In 1932 she accidentally grazed two of her toes when a weapon she was holding for Clyde discharged. Though injured and wounded several times by officers during her two-year run with Clyde, Bonnie never shot anyone but herself. Fults was transferred back to prison, but Bonnie spent only one night in jail and was released. After a failed robbery attempt and a shootout in Kaufman County, Texas, Clyde and an associate named Raymond Hamilton escaped while Fultz and Bonnie Parker were jailed in a small one-room cell in Kemp, Texas. While the Barrow gang is often thought of as prolific bank robbers, they mostly robbed mom-and-pop filling stations, feed, and hardware stores. The first bank heist occurred in April of 1932 at the First National Bank in Lawrence, Kansas. What followed was a two-year stretch that saw the Barrow gang rise into the national consciousness.ġ933 Wanted Poster (via Texas State Library & Archives Commission) Ironically, six days later, on February 2, 1932, he was granted parole by Texas Governor Ross Sterling. While at Eastham, Clyde went so far as to chop off two of his toes with an ax to secure a medical release from the grueling work. It was here that he enlisted future gang member Ralph Fults in a plan to raise enough money and ammunition to raid the prison farm and kill all of the guards after his release. Clyde’s drive in life wasn’t to become a famous bank robber, as he is sometimes labeled it was to take revenge on Eastham. Prisons which ranked the Texas prison system as the worst in the nation in 1935.ĭuring his time at Eastham, Clyde transformed from petty criminal to emotionless killer when he murdered Ed Crowder, a man who had been sexually assaulting him since he entered the prison. Known as the “Murder House” or “The Bloody Ham,” Eastham was notorious for its tough working and living conditions, as well as guards who would beat inmates with trace chains and perform random spot killings, all of which was substantiated by the Texas state legislature and the Osborne Association on U.S. The Barrow filling station (all photographs by the author)īy 1930, Clyde was incarcerated in the Eastham Prison Farm on a 14-year term for automobile theft and robbery.
#WHERE WAS BONNIE AND CLYDE AMBUSHED FULL#
While these charges were dropped, Clyde was arrested again only three weeks later with his brother Buck - who would later initially refuse to join the Barrow gang during the height of its notoriety - for possession of a truck full of stolen turkeys. Growing up in Dallas in the back room of his father’s filling station, Clyde’s first brush with the law came in 1926 when he was arrested for automobile theft as a result of neglecting to return a rental car. Brandishing high-powered machine guns and driving the newly invented Ford V-8s, Bonnie and Clyde are mythologized as Robin Hoods for the poor and destitute who had been failed by the American political and financial institutions.Ĭlyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker (via Library of Congress)īut what is the real story behind Bonnie - a girl from Cement City, Texas, a small industrial town three miles west of Dallas - and Clyde - a young man of 5-foot-6 with dark, wavy hair and tattoos on his arms that included a heart-dagger and the letters “U.S.N.” from a failed attempt to enter the Navy as a teenager?
#WHERE WAS BONNIE AND CLYDE AMBUSHED TV#
Made into legends through books, comics, movies, songs, and TV specials, Bonnie and Clyde have lived on nearly 80 years after their deaths as a Depression era Romeo and Juliet.