Clyde Barrow's Grave

Clyde Barrow lies beside his older brother Buck in Western Heights Cemetery, just south of the Trinity on Fort Worth Avenue, under one headstone reading GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN. By the family's account the wording was Clyde's, chosen for Buck, who took a bullet through the head at a motor court in Platte City, Missouri in July 1933, was shot again five days later when a posse cornered the gang at Dexfield Park in Iowa, and died at a hospital in Perry, Iowa on the twenty ninth of July. The family put off buying a stone, expecting on all the evidence to need it again before long, and did not mark the grave until Clyde was buried in it the following year, so the epitaph came to serve for both brothers. Barrow and Bonnie Parker were shot dead by six lawmen on a Louisiana back road in Bienville Parish on 23 May 1934, in an ambush led by Frank Hamer, a Texas Ranger who had retired two years before and taken the job as a special investigator for the prison system. The bodies came home to Dallas by ambulance, to two different funeral homes: Clyde to Sparkman Holtz Brand downtown, Parker three miles away in South Dallas. Some ten thousand people filed past Clyde's body, and the estimates for Parker run from twenty to forty thousand, queued back toward Fair Park. The largest spray of flowers was paid for by the Dallas newsboys, in thanks for all the extra papers the two of them had sold. The graveside services themselves were small. Parker's mother would not have them buried together.