Bonnie and Clyde died in a hail of gunfire on this date 76 years ago on a rural Louisiana road. Each received about 50 bullet wounds. Clyde was 24 years old; Bonnie was 23.
I passed by that site recently and had a conversation with the son of Ted Hinton. Ted was a Dallas County Sheriff’s deputy assigned to track down Bonnie and Clyde. He set up the ambush. The son, “Boots” Hinton, comes straight from central casting, exactly who you would expect to find behind the desk at the small “Ambush Museum” in Gibsland, Louisiana. He has lots of opinions and all the time in the world to express them.
Ted Hinton’s book “Ambush” is atrociously written (despite the aid of a journalist) but interesting nonetheless. The 1967 Arthur Penn movie took some liberties with the facts, and Hinton’s book gives a clearer picture of the two-year crime spree. The couple really had no goal, and no achievement, other than survival for a time. Their robberies rarely netted anything of significance. They suffered injuries: Bonnie was badly burned when their car careened off a river bank, rolled over on her, and caught fire. Both suffered bullet wounds in some of the shootouts.
Their lives are interesting only for the incredible waste, loss, and desperation. Bonnie is described as much prettier than her pictures, smart, literate, and good natured when Hinton knew her as a waitress.
The 14 men they murdered were almost all law enforcement officers killed in the pair’s efforts to avoid capture. Many of those officers encountered them unaware of who they were. On Easter Sunday 1934, for example, two motorcycle officers saw their car on the side of the road in Grapevine, Texas and went to offer aid. Even when the officers devised a plan, as in Joplin and Platte City, it proved disastrously inadequate. Clyde, of course, was usually better armed than the police (perhaps due to an absence of adequate gun control laws?).
Bonnie and Clyde continuously returned to Dallas to visit family, aided by a network of friends in Dallas’s dismal west side. Hinton grew up in the same neighborhood, knew Bonnie and Clyde and their families, and he tells of regular encounters with the parents. They are sympathetic accounts. Everyone knew how it would eventually end. The constant returning to West Dallas seems inordinately reckless and accounted for virtually all of Hinton’s various encounters with Bonnie and Clyde and near misses.
Hinton did not write his book until he was the sole surviving member of the ambush team, approximately ten years after the 1967 movie. Until then, they had permitted, or more accurately invited, the fictional notion that the police were led to Bonnie and Clyde by the father of gang member Henry Methvin. The movie repeated this widely held notion. But, in fact, Hinton benefitted only from reasonable deductions and some luck. A few days before the ambush, Methvin had been ordering food to go at a Shreveport cafe while Bonnie and Clyde waited in the car, and when police spotted them, they escaped separately. Hinton figured that Clyde would have to reconnect through Methvin’s father. Hinton and his partner, the local sheriff and his deputy, and two officers from the Texas prison system staked out a road leading to the elder Methvin’s farm. After they had spent two nights and a full day crouched in a wooded area beside the road, Methvin’s father drove by. He was stopped and handcuffed to a tree for several hours. The police parked Methvin’s truck on the road, jacked it up, and removed a tire in the hopes that Clyde would at least slow down. Only when they were about to give up did Clyde finally drive by. Had Methvin complained of being kidnapped, the officers would have faced charges, but Methvin saw that it might help his son if people thought he had cooperated.
Was the violation of Methvin’s civil rights justified? Was it reasonable to fire hundreds of rounds into the car? Hinton claims that they gave an audible command for Clyde to halt before opening fire, but Clyde’s reaction was exactly what was expected. The police were still mostly without radios and their actions were uncoordinated. Information traveled slowly. And Bonnie and Clyde continued to kill. Attempts to take them alive had resulted in officers being killed and civilians put at risk. One could reasonably expect that failure to stop them on that road, that day, would result in more lives lost.
Had Clyde come along 30 minutes later, after the ambush team left, Methvin would surely have told a different story. Under today’s standards, imagine the result: lawyers for Methvin, disciplinary boards, press hysteria, handwringing, a major setback in efforts to capture the outlaws, and almost without doubt, additional victims. But we are now much more sensitive to protecting our civil liberties, aren’t we?
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