July 22, 1934: John Dillinger Is Gunned Down

 

July 22, 1934, 90 years ago: John Dillinger, "Public Enemy Number One," is killed.

John Herbert Dillinger Jr. was born on June 22, 1902 in Indianapolis. As a boy, he bullied smaller children. In 1922, he was arrested for auto theft. The following year, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, but soon deserted, and was dishonorably discharged. He was arrested for stealing $50 from a grocery store, and served 9 years in State prison.

He was released on May 10, 1933. Just 42 days later, using advice he got from fellow prisoners, he robbed his 1st bank, getting $10,000 (about $207,000 in today's money) from a bank in New Carlisle, Ohio, outside Dayton. On August 14, he robbed another in Bluffton, Ohio, outside Toledo. But he got caught, and was sent to another prison. He escaped on October 12, and formed what became known as the Dillinger Gang.

On January 25, 1934, the Dillinger Gang was arrested in Tucson, Arizona, and extradited to Indiana, where one of their robberies had led to the death of a policeman. Local police boasted that the prison was escape-proof. On March 3, 1934, Dillinger proved them wrong.

He formed a new gang, made up of those members of his original gang not presently in jail, and other gangs, including Lester Gillis, a.k.a. "Baby Face Nelson." On March 20, the gang and FBI Agents had a shootout in St. Paul, Minnesota. Dillinger was wounded in the leg, but got away, and laid low in Minneapolis to recover. Eventually, he got to Chicago. One member of his gang, Eddie Green, was shot and killed by St. Paul police on April 10. Another, John Hamilton, was shot and killed by police in nearby Aurora, Illinois on April 26.

On May 23, 1934, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were ambushed by a posse in Bienville Parish, Louisiana. Dillinger and fellow Midwestern bank robber Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd apparently never met either Bonnie or Clyde (or each other), but both sent flowers to their funerals in Dallas.

Like Bonnie and Clyde, Dillinger was embraced by a section of the public that didn't like how the banks were foreclosing on their homes during the Great Depression. Also like Bonnie and Clyde, he was a ruthless killer who didn't deserve the adulation. That adulation, and his escapes from jail, much more than his crimes themselves, led J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to name him "Public Enemy Number One."

Hoover put Melvin Purvis on the case, and Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the FBI's Chicago office. On July 22, 1934, John Dillinger went to the Biograph Theater at 2433 North Lincoln Avenue, on the North Side of Chicago, to see the film Manhattan Melodrama, starring Clark Gable and Myrna Loy. FBI Agents, including Purvis, aware that Dillinger liked to go to the movies, were already staking the place out.

At 10:40 PM, Dillinger walked out, and the Agents opened fire. He was hit 4 times, with 1 bullet entering through the back of the neck, severing his spinal cord, going into his brain, and coming out of his right eye. He was dead before he hit the ground. He was 31 years old.

As the body was taken away, souvenir hunters dipped things into his blood, like newspapers and handkerchiefs. A photo of his dead body showed his arm folded over his body, giving rise to the legend that Dillinger was phenomenally endowed. He was a known womanizer, but none of his girlfriends ever mentioned him "packing a cannon" other than his gun.

The rest of the Dillinger Gang didn't last much longer. Homer Van Meter was shot and killed by St. Paul police on August 23. Charles Makley was killed by guards at Ohio State Prison during an escape attempt on September 22. And Baby Face Nelson died in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, Illinois on November 27, a few days after a shootout with police in nearby Barrington. Pretty Boy Floyd, not part of the Dillinger Gang, was given Dillinger's place as "Public Enemy Number One" by the FBI, and died on October 22, after a shootout with police in East Liverpool, Ohio. The year of "public enemies" was over.

Purvis became nationally famous. This angered Hoover, a publicity hound who wanted the credit for the Bureau in general and himself in particular. He went out of his way to marginalize Purvis, who ended up quitting the Bureau the next year, and, like the Communist leader he so despised, Joseph Stalin, "wrote his enemy out of history": Even when Purvis died in 1960, shot in the head, rather than tell the true story -- which the coroner couldn't determine, but the evidence suggests an accident -- Hoover smeared Purvis in the press, saying that he was mentally ill and that his death was definitely a suicide.

Dillinger was played by Lawrence Tierney in the 1945 film Dillinger, Leo Gordon in the 1957 film Baby Face Nelson, Nick Adams in the 1965 film Young Dillinger, Warren Oates in the 1973 film Dillinger, Robert Conrad in the 1979 film The Lady In Red, Mark Harmon in the 1991 TV-movie Dillinger, Martin Sheen in the 1995 film Dillinger and Capone (which was mostly fictional, as it appears that Dillinger and Al Capone never met), and Johnny Depp in the 2009 film Public Enemies.