The Body in John Dillinger’s Grave

Modern testing will wreck a persistent legend of American crime.

The bank robber John Dillinger died on July 22, 1934. Or maybe he didn’t.

At the height of the Great Depression, Dillinger and his crew robbed at least a dozen banks across the Midwest, netting a small fortune (roughly $300,000, or around $5.7 million in 2019 dollars) in the process. He was an adherent of the “system” developed by the German bank robber Herman “Baron” Lamm, who plotted his heists down to the smallest detail — including block-by-block maps of potential escape routes. Dillinger was likewise meticulous; he also had a little flair; and soon enough he became a genuine celebrity to those who felt he was sticking it to the cruel, rapacious banks.

The 2009 film Public Enemies, directed by Michael Mann with his usual attention to historical fidelity, offers a suggestion of what a Dillinger robbery might have been like:

At the very least, it’s movies like that — along with decades’ worth of books, poems, television episodes, and other…