May 21, 2022 • 22 mins
This 2011 episode from previous hosts Sarah and Deblina covers John Dillinger, whose robbery career actually began when he was paroled in 1933. Several escaped inmates joined Dillinger, and they were arrested in 1934. Dillinger escaped, but was gunned down in July. To this day, conspiracy theories abound about his death.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. Not too long ago on the show,
we talked about a series of six prison breaks, and
one of the more famous prison breaks that we did
not get into on the show was John Dillinger's four
escape using a fake gun that he had made, and
we didn't because there's already a podcast on Dillinger by
previous host Sarah and Bablina that came out on December jess.
(00:27):
As a very general guideline, it is not really necessary
to send in corrections for pronunciations in eleven year old
podcast episodes, especially when they are hosted by people who
do not work here anymore. But just in case, we do,
as totally random examples, know how to say the words
mischievous and Lima, Ohio, Welcome to Stuff you missed in
(00:53):
History Class, A production of I Heart Radio, Hello, and
welcome to the podcast I'm to Blieve in chark Reboarding
and I'm Fair Doing And Earlier this year, we talked
a lot about Ned Kelly and some other famous bush Rangers,
who were essentially Australian outlaws, viewed as folk heroes by
(01:15):
many of their contemporaries. A couple of times we compared
that bush ranger phenomenon to the American wild West and
Jesse James. But the United States has seen some more
recent examples of these outlaw hero hybrids in the form
of the Depression era bank robber gangster. Why would the public,
or at least a portion of it, root for a
criminal with a scary Tommy gun. That's what we asked ourselves,
(01:37):
and it's similar to the Bushranger situation, is what we found.
It had less to do with people liking the bank
robbers than it did with their disliking the banks. Basically,
what that meant was that in the twenties banks speculated
on stocks and then went bust and left people who
deposited money high and dry. And then in the thirties
banks foreclosed on farmers who had been hit hard by drought,
(01:58):
for seeing thousands of people to leave their land. So
banks were the enemy. Yeah, and some of the criminals,
like the one that we're going to focus on in
this episode, John Dillinger, we're really kind of likable guys.
Dillinger was known for being charismatic. He's been called Gentleman
John or the Gentleman Bandit, and even though his infamous
crime spree only lasted for one year, he was arguably
(02:22):
the biggest celebrity criminal of his day. He was the
first criminal to be named Public Enemy Number one by
the FBI, and Dillinger's demise also marked the beginning of
the end of the nineteen thirties gangster era and the
rise of the FBI. In fact, when former and the
first FBI director jed Gar Hoover, who's been in the
spotlight recently because of the movie, when he was asked
(02:45):
as an old man with his greatest thrill or the
high point in his career was, he said, it was
the night they got Dillinger. So we're going to take
a look at that night and some of the mysteries
and the myths surrounding it. But of course we're going
to talk a little bit about Jillinger's early days first
and how he became a star of the crime world
in the first place. So John Herbert Dillinger was born
(03:05):
June nineteen o three in a middle class neighborhood in
Indianapolis called Oak Hill. So most sources say he was
trouble from a pretty early age. Not mean spirited, not
a bully necessarily, but mischievous. According to an article by
Peter Carlson in American history. Dillinger's life of crime really
(03:26):
started in grade school when he formed a gang called
the Dirty Dozen. They apparently stole watermelon. Some sources say
that they met have stolen coal um, but instability from
family life probably didn't help things. Dillinger's mother, Mary Ellen,
died when he was only about three or four years old,
and he was cared for mostly by his sister Audrey.
(03:49):
His father, John Wilson, who was a grosser, remarried when
Dillinger was about ten years old, but Dillinger wasn't very
fond of his stepmother, at least at first. Sod Linger
quit school when he was about sixteen and he went
to work in machine shops. He was a decent worker,
but he wasn't that into his work, so he started
staying out late like a lot, and in nineteen twenty
(04:11):
his father moved the family from the city to a
farm in Mooresville, Indiana, presumably in part because he thought
Dillinger was on the road to getting into serious trouble.
But moving to the farm really didn't help with that
problem very much. Dillinger ran wild, and he got into
trouble or what or was about to get into trouble,
I should stay for stealing a car. So at age nineteen,
he joined the Navy, but after only five months he
(04:33):
went a wall when his ship was docked in Boston,
and later he was dishonorably discharged, so he came home
to Morrisville for a little while. He got married to
sixteen year old Beryl Hovious in April of nineteen twenty four,
and also for a brief time he showed promise as
a baseball player for a team in Martinsville, Indiana, but
it wasn't long before Dillinger started to get into trouble again.
(04:57):
That same year, in four he and an older friend
named Ed Singleton assaulted and robbed a local grocer, and
they really botched the crime. They messed up completely, and
they got caught and Singleton pled not guilty and got
off with a light sentence. But Dillinger took some really
bad advice from his father, who convinced him not to
(05:21):
get a lawyer and to plead guilty. And uh, they
were just sort of assuming that maybe, since Dillinger had
no prior criminal record, maybe the court would show mercy
let him off easy. But it didn't go down that way,
Dillinger was sentenced to ten to twenty years in prison.
So what a way to start life. Yeah, pretty serious sentence,
(05:41):
of course, though he didn't just take it lying down
and accept his fate at first. Dillinger attempted to escape
from prison a few times, acted up, gotten all kinds
of trouble. He seemed to become more and more bitter
about a situation as time went on, especially when he
was denied parole and when his wife divorced him in
while he was still in there. After a while, though,
(06:02):
Dillinger settled down, or at least he appeared to. He
worked in the prison shirt factory and started making friends
with some of the older inmates like Harry Pierpont, who
could school him in an advanced criminal tactics like the
finer points of robbing banks, for instance. Then in May
of nineteen thirty three, after nearly nine years in prison,
(06:22):
Dillinger's good prisoner facade paid off and he was paroled
just a few weeks later. On June tenth, nineteen thirty three,
he robbed his first bank in Ohio, and he made
off with somewhere in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars
on that first job, and he also started recruiting a
few friends and pulled off several more robberies that summer.
But it wasn't long before he was back behind bars again.
(06:44):
Really just at the end of the summer, he was
arrested in Dayton, Ohio and September twenty second, eighteen thirty three,
and then he was thrown into the county jail and Lima,
Ohio um According to the FBI's website, when Lima police
were frisking Dillinger, they found a dot commit which seemed
to be a plan for a prison break, but Dillinger
said he didn't know anything about that. But just a
(07:07):
few days later, eight to ten of Dillinger's prisoner buddies
escaped using the exact plan the police had found. So
turned out that Dillinger had arranged for guns to be
smuggled into the prison to aid the escape, so presumably
this had been the plan all along. Dillinger would make parole,
(07:27):
get out of jail, pull off some jobs to get money,
um to get guns, get m oh whatever, and then
return to prison to get his friends out. And his
friends didn't forget the favor either, just a couple of
weeks later, several of the escapees showed up at the
jail again where Dillinger was being held, and at first
(07:47):
they pretended to be there to return Dillinger to the
Indiana State Prison, since he had of course violated parole.
But as soon as Sheriff Jess Sarber asked to see
some sort of I D they shot and killed him,
took his keys, and freed Dillinger. So a wild double
part escape here and the band of outlaws became known
(08:18):
as the Dillinger Gang or the Terror Gang. And during
the last few months of ninety three, Dillinger and friends
raided police arsenals for guns and AMMO and bulletproof vests,
and they robbed about a dozen banks across the Midwest
and picked up some serious cash in the process. In October,
for example, they robbed a bank in Greencastle and made
off with about seventy five thousand dollars. They eventually made
(08:41):
hundreds of thousands of dollars doing this, and there was
no real leader to the gang, but Dillinger became kind
of the star of these robberies. He was well dressed,
he was good looking, and he was athletic. He had
this signature move he would do where he would leap
over the bank counter to intimidate employees and get access
to the miller's cages and also impressed by standards at
(09:02):
the same time. Well, he'd also impressed them by telling
people who were there to deposit their cash that they
could keep their personal money. He was only interested in
getting the bank's money. So there was that Robin Hood
kind of thing going on that keeps on popping up
in a lot of these outlaw episodes we talked about.
But the Dillinger gang did hurt people too. They killed
(09:23):
about fifteen people and wounded several others during their crime spree.
Dillinger was even wanted for murder after a policeman was
killed during robbery at a bank in East Chicago, Indiana,
in January nineteen thirty four. But by this time the
gang was making front page news, I mean, obviously for
for heists like this, and local law enforcement in the
(09:44):
Midwest wanted the FBI, which was then called the Bureau
of Investigation or Division of Investigation, to get involved give
them a little help with all of this. But by
the letter of the law at the time, Dillinger and
his friends hadn't admitted any federal crimes yet, so therefore
the future FBI couldn't couldn't lay a hand on him,
(10:06):
and I'm not officially at least that winter, Dillinger took
his girlfriend, Evelyn Frischette, and the rest of the gang
to Florida on vacation in Daytona Beach for a couple
of weeks, and then after that the whole gang headed
west to Tucson, Arizona, and that's where they were discovered, recognized,
and arrested by police after a fire broke out in
one of the hotels a couple of them were staying
(10:26):
in under assumed names. They were all wanted all over
the Midwest at this point, so states were actually competing
over who would get them. Most of the gang ended
up going to Ohio, but the East Chicago police got
Dillinger and threw him in Crown Point, Indiana Jail, which
was supposedly escape proof. At this time. There was a
media frenzy surrounding Dillinger when he was there. The warden
(10:50):
would let reporters interview him, and Dillinger apparently joked with
them and really just charmed them all. I mean, some
of them thought, Hey, this is a shame that this
guy is gonna end up getting executed because he murdered somebody,
because he really is kind of likable. But less than
two months later, Dillinger put the jail security to the test.
On March third, thirty four, Dillinger escaped by waving a
(11:11):
pistol to force guards to let him out of his cell.
He then captured Crown Points, Warden and guards and locked
them in a cell and fled. According to the popular
version of this story, the gun Dillinger used in this
instance was one that he'd carved out of wood and
darkened with boot black, so basically shoe polish. And some people,
of course think that this is totally focus and that
(11:34):
he actually had a real gun. But it's one of
those one of the many myths out there about Dillinger
that just you want to believe it because it's such
a good story. Encyclopedia Britannica says that he was singing
as he left, quote I'm heading for the last round up.
And in Carlson's article, he says that Dillinger later wrote
about the incident in a letter to his sister and said,
quote you should have seen their faces ha ha ha,
(11:58):
with all exclamation points there too. So right after this
escape is when Dillinger made the mistake that would eventually
lead to his downfall. As part of his escape from jail,
he stole a sheriff's car and crossed the Indiana Illinois
state line, which violated the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act.
So finally there was a federal offense in jade, Hoover
(12:22):
and the Bureau of Investigation could at last go after
Dillinger full force. Dillinger had, of course, basically made a
full out of law enforcement officials with this latest escape
and the possible boot blackened gun, and catching him would
be a huge accomplishment and a much needed win at
this point for Hoover's fledgling bureau. So Hoover put his
(12:46):
Chicago Bureau chief, Melvin Purvis, in charge of finding the outlaw,
but they didn't have any luck at first. All of
their initial attempts to capture him through raids failed. In
the meantime, though, Dillinger was busy, he put together a
new gang since all of his other friends were in
jail already, and the new members of the Dillinger gang
included the Likes of baby Face Nelson, who was generally
(13:08):
considered an unbalanced, homicidal psychopath. He'd denis stint with al
Capone and people were, I mean, this guy was a
guy to be feared, but he wasn't necessarily the type
of person that Dillinger had worked with in the past.
But they set off together on another series of robberies.
Purvis and as guys had been searching for Dillinger all
over the place, but they kept not finding him or
(13:31):
kind of just missing him, and they'd find out that
he was somewhere, but he'd escaped before they could catch him. Then,
in April of four, the Bureau got a tip that
the gang was hiding out at the Little Bohemia Lodge
north of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, while Dillinger recovered from a wound
he'd gotten on their last job. So Purvis and Hugh Clegg,
the assistant director of the Bureau at the time, led
(13:51):
a small army of agents and approached the lodge at night,
trying to ambush the gang. But as they approached, the
owner's watchdogs began to bark, and around this same time,
three men were leaving the building and they got into
a car, apparently Purvis tried to yell at the car,
we're government agents, but the men didn't hear him and
started the car and they started to pull away, and
as the car pulled away, agents opened fire. They ended
(14:15):
up wounding two of the men and killing one of them,
and they were all non gangster civilians, So big embarrassment there.
And after that Purviose and his men opened fire on
the lodge, but as soon as Dillinger and his men
heard the shooting, they managed to escape. They jumped out
windows onto the first floor roof and got away. But meanwhile,
in an encounter with baby Face Nelson at a neighboring resort,
(14:39):
one Bureau agent was wounded and another one killed, and
their government vehicle was stolen too. So all of this,
you know, shooting innocent men, um having one of their
own agents killed by baby Face, losing dillenjer yet again
was a huge embarrassment for Purvis and Hoover, and newspapers
were calling them to be fire heard and some members
(15:01):
of the Roosevelt administration we're thinking that they might need
to get a new FBI director. But after the Wisconsin incident,
Dillinger and his gang went on to rob another bank
in Ohio, and whoever went ahead and dubbed the outlaw
public Enemy number one and put up a pretty significant
cash reward of ten thousand dollars for any information about
(15:25):
his whereabouts. He was he I think he knew at
this point his job was kind of riding on on
catching him. Yes, he did, and there's speculation that this
may have made Dillinger a little bit more cautious finally,
maybe to the extreme. Even he's rumored to have undergone
plastic surgery around this time to change his appearance and
his fingerprints, But of course we don't have any proof
(15:46):
of that. That's just kind of a story that's out there.
Even if Dillinger did go to this extreme, though ultimately
it didn't help them at all. On July twenty one,
four Annas Sage contacted a police officer with information. Sage
(16:06):
was a Romanian immigrant who was the madam of a
brothel in the Chicago area. Her real name was actually
on a companus because of the profession she was in.
She was being deported and in exchange for giving the
Bureau information about Dillinger, she wanted the cash reward and
the FBI's help in preventing her deportation, So Purvis and
his colleagues agreed on at least the first part, and
(16:27):
they said maybe her cooperation would help her with the
second part of it. So she told them she knew
Dillinger's current girlfriend, Polly Hamilton's. Some sources say that Anna
and Polly were roommates, others say that they were just girlfriends,
but regardless, she said that she Dillinger and Hamilton's We're
all going to see the Clark Gable movie Manhattan Melodrama,
which was ironically a gangster movie, at either the Biograph
(16:50):
or the Marlborough Theater in Chicago the following night, So
Sage said she'd let them know which theater they were
going to, and she also said she would wear an
orange skirt so that they could pick her out. That's
how she became known as the Woman in Red later on.
So when Sunday, July twenty two rolled around, Stage still
didn't know what theater they were going to, so agents
were sent to both locations. Then, around eight thirty pm, Stage,
(17:13):
Dillinger and Hamilton's all showed up at the Biograph, whoever,
wanted the agents to wait until Dillinger came out so
that they wouldn't hurt anyone who was inside the theater
watching the movie. So all of the agents at the
other theaters used that time during the movie to come
over to the Biograph and to serve as reinforcements. So
at ten thirty PM, Dillinger came out of the theater
(17:33):
with the ladies and purpose was supposed to light his
cigar as the signal for the agents to close in
and surround Dillinger, But there's some question as to whether
the cigar was actually ever lit or not. They may
have just rushed in. Yeah, they may have just gone
for him as soon as they saw him. The agents
did surround Dillinger. Some witnesses say that Dillinger went for
(17:55):
his gun, others say that he didn't, but the agents
claim he did and the outlaw was shot trying to
escape down the alley. That's their story, at least so
by standards apparently tried to crowd around Dillinger's body in
the street and dip their handkerchiefs and the edges of
their skirts or bits of paper in his blood as souvenirs.
(18:16):
Another case of these grizzly gangster souvenir things going on.
But the remaining gang members were all captured or killed
not too long after Dillinger's death, which really just added
to the prestige of the Bureau of Investigation, which became
the FBI in ninety five, and really boosted Hoover's reputation.
(18:37):
By mid nineteen thirty six, the heyday of the nineteen
thirties outlaws was really pretty much over, and Hoover said
to have kept Dillinger's gun, straw, hat and death mask
in a glass case outside of his office. The shrine
stayed there until Hoover's death in nineteen seventy one. But
of course it's never just that simple when it comes
(18:59):
to famous outlaw Some researchers claimed that Dillinger wasn't really
killed that night. They think that the Bureau of Investigation
agents killed another man in his place. In his book
History's Greatest Lies, which was exerted in a two thousand
nine issue of History Magazine, William Weir references a letter
that Emil Went Not Could Junr received in nineteen sixty eight. Now,
(19:19):
Emil Went Not Could Junior, Just to remind you guys,
he's um the son of the man who owned the
Little Bohemia Lodge. The lodge in Wisconsin, um, when Dillinger
stayed there in nineteen thirty four, the place where they
had exactly so, since Dillinger had escaped in such a hurry,
he left his stuff at the lodge, and the owners
had used those belongings to set up a little Dillinger museum.
(19:40):
The person who had sent the letter to when Naka
said that Dillinger was still alive and had been living
in Hollywood under an assumed name since the shooting. Here.
She also included a photo with the letter, offering it
for use in the museum, and that was I guess,
supposedly the purpose of the letter. And it apparently looked
a lot like Dillinger could have looked as an older man.
(20:01):
So we have to ask what pieces of evidence have
people put forth to actually support this theory. Some say
the person shot had black hair and Dillinger was supposed
to have brown hair, but that could be a pretty
easy fix. You can dye your hair and everything. Um.
There was, however, also a discrepancy in eye color, so
(20:22):
Navy records say that Dillinger's eyes were blue, but the
autopsy showed that the person shot had brown eyes. Um. Again,
though you know, you never know. With eye color, people
can have different interpretations. But finally, the man autopsy had
a heart condition that there's no record of Dillinger having.
(20:43):
That's kind of the strange outlier here. So what do
people who buy this theory think really happened. Well, it
said that before he died, Dillinger was going by the
alias Jimmy Lawrence in Chicago, But there really was a
low level Chicago criminal named Jimmie Lawrence who kind of
resembled Dillinger and also had a heart condition. So some
(21:04):
people think this man was killed instead of Dillinger and
that Dillinger got the last laugh. Although we should say
that the FBI really considers this one of the top
ten myths out there about Dillinger, and there are so
many myths out there about him it's sometimes hard to
separate fact from fiction. Thanks so much for joining us
(21:28):
on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook U
r L or something similar over the course of the show,
that could be obsolete. Now. Our current email address is
History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old
health stuff works email address no longer works, and you
can find us all over social media at Missed in History,
(21:51):
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
Google podcast the I heart Radio app, and wherever else
you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Happy Saturday, everybody. Not too long ago on the show,
we talked about a series of six prison breaks, and
one of the more famous prison breaks that we did
not get into on the show was John Dillinger's four
escape using a fake gun that he had made, and
we didn't because there's already a podcast on Dillinger by
previous host Sarah and Bablina that came out on December jess.
(00:27):
As a very general guideline, it is not really necessary
to send in corrections for pronunciations in eleven year old
podcast episodes, especially when they are hosted by people who
do not work here anymore. But just in case, we do,
as totally random examples, know how to say the words
mischievous and Lima, Ohio, Welcome to Stuff you missed in
(00:53):
History Class, A production of I Heart Radio, Hello, and
welcome to the podcast I'm to Blieve in chark Reboarding
and I'm Fair Doing And Earlier this year, we talked
a lot about Ned Kelly and some other famous bush Rangers,
who were essentially Australian outlaws, viewed as folk heroes by
(01:15):
many of their contemporaries. A couple of times we compared
that bush ranger phenomenon to the American wild West and
Jesse James. But the United States has seen some more
recent examples of these outlaw hero hybrids in the form
of the Depression era bank robber gangster. Why would the public,
or at least a portion of it, root for a
criminal with a scary Tommy gun. That's what we asked ourselves,
(01:37):
and it's similar to the Bushranger situation, is what we found.
It had less to do with people liking the bank
robbers than it did with their disliking the banks. Basically,
what that meant was that in the twenties banks speculated
on stocks and then went bust and left people who
deposited money high and dry. And then in the thirties
banks foreclosed on farmers who had been hit hard by drought,
(01:58):
for seeing thousands of people to leave their land. So
banks were the enemy. Yeah, and some of the criminals,
like the one that we're going to focus on in
this episode, John Dillinger, we're really kind of likable guys.
Dillinger was known for being charismatic. He's been called Gentleman
John or the Gentleman Bandit, and even though his infamous
crime spree only lasted for one year, he was arguably
(02:22):
the biggest celebrity criminal of his day. He was the
first criminal to be named Public Enemy Number one by
the FBI, and Dillinger's demise also marked the beginning of
the end of the nineteen thirties gangster era and the
rise of the FBI. In fact, when former and the
first FBI director jed Gar Hoover, who's been in the
spotlight recently because of the movie, when he was asked
(02:45):
as an old man with his greatest thrill or the
high point in his career was, he said, it was
the night they got Dillinger. So we're going to take
a look at that night and some of the mysteries
and the myths surrounding it. But of course we're going
to talk a little bit about Jillinger's early days first
and how he became a star of the crime world
in the first place. So John Herbert Dillinger was born
(03:05):
June nineteen o three in a middle class neighborhood in
Indianapolis called Oak Hill. So most sources say he was
trouble from a pretty early age. Not mean spirited, not
a bully necessarily, but mischievous. According to an article by
Peter Carlson in American history. Dillinger's life of crime really
(03:26):
started in grade school when he formed a gang called
the Dirty Dozen. They apparently stole watermelon. Some sources say
that they met have stolen coal um, but instability from
family life probably didn't help things. Dillinger's mother, Mary Ellen,
died when he was only about three or four years old,
and he was cared for mostly by his sister Audrey.
(03:49):
His father, John Wilson, who was a grosser, remarried when
Dillinger was about ten years old, but Dillinger wasn't very
fond of his stepmother, at least at first. Sod Linger
quit school when he was about sixteen and he went
to work in machine shops. He was a decent worker,
but he wasn't that into his work, so he started
staying out late like a lot, and in nineteen twenty
(04:11):
his father moved the family from the city to a
farm in Mooresville, Indiana, presumably in part because he thought
Dillinger was on the road to getting into serious trouble.
But moving to the farm really didn't help with that
problem very much. Dillinger ran wild, and he got into
trouble or what or was about to get into trouble,
I should stay for stealing a car. So at age nineteen,
he joined the Navy, but after only five months he
(04:33):
went a wall when his ship was docked in Boston,
and later he was dishonorably discharged, so he came home
to Morrisville for a little while. He got married to
sixteen year old Beryl Hovious in April of nineteen twenty four,
and also for a brief time he showed promise as
a baseball player for a team in Martinsville, Indiana, but
it wasn't long before Dillinger started to get into trouble again.
(04:57):
That same year, in four he and an older friend
named Ed Singleton assaulted and robbed a local grocer, and
they really botched the crime. They messed up completely, and
they got caught and Singleton pled not guilty and got
off with a light sentence. But Dillinger took some really
bad advice from his father, who convinced him not to
(05:21):
get a lawyer and to plead guilty. And uh, they
were just sort of assuming that maybe, since Dillinger had
no prior criminal record, maybe the court would show mercy
let him off easy. But it didn't go down that way,
Dillinger was sentenced to ten to twenty years in prison.
So what a way to start life. Yeah, pretty serious sentence,
(05:41):
of course, though he didn't just take it lying down
and accept his fate at first. Dillinger attempted to escape
from prison a few times, acted up, gotten all kinds
of trouble. He seemed to become more and more bitter
about a situation as time went on, especially when he
was denied parole and when his wife divorced him in
while he was still in there. After a while, though,
(06:02):
Dillinger settled down, or at least he appeared to. He
worked in the prison shirt factory and started making friends
with some of the older inmates like Harry Pierpont, who
could school him in an advanced criminal tactics like the
finer points of robbing banks, for instance. Then in May
of nineteen thirty three, after nearly nine years in prison,
(06:22):
Dillinger's good prisoner facade paid off and he was paroled
just a few weeks later. On June tenth, nineteen thirty three,
he robbed his first bank in Ohio, and he made
off with somewhere in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars
on that first job, and he also started recruiting a
few friends and pulled off several more robberies that summer.
But it wasn't long before he was back behind bars again.
(06:44):
Really just at the end of the summer, he was
arrested in Dayton, Ohio and September twenty second, eighteen thirty three,
and then he was thrown into the county jail and Lima,
Ohio um According to the FBI's website, when Lima police
were frisking Dillinger, they found a dot commit which seemed
to be a plan for a prison break, but Dillinger
said he didn't know anything about that. But just a
(07:07):
few days later, eight to ten of Dillinger's prisoner buddies
escaped using the exact plan the police had found. So
turned out that Dillinger had arranged for guns to be
smuggled into the prison to aid the escape, so presumably
this had been the plan all along. Dillinger would make parole,
(07:27):
get out of jail, pull off some jobs to get money,
um to get guns, get m oh whatever, and then
return to prison to get his friends out. And his
friends didn't forget the favor either, just a couple of
weeks later, several of the escapees showed up at the
jail again where Dillinger was being held, and at first
(07:47):
they pretended to be there to return Dillinger to the
Indiana State Prison, since he had of course violated parole.
But as soon as Sheriff Jess Sarber asked to see
some sort of I D they shot and killed him,
took his keys, and freed Dillinger. So a wild double
part escape here and the band of outlaws became known
(08:18):
as the Dillinger Gang or the Terror Gang. And during
the last few months of ninety three, Dillinger and friends
raided police arsenals for guns and AMMO and bulletproof vests,
and they robbed about a dozen banks across the Midwest
and picked up some serious cash in the process. In October,
for example, they robbed a bank in Greencastle and made
off with about seventy five thousand dollars. They eventually made
(08:41):
hundreds of thousands of dollars doing this, and there was
no real leader to the gang, but Dillinger became kind
of the star of these robberies. He was well dressed,
he was good looking, and he was athletic. He had
this signature move he would do where he would leap
over the bank counter to intimidate employees and get access
to the miller's cages and also impressed by standards at
(09:02):
the same time. Well, he'd also impressed them by telling
people who were there to deposit their cash that they
could keep their personal money. He was only interested in
getting the bank's money. So there was that Robin Hood
kind of thing going on that keeps on popping up
in a lot of these outlaw episodes we talked about.
But the Dillinger gang did hurt people too. They killed
(09:23):
about fifteen people and wounded several others during their crime spree.
Dillinger was even wanted for murder after a policeman was
killed during robbery at a bank in East Chicago, Indiana,
in January nineteen thirty four. But by this time the
gang was making front page news, I mean, obviously for
for heists like this, and local law enforcement in the
(09:44):
Midwest wanted the FBI, which was then called the Bureau
of Investigation or Division of Investigation, to get involved give
them a little help with all of this. But by
the letter of the law at the time, Dillinger and
his friends hadn't admitted any federal crimes yet, so therefore
the future FBI couldn't couldn't lay a hand on him,
(10:06):
and I'm not officially at least that winter, Dillinger took
his girlfriend, Evelyn Frischette, and the rest of the gang
to Florida on vacation in Daytona Beach for a couple
of weeks, and then after that the whole gang headed
west to Tucson, Arizona, and that's where they were discovered, recognized,
and arrested by police after a fire broke out in
one of the hotels a couple of them were staying
(10:26):
in under assumed names. They were all wanted all over
the Midwest at this point, so states were actually competing
over who would get them. Most of the gang ended
up going to Ohio, but the East Chicago police got
Dillinger and threw him in Crown Point, Indiana Jail, which
was supposedly escape proof. At this time. There was a
media frenzy surrounding Dillinger when he was there. The warden
(10:50):
would let reporters interview him, and Dillinger apparently joked with
them and really just charmed them all. I mean, some
of them thought, Hey, this is a shame that this
guy is gonna end up getting executed because he murdered somebody,
because he really is kind of likable. But less than
two months later, Dillinger put the jail security to the test.
On March third, thirty four, Dillinger escaped by waving a
(11:11):
pistol to force guards to let him out of his cell.
He then captured Crown Points, Warden and guards and locked
them in a cell and fled. According to the popular
version of this story, the gun Dillinger used in this
instance was one that he'd carved out of wood and
darkened with boot black, so basically shoe polish. And some people,
of course think that this is totally focus and that
(11:34):
he actually had a real gun. But it's one of
those one of the many myths out there about Dillinger
that just you want to believe it because it's such
a good story. Encyclopedia Britannica says that he was singing
as he left, quote I'm heading for the last round up.
And in Carlson's article, he says that Dillinger later wrote
about the incident in a letter to his sister and said,
quote you should have seen their faces ha ha ha,
(11:58):
with all exclamation points there too. So right after this
escape is when Dillinger made the mistake that would eventually
lead to his downfall. As part of his escape from jail,
he stole a sheriff's car and crossed the Indiana Illinois
state line, which violated the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act.
So finally there was a federal offense in jade, Hoover
(12:22):
and the Bureau of Investigation could at last go after
Dillinger full force. Dillinger had, of course, basically made a
full out of law enforcement officials with this latest escape
and the possible boot blackened gun, and catching him would
be a huge accomplishment and a much needed win at
this point for Hoover's fledgling bureau. So Hoover put his
(12:46):
Chicago Bureau chief, Melvin Purvis, in charge of finding the outlaw,
but they didn't have any luck at first. All of
their initial attempts to capture him through raids failed. In
the meantime, though, Dillinger was busy, he put together a
new gang since all of his other friends were in
jail already, and the new members of the Dillinger gang
included the Likes of baby Face Nelson, who was generally
(13:08):
considered an unbalanced, homicidal psychopath. He'd denis stint with al
Capone and people were, I mean, this guy was a
guy to be feared, but he wasn't necessarily the type
of person that Dillinger had worked with in the past.
But they set off together on another series of robberies.
Purvis and as guys had been searching for Dillinger all
over the place, but they kept not finding him or
(13:31):
kind of just missing him, and they'd find out that
he was somewhere, but he'd escaped before they could catch him. Then,
in April of four, the Bureau got a tip that
the gang was hiding out at the Little Bohemia Lodge
north of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, while Dillinger recovered from a wound
he'd gotten on their last job. So Purvis and Hugh Clegg,
the assistant director of the Bureau at the time, led
(13:51):
a small army of agents and approached the lodge at night,
trying to ambush the gang. But as they approached, the
owner's watchdogs began to bark, and around this same time,
three men were leaving the building and they got into
a car, apparently Purvis tried to yell at the car,
we're government agents, but the men didn't hear him and
started the car and they started to pull away, and
as the car pulled away, agents opened fire. They ended
(14:15):
up wounding two of the men and killing one of them,
and they were all non gangster civilians, So big embarrassment there.
And after that Purviose and his men opened fire on
the lodge, but as soon as Dillinger and his men
heard the shooting, they managed to escape. They jumped out
windows onto the first floor roof and got away. But meanwhile,
in an encounter with baby Face Nelson at a neighboring resort,
(14:39):
one Bureau agent was wounded and another one killed, and
their government vehicle was stolen too. So all of this,
you know, shooting innocent men, um having one of their
own agents killed by baby Face, losing dillenjer yet again
was a huge embarrassment for Purvis and Hoover, and newspapers
were calling them to be fire heard and some members
(15:01):
of the Roosevelt administration we're thinking that they might need
to get a new FBI director. But after the Wisconsin incident,
Dillinger and his gang went on to rob another bank
in Ohio, and whoever went ahead and dubbed the outlaw
public Enemy number one and put up a pretty significant
cash reward of ten thousand dollars for any information about
(15:25):
his whereabouts. He was he I think he knew at
this point his job was kind of riding on on
catching him. Yes, he did, and there's speculation that this
may have made Dillinger a little bit more cautious finally,
maybe to the extreme. Even he's rumored to have undergone
plastic surgery around this time to change his appearance and
his fingerprints, But of course we don't have any proof
(15:46):
of that. That's just kind of a story that's out there.
Even if Dillinger did go to this extreme, though ultimately
it didn't help them at all. On July twenty one,
four Annas Sage contacted a police officer with information. Sage
(16:06):
was a Romanian immigrant who was the madam of a
brothel in the Chicago area. Her real name was actually
on a companus because of the profession she was in.
She was being deported and in exchange for giving the
Bureau information about Dillinger, she wanted the cash reward and
the FBI's help in preventing her deportation, So Purvis and
his colleagues agreed on at least the first part, and
(16:27):
they said maybe her cooperation would help her with the
second part of it. So she told them she knew
Dillinger's current girlfriend, Polly Hamilton's. Some sources say that Anna
and Polly were roommates, others say that they were just girlfriends,
but regardless, she said that she Dillinger and Hamilton's We're
all going to see the Clark Gable movie Manhattan Melodrama,
which was ironically a gangster movie, at either the Biograph
(16:50):
or the Marlborough Theater in Chicago the following night, So
Sage said she'd let them know which theater they were
going to, and she also said she would wear an
orange skirt so that they could pick her out. That's
how she became known as the Woman in Red later on.
So when Sunday, July twenty two rolled around, Stage still
didn't know what theater they were going to, so agents
were sent to both locations. Then, around eight thirty pm, Stage,
(17:13):
Dillinger and Hamilton's all showed up at the Biograph, whoever,
wanted the agents to wait until Dillinger came out so
that they wouldn't hurt anyone who was inside the theater
watching the movie. So all of the agents at the
other theaters used that time during the movie to come
over to the Biograph and to serve as reinforcements. So
at ten thirty PM, Dillinger came out of the theater
(17:33):
with the ladies and purpose was supposed to light his
cigar as the signal for the agents to close in
and surround Dillinger, But there's some question as to whether
the cigar was actually ever lit or not. They may
have just rushed in. Yeah, they may have just gone
for him as soon as they saw him. The agents
did surround Dillinger. Some witnesses say that Dillinger went for
(17:55):
his gun, others say that he didn't, but the agents
claim he did and the outlaw was shot trying to
escape down the alley. That's their story, at least so
by standards apparently tried to crowd around Dillinger's body in
the street and dip their handkerchiefs and the edges of
their skirts or bits of paper in his blood as souvenirs.
(18:16):
Another case of these grizzly gangster souvenir things going on.
But the remaining gang members were all captured or killed
not too long after Dillinger's death, which really just added
to the prestige of the Bureau of Investigation, which became
the FBI in ninety five, and really boosted Hoover's reputation.
(18:37):
By mid nineteen thirty six, the heyday of the nineteen
thirties outlaws was really pretty much over, and Hoover said
to have kept Dillinger's gun, straw, hat and death mask
in a glass case outside of his office. The shrine
stayed there until Hoover's death in nineteen seventy one. But
of course it's never just that simple when it comes
(18:59):
to famous outlaw Some researchers claimed that Dillinger wasn't really
killed that night. They think that the Bureau of Investigation
agents killed another man in his place. In his book
History's Greatest Lies, which was exerted in a two thousand
nine issue of History Magazine, William Weir references a letter
that Emil Went Not Could Junr received in nineteen sixty eight. Now,
(19:19):
Emil Went Not Could Junior, Just to remind you guys,
he's um the son of the man who owned the
Little Bohemia Lodge. The lodge in Wisconsin, um, when Dillinger
stayed there in nineteen thirty four, the place where they
had exactly so, since Dillinger had escaped in such a hurry,
he left his stuff at the lodge, and the owners
had used those belongings to set up a little Dillinger museum.
(19:40):
The person who had sent the letter to when Naka
said that Dillinger was still alive and had been living
in Hollywood under an assumed name since the shooting. Here.
She also included a photo with the letter, offering it
for use in the museum, and that was I guess,
supposedly the purpose of the letter. And it apparently looked
a lot like Dillinger could have looked as an older man.
(20:01):
So we have to ask what pieces of evidence have
people put forth to actually support this theory. Some say
the person shot had black hair and Dillinger was supposed
to have brown hair, but that could be a pretty
easy fix. You can dye your hair and everything. Um.
There was, however, also a discrepancy in eye color, so
(20:22):
Navy records say that Dillinger's eyes were blue, but the
autopsy showed that the person shot had brown eyes. Um. Again,
though you know, you never know. With eye color, people
can have different interpretations. But finally, the man autopsy had
a heart condition that there's no record of Dillinger having.
(20:43):
That's kind of the strange outlier here. So what do
people who buy this theory think really happened. Well, it
said that before he died, Dillinger was going by the
alias Jimmy Lawrence in Chicago, But there really was a
low level Chicago criminal named Jimmie Lawrence who kind of
resembled Dillinger and also had a heart condition. So some
(21:04):
people think this man was killed instead of Dillinger and
that Dillinger got the last laugh. Although we should say
that the FBI really considers this one of the top
ten myths out there about Dillinger, and there are so
many myths out there about him it's sometimes hard to
separate fact from fiction. Thanks so much for joining us
(21:28):
on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook U
r L or something similar over the course of the show,
that could be obsolete. Now. Our current email address is
History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old
health stuff works email address no longer works, and you
can find us all over social media at Missed in History,
(21:51):
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
Google podcast the I heart Radio app, and wherever else
you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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