Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough Read Free Book Online Page B

Dallas home where she was babysitting. A temperamental girl with a histrionic bent, Bonnie married a teenage layabout and had fallen into a depression following the breakup of their marriage. She was an avid reader of detective and movie magazines, and her diary entries portray a young woman desperate to break out of a routine of waitressing and babysitting. “Blue as usual,” she wrote one night in 1928. “Not a darn thing to do. Don’t know a darn thing.” And the day after that: “Haven’t been anywhere this week. Why don’t something happen?” 1
    The attraction between Bonnie and Clyde was immediate, but the romance was short-lived. Several nights later Dallas police arrested Clyde for burglary. When the charges fell through, he was transferred to Waco to face another set of charges. Bonnie, who was obsessed with Clyde and his exciting adventures with the law, moved into a cousin’s home in Waco. When another inmate told Clyde he had a gun at his home, Clyde persuaded Bonnie to smuggle it into the jail. Clyde and two other men used the pistol a few days later to make their escape. They lit out north, crossing Oklahoma into Missouri and driving on into Indiana, stealing cars and burglarizing stores. Police finally caught up with them in Middletown, Ohio, taking Clyde into custody following a car chase. He was returned to Waco, where a judge gave him a fourteen-year sentence in the brutal state prison at Huntsville.
    He served barely two years. After bombarding Clyde with teary letters for months, Bonnie finally began dating other men, but when Clyde was released in February 1932, they were immediately reunited. Clyde avoided crime for a time, taking a construction job in Massachusetts that his sister arranged. But, complaining of loneliness, he soon returned to the Bog and began hanging around the service station his father had opened on its main thoroughfare, Eagle Ford Road. Within days he was rousted by Fort Worth police, arrested, then released. He returned home incensed. “Mama, I’m never gonna work again,” Clyde told his mother. “And I’ll never [be arrested] again, either. I’m not ever going back to that [prison] hell hole. I’ll die first. I swear it, they’re gonna have to kill me.” 2
    The arrest appears to have deepened Clyde’s sense of persecution and victimization. Crime was the only avenue open to him, he rationalized; police had given him no choice. He and several partners returned to burglarizing stores. As she did throughout Clyde’s career, Bonnie took no part in these crimes, though occasionally she sat in the getaway car. On one such excursion in the town of Kaufman, Texas, Clyde was surprised by a night watchman and forced to flee; when their getaway car stalled on a muddy road, he and Bonnie stole a mule and set off cross-country. Cornered by a posse the next morning, Bonnie was arrested. Clyde got away. Bonnie languished in jail for three months before being released in July 1932. Clyde’s crimes grew more violent in her absence. He murdered a storekeeper in Hillsboro, Texas, and, after Bonnie was freed, killed a sheriff in Oklahoma.
    The moment Bonnie and Clyde became “Bonnie and Clyde” came on a Saturday evening, August 6, 1932, when Clyde’s partner, Raymond Hamilton, spirited Bonnie away from her mother’s side to Clyde’s side, where she remained for the rest of her life. The couple commenced a routine they would follow for two years, disappearing for a few weeks, sometimes months, then slipping back to Dallas for clandestine family reunions. These rendezvous, at out-of-the-way roadsides near Dallas, followed a pattern. Clyde and Bonnie announced their return by tossing a bottle onto a family member’s porch, sometimes with a note inside. Word passed among family members in code; for the Barrows, the mention of “cooking red beans” meant a meeting was at hand. The families drove to the meeting point at dusk, spread blankets on the grass, and listened as