The Trap: The Untold Story of Sheriff Henderson Jordan and the Final Pursuit of Bonnie and Clyde, by Brad Dison, 2025.
Reviewed by Wesley Harris
Few stories in North Louisiana history have been told as often as the story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.
Their deaths on a rural Bienville Parish road on May 23, 1934, have been recounted in books, newspaper articles, documentaries, movies, museums, and countless stories handed down through generations. With each retelling, however, fact and folklore have become increasingly difficult to separate.
Brad Dison attempts to do just that in The Trap: The Untold Story of Sheriff Henderson Jordan and the Final Pursuit of Bonnie and Clyde.
Dison, a Bienville Parish historian and writer, spent years researching the story. The resulting book runs more than 400 pages and is backed by nearly 1,000 footnotes, drawing from law enforcement files, prison records, newspapers, photographs, interviews, government records, and other contemporary sources.
That documentation matters because Bonnie and Clyde may be among the most mythologized criminals in American history.
I probably came to The Trap knowing more about the subject than the average reader. My interest in Bonnie and Clyde goes back to Arthur Penn’s 1967 film starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Over the years, I have researched the couple’s connections to North Louisiana, particularly the events surrounding their final days and deaths in Bienville Parish.
My research also gave me the opportunity to hear part of that history firsthand. I interviewed retired Ruston teacher Sophie Stone Cook, who had been kidnapped by the Barrow gang in Ruston in 1933. Cook recalled being pistol-whipped by Bonnie Parker before she and Ruston undertaker H. Dillard Darby were forced into the gang’s car and carried into Arkansas.
Cook’s memories offered a considerably different picture of Bonnie Parker from the romanticized character portrayed in the 1967 movie. They also gave me an early appreciation for how much legend had become intertwined with the Bonnie and Clyde story.
Over the years, I have encountered many of those legends, along with conflicting accounts of who located the couple, who devised the plan that trapped them, what happened during their final days in North Louisiana, and exactly what occurred along the Bienville Parish road on the morning of May 23, 1934.
That background made The Trap an especially interesting read for me. I wasn’t approaching the story for the first time. I was comparing Dison’s account with decades of material I had read, researched, and, in Cook’s case, heard from someone who had actually encountered the Barrow gang.
More often than not, Dison had the documentation to back it up.
The central figure in Dison’s book is not Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrow, or even legendary Texas Ranger Frank Hamer. It is Bienville Parish Sheriff Henderson Jordan.
Dison makes the case that Jordan’s role in the final pursuit has been diminished in many later accounts. His research presents Jordan as the local sheriff who investigated Bonnie and Clyde’s presence in Bienville Parish, identified their connection to the area, and played a central role in developing the plan that placed the posse along the road south of Gibsland.
That emphasis gives The Trap particular importance to North Louisiana readers. This is not simply another retelling of a nationally famous Depression-era crime story. It puts Bienville Parish and its sheriff back at the center of events that happened here.
Dison also avoids one of the great temptations of writing about Bonnie and Clyde: allowing the legend to overwhelm the evidence.
The 1967 movie helped cement the romantic image of the attractive young outlaw couple racing across Depression-era America. It was a landmark film, but it was a dramatization, not a documentary. The real story was considerably less glamorous.
The Trap works in the opposite direction.
It strips away much of the accumulated mythology and returns repeatedly to contemporary records. Its nearly 1,000 footnotes are not simply decoration at the back of the book. They allow readers to see where the information originated and, importantly, to distinguish documented evidence from stories repeated decades later.
For someone who has spent years reading about Bonnie and Clyde’s North Louisiana connections, that may be the book’s greatest strength.
I did not expect to agree with every interpretation, nor should any reader of history. But on the central facts, I found The Trap to be among the most carefully researched and accurate accounts of Bonnie and Clyde’s final pursuit that I have encountered.
For readers unfamiliar with the story, it provides a detailed account of how two nationally notorious fugitives came to their end on a Bienville Parish road.
For readers who think they already know the story, it may be even more valuable.
Some of what we have always “known” about Bonnie and Clyde turns out to be legend.
Brad Dison brought the footnotes.
