By the spring of 1934, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow had become two of the most wanted people in America. Their two-year crime spree — a string of bank robberies, gas station holdups, and violent encounters with law enforcement spanning four states — had left thirteen people dead, including nine police officers. Their exploits had made them folk heroes in some corners, objects of obsession in the press, and priorities for a federal bureau still finding its footing under J. Edgar Hoover.
Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut Barrow were an unlikely pair. Parker, born in 1910 in Rowena, Texas, had married at sixteen but soon found herself drawn to Barrow, who had been convicted of armed robbery and served time in prison before being paroled in early 1932. Together with a rotating cast of associates — the Barrow Gang — they robbed banks and small businesses, stole cars, and left a trail of dead lawmen across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri. Parker, who was with Barrow through most of it, became the stuff of legend: photographs of her posing with a cigar and a rifle, found in an abandoned Missouri hideout in April 1933, cemented her image in the popular press as the gun-toting "gun moll."
By May 1934, Barrow had sixteen outstanding warrants for robbery, auto theft, assault, and murder across four states. The Division of Investigation — the federal bureau that would not be renamed the FBI until 1935 — had made the pair national priorities. Frank Hamer, a former Texas Ranger brought in earlier that year specifically to track Barrow, assembled a six-man posse in Louisiana, combining his own expertise with officers from the Texas Department of Corrections and the Dallas Sheriff's Office. They had received a tip that Barrow and Parker were in the area, and Henry Methvin's father, Ivy, had agreed to cooperate with authorities.
