Bonnie Parker: The Auburn-Haired Bandit Queen

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the notorious gangster couple of America’s early 1930s, were both Texas natives, but they carried out several of their more noted exploits in Missouri. There is no solid evidence that Bonnie ever killed anyone by her own hand, but she was certainly an accomplice to many of Clyde’s multiple murders.

When the lawless duo first made their appearance in Missouri in late 1932, they were little known outside their home state, but that would soon change.

On the last day of November, Clyde and two sidekicks robbed the Farmers and Merchants Bank in Oronogo, while Bonnie waited outside town in a getaway car. The men made off with only about $100 after getting into a shooting affray with the cashier. Outside town, they ditched their car and piled into Bonnie's.

Shortly afterward, Clyde dumped his two Oronogo sidekicks in favor 16-year-old On the evening of January 26, 1933, W. D. Jones. Clyde, W.D. were circling the Shrine Mosque in Springfield looking for a car to steal, because the battery was low in their V-8 Ford, when they were spotted and pulled over by Springfield motorcycle cop Tom Persell. Clyde jumped out of the Ford, forced Persell into it, and made him pilot the gang out of town toward Joplin, using the back roads north and west of Springfield.

When the gang stopped for gasoline during the trip, they forced Persell into the back seat and covered him with a blanket. Bonnie kept him covered with a .45 caliber revolver while the men pumped the gas. Persell later described the girl, whose identity he did not know at the time, as "red-haired and not the least bit beautiful." He also noted that, while Clyde didn't smoke, Bonnie "simply ate fags." Bonnie and W.D. didn't talk at first, but when they finally did, they, like Clyde, were "quite profane," according to Persell.

The gang drove around in the Joplin-Webb City area for several hours before finally stealing a battery for their car in Oronogo. They then let Persell out unharmed near Carl Junction around midnight.

After releasing Persell, the Barrow gang fled to Texas, where they hooked up with Clyde’s brother, Buck, when he was released from prison in March 1933. With Buck and his wife, Blanche, in one car and Clyde, Bonnie, and W. D. in another, all five gang members drove back to Missouri and, under assumed names, rented an apartment about April 1, 1933, in the south part of Joplin with the intention of relaxing and laying low for a while.

Their R & R came to an abrupt halt on April 13 when five law officers pulled up to the apartment in two separate cars to investigate what neighbors had reported as suspicious behavior on the part of the occupants. Clyde immediately opened fire on the lawmen, and before the shootout was over, one officer lay dead and another mortally wounded. Escaping with only minor injuries, the gang made their getaway by ramming one of the police cars, which was blocking the driveway, and knocking it out of the way.

Left behind in the garage apartment were, among other items, some papers that helped establish the identity of the gang members and two undeveloped rolls of film that ultimately made them famous after the film was developed and the photos published, first in the Joplin Globe and then in newspaper across the country.

After the Joplin shootout, the Barrow gang again fled to Texas but returned to Missouri in mid-July. They checked into the Red Crown Cabins near Platte City, where their dress and behavior quickly drew suspicion. On the morning of, July 20, law officers surrounded the cabins, and the desperadoes shot their way to freedom in another sensational gun battle, but this one left Buck seriously wounded.

A few days later, Buck was seriously wounded again in Iowa, and he and Blanche were captured. Buck died a few days later.

The remaining three members of the gang again fled to Texas, where Jones left the gang and Henry Methvin and Raymond Hamilton joined it. Back in Missouri, the four gang members stole a vehicle in Springfield on February 12, 1934, and roared south. They got into another shootout with law officers near Reeds Spring, but no one was seriously hurt.

The Barrow gang made one last appearance in the Missouri region when they killed a town constable at Commerce, Oklahoma, just across the Missouri state line, and kidnapped the town’s police chief on April 6, 1934. During the gang’s pell-mell flight from Oklahoma into Kansas, Bonnie let it be known that she didn’t smoke cigars, as she had playfully portrayed in one of the pictures developed from the Joplin film. She wanted the chief to set the press straight on that point.

The law finally caught up with Bonnie and Clyde a month and a half later when officers shot them full of lead from ambush near Gibsland, Louisiana, on May 23.

The story above is a greatly abridged version of a chapter in my latest book. It's about Bonnie Parker and other murderous women of Missouri https://amzn.to/4xhG5Rd.