Death of Dillinger

Blackie Gallagher was the most engaging screen gangster to come out of Hollywood since Little Caesar. Gay, ruthless. debonair, he rose from guttersnipe to big-shot with swashbuckling bravado, killing in cold blood all who opposed him. Finally the Law caught Blackie Gallagher, marched him to the electric chair.

To see Clark Gable as Blackie Gallagher in MGM's Manhattan Melodrama (TIME, May 14) many a cinemaddict one night last week went to the Biograph Theatre on Chicago's North Side. One of them was a slight, dark-haired, harmless-looking little man in shirtsleeves, wearing a white hat and gold-rimmed spectacles. As he walked up to the box office, a man sitting in a parked car at the curb gave a start. Chief Investigator Melvin Purvis of the Department of Justice in Chicago had, for the first time in a four-month manhunt, clapped eyes on Desperado John Dillinger.

He was not the John Dillinger of the newspictures. His sandy hair had been dyed black. He had grown a mustache. His eyebrows were plucked, his pug nose straightened, his face "lifted." But these disguises did not fool Investigator Purvis. Thanks to a woman's tip, Investigator Purvis and 15 Federal agents were ready for Desperado Dillinger when he strode jauntily out of the Biograph Theatre two hours later. At the sight of men closing in on him from nowhere Dillinger whirled, reached for his gun, darted for an alley. A volley of lead cut him down in his tracks, one bullet through the head, one near the heart. Down the street two women were shot by mistake.

They took all that was left of the most notorious killer and robber of 1934 to the Chicago morgue. There they laid his naked corpse out on a rubber slab and the Hearstpapers also laid him out in gruesome front-page newspictures.* In Washington Attorney General Cummings heaved a mighty sigh of relief.

At his Mooresville, Ind. farmhouse Dillinger's father took the news hard. Barefoot, clad in overalls, he stood in the doorway, tears streaming down his cheeks. "Is it really true?" he asked, bewildered, "Are you sure there is no mistake? I have prayed and prayed it would not happen. ... I can hardly talk. . . Johnny was not near as bad as he was painted. . . ."

*One edition of Hearst's Chicago American carried seven pictures of the corpse.

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