RATTED OUT FOR THE FIRST TIME

9/22/1933 - Aware that John Dillinger has taken up with the sister of one of his Michigan City convict friends, officers seeking the outlaw on bank robbery charges stake-out the apartment of Mary Jenkins Longnacker, a dark-haired twenty-three-year-old living in Dayton, Ohio.

                                             
                                                     Mary & John

When weeks are spent without the bandit showing however, the police team is finally pulled and assigned other duties ... on the very day Dillinger returns to see his girlfriend.  Arriving around midnight, Dillinger parks his Essex Terraplane outside and sneaks up the stairs to Longnacker's room, but not quietly enough as the nosy landlady, Lucille Stricker, who has rented the room the cops have been using for weeks, hears the outlaw, identifies his car, and immediately calls the police ("He's here you dumb flatfoots," she is quoted as saying).  Jumping into action, uniformed police quickly surround the building while an entry team led by the landlady creep up the stairs and knock on the door.  Answered by Longnacker thinking the landlady needs to borrow some coffee, Detective Sgt. Russell K. Pfauhl armed with a twelve-gauge riot gun and Detective Sgt. Charles E. Gross holding a Thompson sub-machine gun, burst into the apartment and find Dillinger standing in the middle of the room looking at pictures he'd taken with Longnaker during a recent adventure to the Chicago World's Fair, which he immediately drops when he sees the weapons trained on his head and chest.

   
                                                    1933 Chicago Fairgrounds

Trying to give the outlaw a chance to make an escape, Longnaker pretends to faint, but the police are having none of it and never take their eyes or weapons off their quarry, threatening to blow him in half if he makes any kind of move ... he doesn't.  Searching the room and their catch, police find a .38 automatic between the cushions of a sofa, a suitcase containing five pistols, and two pistols on the outlaw.  They also find a diagram marked with Xs that they fail to understand ... a drawing of the plan Dillinger has helped put in place for a breakout of his friends from the Michigan City state prison ... a breakout only days away.  

                                
                                           Mug shot and booking paperwork

Dillinger is in custody again (he had been paroled only a few months before, on 5/20/1933) and with multiple robbery charges against him it appears the thirty-year-old outlaw will now be returning to prison to remain behind bars into his old age ... but Fate has other plans for the criminal who has been nicknamed The Jackrabbit.