FBI history: weapons found at the Lincoln Court Apartments, St. Paul (Dillinger case, March 1934)

The FBI's Dillinger history states what agents found at the Lincoln Court Apartments in St. Paul: a Thompson submachine gun with the stock removed, two automatic rifles, a .38 caliber Colt automatic with twenty-shot magazine clips, and two bulletproof vests.

Date: 1934-03-31
Kind: agency-history
Source: FBI, History: Cases and Criminals (John Dillinger)
Retrieved: 2026-10-12
Rights: FBI web text; a work of the United States government, public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105.

The FBI’s account of the Lincoln Court Apartments shooting says: “At the Lincoln Court Apartments, the FBI found a Thompson submachine gun with the stock removed, two automatic rifles, one .38 caliber Colt automatic with twenty-shot magazine clips, and two bulletproof vests.”

This is a secondary narrative written by the Bureau, not the inventory itself. The page says an agent spoke to the apartment manager on 30 March 1934 and that agents knocked on the door “the next day,” so the date given here, 31 March 1934, is inferred from that wording. No inventory of the seizure has been read for this archive; the Dillinger gang files in the FBI Vault were not searched for one.

itemMemorandum for file by Special Agent C. B. Winstead, 25 July 1934: the weapons at the Biograph TheatreTwo-page memorandum by Special Agent C. B. Winstead on the events outside the Biograph Theatre, Chicago, on 22 July 1934. It records the weapons involved: the "Division .45 Automatic" Winstead carried and a ".380 calibre Colt Automatic" that Winstead says Purvis told him he had taken.

itemJohn Herbert Dillinger case file, U.S. Attorney, Northern District of Indiana (National Archives at Chicago)Catalog entry for the U.S. Attorney's file that, per NARA's description, documents Dillinger's 3 March 1934 escape from the Crown Point, Indiana, jail, which NARA says he made with a fake handgun carved from wood. 167 digitized pages.