1934: “While I still have got breath in my lungs I will tell you what a dandy car you make.” The compliment, in a letter delivered to the Detroit office of Henry Ford on 13 April, came from Clyde Barrow of the Barrow gang. “I have drove Fords exclusivly when I could get away with one. For sustained speed and freedom from trouble the Ford has got ever other car skinned, and even if my business hasen’t been strickly legal it don’t hurt any thing to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8.”

There were doubts about the authenticity of the letter, but no doubts about Barrow’s enthusiasm for Fords. It was in a V8, just over a month later, that he and Bonnie Parker were ambushed and killed near the Louisiana town of Gibsland.

Source: Jeff Guinn, Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde (2009), pp. 298–9, 418

Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker’s Ford V8 after their fatal ambush near Gibsland, Louisiana, on 23 May 1934