Bonnie and Clyde

Bonnie Parker was a 19-year-old former waitress when she met Clyde Barrow in West Dallas in January 1930. He was 20, already a small-time car thief with a juvenile record. Within weeks Clyde was arrested and Bonnie was smuggling a pistol into the jail to help him escape; within two years they were leading the loose, ever-changing group the newspapers christened the Barrow Gang. Their crimes were small by Mafia standards — filling-station robberies, a few rural banks, a long string of stolen Ford V-8s — but they killed at least nine police officers and four civilians across the southern Plains between 1932 and 1934, and Bonnie's poems and snapshots gave reporters a never-ending supply of copy.

The gang was almost always running. They slept in their car, washed in creeks, ate from cans, and used the new federal highway system to cross state lines faster than fragmented Depression-era police forces could coordinate. The press built them into icons of working-class rage — Bonnie's cigar in one famous photograph, Clyde's collection of stolen Browning Automatic Rifles in another — even as the real spree grew more desperate and more vicious. A 1933 shootout in Joplin, Missouri left two police officers dead and forced the gang to abandon a roll of undeveloped film that would furnish every newspaper image of them for the rest of their lives.

On May 23, 1934, on a rural highway in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, a six-man posse led by former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer ambushed the couple's Ford and fired roughly 130 rounds into the car in under a minute. Both were dead instantly. Bonnie was 23, Clyde 25. Their funerals drew crowds in the tens of thousands; their bullet-riddled car still tours casinos as an exhibit. The 1967 Arthur Penn film starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway recast them as romantic anti-heroes for a new generation — a reading the historical record only intermittently supports.