John 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.
- Date
- 1934/2005
- Kind
- case-file
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- NAID
- 231363203
- Rights
- Records of the U.S. Attorney, a federal work in the public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105. NARA notes that late 20th- and 21st-century newspaper articles in the file are subject to copyright; this page relies only on NARA's description of the 1934 government records. The stored image is page 1 of the scanned file, a 1934 Department of Justice form.
NARA’s description says the file “primarily document[s] Dillinger’s March 3, 1934 escape from Sheriff Lillian Holley’s jail in Crown Point, Indiana. Dillinger used a fake handgun carved from wood to deceive guards.” It includes transcripts of interviews with jail staff and witnesses and documents the 30 June 1934 Merchants National Bank robbery in South Bend, in which Patrolman Howard C. Wagner was killed. The file is held at the National Archives at Chicago, Record Group 118, with 167 digitized pages.
The wooden gun rests on NARA’s description alone. The FBI’s own Dillinger history is more cautious: it says he escaped using “what he claimed later was a wooden gun he had whittled.” This archive has not paged through the 167 scans and has not seen a photograph or physical description of the wooden gun in the file. Whether the file pictures it is open.
Object: Case file (textual records, digitized)
Maker: U.S. Attorney, Northern District of Indiana
Date: 1934, with later material to 2005
Provenance: National Archives at Chicago, Record Group 118
Appears in: NARA catalog, NAID 231363203
