American History Hit - Outlaws: Bonnie & Clyde

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

Just how murderous were Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow? Where did those famous photos come from? And how did the press lead to the pair's demise?Don chats to Jeff Guinn, best-selling author and historian, to find out about this notorious outlaw couple. They explore the impact of the Great Depression, the prison system and dreams of fame on Bonnie and Clyde's rise and fall.Jeff is an investigative reporter and author of several books including 'Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage'. His book on this subject is ‘Go Down Together: The True Untold Story of Bonnie And Clyde’.Produced by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long. Bonnie's poem read by Breeana Gamueda.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for $1 per month for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. You've read the story of Jesse James of how he lived and died. If you're still in need of something to read, here's the story of Bonnie and Clyde.

Now Bonnie and Clyde are the Barrow Gang, I'm sure you all have read, how they robin steel and those who squeal are usually found dying or dead. There's lots of untruths to these write-ups. They're not so ruthless as that. Their nature is raw. They hate all the law, the stool pigeon, spotters, and rats. If they try to act like citizens and rent them a nice little flat, about the third night they're invited to fight by a subgun's rat-t-tack-tap.

Someday they'll go down together and they'll bury them side by side, to few it'll be grief to the law of relief, but it's death for Bonnie and Clyde. Greetings, this is American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman here. Grateful you are too. 1967 is most commonly known for this summer of love. The music festivals, the sit-ins for peace, hallucinogenic San Francisco happenings in the hippie-dippy hate. The Beatles Sergeant Pepper was the soundtrack those months,

while everyone wondered if Paul was really dead. But during that summer, while civil unrest spread throughout urban centers far and wide, and across the Pacific the Vietnam War had begun to escalate, in the midst of this fraught season, a shoot-em-up movie was released, starring Art Throb Warren Beatty and rising star Faye Dunaway in the infamous roles of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Bonnie and Clyde. That widescreen tale of thieving outlaws is the stuff of 1960s cinematic lore,

lacing anti-hero counterculture themes into the real-life legend, first built in newspapers, newsreels, and detective rags of the day. The film humanized these characters, made them larger than life. It made of Bonnie and Clyde symbols of anti-authoritarian reaction. But right out of the gate, the Barrow Gang's spree of murder and mayhem was overburne. blown and misjudged. And correcting the public perception became a cause undertaken by our guest today. Jeff Gwynn is an investigative journalist, feature writer, and critic, the bestselling author of Go Down Together, the true untold story of Bonnie and Clyde. Jeff, it's nice to meet you. Thanks

for being with us today. Jeff, the outlaw story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow is more the creation of its retelling over the decades than it was their reality. I mean, or certainly as much as. This is so often the case with crime reporting. Truth bent for dramatic effect happened with the gunslingers and the gangsters. But before we delve into the short-lived love story of Bonnie and Clyde, what about them was such fodder for fiction, do you think? Well, Bonnie and Clyde's timing was perfect. They were absolutely inept bank robbers. Yes.

Theirs was a reign of error rather than terror. Uh-huh. But the timing was perfect. they came into public view in a moment when nothing in America was at all diverting or entertaining. It was just hard scrabble trying to survive. People wanted something to entertain them. They had no money for the movies anymore. Everybody was just trying to survive day to day.

And here comes this glamorous outlaw couple. And this is a time in America. remember where everything was very proper, particularly where the ladies were concerned. And Clyde by himself would have been just one more two-bit hustler out there, you know, robin gum machines more often than he did bangs. But Bonnie, the femme fatal, the cute little blonde, brought the umph, the sex appeal. They were unique, and for two years, they were America's Romeo and Juliet, even though they were nothing close to what the public believed them to be. Yeah, glamorized for the sake of selling papers. The story begins in Texas, early 1900s. Clyde

Chestnut Barrow, never knew that name before we prepped for this. Born 1909, a middle child and an impoverished family of seven children. Father failed farmer. They move into West Dallas. Tell me about his childhood and how he arrives at this place in life. Clyde is a child of, sharecropping parents. And in those days, sharecroppers basically would rent part of somebody's farm, grow their own cotton or weed or whatever the crop might be,

try to sell it. They would have to give a large portion of that money to the person who owned the land and then they hopefully had enough to survive on it. It was always hand to mouth. For a little while, World War I causes American crop prices to spike. I mean

every crop Americans can raise is in demand. Just cotton, for example, it's selling for 20 cents a pound, is suddenly selling for 60 cents a pound, people are talking 80, there's all kinds of money in farming. But Clyde's family, like many other sharecropping families, gets caught at the end of World War I, when all of a sudden, all the other countries in the world are bringing their crops to the market and prices fall. And Clyde's family was part of hundreds of thousands of American farming families who simply can't make a living doing what they've always done. It costs more for the seed to plant than you can

sell the crops once they're grown. And so the Barrow family, with an old horse and a beat-up wagon, mother, father, and the three youngest kids goes rolling into Dallas, Texas, where they're going to have to make a living somehow. In all major cities, particularly in Southern America and Southwest America, this is happening, the city of the city. are being overrun by these poor families who are coming in. They need shelter, they need food. The adults really can't work in factory jobs have never been trained for this. And so they settle in West Dallas, which is not part of the main city. It's on the west side of the big Trinity River. And it's a bog. It's horrible. It's mosquito infested. And families camp there and basically

starve to death unless the Salvation Army brings bologna sandwiches. the Barrow family is even poorer. They can't afford a tent. They sleep in the mud under their wagon. That's how Clyde Barrow and his family come to the big city. He wants to be a musician. I mean, he has that aspiration in life. He carries a guitar throughout his entire life, as I understand it.

But he ends up, you know, as a juvenile delinquent, essentially, arrested when he's 17, caught with an overdue rental car. And that's how he first goes to jail, which was surprised me. Then he's caught later on stealing turkeys with his older brother. Ivan Buck Barrow does a short term. And it is in this early crime career that he actually meets a younger Bonnie Elizabeth Parker, who's 19 years old when he's 20. How much is known of that meeting and what first brings them together?

Well, Bonnie came from a family that originally considered itself middle class. Her father was a bricklayer. He died young and her mother had to move in with relatives, also around West Dallas, bringing her small family, three children, with her. Bonnie was a precocious child. She was very tiny. As an adult, she wore a size two dress. Bonnie was brilliant in a way. She won school spelling bees. She loved to sing, she loved to dance. She was a very bright, talented young person, but for young women in those days, when you were poor, didn't count. I mean, her choices in life, if she graduated from high school, and probably

wouldn't, was she'd be a maid or should work as a sales girl or a waitress. That was it. And Bonnie wanted very much to be famous. When she was 15, she married a thug, a young thug named Roy Thornton, because at least he had money for dates. He dressed in nice clothes. He had a car. Roy eventually left her and ended up in jail. Bonnie never divorced him because she thought that would be unfair to a down on his luck. And even high on the inside of her right thigh, she had the tattoo of a heart with an arrow through it and their names together. So Bonnie was a romantic. Very romantic. When she's 19 and Clyde's 20, they needed a party in West Dallas. And it's really loved for her sight. Clyde, from his petty thievery, dresses kind of nicely. And if he's driving a car that's stolen, it doesn't really

matter to Bonnie. It's a car. She's little and cute. He's very sensitive about his height. He's five foot six. He weighs 125 pounds. When he posed for pictures with previous girlfriends, he'd have to step up on a curb so he would look taller than them. But she was little and tiny. She wanted detention. They both wanted to be famous. They hit it off and there you go. Everything follows. After they have their meeting, he ends up being arrested for auto theft. It's during time that she actually smuggles him a gun into jail and he escapes. I imagine these aren't hard jails to get out of in those days. Well, we know that if Bonnie and Clyde could work out a little jail attempt, the security couldn't have been great. These were not criminal masterminds.

But the point being, this proved early on that Bonnie was willing to risk committing criminal acts for him. Yeah. He gets recaptured from that escape. And he receives a very very, stiff 14-year sentence. That's when really, this is when the Clyde Barrow story really starts as far as who he becomes, right? Because terrible things happen to him in jail.

We have to remember in thinking about Clyde Barrow and what he became, that lots of poor kids, not only in West Dallas, but around the country, survived through petty theft. That's kind of what they did. That's where they got their spending money

if they were going to have any spending money. He wasn't any better or worse than any of the others. The problem being, when he's arrested for car theft and briefly is free before he's recaptured, is that when he comes back, he is given a long prison term in what literally is a hellhole. Texas prisons, work farms, are basically slave encampments. And the prisoners police themselves, in a manner of speaking, the big strong ones do. what they want. In Clyde's case, he's little and scrawny, and he is repeatedly raped by one of the biggest, toughest prisoners. It changes him. And obviously, in his experience, prison is just, you don't want to be there. Anything is better than this. He actually kills his rapist by beating

him over the head with an iron pipe. And another prisoner who's in for life, who feels sorry for Clyde, takes the rap for it, says, I did it. Clyde can get out. But what you have coming out of prison when he's paroled is a young guy who's decided two things. First of all, he's not going to be poor and helpless anymore. Second, he will rather die than go back to prison and he's not kidding. He will die rather than goes back to prison. Also, people don't know this because it's not part of the mythology, but to get out of the work farm. Now think all day long, it's backbreaking, killing labor. He uses a hoe to cut off two of his own toes.

He mutilates himself. So when he's paroled from prison, he's just trying to learn how to walk again. And, of course, the job opportunities are, shall we say, very limited. He's had a taste of what it's like to have a nice car and nice clothes. And he reunites with a girlfriend who's willing to do anything to support him. Sure. And it's not like he's from a family that's a shining beacon of examples. Well, Clyde's older brother, Buck,

is also in prison. A younger sister, a younger brother. The Barrow family knows its way around crime, not sophisticated crime. We're talking about stealing chickens and turkeys and cars. But it's also important, and again, something else that isn't usually noted, he is intensely religious,

just as Bonnie is. They will shock their criminal buddies on the road over the next few years because before they go to bed, whether they've robbed a bank or killed a cop or anything else, they still get on their knees and say their prayers. So he gets out in February 1932. This is the dead center of the Great Depression, as you say, all of Texas is hurting.

It's important to underscore what you said. This is a guy who's really had a hard time in this prison. We portray them as sort of bank robbers, the movies does. They're not very good at it, as you say, they do small-time stuff, but they hit the road running together. They've already been in cahoots when she smuggled that gun in to get him out. How do they embark on this? What's the plan of action? What's the project at hand? Oddly enough, throughout the two years that they become national icons, there isn't a whole lot of planning at any given time. There are a couple times when Clyde wants to help former accomplices break out of prison.

They have routes they start driving. They actually get as far north as Minnesota sometimes. They're stealing cars. They have... an evolving group of people who are in the gang with them, though Clyde always has to be the leader. And in these days, it's Clyde Barrow and the Barrow gang. Bonnie's still not famous yet because they're still just doing things on a little regional basis. A few people die, but it's never by intent.

There aren't any outright murders besides the time Clyde kills the man in prison. They don't want to kill people, but they want to rob people. They don't have any sense this is wrong. This is a time in America where the vast majority of Americans look on banks and the police as the bad guys. One in every three farms is being confiscated by the banks because people can't make mortgage payments. You've got people who are working for less than a dollar a week and grateful for the opportunity. All over the country, convents are being overrun by young women who ask to become, nuns, 90% of them aren't even Catholic. People are trying to survive. And you survive however you

have to. The banks, the rich people are the bad guys. They're not feeling these terrible effects of the Depression. And the cops are the villains. They're the ones that come throw you off your land or arrest you. So to the minds of this little Barrow Gang, they're just doing something everybody he wants to do. And who could blame them for doing it, at least not themselves. Yeah. Like so many of these stories of Dillinger and so forth, this is a crime spree. This is a run that they do that lasts about more than a year. But we're talking about 1932 to 1934. It all comes to an end in that time. Along the way, they shoot a lot of cops. That's one of the takeaways of this thing and really what gets them killed in the end.

Did they have a desire to do that? I mean, it seemed like a regular event. One of the things that we have to remember is that the cops who are pursuing them are not trained police officers usually. Bonnie and Clyde weren't sophisticated enough to go to the big cities and try to commit crimes, cities where there might be a trained professional police force. But in little country towns in Oklahoma, in Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, Texas, the five states where the barrow gangs did most of their mayhem. The police force would usually consist of some guy, some farmer who'd lost his land that everybody liked personally. And so he'd be elected the sheriff, so there would be a little bit of a salary coming to him every month.

These cops, these police, had to supply their own weapons and their own cars. And for the farmers, it's usually some battered old shotgun that you used for shooting varmints on the property and a dilapidated old truck. Yeah. Clyde Barrow drove the best cars that were out there. He loved Ford V8 flatheads, and they stole cars regularly, just the fastest and the best ones. And they rob National Guard armories. They would have the so-called Tommy guns and the high-powered weapons. So usually, if they were being pursued by the cops, they could get away. No problem. They could outrun them. And if the cops actually cornered them, they had the firepower to shoot their way out. When that happened, occasionally, a cop would die. And that's wrong, that's murder. There's no excusing it, but it was the circumstances of the time. If they were cornered, their instincts, Clyde's instinct, poor kid, who's been raped, who mutilated himself because the authorities were putting him in such a terrible situation, they regretted it. They never, ever did it deliberately, but it was going to happen because of what they were doing. It was a consequence. And there were literally millions of other American kids who were just as poor and

just as desperate and they didn't turn to crime. So in saying this is the reason they did it, that doesn't mean we're saying it's perfectly acceptable that they did it. There is a difference. We mentioned the revolving door of their gang. There's about, I guess it's nine or ten of them, right? Yeah. Including, as we say, his brother, Buck Barrow and his wife, Buck's wife, Blanche. I mentioned in the opening the film, Bonnie and Clyde, that's the role of a Estelle Parsons, who wins an Oscar award for it. In 1933, Buck joins after he's been released from prison. The Barrow Gang is then settled on Bonnie, Clyde, Buck, Blanch, and W.D. Jones, William Daniel Jones.

And they are holed up in Joplin, Missouri, at a house there. They party. They take pictures. Bonnie writes her poems, their diaries and so forth. And as a group, they drink a lot of beer. The Joplin Police Department raids them. And tell me about what they find there. The Joplin raid. is where the legend of Bonnie and Clyde

really begins on a national basis. When the Joplin police raid their little apartment, and by the way, that apartment now has been preserved as a little B&B, you can actually sleep where Bonnie and Clyde slept if you want to. The Barrow gang gets away, as they always do, though they suffer injuries.

W.D. Jones is shot through the side. Blanche Barrow is injured, but they have to leave behind most of their possession. and that includes a lot of clothes. It includes Clyde's saxophone that he had at the time. And some cameras with some undeveloped film. These go back to Clyde and Bonnie's lives in West Dallas. The poor kids in West Dallas,

the big thing they could do for entertainment is that they had a nickel. They could go to a little photo booth. And there would be these goofy cowboy hats and guns and things. And they could pose for goofy pictures and for a nickel you got a strip with three photos. And they carried this habit over when they're now robbing and becoming local legends.

They would take funny pictures of themselves. And along the way to Joplin, they stopped by the side of the road and took some pictures, and these included Bonnie Parker, waving a gun and posing with her leg up in a very unlady-like position on the fender of one of their stolen cars with a cigar hanging out of her mouth.

Now, ladies in those days, nice girls, if they smoked it all, did it discreetly in their parlors and never inhaled. And Bonnie's got this big fat stogie. So the Freudian implications are clear, even if people didn't know what a Freudian implication was. And these are the pictures that are developed they find in Joplin. There was a newfangled thing in American media called wire services, that a newspaper in one part of the country could have a picture, and then that picture could magically appear in papers all around the country. So suddenly, in an America that's looking for entertainment, in an America where the bandits kind of seem like Robin Hood, as opposed to real bad guys, suddenly you have Romeo and Juliet,

these young kids, and the girl, look at that girl, look what's in her mouth. And Bonnie and Clyde and the Barrow Gang. Overnight, suddenly are American icons. We're not talking just little bitty people who remembered for a week. You're talking people who are right up there

with Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey. They're that famous, all of a sudden. And they first get a hint of this when they're doing their little mom-and-pop shop robberies and things. And there's newspapers in their magazines. And wait a minute, that's us. And they loved it. time they'd leave a stolen car somewhere, steal another car go on. In the backseat of the car

they'd left, there would be all these articles about them that they'd cut out to read over and over again. It was a thrill. Dream come true. It's what they both wanted, especially Bonnie. I'll be right back after this short break. Meantime, if you'd like us to cover anything specifically, if you have any ideas of subject matter we should be looking at, send us an email at ah-h at history hit.com. We'd love to hear from you. Over the course of the summer of 1933, they end up hitting places north and south and the Midwest, far up as Minnesota. Right. And then back down to Texas. They move around a lot to see family. That seems to be one of the incentives of their planning.

How much did they operate knowing that they were going to die? Is this mentioned by Bonnie in any of her diaries or Blanche and hers? Bonnie Parker wrote poetry and her poetry was mostly sad poetry. And a lot of it centered on the fact that, that inevitably the laws, L-A-W-S, that's what they called police collectively, the laws, were going to win, that it always happened that way. I wrote a book called Go Down Together, and the title came from one of Bonnie's poems about her and Clyde, that someday they'll go down together, they'll bury them side by side. Clyde knew it too. They were accepting the fact that, yes, we're going to die.

We're going to get gunned down. It's going to happen. but to them, and we can understand it, if we look at their circumstances, it was worth it. They were famous, they were free, they were their own bosses, they were doing what they wanted to do instead of what they were being told they had to do. So as the myth grew, and it grew very fast, newspapers and magazines were culpable in building them up in this way. In every little town newspaper in the southwest particularly, Bonnie and Clyde would

always be spotted somewhere in the vicinity at a diner or casing the little local bank. And people wanted to believe that. We see in America today that people want to believe what they hear on their favorite TV station or show or reading their favorite publication. And it was the same way then. Newspapers needed to sell copies. And you can't sell copies of the paper when the main story in the front page is somebody else's farm got foreclosed.

Yeah, right. So Bonnie and Clyde feed this terrible need on the part of the media and on the part of the public. And they could be anywhere. And so it was believed that they ranged all over the country when, in fact, they didn't. And the more notorious they get, of course, the more pressure on the authorities to do something about it. The police don't like it when they look like Keystone cops. and Bonnie and Clyde know at some point it's going to end, and it will end the first time a dedicated professional lawman gets on their trail.

It's fascinating to me. These guys, they do not get rich, as we've mentioned several times. They're a pretty small time in their robberies, gas stations and stores and so forth. They really are out for the crazy ride that they're on. I'm not sure how they convince the others to get onto this ride with them, but somehow they do. public fascination turns against them by their end. Clyde, by this time, has 16 warrants in four states for murder, robbery, kidnapping. I mean, they've killed upwards of, I guess, nine cops by the end of their time.

So public opinion turns against them. By May, 1933, the Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, issues a warrant for the arrest. They become wanted people. That's the big change here that applies to all these stories of Dillinger and all the rest of them. the emergence of the B.O.I, the Bureau of Investigation, on its way to becoming the FBI, is due to the strengthening of the laws about interstate transportation, right? It does. And again, we talk about timing. And I'm a historian. You're somebody certainly who is a historian for the public. And we see so often that sometimes it's timing. Everything's related to everything else. Nothing happens in a vacuum. And Bonnie and Clyde, Dillinger, Pretty Boy, Floyd, Ma Bowie. all these groups, they're becoming notorious, they're becoming famous. At the same time, Jay Edgar Hoover, very ambitious, quite a brilliant man in his way, is trying to build the

Bureau of Investigation into something greater and more powerful. After World War I, we have the socialist, communist threat, the red threat that gets so much publicity, the government's got to control this. But that's sort of burned out as a popular topic just when you get the so-called social banditry. Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, and so forth, now taking over the headlines. And for Hoover and for the Bureau of Investigation, now you've got to switch. Now you want to convince the public, and by that you mean the politicians who fund things, that these social bandits really are murderous crooks, and we've got to get them, and we start having the most wanted list and so forth.

Yeah. And obviously, Clyde Barrow is going to be prominent on it. Bonnie Less, because these are times when still girls, women, they can't really be that bad,

can they? She's just a foolish girl in love. And Clyde would often say to her that, you know, if you want to save yourself, turn yourself in and say, I made you do everything. She wouldn't do it.

The famous ambush, which happens on May 23rd, 1934 is not, though, an FBI or a Bureau of Investigation effort. It's a local one, right? Clyde made a serious mistake when he chose in early 1934 to help break out some prisoners from the Texas prison system main focus in Huntsville, Texas. And in Texas, when you broke somebody out of the prison system, that was sort of spitting in the eye of authority. And so the Texas Rangers were controversial organization before, later, and at that time. And the most famous Ranger of the mall was a guy named Frank Hamer. It was about six foot to a 200 pounds

and bragged that he was so special physically he could see a bullet and flight. And here's some noise happening as much as 30 seconds before the next man. He had a great reputation. Hamer was basically hired by the Texas prison system to hunt down Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker and that he would be able to take whatever deputies he wanted he could form his own group to go after them it would take as long as he wanted or needed it would be fun to just find them and this is the case of a professional lawman

now coming on to pursue Bonnie and Clyde This isn't some farmer with his wired together shotgun and his battered pickup truck. You're talking about a smooth, intelligent guy who knows how to network and soon figured out quite quickly that Bonnie and Clyde's pattern of travel was pretty predictable. They wanted to see their families in Dallas that leave from there that always go north into Oklahoma, circle around, maybe get into Missouri, come back into Louisiana, and finally hooked back to Dallas again. He started following on that pattern. Who's seen them? Where do they stay?

What are their habits? What clothes do they buy? Where do they try to eat? And this was the kind of thing where sooner or later he was going to find a connection, a contact, an informer. And he did. One of their gang members, Henry Methven, ends up betraying them. Tell me about that.

How did they connect and how did that happen? Henry Methven was one of the prisoners Clive broke out of the prison in Texas and ended up joining with him and Bonnie for a while. Unlike Bonnie and Clyde, who weren't violent people really and never sought to hurt anyone physically, methven was a really rough and rugged character who came from a bunch of really vicious nasty rednecks, the Methven family, who lived in the backwoods of northwest Louisiana. When he joined their group, when he becomes part of the Barrow Gang, Bonnie and Clyde start now coming into that part of Louisiana so that they can visit Henry's family.

Henry's mother and father would like him to get away, get off, on a murder charge against him in Texas. That's what he was doing in prison there. And they become convinced maybe they can cut a deal. If they can use the authorities and the connection with Henry to tip off where Bonnie and Clyde might be, and Bonnie and Clyde would be arrested or killed, then in return, Henry would be pardoned for his crime in Texas. That was going to be the plan anyway, and they actually came up with a plan where Henry Methan's father would alert the authorities the next time that Bonnie and Clyde and Henry were going to be right there in Louisiana.

the authorities would contact Hamer and his people in Texas, and Hamer and his people would come and ambush Bonnie and Clyde. That was the plan, and that's what happened. And they were tipped off by this system that was put in place. A six-man team of police officers under that Texas ranger, Frank Hamer, conceal themselves in the bushes along the highway. I've always wondered how they knew that the car was there. I mean, this was a remote road, right?

This is an old dirt road. This is part of the fun of being a historian. You know, I actually got in my car and I went all the places the Barrow Gang did. I mean, I waited across the rivers they did. I camped out my car where they did. And in this part of Louisiana, we're talking about little twisty, what they call three rut roads. The tires had worn three ruts in the dirt and clay of the road. And so if cars are coming from different directions, one has to pull off and let the other go first.

So the meth-ins live in little backwoods, jumbes. area. And to get there from Arcadia, the closest little town, it's about eight miles and it takes more than an hour. You're on this little tiny road. But there's this one stretch of road about a quarter mile where everything is really straight. So what the Methfins did was they, Henry Methven's separated himself from Bonnie and Clyde. That always had the plan. If that happened there, Bonnie and Clyde could find him at his parents home afterward. And Bonnie and Clyde got the word that at 9 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, Henry would be waiting for them at his family's house. A Hamer in the posse set up in the brush and the road in this straight little area.

And you can drive it yourself if any of your audience decide they want to reenact, which a lot of people actually do. The side of the road, the hillside goes up almost straight. And the brush is so thick that if you're hiding in the brush and that's straightaway, you can see a quarter mile back down the road to see if a car is coming. but people in the car can't see anything except the road itself. I drove it quite a bit and timed it all out. Is it still dirt? I have to ask.

Well, it's asphalt, but there's a lot of dirt and cracks in the asphalt. Clyde was a daredevil driver, and he liked to press the pedal to the metal. And one of the things the ambushers had worried about was, okay, he's going to be coming 60 miles an hour flat out. Yeah. You know, we'll never be able to aim in fire. and hit him. So they came up with another great idea that everybody loved except Henry Methyn's dad, that old Pah Mephvin would jack his truck up at the end of the straightaway, and that Clyde and Bonnie, seeing their friend would obviously slow down to help him, and when they slowed down,

that's when you could start shooting. Right. And that's what they did. 130 to 150 rounds of bullets. I mean, this is the famous just devastation that they face. 17 bullets find Clyde, 26 bullet holes in Bonnie. They are killed instantly. And to this day, a legendary attack. This was an incredibly scandalous moment. I mean, what a big story this was. It was.

There was this procession after the butchery was over, and it was butchery. Hamer actually went in as the car is sort of almost on its side in a ditch. And with his machine pistol, emptied it in. to Bonnie just to make sure both of them were dead. Clyde was killed with the first shot. Bonnie lived long enough to scream before they got her. One of the deputies there said they looked at the car and there was nothing in there but wet rags in the front seat. That's how disfigured they were. Well, they got a tow truck to come get the car and a lot of people in the area had heard the shots and sort of followed in this little funeral procession and they go on into the main town

and word almost instantly begins to spread that Bonnie and Clyde have been killed and there's an embalmer working on them and the media flocks in literally from all over the country there's a magazine article that said there's so many journalists so many reporters in this little town that a bottle of beer that usually goes for a nickel can't be had for anything less than 25 cent

and a sandwich two pieces of bread with a small disk of meat between can't be had for any price Once Bonnie and Clyde are laid out, the public's actually allowed to line up and walk by their bodies for a good close look. And some people lean in and try to cut off bits of hair. Somebody even tries to cut off Clyde's trigger finger. There's one photographer that managed to sneak in after the autopsy, but before the bodies had been clothed again, took pictures of their naked bodies. And to this day, there is a black market for those pictures. of Bonnie and Clyde sprawled dead, riddled, and naked on the embalming tables.

I've seen those pictures. People sell them for a thousand bucks. Really? So there's this huge spectacle. When the bodies are taken back to Dallas, where, by the way, they aren't buried side by side, Bonnie's mom had a real grudge against Clyde, thought he had led her daughter into all this. Both funeral homes are overwhelmed by crowds. One may forcing his way into the funeral home where Clyde was being displayed, offered Clyde's dad $10,000 for the body. The car, the bullet-riddled car, is sold to some sheister who takes it on tour around the country, charging people to get to sit in the front seat where the killer

sat, and before he opened up the car every day, he'd scramble some eggs, throw it on the inside of the windshield, and claim that's the brains of Bonnie and Clyde right there. Crazy. In death, they became even more legendary than they had been in life. Sure. And their legacy continues. I mean, several movies are made, but of course the famous one in 1967, not only is a controversially violent movie, but it also changes cinema forever, really. It's an incredible piece of work that alters the way people go to the movies even.

What's interesting to me also is the takeaway from the federal government's response. And this, you know, if there's something really tangible to take away besides the notorious legend, it's that the FBI, along with Dillinger and all this reaction to these gangsters and bank robbers of that era in the Great Depression, have a firm foothold in America, a newly federalized effort governing the country. And that is a lot of what we live with today, still, directly from Bonnie and Clyde in a way. Very, very much so. And the movie itself, you were talking about, Beatty's Bonnie and Clyde, while it's, not historically accurate as such great entertainment that it's been accepted as accurate. So that's

the image we still have today. And made a lot of money. That movie, unexpectedly so. Jeff Gwyn is the bestselling author of numerous books, including Go Down Together, The Last Gunfight, Manson, The Road to Jonestown, War on the Border, and a recent book about Waco and the events there. He lives in Fort Worth, Texas, and is a member of the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. It is an honor to meet you. much for your time. I really appreciate it, Jeff. I've really enjoyed it, Don. And thank you for all the great work you do, illuminating history. You're important. Oh, thank you

so much. Hear that, folks? Hello, folks. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. Each week, we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. All kinds of great content, like mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements, to some of the biggest battles across the centuries.

Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Bye for now.