An unthinkable thing is about to happen.
In June, descendants of the famous gangster John Dillinger filed a request with the Indiana Department of Health to have the folk hero’s body exhumed from his resting place in Indianapolis’ Crown Point Cemetery.
The Indianapolis Star reported a few days ago that the health department granted that request. No date for exhumation has been announced, and since Dillinger was buried under heaps of concrete to reportedly protect him from corpse snatchers, his resurfacing could take a while.
When I first heard the news, I hoped it had something to do with a conspiracy theory that’s floated through the American consciousness for 85 years: that the man buried in that tomb isn’t actually John Dillinger.
And on Thursday, it came out that my wish had been granted.
Carol and Michael Thompson, Dillinger’s niece and nephew, wrote in an affidavit submitted to the department of health that they aren’t sure their uncle is the man FBI agents filled with bullets outside the Biograph Theater on July 22, 1934.
The FBI stands by its story, because of course it does. And sure, the possibility that Dillinger lived past his supposed execution is remote.
But it isn’t impossible. Here are a few reasons why.
The evidence
In the affidavit, the Thompsons go as far as saying they have evidence Dillinger isn’t the man resting in the grave.
They cite autopsy results that prove the person buried in Crown Point didn’t match Dillinger in several key ways. He had different-colored eyes, mismatched fingerprints, and a disparate set of teeth.
The autopsy report itself vanished for 50 years until it was discovered jammed inside a random paper bag at the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office in 1984.
“It is my belief and opinion that it is critical to learn whether Dillinger lived beyond his reported date of death of July 22, 1934,” Michael Thompson wrote in the affidavit obtained by the Indianapolis Star. “If he was not killed on that date, I am interested in discovering what happened to him, where he lived, whether he had children, and whether any such children or grandchildren are living today.”
The plastic surgeon
July 22 was a big night for Melvis Purvis.
He helmed a team of federal and local agents who crouched in the shadows outside the Biograph, waiting for the man they hunted for months to walk into the hot summer night.
A woman named Anna Sage told Purvis that Dillinger was inside watching a showing of “Manhattan Melodrama.”
The FBI's official story goes like this: Dillinger appeared and the agents gave chase, trapping him in a nearby alley.
Dillinger attempted to draw his own gun, but it was too late. Agents shot him dead and watched as he fell into the street. Onlookers rushed to dip their handkerchiefs and skirt hems in his blood, hoping to escape with a macabre souvenir.
However, press reports from the next day contained a quote from Purvis that added a weird pall of mystery to the whole thing.
“The plastic surgeon did a good job,” Purvis told United Press International. “But I knew Dillinger the minute I saw him.”
Purvis was commenting on a well-known story that Dillinger had sought out plastic surgery to elude capture.
According to the History Channel – which is making a documentary about this whole exhumation process – Dillinger paid “underworld surgeons” $5,000 to perform facial reconstruction on him.
They allegedly sliced off some moles, filled his cleft chin and burned off his fingerprints with chemicals.
But, according to an account published in the Evansville Press on July 23, 1934, morgue attendants and local police who examined the body didn’t see any difference in his appearance.
Reportedly, Dillinger didn’t either. In the wake of the painful procedures, he lashed out at his sketchy surgeons.
“Hell, I don’t look any different than I did!” he allegedly said after staring in a mirror.
If both Dillinger and local police didn’t see a difference in his appearance, why did Purvis? Did the rudimentary black-market surgery work better than initially thought? Was Purvis just adding a little noir-ish twist to the story?
Or did the man outside the Biograph look different for an even simpler reason: because he was a different man?
Jay Robert Nash
Prolific true crime author Jay Robert Nash has written multiple books claiming that John Dillinger lived well past the supposed day of his death.
In 2009, when the Dillinger biopic “Public Enemies” came out, legendary film critic Roger Ebert turned his column over to Nash.
The move allowed Nash to lay out his theory in lurid, captivating, insane detail. Giving it proper due would cause this column to stretch to a length that would make Ayn Rand blush, so here are the key bullet points.
- The FBI, still a fledgling organization back in those days, brimmed with mistake-prone amateurs. Perhaps they shot the wrong man and had no choice but to cover it up. After all, they had already shot three men they mistook for members of Dillinger’s gang during a botched raid at the Little Bohemia Lodge in Wisconsin.
- Purvis perpetuated the lie to keep his job. According to Nash, J. Edgar Hoover was all over Purvis to finally to capture the suave criminal. After all, he was making authorities look awful, and the public loved him for it. Making a big deal out killing Dillinger, only to turn around later and take it all back, would have been too much to handle.
- Dillinger aided in the faking of his own death, and laughed in the background at Crown Point cemetery as he watched men dig his own grave.
- Dillinger fled west to live out the rest of his life on a Native American reservation with a new wife. Nash claims he has a picture of the two, taken in Oregon in 1948.
Nash’s greatest claim, though? That, years after 1934, he met John Dillinger.
Or at least it was a man he believed could have been Dillinger. The meeting took place in Puente, California. Nash and the man stood in a dark room and had a brief conversation.
“I do not know for certain that the man I talked to was John Dillinger or not,” he wrote in Ebert’s column. “If that was the case, however, it was not my obligation to inform anyone about it, for, according to the FBI, John Herbert Dillinger had been dead since July 22, 1934.
“The world bought Hoover's story and it is welcome to it. I told my story, and the world is welcome to that, too.”
More at: https://www.courierpress.com/story/o...ry/1895302001/
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Originally Posted by Anti Globalist
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