Banking on robbers Woodstock man collects Bonnie & Clyde memorabilia
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Toolbox
By Gordon Dritschilo Staff Writer - Published: May 24, 2009
Bill Flower's Bonnie and Clyde collection includes a brick from what he calls their "last hideout" — a house the notorious bank robbers were driving to on May 23, 1934.
They never made it. Instead, police officers ambushed Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow on a Louisiana road that day, gunning them down without warning. Their bodies were taken to Conger's Funeral Home.
Seventy-five years later, Flower, of Woodstock, has a brick from that building, too.
The notorious bank robbers and their gang had been cornered before, but always managed to make dramatic escapes. Outside of Dallas, they abandoned a car to evade sheriff's deputies. In Joplin, Miss., they shot their way past police, killing two officers.
Flower has acquired bullets they left in the car outside Dallas, a shotgun they dropped in Joplin and a swatch of cloth from the clothes Barrow was wearing when he died. He also has a vast collection of photos and other memorabilia relating to the infamous couple.
Flower, who works at the Woodstock Inn, "wouldn't dare" say how much he has spent on the collection. He said he is touch with a loose network of similar collectors called "The Crime Partners" who keep track of such memorabilia.
Guns tend to be holy grails for Bonnie and Clyde collectors, and Flower said the shotgun from the Joplin shootout - which has been rendered nonfunctional - is the prize of his collection. He said it was on loan the Texas Ranger Museum until its previous owner sold it to him.
An enthusiast for the period from Prohibition to World War II, Flower also has a sign from a warehouse owned by Al Capone, bullets that were in the gun held by Baby Face Nelson when he died, a wanted poster of John Dillinger and issues of True Detective Magazine.
However, he said something about Bonnie and Clyde resonates with him.
"I just find the whole love story aspect, that these people were so in love," he said. "I don't want to make light of what they did, but I want people to understand that the time period they were brought up in was so tough."
It all started, Flower said, when he was watching A&E. Marie Barrow, Clyde's sister and last living relative, was giving an interview. The notion of someone associate with Bonnie and Clyde still being alive fired his imagination. He got in touch with her and they spoke weekly until her death in 1999.
They never managed to meet, he said, but Marie Barrow sent him a picture of her and her brother together. Flower said it was the last picture of Clyde Barrow taken while he was alive. She was 15 at the time.
Flower said he asked Marie Barrow how her brother, despite being on the run, always managed to look so dapper in the gang's photos of him. She said whenever they met in the woods, she'd bring him clean clothes and take his dirty ones.
"She said she knew what her brother was doing was wrong, but she'd always love him," he said.
Clyde Barrow was born in Texas in 1909. He got in trouble at a young age - Flower said one of his earliest arrests was for stealing chickens. He was raped and beaten in jail. When he got out, he tried to find honest work, but authorities would not let him.
"Every time he went to get a job, the police would pick him up and question him," Flower said.
Bonnie Parker, an honor roll student at her school in West Dallas, was married just before her 16th birthday and separated two years later. There are many stories about how she met Barrow in 1930, but most historians seem to agree she joined in his criminal gang because she loved him.
She helped him escape from jail by smuggling a gun in to him, and soon they were on the run together. The Barrow Gang mostly held up gas stations and small stores, but they were most famous for robbing banks.
"They were like heroes," Flower said. "This was the depression era when the banks were taking away the farms and homes."
Other bank robbers became folk heroes during the same period. Carolyn Craven, an assistant professor of economics at Middlebury College who teaches a class on the Great Depression, said the country's economic collapse changed many people's ideas about the rules for getting ahead.
"Before the Depression, there was this idea of, you work hard, take care of your family … you got ahead that way," she said.
In the face of the Depression, she said, that no longer seemed to work.
"For some people - I don't think a majority - the idea of these outlaws who walked in and took the money out of banks was appealing," she said. "Like in our financial crisis now, banks and bankers were the prime villains."
She also said the central states, where Bonnie and Clyde roamed, tended to be harder-affected than New England, where fewer banks failed. The Dust Bowl also complicated rural life at the time.
Their death count - Flower said the gang killed 12 people, including nine police officers - began to turn public opinion against them.
"I think Clyde had a huge amount of rage toward the police and didn't seem to be inhibited about shooting at them," Craven said.
Flower's collection includes newspaper front pages announcing the deaths and original wanted posters. One wanted poster printed following the Joplin shootout offered $600,000.
He also has the original copy of a statement a captured gang member gave to police and several pictures of the duo, from portraits they posed for on the run, taken by fellow gang members, to newspaper photos to grisly pictures of their corpses.
The largest piece is a painted wooden sign bearing a picture of Parker that toured with the "death car." Flower said a man known as "The Crime Doctor" bought the car in which the duo was gunned down. He then toured the country, exhibiting it at state fairs to paying customers.
He also has a smaller poster advertising the exhibit.
"It says 'See the Death Car,'" he said, holding it up. "'Six guns belched death, 166 bullets' … then it says 'Bring the children.'"
gordon.dritschilo@rutlandherald.com
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