John Dillinger's death mask (FBI artifact)
Plaster death mask of John Dillinger held by the FBI. The FBI says Harold May of the Reliance Dental Manufacturing Co. made it at the Cook County Morgue about twelve hours after Dillinger's death on 22 July 1934. A copy of the FBI's photograph is stored here.
- Date
- 1934-07-23
- Kind
- photograph
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Rights
- Text and photograph published by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of an object in its custody. A United States government work, public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105. The stored copy was captured from the FBI's page.
The FBI’s artifact page shows a plaster death mask and says it was made “Just 12 hours after Dillinger’s death on July 22, 1934,” by Harold May of the Reliance Dental Manufacturing Co., at the Cook County Morgue in Chicago, “to demonstrate the quality of the company’s plaster.” The date given here, 23 July 1934, follows from that statement; the FBI does not print a date for the casting itself.
The page quotes the FBI case files on the scene at the morgue: “great confusion existed at the morgue [for] several days, inasmuch as there were thousands of people who attempted to gain admission to view Dillinger’s body.” It says police departments asked for copies, that the FBI refused, and that officers attending the FBI National Academy later cast their own copies from the original, so that “countless copies still exist and are sometimes auctioned online as originals.”
The page also states that after his death “27 individuals were convicted in federal courts on charges of harboring and aiding and abetting Dillinger.” Several of those harboring files are filed in this section.
