The Real Bonnie and Clyde Timewatch

Hollywood portrayed them as the most glamorous outlaws in American history.

She just had this strong love for Clyde and he for her.

Their chaotic crime spree lasted two years and claimed 14 lives.

One man died and bled out at the scene. The other man died later in hospital that night.

But who were Bonnie and Clyde?

What drove them to a life of violent crime?

And how did they evade capture for so long?

Clyde had been shot through the left cheek bone.

Bonnie had been shot in the belly.

Drawing on eye witness accounts,

newly released police files

and the discovery of a remarkable family memoir,

Timewatch reveals the true motives and secret tactics...

..behind the legend of America's most iconic outlaws.

I am prepared under my constitutional duty

to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require.

When Roosevelt was elected President in 1932,

the United States of America was in economic meltdown.

# Once I built a rail road, I made it... #

The 1929 Wall Street crash had decimated the financial markets

and a devastating drought had turned the farmland of the Mid-West into a dust bowl.

# Brother, can you spare a dime...? #

The Great Depression brought America's poor to its knees.

It also triggered a crime wave of unprecedented proportions.

All over America, there were criminal elements,

some of them highly organised,

carrying out all sorts of major crimes.

The depredations of vicious outlaws roving from state to state

like packs of wolves amounted to an actual armed invasion of America.

You can't really understand what motivated them

if you don't understand the economic hopelessness of the time.

The most infamous outlaws of all were a pair of young lovers...

..whose two-year crime spree

included armed robbery, car theft, abduction, murder

and a series of dramatic gun battles across at least 11 states.

Some saw them as modern day Robin Hoods,

others as bloodthirsty hell-raisers.

But all of America was captivated by the story of Bonnie and Clyde.

A story that began here, amid the poverty and economic ruin of Texas.

In February 1932, a 21-year-old car thief and burglar called Clyde Barrow

was released after two years in prison.

He returned to the family home - a filling station in the deprived district of West Dallas.

# I walk along the street of sorrow The boulevard of broken dreams... #

This building behind me was the Barrow family residence

from 1931 to approximately 1940.

It was named the Barrow Star Filling Station.

There is some evidence that Clyde tried to go straight.

But his return to crime seemed depressingly inevitable.

In 1932, when we first see the first embryonic Barrow Gang,

Clyde's already been in prison.

He can't keep a job in Dallas because the police keep rousting him.

For these young people...

..there's a chance for fun and excitement.

You're not going to get that if you obey the law.

Early in April 1932,

with a gang recruited from the West Dallas underworld,

Clyde Barrow became a bank robber.

Later that month, after an aborted car theft, two of his gang were captured and jailed.

One of them was a 21-year-old woman called Bonnie Parker.

She was married very young, like 16, I think,

and her husband was in prison.

Then she met Clyde and it must have just been a strong attraction.

She just had this strong love for Clyde and he for her.

Bonnie grew up in Cement City, part of the West Dallas slum

that's just one of the worst slums,

not only in Texas, but I would say in the entire country during the Depression.

She always wanted to be a singer, an actress on Broadway.

She wanted to be a famous poet. She told people that constantly.

But when you grew up in Cement City, you didn't have many choices in life.

By the time she went to prison,

even her mother was troubled by Bonnie's fascination with Clyde's life of crime.

"Bonnie was learning the jargon of gangdom, in striving desperately to fit into it and become part of it.

"There seemed to be a strange and terrifying change taking place in the mind of my child."

I cannot imagine someone choosing that life,

but I think Clyde just got so far in it, that there was no out.

You know, there was no out.

And she chose to go with him, you know.

While Bonnie was in jail, Clyde's criminal career reached a critical turning point.

Petty theft turned to murder when the bungled robbery

of a grocery store led to the death of its owner, John Boucher.

Clyde and these two friends of his, these two cohorts,

Ted Rogers and Johnny Russell, went down there to case the place.

Clyde knew this guy and so Clyde didn't want to go inside, but he sent the other two in.

There's varying stories about what happened next,

but whatever happened, Ted Rogers shot Boucher.

GUNSHOT

Clyde was outside in the car.

But because Rogers and Russell were associated with Clyde, it was immediately linked to Clyde.

When Bonnie was released from prison two months later, Clyde was wanted for murder.

He faced the electric chair if caught.

But she vowed never to leave him.

Bonnie and Clyde were already beyond the point of no return.

The shooting of John Boucher had been a tragic blunder.

But by the end of the year, Clyde and Bonnie were involved in three more seemingly callous murders.

And in January 1933, Clyde's reputation as a ruthless killer,

who would shoot without hesitation, was sealed

when a deputy sheriff was murdered at this notorious West Dallas safe house.

Clyde wasn't what you'd call a cold-blooded murderer,

as walking up to someone and shooting for the thrill of it.

But if he felt threatened and pushed into a corner, he's going to come out firing.

Acting on a tip-off relating to another local bank robber,

five police officers had the house surrounded.

When Clyde Barrow arrived, trying to contact one of his gang,

his visit proved a deadly coincidence.

Confronted by an armed officer, Clyde opened fire.

He was now a cop killer in a high profile case.

Already wanted for four other murders, Clyde and his lover, Bonnie, took to the road.

Their life on the run was romanticised and made glamorous.

But the true story of their fugitive lifestyle remained untold

until the recent discovery of one of their accomplice's personal effects.

Blanche Barrow was married to Clyde's older brother, Buck.

She became a reluctant member of the Barrow gang in March 1933.

Over 60 years later, a close friend made a remarkable discovery.

It was 12 years after Blanche died.

I was getting ready to move to a new apartment

and I started to just toss it out

because it was in an old raggedy envelope.

And my son, Lee, said "It says Bonnie and Clyde on the outside of this".

I said, "Oh, my! I forgot all about it".

Blanche gave this to me and wanted me to make sense of it.

And inside was this Christmas card

and inside that were two tablets

that had Blanche's writing...

..and it said "written in 1933/34/35".

And those were the years that she was in prison.

Blanche Barrow was captured and jailed after a bloody shoot-out in July 1933.

While in prison, she wrote a detailed account of her time with the Barrow Gang.

"We roamed over many states, leaving a trail of horror behind us,

"terrorising those Clyde came into contact with

"and needed something from."

Esther Weiser took her discovery

to the most highly regarded Bonnie and Clyde historian in America, John Neal Phillips.

It's important because it's an eye witness account

that places you in the car with Bonnie and Clyde.

Yeah, that's him. "Brains blown out and running down shoulders". Wow.

She's really frank.

Blanche's intimate account would lead John Neal Phillips

to revaluate the motives behind the Barrow Gang's legendary exploits.

But there was also a second,

often overlooked side to the outlaws' story.

As Bonnie and Clyde's notoriety grew, the question on everybody's lips was,

"Why couldn't the police catch them?"

Dallas County Deputy Sheriff Ken Holmes believes that the answer lies in the police's own archives.

Well, I'm looking at a document here from the County of Wharton, Texas.

This is dated August 30th 1932 and it's, "To all peace officers in the United States."

So they're taking this very seriously and they're calling them "extremely dangerous".

Ken has pieced together a paper trail of documents from local police officers,

all frustrated by their failure to apprehend Bonnie and Clyde.

"Please make every effort to arrest these parties

"and stop their running over the country shooting officers wherever they go."

"They will not hesitate to shoot in making their escape and have said that they would not be taken alive."

But America as yet had no national police force

and the archives reveal that Bonnie and Clyde

were directly profiting from the shortcomings of American law enforcement

during the Great Depression.

Many of these folks had no law experience in a small town.

Your local deputy would be hired for 15 dollars a week

and he'd have to drive his own farm pick-up truck,

which probably was held together with bailing wire, chewing gum and a lot of hope.

There were two-way radios.

There is no coordinated effort to catch them yet.

But police incompetence was just one factor in Clyde and Bonnie's early success.

The gangsters would play a deadly game of cat and mouse with the law for the rest of their lives.

And the evidence points not to a mindless crime spree,

but reveals Clyde Barrow as a calculated criminal

who made a series of tactical choices deliberately designed to exploit his opponents' weaknesses.

His most important weapon

was a piece of state of the art technology...

..the Ford V8.

In one of those happy accidents of history, in 1932,

Mr Ford introduced his new V8 engine to the public.

It was love at first sight.

The fact is

that if you gave Clyde Barrow a Ford V8 and five minutes head start, he was gone.

The Barrow Gang travelled exclusively in stolen cars.

Clyde realised that using the V8 gave them a clear advantage.

Most of Clyde's opposition was in the form of small town law officers.

And most of those men drove whatever was available -

either their own personal car or possibly a county car.

And most of those would be a few years old.

Clyde maintained, even to his family, that he would much rather run than fight

and if he had to run, he considered himself a better driver than anybody he would come up against.

He was never run down by police pursuit in the 25 months that he was on the run. Never.

Clyde's choice of car epitomised his acute tactical awareness and attention to detail,

driven by his fierce determination to stay one step ahead of the law.

Barrow was the leader.

He was in many ways a control freak.

He decided where they went.

He decided when they went there.

He decided who was driving the car, which was usually him.

He decided everything.

The threat of a death sentence seemed reason enough to explain Clyde's desperate nature.

But now, for the first time, Blanche Barrow's memoir

offers an insider account of what life on the run was really like for the outlaws.

"All of us had a lot of fun together.

"But to me, there always seemed to be a shadow hanging over us,

"like a dark cloud."

On the 1st of April 1933, Bonnie and Clyde rented a hide-out in Joplin,

a notorious gang town in Missouri.

They were accompanied by a teenage gang member called WD Jones,

Clyde's brother Buck, recently released after 17 months inside for burglary,

and Buck's wife, Blanche.

They seemed an unlikely band of outlaws,

but Blanche's memoir also reveals a unique understanding of the forces that drove the Barrow Gang.

"Clyde told me most everything he had done since his own parole.

"And I realised that Buck was in danger

"at any and all times with Clyde."

There's Buck, who's the older brother.

Clyde Barrow was way beyond anything Buck had ever done.

"Buck told me of his plan to try to persuade Clyde to give up the kind of life he was now living."

There's Bonnie Parker.

Bonnie Parker is just head over heels in love with Clyde Barrow.

"She told me everything that had happened to them in the past six months

"and how she wished she and Clyde were as free as Buck and I were."

There's WD Jones.

Before he joined up with Bonnie and Clyde, he didn't even own a pair of shoes

and now he's wearing suits and smoking cigars.

And at that point in Joplin, WD Jones pretty much idolised Bonnie and Clyde.

"I suppose he was like most kids his age, 16 or 17 years old.

"He thought he could get a thrill from most anything even shooting at cops."

And then we've got Blanche who's just absolutely in love with Buck,

just every bit as much as Bonnie is in love with Clyde.

It was Clyde Barrow who had drawn the other four together

and Blanche's description of his state of mind

sheds dramatic new light on the story of Bonnie and Clyde.

"I caught a few words now and then of Clyde's conversation with Buck and I did not like what I heard."

Blanche reveals that by the time the gang gathered in Joplin,

Clyde had become obsessed by a dark episode from his past.

The motivation behind Clyde's deadly violence lies in what happened to him three years earlier

inside this prison.

"Buck and I visited Clyde at a Texas prison farm called Eastham.

"Clyde told me many things that happened in prison."

In September 1930 aged just 20,

Clyde Barrow was sent to Eastham Prison Farm near Huntsville, Texas.

John Neal Phillips has researched Clyde's time here.

He has interviewed fellow inmates and been granted special access to the now derelict building.

John believes that what happened here had a profound effect on Clyde's character.

When Clyde first arrived here at Eastham

he was convicted for burglary and auto theft which were not violent crimes.

A fellow convict described though, a transformation that Clyde Barrow underwent when he was here.

He said "I saw Clyde Barrow change from a schoolboy to a rattlesnake

"right before my eyes".

In October 1931

a convict called Ed Crowder

was brutally murdered in the prison shower block.

Another prisoner called Aubrey Skelley was blamed.

But he wasn't the killer.

Crowder was known to sexually assault convicts and sexually assaulted Clyde.

So, Clyde conspired with another convict who was a life-termer here,

to actually perpetrate this murder, but the life-termer would take the rap for the murder.

The real murderer's identity remained secret for decades.

But, John Neal Phillips believes that Clyde Barrow was a killer

months before he became wanted for murder outside of prison.

That was his first murder.

It was purely an act of desperation.

This place would make you that desperate.

Clyde's remaining three months inside proved unbearable in a prison

which was the scene of some of the worst brutality in American penal history.

There were enough guards that were extremely sadistic all over the prison system.

But it seemed to be really concentrated here at Eastham.

Some prisoners chose suicide.

They would deliberately just run out in front of the guards and let them be killed.

Another way to avoid this however, was to inflict an injury on yourself.

And if it was serious enough you would have to be taken to Huntsville

to the hospital in the main prison there and get away from whatever guard was out to get you.

Blanche's memoir reveals that in January 1932, Clyde was moved to the prison hospital.

"Clyde was walking on crutches

"because he had cut off two of his toes with an axe."

Clyde's experience at Eastham was psychologically devastating.

When he emerged from prison on parole after two years inside, he was a damaged and dangerous man.

There's a lot of evidence to indicate that Clyde was quite a control freak.

You can imagine what that must have been like to somebody like that

to be put in a place like this where you lose complete control.

It didn't effect all prisoners that way,

but Barrow decided to seek revenge.

He just grew to hate this place.

And once he's released from Eastham he swears to several people, including his mother,

that he will never be taken alive.

"I'll never go back to that hell hole," he said.

"They're going to have to kill me".

For the rest of his short life,

Clyde was consumed by a bitter hatred for the regime at Eastham.

It was the fear of being captured and returned there

that fuelled his determination never to be taken alive...

..and drove the Barrow Gang's increasingly extreme tactics.

Shortly after their arrival at Joplin,

the Barrow Gang stole a supply of weapons from a nearby military facility.

"Clyde began showing Bonnie all the guns

"and told her what he could do with one of the army rifles.

"It could shoot 20 times without stopping."

This was just one of a series of audacious raids on National Guard armouries.

The prize target was a military grade machine gun

that would dominate the next chapter in Bonnie and Clyde's continuing battle against the police.

Vintage gun collector, Don Raspante has made a study of the firearms of the time.

The hand guns of the period were mainly .38 special

made by Colt or Smith and Wesson.

And this particular size and configuration

would be very typical of a uniformed police officer.

They came in different sizes.

Your detectives and plain clothes men liked the smaller barrels.

Shot guns were very popular with police departments

because you didn't have to be that great a marksman

and it had a lot of knock down, a lot of force.

All right, now this. This was Clyde Barrow's favourite.

It had a lot of fire power.

This is the 1918 Browning automatic rifle more commonly known as the BAR.

It can fire semi automatic,

which was one round every time you pulled the trigger

or full automatic - you pull the trigger back and it just goes until you stop.

The BAR was a devastating weapon in Clyde's tactical armoury.

He knew it would give him a huge advantage against the local police.

In those days, law enforcement officers

almost always had to buy their own weapons

which was no small thing in the Great Depression.

If they could afford anything it was a pistol.

GUN SHOTS

Well, here comes Barrow with a military weapon.

There's just no contest there.

Clyde's formidable fire power...

..would become the hallmark of a series of increasingly bloody gun fights...

..that began when a group of local law men responded to reports of suspicious activities

at the Barrow Gang's hideout in Joplin.

They stayed here almost two weeks.

But on the afternoon of the 13th

they were interrupted by five policemen who came

with a search warrant thinking that they were going to find a bootlegging operation going on here.

DOOR SLAMS

Two men are hit.

One man died and bled out at the scene.

The other man died later in hospital that night.

The gang blasted their way out leaving two police officers dead.

Their escape was the clearest demonstration yet

that local law men were ill-equipped to take on such dangerous outlaws.

The reason they're able to stay at large

is they're only being pursued by under armed, under manned,

"under car-ed" local authorities.

If they couldn't out run law officers trying to capture them,

the Barrow Gang could just blast the heck out of them.

In Joplin, essentially that is what happened.

But, in their haste to escape, the gang left behind most of their belongings

and when the police examined the scene of the crime,

the legend of Bonnie and Clyde was born.

They left behind their suitcases of possessions and of course several rolls of undeveloped film.

And there suddenly are these pictures.

These gangsters posing like they would for a photo booth shot

only they're pointing real guns instead of fake guns.

And Bonnie Parker, here she is leaning

in a very unladylike posture on the bumper of a car

and she's got a cigar dangling from her mouth.

And that photo broke the Barrow Gang into huge national celebrities.

America was enthralled.

But Blanche's memoir reveals that the price of fame

was an outlaw existence, far from the glamorous lifestyle of legend.

"We lived in the car day and night with very little sleep.

"Just driving like mad going no place.

"We had to keep ahead of the cops.

"If we stayed in one place very long they would catch up with us."

Blanche's account is a unique, first-hand description

of the grim reality of life on the run with Bonnie and Clyde.

One of the greatest aspects of Blanche's memoir

is her description of their lifestyle

between these gun fights.

"We drove so much and so fast most of the day and night,

"sleeping only a few hours at a time."

Living conditions were, well, "How many can we fit in car?"

"We drove through South Carolina,

"North Carolina, Tennessee, Oklahoma and west through Mississippi.

Using local plates to avoid attracting suspicion, Clyde steered the gang relentlessly

from state to state leaving local law men,

whose jurisdiction ended at the county or state line, powerless.

He ranged as far as the East Coast.

We think that he was in Florida and even North Carolina at times.

As far North East as Indiana and Michigan.

As far North as Minnesota, all through the Mid-West and Iowa and Kansas.

He thought nothing of travelling 500 miles a day.

If he was pursued he could travel as much as a 1,000 miles in a 24 hour period.

Fast cars, big guns and relentless travel were the secrets of the Barrow Gang's epic crime spree.

But their tactics were increasingly attracting attention beyond the local police level.

Ken Holmes has obtained the FBI file on Bonnie and Clyde.

It has only recently been released and it sheds new light on the campaign to catch the Barrow Gang.

Now we're finding with the release of this file

from the FBI which is, I don't know 600 to 900 pages of information,

that the Bureau of Investigation was on the Barrow case,

but was very limited in what they were allowed to do.

The file reveals that Federal chief, J Edgar Hoover

was personally outraged by Clyde Barrow's audacious raids on military armouries.

But while Federal jurisdiction didn't include robbery,

or even murder, it did cover the movement of stolen cars across state lines.

In May 1933, a Federal warrant was issued against Clyde and Bonnie for car theft -

The only grounds on which Hoover could involve the Barrow Gang

in his personal mission to change the face of American law enforcement.

In the last year alone it was necessary for local law enforcement officers

in the cities and communities of America to kill nearly 400 members of the underworld,

who fully armed sought to cause the death of the officers who came to arrest them.

In Washington DC, J Edgar Hoover is heading the Justice Department's Division of Investigation.

This will become the FBI, but it isn't yet.

And it's his ambition, which he ultimately succeeds in,

of establishing the FBI

as the group that can come in to any situation, cross any boundaries and lines, but that wasn't the case yet.

He chose to make that case based on the criminals of the day.

Bonnie and Clyde were perfect and he really wanted to get involved.

Federal involvement in the Barrow Gang case has always been thought to be minimal.

But despite the limitations of their jurisdiction,

Hoover's agents would play a significant part in the eventual downfall of Bonnie and Clyde.

By the summer of 1933, the Barrow Gang's formidable fire power

had seen them escape from a series of intense gun fights across several states.

But Bonnie and Clyde's notoriety was making life on the run increasingly grim.

And at an abandoned tourist camp at Dexfield Park, Iowa,

after their second brutal shoot out in less than a week,

their luck changed.

Someone spots this group of campers and becomes suspicious of them.

And word is spread and a small posse is formed.

"I heard Clyde suddenly say, 'Look out'.

"Then he and WD rushed for the car and started shooting."

Clyde is wounded in the arm, grazed in the head.

Buck was hit at least once.

Bonnie was then shot at least once in the abdomen.

And they dragged themselves up this hill.

Shortly after daybreak on the 24th July, 19 year-old Marvelle Feller

was helping with the morning milking on his family farm.

This here was about a five or six acre corn field.

Right here was where it was at. Right here.

Marvelle and his nine year old sister, Louise

were about to come face-to-face with Bonnie and Clyde.

They are the only people alive to have come so dangerously close to the most feared outlaws in America.

Clyde had been shot through the left cheek bones in his head.

He'd been grazed right there and the blood was running down his cheek.

And Bonnie had been shot in the belly. I guess belly is what you say.

And blood was running all down her.

We discovered the fellas coming up

and they were carrying Bonnie -

my brother and my dad.

She'd been shot and really bloody

and Clyde was behind them with a gun on them.

They had my brother pull the car out and get it straightened up in the lane

and Marvelle said that the gun was laying right between them.

And he really wanted to reach down and grab it,

but he knew better than to do that.

Remarkably, despite their injuries, Bonnie, Clyde and WD Jones escaped.

But Clyde's brother Buck was too badly wounded to run.

It was the end of the road for him

and for his wife Blanche.

"They saw Buck faint and pull me down.

"I called to Clyde but they didn't stop."

Finally she stands up and the posse then apprehended Blanche and Buck.

It's at that point that that really famous photo of Blanche is taken.

Buck Barrow died from his wounds five days later.

Blanche was sentenced to 10 years in jail

where she was visited by a high profile interrogator.

J Edgar Hoover himself went to the jail where Blanche was after she gave up.

The net was closing in on Bonnie and Clyde.

Federal, as well as local lawmen, were now on their trail.

Soon after, in Texas, WD Jones was arrested...

..and the Dallas Police made a vital breakthrough.

Since Clyde's murder of a Deputy Sheriff earlier in the year...

..the Dallas County Police had made Bonnie and Clyde their top priority.

The Sheriff, "Smoot" Schmidt had assigned two men to the case.

Ladies and gentlemen, I want to introduce two of my deputies - Bob Alcorn and Ted Hinton.

Ted Hinton, I think had a huge crush on Bonnie. He used to be one of her customers when she was a waitress.

Bob Alcorn was the first man ever to arrest Clyde Barrow.

He arrested Clyde when Clyde was 15 or 16 for chicken theft.

And their value to Schmidt, or at least the way Schmidt perceived it,

was they might have insights that would allow him to, in some way,

get informers, find informers and capture Bonnie and Clyde.

In November 1933, Hinton and Alcorn received a tip off

about a secret Barrow family meeting.

This was the breakthrough they had hoped for -

the opportunity for a police ambush.

Ted and Bob wanted to bring in Highway Patrol,

they wanted to bring in the Texas Rangers, the Marshall's Office.

And "Smoot" rousted up. He said "No, Dallas Sheriff's Department is going to handle this ourselves".

And that proved to be one of the biggest mistakes he ever made in his life.

Sheriff Schmidt directed an unsuccessful attempt to take Bonnie and Clyde alive.

Although the outlaws' bullet-ridden car was later recovered,

they had once again shot their way out of trouble.

But Ted Hinton was determined that the next time he faced Bonnie and Clyde, he would not be outgunned.

He immediately contacted a US Congressman named Hatton Sumners,

and he got Congressman Sumners to agree

for him to draw a BAR out of the National Guard Armoury,

along with a box of ammunition.

Hinton had procured a BAR, the military machine gun beloved of Clyde Barrow.

Finally, the police were beginning to match the tactics of their outlaw opponents.

In January 1934, Clyde decided to realise an ambitious plan.

For some time he had been plotting a raid on Eastham Prison,

the scene of his first murder.

Blanche Barrow's memoir reveals that the brutal abuse he had suffered as an inmate here

was the real driving force behind Clyde's violent criminal career.

Four years after he first arrived at Eastham, a daring prison break was to be his final act of revenge.

Clyde had always planned to raid Eastham.

He was once a prisoner here at Eastham.

He was brutalised here at Eastham.

This was a raid that was planned four years before it actually occurred.

To quote him directly,

"I would like to raid this place, free as many prisoners as I can,

"and kill every damn guard in the place."

Five prisoners escaped.

Clyde had settled his score with Eastham.

But this act of vengeance marked the beginning of the end for Bonnie and Clyde.

A prison guard was fatally wounded by one of the convicts during the escape.

For the Prison Manager, Lee Simmons, it was clear who was to blame.

He now vowed revenge and called on the services of a formidable investigator...

..a former Texas Ranger called Frank Hamer.

He asked Hamer to put Bonnie and Clyde on the spot and shoot everyone in sight.

And that was the beginning of the tracking of Bonnie and Clyde with the express intent of killing them.

Harrison Hamer has made a detailed study of his great uncle's involvement in the Barrow case,

revealing a methodical and ruthless tracker unconcerned by the limits of jurisdiction or geography.

OK, this was Frank's expense account

during the period of February 15th 1934

to February 28th 1934.

This is money expended while travelling on official business in the capacity of investigator.

This was a period about 13 days and he travelled 1,397 miles.

So he was travelling about 100 miles a day.

Adopting the outlaw lifestyle of his opponents, Frank Hamer took to the road.

He got a car exactly like the Ford that Clyde was driving,

and he lived out of that car for the whole time he was tracking them down.

He knew what kind of whisky they drank, what brand of cigarettes they had,

what kind of food they ate, where they ate at.

He was like a pitbull.

He was not going to give up. He was going to bring them to justice.

At last, Clyde Barrow had met his match.

Lee Simmons put Frank Hamer on the job. The job was going to get done.

But while Frank Hamer has long been regarded as the archetypal lone ranger,

the FBI file reveals that he was actually working

in close harmony with J Edgar Hoover's Federal agents.

This letter here was March 17th 1934,

telling the agents to work with Frank Hamer.

And you start finding that

Frank Hamer is working with their special agents

in different locations and they're out investigating.

And they did a quite detailed report.

I mean, this is just a lot of information that is put in here.

Behind the scenes, Hoover's men continued to make their resources and intelligence

available to Frank Hamer.

And in Dallas, the records now reveal

that Bonnie and Clyde's families' telephones had been tapped.

The police pursuit now focused on sophisticated surveillance and intelligence gathering.

The tables were beginning to turn in the battle between Bonnie and Clyde and the law.

Public opinion also turned against them after a shocking double murder

here in Grapevine, Texas on Easter Sunday 1934.

'After a series of murders and bank jobs, Bonnie and Clyde

'were boldly keeping a rendezvous

'with some of their henchmen near Grapevine, Texas.

'While they waited they drank whisky, made love to each other

'and practiced their marksmanship by shooting at birds.

'Presently, two State Highway patrol officers sighted the pair.

'They decide to investigate.

'They approach Bonnie and Clyde, totally unaware of their identity.'

The murder of officers Edward Bryan Wheeler and Holloway Daniel Murphy seemed particularly callous.

And for the first time it was reported that Bonnie, as well as Clyde, had fired the fatal shots.

'This atrocious murder sealed the doom of Bonnie and Clyde...

GUN SHOT

'..for every peace officer in the entire South West

'became so enraged over this killing

'they pledged themselves to sleepless days and nights

'in their search for this murdering pair.'

But despite the media reports, there is no evidence that Bonnie pulled the trigger here

or at any of the other murders attributed to the Barrow Gang.

In fact, it was a third outlaw - Henry Methvin,

one of the escapees from Eastham - who opened fire first at Grapevine.

Everyone within the Barrow Gang

and the stories they told their families later,

there's not much agreement on many things

but there's some agreement on this,

that Clyde said to Henry Methvin, "Let's take them,"

meaning, "Let's take them hostage."

Henry hasn't been in this situation before.

He's mean, he's young and he's had too much to drink

and he starts shooting.

But Methvin is mysteriously absent from the official version of events at Grapevine.

Behind the scenes, a complex drama was beginning to play out.

You can look at the newspaper headlines and you hardly ever find a mention of Methvin's name.

And that, I think, can only have one thing behind it,

and that was the fact that there's this deal working.

The official records reveal that Henry Methvin's family was plotting to betray Bonnie and Clyde

in a deal brokered by Frank Hamer.

"Henry Methvin's sentence in the State of Texas would be wiped out

"provided that Methvin would place Barrow and Bonnie Parker on the spot."

With the help of Henry Methvin's father, the plan was to lure Bonnie and Clyde

into an ambush near the Methvin family home near Gibsland, Louisiana.

The outlaws had been regularly sighted in the area since the raid on Eastham Prison.

And on Monday 21st May 1934,

Frank Hamer assembled six officers on this remote country road.

The composition of the posse was a six-man.

Frank Hamer and "Manny" Gault, who were both retired Texas Rangers...

Two Dallas County Deputy Sheriffs,

Ted Hinton and Bob Alcorn...

And then you had Henderson Jordan, who was the Sheriff here of Bienville Parish,

and his chief deputy, Prentiss Oakley.

The two of them took in the legal jurisdiction for the shooting.

And they waited down here for two days and two nights.

Just before daybreak on Wednesday 23rd May, the posse stopped a pick up truck.

It was Henry Methvin's father.

Bob Alcorn turned his truck around, put it in the Southbound lane here.

He jacked the wheel up, took it off

and by Methvin's truck being there, Clyde is going to naturally slow down

because he recognises the truck.

The trap was set.

Later that morning, Bonnie and Clyde set off in their stolen Ford V8, hoping to meet Henry Methvin.

Clyde Barrow was typically well armed.

If you could have seen in this car that morning,

you would have seen a sawn off shot gun, three Browning automatic rifles,

a loaded pistol and a bag containing another 10 or 11 hand guns.

The car was essentially a rolling armoury.

But this time Bonnie and Clyde faced equal fire power, including Ted Hinton's BAR.

It has been said that they were facing the most amount of fire power

that they could have possibly faced, short of an army platoon.

This time, there would be no hope of taking Bonnie and Clyde alive.

The posse would shoot on sight.

And just after 9.15 on Wednesday 23rd May 1934,

on a lonely road in Louisiana,

Bonnie and Clyde's deadly game of cat and mouse reached its inevitable conclusion.

"I was glad they died together.

"That way, neither one had to deal with the grief of losing the other."

The car wound up with 167 holes in it, counting entrance and exit holes.

Bonnie wound up with 53 in her and Clyde wound up with 51 in him.

There's not much to say now. It is all over.

The ends of law and justice have been served.

The Barrow Gang's chaotic crime spree had claimed 17 lives,

including those of Buck Barrow and Bonnie and Clyde themselves.

For her involvement with the Barrow Gang,

Blanche Barrow spent nearly six years in prison,

where she wrote her unique memoir.

It's an account that finally explains Bonnie and Clyde's journey

from petty crime to vicious murder,

driven by Clyde's experience in a notoriously brutal Texas prison.

The very next year, 1935, Texas was named the worst prison in the United States,

and they cited in particular brutality at various prison installations,

and they really focused at Eastham.

Bonnie and Clyde's downfall also signalled the beginning of a new chapter in American law enforcement.

Bonnie and Clyde were a turning point in American legal history.

Federal law changed so that murder and bank robbery became Federal crimes.

The division of investigation agents

then went out and pretty much, over the next six months,

blew away all the other major criminals at the time.

This was the birth of the FBI as we know it today.

The crime wave of the Great Depression would soon run its course,

but the legend of Bonnie and Clyde would continue to captivate the world for generations to come.

# Bonnie was a waitress in a small cafe

# Clyde Barrow was the rounder that took her away

# They both robbed and killed until both of them died

# So goes the legend of Bonnie and Clyde

# Bonnie and Clyde

# Bonnie and Clyde. #