Bonnie and Clyde’s Guns Stay Together Thanks to a Creepy, Romantic Collector

Bonnie and Clyde’s guns will stay together at least for the foreseeable future in an auction gesture that would be sort of romantic if we weren’t talking about the weapons wielded by two murderous bandits. Fine, it’s romantic anyway.

A Texas collector (who wished to remain anonymous because that’s what you do when you drop a lot of money on weapon memorabilia) bought Bonnie Parker’s snub-nosed .38 pistol for $264,000 and Clyde Barrow’s Colt .45 for $240,000 at auction, for a grand total of $504,000. Both guns were found on Parker and Barrow when they were killed (Parker’s was taped to her thigh with white medical tape, because that’s a detail a collector would share with visitors over a snifter of brandy and a game of billiards) at 23- and 25-years-old, respectively.

The crime spree that Bonnie and Clyde embarked on achieved legendary status in a Depression Era America hungry for something that wasn’t drawn in tones of brown and hungry. The couple became famous for leaving “glamorous” photos of themselves at their crime scenes, which, thank you for asking, included 13 murders, oodles of bank robberies, kidnappings, and car thefts from 1932-1934. A posse of Texas Rangers and Louisiana police killed the couple in an early morning ambush in north Louisiana in May of 1934, thus paving the way for a really sexy Warren Beatty/Faye Dunaway movie, and a not-quite-so-sexy Woody Harrleson/Juliette Lewis movie.

Bonnie, Clyde Guns stay together after high bidder pays $500,000 [Reuters]