Since ancient times, humankindās crimes of cunning and cruelty have left blood stains on the pages of history. Iām Robert Riggs, here with a story from my archive of Crimes Through The Ages: John Dillinger, Americaās First Public Enemy Number One.
John Dillinger was the most famous outlaw of the 1930s. This charming yet elusive bank robber captured the public's imagination and fueled an entire genre of crime melodramas during the darkest days of the Great Depression.
Economic Despair and the Rise of a New Criminal Breed
The 1930s were a time of great turmoil and transition in America. The Jazz Age had ended. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) pushed through the repeal of Prohibition, but the country was in the grip of the Great Depression. Princes became paupers, and families became destitute in the Dust Bowl. The American Dream turned into a nightmare.
Bank failures and foreclosures forced farmers off their land in the rural Mid-West of America. The economic collapse of Black Tuesday in October 1929 left twelve million men unemployed, riding the rails in search of work or selling apples on street corners.
Amidst this backdrop, a new breed of criminal emerged. These were not the pseudo-businessmen of the Prohibition era but rather desperate, often uneducated young men from rural areas who took inspiration from the outlaws of the Old West. They embarked on robbery and kidnapping sprees, hitting with fury and precision that left the country reeling.
Public Enemy Number One
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover dubbed John Dillinger āPublic Enemy Number Oneā and used the moniker āPublic Enemiesā to describe the other notorious gangsters, including Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Ma Barker and her boys, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, and Machine Gun Kelly.
Hoover was the first and longest-serving director of the FBI. He was appointed in 1924 to the Bureau of Investigation, which in 1935 became the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and remained in control until he died in 1972.
Early Life
John Herbert Dillinger, born on June 22, 1903, in Indianapolis, Indiana, was one such desperado. Unlike the stereotypical gangster, Dillinger was quick, athletic, and possessed a certain charisma that made him a natural leader among his peers. But who was John Dillinger? How did he become Public Enemy Number One? Let's delve into his life and uncover the man behind the myth.
Dillinger remains one of the most colorful and enigmatic gangsters in the annals of American crime.
Was he a poor Indiana farm boy driven to crime by cruel twists of fate and an unjust society, as some believe?
Or was he a natural-born thief and thrill-seeker who took what he wanted until the law finally caught up with him in a hail of bullets outside a Chicago movie house?
And was it the real John Dillinger who died that steamy July night in 1934? After 13 months on the run - did his luck run out at last?
The Jackrabbit Bank Robber
Or did the man the press dubbed "the Jackrabbit" for his ability to leap over bank cages and railings with ease pull one last daring escape and fade into anonymous retirement, laughing at a public all too ready to believe he'd got his just deserts?
A Troubled Childhood
John Dillinger's story, like so many gangster yarns of the Great Depression, begins with a troubled childhood full of promise cut short. He came into the world with little fanfare on June 22, 1903, the younger of two children born to John Wilson Dillinger and Mary Ellen "Mollie" Lancaster in the oak-lined streets of Indianapolis' middle-class Brightwood neighborhood. His father was a stern, somewhat distant figure - an ambitious grocer who worked long hours building his business. His mother's love and attention gave young John his only genuine warmth and security.
Tragedy struck just after the boy's fourth birthday when his beloved Mollie died suddenly from a stroke. John's older sister Audrey, then 15, did her best to fill the void. But their father, reeling from grief and the pressures of single parenthood, could manage little more than keeping a roof over their heads. Audrey later said Johnnie "was my baby." From then on, the sister, nearly a dozen years his senior, was forced to be a mother to her lonely little brother.
Despite such early upheaval, outward signs pointed to a stable, successful life ahead for the bright, athletic youth. John consistently earned high marks at the local elementary school. His baseball prowess, particularly a rocket-throwing arm, earned the admiration of his classmates. One childhood friend recalled him as "a typical boy who happened to be a pretty good ballplayer, better than the rest of us."
But there was another side to the agreeable all-American exterior. Dillinger had a restless streak that quickly led the youngster into trouble. At twelve, police hauled Dillinger before a judge for stealing coal from a rail yard and peddling it door to door. The defiant adolescent grinned as the judge scolded him for insubordination, replying Yes sir with a mocking edge that further infuriated the court. The judge sent him home with a dire warning: "Watch your step, young man." A caution the cocky pre-teen would not heed.
As his teen years approached, Dillinger's rebellious streak only grew. When his father remarried and moved the family to a farm in rural Mooresville, 15 miles southwest of Indianapolis, in 1913, the boy bristled at his new stepmother's efforts to instill discipline. He ran off to enlist in the Navy during World War I at just 16. Dillinger lied about his age and deserted within months. Bored and restless in the lazy, leafy hamlet of Mooresville, Dillinger dropped out of high school a year shy of graduation despite his sharp mind and talent for figures.
Work, like school, couldn't hold his interest. He drifted from one menial job to the next - a stint in a machine shop, a turn at a grocery, even a desultory go at his father's hated farming. The common thread: resentment at the honest drudgery and determination not to be entrapped by it. "I was just an ordinary fellow before I went haywire," Dillinger would later muse of his pre-criminal youth to a reporter. "Just a small-town hick who started to be a big shot without knowing how."
Love, Marriage, and a Short-Lived Stability
The aimless young man's path might have straightened out with marriage to pretty teenager Beryl Hovius and the prospect of fatherhood in 1924. A steadier head prevailed for a time as he took a job at an upscale grocery in Mooresville and doted on his baby son. But the idyll was short-lived. Restive and headstrong as ever, Dillinger chafed at domesticity's yoke, squandering his nights drinking and partying with an increasingly rough crowd.
Prison: A Trade School for Crime
His penchant for impetuous thrill-seeking reached its apex that fall when a drunken grocery store heist with an ex-con buddy went south. Though the bungled holdup netted no money and left the grocer with little more than a headache, Dillinger was promptly collared. In court, the 21-year-old farmboy watched in shock as the judge threw the book at him: a 10 to 20-year prison sentence for assault and battery with intent to rob. It was his first offense. He'd be 41 before he breathed free air again.
"I was a fool for trying it," a chastened Dillinger conceded as he was led from the courthouse in cuffs. Little did he know, his true education in crime was just beginning. Prison would be the crucible in which the rash young punk was forged into the hardened career criminal destined to become Public Enemy Number One.
Incarcerated at the Indiana State Reformatory in Pendleton, an embittered Dillinger vowed to his guards, "I won't cause you any trouble - except to escape." It was a threat he made good on four times in his first year, once remaining on the lam for three days before being hauled back in shackles. His reputation for audacity preceded him as he was transferred to the tougher Indiana State Prison at Michigan City. Dillinger caught the eye of its most notorious inmates - seasoned bank robbers Harry Pierpont and Homer Van Meter.
The hardened hold-up men saw potential in the cocky young inmate and took him under their wing. Dillinger said, "I studied banking under Professor Pierpont and earned an 'A' grade." Pierpont, Van Meter, and other veterans like Russell Clark, Charles Makley, and Harry Copeland schooled him in the finer points of their chosen profession - casing joints, devising getaway routes, handling firearms, cracking safes. Dillinger proved an apt pupil in their informal master class on lawbreaking.
He was too apt for the Pendleton parole board, which rejected his release bid in September 1929, declaring, "It is evident that you have not yet recognized the debt you owe society." Enraged at what he saw as a spiteful bid to break him, Dillinger got himself transferred to Michigan City to be near his new mentors and further his studies in crime. He emerged in May 1933, after 8 1/2 years behind bars, a changed man - still the reckless daredevil, but now cunning and hardened, a fully-formed outlaw burning to put his prison education to work.
After a few months of penny-ante stickups and one lucrative safe-cracking job, Dillinger launched his bank-robbing career that fall in earnest. Job one: raising funds to spring Pierpont, Van Meter, and the rest of his imprisoned tutors. A string of solo heists across Indiana impressed his former mentors, their "$10,000 and $15,000 hauls carried out with signature acrobatic flair and gentleman bandit charm. "He vaulted over railings and leaped up on the counters like a circus performer," one awed witness recalled years later. "So agile and quick, you barely saw him move."
Chivalry was one of Dillinger's calling cards. He made a point never to steal from bank customers, only the till. "That's your money there on the counter?" he asked one farmer, too terrified to move as the gang scooped cash into bags. "Keep it then. We only want the banks." Even as he brandished a pistol, his easy smile and wisecracking air seemed calibrated to ease the trauma. "We're in a hurry, so please be quick," he quipped, vaulting nimbly onto a desk as he announced one stickup. The jokes seldom failed to elicit grins, even a smattering of applause as he exited.
By October, he'd amassed enough cash to launch the prison break. Pierpont, Van Meter, and six other inmates blasted their way out of Michigan City with smuggled guns on the 12th. But as they celebrated their feat that night, Dillinger was already in cuffs 200 miles away - caught by chance while laying low at his girlfriend's pad in Dayton, Ohio. His first taste of real notoriety came with the spectacular smash-in staged to free him from the Allen County Jail in Lima 12 days later.
It ended with a beloved local sheriff gut-shot on the jailhouse floor. Triggerman Harry Pierpont was taking no chances on a recapture. "Did you have to do this?" an anguished Dillinger asked, cradling the lawman as he bled out. Pierpont just fixed him with an icy stare. With that, the die was cast. There would be no turning back now for the men the press had tagged "the first family of crime."
A Notorious Criminal and His Gang
The Dillinger Gang, as they came to be known, blazed a yearlong trail of bank jobs across the Midwest that would make them the most famous - and feared - outlaws of the Great Depression. Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Kentucky. No state was safe from their meticulously planned lightning strikes. Newsreels and front pages from coast to coast trumpeted their exploits, making a shameless folk hero of the cocksure young bandit with the devil-may-care grin who always seemed one step ahead of the law.
But the heat steadily rose with each new heist as Dillinger's media profile grew. One close call came after a botched robbery in East Chicago that January left a cop dead in the street. Though Dillinger was hundreds of miles away and likely not the triggerman, the FBI slapped him with his first murder charge. With his mug plastered in post offices nationwide and a $10,000 bounty on his head, the bandit split for Arizona to cool his heels. It nearly proved his undoing.
Recognized by firemen from his wanted poster after a hotel blaze, Dillinger was nabbed with half the gang in Tucson on January 25th, 1934, and hauled back to Indiana's Lake County Jail in Crown Point to await trial for the policeman's murder. Publicly, he shrugged off any worry, posing for reporters alongside the warden and cracking wise. "Sure, Iām a bank robber," he quipped to one reporter. "That's my racket. But I ain't a killer, and I never was."
Privately, Dillinger knew his luck had run out. He'd be convicted of the cop killing and sent back to Michigan City on a life sentence - if he even made it that far. More likely, he'd get shanked by some inmate out to make a name for himself unless he could pull off another miracle jailbreak. This time on his own, without Pierpont and the gang on the outside to blast their way in.
The Infamous Crown Point Escape
The Crown Point job would become the most famous of all Dillinger's great escapes. By his telling, he carved a fake gun from the shelf of his cell, stained it black with shoe polish, and used it to bluff his way out, locking guards in his cell as he strolled to freedom. The jailbreak burnished his legend as a master escape artist - and certified his status as Public Enemy Number One in the eyes of a skittish public. The fabled "wooden gun" break merited a two-page spread in True Detective magazine, making Crown Point's hapless female sheriff a national laughingstock.
Dillinger milked the publicity for all it was worth, even sending the sheriff a taunting postcard thanking her for the hospitality. But he knew the pressure would only intensify now. The FBI was officially on the case, targeting him for arrest under the Dyer Act, a federal rap for interstate car theft. Unless he could alter his famous face, his days as a free man were numbered. In desperation, he turned to an underworld plastic surgeon on Chicago's North Side that May.
The hack doctor was hardly a "magician with a scalpel," as Dillinger's mouthpiece promised. Working from a seedy apartment operating room reeking of bootleg booze and cigar smoke, the quack nearly killed his patient with a botched anesthetic before making even the first incision. Blue and lifeless on the table, Dillinger was brought back from the brink with artificial respiration, and the surgeon's oath to "first do no harm" was tossed out the window. The groggy bandit awoke with his fingertips acid-burned in a crude attempt to remove prints and little more than a crude disguise of scars, cleft chin, and dye job as a reward for his near-death ordeal.
It was hardly the transformation he'd hoped for. One look in the mirror told Dillinger all he needed to know. The game was nearly up. Nor did the FBI's disastrous raid on the gang's Wisconsin hideout a month later do much to buoy his spirits. Agents surrounded the Little Bohemia Lodge, guns blazing on April 22nd, only to find themselves in a firefight with the caretaker and two hapless Civilian Conservation Corpsmen known as the CCC.
When the smoke cleared, one CCC man lay dead, his pal and the lodge owner severely wounded by friendly fire. Dillinger and his posse, meanwhile, had long since rabbited into the woods amid the commotion. It was the gang's last lucky break. A month later, trigger-happy psycho Baby Face Nelson was cut down in a gunfight with the feds. By July, Dillinger's remaining muscle was either dead or behind bars. Only Dame Fortune's favor had spared Public Enemy Number One himself a toe tag at the morgue or a cell. But for how much longer?
Alone, on the lam, a shadow of his smiling, confident self, Dillinger took refuge among the last friends he could trust - the madams and molls of Chicago's underworld. He set up camp in a North Side brothel of Anna Sage, a Romanian-born madam fighting deportation. He struck up a sexual liaison with one of Sage's girls, a brassy redhead called Polly Hamilton. But fate had a final cruel joke in store for America's Public Enemy Number One.
The Biograph Theater
Sage, aka the "Woman in Red," knew a shot at freedom when she saw it. In Dillinger, she spied a golden ticket. Through her cop connections, Sage brokered a deal with the FBI: she'd set up the famous bandit for capture, tell them where to find him, and guarantee he'd be unarmed. In return, J. Edgar Hoover's boys would pull strings to quash her deportation rap. Just like that, Dillinger's luck went from bad to worse.
The trap was sprung on the night of July 22nd, 1934, amid a stifling midsummer heat wave. Dillinger, sweating through his shirt, his face still numb from the botched surgery, his mind preoccupied with escape plans that grew dimmer by the minute, was in no condition to spot the setup. Sage suggested they take in a movie at the Biograph Theater downtown to escape the infernal heat. He'd crack wise about the irony later: him walking into a screening of Manhattan Melodrama, a gangster pic about an underworld antihero who nobly accepts his fate in the chair to save his pals.
The real-life melodrama disappeared for two hours in Biograph's air-conditioned sanctuary. Dillinger let himself get lost in Hollywood gunslinger Clark Gable's too-familiar travails dodging the law, his noble self-sacrifice to save a wayward kid brother at the climax. But any peace the cinema afforded proved fleeting. Did he sense trouble the second he stepped back into the steamy night, blinking away the matinee magic?
Every instinct should have warned him that it was a setup. The "Woman in Red" had sold him out. Did he think to himself as he stared down the barrels of a dozen guns, a thicket of Thompsons and revolvers, and sawed-off scatterguns hungry for famous blood: "Not like this." He'd be damned if he gave Hoover's dogs the satisfaction of dragging him in alive like some carnival oddity, parading him before the newsreels in chains. Better to go out on his feet, lunging for that Colt thirty-eight in his waistband.
The Shootout
The gunfire echoed off the brick and mortar of the alley like cannon fire in the still night, a barrage that, to witnesses, sounded like a gangland massacre. When the smoke cleared, the man lay face down on the trash-strewn cobblestones, blood pooling beneath his shattered face, the contents of his burst brainpan oozing out. Women screamed, and men pushed forward for a closer look. Just like that, the legend of the unstoppable John Herbert Dillinger, America's favorite outlaw, had written its final chapter.
Or had it? Even before the celebrated bandit's bullet-ravaged corpse was cold on a slab in the county morgue, rumors swirled that the FBI had slain the wrong man. Skeptics claimed the body displayed in the pages of True Detective magazine and elsewhere as Dillinger's bore only a passing resemblance to the dashing rogue. The eye color, hairline, height, weight, and even the fingerprints - said to be obliterated by acid - are all wrong. Some swore they'd seen scars, a rheumatic heart, and a different dental profile than could be accounted for by any quick and dirty plastic surgery.
A sizable segment of an adoring public wanted desperately to believe their Depression Robin Hood had cheated death one last time. Even now, he was hightailing it for the Mexican border, his pockets bulging with bank loot, his famous face reworked, and he was laughing up his sleeve at the G-Men.
Did The FBI Really Get Their Man
The FBI counters what it calls a conspiracy theory on its website listing its Top Ten Dillinger Myths. Among them, Myth #8, that John Dillinger was not killed at the Biograph Theater, that a stand-in was.
The FBI says two of its agents took two sets of fingerprints from Dillingerās body outside the Biograph Theater, and both were a positive match. Another set taken during the autopsy was also a match.
The FBI described Dillinger as a notorious and vicious thief. From September 1933 until July 1934, he and his violent gang terrorized the Midwest, killing ten men, wounding seven others, robbing banks and police arsenals, and staging three jailbreaksākilling a sheriff during one and wounding two guards in another.
The Bureau has enshrined the Dillinger case at its training facility in Quantico, Virginia.
In a mock town called Hoganās Alley, thereās a replica of the Biograph Theater where agents set up Dillinger using a girlfriend.
Nearby, recruits practice responding to a robbery at the mock Bank of Hogan.
John Dillingerās legend became intertwined with the FBI legend created by its late director J. Edgar Hoover.
After the shooting at the Biograph Theater, Dillingerās body was put on public display after the autopsy.
A dental company created a death mask of Dillingerās face to demonstrate the quality of the companyās plaster.
Dillingerās legacy entered the world of myth.
Some of Dillingerās stolen loot, valued at five million dollars today, has been the subject of treasure hunts and an episode on the television show Expedition Unknown.
Doubts remain about whether the FBI killed the real John Dillinger or a stand-in that he had hired. Travis Thompson, the great-nephew of John Dillinger and a veteran law enforcement officer in Indiana, has been on a campaign to exhume the body of his gangster relative to find out.
Thus far, Thompson has been blocked by the Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis. He believes Dillinger escaped and lived out his life in California.
Thompson has been digging for clues around the old Dillinger family farm, where bank loot may have been buried.
But the manner of Dillinger's downfall, the gritty details excised from Hoover's tidy official version, leave ample room for doubt - and the romanticizing of a larger-than-life figure. Did a wily operator like Anna Sage give up America's most famous fugitive, a priceless bargaining chip, for a paltry few grand in reward money? Officials deported her after promising citizenship in exchange for her help.
Did Dillinger, sensing the jig was up, broker the betrayal himself, arranging through underworld creditors to have a lookalike rube take the fall? At the same time, he slipped away in the resulting mayhem to a prearranged plastic surgeon far more skilled than the Chicago quack.
No less an authority than mob titan Al Capone's brother Ralph would claim, years later, to have shared a cell with "Dillinger" in Alcatraz in the early '60s. "Far as I know, John Dillinger is still alive and in jail in California. Unless they took him out to shoot him lately," a wizened Bottles Capone told investigative reporter John Toland in 1962. A deathbed fantasy by a shambling ex-con desperate to seem in the know? Perhaps. But enough to tantalize Dillinger buffs and conspiracy hounds for generations to come.
Whatever his true fate, in death, Dillinger would become more prominent than he'd ever been in life. His bloody demise outside the Biograph assured his immortality, forever fixed him in the popular imagination as the cocky, smiling bandit of those famous photos - forever 31, forever eluding death and the law. The tacky souvenir hunters who dipped their hankies in his blood, the morbid gawkers who lined up for a glimpse of his wax museum corpse, even the twisted soul who swiped his brain from the morgue - all in some way were paying homage to the impact one Indiana farm boy with a restless spirit and deadly aim made on the world in a few short months.
Like all men, Dillinger was deeply flawedāa charming rogue but ultimately a selfish and destructive one who left a trail of terror and heartbreak in his wake. Yet in death, he transcended those mortal failings to become something more: a symbol, a spirit, an ideal of individualism and rebellion, of the little guy thumbing his nose at the powerful, of the outlaw hero as an American archetype. In short, he became a legend.
Film director John Ford said that if you have to choose between the truth and you should print the legend. Whatever the prosaic reality of his 31 years, Dillinger lives on where it counts - in the popular imagination, that movie screen of the mind where he'll forever be cracking wise, vaulting over bank counters, living by his wits and his Colt thirty-eight revolver, daring the world to stop him if it can.
No cop, no G-Man, or hangman's noose can touch him there. On that silver screen of our collective dreams, John Herbert Dillinger will forever be on the run, one step ahead, in stories from Crimes Through The Ages.
