Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough Read Free Book Online Page A

Bonnie Parker were driving through the Texas Panhandle, heading to a meeting with Clyde’s brother Buck at a bridge on the Oklahoma border. With them was Clyde’s gofer, a pimply Dallas teenager named W. D. Jones. At first glance all three appeared to be children. Clyde, baby-faced and five-feet-seven, was twenty-three that evening. Bonnie was an inch under five feet, maybe ninety pounds, with yellow hair and baby-blue eyes. She was twenty-one.
    Seventy years after their deaths, no Depression-era criminals loom larger in America’s consciousness than Bonnie and Clyde—thanks to the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, which portrayed Clyde as a sexually ambivalent man-child struggling to cope with a beautiful, fiery Bonnie. While entertaining, the cinematic Bonnie and Clyde were a screenwriter’s creation, a celluloid paean to 1960s-era themes of youth rebellion and antiauthoritarianism. The movie characters had little in common with their real-life counterparts, lazy drifters who murdered nearly a dozen innocent men during and between holdups.
    The real Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were neither rebels nor philosophers. Vain and insecure, Clyde was a preening Dallas burglar who, a friend claimed, had been repeatedly raped in prison and would do anything to avoid going back. Bonnie was a bored waitress, a drama queen with a failed marriage who viewed Clyde as a ticket out of her humdrum existence. Crime was a kind of game to them; you can see it in the photographs they took of each other, play-acting with big guns and fat cigars. Contemporaries showed them little but contempt. One called them “just a couple of cheap filling station and car thieves,” and he was right; at a time when veteran yeggs reaped $50,000 from a single bank robbery, Bonnie and Clyde’s biggest payday was barely $3,800. They robbed far more gas stations and drugstores than banks.
    They came from Dallas. Both the Barrow family, subsistence farmers from south of the city, and Bonnie’s mother, a West Texas widow, had joined the rising tide of rural families moving into Southwestern cities in the early 1920s. The Barrows were so poor they lived for a time beneath a viaduct. In time Clyde’s father started a scrap metal business and built a house in a poor, unincorporated area known as the Bog, just across the Trinity River from downtown. Subject to flooding, crisscrossed by railroads, its air and water polluted by cement plants and foundries, the Bog was a dusty latticework of bleak houses and lean-tos, unpaved roads and littered yards.
    Dropping out of school at sixteen, Clyde became a teenage burglar, joining his older brother Ivan, known as Buck, sneaking into stores at night. The boys were a study in contrasts. Where Buck was a lethargic, monosyllabic figure who talked little and drank lots, Clyde was small, peppy, and bright, a fast talker with rosy cheeks who loved guns and played the guitar and the saxophone. In later years Dallas lawmen would remember stopping the brothers for stealing scrap metal, no doubt to help their father. According to Clyde’s sister Nell, their first arrests came after they stole a flock of turkeys from an East Texas farm; stopped by police in a truck full of hot poultry, Buck drew a few days in jail and Clyde was released.
    For a time Clyde tried a series of menial jobs: messenger boy, movie usher, mirror factory worker. None lasted. By eighteen he evidenced the first signs of a powerful ego, a sense that he was entitled to something better than life in the Bog. In a telling stab at reinvention, he changed his middle name from Chestnut to Champion, hoping that “Clyde Champion Barrow” might elevate him to the status that he believed he deserved. It didn’t: he was still a two-bit burglar. He spent 1928 and 1929 ransacking stores throughout North Texas with Buck, until Buck was captured one night after a foot chase in the town of Denton.
    Clyde met Bonnie Parker one night in January 1930, when he showed up at a west