If it had been raining twenty miles west of Dallas on April 1, 1934, H. D. Murphy probably wouldn’t have become the most famous dead motorcycle cop in America. Officers of the Texas Highway Patrol usually didn’t take their two-wheelers out in inclement weather. But on this sunny Easter Sunday Murphy and two partners, Polk Ivy and E. B. Wheeler, were on holiday duty, cruising on their motorcycles along two-lane Texas Highway 114 near the town of Grapevine. It was considered onerous to be working on Easter, but not particularly hazardous. On a day like this the trio might nab a few speeders, or perhaps help motorists stranded by car trouble. It was the twenty-four-year-old Murphy’s first day on motorcycle patrol. He was tagging along with veteran officers Ivy and Wheeler. Ivy rode a few yards ahead of the other two.
Up to the moment he was gunned down, this was a particularly good time in H. D. Murphy’s young life. In twelve days he was to marry Marie Tullis, his twenty-year-old girlfriend. They’d just found an inexpensive furnished apartment to rent. Until the nuptials, Murphy was living at the YMCA. Marie had purchased her wedding gown. In spite of the current terrible times—Americans were still reeling through the Great Depression—Murphy seemed destined for a happy life. He had a secure job with a steady income and a loving fiancée who was about to become his wife. For most twenty-four-year-old men in 1934 America, that was as good as it got.
At about 3:30 in the afternoon, Murphy and Wheeler were still lagging behind Ivy when Wheeler spied a flashy black Ford V-8 with yellow wire rim wheels parked off Highway 114 on a narrow side road. The car could have been there because it had broken down, in which case whoever was in it might need assistance. Wheeler gestured for Murphy to follow him as he turned off to make a routine check. Polk Ivy, apparently oblivious, kept riding ahead. Wheeler and Murphy clearly didn’t expect trouble. They both had shotguns, but neither pulled his weapon from the harnesses by the seats of their motorcycles. Murphy’s shotgun wasn’t even loaded. He had the shells in his pocket. The patrolmen rolled up to the Ford; two men in nice suits stood beside the car, and there was a woman sitting inside it. Wheeler and Murphy had no idea they were in the presence of the country’s most notorious criminals.
Twenty-four-year-old Clyde Barrow and twenty-three-year-old Bonnie Parker had come to the area for a holiday get-together with their families, who lived in the slum known as West Dallas. Clyde and Bonnie realized the local police would be on the lookout for them—it was well known that they frequently ran the risk of visiting loved ones on special occasions—so they had decided to meet the other Barrows and Parkers out in the isolated countryside. Earlier in the day, Clyde had dispatched henchman Joe Palmer to hitchhike into West Dallas and tell the families to rendezvous off Highway 114 outside Grapevine as soon as possible. Meanwhile, he and Bonnie took long naps in their parked car and enjoyed a pleasant break from their normally frantic lives on the run. Bonnie also spent some time sitting on the grass and playing with the Easter gift she intended to give her mother that day—a live white rabbit that Bonnie had named Sonny Boy.
Thanks to newsreels at movie theaters and photos transmitted to newspapers through the recent magic of wire services, most Americans believed they knew exactly what Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker looked like. The young couple loved to strike dramatic poses for the cameras that they carried along with their guns, and some of these pictures had fallen into the hands of lawmen who made them available to the media. So the nation became familiar with nattily dressed Clyde brandishing a menacing Browning Automatic Rifle, and with Bonnie assuming unladylike postures on the bumpers of stolen cars. The most famous photo showed Bonnie with a cigar dangling from the corner of her mouth, a particularly eye-catching image in a time when most respectable women would discreetly puff cigarettes in private. Thanks to the media, Clyde and Bonnie had quickly come to be considered the epitome of scandalous glamour. But in person Clyde was short and scrawny, and Bonnie’s looks were ordinary. They were both crippled, Clyde from cutting off two of his own toes in prison and Bonnie as the result of a car wreck nine months earlier in which her right leg was burned so badly that bone was visible in several places. She hopped now rather than walked. Clyde often had to carry her. They had little in common with the glittering images of themselves that mesmerized the public. So as the two patrolmen approached the Ford, Wheeler and Murphy were relaxed rather than on guard. There seemed to be nothing threatening about these two strangers or the stocky young fellow who was with them.
But people had a way of dying around the Barrow Gang, and that Easter Sunday proved to be no exception. Clyde Barrow had never intended to kill so many people. Of the seven men who’d died directly by his hand to date—he’d been erroneously blamed for two other murders—only two killings had been premeditated. The first was in 1931, when Clyde used a lead pipe to crush the skull of a fellow inmate who’d repeatedly raped him on a Texas prison farm. The second came six weeks before H. D. Murphy died outside Grapevine, when Clyde helped Joe Palmer murder a guard who’d abused Palmer in prison. Otherwise Clyde always preferred to run rather than fight. Previously he’d even taken lawmen as temporary hostages rather than engaging in unnecessary shootouts, and he always released them unharmed. That was his intention when Wheeler and Murphy rode up. While Bonnie remained in the Ford with Sonny Boy, Clyde turned to twenty-two-year-old Henry Methvin, the third Barrow Gang member present, and muttered, “Let’s take them.”
But Henry, an escaped con who’d joined the gang ten weeks earlier, misinterpreted his boss’s instructions. Henry was always prone to violence, all the more so when he had been drinking. On this Easter afternoon he and Bonnie, a borderline alcoholic, had indulged themselves with whiskey. As usual when he was out in public, Clyde had abstained. Tipsy and mean to begin with, Henry leveled a rifle he’d been concealing behind his back and shot E. B. Wheeler at point-blank range. The veteran patrolman died instantly. Murphy fumbled for his shotgun and the shells in his pocket. Clyde, furious with Henry but resigned to finishing what his partner had foolishly started, shot Murphy. The rookie fell to the ground, badly wounded but not dead. Once again, Henry Methvin overreacted. He stood over the fallen Murphy and fired several more shots into his body. Then he jumped into the Ford with Clyde and Bonnie, and the trio fled. Clyde, at the wheel as usual, cursed Henry while he drove away at breakneck speed, heading northeast toward the Oklahoma state line. This was one of Clyde’s regular tricks—lawmen from one state in pursuit of criminals had no jurisdiction in any other.
Back outside Grapevine, officers gathered at the site of the shooting. Wheeler was dead on the scene, and Murphy died soon afterward. One particularly gregarious witness, who claimed to have watched the whole thing from his farmhouse porch several hundred yards away, swore that two men shot down the patrolmen, and then the woman with them fired more shots into the fallen Murphy while her victim’s head bounced off the ground like a rubber ball. His false statement, combined with less colorful testimony from a couple who’d been driving by on the highway and several other bits of evidence, convinced the authorities that Wheeler and Murphy had become the Barrow Gang’s latest victims. They said as much to the reporters who swarmed to the scene, and these journalists gladly printed every shocking allegation.
Depression-era readers were desperate for entertainment, and stories about the Barrow Gang invariably boosted newspaper and magazine circulation. Many Americans considered cops and bankers to be their enemies. Although Clyde and Bonnie were never criminal masterminds or even particularly competent crooks—their two-year crime spree was as much a reign of error as terror—the media made them seem like they were, and that was enough to turn them into icons. Celebrities reflect their times and cultures: from the spring of 1932, when the newly formed Barrow Gang pulled its first holdups, through May 23, 1934, when a posse led by the only lawman in America who was as famous as they were led the ambush that killed them, Clyde and Bonnie came to epitomize the edgy daydreams of the economically and socially downtrodden. Resentful of their own powerlessness and poverty, Barrow Gang fans liked the idea of colorful young rebels sticking it to bankers and cops. Clyde and Bonnie were even better than actors like Jimmy Cagney who committed crimes onscreen, because they were doing it for real.
But as historian Iris Chang noted in an interview a generation later, “Celebrities are really distractions for the general public, first created, then most often destroyed, consumed, for our amusement.” Up to April 1, 1934, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker provided distraction for most Americans. Their victims in robberies and shootouts were generally perceived as part of a faceless Them who in some sense deserved what they got. But the stories following the shootings in Grapevine emphasized the death of H. D. Murphy—his partner E. B. Wheeler got at most fleeting mention. There were articles about brokenhearted Marie Tullis, who wore her wedding gown to her fiancé’s funeral, and descriptions of the apartment she and Murphy had been about to share. Bonnie Parker had been regarded as the sexy companion of a criminal kingpin. Overnight, she was newly perceived as a kill-crazy floozy who laughed as she finished off an innocent rookie patrolman and simultaneously ruined the life of the sweet young girl who’d been about to marry him. The vicarious love affair between Americans and the Barrow Gang was over. Having been entertained by Clyde and Bonnie for many months, the public now turned on them. It was time for the couple to get its comeuppance. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker still had seven weeks to live, but during those weeks they would be more reviled than celebrated. Their destruction, their consuming, had begun.