Where Bonnie and Clyde died—and still live on
It is a strange thing to grow up in a town marked by killers and killing, a town in flight from its own infamy. I grew up in just such a place.
A hamlet of hundreds, Gibsland, Louisiana, was not known for much until when, on May 23, 1934, Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut Barrow, the Depression-era crime duo, were ambushed and shot down in a hail of bullets a few miles south of its city limits.
(By way of background, over the course of almost two years Bonnie and Clyde, as they became known, engaged in a crime spree that included robberies at gas stations, banks, and restaurants. Along the way, they also engineered a prison break and were responsible for the deaths of three police officers and two prison guards.)
For the first 60 years or so after Bonnie and Clyde met their ignoble end, the town, and the region, seemed to want to wish the association away, but then it began to embrace it. There is now an annual Bonnie and Clyde Festival—to honor the posse of men who killed the couple, organizers insist—replete with a parade down Main Street and a reenactment of the shootout.
My time in the town was before the celebrating, when the killing was simply a stubborn fact that folks moved around the way a river flows around a rock. That may have something to do with the unseemly way that locals initially responded to the killings.
How it happened
After a posse gunned down Parker and Barrow, their bloody bodies remained in the car for hours as members of the posse took pictures, made recordings, and collected mementos. As word spread about what had happened, throngs of townspeople descended on the scene; some allegedly tried to cut off a piece of Parker’s dress and Barrow’s trigger finger.
The car was loaded onto a wrecker, with the bodies of Parker and Barrow still inside, to be transported to a coroner in Arcadia, the parish seat. A caravan of cars followed the wrecker. When it arrived in front of a school in Gibsland, the same school that I would later attend, it stopped, and the children ran out to view the bloody bodies.
Separating legend and fact
What precisely happened at the school has become legend, with different accounts of events, and it can be hard to determine the facts of the matter with absolute certainty.
According to Growing Up Barrow, a book written by Clyde Barrow’s nephew, Buddy Barrow Williams, the wrecker “broke down” in front of the school.
Perry Carver, the owner of the Bonnie & Clyde Ambush Museum in Gibsland, offers another explanation: the sheriff stopped the wrecker there on purpose to show the children “what happens when you break the law.” However, after he was ridiculed for the decision to stop, he invented the story of the wrecker overheating.
As Carver told me: “It traumatized a lot of these children. I talked to a lot of these old folks…that were kids at that school, and they remembered it like it was yesterday. You know, they said the smell in that car was just overwhelming. And a lot of the families had to move out of this area.”
When the wrecker arrived in Arcadia, Louisiana, at a furniture store that doubled as a morgue, there was another mob scene as people pressed into the store, nearly destroying it, trying to get to the bodies in the back. In addition, tens of thousands of people reportedly showed up in Arcadia in the days after the couple’s killing, creating a circus atmosphere according to news reports of the time.
A town tries to forget
The whole episode was macabre and indecorous and at odds with the way the region saw itself: deeply religious and morally upright. And so, people applied a proven Southern bleaching method to the sordid affair: allow silence to smother it and time to fade it. To some degree, the strategy worked.
When I was growing up, there were only a handful of references to the couple. A fading sign that read “Bonnie and Clyde’s Place” was painted on the side of an abandoned building down by the railroad tracks. For a few years I attended the school, where my mother taught. Every day we passed over the spot where the couple had been killed and passed the granite historical markers placed there. The markers had been plagued by vandalism, people shooting at them and chipping pieces off. Carver recounted to me an act of vandalism involving one of the markers: “We’ve actually found it in the middle of the street one time with a chain wrapped around it and a bumper hooked to the other end.”
A resurrection of sorts
In the early 1990s, when the host of Jeopardy! read the clue, “This famous pair of robbers met their end near Gibsland, Louisiana, in May 1934,” I leaped to my feet and yelled at the television, “Bonnie and Clyde!”
It was the first time I had heard an acknowledgment of the town’s connection to the killings on national television. It was during this time that the region was slowly beginning to change its position on the killings, an embrace led by a few passionate people and the sense that the legacy of the killings could be a tourist attraction in an area that was slowly depopulating.
My mother, Freddie Blow, who was born in the area eight years after Parker and Barrow were killed and who has lived in Gibsland most of her life, told me that the town, in the early days, didn’t want to be seen as “glorifying people who did wrong.” But she and the town have evolved, so much so that she served as grand marshal of the Bonnie and Clyde Festival parade in 2021. Now, in Gibsland, the duo is regularly resurrected, to die again, in perpetuity. Revelry has supplanted revulsion.
In Gibsland, Bonnie and Clyde live.