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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Clyde had a premonition that the end was near. At a family gathering at a cemetery near Lancaster, he tried to persuade Bonnie to surrender and spare herself his fate. "I know somebody will put me on the spot soon," he said. Bonnie wouldn't consider the suggestion. He was dead right about someone putting him "on the spot," right down to the use of that colorful phrase. Politicians and lawmen, including the Texas Rangers, were being ridiculed unmercifully in the media. After Smoot Schmid's failed ambush, for example, the headlines were typically caustic, to the delight of Dallas newsboys, who called out, "Read all about it! Sheriff escapes from Clyde Barrow!" No one was more embarrassed by the Eastham breakout and the murder of a guard than Lee Simmons, the general manager of the Texas prison system who had been hired specifically to prevent such lawlessness. Simmons made a daring, quasi-legal decision to hire former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer and commission him to eliminate Bonnie and Clyde. Hamer dated back to the days when Rangers patrolled on horseback and had in his long career killed at least 53 outlaws. Simmons' mandate to the old Ranger was simple and direct: "I want you to put Clyde and Bonnie 'on the spot' and shoot everyone in sight."
Hamer set up his operation center in Dallas, knowing that he would find informants there. Sheriff Smoot Schmid had assigned two deputies, Bob Alcorn and Ted Hinton, to work full-time on the case. The assignment must have come as something of a jolt to Hinton, who had befriended Bonnie in her days as a waitress at a cafe near the courthouse. He had flirted and joked with her, and the notion of helping bring about her demise couldn't have been pleasant.
While the cops ran their traps, Clyde had agreed to arrange a rendezvous between Bonnie and her mother. He selected a meadow off a dirt road, near the town of Grapevine, a place they had used before for meetings. Early that afternoon all seemed serene. Bonnie was grooming the pet rabbit, Sonny Boy, that she had brought as a present for her mother. Clyde was taking a nap in the backseat of the snappy V-8 with canary-yellow wheels. Henry Methvin was keeping a lookout for Raymond Hamilton. Clyde had heard on the radio that the hated Hamilton had robbed a bank in a town south of Dallas, kidnapping a mother and her four-year-old to help the getaway. He felt sure Raymond was headed toward Grapevine, and he planned to kill him on sight. But Raymond never showed. Instead, two highway patrolmen, E. B. Wheeler and H. D. Murphy, were cruising by on their motorcycles and noticed the black V-8 with the canary-yellow wheels, the exact description of the car that Hamilton was last seen driving. When Methvin saw that they were stopping, he retrieved his BAR. Clyde slipped out of the backseat and stood behind the car with a sawed-off shotgun. He intended to take the lawmen prisoners, but when he shouted, "Let's take 'em!" Methvin mistook his meaning and opened fire, shooting Wheeler in the chest. Clyde killed the second officer as he was going for his gun. Methvin then administered the coup de grâce with a handgun, firing point-blank at the fallen officers. Then the gang hightailed it for Oklahoma, where the trigger-happy Methvin shot and killed a 63-year-old constable.
News of the killings of the two patrolmen outraged people all over the country. Over the next few weeks there were dozens of reported sightings of Bonnie and Clyde, some as far north as Indiana. Radio bulletins advised people to stay inside, with their doors and windows locked. Rumors, misinformation, and speculation fed the public fear, not just in the daily media but in pulp-fiction magazines that raced to print the latest Bonnie and Clyde assaults. One self-proclaimed eyewitness to the Grapevine murders told the police that after the first two bursts of gunfire, he saw a short, blond woman stand over one of the fallen officers and blast away with her pistol, exclaiming, "Look-a-there, his head bounced just like a rubber ball." The story was completely made up.
It is also likely that evidence gathered at the murder scene was tainted by lawmen with their own agenda. Thumbprints on a whiskey bottle were identified as being those of Clyde Barrow, when in fact they were the prints of Henry Methvin, whose complicity in the crime the police were trying to conceal. That was because Frank Hamer had worked a secret deal with Methvin and his parents to betray Bonnie and Clyde. An agreement approved by Governor Miriam Ferguson guaranteed Henry Methvin a full parole for a series of robberies if he could successfully lure Bonnie and Clyde into Hamer's trap. Methvin's part in the brutal killing of the two policemen near Grapevine, followed by the slaying of the constable in Commerce, Oklahoma, complicated but didn't kill the deal.
Hamer knew by now that Bonnie and Clyde had a new hideout, an abandoned farmhouse south of Gibsland, Louisiana, near the home of Henry Methvin's parents, Iverson and Ave Methvin. Clyde was pretending to be a lumberjack, working with Iverson. In nearby Arcadia, Hamer formulated plans for the ambush with Sheriff Jordan Hamilton and other local lawmen. The first stage of the plan commenced on May 21, 1934, when Henry slipped away from his outlaw friends; they expected to meet up with him a few days later at the farmhouse. That same day the six-man posse settled in for the kill. They built a blind of brush and vines on a hill above a long, straight stretch of road that provided a perfect sight line. Each man was armed with a BAR, a twelve-gauge shotgun, and two .45 automatics. It would be a long and decidedly unpleasant wait—two nights and a day with chiggers and mosquitoes for company, eating dry sandwiches and drinking cold coffee. On the morning of the second day, they were ready to give up. Then they heard the unmistakable high-pitched whine of a V-8 engine, running full throttle.
Bonnie and Clyde had finished a breakfast of doughnuts and coffee at a cafe in Gibsland and were headed to the farmhouse. He was dapper in his silk suit and blue western-style shirt and tie. As was his custom while driving, Clyde had removed his shoes. Next to his left leg was a sixteen-gauge sawed-off shotgun, next to his right leg a twenty-gauge shotgun, and in his belt a .45 automatic. Bonnie was equally dashing in a red dress with matching shoes and hat. She was eating a sandwich and reading a true-detective magazine. Near a curve at the base of a hill, Clyde spotted Iverson Methvin standing beside his Model A logging truck, one wheel jacked up and a tire removed. When Clyde stopped to help his friend—as Hamer hoped he would—the old man pretended to have a sudden bellyache and rushed behind some trees. This was the signal for the lawmen to open fire.
Hamer remembered that Bonnie "screamed like a panther" as the first two shots rang out, blasting away part of Clyde's head. Then eternal hell broke loose, creating a sound that someone described later as similar to the explosion of a dynamite charge. In the first three seconds the lawmen fired 120 steel-jacketed .30-06 rounds from their BARs. As Clyde's foot slipped from the clutch, the car began rolling downhill, at which point the lawmen emptied their shotguns and then their .45's. Clyde was hit at least 25 times, his head blown open and his spinal cord shattered. Another 28 rounds took off the top of Bonnie's head, tore away part of the left side of her face, smashed her jaw, and blew off several fingers of her right hand. The car came to rest against an embankment, two bloody forms slumped forward on the front seat. Hinton opened the door on the passenger side and lifted the limp, shattered body of his little waitress friend, secretly praying she was still alive. He held her for a moment, then placed her gently on the seat, dead five months short of her twenty-fifth birthday.
The bodies were put on public view, first at an Arcadia furniture store, which doubled as a funeral parlor, then again in Dallas. At the coroner's inquest someone stole Clyde's diamond stickpin. A photographer took pictures of their naked bodies. A man offered the Barrow family $50,000 for Clyde's body, which he wanted to mummify and take on tour with a traveling tent show. An estimated 10,000 people crowded into Clyde's funeral, nearly wrecking the old Belo mansion on Ross Avenue, which had been converted into a funeral home. An airplane chartered by racketeer Benny Binion flew over Clyde's grave site and dropped a floral wreath. Bonnie's funeral the following day was more orderly. She was laid out in a silver casket, dressed in a blue silk negligee, her head wounds partly covered by her permanent wave. The newspaper boys of Dallas, who had benefited so handsomely from her infamy, sent the largest wreath.
Henry Methvin got his pardon and died years later on a railroad track, his body cut in half by a passing train. Raymond Hamilton died in the electric chair. W. D. Jones served prison time, moved to Houston, got addicted to drugs, and died in a shooting in 1974. Ralph Fults was eventually pardoned, found religion, and got a job at Buckner Home for Boys in Mesquite. Emma Parker's ghosted memoirs were published a year or two later. Bonnie's sister, Billie Mace, served a short prison term, then made her stage debut at the State Theater in Wichita Falls, using the name Billie Jean Parker. Rumors of a movie contract did not materialize. Cumie Barrow wrote an indignant letter to Frank Hamer, demanding the return of Clyde's guns. Denounced by some newspapers as a cowardly murderer, the reclusive Hamer vanished from the public eye, refusing to attend his testimonial dinner in Austin. When a showman brought the death car to Austin, Hamer slapped him across the room and warned, "If you ever use my name again, even if you are in South America, I will come to you if I have to crawl on my hands and feet." After Hamer's death, two writers published his unauthorized biography, I'm Frank Hamer, a book filled with misinformation. It includes a cropped photograph of Bonnie's naked body, one of her breasts clearly visible.
It is hard to know just what to make of Bonnie and Clyde. Their legend was nearly lost until Arthur Penn's 1967 movie renewed public interest. At first a number of critics blasted the film, unable to deal with its revolutionary blending of humor and bloody murder. It was years before people were comfortable with the graphically violent death scene, Faye Dunaway twisting in a ballet of bullets, her hair dancing in the wind. Newsweek's John Morgenstern originally pronounced the film "a squalid shoot-'em-up for the moron trade," then changed his mind and decided that it was an American classic. The film became a national and an international sensation. A whole generation of young people came of age wearing gangster-retro clothes and listening to authentic period music of the thirties. The film was a watershed in Hollywood, a battering ram that broke down the old ways and brought on a new wave of directors and writers and films like Easy Rider and The Wild Bunch. For many Texans my age, born the same year that Bonnie and Clyde bought the farm and who lived through a depression, a world war, wars in Korea and Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination, Charles Whitman, and other contortions and abominations, watching the movie was a catharsis. The story of two obsessive-compulsive West Dallas lovers who lived fast and died young is American history writ large. It's who we are.
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