Free The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks by Paul Simpson Page B

assigned to bring him in. Dillinger’s girlfriend, Mary Evelyn “Billie” Frechette, was arrested in Chicago and then Purvis and his men nearly caught Dillinger, who had now teamed up with another well-known gangster, “Baby Face” Nelson, at the summer resort of Little Bohemia Lodge on 23 April. Dillinger escaped by the skin of his teeth, leaving behind an arsenal of weaponry. The Bureau were responsible for the death of civilians, and its leader, J. Edgar Hoover, brought Samuel Cowley in to assist Purvis.
    In an effort to avoid recognition, Dillinger underwent painful plastic surgery on 28 May, after which he needed to recover for a month. On 22 June, Dillinger’s thirty-first birthday, Hoover designated him “Public Enemy No. 1” with $10,000 offered for his arrest, and $5,000 for information that led to his capture. A few weeks later, Anna Sage (an alias adopted by Rumanian Ana Cumpanas) tipped off a police detective that Dillinger was living in her apartment as the boyfriend of her lodger – the FBI’s official history claims that Sage was the madam of a brothel, and that Dillinger had visited, together with a friend of hers, Polly Hamilton. On 21 July, Sage told Purvis and Cowley that she, Hamilton and Dillinger would be going to the movies the next day.
    On the evening of 22 July, the Bureau set a trap around the Biograph movie theatre in Chicago’s Lincoln Park area. John Dillinger went to see the gangster film,
Manhattan Melodrama.
It finished at 10.40 p.m. and within a few minutes Dillinger was dead. Realizing that he was trapped as he left the cinema, he reached for his gun. He was hit by four of the six bullets that Bureau agents fired before he could aim – one of them went through the back of his neck, through his brain, and out beneath his right eye.
    When they heard about Dillinger’s death, Harry Pierpoint and Charles Mackley realized that they would need to escape from death row without any potential help from their friend. Both had been sentenced to death in the electric chair the previous March. They decided to try to emulate Dillinger’s means of escape from Crown Point.
    The pair created fake guns from bars of soap which they had blackened with shoe polish. On 22 September, they made their move. The weapons were convincing enough to persuade the guards to let them out of their cells, but when they reached the main door other guards opened fire on them with rifles. Makley was killed instantly, but Pierpont survived, although he was seriously injured with a bullet remaining in his spine. As a result, he had to be carried to the electric chair on the morning of 17 October 1934. Russell Clark, the third man arrested for the murder of Sheriff Sarber, was convicted of bank robbery; he was sentenced to life in prison.
    Sources:
    Gangster File – The Sensational Truth: Bonnie & Clyde/Al Capone/Dillinger
Online, courtesy of yakidk89’s channel at YouTube. (This has a lot of useful historical footage, although the narration is inaccurate in places.)
    Interview with Edwin Saagar from University of Southern California archives: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e6C7kScGHLw
    FBI: Famous Cases: John Dillinger ( http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/famous-cases/john-dillinger ) (includes huge pdf files of all the correspondence between agents of the Bureau regarding Dillinger)
    G. Russell Giradin, with William J. Helmer and Rick Mattix:
Dillinger: The Untold Story
(Indiana, 2009)
    Burrough, Bryan:
Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34
(Penguin, 2009)
    Hammond Times,
22 July 1984: “The Hobart Wilgus Story”
    Chicago Herald and Examiner,
27 August 1934: “Crime does not pay!”

The Unknown Great Escape
    Many of the escapes contained in this volume are well known, either because of the amount of coverage they received in the media at the time, or because they have become the source material for books, screen adaptations or plays. Others