In the spring of 1933, Dillard Darby was a mortician living in Ruston, Louisiana. He was having lunch at the Brooks Boarding House when he looked out the window and saw a man get into his brand-new Ford V8 and drive away. Darby had left the keys in the ignition, and the car was only seven days old.
A woman named Sophia Stone was also eating at the boarding house. She offered to let Darby use her car to chase down the thief, but only if she could come along. Darby agreed, and the two set off in pursuit.
The car thief was W.D. Jones, a member of the Barrow Gang. Clyde Barrow was nearby, and the stolen Ford was meant to be used as a getaway car for a planned bank robbery in Ruston. The chase was fast and chaotic, and Darby and Stone quickly lost sight of the stolen vehicle.
They decided to give up and head back to town. But Clyde Barrow was angry that anyone had dared to chase his gang. He spun his car around, cut Darby off, and forced him to stop in the middle of the road. Clyde and his older brother, Buck Barrow, jumped out with guns drawn.
Also in the car were Bonnie Parker and Buck’s wife, Blanche Barrow. Clyde demanded to know why Darby and Stone had been following them. Darby explained that his new car had just been stolen. Clyde responded by hitting him in the head with the butt of his pistol.
Clyde then ordered Darby and Stone into the back seat of his own car. The gang had kidnapped them. Clyde’s first thought was to shoot them both on the road, but he changed his mind. After driving around with their captives for a while, the gang decided to let them go.
Before releasing them, Bonnie asked Darby what he did for a living. When he told her he was a mortician, she laughed. She told him he would probably enjoy embalming her and Clyde someday, and she made him promise he would. Darby agreed to just about anything at that point.
The gang dropped Darby and Stone off in Arkansas, less than an hour from where the kidnapping started. Buck Barrow gave Darby five dollars for bus fare home.
Thirteen months later, in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, near the town of Gibsland, the Barrow Gang’s luck ran out. Ivy Methvin made a deal with authorities involving his son, Henry Methvin, a member of the gang. The deal led to an ambush.
Texas Ranger Frank Hamer and his posse, which included Sheriff Henderson Jordan and Deputy Ted Hinton, set up a trap on a rural road. When Bonnie and Clyde drove into the ambush, the posse opened fire. The two outlaws were killed instantly.
Their bodies were taken to a furniture store and funeral parlor in Arcadia, Louisiana, run by Conger Furniture Store. Waiting there to handle the bodies was none other than Dillard Darby. He was joined by another mortician, C.F. Boots Bailey.
The two men faced a serious problem. Bonnie and Clyde had been hit by an enormous number of bullets. Their bodies were riddled with wounds, and the vascular systems were destroyed. When an embalmer pumps preservative fluid into a body, it travels through the veins and arteries. But if those vessels are shredded, the fluid has nowhere to go.
Boots Bailey later described the nightmare. They pumped fluid into the bodies, and it ran right back out. It was like trying to fill a bucket that had been hit with a shotgun. The bodies were leaking from every direction.
Outside the furniture store, word spread fast. Arcadia had a population of about 2,000 people, but within hours, that number reportedly swelled to 12,000. People arrived by car, by horse, and even by plane. The price of a bottle of beer jumped from 15 cents to a quarter, and ham sandwiches sold out completely.
Clyde’s father came to identify the bodies. After seeing his son, he walked into the showroom, sat down in a rocking chair that was for sale, and cried.
After Bailey and Darby did what they could, the bodies were transported to Dallas. Clyde was taken to the Sparkman-Holtz-Brand Funeral Home in downtown Dallas. Bonnie was taken to the McCamy-Campbell Funeral Home in South Dallas.
The accounts from the Dallas embalmers are stomach-turning. Bonnie’s body required hours of work. It took two hours just to pick dirt and rocks out of her hair before it could be washed. She had a tattoo on her right leg of two hearts, one spelling Roy and the other spelling Bonnie.
All the embalming fluid that had been pumped into her in Arcadia had leaked out. The Dallas embalmer spent hours bathing her. Some of the dried blood had to be scraped off, and gold dust was used to remove the rest.
That night, the embalmer noticed something called skin slip. That is a mortician’s term for when the outer layer of skin starts separating from the body because preservation has failed. By the next morning, Bonnie’s body had started to smell and turn dark. By the last day of the viewing, the notes described her as rotten. The odor was awful.
Bonnie had taken more rounds than Clyde, and her wounds were worse. Her face was badly damaged. The embalmers rebuilt it to the point where it was hard to tell. Only one bullet had gone through her brain, but several others had grazed her head, leaving three large holes in her scalp that did not penetrate the skull. Her left eye was badly blackened, so the embalmer put eye shadow on the other eye to make them match and disguise the damage.
The funerals were a massive spectacle. Around 10,000 people viewed Clyde’s body. For Bonnie, the number was closer to 20,000, and some reports say up to 40,000. The largest floral tribute came from a group of Dallas city newsboys. Their deaths sold half a million newspapers in Dallas alone.
Through all the crowds, the chaos, and the spectacle, there was still a man in the back of a furniture store in Arcadia who had done the work nobody else wanted to do. Dillard Darby had been kidnapped, pistol-whipped, and shoved into the back seat of an outlaw’s car. And he had been made to promise he would embalm Bonnie Parker someday.
He kept that promise. Bonnie Parker got exactly what she asked for. She made Dillard Darby promise, and Dillard Darby followed through. Neither of them likely thought it would ever happen, but it did.