The focal point in the thrilling tale that created one of the city's most famous and favorite ghosts, the Biograph Theater on north Lincoln Avenue welcomed a very special guest on a hot July night in 1934 to his last picture show: John Dillinger, christened by his pursuers as Public Enemy Number One.
That evening, Dillinger left the theater accompanied by Anna Sage, the legendary "Lady in Red" and a favorite prostitute, Polly Hamilton, with whom he had been holed up at her 2420 N. Halsted Street apartment. At that point, the infamous criminal met his long-avoided end in a narrow alleyway just steps from the theater doors. The bullet fired through the back of his neck by FBI Agent Charles Winstead had been a long time coming. Congratulations poured into the Chicago Police Department and U.S. government agencies from around the world. For while Dillinger's international renown had been quickly won, he made it unforgettable by being impossibly hard to nab.
For four months, Melvin Purvis, the soft-spoken head of Chicago's FBI agents, had lived and breathed the chase for the Indiana-born gangster, desperate to snag him before Purvis' critics could oust him in favor of "a more experienced man." In hot pursuit of his prey, Purvis had lived from tip to tip, leading his agents in a foiled attempt to surround the scoundrel at a State Street and Austin cafe, an impressive but ill-fated attack on Dillinger's North Woods hideout at Sault St. Marie, and the infamous confrontation at Wisconsin's Little Bohemia Lodge, in which FBI agents recklessly injured two civilians and killed a third. It was here, too, that George "Baby Face" Nelson reportedly killed Special Agent W. Carter Baum, prompting FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover to call Nelson a "rat." Yet these near misses with the FBI were only the last stretch of a sensational, though short, career.
A summary of the "High Points in Life of John Dillinger" was provided by the Chicago Tribune on the morning after his fatal shooting. What follows the headline is a catalog of arrests, sentencings, shootouts, and escapes. At the age of 20, Dillinger held up his hometown grocery store in Mooresville, Indiana. Pleading guilty, he was sentenced to serve 10 to 20 years in prison, while his accomplice, pleading not guilty, received a sentence of little more than two years. Bitterly reflecting on this joke of justice, Dillinger spent a quiet eight and a half years planning his revenge on the law. On May 22, 1933, the then-unknown Dillinger was paroled and proceeded to rob three banks in as many months, making off with$40,000. He was incarcerated at Lima, Ohio in September of that same year. When, barely three weeks later, three former fellow inmates invaded the prison and sprung Dillinger, they ushered the convict into a brief but stellar stint as an internationally notorious gangster. His gang would be described after his death as "the most notorious band of outlaws in America, probably the world." Eluding a police trap in November, the gang pulled off a bank robbery later that month. To celebrate the new year, an unrepentant Dillinger shot and killed police officer William O'Malley in another bank robbery in East Chicago, for which he was arrested in Arizona and sent to Crown Point, Indiana to stand trial. Predictably, he escaped a month later by carving a gun out of soap and blackening it with shoe polish and eluded pursuers for another month. Finding himself at that point in another jam, he shot his way out of a St. Paul police trap on March 31st and made a similar escape from the FBI trap near Mercer, Wisconsin, where he killed two people in the process. Two months later, police found a Ford V-8 at Roscoe and Leavitt streets treated with a fingerprint-dissolving chemical and with one of the windows smashed out to facilitate shotgunning. Inside the car were a half dozen pop bottles, a baby stroller used to tote tommy guns during getaways, and a matchbook from the Little Bohemia Lodge. There was no doubt about it. Dillinger was in Chicago.
In late June, Dillinger was home again, his gang robbing a South Bend, Indiana bank, wounding four civilians and slaying police officer William P. O'Malley, a close friend of East Chicago's then-police chief, Martin Zarkovich.
In little more than a year, Dillinger had led six major bank robberies, killed two police officers, a civilian, and two FBI agents, escaped imprisonment twice, and eluded or shot his way out of a half-dozen cleverly-laid traps.
Prior to his death, the hardened gangster had been well aware of his streak of fortune and was none too secure about its future continuance. In May 1934, a skittish Dillinger had called his lawyer to discuss the prospect of plastic surgery. On the run from nearly every law enforcement agent in the country, the outlaw yet dared to hope for a new freedom, freedom which might be realized through the alteration of his well-known countenance and the obliteration of his infamous fingerprints. Accustomed to relying on none but himself and his gang for salvation, Dillinger was nonetheless prepared to put his money on one man, a surgeon by the name of Loeser. The gangster felt his trust was well placed, for he and his would-be doctor were birds of a feather: the latter had done time in Leavenworth on a narcotics charge. Sprung from his cage, Loeser was in dire need of funds. In payment for the surgeon's services, Dillinger opened his billfold to the tune of five grand.
On May 27th, the optimistic hood arrived on schedule for the promised procedure, met by his lawyer. In a derelict northside flat, owned by an ex-speakeasy operator, the two passed the night in expectation of the doctor's arrival the next day. When Loeser showed, however, the gangster and his counsel were disturbed to find him accompanied by a pallid and nerve-wracked young assistant. Soothed by the doctor's reassurances, the patient recited his wish list to the attentive Loeser: remove three moles and his giveaway scar; fill in his cleft chin and the bridge of his nose; and, most importantly, nix the damning fingerprints. Agreeing to the changes, Loeser showed Dillinger to a cot, instructed his assistant to administer a general anesthetic, and left the room to prepare for the operation. Placing an ether-soaked towel over Dillinger's nose and mouth, the assistant advised his charge to take some deep breaths. The patient obliged, with dire results. The flustered accomplice- had given the gangster a dangerous dosage and his face proceeded to tum blue. Then, to the young man's horror, Dillinger swallowed his tongue.
Summoned by his assistant's screams, Loeser grabbed his forceps and pulled Dillinger's tongue from his throat. The patient was not breathing. In a ramshackle flat on a quiet Chicago morning, the world's most wanted criminal was dead.
Thoroughly alarmed to action, Loeser worked furiously to restore respiration. After a few moments on the other side, Dillinger was revived, reassured, and re-anaesthetized. The surgery was resumed and completed to the gangster's satisfaction. Ironically, a mere 25 days later, Dillinger's new lease on life was bluntly terminated by a well-placed bullet from the frantic FBI.
At approximately 8:30 in the evening on July 22nd, the surgically-altered outlaw strolled into a screening of "Manhattan Melodrama" at the Biograph Theater on north Lincoln Avenue, observed by no less than 16 police officers and FBI agents, including Melvin Purvis himself. For two hours and four minutes, the watchers waited, one or another occasionally entering the theater to walk the aisles in search of their prey. When Dillinger finally emerged onto the sidewalk, his would-be captors were more than ready, but a little bit wary.
Public Enemy Number One he was, but he looked nothing like the romantic trench-coated antagonist noir that popular culture imagined. Instead, agents beheld a weary moviegoer on a hot summer night, clad in a straw hat, a gray-and-black flecked tie knotted onto a white silk shirt, canvas shoes, and gray summer trousers. Coatless, he appeared unarmed as well and must have undermined the resolve of more than a few of his stalkers, especially in light of his altered features. To Purvis, however, he was unmistakable: 'I knew him the minute I saw him. You couldn't miss if you had studied that face as much as I have.'
As the target strolled south on Lincoln Avenue, he stepped down a curb to a narrow alley entrance. As Dillinger turned down the passageway, a half dozen agents closed in. The moment froze as Dillinger, his back to the pack, instinctively went for a cleverly• concealed .38-too late. Four shots were fired, three hitting their mark. Among a swarm of home-bound moviegoers and nearly a score of law enforcement officers, Dillinger went down. Chaos ensued.
According to the Chicago Tribune, Dillinger dropped at the feet of Mrs. Pearl Doss, a woman that recognized the fallen man as "Johnnie," a neighbor boy from her Indiana youth. Doss claimed that in that moment of recognition she was close enough to catch his classic last words: "They've got me at last."
A nearby barkeep mistook the victim for his brother-in-law, sending his wife into hysterics. Tradition tells of passers-by running to dip their handkerchiefs in the still-flowing blood, anxious for gruesome souvenirs of the startling event. Struggling for control, Purvis ordered that Dillinger be rushed to nearby Alexian Brothers Hospital. Dead on arrival, Dillinger's body was turned away at the doors. The strange party retired to the hospital lawn to await the deputy coroner.
That night the city awoke, electric. For weeks, Northsiders had been warned by police at the Town Hall and Sheffield district headquarters that the outlaw had been seen in Lakeview, North Center, and Uptown by various witnesses. A March 7th edition of the local Booster newspaper proclaimed:
LOOK UNDER YOUR BED. SEARCH YOUR CELLAR. SHAKE OUT THE MOTHBALLS FROM LAST SUMMER'S CLOTHES. DILLINGER IS HIDING SOMEWHERE HERE. AND HE MAY BE HIDING IN YOUR BACKYARD.
One lifetime North Side resident, Frances Kathrein, recalls that sweltering July night in 1934, when she and her brothers and sisters lay sleeping on the front-room floor of their second-story flat, hoping for a breath of wind through the screen door. What wafted through that door was not a summer breeze, however, but a sudden sound of commotion on the street outside. Frances' future husband, Norbert, then 13 years old, tore down Cuyler Avenue with a group of newsboys full of papers and cries of "Extra!," delivering in loud voices the news: "Dillinger's Shot!"
In a report shocking for its day, the Chicago Tribune reported on the mob scene at the Cook County morgue, where the line of curiosity-seekers snaked through the building, apparently oblivious to rows of exposed corpses, and stretched down the block outside. The coroner, a man by the name of Walsh, after viewing the crowd "with apparent satisfaction," posed for photographs with the body. At his instruction, Dillinger's corpse was placed in a basement room behind a glass panel so that the crowds might be allowed to file past for a look at the expired Enemy. The scene was as absurd as might be imagined, and the Tribune presented it in all its brutishness, focusing particular attention on the women in the crowd, who
pushed forward with massive shoulders and hips. Some of them sighed or groaned with a pretense of horror as they looked at the body, tilted at a 45- degree angle to give a better view. One or two with faces slightly less depraved than the others clucked their tongues and said as they went away: I wouldn't have wanted to see him except that I think it's a moral lesson, don't you? ... One fat blonde woman, after leaving the basement, applied fresh lipstick and, preparing to join the waiting line to have another look, said, "I'm disappointed. Looks just like any other dead man."
The Biograph Theater manager declined a chance to speak to the press about the theater's role in the set-up, fearing possible ill-effects on his business. On the other hand, when one reporter, hoping to squeeze some information from Morris Oppenheimer, the proprietor of the bar next door, arrived at the tavern, he found that Oppenheimer had "already paint[ed] a sign, in blood-red letters, proclaiming:
DILLINGER HAD HIS LAST DRINK HERE.
In light of the mania following Dillinger's death, it seems almost unbelievable that no unusual phenomena were reported at the shooting site in the immediate months and years that followed. In fact, it was not until the 1970s that passers-by on north Lincoln Avenue began to spot a bluish figure running down the alley, stumbling, falling, and disappearing. Accompanying such sightings were the typical reports of cold spots, feelings of uneasiness, and the sudden unwillingness to use the alley as a handy shortcut to Halsted Street.
In recent years, while paranormal tales of that alleyway have lapsed, its history and mystery remain. Visitors to the Biograph Theater can examine a diagram on the window of the old box office describing the complex set-up of Dillinger by Melvin Purvis' FBI. Led by the story, they can sit in the seat where Dillinger sat more than 60 years ago and afterwards emerge to walk his last path to the passage still known by older Chicagoans as "Dillinger's Alley." There, just beyond the pool of neon light shed by the theater's brilliant marquee, the imaginative and the perceptive might well wonder about the supernatural survival of that most reluctant of victims.
Dillinger's will to live may continue to inspire us to doubt his death, a doubt that echoes that of Mary Kinder, a friend of Dillinger's. Kinder had certainly read the news about the shoot-out in the alley and had talked with a legion of reporters the next morning about her reaction to the fugitive's demise. Despite the undeniable fact of Dillinger's demise, the girl couldn't help asking, as some still do, "Is it true? Is he dead?"
Ursula Bielski is the author of 12 books on Chicago's haunted and dark history and the founder and owner of Chicago Hauntings Tours. She is the host of The Hauntings of Chicago on PBS and the co-host of "The Haunting of M.R. James." Scroll down for a coupon for Chicago Hauntings Tours, available year round, and a link to the website.
All material on this website is copyright Ursula Bielski 2019. Do not republish anything anywhere. Thank you and God bless you!
Ghosts of the White City: Ghosts Stories of the World's Fair, the Great Fire and Victorian Chicago. History Press. 2019
Also see :
Ursula Bielski: Chicago Haunts: Ghostlore of the Windy City.
Ursula Bielski: More Chicago Haunts: Scenes from Myth and Memory
Ursula Bielski: Chicago Haunts 3: Locked Up Stories from an October City
Ursula Bielski & Matt Hucke: Graveyards of Chicago
Ursula Bielski: Creepy Chicago
Ursula Bielski: There's Something Under the Bed!
Ursula Bielski: Haunted Bachelors Grove
Ursula Bielski: Haunted Gary
Coming in 2020/21:
Ursula Bielski: Chicago Hauntings: A Treasury of Classic & Contemporary Ghostlore
Ursula Bielski: Permanent Paranormal Objects
Ursula Bielski: The Ghost in You
Ursula Bielski: The Bluebird Tap: A Memoir
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