03/02/2022
Bonnie Parker met the charismatic Clyde Barrow in Texas when she was 19 years old and her husband (she married when she was 16) was serving time in jail for murder. Shortly after they met, Barrow was imprisoned for robbery. When Barrow was paroled in 1932, he immediately hooked up with Parker, and the couple began a life of crime together.
Over the next two years, the couple teamed with accomplices to rob a string of banks and stores across five states–Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, New Mexico and Louisiana. To law enforcement agents, the Barrow Gang were cold-blooded criminals who didn’t hesitate to kill those who got in their way, especially police or sheriff’s deputies. Among the public, however, Parker and Barrow’s reputation as dangerous outlaws was mixed with a romantic view of the couple as “Robin Hood”-like folk heroes. Their fame was increased by the fact that Bonnie was a woman–an unlikely criminal–and by the fact that the couple posed for playful photographs together.
Before dawn on 1934, retired Texas Ranger Captain Frank Hamer and a group of Louisiana and Texas lawmen hid in the bushes along a country road outside Sailes, Louisana. When Parker and Barrow appeared, the officers opened fire, killing the couple in a hail of bullets. All told, the Barrow Gang was believed responsible for the deaths of 13 people, including nine police officers. Parker and Barrow are still seen by many as romantic figures, however, especially after the success of the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty.
Learn more here: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/police-kill-famous-outlaws-bonnie-and-clyde
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