Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were two of the most notorious outlaws of the Great Depression era, and they did some incredibly crazy things during their lives of crime. But I think one of the craziest things they ever did to another person was what happened to a mortician named Dillard Darby.
Darby was a man who would later promise Bonnie Parker that he would be her mortician, basically just so they wouldn’t 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 him. You might have seen that moment referenced in the 1967 Warren Beatty film, but we’re not there yet. We have to go back to the very beginning of this bizarre story to understand how it all unfolded.
Clyde Barrow started this particular part of the Bonnie and Clyde story when he pulled up alongside Darby’s car and told W. D. Jones to go steal it.
Darby was busy having lunch at the Brooks Boarding House where he lived at the time. While he was eating, he happened to look out the window of the establishment, and he saw a man get into his Ford V8 and start to drive off with it. Apparently, not leaving your keys in the ignition was a foreign concept to Darby, because he had left his keys right there in the ignition.
That’s a big mistake. Don’t do that. So, he exclaimed that someone was stealing his car.
Now, back to the story at hand. Sophia Stone was also eating at the Brooks Boarding House that day, and when Darby started making a fuss that his brand new, seven-day-old Ford V8 coach was getting stolen, she volunteered to let Darby use her car to go chase down the car thief. But she only agreed to that if she could tag along for the excitement.
Plus, if you think about it, she needed to keep an eye on her own vehicle. Darby had already gotten one car stolen that day, so you certainly don’t want to make it two, right?
The car chase itself was exactly what you would think it would be. It was a combination of a cinematic high-speed chase mixed with real-life desperation, like something out of a movie. The only difference is that we’re in 1933, not in modern times.
W. D. Jones drove that car like a scalded dog, and in the process, both Clyde and Darby quickly lost sight of the stolen car.
As far as that part goes, it was okay because they had a prearranged meeting place in case something like this were to happen. But what wasn’t okay with Clyde was that he didn’t like Darby and Sophia getting involved. The main reason they were stealing Darby’s car was because they were going to use it as a getaway car in an upcoming bank robbery, and they were about to do that in that very same town.
So, during the high-speed car chase, and after losing sight of the stolen car, Darby and Sophia decided to give up and drive back to town. Seeing this, Clyde, who was deeply upset that someone was bold enough to try to give chase to his gang, spun his own vehicle around and got behind Darby’s car. Then, Clyde aggressively swerved, cutting off Darby, and forced them to come to a screeching halt in the middle of the road.
And then, Clyde and Buck jumped out of their vehicle with their guns drawn. Yeah, Clyde’s older brother, Buck Barrow, was in the car with Clyde that day. So was Buck’s wife, Blanche Barrow, and Bonnie Parker herself.
The only person missing from this chaotic scene was Raymond Hamilton, who was also a member of the Barrow gang at that time.
Clyde demanded to know why they were following the stolen car. Darby managed to explain that his brand new car had just been stolen, and he simply wanted it back. Well, that admission hacked Clyde off even more, and he reacted by hitting Darby on the head with the butt of his pistol.
Clyde then made them get out of Sophia’s car and get into the back seat of his own vehicle. Are you following me here? We just finished this big mess of a car getting stolen, and now Bonnie and Clyde have kidnapped a mortician and his woman friend, and they’ve got them cramped in the back of their car.
Clyde’s initial thought was just to shoot them both right there in the middle of the road. That must have been some of his East Ham prison farm experiences bleeding through into his decision-making process. But he changed his mind and made them get in his car instead.
Clyde was mainly mad because the gang’s initial plan was to rob a bank in the town where this happened, and they likely would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for these two people chasing after their car. This is where the story shifts into something truly eerie. And don’t worry, we’ll get to the gruesome details in just a minute.
But first, you need to know who is going to be doing what to whom because right now, the mortician Darby is thinking he’s going to be the next body on the table getting mortified. Is that even a word? Whatever the case, that’s what he had to be thinking.
After driving around with their kidnapped victims in the back seat, the Barrow gang decided it was time to let them go. But not before Bonnie asked Darby what he did for a living. And when she found out that Darby was a mortician, she apparently thought this was hilarious.
She told him he would probably enjoy embalming her and Clyde someday. She made him promise that he would do it. I’m sure Darby would have promised just about anything at that point, just to survive the moment.
He was in no position to argue with a heavily armed outlaw and his girlfriend.
When they dropped them off in Arkansas, which might seem far away, but it’s actually less than an hour’s drive to the Arkansas state line from where all this started. Buck gave Darby five dollars for a bus so they could get back home. That way, they wouldn’t encounter any other criminal elements along the way.
It relieves them back to their own lives, shaken up but relatively safe. That seemed like the end of the whole ordeal for him, but it certainly wasn’t, not by a long shot.
So, 13 months later, up in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, near Gibsland, a man named Ivy Methvin cut a deal with the authorities for his son, Henry Methvin. In the process, he sold out Bonnie and Clyde. J.
Edgar Hoover got what he wanted, and Frank Hamer and his posse, which included Bienville Parish Sheriff Henderson Jordan and Ted Hinton, were able to make permanent living arrangement changes for Bonnie and Clyde. They parked his truck on the side of the road as bait to slow Clyde down, and they executed their plan the ambush that would finally end the duo’s reign of terror.
Bonnie and Clyde ended up lying on a down a table at a Conger Furniture Store and funeral parlor. And none other than Dillard Darby was standing beside them, now in his professional element. Also in attendance and leading the mortician show was a man named CF Boots Bailey.
As Boots put it, they had a serious problem on their hands. There was a problem with the bodies, and he laid it out plainly. They’re having an incredibly difficult time with Bonnie and Clyde’s bodies because of all the bullet holes.
And you have to understand why that mattered so much.
Here’s what Boots was up against. When you embalm a person, you’re basically draining the blood out of their body and pumping in a preservative fluid to replace it. The fluid goes through the veins and arteries later, the same pipes the blood was using, and that’s what keeps the body from recollecting.
The problem is that process only works if those pipes are intact. If the body has a couple of holes in it, you can patch around those holes and make it work. But Bonnie and Clyde didn’t have a couple of holes in them.
They had a whole lot of holes in them. And when a body has been hit with as many rounds as Frank Hamer’s posse pumped into them, the vascular system isn’t a system anymore. You can call it Swiss cheese, because that’s what it looked like.
So Boots is down there pumping fluid in, and it’s just running right back out of them. It’s like trying to fill a bucket that somebody struck with a shotgun blast. Boots and Darby are standing there in the back of that furniture store, trying to do precision medical work on two bodies that are leaking from nearly every direction, basically like a leaking fountain with limbs and hair.
What a nightmare. Unless you’re the dead person, of course. Then that nightmare happened a little bit before all this part.
But Bonnie was getting exactly what she asked for. Darby was doing that mortician thing on her. She had made him promise to do this exact thing, and here he was keeping his word in the worst way possible.
So, back to the horror show. While Bailey and Darby were trying to work on those two bodies, something else was happening outside the furniture store that made their job exactly 10 times harder. Word spread fast about the death of Bonnie and Clyde.
Arcadia had a population of about 200 people back then, and within hours, that number reportedly swelled to something like 12,000 people. People showed up by horseback, by car, and even by airplane. The price of a bottle of beer jumped from 15 cents to a full 25 cents in that town overnight.
Well, actually, not even overnight. It happened within hours. And ham sandwiches sold out entirely.
Capitalism is a powerful force, and even when there are two dead famous outlaws in the back room, the need for snacks and souvenirs doesn’t slow down.
There was a brief pause in the action when Clyde’s father showed up to identify the bodies. After seeing them, he walked out of the back from the furniture store and into the front of the fun showroom and just sat down in a rocking chair that was still for sale. And then he sat there and cried.
I don’t really know why they needed him to come by to identify them at all. They had the photographs from the Joplin, Missouri shootout to go by, but they went ahead and brought him in. It was a heavy, terrible moment for him, and it shows that even the family of famous outlaws are victim to the horror of it.
After Boots and Darby did what they could with the bodies in the back of that furniture store, the bodies were transported to Dallas. Clyde ended up at the Sparkman-Holtz brand Funeral Home in downtown Dallas, and Bonnie was taken to the McCamy-Campbell Funeral Home in South Dallas. Those names on paper sound more like law firms than they do funeral homes, but that’s where they ended up.
And the accounts from the Dallas embalmers are where this story takes a turn into truly stomach-turning territory.
The morticians’ notes describe hours and hours of work on Bonnie and just preparing her for viewing. It took two hours just to pick all the dirt and rocks out of her hair before they could even wash it. She had a tattoo on her right leg consisting of two hearts.
One heart spelled Roy and the other spelled Bonnie. And all the embalming fluid that Boots and Darby had used back in Arcadia had all 𝓵𝓮𝓪𝓴𝓮𝓭 out of her body. The Dallas embalmer spent several hours bathing her.
Some of the dried blood had crusted onto her skin. They had to scrape it off, and they used gold dust to remove the rest of the stain.
And then that night, they noticed the onset of something called skin slip. That’s a mortician’s term for when the outer layer of the skin starts separating from the body because the preservation process has failed. Remember that fluid that 𝓵𝓮𝓪𝓴𝓮𝓭 out earlier?
The embalming had not held up, and the body was starting to turn. By the next morning, she had started to smell and turn dark in color. And by the last day of the viewing, the notes described her as rotten, so to speak.
The odor was awful, the kind that sticks in your nostrils and your memory, especially if you have to work with it up close.
Now, Bonnie had taken more rounds than Clyde had, and her wounds were worse than his. They were devastating to her body. Her face was very messed up.
The embalmers rebuilt it to the point where you could hardly tell there had been so much damage to her features. Only one bullet had actually gone through her brain, but several others had grazed her skull, leaving three large holes in her scalp that didn’t penetrate her skull bone. Her left eye was badly blackened, so the embalmer applied artificial beauty to the other eye to make it match and disguise the damage.
You kind of get the gist of how this went. If you want to dig deeper into the gruesome details, you could probably catch a rerun of a slasher film and get some blood and guts going on. There’s plenty of that in this story already.
The funerals themselves were a big spectacle. Around 10,000 people viewed Clyde’s body. For Bonnie, the number was closer to 20,000, and some reports even say it might have been upwards of 40,000.
The largest floral tribute came from the Dallas City Newsboys, a group of local newspaper boys. The sudden and violent end of Bonnie and Clyde sold over 500,000 newspapers in Dallas alone. That’s a lot of papers, especially for the time.
Their deaths were one of the biggest grossing news events of the era, and the public grabbed every scrap of story they could get.
But through all of that, through the crowds, the chaos, the newspapers, and the spectacle, there was still a man in the back of that furniture store in Arcadia who had done the work nobody else wanted to do. A man who, 13 months earlier, had been sitting in a boarding home eating lunch with his car got stolen. A man who got kidnapped, got pistol whipped, got shoved into the back seat of an outlaw’s car, and then had a woman laugh in his face and tell him he would embalm her later.
And then, when the time came, he did it. I would probably do it too, just out of spite, to be honest. Bonnie Parker got exactly what she asked for.
She made Dillard Darby make his promise, and Darby kept that promise. That’s just how he was.
I just don’t think either one of them really believed it would happen. But weirder things have certainly happened, especially in that era of lawlessness that also featured John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd driving the country crazy during their crime spree. That’s a whole other story with its own twists and turns, but those are other tales for another time.
If this story stuck with you, it’s the kind of morbidly fascinating chapter of history that’s hard to shake, you know. That’s the way it goes when you play fast and loose with your life and put your faith in a man with a promise and a very sharp needle.
