History Lesson 
The Whole Shootin' Match
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow grew up on the mean streets of West Dallas. She was a nice girl who wrote poetry and turned cartwheels. He was a jug-eared psychopath. Sixty-six years ago they went down in a hail of bullets in Gibsland, Louisiana.
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In the early thirties it seemed that gangsters had all the advantages. Archaic laws prevented cops from chasing crooks across county or state lines. Liaison between law authorities was almost nonexistent, especially in the days before radio communication was perfected. Cops communicated mostly by telephone, and the Barrow gang learned to climb poles and cut telephone wires on their way out of town. Their arsenal was far superior to anything most police departments could afford. They broke into National Guard Armories, taking crates of .45's and Browning automatic rifles. The BAR was Clyde's personal favorite. The weapon usually identified with cops and robbers of this period was the Thompson submachine gun, and though the Tommy was a terrifying weapon, Clyde considered it inaccurate and unreliable. The BAR, on the other hand, could fire a 20-round clip in three seconds and rip the side off an armored car. Clyde's BAR was custom-fitted with a 57-round banana clip.
By the summer of 1933, when Buck Barrow and his wife, Blanche, joined up, the Barrow gang had gained a national reputation. Clyde had recruited a sixteen-year-old West Dallas boy named W. D. Jones, whose family had known the Barrows from their days in the squatters' camp and who viewed Clyde as the most glamorous of heroes. In the movie version the character C. W. Moss, played by the unforgettable Michael J. Pollard, is a combination of W. D. Jones and a later gang member, Henry Methvin. The reunion of the Barrow brothers and their ladies was as happy (and as bloody) as depicted in the movie. They rented apartments above a two-car garage in Joplin, strategically positioned for a quick getaway. For a couple of weeks life was as normal as it could be for gangsters. Bonnie revised her poem, "Suicide Sal," and cooked her favorite food, red beans with cabbage. Clyde, Buck, and W.D. worked on their cars and prowled neighboring towns at night, robbing small businesses. Blanche played solitaire and romped with her little dog, Snow Ball. The real Blanche wasn't the weepy, hysterical preacher's daughter portrayed so convincingly by Estelle Parsons but a willing member of the crime team, a stand-up gal right to the end.
Their peaceful world was shattered by one of their biggest shootouts with the police, who had surrounded the Joplin apartments. It seems to have been every bit as horrific as the movie version. "I never lived through such hell," Bonnie recalled later. "Every minute seemed like it would be our last. Clyde was wounded, W.D.'s head was spouting blood, . . . and shells were spatting and snarling at us."
For the next few weeks, the gang lived like nomads, constantly on the run, hiding out in creek bottoms and hobo camps, eating cold cans of beans and potted meat. They were broke, sick, exhausted, and half-crazy. Bonnie and Clyde quarreled frequently. She even announced that she was hitchhiking home to her mother. Clyde chased her across a cornfield and carried her back, kicking and crying. He did arrange for a family meeting, however, in the East Texas town of Commerce. At that meeting Emma Parker begged Bonnie to surrender. "Clyde's name is up, Mama," Bonnie told her mother. "He'll be killed sooner or later because he's never gonna give up. When he dies, I want to die too."
A few weeks later Bonnie nearly did die, thanks to Clyde's reckless driving. Driving at his customary lunatic clip across the Panhandle, Clyde failed to notice that the bridge over the Salt River had been washed away. Their car sailed across the dry wash, rolled over twice, landed upside down, and burst into flames. Bonnie was trapped inside. Clyde worked like a demon to free her as she screamed in pain and begged him to kill her. Two passing farmers finally rescued Bonnie, but she was close to death. Clyde remained constantly at her bedside at a tourist camp in Fort Smith, Arkansas. When she was able to travel, he carried her to and from the car, wrapped in a blanket. For once in his life, Clyde cared for someone other than himself. Maybe it wasn't true love, but it was as close as his makeup permitted.
A few weeks later, in a shootout from a tourist court in Platte City, Missouri, Buck was critically wounded by a bullet that passed through his temple and exited his forehead. Blanche was nearly blinded by flying glass. The gang somehow escaped to a campground in Dexfield Park, Iowa, where they were again surrounded by a massive posse. As the others escaped, Blanche stayed behind with her dying husband. She was taken away in handcuffs and never saw Buck again. He died a few days later in a hospital in Perry, Iowa.
Bonnie, Clyde, and W.D. miraculously escaped on foot. They thrashed for hours through dense underbrush, bullets whining inches from their heads. They swam a river, stole a 1929 Plymouth, and hit the road again, wounded, exhausted, and desperate. A few weeks later, in Mississippi, Clyde sent Jones off alone to steal a car, and the boy just kept going. Apparently he had had enough of the glamorous outlaw life.
More peril lay ahead. Acting on a tip that the fugitives had scheduled a reunion with their mothers on an isolated road in northeast Dallas, Dallas County sheriff Smoot Schmid and his deputies waited in ambush, armed with two Thompson submachine guns and a .351 "bullhead" repeating rifle. Clyde smelled trouble and sped past the ambush. The posse shot up his car, but Bonnie and Clyde escaped on three flat tires with relatively minor wounds. In spite of these setbacks and the fact that nearly every lawman in the country was looking for them, Clyde was already planning his next big job: a daring—many would say insane—raid on the Eastham Prison Farm.
Historians have always believed that the famous prison break at Eastham in January 1934 was to free Raymond Hamilton, who was facing 263 years of hard time. Hamilton planned the escape himself, with some help from his older brother, Floyd, who rounded up the necessary guns and people. Why did Clyde Barrow agree to come along? Barrow and Hamilton had joined forces in 1932 but were bitter rivals by then. The Barrow gang was in tatters; death, arrest, desertion, and attrition had exacted a terrible toll. Bonnie and Clyde were at their lowest point. Why take such a risk? Only Clyde knew. He had never talked about his time at Eastham two years earlier, not to his family, not even to Bonnie. Prisons across the country were notoriously brutal and inhumane in the thirties, but this isolated prison farm was the worst of the worst. Beatings of prisoners were common, as were punishments such as being locked in a sheet metal sweatbox or made to "ride the barrel"—standing all day on a barrel, hands cuffed to an overhead pipe. A guard known as Boss Killer specialized in what inmates called spot killings. He would separate a particularly troublesome prisoner from the group, march him behind a hill, and summarily execute him with a pistol. Then he would file a report of another escape attempt thwarted by decisive action.
Clyde was just twenty when he arrived at Eastham, fresh meat for a vicious trusty named Big Ed Crowder who beat and raped him repeatedly. Humiliated and fearing for his life, Clyde lured Big Ed into the toilet one night and beat him to death with a lead pipe. With the exception of a few inmate friends, nobody knew about the rapes or the killing of Ed Crowder until many years later, when Ralph Fults began his series of interviews with author John Neal Phillips. Fults told of watching his friend Clyde become hard, bitter, and full of hate, mutating "from a schoolboy to a rattlesnake." Clyde cut off two of his toes in an attempt to get transferred out, but the ploy failed.
Clyde began planning his revenge while he was still in prison, formulating a plot so fantastic and far-fetched that friends thought it was a joke. After he was paroled, he confided to Fults, he would round up a gang, rob and steal until they had enough money and guns, and then raid the prison farm. They would shoot all the guards and free all the inmates. Clyde was obsessed with his plan and talked of nothing else for days, finally convincing Fults that the idea had merit. While he was recovering from the mutilation, Clyde learned that his parole had been approved. On February 2, 1932, after a little less than two years inside, he left prison on crutches. Clyde set aside his plans for raiding the prison farm. But he never forgot.
A cold fog shrouded Eastham on the early morning of January 16, 1934, as the line of prisoners trotted out to clear a field for spring planting. Raymond Hamilton and another prisoner, Joe Palmer, were armed with smuggled .45 automatics. Clyde and James Mullens, a mercenary hired for the job by Floyd Hamilton, hid in the trees, each with a BAR. Bonnie waited in the getaway car. When the mounted guard rode up close to the work detail, Palmer shot him in the stomach, then turned and shot another guard. Bonnie sounded the horn, directing the escapees to the car. Only Hamilton and Palmer were part of the escape plan, but Clyde permitted two additional inmates to join them. This would prove to be a fatal mistake. One of the added escapees was a thickset, pimply-faced 21-year-old named Henry Methvin, the Judas goat who would lead Bonnie and Clyde to their executioners.
Whatever the reason for the Eastham raid—to secure Hamilton's services or to exact revenge—the raid was Clyde's first victory in months, and he gloried in the triumph. Once again he had a gang to lead. As soon as things cooled down, they burglarized a National Guard Armory in the oil boomtown of Ranger, then hit the bank in Lancaster. But the old rivalry between Hamilton and Barrow simmered below the surface. Raymond insisted on bringing along his girlfriend, Mary O'Dare, an oversexed redhead who flirted with all the men in the gang. Bonnie hated O'Dare and called her "that washerwoman." Bonnie and Clyde continued to quarrel, which prompted O'Dare to suggest to Bonnie that they poison Clyde. Raymond flirted recklessly with Bonnie, hinting that they should "knock off" Clyde and form a threesome with O'Dare. The final argument between the two macho males was over how to split the money and who would decide on the jobs. Raymond called Clyde a small-time twerp, and Clyde called him a yellow punk.
In early March 1934 Hamilton and his girlfriend left the gang for good and began pulling their own bank jobs. A few weeks later Raymond wrote a letter to his attorney, which was published in a Dallas newspaper, dissociating himself from the Barrow gang and accusing Clyde of being a trigger-happy killer and a petty holdup man not worthy of Raymond's time. When Clyde read Raymond's letter, he swore revenge and plotted to kill Hamilton.
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