Badlands is a film unlike any I’ve ever seen. Written, produced, and directed by Terrence Malick, the movie stars Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. Released in 1973, it’s a dramatization of the Starkweather – Fugate crime spree of 1958 in which the couple kills 11 people, beginning with Fugate’s parents
Could it be that the infamous J. Edgar Hoover, when questioning Blanche Barrow in the Des Moines jail in 1933, threatened to put out her other eye if she didn’t rat on the Barrow Gang? (She’d been blinded in one eye by flying glass.) Does this sound like the CIA under the Bush/Cheney administration? We’ll rape […]
Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, is reputed to be a student of the Great Depression. I hope he’s read Jeff Guinn’s book, Bonnie and Clyde. In 1932, Texas was hit with dust storms that choked people and animals alike. Women put wet sheets over windows and doors to try to prevent the dust from coming into their […]
I’m reading Jeff Guinn’s book, Go Down Together, the untold story of Bonnie and Clyde. When you realize they went on their crime spree during the depths of the Great Depression, that Clyde’s parents lived for years in a tent in West Dallas, that Bonnie could barely walk because of a leg injury, that she had to […]
Get the latest news and stories from Rita Welty Bourke. With your subscription, you'll receive a free chapter from Rita's newly-released book, Kylie's Ark: The Making of a Veterinarian.
