At the Bonnie and Clyde Museum: Why Louisiana Man Happily Runs a Room Dedicated to Murderers

Why visit Gibsland, Louisiana? Because it was near here that America’s most famous love-tangled pair of murderers, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, met their end, at a roadside ambush orchestrated by a troupe of lawless Texas lawmen.

Bonnie and Clyde met in Texas in 1930, she was 19 and married to an imprisoned murderer, he was 21 and a phenomenal shot. Months later, their love was christened: Clyde was arrested for burglary and Bonnie smuggled in a gun to help him escape. The two went on a wild crime spree, robbing banks and kidnapping and killing police officers in Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Louisiana. FBI and local law enforcement officers hunted them and their gang across the South, and local residents cheered them on.

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“I never heard anyone down here say they were scared of Bonnie and Clyde,” said Ted Prince, from his paraphernalia-cluttered perch at the larger of two Gibsland, Louisiana museums dedicated to the duo. “You have to remember it was the heart of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl was rolling through, and you had a lot of families being displaced. At a time when society was big business and big bankers, everyday people looked at Bonnie and Clyde and thought, ‘I would be like them if I had the nerve.’”

Ted Prince has devoted his life to Bonnie and Clyde. As a young man he journeyed from Georgia to Gibsland to see the Bonnie and Clyde museum. “I stayed until closing time and it got dark and they kicked me out,” he said. After longtime museum manager L.J. “Boots” Hinton became ill earlier this year, Perry Carver, a dedicated fan originally from Atlanta, took over the museum and Prince became the new manager. Prince met his wife on a web forum for Bonnie and Clyde enthusiasts, and is working on a 1,000 page book about the lives of Bonnie and Clyde, which he says will reveal “everything.”

To learn more I paid my $7 entrance fee and entered a large room packed with newspaper clippings and photos of the pair in action, showing off their guns, picnicking in fields, smiling at the camera. They lived the sort of dreamy outdoorsy stick-it-to-the-man road tripping life many young lovers dream about, except they were actually murdering the man.

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Some of the guns the pair used are encased behind glass and there is a replica of a black 1934 V-8 Ford, like the kind Clyde use to wheel around dusty back roads at 80 miles-per-hour, but the gem of the museum is a rare video clip of the bullet-riddled car right after the ambush, with Bonnie and Clyde’s corpses slumped over in the front seat. Clyde was shot 51 times, Bonnie was shot 33 times. Bullets from automatic rifles the lawmen used were so strong they passed through the door, through both bodies and back out the other door.

Back in the front of the museum, Prince explained the details behind the pair’s fall. Clyde had escaped from Eastham State Prison Farm at Waldo, Texas, where he and other prisoners were beaten and sodomized by the guards. “He just developed a hatred for the government,” said Prince. “He wanted to go back and liberate the other prisoners.”

Indeed, Clyde returned to Eastham with a bunch of guns and freed five other prisoners. Two guards were shot in the act. “This made Clyde a local folk hero,” said Prince, “but he had embarrassed the state of Texas, and that was a powerful enemy to have.”

At this point the FBI were also after Bonnie and Clyde, clued in by the string of stolen cars they were leaving across the Midwest and South. But Texas prison chief Lee Simmons decided he wasn’t going to wait for the Feds, and aimed to organize a posse of the sharpest-shooting Texas Rangers he could find and set up an ambush.

“The first man he went to refused the mission on two grounds,” said Prince. “One, he didn’t do ambushes and two, he didn’t shoot women.” A second retired Texas Ranger told Simmons the same thing. But there were more than enough trigger-happy lawmen for the job, the posse was formed. On a country road outside Gibsland the ambush was executed. However, had the father of a friend of Bonnie and Clyde not sold the pair out and given away their location, the lawmen certainly wouldn’t have been able to ambush the pair so easily—Clyde was said to be possessed of a 6th sense, like a wild animal, and could detect danger.

“Today,” said Prince, “all of those lawmen would have been charged for Bonnie’s murders.” For one, other than the time Bonnie shot herself in the foot, she had never shot anyone. Also, according to one of many conspiracy theories, she may have been pregnant.

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After the ambush the lawmen went into town to call their superiors. Upon returning to the crime scene the officers were shocked to find it crawling with spectators.

“You had people trying to steal teeth and pieces of Bonnie’s dress, you had people looking for bullets wedged in trees, you had people trying to steal bits of glass and seat from the car,” said Prince. “One guy was trying to cut off Clyde’s finger. Someone else was trying to take his ear and planned to pickle it in alcohol.”

“Why is the Bonnie and Clyde story so popular?” I asked Prince, before leaving.

“Because it’s a love story!” he cried. “This one puts Romeo and Juliet to shame.”

And what of Prince’s 1,000 page book, when will it be out?

“I want to trim it down to like 650 or 700 words,” he said. “I am getting closer.”

More about the Bonnie and Clyde Ambush Museum

Profile of the Bonnie and Clyde Ambush Museum in Roadside America

Changes ahead for Bonnie & Clyde museum

80 Years Later, Retracing the Real Life of Bonnie and Clyde