When the infamous bank robber and outlaw John Dillinger was buried in an Indiana cemetery,
his relatives put him under 3 feet of concrete and scrap metal.
Now, the History Channel is planning to dig up his body and see what they find.
Here's the true story of John Dillinger.
John Dillinger was born in 1903, and his mother passed away from a stroke when he was just 4 years
old.
According to History, his dad was an inconsistent disciplinarian who would beat him up and lock
him in the house, but then allow him to roam around the neighborhood at night.
Dillinger became the leader of a street gang called "The Dirty Dozen," which mostly just
ran around the neighborhood pranking people and stealing things.
There were also reports of teenaged antics that included "malicious behavior."
"Schoolboy mischief.
All in the past."
By age 16, Dillinger had dropped out of school.
In 1923, he joined the Navy, and was assigned to the USS Utah as a Fireman 3rd Class.
According to the website Medic in the Green Time, his job was shoveling coal into the
ship's burners.
Dillinger figured he really shouldn't have to do it.
So not long after signing up, he went absent without leave.
When he came back, they threw him in the brig and gave him only bread and water for 10 days.
Dillinger left again.
His superiors waited two weeks for him to come back, then listed him as a deserter.
He was finally given a "undesirable discharge" in 1925 while he was serving time at the Indiana
State Reformatory.
Dillinger met Beryl Ethel Hovious in the spring of 1924.
They got married, and he made a go of life without crime.
It didn't work out great.
Dillinger and his bride had no income, so the couple moved into the house on Dillinger's
father's farm.
Just a few weeks after the wedding, he got caught stealing chickens, and his dad had
to pull strings to keep him out of jail.
The incident put further strain on an already tough father-son relationship, so the couple
ended up moving in with Beryl's parents.
Finally, Dillinger got a job in an upholstery shop and joined a baseball team, which seemed
like a positive step forward.
But that's how he met his first real partner in crime, Edgar Singleton.
He'd soon be in the Indiana State Reformatory.
Beryl visited him there for a few years, and Dillinger sent her frequent letters of love
and devotion, but she eventually got restless and by 1929, they divorced.
Dillinger would later say she had broken his heart.
The crime that got John Dillinger a 10- to 20-year prison sentence in the Indiana State
Reformatory was not a bank robbery or a shooting.
No, it was a foiled stick-up.
And it was Edgar Singleton, the guy he met while playing on the baseball team, who talked
him into committing the crime.
It's reported that the duo planned to rob an elderly grocer at gunpoint.
Dillinger would confront the old man while Singleton waited in an alley with a getaway
car.
But things didn't go the way they were supposed to.
The grocer fought back, the gun went off, and Dillinger fled.
When Dillinger arrived in the alley, there was no sign of Singleton or the getaway car.
Dillinger and Singleton were both caught by the police, but Singleton had a lawyer and
Dillinger did not.
Dillinger's father also got some terrible legal advice from the local prosecutor, who
promised the courts would be lenient if his son would just plead guilty.
Dillinger took the prosecutor's advice and the courts still gave him 10 to 20 years.
Meanwhile, Singleton only served two years of his four-year sentence.
Dillinger wasn't exactly a model prisoner, but he was popular with his fellow inmates.
He worked in the prison shirt factory as a seamster and was so good at it that he used
to fill his own quota and then fill some of the other seamsters' quotas, too.
According to History, he also tried to break out a few times.
By the time Beryl divorced him, Dillinger was already a deeply bitter man.
During his time at Indiana State Reformatory, he made friends with fellow convicts who taught
him the art of bank robbery and got his feet planted firmly on the road to never being
able to do anything else with his life.
Dillinger's sentence was shorter than his new friends' sentences, so he was tasked with
carrying out a series of fundraising robberies that would give them the money they needed
to bribe their guards and facilitate their escape.
"What is it exactly you do for a living?"
"I'm John Dillinger.
I rob banks."
Their lucky break came when Dillinger was granted early parole so he could visit his
gravely ill stepmother.
She passed away before he could return home, but that wasn't really the point.
Dillinger was only ever charged with slaying one person: 43-year-old patrolman William
Patrick O'Malley.
O'Malley was one of the officers who responded to a robbery at the First National Bank of
East Chicago on January 15, 1934.
He arrived just as Dillinger and his gang were fleeing the scene.
The two men exchanged gunfire, but Dillinger was wearing a bullet-resistant vest so he
escaped unharmed.
O'Malley wasn't so lucky.
O'Malley's descendants say his body had 18 bullet holes in it.
It was the first Dillinger Gang slaying of a law enforcement officer and the only one
ever attributed to Dillinger himself.
Dillinger was eventually extradited to Indiana to face charges.
He escaped, though, and spent most of the rest of his life on the run, so he was never
actually convicted of the crime.
John Dillinger was a bad guy.
There's really not much doubt about that.
Yet for some reason, the public loved him and sometimes even seemed to think of him
as a Robin Hood sort of figure, even though there's not really any evidence that he was
ever especially generous to the poor.
“Now put it away.
I'm not here for your money.
I'm here for the bank's money."
To understand the public fascination with Dillinger, you really only have to look at
the times in which he lived.
After Patrick O'Malley, the FBI named Dillinger "Public Enemy Number One."
That title put him in the spotlight, which he shared with the many tangible misfortunes
of the Great Depression.
People everywhere were suffering, and a lot of them blamed the banks for their troubles.
So Dillinger wasn't just a criminal, he was a guy who was fighting back against the institutions
that had robbed the common people.
It didn't hurt that he was also a very charismatic guy.
Every encounter with the police seemed to come with a great one-liner that would further
endear him to the media and the people.
When police shackled him to his seat on an airplane, he reportedly said,
"Guys, I don't jump from these things."
Dillinger's most famous jailbreak was his last one.
According to the New York Daily News, in the late winter of 1934, Dillinger was transported
from Arizona to the so-called "escape proof" Lake County Jail in Indiana, which sounds
a bit like the "unsinkable" Titanic.
Dillinger didn't seem especially intimidated by Lake County's reputation, famously declaring,
quote, "a jail is like a nut with a worm in it."
On March 3rd, 1934, he really did escape, and he did it with a fake gun.
He carved the fake gun himself, possibly from the leg of something like a washboard, and
then he blackened it, possibly with shoe polish, and waved it around intimidatingly until the
guards let him out.
Then he waved it around some more until every employee was locked away in a closet or cell.
Finally, he stole some real guns and a car and forced a garage employee to drive him
away.
That fake gun is now so iconic that there are at least three versions of it, and no
one's quite sure which one is genuine.
Dillinger's break from the Lake County Jail turned out to be his fatal mistake, and it
wasn't because he used a fake gun or stole machine guns or kidnapped a garage employee.
It was because he stole a sheriff's car and used it to cross from Indiana to Illinois.
That was a violation of the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act and a federal offense, which
meant the FBI, then called the Bureau of Investigation, was now involved in the effort to bring him
to justice.
John Dillinger was kind of like the bureau's big break.
Before his infamous crime spree, it was suffering from a credibility problem.
They were expected to work with local police, which was as embarrassing as it was inefficient.
When Dillinger rose to infamy, Director J. Edgar Hoover was trying to reform the bureau,
and one of his strategies was assigning "special agents" to high-profile cases like Dillinger's.
In many ways, Hoover used Dillinger's infamy to elevate the bureau into the FBI, which
became its name in 1935, we know today.
Crime historian Paul Maccabee told South Dakota Public Broadcasting:
"[When] the FBI transformed John Dillinger into "Public Enemy #1" […] what does that
turn J. Edgar into?
It turns him into Public Friend #1."
John Dillinger loved the spotlight, but unfortunately for him, being a celebrity outlaw was not
a good way of evading the police.
According to Crime Museum, Dillinger's face became so well known that he had a hard time
laying low.
In Mercer, Wisconsin, Dillinger holed up at the Little Bohemia Lodge with some of his
criminal cohorts, but other residents of the inn recognized him and called the police.
He barely escaped, and concluded that he would need to change his appearance.
Dillinger dyed his hair and grew a mustache, but that wasn't enough, so he enlisted the
help of "underworld plastic surgeons" to have his entire face changed.
He also burned off his fingerprints with acid.
Still, unless he was planning to never rob a bank again, or to never get captured again,
or to always wear a mask while committing crime, it seems like the plastic surgery was
also a temporary solution.
But we'll never know, because Dillinger was finally foiled not long after getting the
procedures done.
Dillinger must have been feeling pretty good about his new face and his supposed anonymity,
because on the night of July 22nd, 1934, he decided to go to a movie at Chicago's Biograph
Theater with friends Polly Hamilton and Anna Sage.
Sage, as it turned out, was not his friend.
She had just tipped off the FBI about his whereabouts.
According to the FBI, Sage was a brothel madam who was about to be deported for being in
the country illegally.
She agreed to provide information about Dillinger in exchange for a stop to the deportation
proceedings.
She told agents when and where they could find the infamous outlaw, and when the film
ended, the FBI was waiting outside.
Dillinger quickly recognized the sting operation and fled into an alley, where he was shot
by agents.
The bullet that got him entered the back of his neck and severed his spinal cord before
entering his brain.
And so ended John Dillinger's celebrity crime spree.
His total takings: About $500,000, which was roughly a quarter of what the FBI spent on
its effort to bring him to justice.
Dillinger's body was put on public display at the Cook County morgue, and thousands of
people came to see it.
A Wild West show even offered Dillinger's father $5,000 for his son's body.
So really, the decision to bury the body under 3 feet of concrete was a practical one.
Dillinger's family had no reason to think that the public's appetite for morbid spectacle
would go away once he was in the ground.
As the years passed, Dillinger's living relatives seemingly stopped caring so much about the
peaceful slumber of his mortal remains.
In July 2019 a group of descendants applied for a permit to exhume his body.
"They want the body buried here since 1934 exhumed so that modern-day DNA tests can compare
the old bones with DNA from current relatives."
His niece and nephew wrote in separate affidavits:
"I have been presented with evidence that demonstrates that the individual [in the grave]
may not in fact have been my uncle, John H. Dillinger."
It's not the first time the theory has been raised.
In 1965, the Indianapolis News received a letter from a man claiming to be John Dillinger.
Of course there's also the part where the family may or may not be profiting off the
History Channel documentary that will show the entire morbid affair to a prime-time television
audience.
Did Dillinger really pass in that alley?
We'll know the answer in September, if the exhumation goes forward as planned.
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