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.