Bonnie and Clyde

• 1. Introduction

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  Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, together known as Bonnie and Clyde, died on the 23rd of May 1934 on Louisiana Highway 154 in Bienville Parish. Six lawmen crouched in the roadside bushes as a car came toward them at high speed. They fired about 130 rounds. The gunfire was reportedly so loud that the posse stayed temporarily deaf for the rest of the afternoon.

  For two years before that morning, the couple and their shifting gang had roamed the central United States during the Great Depression. They committed robberies, kidnappings and murders. The pair are believed to have killed at least nine police officers and three civilians. The American press followed their trail, and readers followed the press.

  How did two poor Texans become front-page figures across the country? What happened to Clyde Barrow behind prison walls that left the people who knew him unable to recognize him? Why did newspapers print lurid stories about Bonnie that she tried to deny? Who was the retired lawman who spent months a town or two behind them, and what became of everyone around the pair? And why does the phrase "Bonnie and Clyde" now describe loyalty between two people?

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• 2. Two Texas Lives

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  Bonnie Elizabeth Parker was born on the 1st of October 1910 in Rowena, Texas, the second of three children. Her father, a bricklayer named Charles Robert Parker, died when she was four. Her mother, Emma, worked as a seamstress and moved the family into her own parents' home in Cement City, an industrial suburb of West Dallas. Bonnie was a bright child who thrived on attention. She loved performing on stage and dreamed of becoming an actress. As an adult she wrote poems, among them The Story of Suicide Sal and The Trail's End, which is better known as The Story of Bonnie and Clyde.

  In her second year of high school, Bonnie met a young man named Roy Thornton. The two dropped out and married on the 25th of September 1926, six days before her sixteenth birthday. His frequent absences and brushes with the law left the marriage short-lived. They never divorced, but they never saw each other again after January 1929. She was still wearing the ring he gave her when she died. Thornton was in prison when he heard the news, and he said, "I'm glad they jumped out like they did. It's much better than being caught."

  After leaving Thornton, Bonnie moved back in with her mother and waited tables in Dallas. One of her regular customers was a postal worker named Ted Hinton. In 1932 Hinton joined the Dallas County Sheriff's Department, and he would later sit in the posse that killed her. In early 1929, at the age of eighteen, Bonnie briefly kept a diary. It speaks of loneliness, impatience with life in Dallas and a love of photography.

  Clyde Chestnut Barrow was born on the 24th of March 1909 in Telico, Texas, near Dallas, into a poor farming family. He was the fifth of seven children of Henry Basil Barrow and Cumie Talitha Walker. In the early 1920s the family joined the wider drift from farms to the city and settled in the slums of West Dallas. They spent their first months there living under their wagon, until they could afford to buy a tent.

  Clyde was first arrested in late 1926, at seventeen, after he ran from police who confronted him about a rental car he had failed to return on time. His second arrest came soon afterward, alongside his brother Buck, over some stolen turkeys. He held a few legitimate jobs between 1927 and 1929. During those years he also cracked safes, robbed stores and stole cars.

  Accounts of how the couple met differ. One of the more credible versions places it on the 5th of January 1930 at 105 Herbert Street in West Dallas, the home of Clyde's friend Clarence Clay. Clyde was twenty and Bonnie was nineteen. She was out of work and staying with a friend to help her recover from a broken arm. Clyde dropped by while Bonnie was in the kitchen making hot chocolate.

  Their romance was interrupted when Clyde was arrested and convicted of auto theft. On the 11th of March 1930 he escaped from the McLennan County jail in Waco, using a gun that Bonnie had smuggled in. He was recaptured on the 18th of March and sent to Huntsville State Prison in April. In September, at the age of twenty-one, he was assigned to the Eastham Prison Farm.

  At Eastham, Clyde was sexually assaulted. He retaliated by attacking his tormentor with a pipe and crushing his skull. It was his first murder, although another inmate who was already serving a life sentence claimed responsibility.

  In late January 1932, hoping to avoid hard labor in the fields, Clyde had two toes amputated. Either another inmate did it or he did it himself. He limped for the rest of his life, which slowed him down and made it harder to outrun the law. Unknown to him, his mother had petitioned for his release, and he went free six days after the injury. He was paroled from Eastham on the 2nd of February 1932.

  His sister Marie said, "Something awful sure must have happened to him in prison because he wasn't the same person when he got out." Fellow inmate Ralph Fults said he watched Clyde "change from a school boy to a rattlesnake". According to John Neal Phillips, Clyde's goal was not fame or fortune from banks. It was revenge against the Texas prison system for the abuses he had suffered. His first target was already chosen, and it was Eastham itself.

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• 3. Joplin Photographs

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  The M1918 Browning automatic rifle, known as the BAR, was Clyde Barrow's favorite weapon. After his release he robbed grocery stores and gas stations far more often than banks. Only about ten bank robberies are attributed to him and his gang. With Ralph Fults he began robbing stores to collect enough money and firepower for a raid on Eastham. On the 19th of April 1932, Bonnie and Fults were captured in a failed hardware store burglary in Kaufman, where they had hoped to steal firearms. Fults was tried, convicted and served time, and he never rejoined the gang. Bonnie was released after a few months because a grand jury declined to indict her. She wrote poetry in Kaufman County jail, and she reunited with Clyde within a few weeks of her release.

  On the 30th of April 1932, Clyde was the getaway driver in a robbery at Hillsboro, Texas, where store owner J.N. Bucher was shot and killed. Bucher's wife identified Clyde from police photographs as one of the shooters, although he had stayed inside the car. On the 5th of August, Clyde, Raymond Hamilton and Ross Dyer were drinking moonshine at a country dance in Stringtown, Oklahoma. Sheriff C.G. Maxwell and Deputy Eugene C. Moore approached them in the parking lot. Clyde and Hamilton opened fire, killing Moore and gravely wounding Maxwell. Moore was the first law officer the gang killed, and they would eventually murder nine.

  On the 11th of October 1932 the gang allegedly killed Howard Hall during a store robbery in Sherman, Texas, though some historians consider this unlikely. W. D. Jones, a friend of the Barrow family since childhood, joined Bonnie and Clyde on Christmas Eve of 1932, at the age of sixteen. The three left Dallas that night. The next day, Jones and Clyde murdered a young family man named Doyle Johnson while stealing his car in Temple. On the 6th of January 1933, Clyde killed Tarrant County Deputy Malcolm Davis when the trio wandered into a police trap set for another criminal. By then the gang had murdered five people since April.

  On the 22nd of March 1933, Clyde's brother Buck was granted a full pardon and released from prison. He and his wife Blanche joined Bonnie, Clyde and Jones at a temporary hideout at 3347½ Oakridge Drive in Joplin, Missouri. According to family sources, Buck and Blanche came to visit and to persuade Clyde to surrender. The group held loud, alcohol-fueled card games late into the night, and Blanche recalled that they "bought a case of beer a day". The men came and went at all hours, and Clyde accidentally fired a BAR in the apartment while cleaning it. No neighbor knocked on the door, but one reported suspicions to the Joplin Police Department.

  On the 13th of April, Joplin police sent five men in two cars to confront what they believed were bootleggers. The Barrow brothers and Jones opened fire, killing Detective Harry L. McGinnis and fatally wounding Constable J. W. Harryman. Bonnie fired a BAR as the others fled. Its .30 caliber bullets hit an oak tree and blasted splinters into the face of Missouri Highway Patrol Sergeant G.B. Kahler, who had ducked behind it. The group pulled Blanche into the car from the street, where she had been chasing her dog Snow Ball. The surviving officers later testified that they fired only fourteen rounds. One hit Jones, one struck Clyde but was deflected by his suit-coat button, and one grazed Buck after ricocheting off a wall.

  The gang escaped but left most of their possessions behind. These included Buck's parole papers, a large arsenal of weapons, a handwritten poem by Bonnie and a camera holding several rolls of undeveloped film. Police had the film developed at The Joplin Globe. The pictures showed Clyde, Bonnie and Jones posing and pointing weapons at one another. The Globe sent the poem and the photos over the newswire, including one of Bonnie clenching a cigar in her teeth with a pistol in her hand. The Barrow Gang became front-page news throughout the United States.

  Writer Jeff Guinn, in his book Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, noted that John Dillinger had matinee-idol good looks and Pretty Boy Floyd had the best possible nickname. The Joplin photos, he wrote, introduced new criminal superstars with "the most titillating trademark of all". He added that Clyde and Bonnie were wild and young, and undoubtedly slept together.

  Hinton's memoir, Ambush: The Real Story of Bonnie and Clyde, appeared posthumously in 1979. In it he suggests that the cigar was a ruse, added by darkroom staff at the Joplin Globe while they prepared the photo for publication. Guinn says some people who knew Hinton suspect he became delusional late in life. The cigar would come up again in 1934, in a plea from Bonnie herself.

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• 4. Life on the Run

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  For about three months after Joplin, the gang ranged from Texas as far north as Minnesota. In May 1933 they tried to rob the bank in Lucerne, Indiana, and robbed the bank in Okabena, Minnesota. At Ruston, Louisiana, they kidnapped Dillard Darby and Sophia Stone while stealing Darby's car. It was one of several occasions between 1932 and 1934 when they kidnapped police officers or robbery victims. They usually released their hostages far from home, sometimes with money to help them return.

  Notoriety made daily life harder. Blanche, writing from prison in the late 1930s, described a gang that was desperate and discontented. Restaurants and motels were no longer safe, so the group cooked over campfires and bathed in cold streams. Five people in one car around the clock produced vicious bickering. At one point Jones drove off in a stolen car and stayed away until the 8th of June.

  On the 10th of June 1933, near Wellington, Texas, Clyde failed to see the warning signs at a bridge under construction. The car flipped into a ravine. Sources disagree about whether a gasoline fire broke out or battery acid from under the floorboards soaked Bonnie. Either way, she suffered third-degree burns to her right leg, so severe that the muscles contracted and the leg drew up. Jones recalled, "She'd been burned so bad none of us thought she was gonna live. The hide on her right leg was gone from her hip down to her ankle. I could see the bone at places." Bonnie could hardly walk, and she either hopped on her good leg or was carried by Clyde.

  A nearby farm family helped the injured group. The gang then kidnapped Collinsworth County Sheriff George Corry and City Marshal Paul Hardy, leaving them handcuffed to a tree outside Erick, Oklahoma. They met up with Buck and Blanche and hid in a tourist court near Fort Smith, Arkansas, nursing Bonnie's burns. There Buck and Jones bungled a robbery and murdered Town Marshal Henry D. Humphrey in Alma, Arkansas. The gang had to flee despite Bonnie's grave condition.

  In July 1933 they checked into the Red Crown Tourist Court south of Platte City, Missouri, renting both of its brick cabins, which were joined by garages. Beside it stood the Red Crown Tavern, a popular restaurant among Missouri Highway Patrolmen. Blanche registered three guests, but owner Neal Houser could see five people getting out of the car. The driver backed into the garage "gangster style" for a quick getaway. Blanche paid for cabins and dinners in coins, and her jodhpur riding breeches were still remembered by eyewitnesses forty years later. The next day Houser noticed newspapers taped over the cabin windows. He told Captain William Baxter of the Highway Patrol, a patron of his restaurant.

  Clyde and Jones went into town for bandages, crackers, cheese and atropine sulfate to treat Bonnie's leg. The druggist contacted Sheriff Holt Coffey, who had been warned by Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas authorities to watch for strangers buying such supplies. Baxter called for reinforcements from Kansas City, including an armored car. At 11 p.m. on the 20th of July 1933, Coffey led officers toward the cabins with Thompson submachine guns. Their .45 caliber weapons were no match for Clyde's .30 caliber BAR, stolen on the 7th of July from the National Guard armory at Enid, Oklahoma. The gang escaped when a bullet short-circuited the horn on the armored car and officers mistook it for a cease-fire signal. Buck was hit by a bullet that blasted a large hole in his forehead and exposed his brain. Blanche was nearly blinded by glass fragments.

  On the 24th of July 1933 the gang camped at Dexfield Park, an abandoned amusement park near Dexter, Iowa. Buck was sometimes semiconscious and even talked and ate. His wound and loss of blood were so severe, though, that Clyde and Jones dug a grave for him. Residents noticed the bloody bandages, and local police worked out who the campers were. Police and about 100 spectators surrounded the group. Clyde, Bonnie and Jones escaped on foot. Buck was shot in the back, and he and Blanche were captured. Buck died five days later at Kings Daughters Hospital in Perry, Iowa, of his head wound and pneumonia after surgery.

  On the 22nd of November 1933, near Sowers, Texas, Clyde and Bonnie narrowly evaded arrest while trying to meet family members. Dallas Sheriff Smoot Schmid, Deputy Bob Alcorn and Deputy Ted Hinton lay in wait. Clyde sensed a trap and drove past his family's car. Schmid called "Halt!" and the lawmen opened fire with machine guns and a BAR. Schmid's Thompson jammed on the first round, and he never got off a shot. The posse had parked their cars at a distance, so pursuit was impossible. A BAR bullet passed through the couple's car and struck the legs of both Clyde and Bonnie, but they escaped that night. Six days later a Dallas grand jury indicted them for the murder of Deputy Davis, nearly ten months earlier. It was Bonnie's first warrant for murder.

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• 5. Grapevine Outcry

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  On Easter Sunday, the 1st of April 1934, Texas Highway Patrolmen H.D. Murphy and Edward Bryant Wheeler stopped their motorcycles at the intersection of Route 114 and Dove Road, near Grapevine, Texas. They thought a motorist needed help. Clyde and either Henry Methvin or Bonnie opened fire with a shotgun and a handgun, killing both officers. An eyewitness said Bonnie fired the fatal shots, and the story received widespread coverage. Methvin later claimed that he fired the first shot after wrongly assuming Clyde wanted the officers killed. Clyde then joined in, firing at Murphy.

  Through that spring, the killings were retold in exaggerated detail, and the retellings shaped public opinion. All four Dallas daily papers seized on the account of a farmer who claimed to have seen Bonnie laugh as Murphy's head "bounced like a rubber ball" on the ground. Reports said police found a cigar butt "with tiny teeth marks", supposedly Bonnie's. Days later, Murphy's fiancée wore her intended wedding dress to his funeral, and the photographs and coverage deepened the anger. The eyewitness's ever-changing story was soon discredited. Even so, the publicity increased the public clamor for the gang to be exterminated.

  Texas Highway Patrol boss L.G. Phares offered a reward of $1,000 for "the dead bodies of the Grapevine slayers". Texas Governor Ma Ferguson added $500 for each of the two killers. For the first time, there was a specific price on Bonnie's head, since she was so widely believed to have shot Murphy.

  Five days later, Clyde and Methvin murdered sixty-year-old Constable William "Cal" Campbell, a widower and father, near Commerce, Oklahoma. They kidnapped Commerce police chief Percy Boyd and crossed the state line into Kansas. There they released him, giving him a clean shirt, a few dollars and a request from Bonnie to tell the world that she did not smoke cigars. Boyd identified both Clyde and Bonnie to authorities but never learned Methvin's name. The resulting arrest warrant named "Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker and John Doe".

  Historian Knight writes, "For the first time, Bonnie was seen as a killer, actually pulling the trigger". He adds, "Whatever chance she had for clemency had just been reduced." The Dallas Journal ran a cartoon on its editorial page showing an empty electric chair with a sign saying "Reserved", and beneath it the words "Clyde and Bonnie". By May 1934, Clyde had sixteen warrants outstanding against him in four states.

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• 6. Hamer's Posse

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  On the 16th of January 1934, Clyde orchestrated the escape of Raymond Hamilton, Henry Methvin and several others from Eastham in what became known as the "Eastham Breakout". The raid brought negative publicity to Texas. Phillips suggests it achieved Clyde's overarching goal of revenge on the Texas Department of Corrections. During the escape, gang member Joe Palmer shot Major Joe Crowson, who died a few days later in a hospital. This attack drew the full power of the Texas and federal governments into the manhunt. As Crowson struggled for life, prison chief Lee Simmons reportedly promised him that everyone involved in the breakout would be hunted down and killed. All of them eventually were, except for Methvin, who saved his life by turning on the gang and setting up the ambush.

  The Texas Department of Corrections persuaded former Texas Ranger Captain Frank Hamer to take the job. He was retired, but his commission had not expired. He accepted the assignment as a Texas Highway Patrol officer, secondarily assigned to the prison system as a special investigator. Hamer was tall, burly and taciturn, unimpressed by authority and driven by an "inflexible adherence to right, or what he thinks is right". He was officially credited with 53 kills and had suffered seventeen wounds. Three of his four brothers were also Texas Rangers. Brother Harrison was the best shot, but Frank was considered the most tenacious.

  Simmons always said publicly that Hamer was his first choice. There is evidence that he first approached two other Rangers, who declined because they were reluctant to shoot a woman. Starting in February, Hamer became the constant shadow of Clyde and Bonnie, living out of his car a town or two behind them. He studied their movements and found that the gang swung in a circle around the edges of five midwestern states. They exploited the "state line" rule, which prevented officers from pursuing a fugitive into another jurisdiction. Clyde was consistent in his habits, so Hamer charted his path and predicted where he would go.

  The gang's itinerary centered on family visits, and they were due to see Methvin's family in Louisiana. Unknown to Hamer, Clyde had named the home of Methvin's parents as a rendezvous in case the group was separated. Methvin had become separated from the gang in Shreveport. The posse had six members. Hamer, Hinton, Alcorn and B.M. "Maney" Gault came from Texas, and Henderson Jordan and Prentiss Morel Oakley came from Louisiana. On the 21st of May, the four Texans were in Shreveport when they learned that Clyde and Bonnie planned to visit Methvin's father Ivy in Bienville Parish that evening. The full posse set up along Louisiana State Highway 154, south of Gibsland toward Sailes. Hinton recounted that they were in place by 9 p.m. and waited through all of the 22nd with no sign of the pair. Other accounts say the officers set up on the evening of the 22nd.

  In their official report, the posse stated that they had persuaded Methvin to park his truck on the shoulder of the road that morning. They hoped Clyde would stop to speak with him, putting the car close to their hiding place. The approaching vehicle proved to be a Ford V8 with Clyde at the wheel, and he slowed down as hoped. The six lawmen fired while it was still moving. Oakley fired first, probably before any order was given. Clyde was shot in the head and died instantly from that first bullet, while Hinton reported hearing Bonnie scream.

  Hinton and Alcorn described the scene in a joint statement. "They were emptied before the car got even with us. Then we used shotguns," they said. The car rolled into a ditch about 50 yards down the road. "We kept shooting at the car even after it stopped. We weren't taking any chances." Film footage shot by one of the deputies afterward showed 112 bullet holes in the vehicle, and around thirty had struck the couple. Parish coroner J. L. Wade listed seventeen entrance wounds on Clyde's body and twenty-six on Bonnie's. One had severed Clyde's spinal column.

  Inside the car, police found an arsenal of stolen automatic rifles, sawed-off semi-automatic shotguns, assorted handguns and several thousand rounds of ammunition. There were also fifteen sets of license plates from various states. Hamer said, "I hate to bust the cap on a woman, especially when she was sitting down. However, if it wouldn't have been her, it would have been us."

  The posse members came from three organizations and distrusted one another. Hamer and Gault worked for the Texas Department of Corrections, Hinton and Alcorn were with the Dallas Sheriff's office, and Jordan and Oakley were from Bienville Parish. Each pair had its own agenda and told its own version. The four Texans had vetoed calling out a warning before firing, noting that the gang had always shot its way out, as at Platte City, Dexfield Park and Sowers. Accounts conflict over who called out. Jordan was reported to have called to Clyde, Alcorn said Hamer did, and Hinton claimed Alcorn did. In another report, each of them said that two of them had done it. Oakley later admitted firing too early.

  Hinton's memoir offers a different version of the role of Methvin's father. He said the posse had tied Ivy to a tree the night before, to keep him from warning the couple. According to Hinton, Hamer promised that Ivy's son would escape prosecution for the Grapevine murders if Ivy kept quiet, and Hamer swore every posse member to secrecy. Other accounts place Ivy at the center of the action, waving down the car from the road. With the shooting over, Hamer, Hinton, Jordan and Oakley drove into town to telephone their bosses.

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• 7. Arcadia Crowds

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  Back at the car, Alcorn and Gault had been left to guard the bodies, but they soon lost control of the curious crowd. One woman cut off bloody locks of Bonnie's hair and pieces of her dress, which were later sold as souvenirs. When Hinton returned, he was sickened to find a man trying to cut off Clyde's trigger finger. The coroner reported that nearly everyone had begun collecting shell casings, slivers of glass and bloody scraps of clothing. One eager man had opened his pocketknife and was reaching into the car to cut off Clyde's left ear. Hamer and Hinton got the crowd under control and ended what was described as a circus-like atmosphere.

  The posse towed the Ford, with the bodies still inside, to the Conger Furniture Store & Funeral Parlor in downtown Arcadia. Undertaker C. F. "Boots" Bailey began embalming in a small preparation room at the back, since furniture stores and undertakers commonly shared space then. He struggled because of the many bullet holes. The crowd in Arcadia reportedly swelled from 2,000 to 12,000 within hours, arriving by carriage, horseback, plane and train. Sandwiches sold out, and the price of beer jumped from 15 cents to 25 cents a bottle. Henry Barrow identified his son's body and then sat weeping in a rocking chair in the furniture store.

  Dillard Darby, now identified as H. D. Darby, an undertaker at the McClure Funeral Parlor, and home demonstration agent Sophia Stone came from Ruston to identify the bodies. Both had been kidnapped by the gang in 1933. Bonnie had reportedly laughed when she learned Darby was an undertaker and remarked that maybe he would work on her corpse one day. He ended up assisting Bailey with the embalming.

  Clyde and Bonnie had wished to be buried side by side, but the Parker family would not allow it. Bonnie's mother wanted to grant her daughter's last wish to be brought home, but mobs surrounding the Parker house made that impossible. More than 20,000 people attended Bonnie's funeral on the 26th of May, and her family struggled to reach the gravesite. Flowers came from everywhere, including some with cards allegedly from Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger. The largest tribute was sent by a group of Dallas city newsboys, since the sudden end of Bonnie and Clyde sold 500,000 newspapers in Dallas alone. She was buried at Fishtrap Cemetery, and in 1945 her body was moved to the new Crown Hill Cemetery in Dallas.

  Clyde's private funeral was held at sunset on the 25th of May, with thousands gathered outside both Dallas funeral homes. He was buried in Western Heights Cemetery in Dallas, next to his brother Marvin. The brothers share a single granite marker with an epitaph chosen by Clyde, which simply reads "gone but not forgotten". In 2018, Bonnie's niece and last known surviving relative campaigned to have her buried next to Clyde.

  The American National Insurance Company of Galveston, Texas, paid the life insurance policies on both in full. Sheriff Schmid had promised Hinton that the reward would total $26,000, but most organizations that pledged funds reneged. Each of the six lawmen ended up with $200.23. The posse was told to take whatever they wanted from the confiscated items in the car. Hamer kept the stolen guns and ammunition and a box of fishing tackle. In July, Clyde's mother Cumie wrote to him, "You don't ever want to forget my boy was never tried in no court for murder, and no one is guilty until proven guilty by some court so I hope you will answer this letter and also return the guns I am asking for." There is no record of any response. Alcorn took Clyde's saxophone but later returned it to the Barrow family. Bonnie's clothing was taken and later sold as souvenirs.

  Jordan tried to keep the car, but its legal owner, Ruth Warren of Topeka, Kansas, sued him. He relented in August 1934, and she collected it still covered in blood and human tissue. The engine still ran. The bullet-riddled Ford then toured fairs, amusement parks and flea markets for three decades, and visitors paid one dollar to sit in it. In 1988 a casino near Las Vegas bought it for about $250,000. Today it is displayed behind glass at the Primm Valley Resort in Primm, Nevada, alongside the shirt Clyde was wearing when he died.

  A letter to Henry Ford, dated the 10th of April 1934 from Tulsa, Oklahoma, praises the car. "For sustained speed and freedom from trouble the Ford has got every other car skinned," it says. There are doubts about the letter's authenticity.

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• 8. Afterlives

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  In February 1935, Dallas and federal authorities tried twenty family members and friends for aiding Clyde and Bonnie, in what became known as the "harboring trial". All twenty pleaded guilty or were found guilty. The two mothers were jailed for thirty days. Floyd Hamilton, brother of Raymond, got two years, while Clyde's teenage sister Marie was held for one hour. Other defendants included Blanche, Jones, Methvin and Bonnie's sister Billie.

  Blanche had been permanently blinded in her left eye at Dexfield Park. She was convicted of assault with intent to kill and sentenced to ten years, but was paroled in 1939 for good behavior. She returned to Dallas, cared for her invalid father and married Eddie Frasure in 1940. She worked as a taxi dispatcher and a beautician, and she lived in peace with her husband until he died of cancer in 1969. Warren Beatty approached her about the rights to her name for the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. She objected to Estelle Parsons's Academy Award-winning portrayal of her but remained a firm friend of Beatty. Blanche died of cancer at the age of 77 on the 24th of December 1988.

  Hamilton and Palmer, who had escaped Eastham in January 1934, were recaptured. Both were convicted of murder and executed in the electric chair at Huntsville State Prison on the 10th of May 1935. W.D. Jones was captured in Houston, where he had gone to pick cotton, and dictated a confession claiming Clyde and Bonnie had held him prisoner. Some of his more lurid lies concerned the gang's sex lives, and they gave rise to many stories about Clyde's ambiguous sexuality. Jones was convicted of Doyle Johnson's murder and served a lenient fifteen years. He was killed on the 20th of August 1974, in a misunderstanding with a jealous boyfriend of a woman he was trying to help.

  Methvin was convicted in Oklahoma of Constable Campbell's murder, paroled in 1942, and killed by a train in 1948. He had fallen asleep drunk on the tracks, although some have speculated that he was pushed. His father Ivy was killed in 1946 by a hit-and-run driver.

  Frank Hamer returned to a quiet life as a freelance security consultant for oil companies. According to Guinn, his reputation suffered after Gibsland, because many felt he had not given the couple a fair chance to surrender. In 1948 he and Governor Coke Stevenson unsuccessfully challenged Lyndon Johnson's vote total in the election for the United States Senate. Hamer died in 1955 at the age of 71. Bob Alcorn died on the 23rd of May 1964, thirty years to the day after the ambush. Prentiss Oakley admitted to friends that he had fired prematurely, and in 1940 he succeeded Henderson Jordan as sheriff of Bienville Parish. On the 1st of April 2011, Texas officials honored patrolman Edward Bryan Wheeler with the Yellow Rose of Texas commendation, presenting a plaque and framed portrait to his last surviving sibling, 95-year-old Ella Wheeler-McLeod.

  By summer 1934, new federal statutes had made bank robbery and kidnapping federal offenses. With the FBI coordinating local authorities and two-way radios arriving in police cars, robbing and murdering became far harder than it had been weeks before. Law enforcement killed Dillinger two months after Clyde and Bonnie, Floyd three months after Dillinger, and Baby Face Nelson one month after Floyd.

  The film Bonnie and Clyde, released in 1967 and directed by Arthur Penn, starred Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. It was highly fictionalized and historically inaccurate, yet it was a critical and commercial success that revived interest in the pair and gave them a romantic aura. Jones gave an interview to Playboy during the excitement and described telling teenage boys at a drive-in showing, "Take it from an old man who was there. It was hell." The Netflix film The Highwaymen, released in 2019, told the manhunt from the lawmen's point of view.

  The pair have also inspired songs, among them Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot's 1967 single and Jay-Z and Beyoncé's 2002 single "'03 Bonnie & Clyde". Their partnership popularized the term "ride-or-die" for unwavering loyalty between two people. A 1968 Looney Tunes cartoon parodied them as rabbits stealing carrots, and an episode of The Simpsons cast Marge and Homer in the roles. Today Bonnie's niece, Rhea Leen Linder, and Clyde's nephew, Buddy Barrow, occasionally appear in the media to comment on the films and on the question of where the two should lie.

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