Bonnie and Clyde: Resurrection Road

Here’s what happened. Clyde had a fight with his girlfriend at the time, Eleanor Bee Williams (he had her initials tattooed on his arm), and she left Dallas to stay with family in nearby Broaddus, Texas. Clyde, hoping to win her back, rented a car and traveled to see her, but didn’t pay the extra cost required to take the rented car out of town. When he didn’t bring it back, the rental agency called the cops and they put out a warrant.

The car company declined to press charges and the local law went along with that, but Clyde was now officially on their watch list.

While Clyde had legitimate employment during this early period, he also was doing some robbing and car thieving on the side. For example, a few weeks later, Clyde was arrested again, along with his older brother Buck, driving a truck full of stolen turkeys. Eventually, they petty crimes got him a very long sentence in prison—the infamous Eastham prison in Texas where he was forced to work under horrible conditions on a cotton-planting crew.

Some people, including us, speculate that it was this forced hard labor (he cut off two of his toes to try to get out of it) along with other terrible, humiliating things that happened to Clyde in prison that set him firmly on the course away from petty crime to becoming a notorious outlaw. When he finally was released early due to his mother begging for clemency, Clyde was embittered, and never went on the straight path again.

But on a lighter note, and getting back to the story about cars, Clyde loved cars. He stole a lot of cars in his day, and his favorite was always the classic Ford V8. It had a lot of horsepower, and combined with his superlative driving skills, got Bonnie and Clyde out of many scrapes with the law.

Clyde loved the Ford cars so much, he sent a letter praising them to Henry Ford himself. The letter, postmarked from Tulsa, Oklahoma, on April 10 1934, read:

While it’s almost impossible to verify—experts think the handwriting actually looks more like Bonnie’s script—the timing was right and it certainly sounds like something he’d do. The letter is on display today at the Ford museum.

In our book, Bonnie and Clyde: Resurrection Road, the outlaw lovers avoid the gruesome death reported in the papers and are forced to work for the good guys—the government. Clyde spends plenty of time behind the wheel, along with Bonnie, as they try to outrun an assassin and save President Franklin Roosevelt from a deadly plot against his life.