BELL COUNTY, Texas — Central Texas has always been a busy, well traveled place, but as some remember, the traffic coming thru hasn’t always been friendly.
"Well, you had a major cattle trail that ran through, the Chisholm Trail, and with that you brought a lot of cowboys and cowboys liked to spend their money and they get into saloons and saloons were quite frequent, firearms were frequent and so you had a lot of wild guys that would run through here and this was a pretty wild county," said Rick Miller, author and outlaw history buff.
Aside from author, Miller is also the former Killeen police chief and former Bell County Attorney. He has done his research and knows all about the outlaws who used to ride the Chisolm Trail.
Miller says, outlaw and killer of dozens of men, John Wesley Hardin reportedly came through Central Texas in the 1870s.
Train robber Sam Bass died in a shootout with Texas Rangers in Round Rock.
"Of course you had other people just ride through that didn't leave there name,” Miller said.
But two names everyone knows made sure to leave their mark on Central Texas.
“Murderers, gangsters, there was nothing redeeming about them at all,” Miller said.
Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, the notorious criminal duo, reportedly pulled off several different crimes in Central Texas.
Barrow was busted for car thefts and burglaries in Waco in 1930. He escaped from the McLennan County Jail thanks to a gun allegedly smuggled in by Parker.
"They were definitely criminals,” said Dr. Timothy Hemmis, an assistant history professor at Texas A&M Central Texas.
Hemmis remembers one of the many murders tied to the pair.
"The case of the murder of Doyle Johnson, which was a botched car hijacking essentially," he said.
It was Christmas day 1932, Barrow and Parker and a Barrow Gang member were looking to steal a vehicle and stay on the run, Hemmis said. That’s where they found Doyle Johnson’s new car on 13th Street in Temple.
"According to the story, you know, Doyle Johnson, who's a 27 year old grocer, wakes up and goes out to confront this car jacker, this car thief, and it's unclear who pulls the trigger but they recognize that Bonnie and Clyde were there, at least Clyde Barrow was there,” Hemmis said.
Johnson was fatally shot and is now buried at Hillcrest Cemetery in Temple.
A man named Frank Hardy was accused of killing Johnson but a letter written by Barrow cleared his name.
"He put his fingerprints on it to make sure they could prove it was him that wrote the letter, but he just said that Frank Hardy had never been involved in anything he'd ever done," Miller explained. "He didn't talk about the killing of Doyle Johnson at all.”
Parker and Barrow were accused of dozens if not hundreds of crimes. It’s a crime spree that Hemmis says changed law enforcement in America.
"Bonnie and Clyde -- they were part of a larger movement of outlaws that were rebelling and trying to resist, and you start to see the increase of the FBI, and those are definitely shaping the United States," Hemmis said. "The increase in the FBI and the federal government's power to chase down outlaws.”
The stories of America’s most infamous and perhaps most dangerous couple live on in pop culture and movies.
“A paradox that we have for Americans because these are the stories that we're attracted to but these are outlaws," Hemmis said. "They're kind of the bad boys and kind of that stuff that draws us to it.”
Miller said we can’t forget these were criminals who killed people, possibly even a man right here in Central Texas.
"They were cold blooded murderers, deserved the ending that they got when there was a lot of question about how that came about, but very frankly that was the only way they could end," Miller explained. "Had they been confronted knowingly and given the chance to be warned, they would've have been shooting anyway so they got what they deserved.”
It's up to historians like Miller and Hemmis to piece together what’s true and what’s myth when it comes to Barrow, Parker and the rest of the Barrow Gang.
"It is the curse of history, you know, sometimes we just won't know -- there's always these mysteries,” Hemmis added.
But that’s the beauty behind the past.
And time and time again - we’re shown that rich history is surrounding us.