TIME
Monday, Aug. 06, 1934
CRIME: Dead & Alive
In a wicker basket aboard a hearse the body of John Dillinger rode home last week from Chicago's morgue to Mooresville, Ind. There it was dressed in a light suit, fitted into a $165 coffin, and taken to his sister's bungalow outside Indianapolis. During the night 2,500 mourners filed past all that was left of the year's worst killer.
Next afternoon a quartet opened the burial service by singing "God Will Take Care of Him." Father John Dillinger sat motionless in shirtsleeves. The Rev. Charles Fillmore, baptizer of Desperado Dillinger, preached: "I glory that this whole family has had faith in God ... a God of mercy ... so necessary in these days of vindictiveness and hatred." The quartet closed the service with: "We Say Good Night Down Here and Good Morning Up There."
Down thumped the lid of the coffin. The cort?ge set out for Indianapolis' Crown Hill Cemetery where President Benjamin Harrison and three Vice Presidents rest in peace.*
As rain began to fall, breaking the long heat wave (see p. 9), the body of John Dillinger was lowered into a grave beside that of his mother. Mr. Fillmore intoned: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. . . ." The dirt was shovelled in.
Next day in Chicago a man accused of harboring Dillinger during a face-lifting operation jumped to death out of a 19th story window.
In Indianapolis Father Dillinger & family started a six-a-day vaudeville tour.
In Los Angeles Attorney General Cummings postponed payment of the $15,000 reward for Dillinger until his return from Hawaii.
In Washington it was announced that no Federal charge would be brought against Mrs. Anna Sage, the "woman in red'' supposed to have betrayed Dillinger.
In Crown Hill Cemetery guards found a note on Dillinger's grave: "I'm going to get her, John. So long, old boy. J. H."
The Federal Government recognizes no "Public Enemy No. 1." In its books are some 6,000 gangsters and racketeers on whom it would like to lay its hands. Rejoicing at the Department of Justice would run highest if the following four were behind bars or in their graves:
Lester M. Gillis, alias George ("Baby Face") Nelson, 25, second-in-command of the Dillinger gang. Robbery put Gillis in Joliet in 1931. Last January he helped kidnap Edward G. Bremer in St. Paul. In April he killed a Federal agent while the Dillinger gang was shooting its way out of the Little Bohemia roadhouse in Wisconsin. The U. S. will pay $5,000 for him.
John Hamilton, 35, bandit, whom Dillinger helped to escape from the Indiana State Prison last September. Month later Hamilton returned the favor by delivering Dillinger from the jail in Lima, Ohio, killing a sheriff. The pair robbed banks, shot policemen with precise criminal skill.
Homer Van Meter, 29, got his start robbing trains in his 'teens. He met Dillinger in Indiana State Reformatory in 1925. Van Meter became Dillinger's body guard, slugged doctors into treating his chief, robbed police arsenals with him, lent a hand in bank robberies.
Charles ("Pretty Boy") Floyd, 30, Oklahoma badman and bank robber. Born in Georgia, raised in the Ozarks, Floyd in 1925 began a model training for crime: five years in the Missouri Penitentiary for highway robbery. Later he was largely responsible for the fact that Oklahoma country banks at that time paid the highest robbery insurance rate in the country. In one year he killed two Government informers in Kansas City, a Federal agent, a policeman. Last year he was spotted as the man who led the Kansas City massacre in Union Station during which four officers and their prisoner were machine-gunned to death. He is now supposedly hiding in the Ozark mountains.
*Thomas A. Hendricks, Charles W. Fairbanks. Thomas R. Marshall.
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