Know Before You Go
Go north on Dexter road until you come to the Raccoon River.
Dexter, Iowa
Bonnie and Clyde Dexter Shootout Marker
The notorious couple camped at this site after a bloody shootout with police.
When Bonnie and Clyde, W.D. Jones, and Clyde’s brother and sister-in-law, Marvin and Blanche, came to the Dexfield Park in Iowa after a shootout with police in Missouri, Marvin had been shot in the head and Blanche had shards of glass from a shattered window in her eyes.
The notorious criminals camped out in the abandoned 20-acre amusement park while nursing their wounds, but police were alerted when a farmer found their bloody bandages nearby.
On July 23, 1933, police ambushed the group. Marvin was shot four times in the back, and Bonnie, Clyde, and Jones escaped as police apprehended Blanche, who stayed behind with her husband. No one was killed at the scene, but Marvin died a few days later in the hospital. Blanche, who’d been the group’s photographer, spent the next six years in prison.
The surviving members of the infamous gang continued robbing restaurants, gas stations, and banks, until about 10 months later, in May 1934, Bonnie and Clyde were killed in Bienville Parish, Louisiana.
In 2008 a marker was added to the Dexfield site where the group camped out. It’s positioned so that, when you look up from the text describing the event, you face the exact spot where the shootout happened.
