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door. Inside was a scene he would never forget—“like a slaughterhouse,” he would recall. Clyde lay back against the seat, his hair matted in blood. Hinton tried to open the door but there was no room; the car was wedged against the embankment. He scrambled over the hood and opened the passenger’s-side door. Bonnie fell out into his arms. She seemed so tiny, still soft and warm. He caught a whiff of her perfume. Her right hand had been shot off. She was covered with blood. He laid her back on the front seat and grabbed a pistol from beside Clyde. It was cold to his touch.29 Neither Clyde nor Bonnie had gotten off a shot.

Ivy Methvin ran up. There was a blanket in the backseat. Something was under it. “You’ve killed my boy!” Methvin snapped. Sheriff Jordan leaned into the backseat and pulled back the blanket. Beneath it was a row of guns. “We haven’t killed your boy, Mr. Methvin,” he said.

The county coroner was called. By the time he arrived, word had spread of the deaths, and a long line of dusty cars and logging trucks thronged the gravel road as dozens of the curious ogled the death car and Bonnie’s and Clyde’s bullet-riddled bodies. As Ted Hinton passed through the crowd, filming the scene with a movie camera he had brought, Sheriff Jordan had to restrain a man who produced a pair of scissors and was attempting to cut off one of Clyde’s ears. He was unable to stop someone else from shearing off locks of Bonnie’s hair.

Soon a wrecker arrived, towing away the death car. By lunchtime the bodies had arrived at Conger’s Furniture Store in Arcadia, which doubled as the parish funeral parlor. A crowd, later estimated at sixteen thousand people, thronged the streets, struggling for glimpses of the fallen outlaws. When they loaded Clyde’s body onto a stretcher, someone cried out, “He was nothing but a little bitty fart!”

The next day family members arrived and carted the corpses back to Dallas for burial. Enormous crowds greeted Bonnie and Clyde on their return. Bonnie’s body was put on display at the McCamy-Campbell Funeral Home, and in a single day twenty thousand people passed in to stare at her. Amid crowds of newspapermen and photographers, she was buried in the Fishtrap Cemetery. Clyde was laid to rest beside his brother Buck in the Western Heights Cemetery, a mile away. At the funeral home beforehand, a drunk weaved in to view his body, dropped a cigarette butt on the carpet, ground it in, and said, “I’m glad he’s dead.”

In death Bonnie and Clyde proved far more newsworthy than in life. The story of their killings was splashed across the front pages of dozens of Northern newspapers, including the New York Times, the first and last time the couple would rate such coverage. That their profiles should rise so precipitously was a byproduct of the ongoing hysteria over Dillinger: the idea that there were other Dillinger-like desperadoes at work across the country’s midsection was an idea that appealed to editors eager to spot a trend. Within days, however, the story would ebb, in part because Frank Hamer, Sheriff Jordan, and other posse members refused to discuss the ambush in detail.

For the next thirty years Bonnie and Clyde would remain dimly remembered, the province of detective magazines and pulp writers, until a pair of Hollywood screenwriters read of their exploits in John Toland’s 1963 Dillinger Days and created the 1967 movie that led to their rediscovery. Art has now done for Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow something they could never achieve in life: it has taken a shark-eyed multiple murderer and his deluded girlfriend and transformed them into sympathetic characters, imbuing them with a cuddly likability they did not possess, and a cultural significance they do not deserve.

14

NEW FACES

May 24 to June 30, 1934

We sure did run down a lot of bum leads and embarrass ourselves and innocent people a lot of times.

—SPECIALAGENT JOHNWELLES

The morning after Bonnie and Clyde were killed, Dillinger was still wandering the back roads of northwest Indiana in his red panel truck. He and Van Meter