Bonnie & Clyde's Garage Apartment - Joplin, Missouri

DATE:  July 4, 2015

HISTORIC SITE:  Bonnie & Clyde's Garage Apartment

  

LOCATION:  3347 1/2 Oak Ridge Dr., Joplin, Newton Co., Missouri

MARKER #:09000302

DEDICATED:  May 15, 2009

Historic Joplin   Historic Landmark   Bonnie & Clyde Garage Apartment 1933

"Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker, Buck and Blanche Barrow and W.D. Jones rented this apartment and holed up inside for several months. On April 13, 1933, law officers from the Joplin Police Department and from Newton County, seeking suspected bootleggers, approached the dwelling. The outlaws opened fire on them killing Joplin detective Harry McGinnis and Newton County Constable J.W. Harryman. The Barrow gang escaped leaving behind a roll of Kodak film that yielded the first publicly seen photographs of the infamous gang."

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS: 

The road trip from Missouri to Arizona and then back to California has started.  I didn’t have any sites really picked out because I wanted to get to Arizona to give us time to visit Dirk’s family. But that didn’t mean that Dirk wasn’t looking at what was around and when we got near Joplin, Missouri he saw that Bonnie & Clyde’s garage apartment was near.

TripAdvisor and RoadTrippers both stated the site was close. The address was on 34th Street and as it was near the exit to the freeway, we figured we might as well check it out. That’s one of the great things about this whole trip…if we saw something we wanted to go to…we did.

So we drove up 34th Street and our GPS put the address near an intersection, but we couldn’t locate the address. Up and down 34th street we went and…nothing.  On our last try to locate the building, we were doing so based on pictures of the place from the internet and sure enough…there it was. The problem is that although it faces 34th St., the apartment is behind its main house which faces Oak Ridge Dr., therefore it is a ½ address.

Bonnie & Clyde started their life of crime at a time when people were distrustful of banks and the government…banks had collapsed, the dustbowl was wrenching people from their homes and here comes a gang  who rob those same banks that people held responsible for many of their miseries and they became folk heroes…that is, until Joplin.

Bonnie & Clyde, along with W.D. Jones, a long time friend, Clyde’s brother Buck and his wife, Blanche rented this apartment on April 1, 1933. Clyde needed a place they could hang for a while..hide from the cops while planning his revenge on the Texas Dept of Corrections for an earlier incarceration. Buck and Blanche originally agreed to accompany Bonnie & Clyde hoping they could convince Clyde to give up crime and lead a “normal” life. 

They spent the first two weeks relaxing. They would buy a case of beer a day and 4 of them, excluding Blanche would compete to see who could drink the most. Blanche bored of sitting around, started working jigsaw puzzles much to the amusement of the others, until they got hooked on them. Clyde would sit down to do a puzzle and couldn’t leave until it was done. Can anyone say OCD?

The neighbors became suspicious and called Sgt Kahler of the Missouri State Highway Patrol. Kahler suspected bootlegging and contacted the Joplin police to get help in raiding the place.

That day, April 13, 1933 found Bonnie laying on the living floor in a kimono working on her poetry. Blanch had been playing solitaire at the table in the kitchen but had stood up to boil an egg for Bonnie. Buck was in back washing one of their cars.

Clyde and W.D. had left earlier to rob a store, but had trouble with the car and so had just returned. They were transferring guns from one car to another so they could go out again.

The police announced themselves, I guess thinking the gang would come out with their hands up. That isn’t the way it went down. Clyde and W.D. shot at the cops from the garage while Buck ran upstairs to get the girls.

W.D. was shot during the shootout in the garage and Buck was shot going upstairs. Two police officers, Wes Harryman & Harry McGinnis were shot and killed. To get out, the gang had to move one of the police cars blocking the garage entrance. This is where Clyde took his bullet.

Having cleared the way, the gang jumped into their car and got away.  They drove to Texas before allowing themselves to stop and tend to their injuries. Buck and Clyde’s were surprisingly minor and they used a razor to cut the bullet from W.D.

All their possessions were left behind but none more valuable than a camera and some undeveloped film. The pictures, once developed, were the best law enforcement had of the gang up to that point and were immediately put on wanted posters.

This was the first time the gang had killed two cops and it served to not only double the effort of law enforcement to capture the gang, but also started turning the tide from their folk hero status.

The law finally caught up with Bonnie & Clyde on May 23, 1934 in Louisiana. Texas Rangers and other authorities laid in wait and ambushed Bonnie & Clyde. The car was riddled with gunshot and after they crashed, just to make sure these dangerous two met their end, there was another volley of gunshots into the still car. In total, some 130 bullets were shot at the car, 17 hitting Clyde who died from the very first shot...straight to his head and 26 hitting Bonnie.

It was said that some of the bullets went through the car door, through Clyde, through Bonnie and exited the car on the other side. One of two poems that Bonnie had written ended like this…

"Some day they'll go down together;

And they'll bury them side by side;

To few it'll be grief;

To the law a relief;

But its death for Bonnie & Clyde"

    -  Bonnie Parker

Clyde’s family refused to allow Bonnie to be buried in the same cemetery as Clyde, much less side by side. The death and funerals were a circus. When law enforcement brought the bodies in to town, they were overwhelmed by people grabbing and cutting “souvenirs” from the pair. People lined the streets to get a glimpse of the bodies, like you would see great men “lying in state”. I have read that, to this day, flowers are often left on the two graves.