June 17, 2024 • 17 mins
Guest Host George Knapp and Author Lissa Townsend Rodgers discuss the lives of Bonnie and Clyde. They touch on their upbringing up to their last two weeks alive. This is part of Lissa's book Shameless: Women of the Underworld.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Lisa Townsend Rodgers was born in Poughkeepsie spent her formative
years in New York City before eventually moving to Las Vegas.
She's worked as a journalist and editor for a vast
array of publications here in this town, as well as
a teacher and librarian. This book, just out Shameless Women
of the Underworld is just excellent.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Lisa, welcome to the program.
Speaker 4 (00:25):
Ah, thank you for having me, and thank you for
saying so much nice things.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
About my book.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Oh my gosh, I really enjoyed it. I tell me
this walk us through the inspiration. I mean, you've lived
in this town for a while, and our mob history
is well known, but it's mostly about guys Tony Spilatro,
Lefty Rosenthal, Ben Siegel, folks like that. Is that part
of the inspiration that you felt women, bad girl women
needed some representation.
Speaker 4 (00:49):
Too, Yeah, I mean, and also being from New York,
that's another city that has its own history with the Mob.
And you know, I've always been interested in and you
know sort of the people who are whose names you
see mentioned, but nobody really tells you their story, and
that's really sort of what these women were. You you know,
(01:10):
we've heard infinitely about Tony Spilatro Lefty, and you keep
hearing Jerry's name, and she's so important, But who was she?
What was her deal? You know, same thing with Virginia Hill,
you know, the flamingo. But who was she? You know,
you just hear her name all the time. So I
felt it was you know, that was sort of the inspiration,
was looking into them, digging into that more before we
(01:33):
jump into each of the individual characters, tell me a
bit about the research.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I mean, the footnotes make it clear that you did
a lot of reading and did a lot of digging
on your own.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
How you compile all this stuff?
Speaker 4 (01:46):
Well, I mean, in a way, you know, I've sort
of you know, you think if I think about when
I first started reading about Bonnie Parker, I mean, gosh,
I was probably a teenager. So in a way, you
could say researching this for most of my advice, but
you know, mostly I was there over the last ten years.
I was invited to do a book that was part
of the Las Vegas Book Festival, and I wrote a
(02:10):
chapter that was about Vegas in the seventies that was
about Elvis Hunter, S. Thompson and Jerry Rosenthal about how
Vegas kind of gives you what you want and then
takes everything away. And then I did a piece for
Desert Companion about Virginia Hill because you know who was
the Flamingo and it turns out it wasn't actually named
(02:31):
after her. And I started digging into those and then
you know, I started going, hey, well what about these
other women? And then my publisher, Anthony, who I knew,
heard me telling stories about these women because I just
looked into it and was like, you should write a
book and lo and behold, I did you know? So
(02:52):
it was just a lot of internet research. Unfortunately, during
during a pandemic, I couldn't really go in person to
a lot of collections. I did go to the Schomberg
Center in New York obviously UNLV some places in LA
but you know, it was a lot of online libraries,
digging up books, getting old magazines, stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Is the mob Museum? Was that a resource for you?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Here in Las Vegas, we have the Museum of Organized
Crime and Law Enforcement.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
It's terrific.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
If you've ever been to Las Vegas and you haven't
seen it, you've missed out. But were they helpful? I
know Jeff Schumacher from the museum helped write a review.
Speaker 4 (03:29):
Yeah, it's absolutely. You know, that's always been a resource,
you know, I think for anybody who researches the mob
in law enforcement and for this, you know, they were
definitely helpful. And they were people I could, you know,
when I had a question that arose that I couldn't
just kind of look up, I could kind of go
to them as a resource. You know, that was sort
of the value of those places, and you know that is,
(03:52):
as you said, definitely a fantastic place that people should
visit when they're in Las Vegas.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Let's start with a name that pretty much everyone on
our audience well know. I it's not the first chapter
in your book. It's Bonnie Parker, and you know Bodnie
and Clyde. My gosh, I thought I knew a lot
about her and about them, but this opened up a
whole new avenues.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
For me as a reader, and it broke my heart.
This story broke my heart.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
You know, it's been romanticized quite a bit, but gosh,
you focus on a lot on the time they spend
on the run. It is grim and nasty and bad.
So tell me about learning about her. How much of
this was new to you?
Speaker 4 (04:34):
I mean a lot of it was, you know, as
I mentioned, I'd always been interested. Maybe that was sort
of the beginning of my interest in this topic, you know,
when as a kid. But you know, again you get
the romantic version, this very Hollywood vision of them, and
when you start digging into it, you know, unfortunately there
are a lot of accounts from family members. You can
(04:56):
you know, since they were so heavily covered, you can
find a lot of contemporary accounts. But as I dug
in further just finding out how again, it was just
they were so desperate, you know, they you know, Bonnie's
family been kind of middle class but lost everything. Clyde's
family you know, as I say in the book, the
Jodes would have pitied them like the Porks had never
(05:18):
really had a home, you was, just were passed around.
They lived under an aqueduct, you know. And then when
they were on the run, it wasn't this sort of
again glamorous vision of you know, funny cride, We rob banks.
You know, they knocked over grocery stores to get by,
basically camped out, you know, and one of the things
(05:41):
that you know isn't discussed enough I think is also
just you know, Bonnie was horribly wounded, like she could
barely walk by the time they died, so you know,
digging into that. And also that was the chapter that
took me the longest. For that reason was just having
to go through everything. Literally, I would say, there was
a timeline. It's almost you know, week by week.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, well you had to probably sort through a lot
of mythology and toss it aside too, things that have
been written about him that were not accurate.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
I mean, the.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Public perceptions probably are way off base based on what
I just read from you. As you note, if not
for Bonnie of the Bonny and Clyde, Clyde might have
been forgotten. It's just some two bit punk who got
shot by police.
Speaker 4 (06:23):
Oh absolutely. I don't even know how interested the police
would have really been. I mean, they would have gotten him.
But you know, the media coverage was always about her,
and again it was just the idea that there was
a woman involved, which you know is still surprising to people,
but back then was what And also, as I mentioned,
(06:45):
you know she was and this is again one of
the things I discovered from research like an incredibly bright woman,
you know. I mean, she wrote those poems which are
sort of you know, people sort of oh, they're sort
of dogg roll in a way, but they're well done.
She staged most of those photos, you know, she was
very good with media and image, and at time when
(07:07):
people didn't understand that, and I'm sure even she didn't
really understand what she was doing, but at a certain
point she recognized that they were going to be spoken about,
and she wanted to say in that. One thing that
was interesting is, you know, out in prim they have
the Bonnie and Clyde dusk car right, which is unfortunately
now like literally in the middle of the casino floor
(07:29):
used to be a little bit off so you can
sort of focus on it more, but now it's just
sort of literally ringed with slot machines. But when you
look at things like the newspaper clippings they literally have
up there, they talk about how they aren't that final
poem that she wrote. The newspapers already had it when
they died, or somebody had it to give to them,
(07:52):
you know, And literally she had said, don't hand this
off until after we passed, because I want to make
sure I get our final word.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
In U share with us as you describe her. I mean,
she was bright, and she was smart. She could have
gone places, she had high hopes. She was personal in
that she would win people over it, converse them. She
was interested in other people. And how does she go wrong?
Where does that go wrong? Just her family was in poverty.
(08:19):
But tell the story of how she hooks up with Clyde.
Speaker 4 (08:23):
Well, I mean the thing is, yeah, she was this
honorable student in this sweetheart, but also she did have
this sort of you know, she was the girl who
fight you on the playground side. And basically she got
married very young because you know, she was a dramatic creature.
She wanted to fall in love. She married this other guy, Broy,
(08:44):
who was also a criminal who wound up getting arrested.
So she was actually married when she met Clyde, and
she was still married when they both died. You know,
but you know, he was in jail. She had lost
her job because of the depression, and she was taking
care of a friend, just hanging out in her house
(09:05):
and he walked in and it was, you know, that
sort of mythical love at first sight. You hear about
where two people look at each other and the room
stops and everybody sees it. And it was that kind
of devotion until the end. Basically, I mean, that's sort
of what brought her low, was just she worshiped him,
and to be fair, he felt the same way about her.
(09:28):
And you know, she kind of followed him down this
path and at the beginning of their relationship she begged
him to reform, but he went up in East Camp Prison,
a terrible place where he was horrifically mistreated, where he
committed his first murder and of self defense, to be fair,
and he was then consumed with revenge that he was
(09:50):
going to go back knock over East to prison free
everybody kill the guards. You know that that vengeance fantasy,
and and that was really kind of what their crimes
Free was about.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
In a way.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
He spent more time knocking over armories and trying to
get people to help him take Easton than he did
trying to rob and make money. And you know, she
sort of followed him down that path. And I mean,
to be fair again, he actually did break people out
of Eastern Prison, yeah, and she helped him. So there
(10:26):
is that.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
He doesn't become a big time criminal until right toward
the end the breakout of prison, and also they do
a he breaks people out and then they start robbing
banks and their actual big time criminals. But as you note,
most of what they did was robbing liquor stores, gas stations,
grocery stores, small time stuff, right.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
Yeah, yeah, stealing cars, stuff like that. Again, just kind
of enough to keep going, you know. And also one
thing I else to do point out is that you know,
Clyde was not a great planner, so.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
It's a great gang.
Speaker 4 (11:01):
Yeah, he was a driver. If he had been like
I'm going to be the driver for a big gang,
he could have been a big time criminal. But you know,
trying to lead like whatever local bumpkins and you know,
recent escapees he could ring together for a couple of
weeks was not going to get him to you know,
Dillinger's status.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
They get a lot of bad stuff, some of it circumstantial.
They get into circumstances where somebody else who's with them
as part of their little gang goes overboard kills somebody,
and then then they're really wanted. But they really get
become notorious because of these photos they get released.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
You have the one in your book.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
A Bonnie with their leg up on the bumper of
a getaway car, holding a gun and smoking a cigar,
and it was all stage.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
He had staged this thing. They took some photos.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
How is it that those photos get out into the
public and how are they used and what's the overall effect?
Speaker 4 (11:57):
Well, how the photos got out into the public was
during the Battle of Joplin, as they called it, when
they took a cabin in Joplin, Missouri. Bonnie Clyde, Clyde's
brother Buck, his wife Blanch, and the perennial sidekick Wd
and the you know, they are foolish and noisy and rambunctious,
(12:19):
and the police notice they are there, think they're just bootleggers.
Obviously not you know, there's a shootout. They have to
flee and leave everything, something they had to do constantly,
just leave everything. And one of the things they left
behind was this camera where which they had used to
just you know, take photos. And there were you know,
cheesecake photos of Blanche and a lot of other photos
(12:42):
on the road. But they had done a series of photos.
And you know, there's also the legendary one of also
Bonnie pointing a gun at Clyde, and so when these
got out again, they published ones, Oh yeah, here's Clyde
with his gun, and YadA, YadA, YadA. But people had
photos like that before. The photos of Bonnie posing with
(13:04):
a gun were not something that had really been seen before,
so of course, you know, what are the newspapers going
to run with? And then that turned into this whole
myth of like, she runs the gang, she's this criminal,
because again it's kind of a better story, and that's
you know, who really knew at the time, and especially
because you know she had staged the photo smoking a
(13:26):
cigar with a pistol on pointing a gun at Clyde.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
You know, it's it's amazing you detail their exploits and
so much, I mean nearly everything that they do is
just circumstance. They bounce from one hideout to another, trying
to stay ahead of the law, make really bad decisions
pretty much every step of the way that eventually, you know,
(13:49):
at leads to some terrible situations. And but you know,
there was no master plan. They did not have access
to criminal resources like the big name gangsters of that era.
They were on her own, and it seemed like they
made so many dumb mistakes, stay someplace too long, or
drop the bloody bandages on the side of the road
that gets the police on their trail. Talk about that
(14:12):
period a little bit and how it ends in such
a bad way. The last couple of weeks of their life,
as you described in great detail, was absolutely horrible, horrible.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
Yeah, as I had mentioned, Bonnie had had this horrible
accident which unfortunately was caused by Clyde just driving too
fast and crashing off of a bridge. She winds up
pinned under a burning car, getting hit with battery acid.
You know, her, she's basically crippled. You know, she is
burned to the bone, in agony, completely wrecked, and they
have nothing for her. All they can do is just
(14:45):
drive around on back roads and try to steal aspirin
for her, you know, And that is sort of also
one of the moments where you know, Clyde actually almost
grows up a little bit and you know, realize that
he will never leave her, and he's going to do
anything to protect her. But unfortunately, you know, again that
doesn't involve trying to make any sort of concrete plans
(15:07):
or get her help or get organized, and she won't
leave him. He does try to get her to leave him,
and so towards the end they you know, they do
this breakout of East and they sort of pull the
gang back together and that's where they kind of do
some bank robberies and manage it, but things fall apart.
They wind up with this this woman Mary, who sort
(15:31):
of causes problems with Bonnie. She's the girlfriend of one
of the new gang members. She stirs up trouble. Eventually
that all breaks up because they try to convince Bonnie
she should kill Clyde and is sleep and as you
can imagine, Bonnie doesn't take kindly to that, and neither
does Clyde, so break up the gang. So then they're
back to just sort of ping ponging around trying to
(15:54):
just knock over whatever they can. The reason reduced actually
taking things from their family, like begging their own starving
families that they used to give things for, like can
you get us some food and blankets. At one point
they had to flee and were so bloody and shot
up they had to just get rid of their clothes
and drive around with sheep songs, and you know, at
(16:15):
the end, their last gang member kind of you know,
as sells them out basically, you know, his father does
to try to save his son. They wind up they
had tried to avoid killing cops, but they wind up
killing cops because gang members drink and get crazy. And
this is what then sort of also pushes the we
(16:37):
must get Bonnie and Clyde at any cost, and at
the end they're sort of sold out. They're set up
in this ambush and that's the end of them. And
one interesting kind note is that Ted Hinton, who had
been one of the who was one of the chief
(16:57):
law enforcement officers, had actually known von before she met Clyde,
and she was a waitress and he had a crush
on her. She worked near the courthouse, and she was
literally one of the people who put a bullet in
her many bullets, and he was the person who opened
the door and caught her body as it fell out,
which is just sort of chilling.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Yeah, your description of what happens at the end, I mean,
we all remember the movie version of it, but it's
even more horrible than that. And then what happens to
their bodies after that, you know, I guess you know,
they're paraded through town and then there are are funerals.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
Are these are huge events, right yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:36):
Attended by over ten thousand people came to Bonnie's funeral.
Funeral they had to throw out like the local drunks
and stuff.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Lisa Townsend Rodgers was born in Poughkeepsie spent her formative
years in New York City before eventually moving to Las Vegas.
She's worked as a journalist and editor for a vast
array of publications here in this town, as well as
a teacher and librarian. This book, just out Shameless Women
of the Underworld is just excellent.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Lisa, welcome to the program.
Speaker 4 (00:25):
Ah, thank you for having me, and thank you for
saying so much nice things.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
About my book.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Oh my gosh, I really enjoyed it. I tell me
this walk us through the inspiration. I mean, you've lived
in this town for a while, and our mob history
is well known, but it's mostly about guys Tony Spilatro,
Lefty Rosenthal, Ben Siegel, folks like that. Is that part
of the inspiration that you felt women, bad girl women
needed some representation.
Speaker 4 (00:49):
Too, Yeah, I mean, and also being from New York,
that's another city that has its own history with the Mob.
And you know, I've always been interested in and you
know sort of the people who are whose names you
see mentioned, but nobody really tells you their story, and
that's really sort of what these women were. You you know,
(01:10):
we've heard infinitely about Tony Spilatro Lefty, and you keep
hearing Jerry's name, and she's so important, But who was she?
What was her deal? You know, same thing with Virginia Hill,
you know, the flamingo. But who was she? You know,
you just hear her name all the time. So I
felt it was you know, that was sort of the inspiration,
was looking into them, digging into that more before we
(01:33):
jump into each of the individual characters, tell me a
bit about the research.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I mean, the footnotes make it clear that you did
a lot of reading and did a lot of digging
on your own.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
How you compile all this stuff?
Speaker 4 (01:46):
Well, I mean, in a way, you know, I've sort
of you know, you think if I think about when
I first started reading about Bonnie Parker, I mean, gosh,
I was probably a teenager. So in a way, you
could say researching this for most of my advice, but
you know, mostly I was there over the last ten years.
I was invited to do a book that was part
of the Las Vegas Book Festival, and I wrote a
(02:10):
chapter that was about Vegas in the seventies that was
about Elvis Hunter, S. Thompson and Jerry Rosenthal about how
Vegas kind of gives you what you want and then
takes everything away. And then I did a piece for
Desert Companion about Virginia Hill because you know who was
the Flamingo and it turns out it wasn't actually named
(02:31):
after her. And I started digging into those and then
you know, I started going, hey, well what about these
other women? And then my publisher, Anthony, who I knew,
heard me telling stories about these women because I just
looked into it and was like, you should write a
book and lo and behold, I did you know? So
(02:52):
it was just a lot of internet research. Unfortunately, during
during a pandemic, I couldn't really go in person to
a lot of collections. I did go to the Schomberg
Center in New York obviously UNLV some places in LA
but you know, it was a lot of online libraries,
digging up books, getting old magazines, stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Is the mob Museum? Was that a resource for you?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Here in Las Vegas, we have the Museum of Organized
Crime and Law Enforcement.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
It's terrific.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
If you've ever been to Las Vegas and you haven't
seen it, you've missed out. But were they helpful? I
know Jeff Schumacher from the museum helped write a review.
Speaker 4 (03:29):
Yeah, it's absolutely. You know, that's always been a resource,
you know, I think for anybody who researches the mob
in law enforcement and for this, you know, they were
definitely helpful. And they were people I could, you know,
when I had a question that arose that I couldn't
just kind of look up, I could kind of go
to them as a resource. You know, that was sort
of the value of those places, and you know that is,
(03:52):
as you said, definitely a fantastic place that people should
visit when they're in Las Vegas.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Let's start with a name that pretty much everyone on
our audience well know. I it's not the first chapter
in your book. It's Bonnie Parker, and you know Bodnie
and Clyde. My gosh, I thought I knew a lot
about her and about them, but this opened up a
whole new avenues.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
For me as a reader, and it broke my heart.
This story broke my heart.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
You know, it's been romanticized quite a bit, but gosh,
you focus on a lot on the time they spend
on the run. It is grim and nasty and bad.
So tell me about learning about her. How much of
this was new to you?
Speaker 4 (04:34):
I mean a lot of it was, you know, as
I mentioned, I'd always been interested. Maybe that was sort
of the beginning of my interest in this topic, you know,
when as a kid. But you know, again you get
the romantic version, this very Hollywood vision of them, and
when you start digging into it, you know, unfortunately there
are a lot of accounts from family members. You can
(04:56):
you know, since they were so heavily covered, you can
find a lot of contemporary accounts. But as I dug
in further just finding out how again, it was just
they were so desperate, you know, they you know, Bonnie's
family been kind of middle class but lost everything. Clyde's
family you know, as I say in the book, the
Jodes would have pitied them like the Porks had never
(05:18):
really had a home, you was, just were passed around.
They lived under an aqueduct, you know. And then when
they were on the run, it wasn't this sort of
again glamorous vision of you know, funny cride, We rob banks.
You know, they knocked over grocery stores to get by,
basically camped out, you know, and one of the things
(05:41):
that you know isn't discussed enough I think is also
just you know, Bonnie was horribly wounded, like she could
barely walk by the time they died, so you know,
digging into that. And also that was the chapter that
took me the longest. For that reason was just having
to go through everything. Literally, I would say, there was
a timeline. It's almost you know, week by week.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, well you had to probably sort through a lot
of mythology and toss it aside too, things that have
been written about him that were not accurate.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
I mean, the.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Public perceptions probably are way off base based on what
I just read from you. As you note, if not
for Bonnie of the Bonny and Clyde, Clyde might have
been forgotten. It's just some two bit punk who got
shot by police.
Speaker 4 (06:23):
Oh absolutely. I don't even know how interested the police
would have really been. I mean, they would have gotten him.
But you know, the media coverage was always about her,
and again it was just the idea that there was
a woman involved, which you know is still surprising to people,
but back then was what And also, as I mentioned,
(06:45):
you know she was and this is again one of
the things I discovered from research like an incredibly bright woman,
you know. I mean, she wrote those poems which are
sort of you know, people sort of oh, they're sort
of dogg roll in a way, but they're well done.
She staged most of those photos, you know, she was
very good with media and image, and at time when
(07:07):
people didn't understand that, and I'm sure even she didn't
really understand what she was doing, but at a certain
point she recognized that they were going to be spoken about,
and she wanted to say in that. One thing that
was interesting is, you know, out in prim they have
the Bonnie and Clyde dusk car right, which is unfortunately
now like literally in the middle of the casino floor
(07:29):
used to be a little bit off so you can
sort of focus on it more, but now it's just
sort of literally ringed with slot machines. But when you
look at things like the newspaper clippings they literally have
up there, they talk about how they aren't that final
poem that she wrote. The newspapers already had it when
they died, or somebody had it to give to them,
(07:52):
you know, And literally she had said, don't hand this
off until after we passed, because I want to make
sure I get our final word.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
In U share with us as you describe her. I mean,
she was bright, and she was smart. She could have
gone places, she had high hopes. She was personal in
that she would win people over it, converse them. She
was interested in other people. And how does she go wrong?
Where does that go wrong? Just her family was in poverty.
(08:19):
But tell the story of how she hooks up with Clyde.
Speaker 4 (08:23):
Well, I mean the thing is, yeah, she was this
honorable student in this sweetheart, but also she did have
this sort of you know, she was the girl who
fight you on the playground side. And basically she got
married very young because you know, she was a dramatic creature.
She wanted to fall in love. She married this other guy, Broy,
(08:44):
who was also a criminal who wound up getting arrested.
So she was actually married when she met Clyde, and
she was still married when they both died. You know,
but you know, he was in jail. She had lost
her job because of the depression, and she was taking
care of a friend, just hanging out in her house
(09:05):
and he walked in and it was, you know, that
sort of mythical love at first sight. You hear about
where two people look at each other and the room
stops and everybody sees it. And it was that kind
of devotion until the end. Basically, I mean, that's sort
of what brought her low, was just she worshiped him,
and to be fair, he felt the same way about her.
(09:28):
And you know, she kind of followed him down this
path and at the beginning of their relationship she begged
him to reform, but he went up in East Camp Prison,
a terrible place where he was horrifically mistreated, where he
committed his first murder and of self defense, to be fair,
and he was then consumed with revenge that he was
(09:50):
going to go back knock over East to prison free
everybody kill the guards. You know that that vengeance fantasy,
and and that was really kind of what their crimes
Free was about.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
In a way.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
He spent more time knocking over armories and trying to
get people to help him take Easton than he did
trying to rob and make money. And you know, she
sort of followed him down that path. And I mean,
to be fair again, he actually did break people out
of Eastern Prison, yeah, and she helped him. So there
(10:26):
is that.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
He doesn't become a big time criminal until right toward
the end the breakout of prison, and also they do
a he breaks people out and then they start robbing
banks and their actual big time criminals. But as you note,
most of what they did was robbing liquor stores, gas stations,
grocery stores, small time stuff, right.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
Yeah, yeah, stealing cars, stuff like that. Again, just kind
of enough to keep going, you know. And also one
thing I else to do point out is that you know,
Clyde was not a great planner, so.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
It's a great gang.
Speaker 4 (11:01):
Yeah, he was a driver. If he had been like
I'm going to be the driver for a big gang,
he could have been a big time criminal. But you know,
trying to lead like whatever local bumpkins and you know,
recent escapees he could ring together for a couple of
weeks was not going to get him to you know,
Dillinger's status.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
They get a lot of bad stuff, some of it circumstantial.
They get into circumstances where somebody else who's with them
as part of their little gang goes overboard kills somebody,
and then then they're really wanted. But they really get
become notorious because of these photos they get released.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
You have the one in your book.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
A Bonnie with their leg up on the bumper of
a getaway car, holding a gun and smoking a cigar,
and it was all stage.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
He had staged this thing. They took some photos.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
How is it that those photos get out into the
public and how are they used and what's the overall effect?
Speaker 4 (11:57):
Well, how the photos got out into the public was
during the Battle of Joplin, as they called it, when
they took a cabin in Joplin, Missouri. Bonnie Clyde, Clyde's
brother Buck, his wife Blanch, and the perennial sidekick Wd
and the you know, they are foolish and noisy and rambunctious,
(12:19):
and the police notice they are there, think they're just bootleggers.
Obviously not you know, there's a shootout. They have to
flee and leave everything, something they had to do constantly,
just leave everything. And one of the things they left
behind was this camera where which they had used to
just you know, take photos. And there were you know,
cheesecake photos of Blanche and a lot of other photos
(12:42):
on the road. But they had done a series of photos.
And you know, there's also the legendary one of also
Bonnie pointing a gun at Clyde, and so when these
got out again, they published ones, Oh yeah, here's Clyde
with his gun, and YadA, YadA, YadA. But people had
photos like that before. The photos of Bonnie posing with
(13:04):
a gun were not something that had really been seen before,
so of course, you know, what are the newspapers going
to run with? And then that turned into this whole
myth of like, she runs the gang, she's this criminal,
because again it's kind of a better story, and that's
you know, who really knew at the time, and especially
because you know she had staged the photo smoking a
(13:26):
cigar with a pistol on pointing a gun at Clyde.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
You know, it's it's amazing you detail their exploits and
so much, I mean nearly everything that they do is
just circumstance. They bounce from one hideout to another, trying
to stay ahead of the law, make really bad decisions
pretty much every step of the way that eventually, you know,
(13:49):
at leads to some terrible situations. And but you know,
there was no master plan. They did not have access
to criminal resources like the big name gangsters of that era.
They were on her own, and it seemed like they
made so many dumb mistakes, stay someplace too long, or
drop the bloody bandages on the side of the road
that gets the police on their trail. Talk about that
(14:12):
period a little bit and how it ends in such
a bad way. The last couple of weeks of their life,
as you described in great detail, was absolutely horrible, horrible.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
Yeah, as I had mentioned, Bonnie had had this horrible
accident which unfortunately was caused by Clyde just driving too
fast and crashing off of a bridge. She winds up
pinned under a burning car, getting hit with battery acid.
You know, her, she's basically crippled. You know, she is
burned to the bone, in agony, completely wrecked, and they
have nothing for her. All they can do is just
(14:45):
drive around on back roads and try to steal aspirin
for her, you know, And that is sort of also
one of the moments where you know, Clyde actually almost
grows up a little bit and you know, realize that
he will never leave her, and he's going to do
anything to protect her. But unfortunately, you know, again that
doesn't involve trying to make any sort of concrete plans
(15:07):
or get her help or get organized, and she won't
leave him. He does try to get her to leave him,
and so towards the end they you know, they do
this breakout of East and they sort of pull the
gang back together and that's where they kind of do
some bank robberies and manage it, but things fall apart.
They wind up with this this woman Mary, who sort
(15:31):
of causes problems with Bonnie. She's the girlfriend of one
of the new gang members. She stirs up trouble. Eventually
that all breaks up because they try to convince Bonnie
she should kill Clyde and is sleep and as you
can imagine, Bonnie doesn't take kindly to that, and neither
does Clyde, so break up the gang. So then they're
back to just sort of ping ponging around trying to
(15:54):
just knock over whatever they can. The reason reduced actually
taking things from their family, like begging their own starving
families that they used to give things for, like can
you get us some food and blankets. At one point
they had to flee and were so bloody and shot
up they had to just get rid of their clothes
and drive around with sheep songs, and you know, at
(16:15):
the end, their last gang member kind of you know,
as sells them out basically, you know, his father does
to try to save his son. They wind up they
had tried to avoid killing cops, but they wind up
killing cops because gang members drink and get crazy. And
this is what then sort of also pushes the we
(16:37):
must get Bonnie and Clyde at any cost, and at
the end they're sort of sold out. They're set up
in this ambush and that's the end of them. And
one interesting kind note is that Ted Hinton, who had
been one of the who was one of the chief
(16:57):
law enforcement officers, had actually known von before she met Clyde,
and she was a waitress and he had a crush
on her. She worked near the courthouse, and she was
literally one of the people who put a bullet in
her many bullets, and he was the person who opened
the door and caught her body as it fell out,
which is just sort of chilling.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Yeah, your description of what happens at the end, I mean,
we all remember the movie version of it, but it's
even more horrible than that. And then what happens to
their bodies after that, you know, I guess you know,
they're paraded through town and then there are are funerals.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
Are these are huge events, right yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:36):
Attended by over ten thousand people came to Bonnie's funeral.
Funeral they had to throw out like the local drunks
and stuff.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
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