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John Dillinger:’Public Enemy No. 1′
Notorious bank robber John Dillinger is said to have been set up at the Biograph theater in Chicago and shot to death by FBI agents on July 22, 1934. In 1924 he was sent to the Indiana State Reformatory for holding up a grocer, and was later transferred to the Michigan City, Indiana, State Prison, where he hatched a plan for a mass breakout with a group of other infamous convicts. When Dillinger was paroled in 1933, he robbed several banks to provide money for his friends’ escape. He was caught in Ohio, but by then his friends had escaped and they helped him break out. Dillinger’s supposed death the next year remains mysterious–Anna Sage, the ‘Lady in Red,’ had agreed to deliver Dillinger to the FBI if they would stop deportation proceedings against her. The setup went as planned, and the FBI shot the man with Anna Sage–but by some accounts, the man was not John Dillinger.

Photo: The Dillinger Photo File