Did John Dillinger really die outside the Biograph movie theater in Chicago in 1934? And does his allegedly prodigious pecker really reside pickled in a secluded corner of the Smithsonian or some other hallowed ground?
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Bank robber John Dillinger, declared Public Enemy Number One by the U.S. attorney general, was the most notorious of the violent criminals whose exploits fascinated America during the Depression. He learned the bank-robbing trade while serving time for a holdup, and after bing paroled in 1933 he helped orchestrate the escape of ten confederates from the Indiana jail where he’d been confined. Dillinger and several of the escapees then formed a gang and pulled off a series of daring daylight bank robberies throughout the midwest–by one count they netted roughly $300,000 in 11 heists. Along the way they got into several bloody scrapes with the authorities; if you count gang members and folks the police shot by mistake, 26 people were killed and 19 wounded. Arrested on the lam in Tucson in early 1934 and extradited to Indiana for the murder of a cop, Dillinger broke out of jail there, allegedly using a wooden gun he’d carved from a washboard. He soon arrived in Chicago, where he underwent plastic surgery at the home of a local bar owner. On the evening of July 22, tipped off by a female companion later made famous in the newspapers as the Lady in Red (actually she wore an orange skirt and white blouse), agents from the Justice Department’s Division of Investigation, soon to be renamed the FBI, ambushed Dillinger as he left the Biograph. Five shots were fired; at least two struck the wanted man, who died within minutes. His body was put on view at the Cook County morgue, then sent home to Indiana; Dillinger was buried under layers of concrete, scrap iron, and chicken wire to foil grave robbers.
But was the dead man Dillinger–or a patsy? I take it that’s what you’re asking, Horace, and as it happens that was the question posed by crime writer Jay Robert Nash and researcher Ron Offen in the 1970 book Dillinger: Dead or Alive?, which was expanded and republished in 1983 as The Dillinger Dossier. Nash claimed he’d been shown letters, dated 1959 and 1963, from someone who said he was Dillinger. The letters were accompanied by a photo of an older man bearing a vague resemblance to the deceased bank robber. Nash never tracked down the man–who wasn’t the first purported Dillinger–but nonetheless persuaded himself that this fellow was genuine. His theory: The man killed at the Biograph was not Dillinger but a double, set up by the mob to take the fall.
