Dillinger led a very brief and brutal life, dying at the age of 31. From age 21-30, he was incarcerated for robbing a grocery store and learned his bank robbing skills from other prisoners. Paroled in 1933, Dillinger and his gang began their bank robbing spree. Considering how famous he is/was, I was surprised to learn that he was active only from May 1933 until his death on July 24, 1934.
Besides the bank-robbing, Dillinger was noted for his two jail-breaks. The first was in Lima, Ohio, after being arrested in Dayton. The Allen County Museum in Lima has the actual jail cell in which he was held and where members of his gang broke him out and killed the sheriff. We stopped in the museum last month to see the exhibit.
After one other jail break in Crown Point, Indiana, and a nationwide manhunt, Dillinger was shot and killed in an alley outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago where he had just finished watching "Manhattan Melodrama" with a woman who had informed the police of his whereabouts.
We took some pictures of the Biograph on our last trip to Chicago.
Four death masks were made after Dillinger's death and the Allen County Museum has a copy of one of them.
Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis holds the Dillinger family plot and we made a quick visit a few years ago.
His mother, Mollie, who died when John was 4 years old.
His step-mother, Lizzie, who died a year before John.
And his father, John, who lived another 10 years after his infamous son died. His life strikes me as the saddest of them all.
The grave of John Herbert Dillinger is obviously well visited and the stone has been replaced several times due to people breaking off chunks as souvenirs. There was some recent talk about having Dillinger's body exhumed to prove, or disprove, that it was really his body. Some family relatives supported this and others, along with the cemetery, objected. To date, Dillinger lies undisturbed below his stone.
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