Dillinger, John Herbert (1903-1934), was one of the most notorious criminals in United States history. In 1933 and 1934, he and his gangs attracted national headlines for a series of Midwestern bank robberies and narrow escapes from the law.
Dillinger was born on June 22, 1903, in Indianapolis and raised in nearby Mooresville. His first robbery took place in Mooresville in 1924. He was caught and imprisoned until 1933. Soon afterward, he helped some prison inmates escape and joined them in forming a robbery gang.
In January 1934, Dillinger was arrested in Arizona and sent to Indiana to face charges of killing a policeman. He soon broke out of a supposedly escape-proof jail in Crown Point, Indiana, by using what he claimed was a carved wooden pistol. His flight across state lines in a stolen car violated federal law, making him a fugitive from the FBI, then called the Bureau of Investigation. After recruiting a gang, Dillinger resumed robbing banks. He escaped from gun battles with federal agents in Minnesota and Wisconsin. By mid-1934, he had been involved in at least 10 bank robberies in Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, and South Dakota.
Dillinger was hiding in Chicago when he was betrayed by Anna Sage, an acquaintance, on July 22, 1934. Sage told federal agents she would be wearing a red dress when she and a girlfriend accompanied Dillinger to the Biograph theater that night to see the Clark Gable crime movie Manhattan Melodrama. Federal agents fatally shot Dillinger as he left the theater, and Sage became famous as the “woman in red.”
