Bonnie and Clyde: the lie that everyone believed (7 photos)

This couple, despite all their crimes, was and continues to be romanticized. A kind of Romeo and Juliet and America at the beginning of the last century. Always these bad boys (and gals) are gaining popularity. But it has always been this way and, apparently, will be so.





Everything stopped on May 23, 1934. Then, in Louisiana, a Ford V8 was driving along a village road, with Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker in it. He was 25 years old and she was 23 years old. At the time, they were America's most famous and most wanted criminals.

They were chased by cops for three months, and on that May day, the Texas Rangers hired to capture Parker and Barrow were ambushed. There was no talk of taking the couple alive - they just had to be stopped forever. When the car appeared in the kill zone, the rangers began shooting.

130 shots were fired. The car was literally riddled with 112 bullet holes.

They immediately began to be called the love couple of the century, rebelling against the system. But things weren't quite like that.

The myth of all-consuming love



At the beginning of 1930, Bonnie and Clyde met in a common company of friends.

Parker, by the way, got married at the age of 16, but broke up with her husband pretty soon, continuing, however, to wear a wedding ring. She did not get divorced, by the way, until her death. Her husband was engaged in robbery, but his wife did not take part in his affairs.

Barrow, by the time they met, had already been in prison and had no intention of stopping his criminal activities: car theft, night robberies of cars, and so on, little things. It is believed that it was Bonnie who fell in love with the “bad guy” and even waited for him for two whole years while he was once again in prison. But there is no exact data about mutual feelings on Clyde’s part.

When another member of the couple's gang was caught, he was given 15 years in prison. And after his release, the guy gave an interview to Playboy, where he told the truth about Bonnie and Clyde, destroying the romantic image that the media endlessly painted.

The criminal said that Bonnie was a “friend with benefits” not only for Barrow, but also for several other guys in the gang. The man further stated that Clyde was generally gay and that his relationship with Bonnie, although tender, almost never went beyond friendship.

Well... Who knows if it was true, but information about Clyde Barrow's possible gay orientation was mentioned not only by his “colleague”. But those who could hold the candle are already in the next world.

The Myth of Fearlessness





Cinema and the media have created the image of a completely reckless couple capable of engaging in a shootout with armed police. And they broke into the banks so that the whole city would remember the robbery of Bonnie and Clyde.

It’s worth starting with the fact that they committed their most famous raids and other crimes in the company of a gang, where, at different times, there were up to nine people. Together, the couple robbed only a few rural stores and at the end of their “career”, when the rest of the gang members had already been arrested or fled.

The whole gang committed more than a hundred crimes, but it was Parker and Barrow who committed only fifteen, and these were not banks, but cash registers in small towns. Their biggest loot was $80.



They were simply afraid of armed guards and police, simply choosing the path of small shops and gas stations, where no one would resist them. They also had enough courage for lonely travelers they met on empty roads.

Bonnie and Clyde almost never had money. The whole gang, hung from head to toe with weapons, could kill for a couple of bucks. What kind of courage, bravery, and especially “war against the system” is there?

The Myth of Bonnie Parker's Influence and Courage



Cinema and newspapers actively instilled in us the image of a kind of girl, firing a pistol just like men, and then dashingly jumping into a car to take her “boys” away from the crime scene.

Moreover, this image developed during Bonnie’s lifetime, due to the fact that she loved to be photographed. She always tried to bring Barrow into the frame.

In 1933, a year before the Rangers' deadly trap, the police raided the gang's next home. The criminals, firing from all weapons,they wanted to hide, leaving behind all their personal belongings. A film with staged photos of Bonnie and Clyde was found. The police, by the way, gave them to the media and it was these photos that made the couple posthumously famous throughout the world.

All these images of criminals, supposedly taken “in action,” turned out to be staged when they decided to just fool around.

When Bonnie wasn't involved in heated shootouts and didn't even point it at store workers and the police. That same “colleague” said that he had never seen Parker with a weapon in her hands. He generally doubted that she could and knew how to shoot. Sometimes Bonnie simply remained behind the wheel in a running car, waiting for her accomplices. But Clyde Barrow loved guns. He was excellent at shooting practically all types of firearms, and the car became simply a mobile arsenal.



Parker and Barrow are almost always portrayed as simply unhappy people, broken under the weight of circumstances. Bravely standing in defiance of the system and police brutality.

In fact, they are just a group of young and greyhound raiders, not much different from other gangs that flooded the United States during the Great Depression. Almost all of them remained unknown. Bonnie and Clyde should have become the same gang that has sunk into oblivion, if not for the photos found by the police.



The media, perhaps for the first time, showed the faces of criminals not as “Wanted” leaflets, but as ordinary people. They were humanized, made alive, added a pinch of boundless love, and just like that, ordinary residents of the country began to sympathize with those who needed to be hated. 50 thousand people came to see Bonnie Parker off on her last journey.