Bad Man at Large

For months the Midwest has cringed under a reign of terror. For every kidnapping and extortion reported in the Press, perhaps a dozen others went unrecorded as respectable citizens had their first terrifying contact with crime and kept mum about it. Last week a new chapter in the history of Midwest crime was being forced upon them, a chapter less terrifying to most men individually, but one that reached unmatched heights of daredevil ruthlessness. It was the third chapter in the career of Desperado John Dillinger.

First chapter of the Dillinger career was the sordid story of a boy gone wrong. In 1924 he began with petty robbery, was identified after a grocery store hold-up at Mooresville outside of Indianapolis. For that he got a sentence of from 10 to 20 years. And the chapter ended with him in the Indiana State Penitentiary after he had proved too tough a customer to be handled in the reformatory.

Chapter No. 2 began last May when, thanks to the intercession of his honest farmer father and the judge who sentenced him, he was set free and went home. But prison had not cured him, for now his friends were the hardest of hard criminals. He resumed his career with petty robberies in Indianapolis, got enough cash to buy a fast car and guns, turned to bank robbing for which his contempt for human life fitted him. Within three months after his release from prison three banks alone yielded him over $40,000. With his new wealth and daring he plotted the release of his jailbird cronies whom he supplied with smuggled arms. Four days before their successful break at Michigan City, the police caught him in a woman's apartment in Indianapolis. He was sent to Lima, Ohio for trial on a bank robbery charge. Two weeks later on a favor for favor basis his pals raided the Lima jail, killed a sheriff and freed him.

Thus in four short months John Dillinger had become a famed desperado, a bad man no jail could hold and police everywhere were hunting him. In November they caught him coming out of a doctor's office in Chicago but he drove away through a hail of bullets. He began raiding small-town police stations in Indiana for arms and bullet-proof vests while his bank robberies multiplied. Then with his plunder he dropped out of sight until last January when officers arrested him and three of his gang, quietly vacationing in Tucson, Ariz. (TIME, Feb. 5). Chapter No. 2 ended with his return by air to Crown Point, Ind. to face a murder charge for a policeman killed in an East Chicago (Ind.) bank robbery.

The end of the third and most amazing chapter last week held the Midwest enthralled. That chapter began on March 3 when, with a wooden gun, John Dillinger bluffed his way out of jail at Crown Point, escaped in the woman sheriff's car, taking a negro murderer named Herbert Youngblood with him. (At Port Huron, Mich. Fugitive Youngblood fatally wounded a sheriff before he himself was killed.) From Crown Point in seven weeks Dillinger's bullet-strewn trail wound and rewound through half a dozen states (see map). He arrived in St. Paul with a shoulder wound, got a city health officer to redress it. Few days later three Federal agents trapped him in a St. Paul apartment with his sweetheart, Evelyn Frechette. Whipping out a machine gun, he sprayed his way to freedom but not before he had been pinked just above the knee. At the point of a gun he forced another doctor to treat him and stayed three days in the home of a nurse before resuming his travels. These finally took him back to Mooresville and his old father's home where he ate a quiet Sunday dinner with the family.*

At Sault Ste. Marie his pursuers were only three days behind their man. At Mercer, Wis. they actually caught up with him. There Dillinger and five of his henchmen, with three women, had rendezvoused in a roadhouse called Little Bohemia. Federal officers advanced on it in the night. Two big collies bayed a warning to its inmates. The Federals rushed forward. Three strangers, driving away in a car, failed to stop on command. Federal guns blazed. One man fell dead, two wounded, but none of them was Dillinger. From Little Bohemia came a machine gun volley and, behind it. Dillinger & gang made their getaway through a back window. Later one Federal agent crossed their trail and was shot dead. After that the north woods swallowed them.

Assistant Attorney General Joseph B. Keenan, chief-of-staff of the Federal war on crime, whose men captured and convicted notorious Harvey Bailey. Urschel kidnapper, thumped his desk wrathfully in Washington and declaimed:

"I don't know where or when we will get Dillinger, but we will get him. And you can say for me that I hope we will get him under such circumstances that the Government won't have to stand the expense of a trial."

Yet last week the army of the Law, 5,000 strong, seemed no closer than it had been before to John Dillinger & Co. In the woods of northern Wisconsin George (''Baby Face") Nelson stayed three days in the hut of Ollie Catfish, a Chippewa, and the Federals got on his trail after he had left. In a swamp nearby, the Federals went gunning for another gangster whom they were "sure" they had surrounded. At a bank hold-up in Chicago, another member of the gang, Homer van Meter, was "identified." In another suburb three policemen overtook a car, were promptly covered by machine guns and disarmed by men who they were "positive" were members of the gang. "It was Dillinger, all right." said one. But where Desperado Dillinger was or how he would strike next or even whether he yet lived no man knew.

*On this visit Dillinger had dyed his hair red. This was exceedingly embarrassing to a student at the University of Indiana who is red-haired and of Dillinger's approximate height and weight, who was reared at Martinsville only 18 miles from Mooresville and whose own name is also John Dillinger. Honest John Dillinger is no kin to Desperado John Dillinger.

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