Bonnie and Clyde: FBI history page

The essay opens: “Clyde Champion Barrow and Bonnie Parker were shot to death by officers in an ambush near Sailes, Bienville Parish, Louisiana on May 23, 1934, after one of the most extensive manhunts the nation had seen up to that time.” It says the Bureau became interested in December 1932 through a Ford stolen in Pawhuska, Oklahoma and found near Jackson, Michigan, and a prescription bottle traced to a drug store in Nacogdoches, Texas, and that on May 20, 1933 the U.S. Commissioner at Dallas issued a warrant charging the two with interstate transportation of a car stolen in Illinois. “Although the FBI had jurisdiction solely on the charge of transporting a stolen automobile,” it says, agents followed the trail through many states.

The page dates the Iowa shootout in which Buck Barrow was fatally wounded to “July 29, 1933”; the Bureau’s own 1933 report in the Vault dates the raid near Dexter, Iowa to July 24, 1933. It describes the January 16, 1934 break from the Eastham State Prison Farm, in which two guards were shot, and lists killings and robberies that Barrow was “suspected of” or “allegedly” committed. It places the April 6, 1934 killing of a constable “at Miami, Oklahoma”; the Oklahoma court’s opinion in Methvin v. State places the killing of Cal Campbell at Commerce, Ottawa County.

The page names William Daniel Jones and Raymond Hamilton as members of the group at different times. Its list of attributed crimes is the FBI’s summary of what Barrow was suspected of, not a list of convictions.