Tender Murderers by Robbins Trina

Author:Robbins, Trina
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781609253615
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser

On this cover from the 1940s comic, Crimes by Women, the artist hasn't made an attempt to draw the real Bonnie Parker—even her hair color is wrong!

The lawless lovers hid out for the next months, emerging long enough to rob a payroll office. But they needed henchmen. In January 1934 they broke a buddy of Clyde's out of jail. His cellmate Henry Methvin, a car thief, came along for the ride, and the Barrow Gang was complete again. More holdups followed, more shootouts, and more cops killed. There was only one way their story could end, and Bonnie knew it.

Bonnie and Clyde arranged one last meeting with their families on a lonely country road, on May 6, 1934. She told her mother, “Mama, when they kill us, don't let them take me to an undertaking parlor, will you? Bring me home. . . . I want to lie in the front room. . . . A long, cool, peaceful night together before I leave you.” And she handed her mother a poem she had written, “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde.”

It was coming. The gang headed to Acadia, Louisiana, to hide out at the home of Henry Methvin's father, Iverson. But Methvin was having second thoughts. A small-time hood, he was in over his head. He confessed to his father, and Iverson got in touch with Police Chief Tom Bryan to offer a trade: clemency for his son in return for Bonnie and Clyde. On the morning of May 23, 1934, a posse waited on a country road for Clyde's gray 1934 Ford sedan. Leading them was bounty hunter Frank Hamer, a former Texas ranger who'd been tracking the couple for years. Speeding down the road, Clyde spotted Iverson's beat-up truck, seemingly stalled by the roadside, and slowed down. Hamer gave the command: “Shoot!” The posse pumped 167 bullets into the car, which careened out of control into an embankment. Fifty bullets struck the doomed couple.

One member of the ambush posse was Ted Hinton, Bonnie's young admirer from the days when she waitressed at the American Cafe, and now a Dallas County deputy sheriff. He ran to the bullet-riddled car. Clyde was slumped over the wheel, Hinton remembered, “the back of his head a mat of blood.” He pulled open the door on the passenger's side. Bonnie Parker, her stylish red dress soaked with darker blood, fell into his arms.

She was twenty-three years old.

The Movie

Almost before their bodies cooled, Hollywood was turning out films inspired by Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. The first, You Only Live Twice, was made in 1937. Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sydney, as the doomed lovers, get mowed down by the law in a swamp, surrounded by evocative mist.

Gun Crazy, made fifteen years later, has an oddly similar ending, swamp mists and all, but beautiful Peggy Cummins plays crack-shot heroine Annie Laurie Starr as criminally insane, and, unlike the real Bonnie Parker, the instigator of the couple's life of crime.

Finally, in 1967, producer Warren Beatty and director Arthur Penn made Bonnie and Clyde, and did it right, almost.

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