Instead, their husbands came sprinting towards them firing wildly over their shoulders apparently empty handed. The girls expected to see the boys running out of the bank, arms full of bank bags stuffed with cold hard cash. Bonnie & Clyde.Ĭharging to the sound of the gunfire, Bonnie and Buck’s wife Blanche roared to the rescue in their Flathead Ford. Cashier Gregg and the Barrow boys exchanged several shots, but no one was hit. Seems that although the Barrow brothers were alone in the building for hours before the robbery, neither thought to search the place. The bank managers had hidden a shotgun behind the cashier’s desk. But this was 1933 and the rash of bank robberies across the state had made everyone jumpy. As soon as the tellers entered the room, closing the door behind them, the Barrow boys jumped out from their hiding places, ordering the startled workers to put their hands up. Turns out, it was a fiasco.Įmployees Everett Gregg and Lawson Selders arrived at 7:30 Friday morning. Clyde figured that he could get the drop on the unsuspecting employees before customers arrived to interfere. The duo broke into the building and waited for clerks to arrive to open the bank in the morning. Later that night, Bonnie dropped the pair off and drove their most recent stolen Ford V-8 out of sight. On Thursday May 11, Clyde and Buck cased the place. Lucerne, an unincorporated community founded by Swiss immigrants in Cass County, seems to have forgotten their connection to the deadly duo. Some say the gang netted $300, other accounts say they left empty-handed. On May 12, 1933, during Hamer’s heightened observation, Bonnie and Clyde and the Barrow Gang robbed the Lucerne State Bank in Lucerne Indiana. Barrow was a master of that pre-FBI rule, but he became quite predictable in his movements, so the experienced Hamer charted his path and easily predicted where he would go next. Hamer studied the gang’s movements and found they swung in a circle skirting the edges of five Midwestern states, including Indiana, exploiting the “state line” rule that prevented officers in one jurisdiction from pursuing a fugitive into another. For one, the posse that signed on to hunt down the duo to the death, led by the legendary Frank Hamer, had begun tracking the pair on February 12, 1934. Of course! The more your research, the more you find that EVERYTHING has an Indiana connection. But what about Bonnie & Clyde? Do they have Indiana connections? Frank Hamer Devoted Hoosier crime buffs also recognize that Baby Face Nelson coasted through the state during a robbery of the Merchants National Bank in South Bend on June 30, 1934, during which a police officer was shot and killed. Many know that Pretty Boy Floyd spent time here assisting Dillinger in the robbery of an East Chicago bank on Januwhere Police Sargent William Patrick O’Malley died at the hands of the gang. Two months after the Bonnie and Clyde massacre, Hoosier John Dillinger was ambushed and killed in a Chicago alleyway beside the Biograph theatre three months later, Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd was killed by 14 FBI bullets fired into his back in a Clarkson, Ohio cornfield and one month after that, Lester Gillis, aka “Baby Face Nelson”, shot it out, and lost, in Barrington, Illinois.Įveryone knows of Dillinger’s connection to our state and city. By the time of their bloody, bullet riddled deaths on May 23, 1934, new federal statutes made bank robbery and kidnapping federal offenses and the growing relationship between local jurisdictions and the FBI, plus two-way radios in police cars, combined to make the outlaw bandit sprees much more difficult to carry out. ![]() The ambush of Bonnie and Clyde some 80 years ago this month proved to be the beginning of the end of the “Public Enemy” gangster era of the 1930s. Original publish date: May, 2014 Reissue date: October 3, 2019
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