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The Barker deathhouse in Oklawaha, Florida, still sits amid silent oaks dripping with Spanish moss on the shores of Lake Weir. Abandoned for years now, it’s filled with an absentee owner’s garbage, empty boxes, and a child’s yellowing hobby horse; close your eyes and you can almost see Earl Connelley scrambling across the grass to escape Freddie Barker’s bullets. There’s a historical marker beside the field where Pretty Boy Floyd died in far eastern Ohio. Ellen Conkle’s home was torn down years ago, and the area is being reclaimed by the surrounding woods. On a cold December day the wind blows leaves across the yard where Purvis shouted for his men to “Fire!” There’s not another farm in sight. It’s an eerie, barren place.

A concrete marker was erected on the country road not far from where Bonnie and Clyde were killed in northwest Louisiana. It’s a sad, forgotten spot, hard to find, littered with green-glass shards of broken beer bottles and used condoms. The Biograph is still there, despite periodic attempts to tear it down; there’s no marker where Dillinger fell, just a cracked stretch of concrete, pockmarked with black splotches of ancient bubble gum. In the summer of 2003 an office building was going up in the rear parking lot where Chicago detectives accosted the Dillinger Squad that night.

People still live in Dillinger’s flat on Lexington Avenue in St. Paul, in the Joplin apartment where Bonnie and Clyde killed two policemen, in the Dillinger farmhouse outside Mooresville, and in the small frame house where Baby Face Nelson died. Some occupants know their home’s history; others, like the family living in the Italianate home Alvin Karpis rented at the Indiana lakeshore, are startled to learn that a murderer once laid his head in their master bedroom.

Jimmy Probasco’s place is gone. So is Louis Cernocky’s; the ladies at the local historical society look skeptical when told one of the area’s leading citizens was a welcoming host for John Dillinger. The Green Lantern is gone, too; not even photographs remain. So is the house in suburban Chicago where the Barkers held William Hamm and Edward Bremer. The Crown Point jail sits abandoned. There’s a faded pink marker on the building where Frank Nash was snatched off Central Avenue in Hot Springs. On a blustery January day, a man and his teenage son linger a second to read it, then shrug, then walk on.

They don’t know the stories. So many people don’t. More than two dozen sons and daughters of the Dillinger Squad’s men were interviewed for this book; only a handful fully understood what their fathers had lived through. By and large, relatives of the outlaws and their “molls” knew even less or didn’t care to know more. The dark side of their heritage has split more than one of these families. The sons of Frank Nash’s widow do not speak to this day. One beseeched the author to tell him more about his mother. His half-brother hung up the phone.

You can still find the public enemies, if you know where to look. Their graves lie, mostly unnoticed, in remote country cemeteries and along the busy avenues of twenty-first-century Middle America. In the Crown Hill Memorial Park in Dallas, Bonnie Parker is buried beside a budding hedge, a Bally Total Fitness in view to her left, an H&R Block and a Hollywood Video to her right. Three bundles of artificial flowers wreath her headstone and its jarring inscription: AS THE FLOWERS ARE ALL MADE SWEETER BY SUNSHINE AND THE DEW, SO THIS OLD WORLD IS MADE BRIGHTER BY THE LIKES OF FOLKS LIKE YOU. Clyde lies across town in a padlocked, weed-strewn graveyard in west Dallas. He is buried in a corner with his brother Buck, next to their parents, about thirty feet from the white-concrete side wall of Many’s Transmission Service. The headstone’s inscription reads, GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN.

That’s more than one can say about Machine Gun Kelly and the Barker family. An hour northwest of Dallas, in the tidy country cemetery at Cottondale, Texas, Kelly molders in a pauper’s grave.