I just read a good book about these two-and it seems they were pretty awful people.Bonnie and Clyde killed several policemen and state troopers, yet they let a few people (whose cars they had stolen) go without harm.
The other thing: why di they like a life of robbing and fleeing from the cops? I could not have been pleasant (Bonnie nearly died when she was trapped in a burning car); Clyde saw his brother Buck , shot in the head, slowly die.
Were these people complete psychopaths? The Warren Beattie movie was fun, but the rea Bonnie and Clyde came off to me as monsters-were they?
Bonnie never actually killed anyone. Clyde, on the other hand, vowed he would never go back to Eastham prison (where he had been repeatedly raped), which explains why he tended to shoot any police who happened to cross their paths.
Wow, thanks for that information. It was something I’d never heard about Barrow before and after checking some other sources (not that you’re unreliable or anything) it really makes me think differently about his actions.
Odesio
I think the 1930s was about the last time in the USA it was possible to live an “outlaw” lifestyle. Automobiles had made interstate travel much easier and the law, specifically the expansion of federal authority to deal with crimes across state borders, hadn’t caught up yet. The death penalty was a serious threat to your continued existence if you’d killed someone in the course of robbery, and unless I’m misinformed prison sentences were long and parole rare. So if you had little to lose, the temptation was there to gun down any obstacles to a getaway across the border. Compare their three-year long crime spree to the infamous case of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, who were only on the run for days until getting caught.
If I can ask? Why? The man who allegedly raped him in prison was already dead. And while it is certainly a horrible thing to happen to any person, rape does not excuse robbing banks or murdering police officers. Like every human being who walks on this earth, he has good and bad parts, and he had good and bad things happen to him. But when your bad parts include constantly robbing people and killing police officers, you’re not some kind of hero, you’re just a thug.
He just said it makes him think differently about his actions. I didn’t hear anything about ‘hero’.
The survivors won the coinflip.
He probably discovered that the guards (1.) Were bullies given the perfect chance to beat and humiliate helpless victims, and (2.) didn’t give a shit about protecting inmates from other inmates. If you got gangbanged until your rectum ruptured, that’s what you had coming to you, you piece of garbage.
Why do they have to be either, it’s not a black and white issue. I don’t know too much about them, but they were most likely people who didn’t expressly enjoy killing, but did it if it was preferable to leaving someone unharmed.
IIRC, Clyde hated prison so much that he enlisted help to chop off a toe or two while he was in to get released.
I don’t know if it was Clyde or Dillinger or just hoods in general of that time, but I have heard a theory that in those days, a criminal record was practically a death sentence. That is, you couldn’t get a decent job or anything so some turned to crime to support themselves. And while doing that you might as well go big.
Yep, things sure have changed.
Why can’t they be both? Ordinary psychopathic killers who live next door.
I Am Not A Psychiatrist, but I think Clyde was more sociopathic than psychopath, but even then, he truly did love Bonnie. Do true sociopaths love? I just don’t think he was a psychopath. Bonnie definitely was not either. From what I’ve read anyway. She wasn’t an innocent victim of Clyde, she knew what the deal was, but she wasn’t cold-blooded.
One of the most fascinating books I own was written by Bonnie’s mother and Clyde’s sister. Obviously they’re biased, but neither of them shied away from the lawlessness and murders, and didn’t excuse the pair. They just wanted to let people know what the two were like before and after the spree. The two were being painted as inhuman monsters, but they were just human beings gone bad. Way bad.
I just re-read that part of the book. She was actually under the burning car and it took 4 men to lift it off her. Clyde was going 70 mph and hadn’t seen that a bridge was out. The car turned over twice and landed at the bottom of the ditch with Bonnie pinned underneath when the car caught fire. That part of the book is hard to read, as written by Clyde’s sister. I can’t imagine how hard it was for Bonnie’s mother to endure so I don’t blame her for not writing that section. Clyde was out of his mind with grief and worry. He couldn’t take her to the hospital, and they couldn’t do much of anything to ease Bonnie’s terrible agony. According to the book, “She was horribly burned, her face blistered, her arms badly seared, and her whole right leg a mass of cooked flesh.” After a few days when they found a hiding place, Clyde went to Dallas from Arkansas (the accident happened in Oklahoma) to get Bonnie’s sister Billie so she’d have her sister with her when she died. Bonnie’s mother and Clyde’s mother wanted to go but Clyde refused because if they were caught, both mothers would go to jail. He wasn’t going to risk them getting into trouble. If I didn’t think I’d get in trouble (or have a mod cut it down) I’d transcribe that section. It’s pretty intense.
I said it made me think differently about his actions not that it excused his actions. Barrow wasn’t exactly an angel before he was sent to prison but he seemed to come out worse than he was when he went in. He was raped for the better part of a year in Eastham prison. There was no privacy at Eastham meaning the guards were aware of what was happening and did nothing. The other prisoners were equally aware of what was happening and some of them ridiculed him for being Big Ed’s prison bitch.
No, none of that excuses the murders that Barrow committed, though, I must admit, I do not consider his killing of Big Ed to have been his first murder. A homicide, sure, but, murder? Nah. That was self-defense pure and simple. I just wonder whether or not the Texas penal system helped create the monster that Barrow became.
Odesio
I used to know a fellow called Shorty who had been some sort of specialized policeman–Texas Ranger or a US Marshal, maybe–in his youth. He was in Louisiana about the time Bonnie and Clyde were gunned down, and he had known both of them… all he would say about them was that “they was good people”. He’d want to fight anyone who said otherwise, even as an old man.
I’ve always wondered if Shorty fired any shots that day (according to Wiki, it appears that he did not.)
I’m gonna send this across state lines to IMHO.
twickster, Cafe Society moderator
As I say, Clyde Barrow doesn’t come off as terribly bright-the gang lived on balogna sandwiches and slept out a lot-hardly a fun life. Bonnie was a bit smarter-but clearly not capable of seeing the inevitable end that the gang was headed for.
Or, maybe, they got a big rush from living this way.
Incidentally, the B&C “death car” exists-you can see it at a casino in Nevada.
I would think just the opposite.
In the old days of the 1920’s or 1930’s, few, if any, employers had the capability or inclination to be able to determine if job applicants were ever convicted of a crime.
Contrast that to today, virutally every employer asks, and anyone can do a background check on the internet.
There are so few jobs left in America today, that an ex-con has to compete with unemployed college graduates.
I would think its much harder for an ex-con to get a job today.
Clyde was always a POS thief and punk bully. He was a member of some local gang of crooks, and had numerous arrests before he went to Eastham. Of course, he was living in the back of a gas station for some time in his youth, so it could be nurture, rather than nature that made him like he was.
Bonnie’s first husband was in prison when she met Clyde, so, my guess is that she was the kind of person that liked guys like that.
Maybe this has nothing to do with it, but the '30s seem like a time when outlaws were sort of glorified. Organized crime thrived on Prohibition. As for Bonnie and Clyde, the banks they robbed were not seen as the pillars of society during the Depression, easpecially in rural areas where banks were foreclosing on thousands of family farms. I suspect a lot of people in the area secretly (or maybe openly) cheered for B+C. I don’t know how much of this was really true at the time and how much is mythology developed later. To the extent that it was true, though, it would have been heady stuff for B+C to realize they were folk heroes.