The gunfire had barely fallen silent when a man approached the car, pulled out his pocketknife, and reached in to cut off Clyde Barrow’s ear. He did not want the pistol or the money in that car. He wanted the ear as a souvenir. And he was not the only one carrying a knife that morning.

Another man lunged at Clyde’s trigger finger, sawing at it to cut it clean off. A woman leaned in and clipped locks of Bonnie’s hair—hair she had kept curled and carefully styled even while on the run. Someone else was cutting strips from the blood-soaked dress to keep, or perhaps to sell. On the other side, a man tried to pry the wedding ring from Bonnie’s finger.

All of this happened while the two were still seated in the front, still warm, with bullet holes outnumbering the bodies. Because six men had just fired more than 150 rounds into a Ford V8 sedan. You are watching the death of Bonnie and Clyde. Everyone has watched that scene.

But you have only seen the pretty version—the version that ends the moment the shooting stops. The part that will turn your stomach is not the ambush itself. It is the crowd that showed up afterward. Because what ordinary, churchgoing Americans, wearing their Sunday best, did to those two bodies is harder to take than the ambush itself.

On May 23, 1934, on a back road in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, on the outskirts of a small town called Gibsland, six lawmen were hiding in the bushes. Four were from Texas, two from Louisiana. The most famous of them was Frank Hamer, the veteran Texas Ranger who had been called in to hunt the pair down. Beside him was another Texas Ranger named Manny Gault.

The Louisiana side of the line was overseen by Bienville Parish Sheriff Henderson Jordan, and the youngest of the group was Dallas County Sheriff Ted Hinton. Remember Ted—he is the reason we know what happened. Ted carried a camera wherever he went. Years later, he wrote everything down in a book called Ambush.

He is our eyewitness to this story. The trap was simple and cruel. They parked a truck on the side of the road—a truck belonging to a man named Ivy Methvin. His son, Henry, had been running with the Barrow gang for over a year.

So when Clyde saw that truck, he saw a face he trusted. What Clyde did not know was that Ivy had made a deal with the law to set the whole thing up. When Clyde reached that road and saw the familiar disabled truck, he acted like a friendly neighbor and slowed down. That was all it took.

The posse opened fire. Hamer, Gault, and the rest of the group fired with Browning automatic rifles and other weapons. Clyde himself had stolen those rifles from a National Guard armory and turned them into the signature weapon of the Barrow gang. The lawmen later admitted that their rifles were empty before the car even stopped passing by.

No one returned fire or took cover. They just rained bullets on the car—more than 150 rounds in a matter of seconds. When the Ford 40B 1934 model was finally counted, 167 bullet holes were found in it. Bonnie Parker was 23 years old.

Clyde Barrow was 25. The coroner later counted 26 wounds on Bonnie and 17 on Clyde, though some researchers believe the real number was more than 50 for each of them. It all ended in seconds. Both of them fell together in the front seat of that car, which was more bloodstain than sedan.

And here is where the movie ends. Arthur Penn’s 1967 film presents a beautiful slow-motion death scene. The body shudders elegantly, then the scene cuts to black. It looks sad and beautiful, and then it lets you leave.

Roll the credits. But the silence after the gunfire was not the end of the story—it was the beginning. That was the starting signal for chaos. The road was not empty.

Word spread fast, even the unplanned things spread wildly. Within minutes of the last shell falling, people began to arrive, some on foot, some driving in from town. No one was coming to mourn. They were coming to shop.

The posse faced a problem they never expected. They had planned the ambush with meticulous precision, but no one had thought about crowd control. They left two officers to guard the car, and soon a mob overwhelmed them. You cannot stop a hundred strangers who decided in that same moment that they deserved their piece of Clyde.

They took what they wanted. They attacked the trees first, pulling out their knives and digging the spent bullets out of the bark to carry home. They collected shell casings from the ground. They pried the broken window glass out of the Ford as if it were gems.

Anything that was close to the killing site, they wanted in their pockets. Soon the debris was not enough, so they moved to the bodies. When Clyde’s body was moved and money spilled from his pocket onto the ground, a scramble broke out in the dirt. Grown men kneeling and fighting over pennies, because those pennies had been in the pocket of a dead outlaw.

Someone tried to steal the wedding ring off Bonnie’s hand. And here is where Ted Hinton comes back into the story. He had stepped away from the car for a minute, and when he returned, he found a man bent over Clyde’s body, holding a knife and trying to cut off the trigger finger. That finger.

The man wanted to take it home. Ted had just helped kill this man, and even he was disgusted by what was happening. So he stopped it. The man who had set up the ambush for Clyde Barrow was more disturbed by what the crowd was doing to the bodies than the crowd was disturbed by itself.

When the coroner finally made her way through, she described the nightmare herself. She said most of the people there were hiding something—spent cartridges, strips of blood-soaked clothing. She watched a man eagerly open a knife and head toward the car to cut off Clyde’s left ear. The only reason Clyde Barrow fell to the ground with both ears intact was that the coroner grabbed Frank Hamer, and together they managed to regain control of what he frankly described as a circus.

It took a Texas Ranger and a local coroner working together to stop Louisiana residents from carving up two bodies for souvenirs in broad daylight. To give Ted Hinton credit, there was no bravado in his description of that morning. He sounded like a haunted man. He described Bonnie falling from the open car door.

She was young, her hair still carefully styled, and he never forgot that strange and horrible combination—her faint perfume cutting through the smell of burnt gunpowder and blood. None of it felt like a victory lap. It felt like a young deputy who knew he would see that image for the rest of his life. He carried it in his memory for more than forty years before he finally wrote it down in a book.

That book is one of the main reasons we can tell you the truth here instead of the movie version. The coroner cleared the crowd, and you might think it was over. The bodies are safe now, right? No.

Because they still had to transport them, and there was no safe place to put them without the circus following along. They could not properly remove the bodies from the car, so they dragged the whole thing—Bonnie and Clyde still inside. They pulled it to the nearest town, Arcadia, Louisiana. Arcadia was a small town of about two thousand people on a normal day.

But on that day, by the time the news spread, roughly sixteen thousand people poured in. Eight times its population. All of them pushing to see two bodies in a wrecked Ford. They towed the car to a place called Conger’s Furniture Store and Funeral Home.

In a town that size, the man who sells you the sofa is the same man who buries you. The crowd around that building went out of control. So the undertaker had to use a hose of embalming fluid and spray it at people to keep them away from the bodies. It was 1934, and an embalmer was standing in front of a funeral home spraying a crowd with chemical embalming fluid as if he were watering a garden—just to keep them away from the dead.

And when they finally got Bonnie and Clyde inside and laid them on the tables, the embalmer ran into a problem that fits this story perfectly. They could not embalm them properly. The bodies were so full of bullet holes that when he pumped in the embalming fluid, it flowed right back out. The same drainage problem every embalmer who worked on this gang faced.

You cannot keep fluid in a body that has turned into a sieve. The crime scene photographs from that day were so gruesome that two members of the jury felt nauseous just looking at them when they were shown in court later. These were not sensitive people. This was Louisiana in the 1930s, where people butchered their own hogs, and still the images sickened them.

The bodies were finally moved to Dallas, where Bonnie and Clyde were supposed to be buried in peace among their families. But as you might expect, that was not how it went. The crowds followed them to Texas. Bonnie’s mother, Emma Parker, had her house surrounded night and day, so persistently that she changed the funeral plans.

Bonnie had written a poem asking to be buried next to Clyde—her last romantic wish—but her family refused flatly. Partly out of grief and anger. Emma Parker was said to have said that Clyde had been with her daughter for two years, and then he took her. Look what he did to her.

But partly it was logistics. The crowds around the house made managing the funeral a nightmare. More than 20,000 people attended Bonnie Parker’s funeral. Her family had to be escorted by security to the grave because they could not pass safely through the crowds of onlookers who had come to see the body of a 23-year-old girl as if she were a carnival exhibit.

The funeral home did its work carefully. They styled Bonnie’s hair and restored it to its old neat style—the same style that souvenir hunters had messed with on that Louisiana road. They trimmed her nails. It did not matter to those crowds that she was no longer a girl.

She was a display. And the circus was not over yet. That car—the Ford V8 with 167 bullet holes and the blood of two people stained into the seats—do you know what happened to it? It went on tour, like a rock band, for years.

The car became a traveling tourist attraction, moved from place to place at festivals so people could pay money to see where Bonnie and Clyde met their end. And to this day, you can still visit it. It is in a casino called Whiskey Pete’s in Primm, Nevada, though that may change given all the events surrounding that car this year. You will find it, you know, next to the slot machines.

They display it next to the shirt Clyde Barrow was wearing when he was shot, with all its details. Even his name is written on the collar. I believe his sister wrote it there before the shooting. The hunt for souvenirs never stopped.

It became commercial. That car did not just come off that Louisiana road and go back to its original home. They built a gift shop around it. If this subject angered you, be careful.

Because the next story coming is John Dillinger’s blood, sold by the square inch. And after that, Al Capone’s brain, shattered by a target that was not his goal. The truth behind it all is bitter, and the camera is still rolling.