Bonnie & Clyde: The Cigar Photo Was a Joke. Police Found the Film.

Bonnie Parker Didn't Smoke Cigars. The Photo That Made Her Famous Was a Joke. On 13 April 1933 police raided a garage apartment in Joplin, Missouri, expecting bootleggers. Clyde Barrow's gang shot their way out and left almost everything behind, including a camera full of undeveloped film. The Joplin Globe printed the pictures, among them Bonnie Parker posing with a revolver and a cigar, and within days a waitress from West Dallas was the most famous woman outlaw in America. The man who took the photo, W. D. Jones, said years later the cigar was his. A year after Joplin, Bonnie asked a kidnapped police chief to tell the papers she did not smoke cigars. This film follows the documents: Bonnie's poems, Clyde's years at Eastham, the Joplin film and the Globe's prints, the Platte City and Dexfield Park gunfights, the federal identification order issued two days before the ambush, the discredited Grapevine witness, the Methvin deal, the ambush on 23 May 1934, Fugitives (1934), and the 1967 film. A note on accuracy: the cigar accounts are given as the witnesses gave them. The Grapevine eyewitness story was later discredited and the film says so. No photographs of the bodies are shown. CHAPTERS 0:00 The hook 0:59 Rowena 1:31 Roy Thornton 2:00 Clyde 2:41 January 1930 3:08 Eastham 3:58 Kaufman 4:34 The first killings 5:09 The gang 5:45 Buck and Blanche 6:13 The neighbours 6:31 The gunfight 6:54 What they left 7:18 The Joplin Globe 8:04 The legend 8:30 Who took it 8:55 The darkroom 9:18 Percy Boyd 9:49 Wellington 10:25 Platte City 10:49 Dexfield Park 11:31 Eastham again 12:00 Lee Simmons 12:23 The identification order 13:20 Grapevine 13:43 The witness 14:23 Commerce 14:39 The Methvins 15:05 The road 15:38 Nine fifteen 16:14 The car 16:32 Arcadia 16:51 The funerals 17:24 The poem 17:54 Side by side 18:11 Fugitives 18:30 The car on tour 18:50 1967 19:21 Close Forty-sixth film in a series on the archive behind the famous stories. Same method as the rest: the official version, then the documents. SOURCES Joplin Globe, April 1933. Division of Investigation identification orders 1211 and 1227 (21 May 1934). Emma Parker and Nell Barrow Cowan, with Jan Fortune, Fugitives (1934). Blanche Caldwell Barrow, My Life with Bonnie and Clyde (2004). W. D. Jones, "Riding with Bonnie and Clyde", Playboy, November 1968. Ted Hinton, Ambush (1979). Bienville Parish coroner's report, 23 May 1934. IMAGE CREDITS The Joplin photographs (1933); Federal Bureau of Investigation; Wikimedia Commons contributors. All public domain or freely licensed, via Wikimedia Commons. #BonnieAndClyde #BonnieParker #TrueCrime #1930s #History