The Life and Death of a Modern-Day Bonnie and Clyde
On January 31st, Kyle Dease, a 26-year-old front desk clerk at the Microtel Inn & Suites in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was working the night shift when a young couple walked into the lobby claiming to have run out of gas. By the look of their bloodshot eyes and rumpled clothes, it appeared the pair had traveled all night. They used the restrooms, got cups of coffee and the man pulled a “burner” cell phone from his pocket to dial a taxi service. Dease asked where they were from – Joplin, Missouri, they said. Knowing a deadly tornado had struck there in 2011, Dease mentioned a tornado had come through the Tuscaloosa area that same year. “They talked about how it had affected their families,” Dease says. “We sort of connected on that level.”
Then the man approached the counter and told Dease he needed his keys and money from the register. Dease laughed, thinking it was a joke. “I’m not even fucking with you,” the man said, flashing a gun — a .45-caliber pistol. “Do you know what this could do to you?”
After handing over $396, Dease was led outside at gunpoint, and into the backseat of his own Jetta. The woman drove, while her boyfriend, sitting in the front passenger seat, tuned the radio to 95.7 Jamz, a hip-hop station. As they traveled north toward Birmingham, the couple told Dease about their troubles: Three days earlier, Blake Fitzgerald and Brittany Harper had left their homes in southwest Missouri and began what would be a 1,500-mile journey through the South, committing a series of increasingly violent crimes. In 10 days they stole cars, kidnapped people at gunpoint, robbed hotels and stores and ran into two different homes pointing pistols at mothers and fathers with children. But it was with Dease at the Microtel Inn in Tuscaloosa – the halfway point of their run – that they crossed the line that separates foolish crimes from armed violence.
The U.S. Marshals service, in announcing a $10,000 reward for information on Fitzgerald and Harper, referred to them as a “modern-day Bonnie and Clyde,” the notorious Depression-era couple that spent two years killing and robbing in Middle America. Fitzgerald and Harper never killed anyone, but the reference wiped a romantic gleam across their story. The fact that the culprits were lovers hurdling toward certain downfall pushed the story into the realm of theater. “Ride or Die” tributes appeared on social media. For a time, tracking their movements and weighing in on their crimes, while sharing details of new transgressions, became a Twitter pastime.
“I wouldn’t call them #BonnieAndClyde I’d call them #Dumb & #Dumber,” a man in Colorado tweeted.
“Kill them like #BonnieAndClyde,” a Missouri resident offered.
Dease told me that he sensed love between them. Although it was a brief affair – Harper had only made the relationship “official” on Facebook 10 days earlier – they said they were trying to get to Florida to marry. “But they also said they were just telling people that,” Dease says. Fitzgerald also swore to Dease that he would never return to prison. “He told me he would go out shooting,” the clerk says. “I knew he would get killed.”
The Life and Death of a Modern-Day Bonnie and Clyde, Page 1 of 11