Dillinger - False Death Coverup?

Hope this is in the right category...

John Dillinger, Public Enemy number one, was famously gunned down outside Biograph Theater in Chicago thanks to an informant, "The Woman in Red". The events of that night finally put an end to the embarrassment the FBI was suffering thanks to Dillinger's escapes and hiests.

But was it actually Dillinger? There are some pretty big problems with the whole situation. For one thing, the man who was shot did not look at all like Dillinger, had a different wieght, different height and even different coloured eyes. The dead man had more teeth than Dillinger and Dillinger's well known birth mark was not present on the corpse. I have also heard something about the dead man's finger prints not being those of Dillinger but that is unconfirmed.

The FBI claims he underwent plastic surgery which resulted in his altered appearance. My question is, how could plastic surgery (especially in 1934) change his eyes and height? The official autopsy report might have helped validate the FBI's claims but it mysteriously disappeared and did not resurface until 30 years later. When it did, the confusing facts about the height, wieght, teeth and birth mark were revealed as well as the fact that the dead man had brown eyes whereas Dillinger had bright blue eyes.

This is not the first time the FBI has tried to cover a Dillinger blunder either. I'm sure you're all familliar with the story of Dillinger making a false gun from a stolen washboard and shoe polish and using it to escape from jail. You're probably also familliar with the fact that that never happened. Dillinger bribed the guard. The toy gun story was concocted to spare the FBI some embarrassment.

Associates of Dillinger claimed he actually did recieve plastic surgery from a questionable German doctor. Apparently though the surgery altered his appearance very little. According to Louis Piquette, Dillinger's lawyer, the doctor performing the surgery "couldn’t remove feathers from a pigeon’s tail.”

The man who was killed was most likely James Lawrence, a small time thug who "was made a pawn by a ring of conspirators—friends of Dillinger". Lawrence mysteriously disappaered after Dillinger's alleged death.

So given these facts and pseudo facts, I think it's quite possible Dillinger lived out his life under some assumed alias and died many years after his official death of 1934.

Sources are crimelibrary.com, Blithering Antiquity magazine and Gangster Chronicles (as seen on the Discovery Channel).

Hope this hasn't been discussed before (did a search, found nothing).

[edit on 22-5-2006 by specter_smoke]

[edit on 22-5-2006 by specter_smoke]

Living in an area of Indiana that had several banks robbed by Dillinger and his crew, I am interested in this topic. I have never read that there was a discrepancy with the physical characteristics of the dead Dillinger compared to how he looked in real life, but I have read that he did receive some plastic surgery which was crude for its time in history.

I'll have to look into this more.

JDub

There is much talk about the plastic surgery that was performed on Dillinger. Did it really change his appearance? Plastic surgery didn’t seem to keep some of his contemporaries from being recognized like Van Meter, Alvin Karpis and Freddie Barker.

crimelibrary.com.

An interesting read.