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SECOND INSTALLMENT ....Bonnie & Clyde

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SECOND INSTALLMENT

– THE REAL STORY OF BONNIE AND CLYDE

Both Bonnie and Clyde grew up in West Dallas with parents who were poor but loved their children. Even as a teen he with his friend Ray Hamilton had already been engaged in a good deal of petty theft. Even though Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker had lived near one another as children they were not closely connected and it was in 1929 when their story began. Barrow met Bonnie who was then a waitress in a café.

In 1930 Clyde Barrow was arrested in Waco for automobile theft and was sentenced to prison, then escaped, and promptly arrested in Ohio and sent back to Texas to the penitentiary at Huntsville to serve his term.

Buck Barrow, Clyde's brother, had a longer criminal record than Clyde and so while he was in prison Buck and his wife, Blanche, teamed up with Bonnie and Ray Hamilton and continued their career of crime.

Clyde's mother, Mrs. Cumie F. Barrow, appealed to then Governor Sterling for clemency for Clyde and on February 2, 1932 gave Clyde parole. Trouble started almost immediately. In April 1932 the group robbed a store in Hillsboro and killed the store's owner. Next, followed the robbery of a Dallas store and the robbery of a packing house there. They evaded the police officers until mid-summer of 1932 when they turned up at a dance in Atoka, Okla. A deputy sheriff by the name of E. C. Moore tried to question them and he was shot to death.

Their crime spree continued with a kidnapping, gin battles with lawmen and the murder of Howard Hall, a butcher, in a holdup. Then, temporarily they parted – Clyde and Ray had a row over Bonnie's affections and Ray Hamilton went off with another thug. But they continued their crime spree, a beating of a woman near Winslow, Arkansas. They were trapped in both Missouri and Iowa from which Clyde and Bonnie escaped.

In spite of all he did, it was said Clyde prayed every day and took good care of his family. Both Bonnie and Clyde while they continued their crime spree from time to time went back to West Dallas to see their parents and siblings even when they were on the "Most Wanted List" for their many bank robberies and holdups.

There was one period during that time that they truly enjoyed life on the lam and that was when they hung out in Oklahoma with one accomplice and stealing only what they needed for a few days at a time, all the while spending time in neat little tourist courts where they experienced probably for the first time the only luxury of their improvished lives. But to over-romanticize them as was done in the movie "Bonnie and Clyde" would be wrong. Clyde loved to break into armories and always had an enormous stockpile of deadly weapons like the Browning Automatic rifle.

Their crime spree often comical and chaotic.

They both came from what was the poorest of "white trash" families who lived in the hopeless desolation of West Dallas in the early Depression years.

When Bonnie and Clyde met they both knew that fate had flung them together and their lives would be linked until death. Both Bonne and Clyde had a way with words. Bonnie wrote numerous poems

One of Bonnie's poems read: "Someday they'll go down together, And they'll bury them side by side To few it'll be grief, to the law a relief But it's death for Bonnie and Clyde".

As before in the first installment, all information was taken from the book written by Jeff Guinn entitled "Go Down Together: The True Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde". And from an early Dallas newspaper, The Dallas Dispatch.

Next time, we will cover the capture and death of them and the reaction of their family to their death.