Bonnie & Clyde in Iowa

Bonnie Parker & Clyde Barrow

They came into Iowa under gray skies, their Ford V-8 rumbling across the Mississippi River bridge at Fort Madison. Clyde bragged his car could outrun anything on the road, and he wasn’t wrong. “That Ford’ll leave the law in the dust,” he once said, grinning through cigarette smoke. What he couldn’t outrun was the legend chasing him.

The Barrow Gang—Clyde, Bonnie, Clyde’s brother Buck, Buck’s wife Blanche, and young W.D. Jones—had been moving north from Missouri, leaving behind wrecked cars and dead silence. Iowa was just another stop.

Their first run-in with Iowa law came that summer near Dexter, west of Des Moines. They holed up in an abandoned farmhouse, living on canned beans and stolen meat. Clyde had a habit of finding foreclosed farms—places left empty by families who’d lost everything. They stayed quiet, hoping no one would notice.

Henry Nye spotted their mud-caked car parked in the woods and called Sheriff C.A. Knee of Redfield. “Didn’t look right,” Nye said. “Strangers don’t hide out here unless they’re running.” Within days, state patrolmen and Dallas County deputies were closing in.

Before dawn on July 24, 1933, the law surrounded the house. They thought they were catching drifters. Instead, they found the Barrow Gang.

Bonnie Parker

Clyde was already up, checking his rifle. Bonnie, burned from a wreck weeks earlier, could barely move. Buck was still bleeding from a head wound. When the first shot cracked through the dark, the place exploded into chaos.

Clyde fired back through a window. Bullets ripped the walls. Blanche screamed as glass shattered. Bonnie crawled toward the car. Buck, dazed and bleeding, tried to shoot. Deputies dove for cover as Clyde’s stolen Browning Automatic Rifle tore through the night. “They’ve got machine guns!” one yelled.

The gang pushed through the line. Clyde drove with one hand, firing with the other. Buck slumped in the back seat. Blanche held him, covered in blood. They sped north through the fields, tires shot out, the Ford rattling apart.

By the time they reached Platte City, Missouri, Buck was dying. Iowa’s part in the story was over, but the headlines spread fast. The Des Moines Register ran: “Barrow Gang Battles Iowa Police—Escapes in Gunfire.” The Dallas County News called it “a barrage fit for a war zone.”

Locals talked about it for years. “Sounded like the Fourth of July,” one man said. “You could hear it clear to town.”

It wasn’t the last time Iowa heard from them. In early 1934, banks in Stuart and Denison were hit days apart. No one could prove it was Bonnie and Clyde, but the jobs fit their pattern—quick, loud, and clean.

On January 23, two men walked into the First National Bank of Stuart just after opening. “This is a stick-up! Everybody down!” one shouted. They emptied the drawers and vanished. “They didn’t look scared,” a clerk told the Stuart Herald. “They knew exactly what they were doing.”

Two members of the Barrow Gang were captured after a shoot out
 near Dexter, Iowa, in July 1933.

They took about $1,500 and disappeared down back roads. Police found roofing nails scattered behind them—Clyde’s favorite trick.

Days later, the Crawford County State Bank in Denison was robbed the same way. Two men, southern voices, steady hands. Less than $2,000 taken, but the press linked it to the same crew. “Barrow Bandits Strike Again?” the Council Bluffs Nonpareil asked.

Whether Clyde was there didn’t matter. The method was his—fast, hard, and gone. To plenty of Iowans, it felt deserved. In a time when farms were failing and banks were taking homes, some didn’t mind seeing the money men robbed. “They got what was coming,” one man told the Register. Another said, “If Clyde Barrow robbed my bank, I’d shake his hand before I called the law.”

By spring 1934, their luck was gone. They were being hunted across the South, sold out by friends, cornered by men who wanted them dead. When it ended that May near Gibsland, Louisiana, it was over in seconds. Their Ford was hit with more than 150 bullets.

In Iowa, the story stuck. The Dexter farmhouse became a stop for curiosity seekers. Blanche Barrow later told reporters, “It wasn’t glamour. It was hell every mile.”

Kids snuck out at night to see where it happened. Old-timers told it at kitchen tables—how two outlaws from Texas brought gunfire to quiet farmland.

They were only in Iowa a few days, but that was enough. The gunfire, the chase, the headlines—it all stayed, long after they were gone.