Yet as the adage goes, appearances can be deceiving. Just as Bonnie Parker became tabloid-famous in her time on account of a series of clowning photos (in one, she aims a shotgun at her outlaw lover in another, she packs a revolver while chomping on a cigar), the young newspaper heiress and Berkeley sophomore Patty Hearst is remembered for the indelible 1974 image of her cooly wielding a semi-automatic weapon in front of the ragtag Symbionese Liberation Army’s cobra flag, a beret angled over her shoulder-length hair. To what extent were all these women, really just girls at the time they fell under the influence of homicidal figures, independent actors who should have known better? Could they also be understood as brainwashed victims who were acting on the orders of more powerful and threatening men? She expired in a fusillade of bullets in the front seat of her and Barrow’s get-away car the coroner later counted a gruesome 26 holes on her corpse. When the couple was finally ambushed by law enforcement in Louisiana, the poetry-writing Parker had already resigned herself to an early death. Following Barrow’s release from prison in 1932, legend has it that the photogenic duo spent the next and final two years of their lives co-conspiring in a fugitive crime spree that left 13 dead. Photograph: PN2īonnie Parker was also 19 when, in 1930, she first met seasoned criminal Clyde Barrow in West Dallas. Bonnie Parker holds a shotgun to Clyde Barrow in this early 1930s photograph.

The Sex-Ray by Clyde Allison