Bonnie and Clyde

        Bonnie Parker was a poor farm girl growing up in Texas during the turn of the century.  She married very young and dropped out of school to be with her then-husband, Roy Thornton.  He was 16 and she was 15.  However, they were only married a year when Thornton had numerous brushes with the law and was incarcerated.  Although the couple never truly divorced, Bonnie never really saw her husband before he died in an attempted prison break at the age of 28.  Bonnie admitted to being proud that her husband died trying to escape instead of dying in prison.
        Clyde Barrow grew up under a literal wagon.  He was the youngest of seven children and needed to farm to help his family.  However, he figured that crime would pay more.  In 1926, he started stealing cars, robbing stores, and breaking safes.  He was first arrested that same year, but killed an inmate who had allegedly sexually assaulted him.  He later escaped from that same prison using a weapon that Bonnie had snuck in for him.
        After his escape, he created a true criminal gang.  It included him, Bonnie, and a friend of his, Ralph Fults.  The group committed several robberies, including one where they killed the shop owner.  The group was then jailed but escaped.  W.D. Jones, a family friend of Clyde's, also joined the gang and assisted them in killing five police officers/sheriffs.  Despite Jones being 16, he helped commit the majority of murders that the group did.  Also joining them were a group of rotating criminals that included Raymond Hamilton and Ross Dyer.  Hamilton ended up receiving 362 years in prison at the age of just 28.
       The Barrow gang, as they were then called, the group legitimately terrorized everywhere from Texas to as far as Minnesota.  They were notoriously ruthless and frequently killed law officers.  They also kidnapped and shot civilians if they believed they were in the way of the Barrow gang.  However, in 1934, the gang was jailed for what was believed to be their last time.  Bonnie and Clyde were put on death row, and the other members were serving out lifetimes in prison despite their long list of homicides.  This was the first time that Bonnie was viewed as an equal part of the crime.  She had long been looked at as Clyde's mistress, who occasionally helped.  However, several eyewitnesses identified Bonnie as the killer of several sheriffs, and she was finally put on death row alongside her partner.  Unsurprisingly, the pair escaped but left the other members of their gang to rot in prison.
      On May 23, 1934, Bonnie and Clyde were ambushed on a rural road in Louisiana.  They were both shot a total of 50 times, due to the automatic weapons that the officers were carrying.  The officers, which were a total of six men from two different states, tried to avenge the deaths of their fallen colleagues by shooting them as much as possible. 
      However terrifying Bonnie and Clyde were at the time, their crime sprees became a fixture in American pop culture.  Their relationship was highly romanticized, and their lives spurred two movies, four books, a hit Broadway musical, two TV series, and several songs.  However, should we really be romanticizing and praising this kind of behavior?