(2 of 3)
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.