Dillinger Shot Dead: FBI Ends Public Enemy No. 1

Three federal agents waited in the alley beside the Biograph Theater on Chicago's North Side, watching for a man in a straw hat and red-tinted glasses. John Dillinger, the most wanted criminal in America, had just watched Clark Gable in "Manhattan Melodrama" with two women, one of whom had brokered the setup. When he stepped onto the sidewalk and sensed the trap, he reached toward his pocket and sprinted for the alley. FBI agents opened fire, and three bullets struck him down before he made it ten steps. Dillinger had spent the previous fourteen months on a crime spree that captivated Depression-era America. His gang robbed at least a dozen banks across the Midwest, stealing more than $300,000 while killing ten people and wounding seven others. He escaped from jail twice, once using a wooden gun he had carved and blackened with shoe polish to bluff his way past a dozen guards at the Crown Point, Indiana, county jail. That escape humiliated local law enforcement and prompted J. Edgar Hoover to make Dillinger the FBI's first official "Public Enemy Number One." The woman who betrayed him was Anna Sage, a Romanian immigrant facing deportation proceedings. She offered to deliver Dillinger to the FBI in exchange for help with her immigration case, telling agents she would wear an orange skirt to the theater so they could identify her companion. The press later called her "the Lady in Red," though her skirt only appeared red under the theater's lights. Hoover used the Dillinger manhunt to transform the Bureau of Investigation into the modern FBI, lobbying Congress for expanded jurisdiction, new weapons authority, and a dramatically increased budget. The killing became the agency's founding myth, proof that federal law enforcement could accomplish what local police could not. Dillinger was thirty-one years old. More than fifteen thousand people filed past his body at the Cook County morgue, and souvenir hunters chipped pieces from his headstone for decades after the burial.