PEOPLE

“When twenty-year-old Clyde Barrow went before the McLennan Grand Jury on March 4, 1930, charged with five counts of theft, one of burglary, and one of receiving and concealing stolen property, he did not know that one of the cars he had stolen belonged to W.W. Cameron, president of the William Cameron Lumber Company. Nor did Barrow know that E.S. Fentress, founder of the Waco Times-Herald, and V.M. Cox, founder of Cox’s Department Store, were members of the grand jury. After the grand jury indicted him and Judge Richard S. Munroe sentenced him to seven two-year terms, Barrow’s nineteen-year-old girlfriend, Bonnie Parker, came to visit him in Waco’s jail. She smuggled in to him the Colt-32 revolver that he used in his jailbreak. Soon captured and returned to Waco, Barrow went on to prison in Huntsville but, due to overcrowded conditions there received a general parole from Governor Ross Sterling. Clyde Barrow’s and Bonnie Parker’s life of crime had just begun. Photo courtesy The Historic Waco Foundation.”

From the book “Waco: A Sesquicentennial History” (1999) by Patricia Ward Wallace.