Menu
John Dillinger still bigger than life, 85 years after his death
In little more than a year’s time, John Dillinger -- good or bad -- made a name for himself that lives on to this day.
Between his first bank robbery at New Carlisle, Ohio, in June 1933 to his last on June 30, 1934 at South Bend, Dillinger robbed 11 banks and made off with an estimated $300,000.
That would be worth nearly $6 million in today’s money, speaker James Champion told a large crowd at the Putnam County Museum Thursday night.
Less than a month after that South Bend heist, the 31-year-old Dillinger was dead, shot down trying to flee 26 police officers and federal agents who had staked out the Biograph Theatre in Chicago on July 22, 1934.
He was not only bigger than life, but apparently bigger than death as well. His notoriety continues to this day, Champion said, pointing out that when reports that Dillinger’s remains might be exhumed surfaced, even London newspapers printed stories about it.
“He’s still a big draw,” Champion said. “He made national news his whole career. He’s still a draw, 85-1/2 years after his death.”
It was on Oct. 23, 1933 that Dillinger left his mark on Greencastle.
That was the chilly fall Monday afternoon when Dillinger and accomplices Charles Makley, Harry Copeland and Harry Pierpont robbed Central National Bank on the square in Greencastle of $75,000 in cash and negotiable bonds.
“It wasn’t just, ‘Let’s go rob Greencastle,’” Champion said. “They staked it out.”
Enough so that the gang knew it would be a lucrative day at the bank as proceeds from Old Gold Weekend at DePauw University came rolling in. They also had figured out when the bank guard, who also stoked the building’s coal furnace, would leave his post for that duty.
The robbers were in and out in about five minutes, Champion said, noting that not only did they leap over the counter and make off with all the money from the tellers but even managed to get in the vault.
The gang then fled south on Bloomington Street until running into a stopped train at the Penn Central tracks (now the site of Veterans Memorial Highway). There they turned west onto Berry Street and went over to Manhattan Road, he said of the getaway.
“From there, who knows?” Champion continued. “Indianapolis? Terre Haute? St. Louis? They may have gone to Mooresville to see John’s dad.”
In doing research on Dillinger and his gang, Champion said he doesn’t buy into the myth of Dillinger as an American Robin Hood, taking money from the banks in an era when the banks had foreclosed on many farms and homes.
“He robbed from the rich and gave to himself,” one audience member noted.
“One of his myths,” Champion noted, was Dillinger supposedly telling people, “‘I want the bank’s money, not yours’ and ‘I don’t want to hurt anybody, I just want the money.’”
Then why did he take $300 from a man’s pocket at Central Bank, Champion asked. “That doesn’t sound like just wanting the bank’s money.”
Dillinger wasn’t just some messed-up Indiana farm boy, as an amazingly adoring public might liked to have believed, Champion said.
“We’re talking about a career criminal here,” he said. “I don’t think anybody who robbed 11 banks was ‘just messed up.’ He might have been a nice guy but I wouldn’t want to be in the bank during his robberies.”
And as Champion suggested, “If he never really meant to kill anybody, then why did you come in (the bank) with loaded weapons.”
On Dillinger’s 31st birthday, June 22, 1934, he was named Public Enemy No. 1.
One month later, he was dead.
“He liked his guns,” Champion said. “He loved his women, and he no doubt loved the booze and having a good time. But the money he used was stolen. At the end of the day it was still stealing.”
Of the men linked to the Greencastle heist, the richest of Dillinger’s career, only Copeland was ever brought to justice here. He was arrested and ultimately pleaded guilty on June 29, 1934 in Greencastle before being sentenced to 25 years in prison. He was released in 1949.
The others met a violent demise. Makley was killed trying to escape custody, while Pierpont was wounded in the escape attempt and later met his fate in the electric chair.
And of course, Dillinger died in an alley beside the Biograph after going to see the movie “Manhattan Melodrama” starring Clark Gable that hot July night in Chicago.
Gable was not yet the big name he would be a few years later with “Gone With the Wind” and other big-screen successes. But MGM, Champion said, used the circumstances of Dillinger’s death to publicize the movie he had gone to see.
“So if you want to go out on a crazy tangent,” the 36-year-old Greencastle man suggested, “you might say Dillinger’s death jump-started Clark Gable’s career.”
That’s better than Dillinger film history has fared. The latest Dillinger motion picture, “Public Enemies,” featuring Johnny Depp in the lead role, was pretty much a box-office flop and not exactly historically accurate in places.
The film does have a scene in which Depp goes into a bank to rob it and mention is made immediately thereafter about the Greencastle bank robbery.
“The bank they showed in the movie is about 10 times the size of the one here,” Champion said. “I don’t know if that’s just Hollywood or what?”