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The Death of John Dillinger

Was He Really Slain on the Streets of Chicago?

It was a scene made for a movie script (and in fact has been scripted for the big screen). Public Enemy Number One emerged one evening from a downtown theatre into a snare carefully constructed by government detectives. Sensing danger, he bolted down a side street, reaching for his automatic pistol. There was no time. A fusillade of gunfire from the darkness left John Dillinger, one of history's most infamous criminals, facedown and dying on the pavement.

The death of Dillinger happened basically that way, according to the long-closed file of the FBI (called simply the Bureau of Investigation at the time the drama occurred, July 1934). But in the minds of a few skeptics . . . or mystery instigators . . . the man felled by three bullets that evening in Chicago wasn't Dillinger. He was a look-alike, a small-time hood named James Lawrence who was made a pawn by a ring of conspirators—friends of Dillinger (clearly not friends of Lawrence). They arranged for Lawrence to be in a bad place at a bad time. The conspirators, according to the story, informed bureau agents that Dillinger would attend a showing of Manhattan Melodrama at the Biograph Theater. Lawrence, not Dillinger, was the miscreant attendee. Perhaps the plotters cajoled Lawrence to attend the movie after they secretly contacted the feds. Perhaps they had their go-between, pitiable bordello manager Ana Cumpanas, contact the bureau after learning that Lawrence planned to attend the movie. In either case, Lawrence took the lethal fall. Dillinger, according to the account, then was free to slink into comfortable anonymity and oblivion with his ill-gotten fortune from robbing banks. He presumably died quietly, under an alias, sometime during the next half century or so.

The Bureau of Investigation never officially designated Dillinger "Public Enemy Number One," although its training facility did come to use his likeness for target practice. He grew up in Indianapolis with an overbearing father and stepmother and turned out as your basic wild teen-ager. A school drop-out, he joined the Navy, soon deserted, and in 1924 was nabbed for attempted robbery. The Indiana prison system was cruel, Dillinger defiant. He made several escape attempts during the first few months of incarceration, resulting in an hellacious nine-year stint from which he emerged bitter and bent against the law. Within a month, beginning in early summer 1933, John Dillinger's prolific and thankfully brief crime spree was in high gear. Store and bank employees from Ohio to Arizona to Minnesota feared the mention of his name. He was arrested and escaped twice. The second time, he was being held on a murder charge in a supposedly "escape-proof" jail in Crown Point, Indiana, when he surprised guards with a fake pistol he'd carved and blacked with shoe polish. He stole the sheriff's car and escaped into Illinois. This simple act of interstate transportation was what made him a target of the feds—not for murder, but for violating the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act.

The pursuit, extending over a period of months, was bloody. Innocent folks died in the crossfires. G-men ("government men") directed by midwestern bureau chief Melvin Purvis couldn't catch the various Dillinger gangs. But in July 1934, they received a critical tip from one Ana Cumpanas, matron of a brothel in Gary, Indiana. Cumpanas was a Romanian national who feared being deported to Europe—and who wouldn't mind claiming the reward for John Dillinger's apprehension. In return for security and cash, she told Purvis she would accompany Dillinger and one of her prostitutes, whom he'd been seeing, to a movie in Chicago. To help agents identify the trio on the street, she would wear a bright red dress. Cumpanas thus notched her entry in criminal history as the celebrated "Woman in Red."

Perhaps it was surprising—too surprising—that the sting went off as planned. Soon, skeptics were challenging the identity of the corpse in the police photographs. Witnesses claimed certain physical traits, including the color of the dead man's eyes, failed to match the known description of Dillinger. Theories of a concealment conspiracy were proposed. Cumpanas certainly was involved, cover-up proponents asserted, as was at least one Chicago city detective.

On the other hand, why would criminal conspirators even have wanted to  arrange a delicate, apt-to-fail scheme to delude investigators into thinking Dillinger was dead? If Dillinger had decided to simply retire into obscurity with a fortune, he probably could have done so easily in any number of foreign countries, if not in America, under an assumed identity, without attempting a risky ruse of questionable benefit. ("Risky?" Well, for example: What if the alleged Dillinger look-alike hadn't been killed, but only wounded—or arrested peacefully. The plot quickly would have unraveled and all the conspirators would have been called into custody. Would Cumpanas, worried about deportation, have toyed with that possibility?)

But who's to say, at this date, whether the dead man was Dillinger or Lawrence? In the end, maybe it mattered little. History records no further atrocities committed by John Herbert Dillinger and company.

Footnote: We'll peek at the record of Ana Cumpanas, the "Woman in Red" who betrayed Dillinger, in a later issue of Blithering Antiquity.

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