DS, signed “John Herbert Dillinger,” one page, 8.25 x 8.5, September 19, 1924. Indiana Reformatory document headed "Department of School of Letters," assessing Dillinger's performance in academic tests upon entering the prison. He earns "A" grades in arithmetic (with computational abilities "To Percentage," skills likely learned in his four-year career as a "Screw Machinist") and in language, noting his ability to "Read & Write Readily." At the conclusion, Dillinger provides a sample of his neat cursive penmanship: "This is a specimen of my penmanship on entering the Indiana Reformatory." Boldly signed at the conclusion in ink by John Dillinger, and countersigned by the superintendent of schools. In fine condition. Accompanied by an original vintage glossy 5 x 7 press photo of Dillinger at age 18, before embarking on his life of crime, with an International News Photos, Inc. stamp on the reverse; the accompanying caption, dated on the day of his death, July 22, 1934, notes that "his bullet riddled body lies in a Chicago undertakers' parlor."
In 1924, John Dillinger was convicted of assaulting a grocer during a holdup, and expected to receive a light sentence by pleading guilty—only to be slapped with a stiff 10-20 years upon sentencing. His accomplice, an ex-convict and distant cousin named Ed Singleton, was sentenced to just two years for his role in the robbery. During Dillinger's nine-year stint in the Indiana Correctional System, he met and befriended a number of hard-core criminals who would later become part of his gang: Harry Pierpont, John Hamilton, Homer Van Meter, Fat Charley Makley, Russell Clark, and Walter Dietrich.
Dillinger was released in May 1933, after a petition bearing the signatures of almost 200 residents from his adopted hometown of Mooresville, Indiana—including that of his grocer victim—was presented to the governor. Embittered with the criminal justice system for having served what he felt was an unjust term, Dillinger quickly resumed a life of crime with his prison friends, whom he helped escape in a spectacular and well-planned breakout. He and the gang embarked on a bank robbing spree, conducting a dozen separate heists between June 21, 1933, and June 30, 1934—to the tune of well over $300,000.
In 1934, when J. Edgar Hoover named Dillinger 'Public Enemy Number 1,' Indiana Governor Paul V. McNutt's secretary, Wayne Coy, observed: 'There does not seem to me to be any escape from the fact that the State of Indiana made John Dillinger the Public Enemy that he is today. The Indiana constitution provides that our penal code shall be reformative and not vindictive…Instead of reforming the prisoner, the penal institutions provided him with an education in crime.'
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