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John Herbert Dillinger was born on June 22, 1903,
in Indianapolis. His father, John Wilson Dillinger, owned a small grocery store and four houses. His mother died when he was
three. His sister, Audrey, who was fourteen years older, took care of him until she married a year later. His father remarried
when he was nine.
Johnnie was constantly getting into trouble. He led a neighborhood gang called
the Dirty Dozen, and pilfered coal from railroad freight cars. Most neighbors did not know about Johnnie's exploits, and described
him as a cheerful, likable youngster, who dressed neatly and was no more mischievous than any other boy.
At 16, Dillinger dropped out of school and began working at a machine shop, where he did very well. At night he always returned
home late, creating tension with his father.
In 1920 his father sold his property in Indianapolis
to retire to a farm in Mooresville, Indiana. He was also hoping that the country would provide his son with a wholesome environment.
Instead Dillinger kept his job in Indianapolis by commuting 18 miles on his motorcycle.
After
five months in the Navy, Dillinger went AWOL, and married Beryl Hovious on April 12, 1924. He was 20 and she was 16.
On September 6, 1924, Dillinger and his friend, Edgar Singleton, robbed a Mooresville grocer. Frank Morgan was returning home
with the week's receipts when the two men assaulted him. Although Dillinger beat Morgan with a cloth-wrapped iron bolt, the
grocer was not severely hurt. Dillinger was arrested; his father sternly advised him to plead guilty and take his punishment,
which turned out to be quite harsh. Young Johnnie was given the maximum penalty of 10 to 20 years in prison, even though he
had no previous criminal record. Singleton, who was much older and did have a prison record, served less than two years of
his 2-to-14-year sentence, thanks to his lawyer.
Dillinger was sent to the Indiana State Reformatory
in Pendleton. Although he was occasionally disciplined for disorderly conduct, he was not considered dangerous. He played
on the prison baseball team and worked in the shirt factory as a seamster. With his impressive manual dexterity, Dillinger
frequently completed twice his daily quota. He secretly helped other men meet their quotas, and made many friends, his closest
ones being Harry Pierpont and Homer Van Meter.
Dillinger's wife and family visited him frequently.
He wrote often, and his letters were full of warmth and affection. But Beryl Hovious still filed for a divorce, which she
obtained on June 20, 1929. Dillinger was devastated. Six years later, while hiding in Chicago, he said, "I began to know how
you feel when your heart is breaking. For four years I had looked forward to going back home, and now there wasn't going to
be any home to go back to."
The second blow came a month later when Dillinger was denied parole.
After achieving exemplary behavior for two years, he was angry. He asked to be sent to the Indiana State Prison in Michigan
City. Dillinger told officials the penitentiary had a better baseball team. The truth was that he wanted to leave Mooresville
behind and join his old friends Pierpont and Van Meter, who had been transferred there.
At Michigan
City, the discipline was harsher, and Dillinger was surprised to see many men his father's age. He became depressed, and did
not bother joining the baseball team. Dillinger worked in the shirt factory again, where he once again produced double quotas
and assisted less skillful men.
At the penitentiary, Dillinger learned all he could from older
inmates. He met Walter Dietrich, who had worked with Herman K Lamm. A former officer of the German army, Lamm immigrated to
the United States. He became successful by applying his military training to bank robbery. He would carefully investigate
a bank's layout, and assign each associate a role. The driver of the getaway car would plan the escape route down to tenths
of a mile, and practice it several times. Lamm's method worked for thirteen years, until he was killed in a shoot-out with
police.
After nine years, Dillinger was paroled on May 22, 1933. He felt that he had paid his
debt to society by spending his youth in prison. He and his family later claimed that it was prison and the law which turned
him into a criminal, but in truth, his record before going to prison was pretty bad. It is clear that prison did nothing to
rehabilitate him. At this point in his life, Dillinger was determined to become a professional bank robber.
Using guns smuggled in by the newly freed Dillinger and arrangements made by Harry Pierpont's girlfriend, Mary Kinder, ten
men escaped from the Indiana State Prison on September 22, 1933. Among them were Harry Pierpont, Charles Makley, John Hamilton,
Walter Dietrich, and Russell Clark, who formed the Dillinger gang. They were joined by Homer Van Meter, who had been released
on parole.
Four days before his friends escaped, Dillinger was arrested in Dayton, Ohio. One of
the gang's first missions was to free Dillinger, who was being held at the Allen County Jail in Lima, Ohio. In the process,
Pierpont shot and killed Sheriff Jesse Sarber.
The Dillinger gang raided police stations for guns
and ammunition, and used the Lamm method to rob banks. One or two men would visit a bank during business hours. They would
memorize the interior layout, and note the distance from the nearest police station. Gang members would drive through an escape
route three or four times. The men drew maps showing towns, landmarks, and the number of miles between various points. These
were marked on a chart which the "navigator" read to the driver. The men even hid cans of gasoline in haystacks along the
escape route.
Most of the gang members had girlfriends. Dillinger dated Evelyn Frechette. While
the other girlfriends drank hard liquor, Dillinger refused to give Frechette any; because of she had a Native American background
and his belief that she might become an alcoholic. The men themselves rarely drank, because Pierpont would not allow a robbery
to be committed, or even planned, under intoxication. He maintained that because they lived in constant danger of being caught,
the men had to be alert at all times.
Police departments and newspapers attributed many crimes
to the Dillinger gang that they did not commit. While vacationing in Florida in December 1933, the gang was accused of Different
crimes in the Midwest. One Chicago newspaper accused Dillinger of shooting a dog. He said, "Hell! This is going too far. How
could I shoot a dog in Chicago from down here in Florida. I wonder if the dog's name was Matt Leach." (Leach was chief of
the Indiana State Police.)
On January 25, 1934, Dillinger, Pierpont, Makley, and Clark were arrested in Tucson. The three
men were extradited to Lima, Ohio. Dillinger was extradited to Indiana for the murder of Officer O'Malley, and transported
by airplane. Because he put up a struggle, police had to shackle him and virtually drag him to the plane. When they chained
him to a post inside it, he said, "Hell, I don't jump out of these things."
Dillinger, by now
a folk hero to Americans disillusioned with failing banks and the ineffective federal government, arrived at the jail in Crown
Point, Indiana, on January 30, 1934. But he would never be tried for the murder of Officer O'Malley. On March 3, he escaped
by threatening guards with a wooden gun he claimed to have carved out of a washboard. Dillinger stole the sheriff's car and
drove to Chicago. D.O.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover was ecstatic, because driving a stolen vehicle across state lines was a
federal crime, making Dillinger eligible for a D.O.I. pursuit.
From April 5 to 8, 1934, Dillinger
and Frechette visited his family in Mooresville. The gathering was a happy one that included a Sunday dinner. The following
day, Dillinger and Frechette drove to Chicago, where she was arrested by D.O.I. special agents.
Because of his fame, life was becoming increasingly difficult for Dillinger. He and Van Meter underwent plastic surgery on
May 27, 1934, at the home of Jimmy Probasco, a bar owner with connections to the Chicago Syndicate. The two men spent the
following month recuperating at Probasco's house.
During his recovery, Louis Piquett, Dillinger's
lawyer, and Arthur O'Leary, Piquett's legal investigator, visited Probasco's house frequently, and got to know Dillinger well.
They said he dressed neatly and conservatively, and kept his fingernails perfectly manicured. Dillinger liked to read, and
enjoyed talking about current events and baseball. He was usually friendly and good-natured, and rarely used profanity. Dillinger
had an outstanding ability to remain calm in an emergency, and to act quickly and rationally. Piquett and O'Leary said he
did not have a killer instinct.
On his 31st birthday, June 22, 1934, Dillinger was declared America's
first Public Enemy Number One. The following day the federal government promised a $10,000 reward for his capture, and a $5,000
reward for information leading to his arrest.
Dillinger moved into Anna Sage's apartment on July 4,
1934. Originally from Romania, she was facing deportation proceedings for operating several brothels. Sage was working a double
game, though; by turning Dillinger over to the D.O.I., she thought she would not be deported. On July 22, 1934, Dillinger
invited Sage and Polly Hamilton, his current girlfriend, to the movies. They saw Manhattan Melodrama with Clark Gable. When
the movie was finished, Dillinger walked out of the theater between Sage and Hamilton. He had walked into a D.O.I. ambush.
John Dillinger was shot twice, and died instantly.
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