The famous line from the film Bonnie and Clyde was delivered by the latter, played by Warren Beatty: "This here's Miss Bonnie Parker. I'm Clyde Barrow. We rob banks." Now, more than 40 years after that Arthur Penn movie, any time a man, a woman and a gun go on the run together, the chances are they will be compared to the real-life pair of lowlife gangsters who died in a hail of around 50 bullets on a Louisiana back road in 1934. The myth at the time was partly fed by the photos of the pair released by police to a crime-hungry, Depression-era press; the familiar one has Bonnie posing with a cigar.
The latest pairing are John McCluskey, who escaped from prison in Arizona 10 days ago, and fellow-fugitive Casslyn Welch. "They consider themselves as Bonnie and Clyde," said US marshal services spokesman David Gonzales yesterday. He added, in terms that suggest he might be available for screenwriting duties himself: "Rest assured, we are going to be on McCluskey like a cheap suit."
The present-day pair, now being hunted in Yellowstone Park, are suspected of two murders, but recently the bar for qualifying for the "latter-day Bonnie and Clyde" badge has been set pretty low, considering that the originals are thought to have killed more than a dozen people, including nine law officers. Nowadays you don't even need a gun to qualify. In May this year, Portsmouth crown court was told that Samson Biddle, jailed for eight years for kidnapping a 15-year-old girl, stealing a car and driving off without paying for his petrol for a trip from Portsmouth to Oxford was "like Clyde of Bonnie and Clyde".
Last year, a "Bonnie-and-Clyde couple", Peter Clarke and Sharon Arthurs-Chegini, who skipped bail while awaiting trial for nicking a boat were found dead off the coast of Senegal on board a yacht they had also stolen. And a New Zealand couple who did a runner after their bank lent them £4m when they asked for £4,000 swiftly became "a Bonnie and Clyde for our times".
As for the current pair, a lesser-known line from the film may be more pertinent. A reflective Bonnie remarks to Clyde: "You know what, when we started out, I thought we were really goin' somewhere. This is it. We're just goin', huh?"
