Late on a balmy summer night 75 years ago, a dark Ford sedan rolled to a halt at the Red Crown, a combination service station, tavern and café at the junction of U.S. 71 and a state road north of Kansas City. The business also had two guest cabins, available for $4 a night. There, in the rolling countryside of Platte County, the driver and his four passengers hoped to recover quietly from a grueling journey.

No such luck. They would have to shoot their way out.

They were the Barrow gang – leader Clyde Barrow, companion Bonnie Parker, brother Buck Barrow, and Buck’s wife, Blanche. Along for the ride was W.D. Jones, a longtime friend of Clyde’s. For months they had driven the highways and back roads of middle America, fleeing the law for past crimes and breaking more laws as they went. When they needed a car, they stole one. When they needed cash, they held up stores and service stations. When they needed a place to spend the night, they rented rooms if cash was available and camped in the country if it was not.

They trekked unendingly across the country, passing from jurisdiction to jurisdiction to elude the law. To make their trail hard to follow, the gang drove in great loops, motoring from their native Texas through Missouri and Oklahoma, Iowa and Minnesota, Arkansas and Louisiana.

The Barrows and other gangsters were much in the columns of newspapers and on the minds of Americans in the early 1930s. The availability of automatic weapons and fast automobiles helped outlaws defy poorly equipped local authorities. In Kansas City only one month before, emboldened hoodlums had ignited the Union Station massacre when they tried to free a convict.

The Barrow gang changed over time, but two members were constant -- Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. The five-member group that roomed at the Red Crown in Platte County on July 18 had been together since late March 1933, when Buck Barrow was released from a Texas prison.

At first, he and Blanche joined Clyde, Bonnie and W.D. Jones in Joplin, Missouri, where they rented an apartment. There they spent days inside and nights robbing stores until the law became suspicious and tried to arrest them. In April 1933, the gang shot its way out, leaving two dead officers behind.

Afterward, the gang kidnapped an undertaker and his fiancee in Louisiana, held a Barrow family get-together near Dallas, wrecked their vehicle in the Texas panhandle and killed a town marshal in northwest Arkansas. Now the subject of national attention in the newspapers and among law enforcement, the Barrow gang continued wandering. Just before arriving at the Red Crown, they had been in Iowa, holding up three service stations.

The Red Crown, named for the brand of gasoline it originally sold, was built in 1931 to take advantage of the traffic along U.S. 71. It lay about 20 miles northwest of downtown Kansas City and five miles southeast of Platte City.

The gang member who needed rest the most was Bonnie Parker. She had been severely burned in June, when the Barrow vehicle crashed into a stream bed in the Texas panhandle. She was still recovering in late July, and the gang hoped a stay at the Red Crown would help. They checked in about 10 p.m. on July 18.

But if privacy was what they wanted, they were sloppy about protecting it. On July 19, Blanche Barrow drove to a drugstore in Platte City to buy medical supplies to treat Bonnie. She wore a riding habit she had purchased in Texas, which drew the attention of the regulars at the drugstore’s soda fountain.

At the Red Crown, these new residents stayed mostly inside their cabins, behind closed doors and windows even as temperatures reached the mid-80s on July 19. Blanche made most of the purchases and paid mostly in coin.

Red Crown employees grew suspicious and went to the sheriff of Platte County, Holt Coffey. The local highway patrol captain, William Baxter, was also contacted. For various reasons, the officers suspected that this was the Barrow gang. They notified the Platte County prosecutor, David Clevenger, and began organizing a posse that numbered as many as 13 officers.

Knowing that the gang possessed military-grade weapons – Browning Automatic Rifles stolen in a raid on an armory in Oklahoma – they also persuaded the Jackson County sheriff’s department to lend them its new armored car and some metal shields. The two cabins rented by the gang were built of brick and joined by a low, two-car garage for guests’ automobiles. The cabin-garage structure was separate from the main Red Crown service station and café.

On the night of July 19, Coffey and his posse began moving in, having waited for a dance at the Red Crown to end. Quietly, they parked a truck in a driveway to block an escape route and rolled the armored car up to the door of the garage containing the Barrows’ car.

Holding his shield in front of him, Sheriff Coffey approached the cabin of Buck and Blanche Barrow, knocking and announcing his presence. According to most accounts, Blanche replied loudly, using a phrase that tipped off Clyde in the other cabin. Although accounts vary widely on the events that came afterward, all were consistent with Sheriff Coffey’s recollection reported years later:

“All hell broke loose.”

Using their powerful Browning Automatic Rifles, the gang members opened fire from inside the cabins. Bullets slammed into the walls of the main Red Crown structure, ricocheting off walls. The posse fired back. Sheriff Coffey fell to the ground, wounded.

The Barrows’ BARs, meanwhile, blasted through the armor of the special car, striking the driver in the leg and hitting the horn, which began to sound continuously. Fearing for their lives, the occupants of the armored car backed it away from the garage door. The posse, perhaps thinking the blaring horn was a signal, briefly stopped firing.

Buck and Blanche burst through the doorway of their cabin, heading for the Barrows’ car. On the way, Buck was struck in the head by a bullet. Meanwhile, the burned Bonnie Parker made it to the vehicle, too, and the garage door was opened. With all aboard, Clyde behind the wheel and W.D. Jones on the running board firing his weapon, the Barrows rumbled out of the garage. They avoided the truck meant to block them, and sped off down the highway. In the process, bullets fired through the back window of the Barrows’ shattered the glass and bits lodged in Blanche Barrow’s eye.

Neither Clyde Barrow nor W.D. Jones was uninjured in the battle. In the haste to leave, Bonnie Parker reopened some of her burn wounds. Blanche eventually would lose sight in her right eye. Buck Barrow’s head injury was serious, but he would survive a few more days until the gang was surrounded at an abandoned amusement park near Des Moines, Iowa.

On July 23, the five outlaws saw the posse, which numbered more than 100, and began firing. Clyde, Bonnie and W.D. Jones eventually disappeared into a nearby woods. Buck was struck again and Blanche stayed with him. The two were arrested. Buck was hospitalized but survived only six days. Blanche was returned to Platte City to face charges in the Red Crown shootout.

Ten months later, Bonnie and Clyde were ambushed on an isolated road near Gibsland, La., and died in a hail of gunfire. Thousands of people flocked to see the scene of their deaths and crowded around their bodies.

Three decades later, Hollywood revived their story with the motion picture, “Bonnie and Clyde,” which won two Oscars and was nominated for others including best picture. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway played Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker as antiheroes, drawing rave reviews and also complaints that they had romanticized brutal killers.

As with most historical movies, facts were altered for the sake of the story. One of the most notable changes: Platte City, and thus the Red Crown incident, was placed in Iowa, not Missouri.