Dillinger

[drlamont]

While most of the tales concerning famous people faking their own deaths are obvious pipe dreams, there seems to be enough odd facts surrounding the death of John Dillinger to merit a closer look. The eye color of the dead man did not match Dillinger's.The dead man had more teeth than Dillinger. The dead man was shorter and heavier than Dillinger was. When they went to dress the body for the funeral in one of Dillinger's coats the sleeves were longer than the corpse's arms. The dead man had a heart condition that would not have allowed him to have jumped over teller cages or run from G-Men.
Aside from the hair line not being quite as far back as it seemed to be in photos of Dillinger when he was alive, the pictures of the dead man do look like Dillinger in profile, though not as much straight on. Plastic surgery and a bullet through the cheek could explain some of the disparities in appearance.
Dillinger's father, upon seeing the body exclaimed "That's not my boy." Dillinger's sister did identify the body as that of her brother, but this means little if she knew her brother wanted to be thought of as being dead.
Is this all just fabrication? If not, then how do we explain it?

[NorfolkAtheist]

The Straight Dope (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2462/did-john-dillinger-really-die-outside-the-biograph-theater) has tackled this.

[SezMe]

Snopes also took on the pecker poser (http://www.snopes.com/risque/penile/dillinger.asp).

Welcome to the fora, drlamont. You will find that we're a friendly crowd but have expectations that you will do some homework before asking questions such as the one about Dillenger.

[JoeyDonuts]

Interesting anecdote follows.

One of my wife's friends got married up in Wisconsin - Manitowish Waters, to be exact. Turns out the campground we stayed at was about a 1/4 mile away from the Little Bohemia Lodge where Dillinger and his gang showed up. I only learned of the history of the place much later. Wish I'd known about it beforehand.

Anyway, the actual documented facts about John Dillinger's life and the manhunt that eventually killed him are interesting...but apparently not enough for those who feel there should be more intrigue to the story.

[dudalb]

The Jay Nash theory of Dillenger's death being a fake has been throughly demolished.
I suspected this would surface in the wake of the Michael Mann/Johnny Depp film "Public Enemies".

[drlamont]

While the notion of Dillinger faking his death does seem farfetched, and is probably a myth, nobody seems to have any good answers as to some of the particulars of the case. The dead man having more teeth than Dillinger might not mean anything other than bad record keeping, but has any body really looked into this? When I search for rebuttals to Nash's story, I see a lot of "most likely" type guess work.

[dudalb]

Interesting anecdote follows.

One of my wife's friends got married up in Wisconsin - Manitowish Waters, to be exact. Turns out the campground we stayed at was about a 1/4 mile away from the Little Bohemia Lodge where Dillinger and his gang showed up. I only learned of the history of the place much later. Wish I'd known about it beforehand.

Anyway, the actual documented facts about John Dillinger's life and the manhunt that eventually killed him are interesting...but apparently not enough for those who feel there should be more intrigue to the story.


BTW:Michael Mann rented out the Little Bohemia Lodge and temporary dressed it back to 1934 for the shoot out in "Public Enemies". Mann tried to shoot as much on the actual locations as possible.
He takes some liberties, of course, (He has Baby Face Nelson killed trying to get away from Little Bohemia)and the film has some grave flaws but visually it recreates the period brilliantly. And Depp is great as Dillenger.

[drlamont]

At first I thought Depp might look too young to play Dillinger, but he pulled it off. He is actually about 15 years older than Dillinger was in 1934.

[AmandaM]

Hi gang -- I haven't seen the film and I didn't know him personally, but growing up a Hoosier outside of Chicago, I heard much different stories about Dillinger. Vague anecdotal stories at best, but still kind of interesting. To me, anyway.

It was always sort of accepted by some of our families that the "jailbreak" wasn't much of a break. We'd always heard he was LET out, as a result of something about mob wars and the relationship between the Terre Haute and Chicago families. I never heard anything about him faking his death, but it was "common knowledge" that he'd been sold out by one of the families. (Again, anecdotal stories, I know, but kind of interesting.)

The relationship between mob families and the police was different then, and it wasn't uncommon for us to have two uncles on either side of the mob/police line sitting together at Thanksgiving. If I look back now, in the post John-Gotti world, it seems strange, but I think then it was just viewed as a family trade, like any other.

I was also told a story that the "homemade" gun was actually a real gun, but it was turned into a fake gun in the papers to keep the police from looking bad. lol. Anyway, a little off-topic but I find the whole subject kind of interesting :)

[arthwollipot]

What's this about having more teeth? Were some supposed to have fallen out?

[jhunter1163]

I haven't seen the movie but I have the book and recommend it wholeheartedly.

[drlamont]

What's this about having more teeth? Were some supposed to have fallen out?
Somehow Dillinger had sprouted an extra tooth after he was killed.
While it seems unlikely Dillinger wasn't the man killed that night, the answers to the questions raised by the medical reports of the incident are almost as farfetched. Being shot through the cheek does not change the color of both eyes from blue to brown, nor does the summer heat.