The mortician had just finished his lunch at the Brooks Boarding House when he looked out the window and saw a stranger climb into his Ford V8, start the engine, and pull away from the curb. Dillard Darby had left the keys in the ignition, a casual habit he would never repeat. He shouted that someone was stealing his car, and the room erupted. Sophia Stone, who was also eating there, volunteered her own car for a chase, but only if she could come along.

She had watched one car disappear that day and had no intention of letting hers become the second. What Darby and Sophia did not know was that the car thief was W. D. Jones, and he was working for Clyde Barrow.

The stolen Ford was meant to serve as a getaway vehicle for a bank robbery the gang was planning in Ruston, Louisiana, the very town where Darby was finishing his meal. So when Darby gave chase, he was not just chasing a car thief. He was chasing the Barrow gang’s entire plan. The pursuit became a roadside blur.

Jones drove the stolen car like a man fleeing for his life, and soon both Clyde and Darby lost sight of it. The gang had a prearranged meeting place for such a mishap, so the theft itself was not yet a disaster. The problem was that Darby and Sophia had dared to chase them, and Clyde Barrow did not take that lightly. When Darby and Sophia gave up the chase and headed back toward town, Clyde spun his own vehicle around and pulled in behind them.

He swerved aggressively, cutting them off and forcing their car to a screeching halt in the middle of the road. Clyde and his older brother Buck Barrow jumped out with guns drawn. Buck’s wife, Blanche, was in the car, and so was Bonnie Parker. Only Raymond Hamilton, the fifth member of the Barrow gang, was missing from the scene.

Clyde demanded to know why Darby and Sophia had been following the stolen car. Darby explained that his brand new seven-day-old Ford V8 coach had just been stolen and he wanted it back. That answer angered Clyde even more, and he struck Darby across the head with the butt of his pistol. Then he ordered both captives into the back seat of his own car.

For a moment, Clyde’s initial thought was simply to shoot them both in the middle of the road. The impulse may have come from his time in the Eastham prison farm, where violence had shaped his decisions before. But he changed his mind and decided to drive them around instead. Darby, his head still ringing from the pistol blow, had every reason to believe he was about to become the next body on a mortician’s table.

After driving his kidnapped passengers around for a while, Clyde decided it was time to let them go. But before they were released, Bonnie asked Darby what he did for a living. When he told her he was a mortician, she found the answer hilarious. She told him he would probably enjoy embalming her and Clyde someday, and she made him promise that he would.

Darby, in a position to promise just about anything, agreed. Then the gang dropped them off in Arkansas, less than an hour’s drive from where the whole ordeal had begun. Buck handed Darby five dollars for a bus ticket home, and the two captives were left to make their way back. Thirteen months passed.

Up in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, near the town of Gibsland, Ivy Methvin cut a deal involving his son Henry, a member of the Barrow gang who had his own reasons to turn against Clyde and Bonnie. In the process, he sold them out. J. Edgar Hoover got what he wanted.

Texas Ranger Frank Hamer assembled a posse that included Bienville Parish Sheriff Henderson Jordan and another lawman named Ted Hamilton. They parked a truck on the side of the road as bait, intending to slow Clyde down when he approached. It worked. On May 23, 1934, the posse opened fire on the stolen Ford coupe and killed Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in a hail of bullets.

The bodies were brought to Arcadia, Louisiana, to a place called the Conger Furniture Store and funeral parlor. And standing beside the table where the bodies lay was none other than Dillard Darby, the mortician who had promised Bonnie Parker he would embalm her. Leading the work was another mortician named C. F.

Boots Bailey. As Boots later put it, they had a serious problem. The bodies were riddled with bullet holes, and that made their work nearly impossible. Embalming works by draining the blood from the body and pumping preservative fluid through the veins and arteries, the same pipes the blood used in life.

The fluid keeps the body from decomposing, but only if those pipes remain intact. A body with a couple of holes can be patched. Bonnie and Clyde did not have a couple of holes. Frank Hamer’s posse had pumped so many rounds into them that the vascular system was no longer a system at all.

It was, in Boots’s words, Swiss cheese. He would pump fluid in, and it would run right back out, like trying to fill a bucket that someone had hit with a shotgun. The two morticians stood there in the back of the furniture store, trying to do precise medical work on two bodies that were leaking from every direction. For Bonnie, it was exactly what she had asked for.

Darby was doing the mortician thing on her, just as she had made him promise. Meanwhile, something was happening outside that made their job ten times harder. Word spread fast. Arcadia had a population of about two thousand people, and within hours that number reportedly swelled to twelve thousand.

People arrived by horseback, by car, by plane. The price of a bottle of beer jumped from fifteen cents to a quarter overnight, and ham sandwiches sold out entirely. The crowd pressed in around the furniture store, hungry for a glimpse of the famous outlaws. There was a brief pause when Clyde’s father arrived to identify the bodies.

After seeing them, he walked through the back of the store and into the showroom, sat down in a rocking chair that was still for sale, and cried. The identification seemed unnecessary, given that the gang had been photographed during the Joplin, Missouri shootout, but the family wanted to see for themselves. When Boots and Darby had done what they could, the bodies were transported to Dallas. Clyde went to the Sparkman-Holtz Funeral Home in downtown Dallas, and Bonnie was taken to the McCamy-Campbell Funeral Home in South Dallas.

The accounts from the Dallas embalmers describe hours upon hours of labor on Bonnie’s body. It took two hours just to pick the dirt and rocks out of her hair before they could even wash it. She had a tattoo on her right leg, two hearts, one spelling Roy and the other spelling Bonnie. All the embalming fluid that Boots and Darby had pumped into her had leaked out.

The Dallas embalmers spent several hours bathing her, scraping off some of the dried blood and using gold dust to remove the rest. That night, they noticed something called skin slip, a mortician’s term for when the outer layer of skin begins to separate from the body because the preservation has failed. By the next morning, the body had started to smell and turn dark. By the last day of the viewing, the notes described her as rotten.

The odor was awful. Bonnie had taken more rounds than Clyde, and her wounds were worse, devastating. Her face was badly damaged, and the embalmers rebuilt it to the point where you could hardly tell. Only one bullet had gone through her brain, but several others had grazed her skull, leaving three large holes in her scalp that did not penetrate the bone.

Her left eye was badly blackened, so the embalmer put eye shadow on the other eye to make them match and disguise the damage. The funerals were a spectacle. Around ten thousand people viewed Clyde’s body. For Bonnie, the number was closer to twenty thousand, with some reports saying up to forty thousand.

The largest floral tribute came from a group of Dallas city newsboys. The sudden end of Bonnie and Clyde sold half a million newspapers in Dallas alone. Their deaths were the biggest marketing event of the century. Through all the crowds, the chaos, the newspapers, and the spectacle, there was still a man in the back of the furniture store in Arcadia who had done the work nobody else wanted to do.

A man who, thirteen months earlier, had been eating lunch in a boarding house when his car was stolen. A man who had been kidnapped, pistol-whipped, shoved into the back seat of an outlaw’s car, and then had a woman laugh in his face and tell him he would embalm her later. And he did. Bonnie Parker got exactly what she asked for.

She made Dillard Darby promise, and Dillard Darby kept that promise. Neither of them probably thought it would ever actually happen, but it did. Weirder things have happened in that public enemy era, when John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd were also driving the country crazy with their crime sprees. But those are other stories.

For Dillard Darby, the story ended with him standing over the body of the woman who had laughed at him and made him promise to do the one thing he never expected to do. And he did it.