The Irresistible Bonnie Parker

Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker began in 1933 what a high note was for them. Clyde and a group of police officers robbed and opened fire in and around Dallas, and Clyde barely escaped a police ambush at a friend's west Dallas home where they had been on the run for months. But after he escaped (killing a sheriff's deputy in the process), he and Bonnie roamed Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri for three months with partner W.D. Jones, anonymously and Not in a hurry. RELATED CONTENT This period took place during the six-day hostage standoff that led to "Stockholm Syndrome" among the men and the Molls

This period is closest to Clyde's release from a Texas prison in February 1932 The carefree life of crime the couple envisioned after the farm was paroled. They were not subject to any organized pursuit, traveling from town to town, stealing cash and food as needed. They eat on the roadside or in rented rooms. Bonnie felt safe enough to ditch her flats (easier to run in) for her preferred heels.

Later, Clyde's sister Mary would mused that during those months, members of the so-called Barrow Gang wielded screwdrivers more often than they carried guns. They use this tool to change license plates to escape their identity as car thieves. Clyde drove; Bonnie drove. W. He is often invited to be the photographer.

Clyde and Bonnie loved posing for pictures. Sometimes they pose as innocent as they would in a Dallas amusement park photo studio (when the guns they brandish are toys). A photo taken by W.D. shows Bonnie posing with a gun in her hand and a cigar in her mouth. "Bonnie smoked, but... I gave her the cigar," he later said.

At that moment, the Barrow Gang's fame was concentrated in Texas, with faint radiances reaching into New Mexico and Oklahoma. parts of Maryland.

On April 13, 1933, police in Joplin, Missouri, raided an apartment in that town. Some bootleggers were found there (Prohibition wasn't quite over in Missouri; beer was legal, liquor was not.) Instead, they found Clyde, Bonnie, and W.D., along with Clyde's brother Buck and Sister-in-law Blanche, who met with the others after Buck himself was released from prison, a firefight broke out in which two policemen were shot, although W.D. was shot in the side (from which he would recover. came over), but all five members of the handcart party escaped and Clyde drove them to Clover, Texas, covering nearly 600 miles overnight with only their smoking guns and clothes. .

Back at the Joplin apartment, police discovered a camera and some undeveloped film, which produced a series of photos depicting the five fugitives during the raid. Two days later, Joplin Universal released several photos, including one of Bonnie with a gun and a cigar, which were then sent over the wire.

Joplin's photo was introduced to the nation. The new crime superstar. There were others, of course, Al Capone, Ma Barker, John Dillinger, Handsome Floyd, but in Clyde and Bonnie, the public had something new to think about: the idea of ??illicit sex. The two were young, traveling together, without the benefits of marriage, and while the ladies were smoking, the girl smoked a cigar, Freudian innuendo, etc.

Article about the two. Soon appearing in magazines such as True Detective Mysteries, Bonnie and Clyde were on their way to becoming a pair of hypochondriac folk heroes in Texas and Oklahoma. Even if you didn't approve of them, you had to envy them a little to be so handsome, wealthy and happy, recalled former House Speaker Jim Wright, who grew up in Homer.

But the couple's last 13 months overshadowed their new image. They spent some time in a gang of gangsters. (They eventually parted ways with W.D., who was jailed that November for killing a sheriff's deputy.) They robbed, or attempted to rob, the small town's banks and mom-and-pop stores. They sometimes break into the gumball machine for food money. Their reputation made them targets for police in the Midwest and Southwest.

In February 1934, authorities in the Lone Star State hired former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer to track them down and obtain information from the family of a Barrow gang member, which he did. On May 23, 1934, 75 years ago next month, Clyde and Bonnie were alone when they drove a stolen Ford sedan into a fatal collision with a police car outside Gibbsland, Louisiana. . He is 24 years old and she is 23 years old.

The allure of their images outlasts them. Ten thousand people passed by the funeral parlor where Clyde's body lay; Bonnie's mother estimated that twice as many people passed by her coffin. Later, an entrepreneur bought the bullet-riddled Ford and toured it for several years in the early 1940s. People lined up to see it.

Jeff Quinn, a former investigative reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, has written 14 books of fiction and nonfiction.

Adapted from "Let's Go" by Jeff Quinn.

Copyright ? 2009 Jeff Guinn. Reprinted with permission from Simon & Schuster, New York, Bonnie and Clyde (in a photo of the owner of a stolen car behind them) were brutally murdered in a police ambush in Louisiana 75 years ago. (Buddy Barrow Collection) "People like to say the cigars are fake," said W.D. Jones, who seized Bonnie's photo during a police raid. (Bettmann/Corbis) An entrepreneur keeps the car where Bonnie and Clyde were killed at the carnival track.

(National Crime Museum