Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the good-looking outlaws who were very much in love, kept their heists small but brutal — they had a tendency to kill anyone who got in their way. In January 1934 they orchestrated a prison escape in Texas that resulted in the deaths of two guards. Three months later, they murdered two police officers and a constable and kidnapped a police chief. The Texas Highway Patrol announced an official manhunt, and it was only a matter of time before the bandits were caught. On May 23, 1934, police ambushed their car outside Gibsland, La. The duo went down in a hail of bullets, and their 21-month-long crime spree of robbing gas stations, restaurants and banks came to an end.
The couple never married, and Parker had no previous record before she met Barrow, an ex-con. Historians believe that she chose the life of crime because she was in love, and the handful of photographs of the two of them — she in his arms, he holding her up — seem to indicate that this was true. Their story seemed like something out of a movie, and later, it was.