Tender Murderers Page 7

  Clyde pulled into a small forest park, and the gang nursed their wounds, but by morning they'd been spotted by a hunter who alerted the sheriff's office. Soon the fugitives were surrounded by more than a hundred heavily armed men. Their escape car shot out from under them, Bonnie and Clyde fled into the forests and the fields, leaving behind the dying Buck and his blinded wife, who'd never wanted to be an outlaw anyway. He died in the hospital; she got ten years in prison.

  On this cover from the 1940s comic, Crimes by Women, the artist hasn't made an attempt to draw the real Bonnie Parker—even her hair color is wrong!

  The lawless lovers hid out for the next months, emerging long enough to rob a payroll office. But they needed henchmen. In January 1934 they broke a buddy of Clyde's out of jail. His cellmate Henry Methvin, a car thief, came along for the ride, and the Barrow Gang was complete again. More holdups followed, more shootouts, and more cops killed. There was only one way their story could end, and Bonnie knew it.

  Bonnie and Clyde arranged one last meeting with their families on a lonely country road, on May 6, 1934. She told her mother, “Mama, when they kill us, don't let them take me to an undertaking parlor, will you? Bring me home. . . . I want to lie in the front room. . . . A long, cool, peaceful night together before I leave you.” And she handed her mother a poem she had written, “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde.”

  It was coming. The gang headed to Acadia, Louisiana, to hide out at the home of Henry Methvin's father, Iverson. But Methvin was having second thoughts. A small-time hood, he was in over his head. He confessed to his father, and Iverson got in touch with Police Chief Tom Bryan to offer a trade: clemency for his son in return for Bonnie and Clyde. On the morning of May 23, 1934, a posse waited on a country road for Clyde's gray 1934 Ford sedan. Leading them was bounty hunter Frank Hamer, a former Texas ranger who'd been tracking the couple for years. Speeding down the road, Clyde spotted Iverson's beat-up truck, seemingly stalled by the roadside, and slowed down. Hamer gave the command: “Shoot!” The posse pumped 167 bullets into the car, which careened out of control into an embankment. Fifty bullets struck the doomed couple.

  One member of the ambush posse was Ted Hinton, Bonnie's young admirer from the days when she waitressed at the American Cafe, and now a Dallas County deputy sheriff. He ran to the bullet-riddled car. Clyde was slumped over the wheel, Hinton remembered, “the back of his head a mat of blood.” He pulled open the door on the passenger's side. Bonnie Parker, her stylish red dress soaked with darker blood, fell into his arms.

  She was twenty-three years old.

  The Movie

  Almost before their bodies cooled, Hollywood was turning out films inspired by Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. The first, You Only Live Twice, was made in 1937. Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sydney, as the doomed lovers, get mowed down by the law in a swamp, surrounded by evocative mist.

  Gun Crazy, made fifteen years later, has an oddly similar ending, swamp mists and all, but beautiful Peggy Cummins plays crack-shot heroine Annie Laurie Starr as criminally insane, and, unlike the real Bonnie Parker, the instigator of the couple's life of crime.

  Finally, in 1967, producer Warren Beatty and director Arthur Penn made Bonnie and Clyde, and did it right, almost. Some of the movie is odd; the film hints that Clyde was either impotent or gay, yet there doesn't seem to be any evidence of this in any of the histories I've read. Faye Dunaway, as Bonnie, is about a foot taller than the real thing, and looks like she stepped out of the pages of a 1967 Vogue magazine, but she does a great Texas accent.

  And the ending, even when you know what's coming, is shocking and heartbreaking.

  The Ballad

  Here's Bonnie's ballad, as written down in a calendar by Clyde Barrow.

  THE STORY OF BONNIE AND CLYDE by Bonnie Parker

  You've read the story of Jesse James

  Of how he lived and died;

  If you're still in need

  Of something to read

  Here's the story of Bonnie and Clyde.

  Now Bonnie and Clyde are the Barrow gang.

  I'm sure you all have read

  How they rob and steal

  And those who squeal

  Are usually found dying or dead.

  There's lots of untruths to those writeups;

  They're not as ruthless as that;

  Their nature is raw;

  They hate all the law

  The stool pigeons, spotters, and rats.

  They call them cold-blooded killers;

  They say they are heartless and mean;

  But I say with pride,

  That I once knew Clyde

  When he was honest and upright and clean.

  But the laws fooled around,

  Kept taking him down

  And locking him up in a cell,

  Till he said to me,

  “I'll never be free,

  So I'll meet a few of them in hell.”

  The road was so dimly lighted;

  There were no highway signs to guide;

  But they made up their minds

  If all roads were blind,

  They wouldn't give up till they died.

  The road gets dimmer and dimmer;

  Sometimes you can hardly see;

  But it's fight, man to man,

  And do all you can,

  For they know they can never be free.

  If a policeman is killed in Dallas,

  And they have no clue or guide;

  If they can't find a fiend,

  They just wipe their slate clean

  And hang it on Bonnie and Clyde.

  A newsboy once told his buddy:

  “I wish old Clyde would get jumped;

  In these awful hard times

  We'd make a few dimes

  If five or six cops would get bumped.”

  If they try to act like citizens

  And rent them a nice little flat,

  About the third night

  They're invited to fight

  By a sub-gun's rat-tat-tat.

  They don't think they're too smart or desperate,

  They know that the law always wins;

  They've been shot at before,

  But they do not ignore

  That death is the wages of sin.

  Some day theyll go down together;

  They'll bury them side by side;

  To a few it'll be grief

  To the law a relief

  But it's death for Bonnie and Clyde.

  Lai Choi San

  The Pirate Queen of Macau

  In South China of the 1920s and 1930s, the island of Macau was a den of thieves and cutthroats. pirates ruled the China seas, and any vessel sailed there at its own risk. Many of these ships hired White Russian guards for protection and barred their engine rooms, but this didn't stop the pirates, who were after silver dollars, which was legal tender in China at the time. If there was no silver to be found, the unfortunate passengers might find themselves kidnapped and held for ransom. If the ransom money was slow in coming, first an ear or a finger, then perhaps an entire hand, might be sent to the victim's relatives to help loosen their purse strings.

  Side by side with the pirates sprang up another industry–a seaborne protection racket. These were semilegal pirates, who solicited–and got–protection money from the various junks and fishing fleets. (Of course, ships that didn't come across with money were liable to meet with “accidents.”) In return for their payoffs, the “protectors” policed the waters around Macau, meting out a cruel justice upon any pirates they might come in contact with, and often fighting bloody battles with other would-be protectors who trespassed on their watery turf. The undisputed leader of these avenging marauders was a woman: Lai Choi San, the Pirate Queen of Macau.

  Lai Choi San's name meant “Mountain of Wealth,” and she was indeed filthy rich. Her father, who had also been a pirate, expected eventually to turn his business over to his four sons. Still, he took young Lai along on his excursions to perform �
�woman's work” for him, mending his clothes and cooking. The girl got used to life on the water, and after her father and her four brothers all died “with their slippers on,” meaning in combat, she inherited the family's seven ships. By the late 1920s, she had built her fleet up to twelve and owned a mansion in Macau. She had a reputation as something of a Robin Hood to the fisher folk she protected, but to her enemies she was fierce and ruthless.

  At the same time, Lai was very much a woman, and a mother. She'd been married twice–her first husband was killed by a rival gang–and had many lovers. She liked to take her young son along on her excursions. She was training the kid to eventually take over the family business and boasted proudly that he already smoked like a man. Sailing with some of the toughest guys on the China coast, Lai was careful to preserve her reputation. A pirate queen she might be, but never a loose woman, so she always taveled with two amahs, Cantonese chaperones.

  Much of what we know about Lai Choi San is from a book called I Sailed with Chinese Pirates, written in 1930 by a Finnish adventurer named Aleko Lilius. A real-life Indiana Jones, Lilius paid Lai $43 a day for the privilege of sailing with her on aids in her heavily armored junk. In his book, Lilius supplies a vivid description of the pirate queen:

  What a woman she was! Rather slender and short, her hair jet black, with jade pins gleaming in the knot at the neck, her ear-rings and bracelets of the same precious apple-green stone. She was exquisitely dressed in a white satin robe fastened with green jade buttons and green silk slippers. . . . Her face and dark eyes were intelligent. . . .

  But when she dressed for action on her ship, she tossed the glamour garb overboard. Lilius writes that “she was entirely transformed. Now she wore a jacket-like blouse and black trousers made of the strong, glossy material commonly used by coolies for garments. Her two amahs were dressed in a similar fashion.” And both Lai and her chaperones carried rifles and strapped cartridge belts around their waists.

  On board her ships, Lai was an empress, never deigning to speak to the crew, but barking her orders only to the captain himself. And she was always obeyed!

  Lilius was on board Lai's ship when she battled a rival gang, but the captain forced him to hide below in his cabin. All he could do was listen as six shots were fired from Lai's ship, with no answering shots from the foe. He was allowed back up on deck in time to see the rival ship sinking and to find two men lying on the deck, bound hand and foot. They would not be killed, he was told. It was more profitable to ransom them back to their families.

  Although Lai was an officially government-sanctioned “protector,” she doesn't seem to have been above the occasional act of pure piracy. In 1928, a steamer called the SS Anking was attacked by pirates led by a woman. The captain and five officers were shot, and the captain later died of his wounds. Although it was never proved, Lai was probably the woman in charge of the attack.

  Brigand she might be, but Lai Choi San was a patriot, too, and the Japanese were her sworn enemies. By the late 1920s, the Japanese had already invaded China and had set up a puppet government in Manchukuo, and Lai set her sights on the Japanese fleet. When the Japanese ship Delhi Maru was attacked by pirates on September 20, 1929, and several of the guards were shot, the newspapers reported that the raid had been “led by a woman pirate.” Of course, everyone knew that there was only one woman pirate who could have done the deed.

  Nobody knows what eventually happened to the Pirate Queen of Macau, although one source suggests she may have been executed by the Japanese in 1939. But that wasn't the end for Chinese women pirates. Lai's successor was Huang Pemei, Madame Two Revolvers, who worked for Chiang Kai-Shek and the American Secret Service during the Second World War.

  From a 1940s magazine story about Lai Choi San. The artist probably never saw a photo of the real woman.

  I prefer to believe that Lai survived the war, retired, and enjoyed her wealth, living to a ripe old age in her Macau mansion along with her aging amahs, dressing in jade and satin, and burning incense in front of her statue of A-Ma, the goddess of the sea.

  The Dragon Lady

  When cartoonist Milton Caniff started his long-running comic strip, Terry and the Pirates, in 1934, Lai Choi San still ruled the South China coast. Caniff's strip took place in China, and although the cartoonist had never been there, he researched his subject thoroughly. He was influenced by movies as well as by then-current news coming out of China. For instance, his blonde-bombshell character, Burma, was obviously based on Jean Harlow in the movie, China Seas. But for his glamorous Chinese pirate queen, the Dragon Lady, whose name has become synonymous with Asian vamps, he chose Lai Choi San. Described in the strip as” the most notorious woman pirate on the China coast,” the ruthless Dragon Lady's sworn enemies, like those of her inspiration, were the Japanese invaders. But she had a soft spot in her heart for the adventurer Pat Ryan, who may or may not have been based on Aleko Lilius. At any rate, Lilius's son tried unsuccessfully to sue the strip's publishers.

  We don't know if Lai Choi San ever saw the comic strip, but if she did, she probably liked it.

  Lai Choi San as the Dragon Lady in Terry and the Pirates by Milton Caniff, 1934.

  Phoolan Devi

  India's Bandit Queen

  Of all the killers in this book, only Phoolan Devi seems justified in her acts. The illiterate daughter of a low-caste fisherman in a remote mud-hut village in the Central India province of Uttar Pradesh, at the age of eleven Phoolan was married off to a man three times her age. Her husband paid the price of a cow and a bicycle for his new bride, and beat and raped her. No matter how “legal” a marriage between an eleven-year-old child and a grown man may be, any sex between them can only be considered rape.

  After a year of this treatment, the young girl ran away, hiking alone over an area roughly as wide as Texas, to return home. In traditional villages like Phoolan's, it is a disgrace for a woman to leave her husband, and Phoolan was considered to be no better than a prostitute. Her mother even suggested that the only way to save the family's honor would be for her daughter to commit suicide. Phoolan did not kill herself, but matured into an attractive young woman. The upper-caste men of her village harassed her constantly.

  India's 2,500-year-old caste system is its own form of apartheid or segregation. You are born into a caste from which there is no escape. Your caste defines how you will live, what you will eat and wear, where you will be allowed to stand at the village well, even whether or not you will be allowed to enter a temple. If lower-caste men are considered inferior by the higher castes, lower-caste women have it even worse: they are sexual targets. In a 1996 interview “with journalist Mary Anne Weaver, Phoolan grimly explained, “It is assumed that the daughters of the poor ar e for the use of the rich. They assume that we're their property. . . . We can't cut the grass or tend to the crops without being accosted by them. We are the property of the rich.”

  In 1979, Phoolan, now twenty-one years old, complained to the village authorities, but it was she who was put into prison for a month, where as a matter of course she was beaten and raped by her guards. Soon after her release from prison, a gang of bandits, known in India as dacoits, invaded her parents' home and dragged her off with them. An upper-caste relative of the Devis, whom Phoolan had accused of stealing land from her father, may have paid the gang to get rid of his trouble-making cousin. Or perhaps the upper-caste dacoit leader, Babu Gujar, had decided to punish this uppity, tradition-breaking woman whom he considered a low-caste whore. In any case, Phoolan was force-marched into the ravines where the bandits made their lairs, and was raped by the bandit chief for the next three days. Finally, Gujar's chief lieutenant, Vikram Mallah, a handsome young low-caste man who took pity on Phoolan, shot his chief and took over leadership of the gang. He and Phoolan became lovers: he taught her to negotiate the steep hills and valleys of the Indian badlands, and he taught her to shoot. He also told her: “If you are going to kill, kill twenty, not just one. For if you kill twenty, your fame will sp
read; if you kill only one, they will hang you as a murderess.”

  For the next year, the lovers and their gang roamed the hills and snake-infested jungles of Uttar and Madhya Pradesh, looting, robbing trains, stealing from upper-caste villagers, and killing a goodly number of them along the way. But always before they attacked and ransacked another village, Phoolan would visit a temple to Durga, where she would kneel before her patron goddess, whom she believed protected her and gave her strength. Her battle cry was “Jai Durga Mata!” (“Victory to Durga, the Mother Goddess!”).

  As Phoolan's fame spread among lower-caste villagers, especially among the women, she was soon considered a reincarnation of Durga herself. Songs were written about her, and legends grew up around her. One such tale had her climbing to the roof of a bank her gang was robbing, singing to the people on the str eet below, and bewitching them all, including the police. Vikram Mallah was in for his share of fame, too, as a lower-caste man who had dared to kill his upper-caste chief and take over the gang. Phoolan was called the Beautiful Bandit, the Rebel of the Ravines, the Goddess of Flowers, but she had her own name for herself. She commissioned a rubber stamp. She couldn't read it, but she knew what it said: “Phoolan Devi, dacoit beauty, beloved of Vikram Mallah, Emperor of Dacoits.”