It’s a tale as old as time. Boy meets girl. They fall in love. Boy and girl start hijacking cars and robbing gas stations before dying in a shootout with law enforcement.
This is, of course, the tale of Bonnie and Clyde, the infamous West Texas Depression-era outlaw couple. Though they’ve long been iconic figures in pop culture, their descendants are still around. And Bonnie’s niece, Rhea Leen Linder, has been locked in a legal battle over her aunt’s gravesite for years.
Uwa Ede-Osifo, who reports for The Dallas Morning News, said Bonnie Parker is currently buried in Crown Hill Memorial Park. And the location of her grave was ultimately decided by her mother.
“There was an empty plot left in northwest Dallas, which is where Clyde Barrow is buried, for Bonnie’s body,” Ede-Osifo said. “And the understanding was that she was gonna be placed next to him because there was a poem she’d written before her death where she kind of foreshadowed their fatal fate.
“But ultimately, in the wake of her death, her mother told a newspaper that Clyde had had her for all these years and essentially was responsible for her death and responsible for her criminal bent. And she said, ‘my daughter’s mine, I won’t let anyone else have her.’”
Linder, who is in her 90s, feels a moral obligation to try and honor Bonnie Parker’s apparent wish to be buried by her lover.
“She said that the family didn’t condone what they did and certainly was not supportive of their violence, but at the same time, she said that the family loved them,” Ede-Osifo said. “She’s been trying to reunite their remains to fulfill this unfulfilled wish from the past. And she’s been trying to get permission from the owner and DeWayne Hughes, whose family has operated the Dallas cemetery for the last couple of years, for him to allow the removal proceedings to take place.”
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But Hughes has not been easy to convince, Ede-Osifo said. Linder has enlisted help from several different attorneys to try and get a disinterment permit or a court order that would allow Bonnie’s body to be moved. But Hughes said questions remain about who counts as Bonnie’s next of kin.
“[Linder’s] aunt was the one who bought the family plot. And she had a husband, and they didn’t have any children, but he had children from a prior marriage. And so the cemetery owner was saying the rights would belong to them,” Ede-Osifo said. “And so there was this back-and-forth that was happening. … Ultimately there was an impasse that they kind of reached where there was not much more that could be said over email. There was no agreement that would be reached. And so Rhea Leen took the matter to court.”
Linder was born after Bonnie and Clyde were gunned down, so she never met her aunt. But she said Bonnie was still a presence in her life — though Ede-Osifo said Linder emphasizes that she does not stand to gain personal or financial compensation from moving this grave.
“She grew up with this notorious relative, but her actual family members didn’t talk that much about Bonnie. She had this curiosity that kind of loomed over her life,” Ede-Osifo said. “But I think it was later in her life really when she became closer to Clyde’s sister. Clyde’s sister brought her into this world, the world of Bonnie and Clyde aficionados
“I think it was around that time in the 1990s that she actually began to have more of a personal stake, more than she ever had in her life, to the couple’s life because she was learning about the mythology, she was seeing all of these people who were deeply, deeply engrossed in the history of the two.”
