Bonnie and Clyde: The Grim Reality Behind the Outlaw Legend

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The most famous photograph of Bonnie Parker shows her leaning on a car with a revolver and a cigar. She smoked Camel cigarettes; the cigar was a joke for the camera, found on undeveloped film police recovered from an abandoned hideout in Joplin, Missouri. This episode sets that image against the facts. Bonnie grew up in Cement City, married an abusive man at 15, and waited tables in Dallas. Clyde Barrow's family was so poor they slept under their wagon in the West Dallas slums. They met in January 1930, when she was 19 and he was 20, and he was arrested weeks later.

The turning point was the Eastham prison farm, where Clyde was repeatedly assaulted, killed his abuser with a lead pipe, and chopped off two of his own toes six days before he was paroled. He came out in 1932 wanting revenge on the Texas prison system, and the couple's robberies of gas stations and grocery stores were meant to fund a raid on it. Life on the run meant cold beans, creek baths, and five people in one Ford V8, until former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer studied their habit of circling home and set a trap.

• Clyde's first arrest was for failing to return a rental car on time, followed by stealing turkeys.
• A June 1933 crash off a broken bridge poured battery acid over Bonnie's right leg, burning to the bone in places. Afterward she hopped or was carried.
• At the Red Crown Tourist Court the gang taped newspapers over the windows and paid with coins from gumball machines. Buck Barrow was shot in the head in the escape and Blanche was blinded in one eye.
• Clyde's January 1934 raid freed several Eastham inmates and killed a guard, which led the Texas prison system to hire Hamer.
• On May 23rd, 1934, near Gibsland, Louisiana, six lawmen fired roughly 130 rounds into the couple's car without warning. Souvenir hunters then swarmed the bodies, and the Parker family refused a side by side burial.