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It was during this visit, at the Methvins’ urging, that Clyde and Bonnie began bunking in the house they had mentioned to their parents, an abandoned home ten miles south of the town of Gibsland. Locals called it the John Cole house, after its last owner, who died of tuberculosis there with his wife and two daughters four years earlier. It was a four-room, unpainted wooden house at the end of a dirt road in the pines, two rooms on each side of an open-air hallway. There were a few pieces of furniture and a tin roof, but water dribbled in when it rained. It was such a wreck the Cole family left it vacant, but for Bonnie and Clyde it was their first home, and it seemed like heaven.

How they came to claim the house isn’t clear. Clyde told his family he rented or purchased the house from the Cole family. A local historian, Carroll Rich, maintains that Clyde and Bonnie moved in without the family’s knowledge. Years later, John Cole’s son, Otis, told Rich that he visited the house when a friend told him squatters had moved in. Otis Cole said he walked up to the house one afternoon and found Ivy Methvin sitting on the front porch, drunk. Cole could see two other people moving around inside. When Methvin asked him where he could find some more bootleg whiskey, Cole said, “I don’t fool with that stuff,” and hurried off. He asked no more questions.22

Soon, however, word spread that the “squatters” were none other than Bonnie and Clyde. Carroll Rich, a Bienville Parish native, paints an evocative picture of how the stories filtered through the pines; there was nothing romantic about Bonnie and Clyde in these tales, nothing free or rebellious or heartwarming. They were murderers, modern-day bogeymen whose approach could mean only death.

As Rich recalled:

Country children shivered to hear old folks speculate on who had come to the piney woods, and at night when families sat rocking on front porches, they looked across a cornfield . . . and wondered whose yellow carlights were moving under the trees. Sometimes when cousins came to spend Friday night, as many as five children slept in one bed, the older children telling Bonnie and Clyde stories late into the night, stories of policemen shot in the face, of fat sheriffs tied up and bleeding, crying for mercy, tales designed to make the younger ones whimper with fright and weariness and finally fall into uneasy sleep.23

If Clyde realized that people knew he was in the area, he showed no signs of worry. In those days Bienville Parish seemed mired in the nineteenth century. The country people scraped by on dusty farms or driving rickety logging trucks. For most there were no phones, no indoor plumbing, no movie theaters, and no newspapers; many couldn’t read. On those moist spring evenings in 1934, stories of Bonnie and Clyde spread like the morning fog that crept in from the swamps.

People whispered that they had been seen at the crossroads store at Sailes, stopping to buy cheese and crackers and a cold Coca-Cola. There was the man in sunglasses who parked his big Pontiac outside area farms, asking to buy a chicken to fry; it was Clyde, they had no doubt. A share-cropper swore he saw Clyde and Bonnie on a quilt spread on pine needles beneath the trees, their naked bodies moving rhythmically. Maybe these tales were concocted, maybe not. For the moment no one said a thing to the law. No one wanted to be murdered in their beds.

Bonnie and Clyde’s springtime idyll did not last long. Their money was running low, and by Friday, April 27, they were back on the road.cu After stopping in Memphis, Clyde drove north, cutting across Arkansas and Missouri and driving into Kansas. On Sunday afternoon, April 29, they reached Topeka, where they cruised neighborhood streets in search of a car that struck Clyde’s fancy. They found it at 2107 Gable Street, a spanking new cordova-tan Ford V-8 Deluxe, sitting in a driveway. They stole it and headed toward northwestern Iowa, where they drove through greening