John Dillinger – July 22 1934

“I rob banks for a living, what do you do?”

John Dillinger was shot dead by FBI agents outside the Biograph Theater on North Lincoln Avenue in Chicago on the evening of July 22nd 1934. He was 31 years old and had been Public Enemy Number One for less than a year. His death — arranged partly through the betrayal of a woman who became known as the Lady in Red — ended the most intense manhunt in FBI history to that point.

The Betrayal

By the summer of 1934, Dillinger was the most wanted man in America. He had escaped from two jails — including the supposedly escape-proof Crown Point county jail in Indiana, using a carved wooden gun — robbed dozens of banks across the midwest, and killed several police officers. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover had made capturing him a national priority and a test of the bureau’s credibility.

The tip came from Anna Sage, a Romanian-born madam who ran several brothels and was facing deportation proceedings. She was a friend of Dillinger’s girlfriend Polly Hamilton and had become close to Dillinger himself. She approached FBI agent Melvin Purvis and offered to set Dillinger up in exchange for help with her deportation case. The FBI agreed — and then deported her anyway after Dillinger was dead.

Outside the Biograph

On the evening of July 22nd, Sage, Hamilton and Dillinger attended a showing of Manhattan Melodrama at the Biograph. Sage wore an orange skirt — which appeared red under the cinema’s lights — so FBI agents waiting outside would be able to identify the group when they emerged. Approximately twenty agents were positioned around the theater.

As Dillinger emerged from the theater and turned into the alley alongside the building, agents moved to intercept him. Dillinger reached for a gun. Three shots were fired — two struck him in the body and one entered the back of his head, exiting below his right eye. He died within minutes on the pavement of the alley.

Aftermath and Controversy

The death of John Dillinger was treated as a major triumph for the FBI and for Melvin Purvis personally — though Hoover, who resented Purvis’s celebrity, subsequently forced him out of the bureau. Crowds gathered at the scene within minutes of the shooting, some reportedly dipping handkerchiefs and skirts in Dillinger’s blood as souvenirs.

Controversy has surrounded the killing ever since. Some researchers have argued that the man shot outside the Biograph was not Dillinger at all — that the real Dillinger escaped and lived out his life under a false identity. The FBI has consistently rejected this theory, but it has never entirely gone away. The body on display at the morgue showed several physical differences from the known photographs of Dillinger, and the mystery has fed decades of speculation.

Whether or not the body was really Dillinger’s, the man who had made the FBI look incompetent for years was gone. J. Edgar Hoover used the killing as the foundation of the bureau’s heroic mythology — and the Biograph Theater on North Lincoln Avenue still stands today as a landmark of Chicago crime history.