonnie, and Jones escaped on foot, but Buck was shot in the back and apprehended along with his wife. He died five days later at King’s Daughters Hospital in Perry, Iowa, from his head injury and pneumonia.
The gang risked a run to Dallas in early September to see their families for the first time in four months. Jones parted ways with them and headed to Houston, where his mother had relocated. On November 16, he was arrested without incident and returned to Dallas. On November 22, the gang narrowly avoided arrest while attempting to meet family members near Sowers, Texas.
Deputy Bob Alcorn and Deputy Ted Hinton were waiting nearby. Clyde spotted the trap as he drove up and passed his family’s car, at which point the officers stood up and opened fire. Bullets flew through the car, striking both Bonnie and Clyde in the legs, but they escaped. On November 28, a Dallas grand jury indicted Bonnie and Clyde for the murder of Tarrant County Deputy Malcolm Davis, nearly 10 months earlier.
It was Bonnie’s first murder warrant. Clyde orchestrated the escape of Hamilton, Methvin, and several others in the Eastham breakout on January 16, 1934. During the escape, gang member Joe Palmer shot Major Joe Crowson, who died a few days later in the hospital. The Texas Department of Corrections approached former Texas Ranger Captain Frank Hamer and convinced him to pursue the Barrow gang.
Although retired, Hamer’s commission was still active. He accepted the assignment as a Texas Highway Patrol officer and was later assigned to the prison system as a special investigator, tasked with bringing down the gang. By May 1934, Clyde had 16 outstanding warrants in four states for multiple counts of robbery, auto theft, theft, escape, assault, and murder. Hamer had studied the gang’s movements and discovered that they swung in a circle around the edges of five Midwestern states, taking advantage of the state line rule that prohibited officers from pursuing a fugitive into another jurisdiction.
Because Barrow’s movements were consistent, Hamer plotted his path and predicted where he would go. On May 21, the four Texas posse members were in Shreveport when they learned that Bonnie and Clyde were planning to visit Ivy Methvin in Bienville Parish. The entire posse planned an ambush on Louisiana State Highway 154 south of Gibsland, heading toward Sailes. Hinton stated that the officers arrived at 9 p.
m. and stayed until the next day with no sign of the fugitives. On May 23 around 9:15 a. m.
, the posse was still hidden in the bushes and about to give up when they heard a vehicle approaching at high speed. They hoped Barrow would stop to speak with Methvin, positioning their vehicle near the posse’s position in the bushes. The vehicle turned out to be a Ford V8 with Barrow behind the wheel, and he slowed down as planned. While the vehicle was still moving, the six cops opened fire.
Oakley took the first shot, and Barrow was killed instantly after being shot in the head. The officers fired approximately 130 rounds, emptying their weapons into the car. During their earlier run-ins with the law, Bonnie and Clyde had received several bullet wounds.
This was not one of those run-ins—it was the end of the road.