July 22, 1934: John Dillinger is mortally wounded outside a theater in Chicago.
In the era of outlaws like Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Alvin Karpis, John Dillinger was once the most notorious of them all. Though accounts of the exploits of these criminals are often highly exaggerated, Dillinger is believed to have robbed at least a dozen banks and accumulated some $300,000 in two years. He escaped from prison twice, and the media exaggerated and even falsified stories about Dillinger’s gang, and so his reputation grew until he was declared “Public Enemy Number One” a month before his death.
The FBI (under J. Edgar Hoover) soon caught up with him in Chicago. On July 22, 1934, FBI agents waited outside the Biograph Theater for Dillinger to finish watching Manhattan Melodrama; as he exited the theater, the agents gunned him down. He was hit three times. According to some accounts, bystanders dipped whatever pieces of cloth they had close at hand in the pool of blood around Dillinger’s body and kept them as souvenirs. After his death, his corpse was put on display at a Chicago morgue for public viewing (pictured above).