Detectives have always paid attention to cars. A car carries a license plate that a stranger can memorize in a parking lot, carpet that holds a fiber, a trunk that holds a rope, and a registration with a name on it. It moves a crime across a county line or a state line, and in doing so it often lays down the trail that ends it. A Ford stolen in Illinois gave the federal government its only way into the hunt for Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. A tan Volkswagen rolling through a quiet Salt Lake County subdivision at three in the morning put Ted Bundy in front of a highway patrolman. A white Corvette, sold and half forgotten, kept a single button under its passenger seat until detectives came for it. Some of these vehicles went on to stranger lives once the trials were over, as carnival exhibits, auction lots and museum pieces, still drawing paying crowds long after the people who drove them were dead.
The Bureau of Investigation, as the FBI was then called, entered the pursuit of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker through a car. A Ford stolen in Illinois had been abandoned in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, and was traced to Barrow, Parker and Barrow’s brother, L. C. On May 20, 1933, a United States commissioner in Dallas issued a warrant charging Barrow and Parker with taking the stolen car from Dallas into Oklahoma. It was a modest federal case against two people the Bureau believed responsible for thirteen murders, among them two police officers at Joplin, Missouri, a constable at Miami, Oklahoma, and a sheriff at Stringtown, Oklahoma. By the FBI’s own account, the stolen car was the only thing that gave the Bureau jurisdiction.
On May 23, 1934, officers from Louisiana and Texas waited in the brush beside a road near Sailes, in Bienville Parish, Louisiana. When the couple tried to drive away, the officers opened fire, and Barrow and Parker died where they sat. Neither was ever tried for any of the killings laid to them.
The car they died in was another stolen Ford, taken from Jesse and Ruth Warren of Topeka, Kansas, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It went back to Kansas, was sold, and spent years touring fairs and carnivals. In 1973 Peter Simon, a casino owner, bought it at a Massachusetts car auction for $175,000, at the time the highest price paid for an antique car anywhere, and put it in a museum at his Nevada casino, Pop’s Oasis, at $2.50 a visit. More than 100,000 people paid, the Review-Journal reported, and in December 1975 Simon announced that the car had done its job for him and he would sell. Gary Primm bought it at auction in 1988 for $250,000. It stood for years at Whiskey Pete’s in Primm, Nevada, moved to the entrance of the Primm Mall during the pandemic, and in late 2022 went onto the casino floor at Buffalo Bill’s, where it rests in a glass case, its body marked by more than 160 bullet holes.
In November 1957 Bernice Worden, 58, who ran the hardware store in Plainfield, Wisconsin, disappeared. Ed Gein, a 51-year-old bachelor farmer from outside the village, was questioned for two days at the State Crime Laboratory in Madison, where he admitted killing two women and looting graves. He was charged with Bernice Worden’s murder. He was held to be unfit for trial and committed to a state hospital; when he was finally tried, in 1968, the court found that he had committed the killing but had been legally insane at the time. He died in a state mental hospital in July 1984, aged 77.
After the Gein farm was auctioned in March 1958, his car toured county fairs, Isthmus recalled in 2007, billed as "The Car that Hauled the Dead from their Graves."
The killings for which Charles Manson was convicted began in July 1969 with the death of Gary Hinman, a music teacher, and Hinman’s car became the first thread in the case. On August 6, Bobby Beausoleil was found asleep in Hinman’s Fiat on Highway 101 near San Luis Obispo and arrested. After the car was impounded, a knife was found in the spare tire well.
Two nights after Beausoleil’s arrest, a car left the Spahn Movie Ranch in Chatsworth, on the western edge of Los Angeles. Linda Kasabian, who later became the prosecution’s key witness, testified that Manson told her to bring a change of clothes and her driver’s license, and to do whatever Charles Watson told her. Watson drove. Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel sat in the back. As the car began to move, Manson called it to a stop, came to Kasabian’s window and told the women to leave a sign: "You girls know what I mean, something witchy." The California Court of Appeal, reviewing the convictions in 1976, recorded that Watson then drove directly to the Tate residence. On the way home, Kasabian testified, Watson pulled over and handed her the clothing the others had changed out of, and she threw it out. Back at the ranch, Atkins said she had noticed a spot of blood on the outside of the car at a gas station, and Manson sent them for a sponge to wipe it off. The next night Kasabian drove while Manson gave directions, and they wandered the city before the LaBianca killings.
The Family’s vehicles kept drawing the police. On August 16 sheriff’s deputies raided Spahn Ranch in an investigation of stolen dune buggies and arrested most of the group. Manson moved them about two hundred miles northeast to the Barker Ranch, a remote homestead in the Panamint Mountains near what was then Death Valley National Monument. In mid-September someone set fire to a park crew’s road loader near the Racetrack Playa; the crew found a cut fuel line, an empty gas can and tire tracks leading away. Dick Powell, a twenty-seven-year-old ranger with no formal law enforcement training, followed what National Parks magazine called a maze of tire tracks and turned up stolen vehicles and dune buggies hidden in the brush. Over two days in October, rangers, Highway Patrol officers and Inyo County deputies raided the ranch and arrested twenty-six people on suspicion of arson, vandalism and grand theft auto. On October 12 a patrolman found Manson hiding under a bathroom sink. He was booked for car theft before anyone in Inyo County knew who he was. In the desert town of Ballarat, an old green-and-white truck is still pointed out to visitors as the Family’s; one writer who went looking for it allowed that the story might well be a myth.
Manson was convicted of nine first-degree murders: seven at the Tate-LaBianca trial in January 1971 and two at the Hinman-Shea trial that November. His death sentence was vacated when California’s death penalty fell in 1972, and he died in custody on November 19, 2017, aged 83.
In the summer of 1974, after two young women vanished from Lake Sammamish State Park east of Seattle on the same day, witnesses gave King County detectives a first name and a car: a young man called Ted, who drove a Volkswagen Beetle. Robert Keppel, a young homicide detective in the sheriff’s office, and his colleagues tried something new for the time. They had the names in their files punched onto computer cards and cross-matched against the traits they knew, the name Ted and the Volkswagen among them. The list fell to about a hundred names and then to twenty-five, a number Keppel called workable. Theodore Robert Bundy was seventh on it.
Before Keppel’s team reached him, a highway patrolman in Utah did. At about three in the morning on August 16, 1975, Sergeant Bob Hayward of the Utah Highway Patrol watched a tan Volkswagen pass his home in Granger, outside Salt Lake City. When his headlights found it a few minutes later, it sped off, and he followed it into an abandoned gas station. The driver got out with his hands up and said he was lost. Inside the car were a crowbar, an ice pick and a ski mask. Bundy was booked on a minor charge and released. The report reached two Salt Lake County detectives, Jerry Thompson and Ben Forbes, who understood what a tan Volkswagen and a crowbar might mean, and a call to Washington found that his name was already on the King County list. "I didn’t want to shoot the guy," Hayward told the Associated Press in 2000. "I wish I had."
Bundy cleaned the car and sold it, according to the Alcatraz East Crime Museum, which now owns it, to a teenager in Sandy, Utah. Investigators traced it. The Associated Press reported in 1997 that three hairs found in the 1968 beige Beetle were matched to a young woman who had escaped from Bundy in Murray, Utah, in November 1974, to Melissa Smith, a 17-year-old from Midvale, and to Caryn Campbell, a 23-year-old nurse from Michigan who disappeared from a ski lodge in Snowmass Village, Colorado, in January 1975. "There’s no question the car was a key piece of evidence," Thompson said. Utah convicted Bundy of aggravated kidnapping in the case of the woman who escaped. Colorado charged him with Caryn Campbell’s murder in October 1976, but he escaped twice before trial and was never tried for it.
The second escape took him to Tallahassee, Florida, and the vehicles of his last weeks of freedom became evidence in the case that sent him to the electric chair. On February 8, 1978, in a Jacksonville shopping center parking lot, two teenagers wrote down the tag of a white van whose driver drove off when the girl’s brother arrived; the plate had been stolen in Tallahassee. A white van belonging to Florida State University’s media center had gone missing from the city. On February 9, Kimberly Leach, 12, disappeared from her junior high school in Lake City, and a crossing guard later said he saw a man he identified as Bundy driving a white van past the school that morning. When the university’s van was recovered, the Supreme Court of Florida recorded, its carpet held a bloodstain of a type Kimberly shared with about fifteen percent of people, and an analyst testified that the fibers made it extremely probable that Bundy’s clothing, Kimberly’s clothing and the van’s carpet had all been in contact.
He was caught in a third Volkswagen. Early on February 15, 1978, Officer David Lee of the Pensacola police saw a Volkswagen pulling out of a lot, ran its plate and found that it was stolen. The driver struck him and ran, and was taken after a chase and a struggle. He gave a false name for nearly two days. Bundy was convicted of the murders of Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy at the Chi Omega sorority house in Tallahassee, and of Kimberly Leach’s murder, with other charges. He was executed at Florida State Prison in Starke on January 24, 1989.
The Beetle he drove in Utah outlived him. In 1997 Lonnie Anderson, a former Salt Lake County sheriff’s deputy who had bought it at a sheriff’s auction in the late 1970s for $925, advertised it for $25,000, with title papers bearing Bundy’s signature. He called it an investment. The father of Janice Ott, one of the two women who disappeared from Lake Sammamish, said the sale repulsed him. The car is now on display at the Alcatraz East Crime Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.
On December 11, 1978, Robert Piest, 15, left his job at a pharmacy in Des Plaines, Illinois, telling his mother he was going to see a building contractor about a summer job. He did not come back. The contractor was John Wayne Gacy, and in its 1993 opinion the federal appeals court singled out one piece of evidence that pointed the police to him: Gacy’s truck had been parked outside the place where Piest was to meet his would-be employer. Lieutenant Joseph Kozenczak of the Des Plaines police swore out a complaint for a search warrant that listed what Piest had been wearing and three of Gacy’s vehicles.
The search of Gacy’s house turned up a class ring belonging to John Szyc, a 19-year-old who had been missing for nearly two years. Gacy had sold Szyc’s car to Michael Rossi, who later testified at the trial. While the evidence was examined, teams of Des Plaines officers followed Gacy’s car around the clock through the city and the suburbs, and he talked to them as they went. He was arrested on December 21, 1978. In March 1980 a Cook County jury convicted him of thirty-three murders, with other charges, and he was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994.
On July 27, 1981, Adam Walsh, 6, disappeared from a shopping mall in Hollywood, Florida. About two weeks later he was found dead 120 miles away. His father, John Walsh, later became the host of America’s Most Wanted, and the case stayed open until 2008. In 2013 WSVN in Miami aired an account by two men who said they had been at the mall that day. One said he saw a man lift a struggling boy by one arm and throw him into a blue van, which sped away. Both men said they reported what they saw to Hollywood police in 1981, and both said that in 1991, when Jeffrey Dahmer’s photograph appeared in newspapers after his arrest in Milwaukee, they recognized him. Dahmer had been living in Miami Beach in 1981 and worked at a sandwich shop that made deliveries; the reporter Art Harris said that one of its delivery vehicles had been a blue van.
The police were not persuaded. A detective interviewed Dahmer in Wisconsin, and Dahmer denied any part in it. "Honest to God, Neil, I didn’t do Adam," he told a former FBI agent, Neil Purtell, who came away believing he was lying. A Hollywood police captain who went through the file said he was convinced Dahmer had not done it. Dahmer was never charged, and he was killed in prison in 1994.
The vehicle that mattered in the official case was a different one. Ottis Toole, imprisoned for a Jacksonville murder, confessed to Adam’s killing in 1983 and recanted repeatedly. Bloodstained carpet from Toole’s car was lost by the Hollywood police, and so was the car itself, which might otherwise have been tested for DNA. On December 16, 2008, the police chief, Chadwick Wagner, closed the case and named Toole, who had died in prison in 1996, saying he believed Toole could have been convicted had he lived. "If you’re looking for that magic wand, that one piece of evidence, it’s not there," Wagner acknowledged to the Associated Press. Toole was never charged in Adam’s death.
Not every car in a murder case is a means of escape. On Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 1980, at about 2:59 in the afternoon, Priscilla Ford drove a six-year-old blue Lincoln Continental onto the sidewalk of Virginia Street in downtown Reno, Nevada, the stretch known as Casino Row, and kept going for blocks before swinging back into the street and stopping behind traffic at a red light at Fifth Street. Her blood-alcohol level was .162. Five people were killed at once and twenty-four were injured. Reports differ on the final toll: the Las Vegas Sun put it at six dead, the Reno News and Review at seven.
Ford was charged with six counts of murder and twenty-three of attempted murder and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Police attributed to her a statement that she had deliberately planned "to get as many as possible." She had been found incompetent to stand trial and later competent; at trial, which began in November 1981 and lasted nearly five months, three defense psychiatrists and a psychologist said she did not know right from wrong, and a prosecution psychiatrist disagreed. She testified that she was Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit and said she did not remember the crash. The jury convicted her of six counts of first-degree murder and twenty-three of attempted murder, and on March 28, 1982, she was sentenced to death. The Nevada Supreme Court upheld the verdict in April 1986, adding in a footnote that a negotiated sentence of life would have been "the better course." She was never executed. Ford died of natural causes in July 2005, still under sentence of death and still in the courts.
The Manchester case had no single famous vehicle, but vehicles carried two of its children to their deaths. Pauline Reade, 16, disappeared on her way to a dance in Gorton on July 12, 1963. Keith Bennett, 12, disappeared on June 16, 1964, on his way to his grandmother’s home. In 1987, more than twenty years after their trial, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley admitted both killings. By the accounts the couple then gave, Hindley was at the wheel when each child was taken out to Saddleworth Moor. Pauline Reade’s body was found on the moor on July 1, 1987. Keith Bennett has never been found, and his mother died in 2012 without knowing where he lay.
Neither killing was ever charged. At Chester Assizes on May 6, 1966, Brady was convicted of the murders of John Kilbride, 12, Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17; Hindley was convicted of the murders of Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans and of harbouring Brady knowing he had killed John Kilbride. Brady died on May 15, 2017.
John George Haigh, a convicted fraudster who had once forged vehicle documents and sold cars that did not exist, lived in some style by 1947. The historian Gordon Lowe describes a man in Savile Row suits who drove an Alvis and passed himself off as a civil engineer and inventor, living at a South Kensington hotel on money taken from people whose deaths he later admitted. Among the hotel’s residents was Olive Durand-Deacon, 69, a widow with an idea for a business in artificial fingernails. Haigh offered her the use of his workshop in Crawley, Sussex. On February 18, 1949, he drove her there and shot her.
Within days a friend at the hotel noticed she was gone, and Haigh himself went with the friend to report her missing. A sergeant did not care for his manner. Police found his criminal record, searched the Crawley workshop, and in an attache case found a dry cleaner’s receipt for Mrs. Durand-Deacon’s fur coat. In a statement to the police, Haigh admitted killing her and five other people he knew and claimed three more killings that were never confirmed. He was tried for her murder alone. A jury at Lewes Assizes convicted him in July 1949, rejecting his insanity defense, and he was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on August 10, 1949.
Gerald Gallego and Charlene Williams, who later used his surname, moved their victims in a van and a car, and the vehicles appear again and again in the court records. On September 11, 1978, two girls, Kippi Vaught and Rhonda Scheffler, were taken from a Sacramento-area shopping mall in Gallego’s van, according to the facts set out by the supreme courts of Nevada and California. Their bodies were found two days later. Fibers on Rhonda Scheffler’s clothing matched the carpet of Gallego’s van. Their deaths were never charged; both courts admitted them as evidence of uncharged crimes.
On April 24, 1980, Stacey Redican and Karen Chipman Twiggs, both 17, disappeared from a shopping mall in the Sacramento area. Charlene Gallego testified that she had driven the van across the state line into Nevada while Gerald held them. The rope found in the case was an uncommon kind of macrame rope, and rope matching it turned up in the trunk of a car he owned. Nevada law requires that an accomplice’s account be corroborated, and the Nevada Supreme Court held that the rope and the other evidence did so.
The case broke on the night of November 1 to 2, 1980. With Charlene at the wheel, the couple stopped in a Sacramento shopping center parking lot, and Gerald forced Craig Miller, 22, and Mary Beth Sowers, 21, both students at Sacramento State, into the car at gunpoint. A friend of Miller’s saw it and came over. Charlene slapped him and told him to leave. As the car pulled away, he wrote down its license number. The police traced the number to the car and went to the home of Charlene’s parents, and Charlene arrived while they were still there. The couple fled to Reno, then by bus to Salt Lake City, Denver and Pueblo, Colorado, and finally to Omaha, where they were arrested when they went to collect money her parents had wired.
Gerald Gallego was convicted in California in 1983 of the first-degree murders and kidnappings of Craig Miller and Mary Beth Sowers, and in Nevada in 1984 of the murders of Stacey Redican and Karen Twiggs, with other charges. Both states sentenced him to death. He died of colon cancer in the Nevada prison system’s medical center in Carson City on July 18, 2002. Charlene Gallego pleaded guilty to murder in both states under an agreement that set her term at 16 years and 8 months, testified against him, and was released in the late 1990s.
On August 16, 1997, a friend saw Jennifer Joseph, 16, get into a white Corvette in Spokane, Washington. She was from Tacoma, born in Hampton, Virginia, the daughter of an Army sergeant, and had grown up in a military family in Denmark, South Korea and Massachusetts. Her body was found in rural Spokane County on August 26. After her death sheriff’s deputies were told to watch for white Corvettes. On September 24, 1997, an officer stopped a white 1977 Corvette a few blocks from where she had last been seen. The driver was Robert Lee Yates Jr., a former Army helicopter pilot and father of five. He was not cited. On November 28 a state trooper stopped him in the same car for speeding.
The task force formed that winter built a database of Corvette stops, a list of every Corvette registered in Washington and Idaho, and lists of Corvette club members. Yates sold the car in May 1998 to a woman he knew. In September 1999 detectives interviewed him about the 1997 stop, and he told them he had sold the Corvette to a friend. In January 2000 they found it, stored by its new owner at her sister’s home, and with permission took carpet fibers for the state crime laboratory. On April 5 the laboratory reported that the fibers closely matched fibers from Jennifer Joseph’s case. Investigators seized the car on April 10. Under the front passenger seat they found a white mother-of-pearl button that matched the one missing from her blouse, and bloodstains in the car matched her DNA. Yates was arrested on April 18, 2000. A later search of a black Ford van he owned found blood that was identified as that of two more women.
In October 2000 Yates pleaded guilty in Spokane County to thirteen murders and one attempted murder and was sentenced to 408 years. In 2002 a Pierce County jury convicted him of two more murders and sentenced him to death. The Washington Supreme Court converted that sentence to life imprisonment in October 2018, when it struck down the state’s death penalty.
In November 1988 a woman of thirty accepted a ride in South Los Angeles from a man driving an orange Ford Pinto. He shot her in the car and left her for dead. She survived, and bullets taken from her matched the gun used in a series of killings of young women in the same neighborhoods. Two decades later California’s new familial DNA search led investigators to Lonnie Franklin Jr., a retired city sanitation worker and former police garage attendant who fixed cars in his backyard. A detective collected food and utensils he left at a pizza restaurant, and the DNA matched the crime scenes. He was arrested in July 2010.
At his trial in 2016 the prosecutor told the jury that Franklin had owned an orange Pinto. Among the photographs police recovered from his home after his arrest was a Polaroid, and on the witness stand the woman who had survived recognized herself in it, sitting inside the Pinto. "That’s the person who shot me," she said, pointing at Franklin. On May 5, 2016, a Los Angeles County jury convicted him of ten counts of first-degree murder, among the victims a 15-year-old girl, and one count of attempted murder. He was sentenced to death and died at San Quentin State Prison on March 28, 2020, with his automatic appeal still pending.
For three weeks in October 2002, a sniper shot people at random around Washington, D.C. Ten people were killed and three badly wounded in Maryland, Virginia and the District, according to the FBI. They were pumping gas, mowing grass, sitting on a bench, loading shopping into their cars, walking to school, or standing on the step of a bus. The car that mattered was a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice.
John Allen Muhammad, a 41-year-old Army veteran, had bought it from a man in Trenton, New Jersey, on September 9, 2002, the Supreme Court of Virginia recorded. By the time of the arrest it had been altered into what the FBI later called "a rolling sniper’s nest." It had been near the shootings from the start. A witness saw it outside a liquor store in Clinton, Maryland, before a shooting in September. On the evening of October 3, a District of Columbia police officer stopped it for running two stop signs, checked the driver’s license and let Muhammad go with a warning; about two hours later and some thirty blocks away, Pascal Charlot, 72, a retired carpenter from Haiti, was shot and killed, and the Caprice was seen at the scene. Witnesses saw it near shootings at a shopping mall in Spotsylvania County and at a gas station off Interstate 95, and an off-duty officer saw Lee Boyd Malvo, then 17, driving it near the store in Falls Church, Virginia, where Linda Franklin, an FBI analyst, was killed on October 14.
On October 22 investigators found that Muhammad had registered a blue Caprice with New Jersey plates, and the description went out to the public. Late on October 23 the car was spotted at a rest area off Interstate 70 near Myersville, Maryland, about fifty miles northwest of Washington. Ron Lantz, a 61-year-old truck driver from Kentucky, told CBS News that he recognized it from the radio, called 911, and with another trucker pulled his rig across the exit. A state trooper, D. Wayne Smith, blocked the ramp to the interstate with his cruiser and watched the car with a shotgun until help came. Maryland State Police, Montgomery County SWAT officers and agents of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team closed in on foot, and at 3:19 in the morning of October 24 they took Muhammad and Malvo from the car, asleep.
The Caprice held most of the case. Behind the rear seat was a loaded Bushmaster rifle. With it were a scope, a GPS receiver, walkie-talkies, maps, a voice recorder and a laptop computer stolen from a restaurant owner who had been shot and wounded in September. FBI examiners found impressions of a written demand on the car’s owner’s manual. Muhammad was convicted in Virginia in November 2003 of capital murder in the death of Dean Harold Meyers, and in Maryland in May 2006 of six murders. He was executed by lethal injection in Virginia on November 10, 2009. Malvo was convicted in Virginia and is serving life sentences; in August 2026 the Supreme Court of Maryland declined to hear his appeal over a resentencing that had stalled.
The white Bronco belonged to neither a convicted killer nor a victim. On June 17, 1994, after Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman had been killed in Los Angeles, Al Cowlings drove a white Ford Bronco along the city’s freeways with O.J. Simpson in the back seat, trailed by a line of police cars. The chase ended at Simpson’s home. On October 3, 1995, a jury found Simpson not guilty of both murders. In 1997 a civil jury found him liable for the two deaths and ordered him to pay 33.5 million dollars to the families. He was never convicted of either killing.
The Bronco was Cowlings’s. In November 1994 a memorabilia collector, Michael Kronick, reportedly agreed to pay 75,000 dollars and 250 signed photographs for it, but Cowlings did not show up to trade his keys for the check; Kronick sued, and they settled in 1996. The truck passed to Michael Pulwer, a businessman who kept it for more than a decade in the underground garage of his condominium in Southern California. It surfaced at the Luxor in Las Vegas in May 2012 and about six months later at the Brant Foundation in Greenwich, Connecticut. Mike Gilbert, Simpson’s former agent, has said that he bought it from Cowlings to keep a tour company from using it and turned down 500,000 dollars for it. The Bronco now sits in the Alcatraz East Crime Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, a few miles from Dollywood; the museum has declined to say who allowed it to be shown. Simpson died of cancer on April 10, 2024, at 76.
On April 30, 2009, Queen’s Day in the Netherlands, crowds lined the streets of Apeldoorn to watch an open-topped bus carrying members of the royal family. Karst T., 38, drove a black Suzuki Swift into the crowd at a crossroads where people stood waiting for the bus to arrive. Seven people died. He told a police officer at the scene that he had done it on purpose. He died of his injuries early the next morning, and no one was ever tried.
In September 2009 the public prosecution service concluded that he had most probably meant to drive into the royal bus, that he had acted alone and made no elaborate preparations, and that he had been a loner who had recently lost his job and was about to lose his home. He was critical of the monarchy, the prosecutors said, but held no ideology that explained the attack, and his motive remained difficult to determine.
The vehicles outlast the people. Barrow and Parker’s Ford sits on a casino floor in Nevada; Bundy’s Beetle and Cowlings’s Bronco share a museum in Tennessee; Gein’s Ford went around the county fairs. Yet the more important work of these cars was done quietly, long before anyone charged admission. A federal warrant for a stolen Ford, a list of Volkswagen owners fed into a computer, a license number scrawled in a parking lot, a button lodged under a seat, a Polaroid taken inside a Pinto, a car registration in New Jersey: again and again, the car gave investigators what witnesses could not.
• May 20, 1933: A federal warrant in Dallas charges Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker with taking a stolen Ford from Texas into Oklahoma.
• May 23, 1934: Barrow and Parker are killed by officers near Sailes, Bienville Parish, Louisiana.
• February 18, 1949: John George Haigh drives Olive Durand-Deacon to his Crawley workshop; he is hanged on August 10.
• November 1957: Ed Gein admits killing two women in Waushara County, Wisconsin.
• March 1958: The Gein farm is auctioned; his car later tours county fairs.
• July 12, 1963, and June 16, 1964: Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett disappear in Manchester.
• May 6, 1966: Ian Brady and Myra Hindley are convicted at Chester Assizes.
• August 6, 1969: Bobby Beausoleil is arrested asleep in Gary Hinman’s Fiat.
• August 8 and 9, 1969: The Tate and LaBianca killings; Linda Kasabian rides in and drives the car.
• October 12, 1969: Charles Manson is arrested at the Barker Ranch and booked for car theft.
• August 16, 1975: Utah Highway Patrol Sergeant Bob Hayward stops Ted Bundy’s Volkswagen in Granger.
• February 9, 1978: Kimberly Leach disappears in Lake City, Florida.
• February 15, 1978: Bundy is arrested in a stolen Volkswagen in Pensacola.
• September 11, 1978: Kippi Vaught and Rhonda Scheffler are taken in Gallego’s van.
• December 11, 1978: Robert Piest disappears in Des Plaines; Gacy is arrested December 21.
• April 24, 1980: Stacey Redican and Karen Twiggs disappear near Sacramento.
• November 1 to 2, 1980: Craig Miller and Mary Beth Sowers are taken; a friend writes down the car’s license number.
• November 27, 1980: Priscilla Ford drives onto a Reno sidewalk.
• July 27, 1981: Adam Walsh disappears from a mall in Hollywood, Florida.
• March 28, 1982: Ford is sentenced to death.
• November 1988: A woman survives being shot in an orange Ford Pinto in South Los Angeles.
• January 24, 1989: Bundy is executed.
• May 10, 1994: Gacy is executed.
• June 17, 1994: The white Bronco chase in Los Angeles.
• October 3, 1995: O.J. Simpson is acquitted.
• July 1997: A former deputy offers Bundy’s Volkswagen for sale.
• August 16, 1997: Jennifer Joseph is seen getting into a white Corvette.
• September 24, 1997: An officer stops Robert Lee Yates Jr. in his white Corvette.
• April 10, 2000: The Corvette is seized; Yates is arrested April 18.
• July 18, 2002: Gerald Gallego dies in prison.
• October 3, 2002: A D.C. officer stops the Caprice and lets Muhammad go with a warning.
• October 24, 2002: Muhammad and Malvo are arrested asleep in the Caprice near Myersville, Maryland.
• July 2005: Priscilla Ford dies under sentence of death.
• December 16, 2008: Hollywood police close the Walsh case and name Ottis Toole.
• April 30, 2009: The Apeldoorn attack.
• November 10, 2009: Muhammad is executed.
• July 2010: Lonnie Franklin Jr. is arrested in Los Angeles.
• May 5, 2016: Franklin is convicted; the surviving woman had identified herself in a Polaroid taken inside the Pinto.
• November 19, 2017: Manson dies.
• 2022: The Barrow and Parker car moves to Buffalo Bill’s in Primm, Nevada.
• April 10, 2024: Simpson dies.