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Killers
in Love
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Bonnie & Clyde's
Relationship was
Based on Their
Mutual Desire to
Rob and Kill
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The Southwest's most
noted desperados during the early 1930's were Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker.
Bonnie and Clyde (or the "Bloody Barrows", as they were then commonly called)
terrorized the country, from Texas to Iowa and back, for two years, slaughtering
at least a dozen men, most of whom were peace officers. They regularly
visited Oklahoma for the purpose of committing robberies.
Raised in the slums
of West Dallas, Clyde Chestnut Barrow (or Clyde Champion, as he
preferred to be called) and Bonnie Parker Thornton apparently met in early
1930. He was the son of a former sharecropper who now ran a gas station
in West Dallas. Both Clyde and his older brother, Buck (then in Huntsville
Prison) had been arrested several times for burglary and car theft. Bonnie,
as yet, had no record, but did have a husband, Roy Thornton, who was doing
99 years at Huntsville as an habitual criminal. She briefly found solace
with Clyde Barrow but their budding romance was interrupted by police,
who hauled Barrow off to Waco, where he was wanted for a series of burglaries
and car thefts.
Clyde pleaded guilty to two burglaries and five car thefts
and was sentenced to two years, with 12 years probation. On March 11, 1930,
he escaped from the Waco jail, with two other men, William Turner and Emory
Abernathy. According to Bonnie's relatives and Clyde's fellow escapee,
William Turner, it was Bonnie who smuggled the a gun into Clyde's cell.
At any rate, Barrow and his gang left Bonnie behind and lit out for Middleton,
Ohio, where they were arrested on March 18, after robbing a railroad depot
of $57.97. The three were soon returned to Texas in chains, accompanied
by Sheriff Leslie Stegall of Waco.
Clyde's probation was revoked and, on April 21, 1930,
as Clyde Champion Barrow, No. 63527, he was received at the State Penitentiary
at Huntsville, to begin serving a 14-year sentence. Nevertheless, he was
paroled, on February 2, 1932. While in prison he chopped two toes from
his left foot to avoid a work detail.
Reunited with Bonnie, Barrow resumed his petty criminal
career. They bungled a robbery at Kaufman, Texas and Bonnie was arrested,
spending three months in the
Kaufman jail. Clyde teamed up with another young criminal named Raymond
Hamilton on a series of small holdups, one of which resulted in the murder
of John Bucher at Hillsboro, in April 1932. This was the Barrow Gang's
first known killing.
Clyde and Bonnie dropped out of the limelight for a time
but surfaced again in Texas. They robbed a refinery in Overton Township
on November 15, then on November 22 were ambushed by Dallas County deputies,
while meeting their mothers in Wise County, Texas. Bonnie and Clyde were
both wounded but escaped. Years later, interviewed by Jud Collins, Billie
Parker would say that Clyde and Bonnie then fled to Oklahoma, where their
wounds were tended by "some of Pretty Boy Floyd's people."
Numerous other robberies and killings took place over
the next two years. During that time they became the most wanted
criminals in the country. Their recklessness would soon prove their
undoing as the ring around them began to close.
Clyde and Bonnie Parker were slain in an ambush near Sailes,
Louisiana, on May 23, 1934. Accounts vary as to the circumstances and how
it came to be. Six officers were involved in the actual ambush and a seventh
was apparently involved in the negotiations with informers. All who talked
about it gave different versions but what seems to have happened is that
Henry Methvin, a close coheart, and his parents sold out Bonnie and Clyde,
in exchange for immunity for Henry from Texas and Louisiana.
Henry Methvin was not prosecuted in Texas, in spite of
the facts that he was an escaped convict and had also participated in the
murders of two highway patrolmen. He was later convicted in Oklahoma, however,
of the murder of Constable Cal Campbell. At the conclusion of two trials,
Henry was sentenced to death. On appeal, this was reduced to life imprisonment,
under the "mitigating circumstances" that he had betrayed Bonnie and Clyde.
He was paroled ten years later and was killed by a train in Sulphur, Louisiana
in 1948.
The car in which Bonnie and Clyde were killed (a Desert
Sand 1934 Ford V-8, once owned by Jesse and Ruth Warren of Topeka, Kansas)
is now owned by Whiskey Pete's hotel-casino, at Stateline, Nevada, and
is on display in the hotel lobby, complete with shattered windshield and
167 bullet holes, along with a letter, which may or may not be genuine,
mailed to Henry Ford from Tulsa, April 10, 1934: :Dear Sir: While
I still have got breath in my lungs I will tell you what a dandy car you
make. I have drove Fords exclusively when I could get away with one. For
sustained speed and freedom from trouble the Ford has got ever other car
skinned and even if my business hasn't been strickly legal it don't hurt
eny thing to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8. Yours truly, Clyde
Champion Barrow." |
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A Comment from
the Writer..
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When my oldest daughter was still in high school, she
introduced me to a very nice young man who had been giving her some attention.
He was perhaps the politest, nicest, and most clear spoken young fellow
I have ever met. I was absolutely impressed with him. He even
attended church with us a number of times.
Although, as time went by, we saw him less and less.
My daughter had lost interest in him and he moved on.
A year later this same young fellow was in every newspaper
in our side of the state. It seems that he had taken up with another
young gal, gotten involved in some rather crazy behaviour, and was now
facing murder charges along with his new girlfriend. They had met
some older man in a bar, lured him to a motel with the promise of sex with
her, killed him with a knife, and stolen over a thousand dollars in cash
out of his wallet.
They were apprehended, arrested, were found guilty, and
are both in federal prisons today because they were tried as adults.
Playing Bonnie and Clyde is not all that it's cracked up to be. |
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The mission of this not-for-profit website is to promote clear insights
and toleration regarding the many variations of primary relationships that
exist in our world. We ask for neither acceptance or approval but
hope that each visitor who reviews the pages of this site will leave them
with a better understanding of the numerous cultural, historical, preferential,
religious, sexual, and sociological approaches to coupling that have always
existed and will continue to exist as long as there are at least two human
beings living on this planet. If the effort put into creating and
maintaining this site results in others coming to the realization that
the basic human need to love and be loved takes on many forms which are
accepted by those who practice them, whether right or wrong as determined
by the personal belief system of others, then it will have served it's
purpose well. |
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