August 11, 2026 • 54 mins
You've probably seen the movie, but what else do you know about this legendary crime couple? Listen in to find out.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, machine Gun Jerry Rowland and this
is Stuff you Should Know about Bonnie and Clyde. A
(00:22):
true crime edition but also a folk hero edition.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
That's right, and it's given me an opportunity to get
that Bonnie and Clyde song stuck in my head all day,
which is great because I've never heard that song, Bonnie
and Clyde. Bonnie and Clyde, I think you're just making
that up now, it's for real. I think it was
Serge Gainsbourg, but I know the Luna version.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
I came across that mention of that, so yeah, it
was Serge Gainsburg and Brigie Bardot.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yeah, but Luna covered it. And speaking of Luna leader,
Dean Wareham's brother Anthony as a listener, So hello Anthony.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Wow, we finally got to Anthony.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
I tried to buy Dean's guitar off of Instagram a
few weeks ago. How did he go, Well, he put
his guitar up and it's the one that's on the
cover of his book Black Postcards. And he's used in
the studio and on tour. And I was like, huh,
let me just see how much he wants and he said,
I missed it by a day, so it stinks.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Well, maybe Anthony can pull some strings for you.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah, like steal a guitar from Dean and just send
it my way.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Yeah. And if Anthony did that, he'd be a lot
like Clyde Barrow or Bonnie Parker.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah. Man, these guys like to steal stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
So yeah, I did you see the PBS documentary, the
American Experience documentary on him. No, just it, it's worth watching.
I haven't seen the movie. So you put the two
of us together, we have a full comprehension, right.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
That's how it works.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
But they kind of they basically got across that they stole,
or Clyde stole just literally a way of life, like
he stole cars to get around, he stole money to
buy food with, like he that's just how he lived.
And they make the point. And I think Lvia Olivia
helped us with this. I she kind of makes the
(02:12):
point too, like these were the options that were open
to them, especially Clyde because he was raised dirt poor
during the depression, and like a lot of people were
poor during the depression. So if you were dirt poor
during the Depression, you were really really poor. And that's
the life that that Clyde Barrow was born into.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Yeah for sure, and you know, not to excuse crime,
but that was just his background and not to you know,
they've been glorified over the years, but kind of reading
through this, it was like, oh, man, they like just
would murder people at will, again usually to get out
of a scrape, but still just like killing people left
and right, just you know, to not get caught.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Yeah, particularly cops. And there's some disputes over there's a
pair of patrol men that were killed, and it's disputed
whether Bonnie was one of the gunmen or not. There's
some other crimes that they have had attributed to them
that may or may not have been there doing, but
there are definitely there's a the path behind them was
(03:18):
littered with dead cops that they definitely murdered. They were
known to like if a cop came up to him,
even if they had no idea who they were and
were trying to help, they just opened fire and killed
the guy. Like that was definitely their mo typically with
cops though, and this isn't like justify it, but this
was also the era where the cops would just open
(03:40):
fire on you too. There wasn't like I put your
hands up kind of stuff. It was like, you're an outlaw.
I'm going to start shooting at you first, ask questions later.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Yeah, not like these days where cops and ice never
just kill people, right, bad joke? Yeah, all right, well,
and you know it. And maybe I'll make this point
later too. But and again it doesn't justify it. But
after Clyde's prison stent early on, like he was to
(04:10):
me like clearly killing people, so he would never ever
have to go back to prison, right you know.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Yeah, and you can kind of get that after you
hear about his time in prison and how much he
hated it.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yeah, so let's get going and talk about Clyde first.
I know it's Bonnie and Clyde, but we're going Clyde
and Bonnie initially.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Ooh.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
He was born in Texas in nineteen oh nine, in
Teleco And you know, when he was a kid, he
I don't think this necessarily means he was set for
a life of crime. So a lot of kids played
gangster play outlaw and that's but that's what he did.
And in the twenties they moved to a very very
very poor neighborhood in West Dallas and we're homeless as
a family for a while. And his brother Buck Barrow
(04:53):
and Clyde started you know, early on, like stealing food,
like you mentioned, stealing turkeys, and then that graduated to
robbery and car theft and stuff like that, to the
point where he was eventually arrested for the first time
when he was seventeen for car theft.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Yeah. This was not him boosting a car, which was
basically how he got every other car. He actually went
and rented a car and then a girlfriend and then
didn't take it back.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Yeah, that's stealing, though, you know, no, it definitely ok.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Death by taking I think, But I think also you
can implicate the car rental place for renting a car
to a seventeen year old.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Yeah. I was also quite frankly surprised to learn that
they had car rental services in nineteen twenty six.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Yeah, although it was probably just some dude in town
who'd let you take his car for ten.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Bucks or something, but you got to be thirteen.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Right, So yeah, that was his first brush with the law,
and that was certainly far from his last. And that's Clyde.
His middle name was Chestnut, by the way, which I
thought was pretty cool, very cute. Bonnie's middle name was Elizabeth.
Her name was Bonnie Elizabeth Parker. She was born into
different circumstances than Clyde. Her mom was a seamstress, her
(06:05):
dad was a bricklayer, but she was born in Rowena, Texas,
and after her father died, the family had very little
means of supporting themselves, and her mom was I think
her mom's name was Emma. She was basically left to
raise three very little kids on her own. So they
ended up in the same area roughly where Clyde and
(06:28):
his family were. Basically, I saw it put that they
were both from the same side of the tracks, despite
Bonnie's mom raising her and her siblings to be respectable
and up to feel that they were above their circumstances
rather than you know, part of their circumstances for sure.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
So you know, this was the early nineteen hundred, so
a lot of times you would find kids dropping out
of school or getting married at very young ages, and
that's what happened with Bonnie. At fifteen, she married a
guy named Roy Thornton who was a criminal, so that
kind of gave her a taste of that lifestyle. They
weren't together too long, I think about four years, even
(07:08):
though they never officially legally got divorced, and finally hooked
up with Clyde in nineteen thirty when he was twenty
and she was nineteen. And it wasn't long after they
got together that Clyde went to prison for car theft
and burglary again just sort of doing the same fairly
(07:29):
low stakes crimes at the time, and she got him
out of jail. She smuggled in a gun and helped
him escape basically with two other inmates. They were all
three recaptured though, and that's when he got his kind
of really tough stint in prison.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Yeah, they send him to fourteen years hard labor on
the East of Prison farm, which was a notorious farm
in the Texas pedals system where you would just get
beaten for no reason by the guards who were just
completely beyond the law. And he was also he had
been taken remember he's still pretty young at this time.
(08:06):
He was basically claimed by another inmate who raped him
repeatedly and beat him repeatedly, and he essentially was like,
this is my life now for at least the next
fourteen years. And there he finally was tired enough of
it that he smuggled a galvanized pipe into the cells
with him and he walked to the showers, knowing that
(08:28):
this guy was going to follow him, and the guy did,
and Clyde suddenly turns on him and beat him over
the head until he was dead with the lead pipe.
And I think one thing that really kind of gets across,
like how Clyde was. He was kind of a likable
person throughout his life, but especially at this time. Another
inmate who already had a life sentence he was never
(08:50):
getting out, he took the blame so that Clyde wouldn't
basically ruin his future for killing the man who'd been
raping him.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Yeah. I mean, hey, it's a pretty stand up thing
to do for that guy in prison.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
It totally is. It's like I donated a kid need
to a stranger. Oh yeah, well I took a murder
rap so a kid wouldn't who was doling out his
own justice wouldn't ruin his life.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah, So you know that's what I was referencing when
it You know, it seems that Clyde did everything, including
killing cops, that he could to stay out of jail.
Again again, not excusing to killing a police, just kind
of kind of lay down the reality of being assaulted
in prison like that.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
I think you're explaining his mindset. That's legitimate.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah, okay, So one of the other things. I don't
think Clyde was ever accused of being like the smartest
guy in the world, because at one point he cut
off two of his toes to avoid the hard labor
part of the hard labor prison, and less than a
week later he was freed when in his mother petitioned
(09:54):
for parole. So I didn't time that one out quite right.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
No, he was also, I guess, not known as the
luckiest guy around too. Yeah, he spent so he spent
less than two years in prison. But in that time
he changed like fundamentally before, like you said, fairly light stuff,
boosting cars, stealing truckloads of turkeys, that kind of stuff.
But there was another guy that he was in the
(10:20):
prison with who said that before his very eyes he
saw Clyde change from a schoolboy to a Rattlesnake, and
even Bonnie. Later on, in a poem that she wrote
she used to write poetry, she mentioned that that Clyde
was basically a victim of unfair institutionalization. Basically that that's
(10:41):
what that's why he was the way he was.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
I gotta say, every time you say boosted a car,
it makes you sound super street.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
It sound like a fifties greaser in the seventies.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah, instead of stealing a car, Like I'm not cool,
I don't say boosting a car.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
I guess you could say stealing. Yeah, I was gonna say,
I don't know any other way to put it. But
I mean, I guess it's just because I'm from the streets.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
You know.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
It's about to say, you're like, oh wait, there's a
word for boosting a car, stealing steel. Yeah, they don't
teach that on the street. So I don't blame you.
So Clyde was released, like we said, when his mother
petitioned for that release, and he went right back to robbing,
you know, gas stations, convenience store stuff like that. He
(11:25):
had his first sort of partner in crime. His name
was Ralph Foltz, and Bonnie was kind of joined up
with them as the first version of the Barrow Gang,
just the three of them, even though like you know,
parents on both sides were like, Bonnie, you can't join
up with this criminal gang, Like please, don't do it,
and she's like, I love my man.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Yeah, she said, I like the bad boys for sure.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
But you know, one of the reasons why we still
know about Bonnie and Clyde not just because they became celebrities,
but also because they were just totally in love with
one another.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Like basically every single outlaw romance or love story that
you've ever seen, and the movies are on TV, is
in one way or another based on Bonnie and Clyde.
Oh yeah, that's my theory. Yeah. I should probably say
this is not you know, something from an academic journal
I read, but.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
A white paper, as Emily would say.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Yeah, exactly right, it's it's something I'm working on.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Emily.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Emily's got one for everything, doesn't she.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Oh yeah, when I like, you know, when she'll just
sort of make a claim or something else and not
to its challenger, I'll just be like, are you sure
about that or something, and She'll be like, well, I
don't have a white paper. On it all right, I
know that's the time.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
To back off, Thank you, Emily.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
So in April of thirty two, and you know, we
should point out this is over just a couple of
years that all of derrib shenanigans took place. Yeah, so
we're gonna be spitting out dates kind of Fast and Furious.
But in April of speaking of boosting cars of thirty two,
did you get that one?
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Hm?
Speaker 2 (13:03):
Hmmm, Fast and Furious?
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Oh oh, did they boost cars? I thought they There
were extensive, lengthy scenes of them negotiating at car dealerships.
Actually they're purchasing.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
I think saw you got to sell me this car?
It's about family. I only know that line about family
as a reference because I've only seen one of that.
I think I saw that very first movie, did you.
I'm not familiar with the Fast and the Furious verse,
But were they even Carthy's I think they were right.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
I probably, I mean they were definitely. I get the
impression that they were on the wrong side of the law,
the right side.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Of Justice's man, that's the log line. Did you you
didn't see any of those? No, not even the first one. No,
you say that like you have that I know I'm
starvage movies before.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Sorry, but it's also the highest grossing movie franchise in
the world ever.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Well it's because there's thirty seven of them.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
I mean, that's definitely part of it. But also people
prettily like car movies.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
They do, they're supposed to be good, all right. So
back to after pointing out my dumb pun. April of
thirty two, Bonnie and Ralph Fultz, who was the guy
who he initially hooked up with and then gang they
were arrested trying to rob a hardware store and she
got out, was never indicted at least, and Ralph was convicted,
and while she was sort of being investigated for indictment,
(14:24):
Clyde and his other boys are still out there again.
Robin banks, Robin stores, gas stations, all pretty And this
is one reason they got away with it for so
long is they never did like these huge things. They
were kind of in small towns Robin, you know, kind
of backwater grocery stores and stuff.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
It's key.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
But it was at one of these robberies where the
first murder happens when a store owner and one of
the only non cops, a guy named John Butcher, was killed.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Yeah, and it's also not clear whether it was Clyde
that did it. Yeah, I don't think anyone thinks it
was Bonnie. I'm yeah, she was in jail, I think,
like you said at the time, Yeah, definitely wasn't her.
There was. He was with an associate named Raymond Hamilton,
and Raymond Hamilton and Floyd Hamilton would kind of come
in and out of the Barrow gang, and I got
the impression that, like Clyde was definitely one of the
(15:16):
more stand up gangsters, of the people in his gang,
that he ran with some shady, shady dudes that were
way more murderous than him, and that it was just
basically him being pragmatic, like he just had a small
pool of people who he knew could help him rob
a store at any given time, so he had to
(15:38):
kind of hang out with these shady people. I get
the impression the otherwise wouldn't have necessarily.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Yeah, I sort of do too. Yeah. So that was
in April of the first murder. The second murder was
in August of that year when Clyde and Raymond and
another you know guy that they was sort of in
and out of the gang killed an undershare if I guess,
which is sort of like a deputy named Eugene Moore
in Stringtown, Oklahoma, and then went back to Dallas around
(16:08):
Christmas and Clyde talked to a kid, basically a sixteen
year old named w D. Jones into joining up with
the gang. And on Christmas Day, which was the next day,
they killed another guy named Doyle Johnson while stealing his car,
and Clyde was like, all right, kid, like, you got
to stay with us now otherwise like they're going to
(16:29):
get you for this murder.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Yeah, and w D being sixteen at the time, was like,
oh God, I have no choice. I have to turn
to a life of crime now. I'm in too deep.
As Phil Collins would later saye so he did. He
stuck around and he and Bonnie and Clyde were essentially
the first cohesive Bonnie and Clyde gang, Yeah, because they
(16:53):
stuck together for quite a while.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
A member.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
She did a lot of stuff. Everything we're talking about here,
every signify thing, which is usually the murder of a cop.
They're in between those, there's handfuls and handfuls of robberies
and you know, shootouts and stuff like that that they
engaged and they were on the run and on the
move and under the gun. Yeah, every moment from the
(17:17):
start to their death. Over the course of this two
something years, they were just constantly in action. Even when
they took a vacation, as we'll see in Joplin, Missouri,
they ended up in a shootout.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
Yeah, there was a lot of gunplay. I mean that
was at Christmas when the second murder happened. In January,
there was another murder and this was just a sort
of an unlucky circumstance when they walked into an ambush,
but it wasn't for them, it was for a different target,
but it was an ambush nonetheless. So they killed the
(17:51):
deputy sheriff named Malcolm Davis. And for the next couple
of months, basically early thirty three through the spring, it
was Zora, Arkansas, Oklahoma, stealing boosting cars how to say it, right, Yeah,
boosting cars. And you know, if you've ever seen the
(18:12):
very famous photos that looks like, hey, this looks sort
of like a photo shoot of these criminals, that's kind
of exactly what it was. It was during this time
that w D took these photos of them, these very
famous photos. One of which I'm sure you saw this
one online. Somebody did a really good job colorizing the
one where he's kind of lifted Bonnie up and like
(18:36):
colorized and retouched to where it looks like a modern photo.
There's like a lot of clarity because otherwise they're sort
of grainy black and white. But yeah, you get your
with this color photo. You get a really good look
at like who they were, and they they you know,
Fade Dunaway and Warren Batty played them for a reason,
like they were both like pretty attractive people.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Yeah, and I didn't know this, but Bonnie was really Dnkham's.
Like she was under what is that she was under
five feet tall and weighed eighty five pounds.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
That's a Dnkham's.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Yeah, that's a dnkham Never heard of that. I guess
it's it's mine. Oh okay, like being white papered. It's
on archive right now.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Well you means it to a small person, do you say,
come here, little Dinkams? Is that where it comes from?
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Yeah? Drives her crazy, She's like, put me down, all right?
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Yeah, she was a Dnkhams. That's why he was just
sort of holding her up with one arm.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
I guess yeah. And also it would come in handy
later when she injures her leg, right, because she had
to be carried quite a bit. But so around this
time those photos, like you said, they'll they'll come back
in again. But around this time, I guess in March.
This is January when they started shooting at the cops again.
(19:50):
December and January art shooting at the cops again, right,
so this is this is March. And when Clyde's brother
Buck shows up, and Buck had been in pre remember
he basically taught his little brother Clyde how to be
a criminal, but not a murderous criminal. Clyde learned that
on his own, remember, Yeah. And Buck's wife Blanche came along.
So now they had a two couple gang with a
(20:13):
fifth wheel in WD Blanche and Buck and Bonnie and
Clyde in poor little w D, who again is like sixteen,
maybe seventeen by now, and after like this at least
a year of just constant crime, they're like, let's take
a vacation in Joplin, Missouri, Missouri, right, that's how they
(20:35):
say it. Yeah, And they were there for thirteen days
before the cops got called on them because they were
basically being noisy drunks in a neighborhood, and the neighbors
were like, these are probably bootleggers because this is you know,
I guess it's after prohibition, shortly after prohibition, but still,
(20:57):
these bootleg operations were so successful. I'm sure they just
didn't go away immediately.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Yeah, they're like, whoever's at this airbnb is really dragging
the neighborhood down.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
So they did call the cops and another gunfight. You know,
the cops come up and, like you said, this is
just a time where people are just opening fire all
over the place, and they killed two cops, Harry McGinnis
and Wes Harryman, and the gang got out of there
and wd his nickname was Little Forty. He was shot
in the side and recovered and they somehow, with those
(21:32):
old cars in the nineteen thirties, drove about six hundred
miles overnight to Shamrock, Texas.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
It's a long drive, yeah, because Clyde was a professional
getaway driver. He was really good at stealing cars and
he was really good at driving cars fast.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Yeah, should we take a break, Yes, I.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Think that's a great idea.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Chuck, all right, we'll be right back with more on
B and C.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
Burning Stoffy jaw Sh shows Soffi.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
S all right, So we're back with Bonnie and Clyde.
They are starting to get a little bit of press
at this point, and the newspapers show up at the
hide out in Joplin, Missouri, at the Airbnb once they
found out what was going on. They found you know, guns,
(22:39):
they found this poem that Bonnie had written, which we'll
get to in a second little more detail. They found
that undeveloped film, so you can imagine they developed that
film of these like soon to be infamous photos of
Bonnie with a cigar and all this stuff, and it
was front page stuff, and like everybody was all of
a sudden, like really kind of captured by the allure
(23:02):
of these gangsters.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
Yeah, because not only are they like doing you know,
news paper article worthy crimes, getting away from the cops,
killing cops. Now there's photos that they can run alongside
of them. So everybody starts getting in on the act,
not just the press, but also true crime magazines, newsreels.
Like they became famous overnight, Like they were already local
(23:27):
legends in Texas after those photos started getting published on
the wire. That was when they just really became icons.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yeah, I mean attractive young lovers. They're having a good
time because in these photos they're like goofing off and
having fun, so obviously just something that's going to capture
the public's attention. They published that poem that you referenced earlier.
This was called the Story of Suicide sal and I
read the poem. I'm sure you did too. She wrote
this in jail when she was briefly in jail in
(23:57):
nineteen thirty two. And you know, it's an okay poem.
It's not the greatest thing in the world. But when
I was reading it, I was like, I wonder if
anyone's ever put this to song. I was like, surely
someone has, and I went online. I was like, oh, yeah,
there it is. And I went and played it and
I was listening to it and it was this woman
and it was like a country sort of version. I
was like, wait a minute. I was like this, I
(24:19):
bet this is not real. And I looked of course
it was freaking Ai from like February of this year,
like all completely fake, and I was just it left
a really nasty taste in my mouth.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
I'm sure, and well it should man, Yeah, you got
duped by AI. Somebody said, AI make a song out
of this Bonnie Parker poem in the in the in
the the style of Juice Newton.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
It was more like, I don't know, I can't think
of a country singer like.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
New country stuff like country pops.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
I mean it wasn't poppy. It sounded country. But the
way the woman's the fake woman's voice, I don't we
want to call her a woman. The computer voice mm
was just super sort of modern Nashville polished. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Yeah, I hope AI, when they take over, don't come
back and punish us for saying things derogatory things like
we've said about them over the years.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Remember, Yeah, I remember the guy on the train in
Canada that I overheard talking about AI. Was on the
ride from uh yeah, uh Ottawa to Toronto.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Yeah, but I don't remember what he said.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
He said, he's talking about AI. He's like, some people
don't like it, some people do like it. He's like,
I mean I can't wait for AI to get here,
like it was coming to dinner. I was like, oh,
it is here, my friend, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Sweet, sweet to get off the more often.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Yeah, I tell you what, he knew a lot about
NHL hockey though.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
I'll bet this, like basically every Canadian does. Yeah, one
thing about that poem too, So in it she uses
a bunch of like slang, like like underworld slang basically yeah,
but it's still a serviceable poem, especially for a twenty
two year old who dropped out of school at fifteen.
(26:06):
And I think that that's like a really good back
of the envelope sketch of Bonnie's personality. She was very bright,
she excelled in school, but she dropped out at fifteen,
and she was fascinated with the underworld and like outlaw
stuff so much so that she started living that life
because she found a guy who was living in that
(26:26):
life and she decided to be with them, you know,
So that was that's her basically encapsulated.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
Yeah, I totally agree. So there the public again is
enthralled at this point. They're in like the true detective
mysteries magazines and stuff like that. In nineteen you mentioned
that Clyde loved cars and like loved to boost them
and also drive them, and he loved Fords, and he
(26:53):
wrote a letter in nineteen thirty four supposedly. I don't
think they verified it from him, but it certainly sounds
like it was to me. Wrote a letter to Henry
Ford and he said. Part of the letter says, while
I still have got breath in my lungs, I will
tell you what a dandy carr you make. I have
drove forwards exclusively when I could get away with one
for sustained speed and freedom from trouble. To Ford has
(27:15):
got every other car skin. There's your ad. And even
if my business hasn't been strictly legal, it don't hurt
anything to tell you what a fine car you got
in the V eight and judging from you know, we
later got poems from Clyde as well, and there are
a lot of misspellings and stuff. And I said he wasn't,
you know, the brightest bulb because of his upbringing, of course,
(27:35):
but it sounds to me pretty legit.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Yeah, yeah, I think at least Henry Ford was like,
it's legit enough to have his secretary Kraft to thank
you letter to sounds back pretty funny, yeah, And you
said that that like they were, you know, they become
popularizing true crime magazines in part as like folk heroes,
Like I said, at the outset, And one of the
(27:59):
reasons why is they're committing these crimes at the height
of the depression or the depth of the depression. Yeah,
and people were rooting for people who did things like
rob banks because the banks were the villains at the time.
They were foreclosing on like hard working, honest people, and
so if you robbed a bank, you kind of automatically
became a folk hero. And people like Bonnie and Clyde
(28:21):
so much that those true crime magazines basically attributed scores
of bank robberies to them that they never did.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Apparently they were popular enough that banks would if they
got robbed, they'd be like, yeah, Bonnie and Clyde just
robbed us, just to have that brush with celebrity, even
if it wasn't them.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Yeah, I mean, get it in the paper for sure.
They also, you know, they did kill a lot of cops,
but they also let a lot go by way of
kind of taking them with them, which is technically kidnapping.
Sometimes cops sometimes civilians that would they would kidnap and
then just drop them off in the middle of nowhere,
basically so they didn't have to kill them, which you know,
(29:01):
that was a better choice, I guess. And they were
also like, you know, this is a time where you
get away with crime a lot easier and come and
go as a lot easier, just because of communications and
the way things worked. And they would, you know, they'd
go home and like visit their families and stuff and
not get caught, Like they didn't have their famili's homes
staked out at this point.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
No, But they were also really safe about it. They
were very smart, Like they write a message in a
coke bottle and just throw it out of the car
as they were driving past at their mom's house or whatever.
Like they were smart. They assumed the phones were tapped
and all that stuff. But if you're an outlaw that
are well known around those parts, just show up at
home is still pretty pretty risky, oh for sure. So
(29:45):
after Joplin, after the little vak in Joplin that ended
on a shootout with the cops and the death of
two cops, they kept moving. They got back on the
road and they were in a car wreck actually at
one point like a couple months later, and they it
was a bad crash. The Clyde was going really fast.
(30:06):
They rolled the car and Bonnie got third degree burns
on her leg. I saw from one account that she
was burned because the car caught on fire. Another account
said that it was acid from the battery. Either way,
she had third degree burns down to her bones and
no options about going and getting actual medical treatment. So
(30:26):
she had. She was in a lot of pain and
limped and hopped and was carried in some cases for
the rest of her life.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Why does it surprise me that cars had batteries? Then?
Speaker 1 (30:39):
I think that was actually very new, and that was
one of the reasons Clyde was able to steal so
many cars is because you could hot wire them. Now,
oh okay, I think that was super new.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
All right, which is probably what it leaked all over Bunny.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
I guess they didn't have the caps.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
No, They're like, just don't tip it over, don't roll
your car over, and everything should be fine, all.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Right, So good driver, except when he's crashing cars. Later
they wrapped. I think that was in June of thirty three,
they robbed a store in Alma, Texas, another gunfight with
two cops, and they killed another cop, Marshall Henry D.
Humphrey escaped again in July. They were not at that Airbnb,
(31:24):
but they went to a different one in Missouri, another guesthouse,
and the owner and I never had heard of this,
but it makes sense if you, apparently back then, if
you would back a car, and they called that like
gangster style because you want to get out of there quick,
and that was sort of a just a red flag.
So he noticed that they backed their car in the
other thing he noticed to me a bigger tell is
(31:44):
they taped newspapers over the windows, and they paid for
their meals with coins. And it turns out some vending
machines nearby had been robbed. So this was all just like.
The guy was like, well, maybe I should call the cops.
So they did. The cops came out. Guess what happened.
Another gunfight. Guess what happened. They escaped again, but this
(32:04):
time Buck Barrow his brother was wounded pretty badly and
Blanche was too. Blant's got charge of glass in her eyes,
I'm guessing temporarily blinding her considering the jobs she had
later in life.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
She was blinded in at least one eye, so I
don't know if it was permanent or not. Either. I
didn't see that anywhere. Yeah, so they actually made it.
They escaped from this gunfight with the cops in Missouri,
and they made it all the way to Iowa, and
they found like a park and were hanging laying low
in this park, trying to keep Buck alive and I
(32:40):
guess tending to Blanch as well. And again they backed
their car in gangster style, and that caught people's attention.
They also left the car running when they went to
town to buy supply.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Extra gangster for sure.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Either there, you just got places to be, you know.
But I guess people were jumpy back then. Yeah, the
cops showed up at the park. Somebody followed them or said,
these people are staying at the park right now, fifty
cops show up. Another gun fight happens. This is like
a day or so, I think, after the first one,
and Blanche and Buck buckets hit again and He's like,
(33:16):
I can't make it any further, you guys go on.
Blanche stays with Buck and they both get arrested. Bonnie
Clyde and w D make their escape and they actually
get away. W D finally says like that's enough for me.
I'm done. He did the whole Blackjack dealers like I'm
out thing. Yeah, and he went home to Texas.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Yeah, so he goes home to Texas while Buck is arrested,
I think five days later he dies. So a big
brother is now gone, Blanche's husband, and when w D
goes home, he's arrested in pretty short order, I think
in November. And he told the cops like, yeah, I
was in the Barrow gang, but he said he was
(33:55):
forced into it, and because of that fact and because
he was a kid, they were fairly lenient on him.
They sentenced ht to six years in prison.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
Yeah. So yeah, I think WD kind of got the
least of it to anybody because also at this time,
like there are other people that they're kind of coming
up against doing some crimes with here there, they're going
in and out of prison, Yeah, pretty pretty frequently. And
as a matter of fact, because he was shorthanded, he
(34:24):
actually Clyde stage a prison break. Remember the old Eastham
prison farm that Clyde had learned to hate, and it
had changed Clyde essentially right. Well, he had people on
the inside and he and a guy named Jimmy Mullins
busted these guys out. They busted out Henry Methvin, Joe Palmer,
(34:47):
guy named Hilton Biby and Raymond Hamilton remember him from
the earlier section. He had been captured and sent to prison,
and so they busted him out because Clyde needed more
help because now WD was gone and so was.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
Buck Yes, and killed two guards in the process here,
So that's two more down. I mean, the bodies are
stacking up at this point.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
Well, one of those guards I think may have been
purposely killed because he was known as such a brutal guard.
He would leave his post just to go beat inmates. Yeah,
so it's probably not coincidence that he was one of
the two that were killed during this.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Get one on the way out, all right, So the
gang is still on the run, and it feels like
it feels like the noose is tightening a little bit.
Like the original gangs now has partly died and been
in prison, so it's been splintered. Yeah, but they're soldiering
on with new people. And in April of thirty four,
Bonnie Clyde and Henry Methvin were in and he was
(35:47):
one of the guys they boosted from prison. Yeah can
you say.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
That too, Yeah, you can boost somebody from prison.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
Sure, okay, what about when you just give somebody a boost,
like an emotional support? Where does that fit in?
Speaker 1 (36:00):
That is see, I guess that would be Clark and somebody.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
Yeah, Clark made some good feelings. Yeah, so, uh, where
was I Henry Methin? They all went to grape Vine,
Texas At this point a couple of highway cops, highway
patrolmen saw thought they were stranded motorists and stopped to
help them out, and they killed them. So two more
cops dead. And then five days after that they killed
(36:25):
another cop in Oklahoma and kidnapped a police chief. So
things are getting really pretty intense at this point.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Yeah, I mean three cops in two days, I think, Yeah,
that's or three cops and yeah, three days something like that.
That's crazy. So this was like, yeah, you kind of
get the impression that things are starting to move really
really fast at this point. Right Raymond Hamilton, he was
recaptured I think by like a month or so after,
(36:56):
but he'd already been involved in the murders of these
cops and like a bunch of other robberies and stuff.
So remember he had been busted out. So when he
was recaptured not only was he being re sentenced for
escaping prison, but also for all the crimes, including murder,
that he committed in the short like month or two
that he was out. Yeah, he was sentenced to the
(37:18):
Texas State Pen in Huntsville and placed on death row there. Yeah,
he also escaped there too, but he was recaptured again.
Do you know, heart, it's got to be to escape
from death row?
Speaker 3 (37:29):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (37:31):
How hard?
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Really hard?
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
But he had already actually split ways with Bonnie and
Clyde when they finally recaptured him and sent him to Huntsville,
and they had had a falling out.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
Yeah. They ended up sending a letter to Hamilton in prison, yeah,
saying like, you know, you stole from us and you're
a coward. So yeah, it was a pretty bad breakup.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
It was. There was no love lost.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Should we break up this episode?
Speaker 1 (38:01):
Oh? Good call?
Speaker 2 (38:03):
All right, we'll be back to finish up on Bonnie
and Clyde, right if you did.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
Softly jawh sh.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Soft okay, Chuck. So you had said a little while
ago that one of the reasons they were able to
be so successful is because they were there was a
there were a handful of reasons one. They typically kept
their targets pretty small. They were small towns, often mama
(38:47):
pop groceries, maybe like a gas station something like that.
Every once in a while a bank. But remember like
all of their crimes were exaggerated, so they were supposedly
two of the greatest bank that ever lived, even though
they'd only done a couple of banks. So by making
their takes pretty small, I think the biggest take was
like eighteen hundred, which is less than fifty grand today.
(39:09):
That was far and away the biggest take. Sometimes they'd
make enough money just to buy some groceries or something
like that. They kept themselves small. They made themselves small targets.
What made them huge targets was killing cops, you know,
like that definitely catches the attention of other cops. And
there was another Texas outlet named Willis Newton who said
killing that first cop, Eugene Moore, was their true undoing,
(39:34):
and then all the cops after that just made them
even bigger targets. But one of the other reasons they
were able to still get away even after killing all
those cops is because those cops and the different jurisdictions
were not coordinating in any way.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
No, I mean that didn't happen back then. It's not
like they were being stubborn. That was just not a
thing that had really come along yet, like working interstate
with one another or even inter county. Probably, yeah, BI
wasn't quite a thing yet. The Bureau of Investigation was
and all they could. They did start investigating them the
I guess the BI in December of thirty two, and
(40:10):
did get a warrant in May of thirty three, but
it was only over interstate moving of the stolen cars.
But they did get involved with the local cops and
start sort of providing information, providing support to like the
local cops and the state agencies as you know, part
of the eventual dragnet. And it seems like the cops
(40:31):
in Texas and Louisiana are the ones who really sort
of got together finally to zero in on them and
focus on these guys. And when the Texas Rangers come
on the scene, that means things are really serious. And
that's what happened after that that second prison break. The
Texas Rangers got together. This guy came out of retirement,
Captain Frank not Hammer, but Hamer. I guess he probably
(40:54):
he'd probably called himself the Hammer, and he was like,
I'm coming out of retirement to get these guys and
had a posse of six rangers and he's like, I've
killed fifty three dudes in my law enforcement career. So
it was really on at this point.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
It was he coordinated with a guy named Henderson Jordan,
who was sheriff in a parish in Louisiana, Bienville Parish.
And the reason he's significant is because Henry Methvin. Remember,
he was one of the guys that got busted out
with Raymond Hamilton and some of the other guys and
joined the gang. Methavin was now a part of the gang.
(41:30):
He lived, his family lived in Bienville Parish, and supposedly
Henderson Jordan, the sheriff, had been approached by Methvin's family,
who were alarmed that he was wanted by the cops
and with Bonnie and Clyde's notorious outlaws, and they said, look,
we can get our son to cooperate. He was basically
Daryl and Red Dawn essentially. Yeah, right, that's Daryl's dad's car,
(41:52):
it's the mayor's car. So his family is like, we'll
get him to cooperate. But you got to give him
Clement and see, but we'll get you Bonnie and Clyde
if you make sure our boy doesn't get the chair
for all this stuff. And so Frank Hamer and Henderson
Jordan are like, let's make this happen. This was ultimately
the downfall. Trusting Henry Methvin was what brought them to
(42:17):
their end.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
You know, I'm still mad at Darryl after all these years.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
I know.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
The second you said Darryl from Red Dawn, I was
just like, oh, that.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
Guy they picked, like a perfect actor for that guy
really suited that part.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
Yeah, he was one of the bad socials in The
Outsiders too.
Speaker 1 (42:34):
Oh I didn't know that, so that fits. Did you
know that Si Hinton was a teenage girl? Wouldn't you
write the Outsiders?
Speaker 2 (42:40):
I had no idea.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
It's crazy.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
So they kind of figured out their route basically, and
that Bonnie and Clyde were driving a lot to that
Methven home in Louisiana on Highway one point fifty four.
So in May of nineteen thirty four, they were like,
all right, we really need to get this done. And
this is where the famous ambush happens. There, you know,
are different, like kind of disputing accounts of exactly how
(43:06):
it went down, but it seems like they got Methan's
dad's car out on the road and parked it there
with a wheel removed, so they would be like, oh,
that's your dad's car, Like, it looks like he needs help,
so they would pull over. They had those six Texas Rangers.
They had automatic rifles, and as soon as that Bonnie
and Clyde car showed up, they just started firing. They're like,
(43:28):
we've seen enough of these guys work to not let
them open the doors, not try and arrest them or whatever,
because they're going to be shooting at us. So they
just basically shot the crud out of this car and
to great effect. I mean, they murdered the cred out
of them.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
They did, they got them.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
Yeah, Bonnie was shot twenty six times, Clyde was shot
seventeen times. Further, Resharts says that it may have been
as many as fifty times. They were kids, you know,
they were twenty three and twenty four years old, and
it was pretty gruesome and the people in the press
went wild over this ambush.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
Yeah, they towed the car with the bodies inside.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
It was crazy.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
Yeah too. Well, they also laid in wait and executed
them without giving them any chance to give themselves up.
So at this point, basically anything's on the table, right. Yeah,
So they towed the death car, and I guess it
essentially immediately became like a tourist attraction. They sent them
both back to Dallas for burial, and both of the
(44:33):
funeral homes where they were they were each in a
different funeral home because Bonnie's mom, Emma was like you,
in death, they can't have anything to do with one another.
I couldn't talk her out of being with them while
she was alive, but I'm calling the shots now that
she's dead, and I don't want her anywhere near him. Yeah,
both of their funerals were thronged with onlookers. But even
(44:54):
before that, while their bodies were just basically hanging out
in the public, all these basically souvenir seekers were trying
to like cut off their body parts and stuff.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
Right, Oh yeah, just like looting what they could to
get a piece of the car, maybe to get a
like a blood soaked handkerchief or something like that. And yeah,
supposedly some guy tried to cut off Clyde's ear Their
death photos are you know, you can look those up
if you have a strong stomach. They're pretty nasty, and
their funerals attracted like thousands of people to come and
(45:26):
see the burials of Bonnie and Clyde. After they died.
There was sort of a lot that went on. There
was a book initially from Bonnie's mother and Clyde's sister.
They got together and wrote a book called Fugitives, colon
the story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. They started
(45:47):
publishing more poems from Bonnie and Clyde. One from Bonnie
called The Trail's End or the Story of Bonnie and Clyde,
and then another one that I mentioned earlier that Clyde
had written sort of as respect and both of them
they're kind of still talking about like, hey, we didn't
do all these crimes, were not as bad as everyone
makes us out to be. That kind of thing and
(46:09):
key though in one of these Bonnie had requested, at
least in the poem, someday they'll go down together day
meaning them, and they'll bury them side by side. So
that seemed like that would have been her wish that
she did not.
Speaker 1 (46:20):
Get no because her mom said, heck no, I read
his nephew and her niece maybe great niece have been
like trying to trying to draw up support to bury them,
rebury them together, but it hasn't gotten anywhere.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Yeah, So, as you know, I said, a lot happened.
Basically what happened from this point forward is the cops
were like, it's not good enough just to get like
Bonnie and Clyde, Like, we got them, but we need
to just dragnet the whole operation. And so all of
their friends and family that were ever aiding in a
betting or anything like that were rounded up. I think
(46:58):
Dallas police got twenty four family. Everybody was found guilty
and you know, not very long prison sentences. I think
the max was like a couple of years. But they
wanted to get everyone who ever touched part of this
gang and put them away.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
Yeah, and I mean, yeah, two years for just basically
being friends with Bonnie and Clyde. That's a lot.
Speaker 3 (47:19):
You know.
Speaker 2 (47:21):
Raymond Hamilton aiding in a bedding is like, yeah, we
were just friends, right, right, Like they might have stayed
at my house and I might have given him food and.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
Right and give them the cops, but like ammunition, and
that's what friends do. Raymond Hamilton and Joe Palmer, they
were both executed in Huntsville at the prison in Huntsville
on May tenth, nineteen thirty five. And Henry Methvin, he
was so there was this. I said, there was a
disputed murder of one of the patrol men. That farmer
(47:48):
who supposedly witnessed this, said that he saw Bonnie like
go over and execute the cop at point blank range,
blowing his head off with the shotgun and making some
greasily tasteless remark about it. She supposedly wasn't.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
Even I'm about to head out or something that would.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
Have been good. No, something like a look of there
his head bounced like a rubber ball or something like that. Right,
So the kind of thing where you're like, wow, she's
really despicable. And of course everybody printed it because this
farmer said he saw it.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
Right.
Speaker 1 (48:17):
What historians now believe is that it was actually Henry
Methvin who actually did the killing, and the reason why
he wasn't implicated was because his family's plan to bring
in Bonnie and Clyde was already in motion. So now
the authorities had to cover up his murder of a
cop before he could turn in Bonnie and Clyde, so
(48:38):
that it was attributed to her and almost certainly wasn't her.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
Yeah, Methan was eventually paroled in forty two and died
six years after that. And the story is he was
hit by a train. He was either drunk and got
hit by a train or maybe he was shoved into
a train and murdered, but no one was ever tapped
for that. As far as Blanche, she was Bucks, you know,
Clyde's sister in law and Buck's wife who was blinded
(49:05):
in one eye. She served six years, was proled in
thirty nine and wrote her book, My Life with Bonnie
and Clyde No Colin's and went back to Dallas and
you know, lived a life there, worked as a taxi
dispatcher and a beautician, cared for her dad, got married again.
The death car eventually, you know, it would end up
(49:26):
at Buffalo Bill's resorting casino in prem Nevada. I think
that's where it is now, But for a while it
was you know a lot of this stuff, like the
guns and the cars, like everyone wanted a piece of this.
I think everyone knew it was going to be worth
a lot of money, so various family members had to
sue various institutions to get this stuff back. And in
(49:46):
the case of the guns, Clyde's mom was like, I
want those guns back because Clyde had never been convicted
of the murders, like he was just shot in cold blood,
So I want those guns back. And I think the car,
like the original car owner Ruth Warren, was like, Hey,
that was my car to begin with. Yeah, the cops
(50:07):
can't keep that thing, so she sooned to get it
back and got it back.
Speaker 1 (50:10):
Yeah, And before it ended up at the Prim Valley
Casino resort, it was a traveling amusement at like circuses
and carnivals and state fairs and stuff.
Speaker 2 (50:21):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (50:22):
I don't know entirely that we would just know and
everybody would be walking around knowing that there was such
a couple as Bonnie and Clyde were it not for
that nineteen sixty seven movie starring Fade Unaway and Warren Beatty.
I never saw the movie, so it's not like my
understanding of them comes directly from it, but all the
(50:44):
people it informed, I think it brought them back up
into the popular culture again and they never really left
since then.
Speaker 2 (50:52):
It's a good movie. The great Arthur Penn was the
director who had another Stuff you Should Know connection, and
that he directed The Miracle Work as well.
Speaker 1 (51:01):
Oh okay, yeah, that's he's basically a friend of the podcast.
Speaker 2 (51:04):
Then yeah, two Stuff you Should Know movies. A good
movie though, but it was the year after the Hayes
Code ended, you know, the movie Codes that tried to
rein in sex and violence, and so there was a
lot of sex and violence in this movie and glamorization
of crime and stuff like that. And that ambush scene
is like a sort of a legendary film scene because
it shows it all and it's pretty gory. But it
(51:25):
was a It was a big, big movie, and I
think a lot of gangster movies kind of started coming
around in its wake because it was so popular.
Speaker 1 (51:32):
Yeah, it was huge in the UK apparently, and it
set the stage for other bloody movies to come, everything
from The Wild Bunch two years later, to Pulp Fiction,
which was originally written by Eleanor Roosevelt, to basically every
violent movie you've ever seen. Bonnie and Clyde essentially set
the stage for that that's right.
Speaker 2 (51:54):
I'll tell you what. If I'm ever near prim Nevada,
I'm gonna go over to Buffalo Bill's Resort and Casino
to check that car out.
Speaker 1 (52:01):
Uh, I'd like to see that and his death shirt too.
Speaker 2 (52:05):
Yeah they got a shirt.
Speaker 1 (52:06):
Yeah, it's crazy. I mean it's full of holes.
Speaker 2 (52:10):
Yeah, and not in a bad plot sort of way.
Speaker 1 (52:16):
Boy, you're pulling all those ingers today, aren't you? That
little shorty for w D or a little forty?
Speaker 2 (52:22):
Oh? Yeah? Did you catch that one?
Speaker 1 (52:24):
Yeah? I was killing Uh you got any other little zingers?
Speaker 2 (52:28):
I got no other zingers?
Speaker 1 (52:29):
Okay, Well, then that means this is the end of
the road for Bonnie and Clyde as far as stuff
you should know goes. And I think that means it's
time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (52:39):
That's right, and uh, we did not plan this everyone,
but here's the listener mail. Hey guys, I wanted to
share a moment from the Eleanor Roosevelt episode that gets
a gold star for Josh. I have a long history
of Josh like moments where I will add in an absurd,
impossible fact when talked to my wife, such as a
local construction site being a dining with your pets restaurant
or coming or a Lava Fields in the California Desert
(53:02):
being a huge disposal site for used asphalt. And my wife,
over twenty five years of marriage, has become very canny
about my quote unquote facts, and it's very difficult to
fooler anymore. However, when Josh said in her writings Eleanor
Roosevelt wrote an initial treatment that became the script of
pulp Fiction, I saw my wife process that fact for
about ten seconds with narrow eyes and complete confusion, followed
(53:23):
by a loud no. So thank you Josh for that
magic moment, and thank you both for all you do.
Very long time listener, I started listening when there were
only about one hundred back episode, so one hundred episodes
in and that is from Sam and Lisa.
Speaker 1 (53:36):
Nice. Thanks Sam, And yeah that wasn't planned. How what
a coincidence? Huh.
Speaker 2 (53:40):
As soon as you said it, I was like, oh,
boo ah, I'm just going to be so excited.
Speaker 1 (53:44):
And I was and I still will be, probably for
hours after this, Sam and Lisa, Right, that's right. Sam
and Lisa, thanks for the email. Thanks for listening to
us for so long too, And if you want to
be like Sam and Lisa and send us an email.
You can do that too. There's nothing stopping you except
no access to the internet. If you have access to
(54:05):
the internet, you can send us that email to Stuff
podcast at iHeartRadio dot Stuff You Should Know is a
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (54:16):
For more podcasts Myheartradio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, machine Gun Jerry Rowland and this
is Stuff you Should Know about Bonnie and Clyde. A
(00:22):
true crime edition but also a folk hero edition.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
That's right, and it's given me an opportunity to get
that Bonnie and Clyde song stuck in my head all day,
which is great because I've never heard that song, Bonnie
and Clyde. Bonnie and Clyde, I think you're just making
that up now, it's for real. I think it was
Serge Gainsbourg, but I know the Luna version.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
I came across that mention of that, so yeah, it
was Serge Gainsburg and Brigie Bardot.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yeah, but Luna covered it. And speaking of Luna leader,
Dean Wareham's brother Anthony as a listener, So hello Anthony.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Wow, we finally got to Anthony.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
I tried to buy Dean's guitar off of Instagram a
few weeks ago. How did he go, Well, he put
his guitar up and it's the one that's on the
cover of his book Black Postcards. And he's used in
the studio and on tour. And I was like, huh,
let me just see how much he wants and he said,
I missed it by a day, so it stinks.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Well, maybe Anthony can pull some strings for you.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah, like steal a guitar from Dean and just send
it my way.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Yeah. And if Anthony did that, he'd be a lot
like Clyde Barrow or Bonnie Parker.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah. Man, these guys like to steal stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
So yeah, I did you see the PBS documentary, the
American Experience documentary on him. No, just it, it's worth watching.
I haven't seen the movie. So you put the two
of us together, we have a full comprehension, right.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
That's how it works.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
But they kind of they basically got across that they stole,
or Clyde stole just literally a way of life, like
he stole cars to get around, he stole money to
buy food with, like he that's just how he lived.
And they make the point. And I think Lvia Olivia
helped us with this. I she kind of makes the
(02:12):
point too, like these were the options that were open
to them, especially Clyde because he was raised dirt poor
during the depression, and like a lot of people were
poor during the depression. So if you were dirt poor
during the Depression, you were really really poor. And that's
the life that that Clyde Barrow was born into.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Yeah for sure, and you know, not to excuse crime,
but that was just his background and not to you know,
they've been glorified over the years, but kind of reading
through this, it was like, oh, man, they like just
would murder people at will, again usually to get out
of a scrape, but still just like killing people left
and right, just you know, to not get caught.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Yeah, particularly cops. And there's some disputes over there's a
pair of patrol men that were killed, and it's disputed
whether Bonnie was one of the gunmen or not. There's
some other crimes that they have had attributed to them
that may or may not have been there doing, but
there are definitely there's a the path behind them was
(03:18):
littered with dead cops that they definitely murdered. They were
known to like if a cop came up to him,
even if they had no idea who they were and
were trying to help, they just opened fire and killed
the guy. Like that was definitely their mo typically with
cops though, and this isn't like justify it, but this
was also the era where the cops would just open
(03:40):
fire on you too. There wasn't like I put your
hands up kind of stuff. It was like, you're an outlaw.
I'm going to start shooting at you first, ask questions later.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Yeah, not like these days where cops and ice never
just kill people, right, bad joke? Yeah, all right, well,
and you know it. And maybe I'll make this point
later too. But and again it doesn't justify it. But
after Clyde's prison stent early on, like he was to
(04:10):
me like clearly killing people, so he would never ever
have to go back to prison, right you know.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Yeah, and you can kind of get that after you
hear about his time in prison and how much he
hated it.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yeah, so let's get going and talk about Clyde first.
I know it's Bonnie and Clyde, but we're going Clyde
and Bonnie initially.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Ooh.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
He was born in Texas in nineteen oh nine, in
Teleco And you know, when he was a kid, he
I don't think this necessarily means he was set for
a life of crime. So a lot of kids played
gangster play outlaw and that's but that's what he did.
And in the twenties they moved to a very very
very poor neighborhood in West Dallas and we're homeless as
a family for a while. And his brother Buck Barrow
(04:53):
and Clyde started you know, early on, like stealing food,
like you mentioned, stealing turkeys, and then that graduated to
robbery and car theft and stuff like that, to the
point where he was eventually arrested for the first time
when he was seventeen for car theft.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Yeah. This was not him boosting a car, which was
basically how he got every other car. He actually went
and rented a car and then a girlfriend and then
didn't take it back.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Yeah, that's stealing, though, you know, no, it definitely ok.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Death by taking I think, But I think also you
can implicate the car rental place for renting a car
to a seventeen year old.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Yeah. I was also quite frankly surprised to learn that
they had car rental services in nineteen twenty six.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Yeah, although it was probably just some dude in town
who'd let you take his car for ten.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Bucks or something, but you got to be thirteen.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Right, So yeah, that was his first brush with the law,
and that was certainly far from his last. And that's Clyde.
His middle name was Chestnut, by the way, which I
thought was pretty cool, very cute. Bonnie's middle name was Elizabeth.
Her name was Bonnie Elizabeth Parker. She was born into
different circumstances than Clyde. Her mom was a seamstress, her
(06:05):
dad was a bricklayer, but she was born in Rowena, Texas,
and after her father died, the family had very little
means of supporting themselves, and her mom was I think
her mom's name was Emma. She was basically left to
raise three very little kids on her own. So they
ended up in the same area roughly where Clyde and
(06:28):
his family were. Basically, I saw it put that they
were both from the same side of the tracks, despite
Bonnie's mom raising her and her siblings to be respectable
and up to feel that they were above their circumstances
rather than you know, part of their circumstances for sure.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
So you know, this was the early nineteen hundred, so
a lot of times you would find kids dropping out
of school or getting married at very young ages, and
that's what happened with Bonnie. At fifteen, she married a
guy named Roy Thornton who was a criminal, so that
kind of gave her a taste of that lifestyle. They
weren't together too long, I think about four years, even
(07:08):
though they never officially legally got divorced, and finally hooked
up with Clyde in nineteen thirty when he was twenty
and she was nineteen. And it wasn't long after they
got together that Clyde went to prison for car theft
and burglary again just sort of doing the same fairly
(07:29):
low stakes crimes at the time, and she got him
out of jail. She smuggled in a gun and helped
him escape basically with two other inmates. They were all
three recaptured though, and that's when he got his kind
of really tough stint in prison.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Yeah, they send him to fourteen years hard labor on
the East of Prison farm, which was a notorious farm
in the Texas pedals system where you would just get
beaten for no reason by the guards who were just
completely beyond the law. And he was also he had
been taken remember he's still pretty young at this time.
(08:06):
He was basically claimed by another inmate who raped him
repeatedly and beat him repeatedly, and he essentially was like,
this is my life now for at least the next
fourteen years. And there he finally was tired enough of
it that he smuggled a galvanized pipe into the cells
with him and he walked to the showers, knowing that
(08:28):
this guy was going to follow him, and the guy did,
and Clyde suddenly turns on him and beat him over
the head until he was dead with the lead pipe.
And I think one thing that really kind of gets across,
like how Clyde was. He was kind of a likable
person throughout his life, but especially at this time. Another
inmate who already had a life sentence he was never
(08:50):
getting out, he took the blame so that Clyde wouldn't
basically ruin his future for killing the man who'd been
raping him.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Yeah. I mean, hey, it's a pretty stand up thing
to do for that guy in prison.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
It totally is. It's like I donated a kid need
to a stranger. Oh yeah, well I took a murder
rap so a kid wouldn't who was doling out his
own justice wouldn't ruin his life.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah, So you know that's what I was referencing when
it You know, it seems that Clyde did everything, including
killing cops, that he could to stay out of jail.
Again again, not excusing to killing a police, just kind
of kind of lay down the reality of being assaulted
in prison like that.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
I think you're explaining his mindset. That's legitimate.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah, okay, So one of the other things. I don't
think Clyde was ever accused of being like the smartest
guy in the world, because at one point he cut
off two of his toes to avoid the hard labor
part of the hard labor prison, and less than a
week later he was freed when in his mother petitioned
(09:54):
for parole. So I didn't time that one out quite right.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
No, he was also, I guess, not known as the
luckiest guy around too. Yeah, he spent so he spent
less than two years in prison. But in that time
he changed like fundamentally before, like you said, fairly light stuff,
boosting cars, stealing truckloads of turkeys, that kind of stuff.
But there was another guy that he was in the
(10:20):
prison with who said that before his very eyes he
saw Clyde change from a schoolboy to a Rattlesnake, and
even Bonnie. Later on, in a poem that she wrote
she used to write poetry, she mentioned that that Clyde
was basically a victim of unfair institutionalization. Basically that that's
(10:41):
what that's why he was the way he was.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
I gotta say, every time you say boosted a car,
it makes you sound super street.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
It sound like a fifties greaser in the seventies.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah, instead of stealing a car, Like I'm not cool,
I don't say boosting a car.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
I guess you could say stealing. Yeah, I was gonna say,
I don't know any other way to put it. But
I mean, I guess it's just because I'm from the streets.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
You know.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
It's about to say, you're like, oh wait, there's a
word for boosting a car, stealing steel. Yeah, they don't
teach that on the street. So I don't blame you.
So Clyde was released, like we said, when his mother
petitioned for that release, and he went right back to robbing,
you know, gas stations, convenience store stuff like that. He
(11:25):
had his first sort of partner in crime. His name
was Ralph Foltz, and Bonnie was kind of joined up
with them as the first version of the Barrow Gang,
just the three of them, even though like you know,
parents on both sides were like, Bonnie, you can't join
up with this criminal gang, Like please, don't do it,
and she's like, I love my man.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Yeah, she said, I like the bad boys for sure.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
But you know, one of the reasons why we still
know about Bonnie and Clyde not just because they became celebrities,
but also because they were just totally in love with
one another.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Like basically every single outlaw romance or love story that
you've ever seen, and the movies are on TV, is
in one way or another based on Bonnie and Clyde.
Oh yeah, that's my theory. Yeah. I should probably say
this is not you know, something from an academic journal
I read, but.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
A white paper, as Emily would say.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Yeah, exactly right, it's it's something I'm working on.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Emily.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Emily's got one for everything, doesn't she.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Oh yeah, when I like, you know, when she'll just
sort of make a claim or something else and not
to its challenger, I'll just be like, are you sure
about that or something, and She'll be like, well, I
don't have a white paper. On it all right, I
know that's the time.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
To back off, Thank you, Emily.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
So in April of thirty two, and you know, we
should point out this is over just a couple of
years that all of derrib shenanigans took place. Yeah, so
we're gonna be spitting out dates kind of Fast and Furious.
But in April of speaking of boosting cars of thirty two,
did you get that one?
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Hm?
Speaker 2 (13:03):
Hmmm, Fast and Furious?
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Oh oh, did they boost cars? I thought they There
were extensive, lengthy scenes of them negotiating at car dealerships.
Actually they're purchasing.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
I think saw you got to sell me this car?
It's about family. I only know that line about family
as a reference because I've only seen one of that.
I think I saw that very first movie, did you.
I'm not familiar with the Fast and the Furious verse,
But were they even Carthy's I think they were right.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
I probably, I mean they were definitely. I get the
impression that they were on the wrong side of the law,
the right side.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Of Justice's man, that's the log line. Did you you
didn't see any of those? No, not even the first one. No,
you say that like you have that I know I'm
starvage movies before.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Sorry, but it's also the highest grossing movie franchise in
the world ever.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Well it's because there's thirty seven of them.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
I mean, that's definitely part of it. But also people
prettily like car movies.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
They do, they're supposed to be good, all right. So
back to after pointing out my dumb pun. April of
thirty two, Bonnie and Ralph Fultz, who was the guy
who he initially hooked up with and then gang they
were arrested trying to rob a hardware store and she
got out, was never indicted at least, and Ralph was convicted,
and while she was sort of being investigated for indictment,
(14:24):
Clyde and his other boys are still out there again.
Robin banks, Robin stores, gas stations, all pretty And this
is one reason they got away with it for so
long is they never did like these huge things. They
were kind of in small towns Robin, you know, kind
of backwater grocery stores and stuff.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
It's key.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
But it was at one of these robberies where the
first murder happens when a store owner and one of
the only non cops, a guy named John Butcher, was killed.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Yeah, and it's also not clear whether it was Clyde
that did it. Yeah, I don't think anyone thinks it
was Bonnie. I'm yeah, she was in jail, I think,
like you said at the time, Yeah, definitely wasn't her.
There was. He was with an associate named Raymond Hamilton,
and Raymond Hamilton and Floyd Hamilton would kind of come
in and out of the Barrow gang, and I got
the impression that, like Clyde was definitely one of the
(15:16):
more stand up gangsters, of the people in his gang,
that he ran with some shady, shady dudes that were
way more murderous than him, and that it was just
basically him being pragmatic, like he just had a small
pool of people who he knew could help him rob
a store at any given time, so he had to
(15:38):
kind of hang out with these shady people. I get
the impression the otherwise wouldn't have necessarily.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Yeah, I sort of do too. Yeah. So that was
in April of the first murder. The second murder was
in August of that year when Clyde and Raymond and
another you know guy that they was sort of in
and out of the gang killed an undershare if I guess,
which is sort of like a deputy named Eugene Moore
in Stringtown, Oklahoma, and then went back to Dallas around
(16:08):
Christmas and Clyde talked to a kid, basically a sixteen
year old named w D. Jones into joining up with
the gang. And on Christmas Day, which was the next day,
they killed another guy named Doyle Johnson while stealing his car,
and Clyde was like, all right, kid, like, you got
to stay with us now otherwise like they're going to
(16:29):
get you for this murder.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Yeah, and w D being sixteen at the time, was like,
oh God, I have no choice. I have to turn
to a life of crime now. I'm in too deep.
As Phil Collins would later saye so he did. He
stuck around and he and Bonnie and Clyde were essentially
the first cohesive Bonnie and Clyde gang, Yeah, because they
(16:53):
stuck together for quite a while.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
A member.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
She did a lot of stuff. Everything we're talking about here,
every signify thing, which is usually the murder of a cop.
They're in between those, there's handfuls and handfuls of robberies
and you know, shootouts and stuff like that that they
engaged and they were on the run and on the
move and under the gun. Yeah, every moment from the
(17:17):
start to their death. Over the course of this two
something years, they were just constantly in action. Even when
they took a vacation, as we'll see in Joplin, Missouri,
they ended up in a shootout.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
Yeah, there was a lot of gunplay. I mean that
was at Christmas when the second murder happened. In January,
there was another murder and this was just a sort
of an unlucky circumstance when they walked into an ambush,
but it wasn't for them, it was for a different target,
but it was an ambush nonetheless. So they killed the
(17:51):
deputy sheriff named Malcolm Davis. And for the next couple
of months, basically early thirty three through the spring, it
was Zora, Arkansas, Oklahoma, stealing boosting cars how to say it, right, Yeah,
boosting cars. And you know, if you've ever seen the
(18:12):
very famous photos that looks like, hey, this looks sort
of like a photo shoot of these criminals, that's kind
of exactly what it was. It was during this time
that w D took these photos of them, these very
famous photos. One of which I'm sure you saw this
one online. Somebody did a really good job colorizing the
one where he's kind of lifted Bonnie up and like
(18:36):
colorized and retouched to where it looks like a modern photo.
There's like a lot of clarity because otherwise they're sort
of grainy black and white. But yeah, you get your
with this color photo. You get a really good look
at like who they were, and they they you know,
Fade Dunaway and Warren Batty played them for a reason,
like they were both like pretty attractive people.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Yeah, and I didn't know this, but Bonnie was really Dnkham's.
Like she was under what is that she was under
five feet tall and weighed eighty five pounds.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
That's a Dnkham's.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Yeah, that's a dnkham Never heard of that. I guess
it's it's mine. Oh okay, like being white papered. It's
on archive right now.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Well you means it to a small person, do you say,
come here, little Dinkams? Is that where it comes from?
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Yeah? Drives her crazy, She's like, put me down, all right?
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Yeah, she was a Dnkhams. That's why he was just
sort of holding her up with one arm.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
I guess yeah. And also it would come in handy
later when she injures her leg, right, because she had
to be carried quite a bit. But so around this
time those photos, like you said, they'll they'll come back
in again. But around this time, I guess in March.
This is January when they started shooting at the cops again.
(19:50):
December and January art shooting at the cops again, right,
so this is this is March. And when Clyde's brother
Buck shows up, and Buck had been in pre remember
he basically taught his little brother Clyde how to be
a criminal, but not a murderous criminal. Clyde learned that
on his own, remember, Yeah. And Buck's wife Blanche came along.
So now they had a two couple gang with a
(20:13):
fifth wheel in WD Blanche and Buck and Bonnie and
Clyde in poor little w D, who again is like sixteen,
maybe seventeen by now, and after like this at least
a year of just constant crime, they're like, let's take
a vacation in Joplin, Missouri, Missouri, right, that's how they
(20:35):
say it. Yeah, And they were there for thirteen days
before the cops got called on them because they were
basically being noisy drunks in a neighborhood, and the neighbors
were like, these are probably bootleggers because this is you know,
I guess it's after prohibition, shortly after prohibition, but still,
(20:57):
these bootleg operations were so successful. I'm sure they just
didn't go away immediately.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Yeah, they're like, whoever's at this airbnb is really dragging
the neighborhood down.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
So they did call the cops and another gunfight. You know,
the cops come up and, like you said, this is
just a time where people are just opening fire all
over the place, and they killed two cops, Harry McGinnis
and Wes Harryman, and the gang got out of there
and wd his nickname was Little Forty. He was shot
in the side and recovered and they somehow, with those
(21:32):
old cars in the nineteen thirties, drove about six hundred
miles overnight to Shamrock, Texas.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
It's a long drive, yeah, because Clyde was a professional
getaway driver. He was really good at stealing cars and
he was really good at driving cars fast.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Yeah, should we take a break, Yes, I.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Think that's a great idea.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Chuck, all right, we'll be right back with more on
B and C.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
Burning Stoffy jaw Sh shows Soffi.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
S all right, So we're back with Bonnie and Clyde.
They are starting to get a little bit of press
at this point, and the newspapers show up at the
hide out in Joplin, Missouri, at the Airbnb once they
found out what was going on. They found you know, guns,
(22:39):
they found this poem that Bonnie had written, which we'll
get to in a second little more detail. They found
that undeveloped film, so you can imagine they developed that
film of these like soon to be infamous photos of
Bonnie with a cigar and all this stuff, and it
was front page stuff, and like everybody was all of
a sudden, like really kind of captured by the allure
(23:02):
of these gangsters.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
Yeah, because not only are they like doing you know,
news paper article worthy crimes, getting away from the cops,
killing cops. Now there's photos that they can run alongside
of them. So everybody starts getting in on the act,
not just the press, but also true crime magazines, newsreels.
Like they became famous overnight, Like they were already local
(23:27):
legends in Texas after those photos started getting published on
the wire. That was when they just really became icons.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yeah, I mean attractive young lovers. They're having a good
time because in these photos they're like goofing off and
having fun, so obviously just something that's going to capture
the public's attention. They published that poem that you referenced earlier.
This was called the Story of Suicide sal and I
read the poem. I'm sure you did too. She wrote
this in jail when she was briefly in jail in
(23:57):
nineteen thirty two. And you know, it's an okay poem.
It's not the greatest thing in the world. But when
I was reading it, I was like, I wonder if
anyone's ever put this to song. I was like, surely
someone has, and I went online. I was like, oh, yeah,
there it is. And I went and played it and
I was listening to it and it was this woman
and it was like a country sort of version. I
was like, wait a minute. I was like this, I
(24:19):
bet this is not real. And I looked of course
it was freaking Ai from like February of this year,
like all completely fake, and I was just it left
a really nasty taste in my mouth.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
I'm sure, and well it should man, Yeah, you got
duped by AI. Somebody said, AI make a song out
of this Bonnie Parker poem in the in the in
the the style of Juice Newton.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
It was more like, I don't know, I can't think
of a country singer like.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
New country stuff like country pops.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
I mean it wasn't poppy. It sounded country. But the
way the woman's the fake woman's voice, I don't we
want to call her a woman. The computer voice mm
was just super sort of modern Nashville polished. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Yeah, I hope AI, when they take over, don't come
back and punish us for saying things derogatory things like
we've said about them over the years.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Remember, Yeah, I remember the guy on the train in
Canada that I overheard talking about AI. Was on the
ride from uh yeah, uh Ottawa to Toronto.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Yeah, but I don't remember what he said.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
He said, he's talking about AI. He's like, some people
don't like it, some people do like it. He's like,
I mean I can't wait for AI to get here,
like it was coming to dinner. I was like, oh,
it is here, my friend, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Sweet, sweet to get off the more often.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Yeah, I tell you what, he knew a lot about
NHL hockey though.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
I'll bet this, like basically every Canadian does. Yeah, one
thing about that poem too, So in it she uses
a bunch of like slang, like like underworld slang basically yeah,
but it's still a serviceable poem, especially for a twenty
two year old who dropped out of school at fifteen.
(26:06):
And I think that that's like a really good back
of the envelope sketch of Bonnie's personality. She was very bright,
she excelled in school, but she dropped out at fifteen,
and she was fascinated with the underworld and like outlaw
stuff so much so that she started living that life
because she found a guy who was living in that
(26:26):
life and she decided to be with them, you know,
So that was that's her basically encapsulated.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
Yeah, I totally agree. So there the public again is
enthralled at this point. They're in like the true detective
mysteries magazines and stuff like that. In nineteen you mentioned
that Clyde loved cars and like loved to boost them
and also drive them, and he loved Fords, and he
(26:53):
wrote a letter in nineteen thirty four supposedly. I don't
think they verified it from him, but it certainly sounds
like it was to me. Wrote a letter to Henry
Ford and he said. Part of the letter says, while
I still have got breath in my lungs, I will
tell you what a dandy carr you make. I have
drove forwards exclusively when I could get away with one
for sustained speed and freedom from trouble. To Ford has
(27:15):
got every other car skin. There's your ad. And even
if my business hasn't been strictly legal, it don't hurt
anything to tell you what a fine car you got
in the V eight and judging from you know, we
later got poems from Clyde as well, and there are
a lot of misspellings and stuff. And I said he wasn't,
you know, the brightest bulb because of his upbringing, of course,
(27:35):
but it sounds to me pretty legit.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Yeah, yeah, I think at least Henry Ford was like,
it's legit enough to have his secretary Kraft to thank
you letter to sounds back pretty funny, yeah, And you
said that that like they were, you know, they become
popularizing true crime magazines in part as like folk heroes,
Like I said, at the outset, And one of the
(27:59):
reasons why is they're committing these crimes at the height
of the depression or the depth of the depression. Yeah,
and people were rooting for people who did things like
rob banks because the banks were the villains at the time.
They were foreclosing on like hard working, honest people, and
so if you robbed a bank, you kind of automatically
became a folk hero. And people like Bonnie and Clyde
(28:21):
so much that those true crime magazines basically attributed scores
of bank robberies to them that they never did.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Apparently they were popular enough that banks would if they
got robbed, they'd be like, yeah, Bonnie and Clyde just
robbed us, just to have that brush with celebrity, even
if it wasn't them.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Yeah, I mean, get it in the paper for sure.
They also, you know, they did kill a lot of cops,
but they also let a lot go by way of
kind of taking them with them, which is technically kidnapping.
Sometimes cops sometimes civilians that would they would kidnap and
then just drop them off in the middle of nowhere,
basically so they didn't have to kill them, which you know,
(29:01):
that was a better choice, I guess. And they were
also like, you know, this is a time where you
get away with crime a lot easier and come and
go as a lot easier, just because of communications and
the way things worked. And they would, you know, they'd
go home and like visit their families and stuff and
not get caught, Like they didn't have their famili's homes
staked out at this point.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
No, But they were also really safe about it. They
were very smart, Like they write a message in a
coke bottle and just throw it out of the car
as they were driving past at their mom's house or whatever.
Like they were smart. They assumed the phones were tapped
and all that stuff. But if you're an outlaw that
are well known around those parts, just show up at
home is still pretty pretty risky, oh for sure. So
(29:45):
after Joplin, after the little vak in Joplin that ended
on a shootout with the cops and the death of
two cops, they kept moving. They got back on the
road and they were in a car wreck actually at
one point like a couple months later, and they it
was a bad crash. The Clyde was going really fast.
(30:06):
They rolled the car and Bonnie got third degree burns
on her leg. I saw from one account that she
was burned because the car caught on fire. Another account
said that it was acid from the battery. Either way,
she had third degree burns down to her bones and
no options about going and getting actual medical treatment. So
(30:26):
she had. She was in a lot of pain and
limped and hopped and was carried in some cases for
the rest of her life.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Why does it surprise me that cars had batteries? Then?
Speaker 1 (30:39):
I think that was actually very new, and that was
one of the reasons Clyde was able to steal so
many cars is because you could hot wire them. Now,
oh okay, I think that was super new.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
All right, which is probably what it leaked all over Bunny.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
I guess they didn't have the caps.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
No, They're like, just don't tip it over, don't roll
your car over, and everything should be fine, all.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Right, So good driver, except when he's crashing cars. Later
they wrapped. I think that was in June of thirty three,
they robbed a store in Alma, Texas, another gunfight with
two cops, and they killed another cop, Marshall Henry D.
Humphrey escaped again in July. They were not at that Airbnb,
(31:24):
but they went to a different one in Missouri, another guesthouse,
and the owner and I never had heard of this,
but it makes sense if you, apparently back then, if
you would back a car, and they called that like
gangster style because you want to get out of there quick,
and that was sort of a just a red flag.
So he noticed that they backed their car in the
other thing he noticed to me a bigger tell is
(31:44):
they taped newspapers over the windows, and they paid for
their meals with coins. And it turns out some vending
machines nearby had been robbed. So this was all just like.
The guy was like, well, maybe I should call the cops.
So they did. The cops came out. Guess what happened.
Another gunfight. Guess what happened. They escaped again, but this
(32:04):
time Buck Barrow his brother was wounded pretty badly and
Blanche was too. Blant's got charge of glass in her eyes,
I'm guessing temporarily blinding her considering the jobs she had
later in life.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
She was blinded in at least one eye, so I
don't know if it was permanent or not. Either. I
didn't see that anywhere. Yeah, so they actually made it.
They escaped from this gunfight with the cops in Missouri,
and they made it all the way to Iowa, and
they found like a park and were hanging laying low
in this park, trying to keep Buck alive and I
(32:40):
guess tending to Blanch as well. And again they backed
their car in gangster style, and that caught people's attention.
They also left the car running when they went to
town to buy supply.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Extra gangster for sure.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Either there, you just got places to be, you know.
But I guess people were jumpy back then. Yeah, the
cops showed up at the park. Somebody followed them or said,
these people are staying at the park right now, fifty
cops show up. Another gun fight happens. This is like
a day or so, I think, after the first one,
and Blanche and Buck buckets hit again and He's like,
(33:16):
I can't make it any further, you guys go on.
Blanche stays with Buck and they both get arrested. Bonnie
Clyde and w D make their escape and they actually
get away. W D finally says like that's enough for me.
I'm done. He did the whole Blackjack dealers like I'm
out thing. Yeah, and he went home to Texas.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Yeah, so he goes home to Texas while Buck is arrested,
I think five days later he dies. So a big
brother is now gone, Blanche's husband, and when w D
goes home, he's arrested in pretty short order, I think
in November. And he told the cops like, yeah, I
was in the Barrow gang, but he said he was
(33:55):
forced into it, and because of that fact and because
he was a kid, they were fairly lenient on him.
They sentenced ht to six years in prison.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
Yeah. So yeah, I think WD kind of got the
least of it to anybody because also at this time,
like there are other people that they're kind of coming
up against doing some crimes with here there, they're going
in and out of prison, Yeah, pretty pretty frequently. And
as a matter of fact, because he was shorthanded, he
(34:24):
actually Clyde stage a prison break. Remember the old Eastham
prison farm that Clyde had learned to hate, and it
had changed Clyde essentially right. Well, he had people on
the inside and he and a guy named Jimmy Mullins
busted these guys out. They busted out Henry Methvin, Joe Palmer,
(34:47):
guy named Hilton Biby and Raymond Hamilton remember him from
the earlier section. He had been captured and sent to prison,
and so they busted him out because Clyde needed more
help because now WD was gone and so was.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
Buck Yes, and killed two guards in the process here,
So that's two more down. I mean, the bodies are
stacking up at this point.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
Well, one of those guards I think may have been
purposely killed because he was known as such a brutal guard.
He would leave his post just to go beat inmates. Yeah,
so it's probably not coincidence that he was one of
the two that were killed during this.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Get one on the way out, all right, So the
gang is still on the run, and it feels like
it feels like the noose is tightening a little bit.
Like the original gangs now has partly died and been
in prison, so it's been splintered. Yeah, but they're soldiering
on with new people. And in April of thirty four,
Bonnie Clyde and Henry Methvin were in and he was
(35:47):
one of the guys they boosted from prison. Yeah can
you say.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
That too, Yeah, you can boost somebody from prison.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
Sure, okay, what about when you just give somebody a boost,
like an emotional support? Where does that fit in?
Speaker 1 (36:00):
That is see, I guess that would be Clark and somebody.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
Yeah, Clark made some good feelings. Yeah, so, uh, where
was I Henry Methin? They all went to grape Vine,
Texas At this point a couple of highway cops, highway
patrolmen saw thought they were stranded motorists and stopped to
help them out, and they killed them. So two more
cops dead. And then five days after that they killed
(36:25):
another cop in Oklahoma and kidnapped a police chief. So
things are getting really pretty intense at this point.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Yeah, I mean three cops in two days, I think, Yeah,
that's or three cops and yeah, three days something like that.
That's crazy. So this was like, yeah, you kind of
get the impression that things are starting to move really
really fast at this point. Right Raymond Hamilton, he was
recaptured I think by like a month or so after,
(36:56):
but he'd already been involved in the murders of these
cops and like a bunch of other robberies and stuff.
So remember he had been busted out. So when he
was recaptured not only was he being re sentenced for
escaping prison, but also for all the crimes, including murder,
that he committed in the short like month or two
that he was out. Yeah, he was sentenced to the
(37:18):
Texas State Pen in Huntsville and placed on death row there. Yeah,
he also escaped there too, but he was recaptured again.
Do you know, heart, it's got to be to escape
from death row?
Speaker 3 (37:29):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (37:31):
How hard?
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Really hard?
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
But he had already actually split ways with Bonnie and
Clyde when they finally recaptured him and sent him to Huntsville,
and they had had a falling out.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
Yeah. They ended up sending a letter to Hamilton in prison, yeah,
saying like, you know, you stole from us and you're
a coward. So yeah, it was a pretty bad breakup.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
It was. There was no love lost.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Should we break up this episode?
Speaker 1 (38:01):
Oh? Good call?
Speaker 2 (38:03):
All right, we'll be back to finish up on Bonnie
and Clyde, right if you did.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
Softly jawh sh.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Soft okay, Chuck. So you had said a little while
ago that one of the reasons they were able to
be so successful is because they were there was a
there were a handful of reasons one. They typically kept
their targets pretty small. They were small towns, often mama
(38:47):
pop groceries, maybe like a gas station something like that.
Every once in a while a bank. But remember like
all of their crimes were exaggerated, so they were supposedly
two of the greatest bank that ever lived, even though
they'd only done a couple of banks. So by making
their takes pretty small, I think the biggest take was
like eighteen hundred, which is less than fifty grand today.
(39:09):
That was far and away the biggest take. Sometimes they'd
make enough money just to buy some groceries or something
like that. They kept themselves small. They made themselves small targets.
What made them huge targets was killing cops, you know,
like that definitely catches the attention of other cops. And
there was another Texas outlet named Willis Newton who said
killing that first cop, Eugene Moore, was their true undoing,
(39:34):
and then all the cops after that just made them
even bigger targets. But one of the other reasons they
were able to still get away even after killing all
those cops is because those cops and the different jurisdictions
were not coordinating in any way.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
No, I mean that didn't happen back then. It's not
like they were being stubborn. That was just not a
thing that had really come along yet, like working interstate
with one another or even inter county. Probably, yeah, BI
wasn't quite a thing yet. The Bureau of Investigation was
and all they could. They did start investigating them the
I guess the BI in December of thirty two, and
(40:10):
did get a warrant in May of thirty three, but
it was only over interstate moving of the stolen cars.
But they did get involved with the local cops and
start sort of providing information, providing support to like the
local cops and the state agencies as you know, part
of the eventual dragnet. And it seems like the cops
(40:31):
in Texas and Louisiana are the ones who really sort
of got together finally to zero in on them and
focus on these guys. And when the Texas Rangers come
on the scene, that means things are really serious. And
that's what happened after that that second prison break. The
Texas Rangers got together. This guy came out of retirement,
Captain Frank not Hammer, but Hamer. I guess he probably
(40:54):
he'd probably called himself the Hammer, and he was like,
I'm coming out of retirement to get these guys and
had a posse of six rangers and he's like, I've
killed fifty three dudes in my law enforcement career. So
it was really on at this point.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
It was he coordinated with a guy named Henderson Jordan,
who was sheriff in a parish in Louisiana, Bienville Parish.
And the reason he's significant is because Henry Methvin. Remember,
he was one of the guys that got busted out
with Raymond Hamilton and some of the other guys and
joined the gang. Methavin was now a part of the gang.
(41:30):
He lived, his family lived in Bienville Parish, and supposedly
Henderson Jordan, the sheriff, had been approached by Methvin's family,
who were alarmed that he was wanted by the cops
and with Bonnie and Clyde's notorious outlaws, and they said, look,
we can get our son to cooperate. He was basically
Daryl and Red Dawn essentially. Yeah, right, that's Daryl's dad's car,
(41:52):
it's the mayor's car. So his family is like, we'll
get him to cooperate. But you got to give him
Clement and see, but we'll get you Bonnie and Clyde
if you make sure our boy doesn't get the chair
for all this stuff. And so Frank Hamer and Henderson
Jordan are like, let's make this happen. This was ultimately
the downfall. Trusting Henry Methvin was what brought them to
(42:17):
their end.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
You know, I'm still mad at Darryl after all these years.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
I know.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
The second you said Darryl from Red Dawn, I was
just like, oh, that.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
Guy they picked, like a perfect actor for that guy
really suited that part.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
Yeah, he was one of the bad socials in The
Outsiders too.
Speaker 1 (42:34):
Oh I didn't know that, so that fits. Did you
know that Si Hinton was a teenage girl? Wouldn't you
write the Outsiders?
Speaker 2 (42:40):
I had no idea.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
It's crazy.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
So they kind of figured out their route basically, and
that Bonnie and Clyde were driving a lot to that
Methven home in Louisiana on Highway one point fifty four.
So in May of nineteen thirty four, they were like,
all right, we really need to get this done. And
this is where the famous ambush happens. There, you know,
are different, like kind of disputing accounts of exactly how
(43:06):
it went down, but it seems like they got Methan's
dad's car out on the road and parked it there
with a wheel removed, so they would be like, oh,
that's your dad's car, Like, it looks like he needs help,
so they would pull over. They had those six Texas Rangers.
They had automatic rifles, and as soon as that Bonnie
and Clyde car showed up, they just started firing. They're like,
(43:28):
we've seen enough of these guys work to not let
them open the doors, not try and arrest them or whatever,
because they're going to be shooting at us. So they
just basically shot the crud out of this car and
to great effect. I mean, they murdered the cred out
of them.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
They did, they got them.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
Yeah, Bonnie was shot twenty six times, Clyde was shot
seventeen times. Further, Resharts says that it may have been
as many as fifty times. They were kids, you know,
they were twenty three and twenty four years old, and
it was pretty gruesome and the people in the press
went wild over this ambush.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
Yeah, they towed the car with the bodies inside.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
It was crazy.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
Yeah too. Well, they also laid in wait and executed
them without giving them any chance to give themselves up.
So at this point, basically anything's on the table, right. Yeah,
So they towed the death car, and I guess it
essentially immediately became like a tourist attraction. They sent them
both back to Dallas for burial, and both of the
(44:33):
funeral homes where they were they were each in a
different funeral home because Bonnie's mom, Emma was like you,
in death, they can't have anything to do with one another.
I couldn't talk her out of being with them while
she was alive, but I'm calling the shots now that
she's dead, and I don't want her anywhere near him. Yeah,
both of their funerals were thronged with onlookers. But even
(44:54):
before that, while their bodies were just basically hanging out
in the public, all these basically souvenir seekers were trying
to like cut off their body parts and stuff.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
Right, Oh yeah, just like looting what they could to
get a piece of the car, maybe to get a
like a blood soaked handkerchief or something like that. And yeah,
supposedly some guy tried to cut off Clyde's ear Their
death photos are you know, you can look those up
if you have a strong stomach. They're pretty nasty, and
their funerals attracted like thousands of people to come and
(45:26):
see the burials of Bonnie and Clyde. After they died.
There was sort of a lot that went on. There
was a book initially from Bonnie's mother and Clyde's sister.
They got together and wrote a book called Fugitives, colon
the story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. They started
(45:47):
publishing more poems from Bonnie and Clyde. One from Bonnie
called The Trail's End or the Story of Bonnie and Clyde,
and then another one that I mentioned earlier that Clyde
had written sort of as respect and both of them
they're kind of still talking about like, hey, we didn't
do all these crimes, were not as bad as everyone
makes us out to be. That kind of thing and
(46:09):
key though in one of these Bonnie had requested, at
least in the poem, someday they'll go down together day
meaning them, and they'll bury them side by side. So
that seemed like that would have been her wish that
she did not.
Speaker 1 (46:20):
Get no because her mom said, heck no, I read
his nephew and her niece maybe great niece have been
like trying to trying to draw up support to bury them,
rebury them together, but it hasn't gotten anywhere.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Yeah, So, as you know, I said, a lot happened.
Basically what happened from this point forward is the cops
were like, it's not good enough just to get like
Bonnie and Clyde, Like, we got them, but we need
to just dragnet the whole operation. And so all of
their friends and family that were ever aiding in a
betting or anything like that were rounded up. I think
(46:58):
Dallas police got twenty four family. Everybody was found guilty
and you know, not very long prison sentences. I think
the max was like a couple of years. But they
wanted to get everyone who ever touched part of this
gang and put them away.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
Yeah, and I mean, yeah, two years for just basically
being friends with Bonnie and Clyde. That's a lot.
Speaker 3 (47:19):
You know.
Speaker 2 (47:21):
Raymond Hamilton aiding in a bedding is like, yeah, we
were just friends, right, right, Like they might have stayed
at my house and I might have given him food and.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
Right and give them the cops, but like ammunition, and
that's what friends do. Raymond Hamilton and Joe Palmer, they
were both executed in Huntsville at the prison in Huntsville
on May tenth, nineteen thirty five. And Henry Methvin, he
was so there was this. I said, there was a
disputed murder of one of the patrol men. That farmer
(47:48):
who supposedly witnessed this, said that he saw Bonnie like
go over and execute the cop at point blank range,
blowing his head off with the shotgun and making some
greasily tasteless remark about it. She supposedly wasn't.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
Even I'm about to head out or something that would.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
Have been good. No, something like a look of there
his head bounced like a rubber ball or something like that. Right,
So the kind of thing where you're like, wow, she's
really despicable. And of course everybody printed it because this
farmer said he saw it.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
Right.
Speaker 1 (48:17):
What historians now believe is that it was actually Henry
Methvin who actually did the killing, and the reason why
he wasn't implicated was because his family's plan to bring
in Bonnie and Clyde was already in motion. So now
the authorities had to cover up his murder of a
cop before he could turn in Bonnie and Clyde, so
(48:38):
that it was attributed to her and almost certainly wasn't her.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
Yeah, Methan was eventually paroled in forty two and died
six years after that. And the story is he was
hit by a train. He was either drunk and got
hit by a train or maybe he was shoved into
a train and murdered, but no one was ever tapped
for that. As far as Blanche, she was Bucks, you know,
Clyde's sister in law and Buck's wife who was blinded
(49:05):
in one eye. She served six years, was proled in
thirty nine and wrote her book, My Life with Bonnie
and Clyde No Colin's and went back to Dallas and
you know, lived a life there, worked as a taxi
dispatcher and a beautician, cared for her dad, got married again.
The death car eventually, you know, it would end up
(49:26):
at Buffalo Bill's resorting casino in prem Nevada. I think
that's where it is now, But for a while it
was you know a lot of this stuff, like the
guns and the cars, like everyone wanted a piece of this.
I think everyone knew it was going to be worth
a lot of money, so various family members had to
sue various institutions to get this stuff back. And in
(49:46):
the case of the guns, Clyde's mom was like, I
want those guns back because Clyde had never been convicted
of the murders, like he was just shot in cold blood,
So I want those guns back. And I think the car,
like the original car owner Ruth Warren, was like, Hey,
that was my car to begin with. Yeah, the cops
(50:07):
can't keep that thing, so she sooned to get it
back and got it back.
Speaker 1 (50:10):
Yeah, And before it ended up at the Prim Valley
Casino resort, it was a traveling amusement at like circuses
and carnivals and state fairs and stuff.
Speaker 2 (50:21):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (50:22):
I don't know entirely that we would just know and
everybody would be walking around knowing that there was such
a couple as Bonnie and Clyde were it not for
that nineteen sixty seven movie starring Fade Unaway and Warren Beatty.
I never saw the movie, so it's not like my
understanding of them comes directly from it, but all the
(50:44):
people it informed, I think it brought them back up
into the popular culture again and they never really left
since then.
Speaker 2 (50:52):
It's a good movie. The great Arthur Penn was the
director who had another Stuff you Should Know connection, and
that he directed The Miracle Work as well.
Speaker 1 (51:01):
Oh okay, yeah, that's he's basically a friend of the podcast.
Speaker 2 (51:04):
Then yeah, two Stuff you Should Know movies. A good
movie though, but it was the year after the Hayes
Code ended, you know, the movie Codes that tried to
rein in sex and violence, and so there was a
lot of sex and violence in this movie and glamorization
of crime and stuff like that. And that ambush scene
is like a sort of a legendary film scene because
it shows it all and it's pretty gory. But it
(51:25):
was a It was a big, big movie, and I
think a lot of gangster movies kind of started coming
around in its wake because it was so popular.
Speaker 1 (51:32):
Yeah, it was huge in the UK apparently, and it
set the stage for other bloody movies to come, everything
from The Wild Bunch two years later, to Pulp Fiction,
which was originally written by Eleanor Roosevelt, to basically every
violent movie you've ever seen. Bonnie and Clyde essentially set
the stage for that that's right.
Speaker 2 (51:54):
I'll tell you what. If I'm ever near prim Nevada,
I'm gonna go over to Buffalo Bill's Resort and Casino
to check that car out.
Speaker 1 (52:01):
Uh, I'd like to see that and his death shirt too.
Speaker 2 (52:05):
Yeah they got a shirt.
Speaker 1 (52:06):
Yeah, it's crazy. I mean it's full of holes.
Speaker 2 (52:10):
Yeah, and not in a bad plot sort of way.
Speaker 1 (52:16):
Boy, you're pulling all those ingers today, aren't you? That
little shorty for w D or a little forty?
Speaker 2 (52:22):
Oh? Yeah? Did you catch that one?
Speaker 1 (52:24):
Yeah? I was killing Uh you got any other little zingers?
Speaker 2 (52:28):
I got no other zingers?
Speaker 1 (52:29):
Okay, Well, then that means this is the end of
the road for Bonnie and Clyde as far as stuff
you should know goes. And I think that means it's
time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (52:39):
That's right, and uh, we did not plan this everyone,
but here's the listener mail. Hey guys, I wanted to
share a moment from the Eleanor Roosevelt episode that gets
a gold star for Josh. I have a long history
of Josh like moments where I will add in an absurd,
impossible fact when talked to my wife, such as a
local construction site being a dining with your pets restaurant
or coming or a Lava Fields in the California Desert
(53:02):
being a huge disposal site for used asphalt. And my wife,
over twenty five years of marriage, has become very canny
about my quote unquote facts, and it's very difficult to
fooler anymore. However, when Josh said in her writings Eleanor
Roosevelt wrote an initial treatment that became the script of
pulp Fiction, I saw my wife process that fact for
about ten seconds with narrow eyes and complete confusion, followed
(53:23):
by a loud no. So thank you Josh for that
magic moment, and thank you both for all you do.
Very long time listener, I started listening when there were
only about one hundred back episode, so one hundred episodes
in and that is from Sam and Lisa.
Speaker 1 (53:36):
Nice. Thanks Sam, And yeah that wasn't planned. How what
a coincidence? Huh.
Speaker 2 (53:40):
As soon as you said it, I was like, oh,
boo ah, I'm just going to be so excited.
Speaker 1 (53:44):
And I was and I still will be, probably for
hours after this, Sam and Lisa, Right, that's right. Sam
and Lisa, thanks for the email. Thanks for listening to
us for so long too, And if you want to
be like Sam and Lisa and send us an email.
You can do that too. There's nothing stopping you except
no access to the internet. If you have access to
(54:05):
the internet, you can send us that email to Stuff
podcast at iHeartRadio dot Stuff You Should Know is a
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (54:16):
For more podcasts Myheartradio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Josh Clark
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