12. Bonnie Parker
Bonnie Parker is best known when combined with her other (certainly not better) half: Clyde Chestnut Barrow. Together, they were the infamous bank robbers known as Bonnie and Clyde. Parker was born into a poor Texas family. Her father died when she was only four, leaving her mother, a seamstress, to provide for three children alone. Parker married at just 15, to a husband who had frequent brushes with the law. They separated, but never legally divorced, after only a few years of marriage.
Parker met her notorious partner in crime at a friend’s home while she was recovering from a broken arm and unemployed. Reportedly, the two were smitten with each other immediately. In 1932, after being released from jail, Clyde began assembling a gang of robbers and Parker joined up. She was briefly jailed soon after for a botched hardware store robbery. She and other members of the group lived in what was widely known as a wild party house in Joplin, Missouri.
Over the course of their criminal career, Parker and Clyde were involved in the deaths of at least nine people including several law enforcement officers. Their final and most notorious criminal act was the murder of two highway patrolmen in what would come to be known in the media as the Grapevine Killings. The pair were ambushed and killed by four officers in May 1934.
