The Tale of Bonnie and Clyde in Missouri
“Someday they’ll go down together; And they’ll bury them side by side. To few it’ll be grief, to the law a relief; But it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.”—From “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde,” a poem by Bonnie Parker.
Many have heard the outrageous tales of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the criminal lovers who frequented Route 66, wreaking havoc at every stop.
They stole cars and robbed banks, gas stations, and grocery stores during the Great Depression. Their schemes killed police and, on occasion, innocent civilians. They were dangerous, yet America was and has remained transfixed on everything that they did. Their fame was heavily fueled by private photographs Bonnie and Clyde took of themselves, which the American media exposed to readers.
Some called them the epitome of true love. Others called them monsters. Like many historic figures, the truth behind their story is more complex than any black-and white judgment or assumption.
Bonnie, who was known to be a smart young lady, spent her time reading, writing poetry, and dreaming of becoming a Hollywood star. She had it all—talent, looks, and a unique vivaciousness. Clyde had already been arrested several times for car theft and burglary before he met Bonnie.
Bonnie met Clyde in 1930 at mutual friend Clarence Clay’s home in West Dallas, Texas. Over hot chocolate, the two bonded, electricity surging between them. At the time she was introduced to Clyde, Bonnie was legally married to Roy Thornton, who was serving time in prison for robbery. Bonnie never officially divorced Roy, yet still fell in love with Clyde. A month after meeting Bonnie, Clyde was jailed for robbery at McLennan County Jail in Waco, Texas.
As Clyde served a stint behind bars, their newfound relationship was challenged. Bonnie and Clyde shared letters, and she visited him in prison as much as possible. Bonnie smuggled a gun into the jail to Clyde. Clyde managed a daring escape, although shortly afterward he was once again arrested and held at Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville.
with bullet holes in 1934• Dallas Police Archives
Clyde was eventually transferred to Eastham Prison the same year. It was there that Clyde was sexually assaulted by an inmate, whom Clyde killed in retaliation.
He was paroled in February 1932. Even though he vowed never to return to prison, Clyde still chose a life of crime. Bonnie chose a life with Clyde.
Bonnie, while a good girl in her youth, felt such loyalty to this man that she entered a new life of robbing grocery stores, filling stations, and small banks, living on the lam, and killing others when threatened with capture.
“Desperation often leads to bad choices,” says Buddy Barrow, Clyde’s nephew and one of his last living relatives.
The farther and faster that Bonnie and Clyde ran, the more enmeshed they sank into a life that would eventually lead to their end.
JANUARY 1933
A Kidnapping by Crooks
On January 26, 1933, Bonnie and Clyde made their first mark on the Midwest.
In Springfield, on Route 66 in southwest Missouri, police officer Thomas A. Persell patrolled the quiet streets of downtown. He noticed a suspicious vehicle with Oklahoma license plates on the Benton Avenue Viaduct, which is now known as the Martin Luther King Jr. Bridge. He suspected the driver was casing the area to steal an automobile.
Upon his approach to the car, the driver rolled down his window and pointed the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun at Thomas, who quickly realized this was no ordinary traffic stop.
“Put your hands up, or I will blow your brains out,” Clyde calmly ordered Thomas.
Thomas was disarmed and forced into the back of the vehicle and roughly yanked to the floorboard, where he could feel the pressure of Bonnie’s heels along with a gun pressed firmly against his ribs. Also in the car with them was W.D. (William Daniel) Jones, a teenage member of the small gang who had met Clyde as a child.
Clyde used Thomas’s navigation skills to direct them out of Springfield. Thomas, though he was certain the gang would kill him once he served their purpose, stayed calm and collected. Thomas’s wife was pregnant with the couple’s son at the time of his kidnapping.
They held Thomas captive for six hours and dropped him off outside Joplin at what is now known as Stone’s Corner.
When the gang let him go, Thomas asked if he could have his revolver back.
Clyde simply said, “We can use it,” and that Thomas was lucky to be getting away with his life.
Thomas, in a newspaper interview, recounted Clyde as a “dark-faced desperado,” Bonnie as “not the least bit beautiful,” and W.D. Jones as “a chunky thug.” In addition to taking his prized pistol, a rare .36 caliber with white bone grips, he recalled how the trio bummed cigarettes off him and “cussed like sailors.”
Thomas passed away in 1989, but his son, Tommy Persell, resides in Springfield today. Nearly 93 years later, his son Tommy recounts growing up as “the kid whose father was kidnapped by Bonnie and Clyde.”
Tommy describes how his father attended a local theater to see the 1967 film, Bonnie and Clyde, starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.
“My father was not impressed with the film. He felt it depicted the duo as heroic, while he maintained those two were not nice people,” Tommy says.
His father eventually rose to sergeant with the Springfield Police Department before joining the US Postal Service in 1937.
Tommy never considered a career in law enforcement, saying, “My dad told me not to.”
As that winter faded into spring, Bonnie and Clyde continued their havoc along the Midwest portion of Route 66. In April, they returned to Joplin. Patrick Tuttle, the Visit Joplin director, shared how the garage apartment, where Bonnie and Clyde and their gang hid out for 13 days, once belonged to his family.
According to Patrick, during their stay, Bonnie and Clyde were on a crime hiatus because Bonnie was recovering from a leg injury. Not long before, Clyde had driven off a bridge, crashing their Ford automobile and giving Bonnie third-degree burns on her leg from a battery acid leak. Additionally, Clyde’s brother, Buck, had recently been released from the Texas State Penitentiary. Buck and his wife, Blanche, met up with the couple in Joplin.
Blanche, with her husband’s newfound freedom, hoped to convince Bonnie and Clyde to turn away from crime. Unfortunately, Blanche’s plan failed.
Blanche initially rented a house in Joplin, but Clyde preferred the privacy of the garage apartment they eventually settled in. Not only did it provide a garage (Clyde insisted on backing their cars into the garage so they were always ready to run), but the living quarters were upstairs, offering a 360-degree view of their surroundings, as well as six-inch thick Carthage limestone walls that were impenetrable by bullets.
Chris Wiseman, curator of the Joplin History and Mineral Museum, also has family ties to the apartment. His great-grandfather built the apartment as temporary lodging while he was building a house for his family.
Chris shared that the Bonnie and Clyde gang drew attention from the police. A tip from a witness connected one of the gang’s cars to a burglary at the Neosho Milling Company. As this was during Prohibition, police obtained a liquor warrant, suspecting they were bootleggers.
On April 13, 1933, the police went to investigate the apartment, quickly finding out that these “bootleggers” were actually the dangerous, infamous criminals they had been searching for.
The officers’ approach was met with a spray of bullets, and a bloody massacre ensued. As the gang escaped, they shot and killed two police officers, detective Harry McGinnis and Newton County constable John Wesley Harryman.
In the aftermath, the police uncovered an extensive array of weapons, jewelry, and a camera, along with several rolls of undeveloped film. This was the beginning of the end for Bonnie and Clyde. Many folks didn’t know who Bonnie and Clyde were before this, much less what they looked like. Media frenzy after a crime was not as immediate during the Depression as it is now, but once the officers developed the film, everything changed.
Shocking pictures of Bonnie, dressed up and posing with a cigar and an arsenal of guns, gave the public faces to match to the criminals. The photos were widely distributed by the Joplin Police Department, which thought the snapshots would allow for better recognition than the typical artist sketches of the day.
Chris Wiseman shared that a detective gathered the jewelry, whether Bonnie’s or Blanche’s, from the apartment. Rather than turning the pieces in for evidence, he gave them to his girlfriend. The jewelry outlasted the relationship and eventually ended up in the former girlfriend’s granddaughter’s possession. Around 1998, the granddaughter shared the story with the Joplin History and Mineral Museum, turning the jewels in for posterity. The jewelry now lives behind protected glass in its Bonnie and Clyde exhibit at the museum.
The current owner of the Joplin hideout at 3347 1⁄2 Oak Ridge Drive is Christopher Dumm. He has turned the space into an Airbnb and worked diligently to maintain the 1933 aesthetic, evident in the light fixtures, wall hangings, furniture, and decor. Complete with a Route 66 Depression-era theme, along with modern comforts, including Wi-Fi, guests can experience a historic foray into one of the most notable locales of Bonnie and Clyde’s nearly two-year crime spree. While Christopher Dumm initially purchased the apartment as an investment, he has also been grateful to contribute to preserving Joplin’s history. The apartment was added to the National Register of Historic Places in May 2009.
“Thirteen days in Joplin may have been the longest the couple stayed in one place since the beginning of their crime spree,” says Brad Belk, former director of the Joplin History and Mineral Museum and community historian at Missouri Southern State University.
MAY 23, 1934
A Violent End
A little more than a year after the Joplin shootout, on May 23, 1934, the day that Bonnie and Clyde were killed, there were six officers hidden in the bushes off a rural road in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, waiting for the opportunity to target the criminal duo. The officers were led by former Texas ranger Frank Hamer, who orchestrated the plot to bring the outlaws to justice.
Frank set a trap for Bonnie and Clyde with the help of Ivy Methvin, the father of a longtime gang associate, Harry Methvin. Harry’s father was desperate to secure a pardon for his son from the legal consequences of the gang’s crimes. Frank, with the permission of the Texas governor, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, offered to pardon Harry. The only requirement was that Ivy gain access to the gang members, and Ivy complied.
Ivy parked his pickup truck off to the side of the road, pretending to have a flat tire. He knew that Clyde would stop to help an old family friend. When Clyde approached the vehicle in his own Ford V8 Deluxe, sure enough, he slowed to assist.
At that point, six law enforcement officers took their shot, opening fire. They pummeled not only the vehicle but also its two occupants with rounds of bullets. Clyde was killed instantly. Bonnie uttered a scream before being silenced by bullets that riddled her small-framed body. Both criminals were dead within seconds, ending their two years of crime across the Midwest and, most notably, along Historic Route 66.
While historians disagree on whether the officers gave Bonnie and Clyde a chance to turn themselves in before shooting, most agree that there was no prior warning of the gunfire that lasted less than 20 seconds.
Bonnie and Clyde were buried separately, due to Bonnie’s mother’s wishes: “Clyde had her in life. He can’t have her in death too,” she said.
“They both came from good, hardworking families,” shares Rhea
Leen Linder (formerly Parker), Bonnie’s niece. “We certainly don’t condone their actions, but they were loved by their families.”
Rhea is on a passionate campaign to exhume Bonnie’s body and have her buried next to Clyde. “If she was willing to die for the man she loved, she certainly should be buried next to him,” Rhea says.
Louisiana, where Bonnie and
Clyde were shot • Wikimedia Commons
Clyde’s headstone reads: “Gone but not forgotten,” which has proved to be the most accurate account of the couple’s story. While Bonnie never achieved her goal of Hollywood stardom, the infamy of Bonnie and Clyde and the 13 killings generally attributed to them have made them more famous in death than life.
Based on her memorialized poetry, Bonnie knew that the only version of life she would share with Clyde would lead to death.
Other Outlaws Along Route 66
WILD BILL HICKOK shot Davis Tutt over a pocket watch in 1865 on the courthouse steps in what is now the city square of downtown Springfield. This was well before Route 66 was a notion.
JESSE JAMES was rumored to have taken refuge in Meramec Caverns in Stanton during the 1870s, which is still known today as the Jesse James hideout.
PRETTY BOY FLOYD (Charles Arthur Floyd) was known for his bank robberies, primarily in Kansas City and St. Louis, in the early 1930s. He was viewed by society as a Robin Hood of sorts, since legend has it that he burned mortgage documents when robbing banks, freeing many families from impossible financial obligations during the Depression.
BILLY COOK (William Edward Cook Jr.) was born in Joplin in 1928. A witness to violence from an early age, he watched as his mother was brutally murdered (allegedly by his father), and he was later abandoned, along with his siblings, by his father in an old mine shaft. Billy became a criminal hitchhiker along Route 66. His first victim was kept in the trunk of a car and escaped. The Mosser family was not so lucky. In Claremore, Oklahoma, Billy shot the five family members as well as their dog and placed their bodies in an abandoned mine shaft in Joplin, Missouri. Billy is known for his final words at his 1952 San Quentin Prison execution: “I hate everyone, and everyone hates me.”
This article was originally printed in the February 2026 issue of Missouri Life.
