Originally posted by Archaic
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Nash's books contain so many errors and outright fictions that he is not generally held in high regard by many American crime historians.
"Jimmy Lawrence" was simply an alias of Dillinger's. He did not work at any time as a clerk but did tell people he worked for the Chicago Board of Trade. Dillinger did take Polly Hamilton out dancing and also to Cubs ball games and movies but this sort of bravado typified his entire brief 14-month career as a bank robber. He typically engaged in "hiding in plain sight." The previous year Dillinger had attended the World's Fair in Chicago with an earlier girlfriend, Mary Longnaker, where he delighted in taking pictures of unsuspecting police officers he asked to pose for. At the time of his death Dillinger had recently undergone plastic surgery and while it did not dramatically alter his features he may have been a little overconfident with his "new face." (If you look at some of the other morgue photos of Dillinger you can still see the resemblance, including Dillinger head shape and the widow's peak hairline.) It's worth noting too that Dillinger allegedly had contacts within the Chicago Police Department and the Cook County State's Attorney's office. At the time of his death he was also planning one last job, a train robbery, after which he intended to flee to Mexico.
Dillinger had served in the Navy (in 1923, eleven years before his death, and the medical condition may not have existed then; I'm also inclined to think that U.S. Navy physical exams were perhaps less rigorous then than now), had played baseball, and was noted for his especially athletic stunts, such as leaping over bank teller's cages during some of his early robberies (he gave that stunt up after a short time when some of his accomplices ridiculed it as unprofessional behavior). But he did have a rheumatic heart condition. This was confirmed by Dr. Patrick Weeks, the prison doctor at the Indiana State Penitentiary in Michigan City, who had treated Dillinger during his incarceration there. I'm no doctor but I've known people who were rheumatic and still managed to have active and even athletic lifestyles. None of them robbed banks, of course, but at least one other notorious outlaw who was contemporary with Dillinger was diagnosed as a teenager with a bad heart. This was Alvin Karpis, who lived a life similar to Dillinger's and survived not only five years on the run but 33 years in federal prisons, 25 of them in Alcatraz, and lived until 1979 when he died in Spain, supposedly of a drug overdose.
None of the morgue photos I've seen of Dillinger's corpse show his teeth and I don't recall now if there's any mention of the missing tooth in the autopsy report. I'll have to check on that. The missing tooth is evident in newsreel film footage of Dillinger laughing in the Crown Point jail during his brief stay there. It has been reported that Dillinger sometimes wore a temporary filling to replace the missing tooth.
Again, I'm no doctor but different medical opinions I've heard expressed by people who are qualified have been to the effect that eye color can be affected/darkened by such things as a traumatic head wound (a .45 ACP slug from Special Agent Charles Winstead's automatic entered the base of Dillinger's skull, passed through his brain, and exited below his right eye) or by exposure to heat (Dillinger's body was displayed for the public for hours in an unrefrigerated room at the Cook County Morgue during one of the hottest nights in a record-breaking Midwestern summer; don't recall for sure but I believe something like 23 people died of heat exposure in Chicago on July 22, 1934). So Dillinger's grey eyes might possibly have appeared brown and simply been erroneously recorded.
The fledgling agents of what would become the FBI (known until 1935 as the Division of Investigation) were real novices as detectives at the time. Most were young lawyers with little real law enforcement experience. Until the Lindbergh kidnapping in 1932 they been generally just investigators and mostly of white-collar criminals and car thieves who happened to drive across a state line. They'd had little real experience in dealing with violent criminals such as gangsters and bank robbers and were learning along the way. They'd only recently acquired the legal authority to carry firearms at all times and to make arrests without the assistance of local police. But there would have been no thoughts along the lines of looking at the dead man's eyes at the time, or of preserving the integrity of the shooting scene, etc., or of anything much beyond picking up Dillinger's gun, explaining things to the just arriving Chicago police, and trying to maintain some form of crowd control as people flocked into the alley.
Dillinger's father feared the corpse would be stolen. John Sr. had received several offers from carnival operators, etc. for his son's body. Though doubtless affected by the Depression, John Sr. was not impoverished either. He had been relatively well off before moving to Mooresville. He bought his farm with proceeds from the sale of his grocery store and four houses in Indianapolis. The Dillinger family had also received money, and new cars, from Dillinger during his time as a fugitive.
Melvin Purvis may or may not have committed suicide. According to his son Alston, in fairly convincing revelations in his recent book Vendetta, the self-induced shooting was accidental.
Rick Mattix (coauthor of The Complete Public Enemy Almanac and expanded edition of Dillinger: The Untold Story)
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