They don’t do criminal names like they used to. Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, Francis "Two Gun" Crowley, Alvin "Creepy" Karpis. Their names were known far and wide. The newspapers loved them. They say that “if it bleeds, it leads”, and the coverage of Depression-era criminals was no exception. Arguably no criminals were followed as closely as Bonnie and Clyde, the infamous criminal couple. Further immortalized in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, their legacy is shrouded in myth. But who was Bonnie, and how did she end up on a murderous crime spree at only 22 years old?

Photo of Bonnie and Clyde playing around for the camera.

After a short-lived marriage beginning at age 15, Bonnie Parker met Clyde Barrow in 1930. At the time, 19-year-old Parker was working as a waitress, and Barrow had recently been released from state prison, already a hardened criminal. By 1932, they were both committing robberies through the Barrow Gang, which soon escalated to murderers.

Photo of Bonnie Parker, the cigar-smoking “gun moll”, slang for a gangster’s girlfriend.

In 1933 in a rush to escape the authorities, the gang left behind most of their possessions at their hideout in Joplin, Missouri. Among the belongings were rolls of undeveloped film and several of Bonnie Parker’s poems including “Suicide Sal.” The local newspaper developed and published the images and the poem which caught fire among the wider media. Who was this woman with a cigar clenched in her teeth and a gun at her hip?

After a shooting in April 1934 where eyewitnesses reported Parker laughed while killing two police officers, public opinion turned against the couple. Perhaps Parker could tell that she would soon be caught; she wrote a poem, “The Trail’s End”, just weeks before her and Barrow’s deaths on May 23, 1934. It ends:

They don't think they're too smart or desperate,

They know that the law always wins;

They've been shot at before,

But they do not ignore

That death is the wages of sin.

Some day they'll go down together;

They'll bury them side by side;

To few it'll be grief—

To the law a relief—

But it's death for Bonnie and Clyde.

Bonny and Clyde’s car riddled with bullet holes after the ambush . Picture taken by FBI investigators, May 23, 1934.

The American public followed the couple to their grisly end. The authorities had unloaded over 150 bullets into Bonnie and Clyde’s car which attracted attention from people nearby who swarmed the scene, with some even going so far as to try to steal the couple’s bloody garments from their bodies. Many newspapers ran graphic photos of the couple’s corpses, which was not an uncommon practice at the time. The bloody, bullet-ridden car toured the country for nearly 40 years following the shootout going from amusement park to county fair to flea markets. Their allure continues today with Netflix's The Highwaymen released in 2019.

You can watch a newsreel that would have been shown in theaters in 1934 showing the aftermath of the final Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow shootout here. (Viewer discretion is advised.)

Learn more about newsreels in 1930s Unboxed- coming soon!