Bonnie And Clyde's Victims Recalled -- Widow Glad To See New Memorial

SOUTHLAKE, Texas - Doris Edwards had been married less than two years when her husband, state Trooper E.B. Wheeler, went to work on Easter Sunday 1934.

Edward Bryan Wheeler never made it home after running into Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.

While Bonnie and Clyde are infamous, their victims are often forgotten. Edwards hopes a monument erected yesterday on the site where her husband and his partner were killed will help change that.

"It's just stayed inside me and festered all this time - all the publicity on Bonnie and Clyde, glamorizing them," said Edwards, 85. "I want the world to know what vicious killers and murderers they are."

On that fateful day in 1934, the 26-year-old Wheeler and his rookie partner, H.D. Murphy, were planning to offer assistance when they rode on motorcycles toward a black Ford that was parked on a hill. Bonnie and Clyde saw them coming and opened fire with rifles and shotguns.

Murphy, 24, left behind a 20-year-old fiancee, who wore her wedding dress to his funeral.

In the decades that followed, Bonnie and Clyde - who were blamed for at least 12 deaths - would become the stuff of legend, memorialized in movie and song. And the slayings of Wheeler and Murphy would go all but overlooked.

Edwards become outraged after seeing a Bonnie and Clyde exhibition at the Dallas public library.She was put in touch with two men who have been placing markers on the spots where state troopers and Texas Rangers have been killed.

The men, Rick Metcalf and Paul Luckey, said the troopers killed by Bonnie and Clyde eventually would have been honored, but Wheeler and Murphy were moved up on the list after Edwards complained.

At yesterday's ceremony, Edwards and two of Murphy's four brothers stood on a highway shoulder and unveiled a 6-foot, gray granite memorial where Wheeler and Murphy became the first Texas troopers to die in the line of duty.

"Next to dying and going to heaven, this is the best thing," Edwards said. "At last, people are remembering him and the rest of the troopers, too."