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They came from Dallas. Both the Barrow family, subsistence farmers from south of the city, and Bonnie’s mother, a West Texas widow, had joined the rising tide of rural families moving into Southwestern cities in the early 1920s. The Barrows were so poor they lived for a time beneath a viaduct. In time Clyde’s father started a scrap metal business and built a house in a poor, unincorporated area known as the Bog, just across the Trinity River from downtown. Subject to flooding, crisscrossed by railroads, its air and water polluted by cement plants and foundries, the Bog was a dusty latticework of bleak houses and lean-tos, unpaved roads and littered yards.

Dropping out of school at sixteen, Clyde became a teenage burglar, joining his older brother Ivan, known as Buck, sneaking into stores at night. The boys were a study in contrasts. Where Buck was a lethargic, monosyllabic figure who talked little and drank lots, Clyde was small, peppy, and bright, a fast talker with rosy cheeks who loved guns and played the guitar and the saxophone. In later years Dallas lawmen would remember stopping the brothers for stealing scrap metal, no doubt to help their father. According to Clyde’s sister Nell, their first arrests came after they stole a flock of turkeys from an East Texas farm; stopped by police in a truck full of hot poultry, Buck drew a few days in jail and Clyde was released.

For a time Clyde tried a series of menial jobs: messenger boy, movie usher, mirror factory worker. None lasted. By eighteen he evidenced the first signs of a powerful ego, a sense that he was entitled to something better than life in the Bog. In a telling stab at reinvention, he changed his middle name from Chestnut to Champion, hoping that “Clyde Champion Barrow” might elevate him to the status that he believed he deserved. It didn’t: he was still a two-bit burglar. He spent 1928 and 1929 ransacking stores throughout North Texas with Buck, until Buck was captured one night after a foot chase in the town of Denton.

Clyde met Bonnie Parker one night in January 1930, when he showed up at a west Dallas home where she was babysitting. A temperamental girl with a histrionic bent, Bonnie married a teenage layabout and had fallen into a depression following the breakup of their marriage. She was an avid reader of detective and movie magazines, and her diary entries portray a young woman desperate to break out of a routine of waitressing and babysitting. “Blue as usual,” she wrote one night in 1928. “Not a darn thing to do. Don’t know a darn thing.” And the day after that: “Haven’t been anywhere this week. Why don’t something happen?”1

The attraction between Bonnie and Clyde was immediate, but the romance was short-lived. Several nights later Dallas police arrested Clyde for burglary. When the charges fell through, he was transferred to Waco to face another set of charges. Bonnie, who was obsessed with Clyde and his exciting adventures with the law, moved into a cousin’s home in Waco. When another inmate told Clyde he had a gun at his home, Clyde persuaded Bonnie to smuggle it into the jail. Clyde and two other men used the pistol a few days later to make their escape. They lit out north, crossing Oklahoma into Missouri and driving on into Indiana, stealing cars and burglarizing stores. Police finally caught up with them in Middletown, Ohio, taking Clyde into custody following a car chase. He was returned to Waco, where a judge gave him a fourteen-year sentence in the brutal state prison at Huntsville.

He served barely two years. After bombarding Clyde with teary letters for months, Bonnie finally began dating other men, but when Clyde was released in February 1932, they were immediately reunited. Clyde avoided crime for a time, taking a construction job in Massachusetts that his sister arranged. But, complaining of loneliness, he soon returned to the Bog and began hanging around the service station his father had opened on its main thoroughfare, Eagle Ford Road. Within days he was rousted by Fort Worth police,