A Life of Crime: Bonnie and Clyde

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MAY 23 WILL BE 75th anniversary of the death of Bonnie and Clyde, the most bloodthirsty romantic outlaws in America's history. To mark the event, the National Museum of Crime and Punishment is mounting a temporary exhibition that presents a more fully realized vision of the much-romanticized pair. Elizabeth Maurer, the show's curator, talked to Express about the myths and realities of their lives.

» EXPRESS: Is this show part of a series?
» MAURER: We're gonna follow Bonnie and Clyde with John Dillinger, so it is sort of the summer of Depression-era notorious criminals, if you will.

» EXPRESS: What's in the exhibit?
» MAURER: We're going to be focusing on Bonnie and Clyde and their families, rather than just Bonnie and Clyde the romantic outlaws. ... So we're going to focus on things that belonged to Clyde before he became a criminal. We have his recreation cards, the equivalent of what you would take to get into the gym. And we have some payroll envelopes from when he worked at Procter & Gamble. ... So he goes from being this working-class guy who commits petty crimes on the weekends to this murderer.

» EXPRESS: Does the show follow that narrative as well?
» MAURER: Yes, we're going to start with the end. I have a case of things that tell the end of the story: We have the Dallas Morning News, an original of the newspaper announcing that they've been killed; we have an original "wanted" poster. And we have this nice little, almost a shadowbox, that will have things that were recovered from the car after they were shot.

» EXPRESS: How were those items salvaged?
» MAURER: What happened was they were ambushed on the road, and we don't, I think, appreciate how populous the rural parts of the country were at that time... In the 1930s, there was more agribusiness, more farmhouses, more people going back and forth along the roads. When [Bonnie and Clyde] were shot, people came pretty quickly to see what the shots were about, and they started taking things from the car and the crime scene — they were digging bullets out of trees. So what we have is things that were recovered from the car, like pieces of their hats.

It's almost a cinematic opening.

Then we'll back up and talk about Bonnie and Clyde before this happened. And then the aftermath focuses on the impact on their families and on popular culture.

» EXPRESS: By family, do you mean their relatives or their tribe of outlaws?
» MAURER: Their blood relatives. I find it fascinating, because their families knew what was going on. ... After they were killed, Clyde's and Bonnie's mothers were put on trial for harboring — they both got 30 days for this.

» EXPRESS: What do you hope that people who are familiar with the romanticized version of the story will get out of this exhibition?
» MAURER: That they're real people, and the society and culture in many ways moved them in this direction, and they, in turn, used it to their advantage.

» EXPRESS: What's your favorite artifact?
» MAURER: Personally, I love the payroll envelope. And also, we have a piece of the Barrow family gas station — it's like a little windowpane.

» EXPRESS: The gas station is still around after 75 years?
» MAURER: I know that the gas station was still standing a couple of years ago. ... I found it on Google Earth. If you look at it, it's still a really scary neighborhood.

» National Museum of Crime and Punishment, 575 7th St. NW; through May 31; 202-393-1099. (Gallery Place-Chinatown)

Photo courtesy NMCP