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History This Week, May 23, 1934.
I'm Sally Helm.
9.15 on a hot, muggy morning in Louisiana.
Clyde Barrow is speeding down the road, heading toward the Texas state line.
Beside him in the car is his girlfriend, Bonnie Parker.
These two are wanted for dozens of robberies and more than a dozen murders.
And Americans have been breathlessly following the manhunt, the search for Bonnie and Clyde.
In the most famous movie version of their story, which came out in 1967, Bonnie reaches into the backseat and pulls a pear out of a cardboard box.
She takes a bite and then holds it out so that Clyde can take a bite too.
It's an intimate moment, a sign of their love, which was famously unbreakable.
In real life, it wasn't a pair.
Bonnie was eating a sandwich.
Witnesses disagree on whether it was fried bologna or a hamburger or a BLT.
But the next part of the story, the movie gets pretty much right.
Bonnie and Clyde see a broken down truck on the side of the road and realize that it belongs to a friend of theirs who seems to need some help.
So they slow down, which is exactly what the lawmen waiting in the bushes had planned.
And then, so many bullets.
Clyde is killed instantly, shot in the head.
Bonnie has time to scream, and then she's killed too.
She's still holding her sandwich, wrapped up in a paper napkin.
Before the gun smoke has even cleared, people come to see the carnage.
One of them even cuts away a piece of Bonnie's bloody dress, a gruesome souvenir.
Because by the time they died, Bonnie and Clyde were folk heroes to many, though villains to some.
And when they died again decades later on the big screen, they became full-blown American myths.
Today, the true story of Bonnie and Clyde.
How did two kids from Texas become robbers and killers?
And what really motivated them to do all the damage that they did?
Dallas, Texas in 1929 is a boomtown, thriving on oil, textiles too.
Over the last decade, job seekers have poured in.
Dallas was just bursting at the seams with people.
John Neal Phillips is an associate professor of art, and he lives in Dallas himself.
He grew up hearing stories about the outlaws who prowled in and around Texas back in the 20s and 30s.
Public enemies like Pretty Boy Floyd, and maybe most famous, Bonnie and Clyde.
The 1967 Warren Beatty movie piqued my interest.
Do you like that movie?
Oh, it's a great movie.
It's not accurate at all but it really is a fabulous movie.
Philip says he's the kind of guy who starts reading about one thing and notices a detail and starts reading about that.
And before you know it, he's tracking down all of Bonnie and Clyde's living family members.
That's basically what happened.
He just got curious, then talked to everyone.
The accomplices and the cops.
I wound up interviewing more than 60 people on both sides of the law.
And the more layers I peeled away, the more I realized man, this story's never actually really been told.
It begins in 1929, when Clyde Barrow is about 19 years old.
The Barrows are a large, close-knit family, a bunch of siblings.
Members of the family told me that the brothers and sisters were kind of divided down the middle.
Half of them, if they got angry, they would blow off steam and then that was it.
They'd never go back to it again.
But then the other half, if they got angry, they never forgot it.
And it just always festered in them.
And Clyde was one of them.
Clyde knows how to hold a grudge, but he's also fun, charismatic.
He was very charming, supremely polite and friendly and had a ready smile.
But if he felt he had been slighted, he would turn on a dime and he was really dangerous when he'd get like that.
There are multiple layers to that guy.
Clyde starts getting into trouble when he's just a kid.
He and his brother Buck steal metal for their dad to sell at local scrapyards.
When they get older, they ride around Dallas robbing local businesses.
Then Clyde branches out on his own.
He perpetrated burglaries and auto theft.
But he doesn't take things too far.
He didn't carry a weapon.
He was nonviolent.
In February 1930, Clyde gets picked up for a petty crime and goes to jail.
Someone smuggles in a gun, and he uses it to escape.
But the police catch up to him.
And even though what he's done is relatively minor, they send him off to a notorious place, the East Ham Prison Farm.
An institution called the Osborne Association on Prisons in the US declared the Texas prison system the worst in the nation.
And in particular they cited East Ham for the brutality of the guards there and the living conditions of the inmates there.
Philip says one of the most brutal people involved with East Ham was a man named Lee Simmons.
Lee Simmons was the general manager of the whole prison system throughout the whole state.
Simmons tells his guards to maintain rigid control, and they do.
The guards had trained their horses to knock prisoners over and stand on their backs if you made any infraction at all.
Some prisoners are forced to stand for hours at a time in a small tin structure called the box.
It's outside in the harsh sun.
So you can imagine what that was like in August.
And if they were particularly mad at you, they'd drench you in honey or molasses and then push you in there to attract insects.
Supposedly, the guards were being harsh in order to reduce escapes.
And if they caught someone trying to make a break for it, they'd get a payout.
There was a 30 reward if you captured an inmate that was escaping dead or alive, which is more than a month's wages.
Some guards saw this as an opportunity.
Clyde would be working in the fields and the guards would come pick somebody out of the crew and march them over behind some trees and you hear shots.
And then they'd come back, oh, they tried to escape.
And then they collect the 30 bucks.
And it isn't just the guards.
Some inmates are given the power to rule over the dorms at night.
One of them is a man named Ed Crowder.
What he does to Clyde changes both their fates.
He was picking on Clyde and raped him at least once.
Crowder expects Clyde to just take the abuse.
After all, Clyde is a young man with no power in prison.
This is just how East Ham works.
So Crowder torments him for about a year until Clyde strikes back.
Clyde smuggled a piece of galvanized pipe into the dormitory and lured this guy into the back of the dormitory.
And when that guy came back here he pulled that pipe out and just ripped the top of that guy's head off and killed him right there on the spot.
There's a familiar kind of story, one where someone does everything right and still hits a wall.
In history, that might come from bureaucracy.
Today, it might be the healthcare system.
If you've ever tried to deal with it waiting on hold, getting a claim denied, not fully understanding what a doctor just told you you know how frustrating that can be.
It's complicated, time consuming, and it can feel like no one's really connecting the dots.
That's why I was struck when I came across Solace.
And importantly, the Solace advocate is covered by insurance.
With Solace you get that dedicated advocate, someone who actually steps in and does the hard parts for you.
So you're not left guessing.
These are experienced professionals, registered nurses and health care experts who work with you one on one.
It's the kind of support you don't realize you need until you do.
Go to solacehealth.com to see if you qualify.
It takes about two minutes and it's covered by insurance.
That's solacehealth.com.
Must be 18 or older.
Advocates do not provide medical or legal advice.
What if everything you learned in history class was only half the story?
I'm Dr. Harini Bhatt, host of Hidden History.
Every Monday, I go where history gets mysterious.
Vanished civilizations, doomsday prophecies, paranormal phenomena and events that science still can't fully explain.
On Hidden History.
I treat these moments like open case files, not myths, not superstition, just incomplete explanations waiting for a closer look.
Listen to and follow Hidden History available now wherever you get your podcasts.
It's Clyde Barrow's first violent crime.
John Neal Phillips later talked about it with one of Clyde's fellow inmates, who said that afterwards Clyde was not the same.
He said, I saw Clyde Barrett change from a schoolboy to a rattlesnake right in front of my eyes.
The next morning, officials remove Ed Crowder's body from the dorm.
John Neal Phillips says nobody really cares how it got there.
At the time, an inmate killing another inmate meant almost nothing.
Soon after this, Clyde catches a break.
Eastham Prison Farm is drastically overcrowded, so they release some nonviolent offenders.
Clyde qualifies.
To the prison officials, Crowder's death doesn't count.
So in February of 1932, Clyde Barrow leaves the Eastham Prison Farm on parole.
He came into the prison as a nonviolent burglar and auto thief and he walked out of that prison a stone-cold killer.
John Neil Phillips says that part of Clyde that knows how to nurse a grudge, that part has only gotten stronger.
He's bitter and more dangerous.
This kind of thing just became a monster inside him.
The world that Clyde walks into is in terrible trouble.
It's the Great Depression.
Millions have been thrown out of work, children are going hungry and people are angry, resentful of an economic system that seems designed for the rich, not for them.
They are only too ready to embrace a dark Robin Hood, an avenging figure who will strike out against the state and the police.
That's how some Americans will come to see Clyde.
But it's not what he sets out to be.
Philip says Clyde takes aim at a very specific, very personal target, the East Ham prison farm.
He wants to raid it.
He really wanted to do this.
I mean that's all he talked about when he was in prison.
Clyde is out for revenge.
But first, there's a girlfriend situation he needs to deal with.
The woman in question is a 21 year old waitress named Bonnie Parker.
They'd met two years earlier at her brother's house in Dallas.
Apparently they bumped into each other in the kitchen and by all accounts, it was love at first sight.
Remember how someone smuggled Clyde a gun so he could bust out of jail?
That was Bonnie.
She'd been captivated by his swagger and his charisma.
And he'd fallen for her in return.
He wasn't the only one.
Everyone I ever interviewed that actually knew her really liked her.
They described her as real bubbly and vivacious and a lot of fun, full of jokes.
While Quide was locked up at East Ham, Bonnie waited for him.
Now he's out on parole in Dallas.
But as he begins thinking once again about a life of crime, he keeps his distance from Bonnie.
He always was afraid for her safety.
He always tried to keep her away from what he did on the road.
That is not what Bonnie wants.
She's determined to be with Clyde.
She would go out riding with him and he'd bring her back to Dallas and tell her, stay away from me.
And she'd make her way back.
She'd hitchhike to him.
She'd take buses to wherever he was.
There was just no keeping her away from him.
Before long, Clyde gathers up some criminal accomplices and makes a proposal.
He said, let's get a gang together.
And they do.
The Barrow gang takes to robbing stores and banks, even an oil refinery.
They'll kidnap anyone who gets in their way and drop them off a few states over.
For Clyde, it's all a means to an end.
Any robbery they pulled was to get funds so that they could get a gang together and get some vehicles and some weapons and go down and raid Easton.
That's the end game.
He tells his gang, this is what I want to do.
We come back down, we'll turn everybody loose, and I want to shoot every damned one of these guards.
Around the time he gathers up this gang, Clyde finally gives in to Bonnie's pleas.
He lets her come with him on a trip to Tyler, Texas.
An accomplice, Ralph Fultz, comes too.
Their plan is to steal weapons and cars.
Clyde just wanted to be with Bonnie and he thought this was going to be an easy job.
And so Bonnie came along just for the ride.
And she's along for the ride when things go sour.
They're breaking into a store when a night watchman spots them and raises the alarm.
The three of them all run, hop into their stolen cars and speed out of town.
They don't get far.
They stick both of the cars in the mud and they take off on foot.
Bonnie loses her shoes.
It's pouring rain, and a posse is coming after them.
They need to be moving.
So?
They commandeer a couple of mules and ride these mules into a little tiny town.
Getaway mules.
They steal a car there.
And they're back on the road again.
But that car runs out of gas because nobody can afford gas in the Depression.
Bonnie, Clyde, and Ralph ditch the car and hide out until that posse does indeed catch up to them.
They're angry.
They start firing at the outlaws.
Ralph fires back over their heads.
He's trying to scare them.
Clyde runs through the posse while they're reloading their guns and escapes.
But Ralph and Bonnie are captured.
Ralph takes the fall.
He tells the police that he and Clyde kidnapped Bonnie.
She's no criminal, he says.
I mean, she's terrible with guns.
That much was true.
One time, she picked up one of Clyde's pistols and accidentally shot herself in the foot.
That's how good she was with weapons.
The police eventually let Bonnie out of jail.
She goes right back to Clyde.
And John Neal Phillips says a new phase of their criminal careers begins.
On April 30th, 1932, Clyde cases a store in Hillsboro, Texas.
That night, his accomplice orders the store owner to open his safe.
When the store owner reaches for a gun, the accomplice shoots him.
It really escalates from there.
Within a couple of months there are a couple of more murders as he starts getting more and more desperate to not be arrested.
Wait, and why does it escalate to so many murders?
Just the nature of the beast.
If you start carrying guns around, guns are going to go off.
John Neal Phillips says the people he interviewed had a word for this.
Everybody that was in that game told me that.
The term they used was things go to snowballing.
So things go to snowballing for Clyde, and now he's wanted for murder.
Robbing banks, killing without mercy.
Like a snowball rolling downhill, Barrow's crime record began to grow.
Are they already at this point in the story becoming legends to the broader world?
It was the shootout in Joplin, Missouri that made their names appear in the newspaper.
Joplin, Missouri, April 1933.
Two couples are renting a garage.
One is Bonnie and Clyde.
The other is Clyde's brother Buck and his wife Blanche.
For a couple of weeks, they're all contentedly living a normal life.
They stay up late playing card games, buy new linens for their beds, drink hot chocolate.
But Clyde makes his living by robbery, so he pulls a few jobs in town.
When four lawmen show up at the door of the garage, things go to snowballing.
Clyde opens fire...
And as two of the officers lie dying of their wounds, the couples escape in a stolen car with a handful of weapons.
They had to leave in such a hurry that they left all of their identification.
And there's something else.
Blanche's camera, she was the camera buff.
And she had this Kodak camera.
The police find that, plus a couple of unprocessed rolls of film.
So Now everyone knows the names of the gang that has been on a crime spree in Texas for nearly a year.
And they can see their faces.
One photo especially stands out.
It's Bonnie posing with a pistol in her hand, a cigar dangling from her mouth.
In another, she playfully aims a rifle at Clyde's stomach.
Those photos, as much as anything, make them famous.
Newspapers cannot cover the Barrow Gang enough.
And reading about Bonnie and Clyde becomes a form of entertainment.
It was an escape.
An escape from the grinding reality of an economy gone to pieces.
Some people even start to see Bonnie and Clyde as those dark Robin Hood figures, agents of chaos that the country needs.
More than one person told me Anybody that could make a fool out of law enforcement or politicians or bankers was just fine with them in the Great Depression, because they were the three groups seen to be the most responsible for the economic woes of the land.
But for the Barrow gang, all this attention comes at a cost.
One newspaper reports a $1,500 bounty on Clyde's head, about $35,000 today.
And in the midst of the Great Depression, a lot of people would be desperate to claim it.
June 1933.
The Barrow gang, Bonnie and Clyde and Buck and Blanche, are still outrunning the law, shooting as they go.
These people were going from one gunfight to another.
Some of them were what you would call a minor scrape, and then others were just major firefights.
In late July.
The group is hiding out at a motel in Missouri when a dozen lawmen catch up to them and ambush them outside their room.
They left that place so fast, Blanche said she and Bonnie didn't have time to dress.
They were in their nightgowns and they nearly froze to death in that car because they didn't have anything to wear.
But that's the least of their problems.
Buck had been shot through the head, and he was still conscious.
And flying glass and a bullet shard had struck Blanche in the head.
The glass had penetrated all of her face and her skull and had damaged one of her eyes.
The back seat of that car was just full of blood.
Clyde finds a hideout where they can lay low and heal up.
They arrive in Iowa at this remnant of this old amusement park.
It had been a very popular place in the 1920s.
It's an eerie sight, spacious, unkempt grounds, rusted Ferris wheel, empty dance hall.
It had rides and a baseball field and a big giant swimming pool and all kinds of things, but it was abandoned.
The group camps out in the woods next to the park.
Clyde goes into town to buy gauze and first aid supplies and food, chicken dinners.
He's polite.
He wears a newly purchased shirt and shoes.
Bonnie occasionally goes with him.
She stays in the car because she has a badly injured leg.
And some people in town are like, seems like a nice guy.
Others in town are starting to wonder about this couple.
Why does the woman never get out of the car?
Why is this guy dressed to the nines?
Then one day, a local farmer is out walking his dog when he stumbles across the campsite.
First, he saw a bunch of bloody rags.
And then he saw a car full of bullet holes.
And then he saw one or two people and he was really suspicious.
The farmer contacts the sheriff.
The sheriff contacts some other officers.
Everyone's like, is it the Barrow Gang?
Could it be?
People want to find out, so they show up to watch.
Some reports say over 100 people were out there in the woods all night long, some of them drinking.
Some of them brought dates thinking they're going to see a movie or something.
I don't know what they thought they were going to see.
In the morning, Bonnie spots the crowd.
They're moving toward the campsite, and in front of them are six armed officers.
She shouts a warning to the gang.
Clyde yells for everybody to get in the car.
The officers open up on that car and they shoot all the tires out.
And so everybody gets out of that car and they go to the other car.
They pile in that car and Clyde's trying to drive off and he accidentally drives over a tree, stump and completely sticks the car.
So everybody's out on foot, including Buck and Blanche.
But the two of them can barely walk.
Buck gets shot two or three times in the back and Blanche keeps picking him up and carrying him on, trying to keep up with Bonnie and Clyde.
Bonnie is shot twice in the stomach.
Clyde is shot in the shoulder.
Bonnie's nightgown is soaked in blood.
Clyde throws her in the backseat of a farmer's car and peels out, leaving Buck and Blanche who have fallen way behind.
And finally Buck can't go any further and Blanche drags him behind a great big log and they hide there for several hours.
They're hiding there before they're finally discovered.
Blanche, who's been half-blinded by glass shards in her eye, begs the officers not to shoot her husband.
The couple is too injured to pose a threat, so the officers take them alive.
One of the officers asked, Buck, where are you wanted by the law?
And his answer was, wherever I've been.
Five days later, Buck dies of his wounds.
A month later, Blanche is convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
But what about Bonnie and Clyde?
Newspapers report sightings in Dallas and other places. but nobody really knows.
After the escape from Iowa, Bonnie and Clyde just kind of disappear.
And there's even rumors that they crawled off somewhere and died, which was just fine with Clyde and Bonnie.
Actually, they are plotting their next move, which is the big one.
January 16th, 1934.
The East Ham Prison Farm.
Crews of prisoners are working in the fields, planting cotton, chopping wood.
Those fields are dotted with brush piles.
Before the raid, an accomplice of Clyde's walked up to one of those brush piles.
One that had been specifically chosen, and he hid two 45 caliber Colt automatics in that brush pile.
And the next morning, the work crew came out there.
Bonnie and Clyde were waiting in a car not far away.
Clyde gets out of the car and heads for the fields.
He walked off down this ravine and got very close to that brush pile before dawn and Bonnie stayed in the car.
He waits.
A large work crew of inmates arrives.
One of them has been told in advance where to find the guns.
Clyde watches, then fires his Browning automatic into the air, a signal that the raid has begun.
An inmate shoots and kills two guards, All the inmates run.
Some of the guards have surrendered, but one is still shooting, pinning down the prisoners in the field.
Just four inmates managed to make it to the woods to Clyde.
There were probably nearly 100 convicts out there.
They probably would have all run off if that one guard hadn't held his ground.
It's not the mass breakout Clyde had imagined, but it does make the authorities look pretty bad, especially the manager of Texas state prisons, Lee Simmons.
Lee Simmons was extremely embarrassed by that raid.
The way the newspapers were portraying it was basically Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker just walked onto the property there and took as many people as they wanted, and all the guards ran away.
Simmons assigns former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer to track down Bonnie and Clyde.
And he gives Hamer clear instructions about what to do when he finds them. in his own book.
These are his words.
I told Frank Hamer to put Clyde and Bonnie on the spot and shoot everyone in sight.
Hamer hunts them until May 23 1934, the day the story of Bonnie and Clyde comes to an end, when officers ambush their car, firing 167 bullets in less than 20 seconds.
The day after their deaths, many newspapers printed a poem that Bonnie herself had written.
The last stanza reads, Someday they will go down together, and they will bury them side by side.
To a few it means grief, to the law it's relief, but it is death to Bonnie and Clyde.
The poem is eerily prescient, and people also find it kind of romantic.
That's a big part of the story.
Then and now.
Much of it is extremely romanticized.
Here's a young guy and a young girl who, through thick and thin, are going to die together for whatever it is they stand for.
Yeah, that people love it as a love story.
Of course.
But for Phillips the story is rooted in something very different, in the violence of the Texas prison system.
There over the years has been some reform, but there are still practices in the Texas prison system that are still going on that were in place when Barrow was a convict there.
We're still producing Clyde Barrows.
Do you think he preferred to be killed than to go back to prison?
Oh, no doubt about it.
He told more than one person, I am never going back to that hellhole.
They will have to kill me.
A lot of outlaws said, oh, they're never going to take me alive.
But Clyde actually meant it.
And since Bonnie was sticking with him, she knew it too.
Thanks for listening to History This Week.
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Special thanks to our guest today, John Neal Phillips, author of Running with Bonnie and Clyde, The Ten Fast Years of Ralph Fultz.
This episode was produced by Corinne Wallace.
It was sound designed by Brian Flood and story edited by Jim O'Grady.
Our senior producer is Ben Dickstein.
History This Week is also produced by Julia Press, Chloe Weiner, and me, Sally Helm.
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