Bonnie and Clyde’s Guns to Hit the Auction Block - East Idaho News
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Bonnie and Clyde’s Guns to Hit the Auction Block

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3208705?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1342207021895American Stock/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — They could not save Bonnie and Clyde from an ambush by six Texas Rangers in 1934, but guns recovered from the infamous gangster couple’s bodies at the time of their capture are expected to attract sky-high bids at a September auction.

After Texas Ranger Capt. Frank Hamer and his posse gunned down Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow on a road in Gibsland, La., 78 years ago, Hamer found a Colt .38 revolver taped to Bonnie’s inner thigh and a pistol tucked into Clyde’s waistband. Hamer kept them, having been promised by Texas prison general manager Lee Simmons that he could have anything the outlaws carried with them if he succeeded in capturing them.

The guns are scheduled to be auctioned Sept. 30 at RR Auction in Amherst, N.H., along with a gold watch Clyde was wearing when he was killed, a cosmetics case in which Bonnie carried her lipstick, a powder puff, Coty face powder and a letter from Clyde to his brother signed with his code name “Bud.”

RR Auction Vice President Bobby Livingston said the items are all coming from the estate of Robert Davis, a Texas collector who acquired them at an auction in 1986.

Livingston predicted that each gun would sell for between $100,000 and $200,000 but said “the sky is the limit on artifacts that have this type of provenance.”

Two guns seized from Bonnie and Clyde after a 1933 shootout with police in Joplin, Mo., sold for a combined $210,000 to an unnamed bidder in Kansas City earlier this year.

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

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