CLYDE KILLS AGAIN

1/6/1933 - Tragedy strikes at the Dallas home of Lillian McBride when Clyde Barrow walks into a police ambush set up to capture Texas bank robber Odell Chambless.

                           
                                                  Clyde Barrow
                                        
                                                  Chambless

Hoping to spring his partner Raymond Hamilton from police custody, earlier in the week Clyde has given Hamilton's sister, Lillian McBride, a radio with hacksaws inside for McBride to give to her brother.  On the night of the 6th, Clyde returns to the shack house McBride lives in to see if his gift to his friend has been delivered.  Unfortunately though, for a chance at a lighter sentence, West Dallas thief Les Stewart has told authorities that fugitive bank robber Chambless, wanted for a heist the previous year in Fort Worth and also an associate of Raymond Hamilton, is a frequent visitor to McBride's home causing a posse to put a stakeout on the place.

                        
                                                 Raymond Hamilton

Authorized by newly elected Dallas County Sheriff Richard "Smoot" Schmid, at 11:00 in the evening Tarrant County Assistant District Attorney W. T. Evans, Special Ranger J. F. Van Noy, Dallas Deputy Sheriff Fred Bradberry, and Fort Worth Detectives Dusty Rhodes and Malcolm Davis arrive at the McBride residence to set up their ambush ... Bradberry, Evans, and Van Noy take up positions in the small front room of the darkened house, while Rhodes and Davis wait outside on the back porch.

              
                                                 Schmid in the dark suit

Shortly after midnight, a Ford V-8 coupe with its lights off drives slowly past the house on North Winnetka, turns at the corner, quietly returns, and parks ... inside are Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker, and new gang member W.D. Jones.  Alert for danger, Clyde gets out of the car carrying a shotgun at his side and walks toward the front porch, but before he can arrive, he is greeted from inside by a scream from Hamilton's youngest sister, Maggie Farris.  Warned that all is not right, Clyde instantly brings up his shotgun and blasts in the front window of the home, causing the lawmen on its other side to throw themselves to the floor.  Finding his first shot has jammed the shotgun, the outlaw then backs away from the porch as he draws the spent cartridge out of the breech of his weapon and reloads ... just as fifty-one-year-old Davis, responding to the gunfire at the front of the house, runs around to the front yard and finds himself only inches away from Clyde ... a recipe for disaster.  And disaster it is for Clyde does not hesitate for even a split second in shooting Davis at point-blank range, blowing an instantly fatal buckshot hole in the lawman's chest.

                                      

At this point Rhodes arrives from the back and begins shooting, the three lawmen in the house rise and beginning shooting, and from the Ford, Jones begins sending return gunfire at McBride's home.  In the ensuing mayhem of noise and slugs, Clyde takes off and begins running between houses, while Bonnie, seeing the direction in which Clyde is sprinting, pulls away from the curb at tire screeching speed and eventually picks up her boyfriend on nearby Eagle Ford Road.  

                            
                      Re-enactment of the crime ... hatted man is Chief
                                of Detectives Bill Decker in the role of Clyde

Gone in seconds, Clyde has killed for the second time in the short span of only two weeks ... Davis is the fifth murder the outlaw has been involved in ... and it will not be his last.

           
                                       Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow

THE ALCATRAZ SWIM CLUB IS CREATED

12/16/1937 - After months of planning and labor, the day finally arrives in which convict buddies Ralph Roe (prisoner AZ-260) and Theodore Cole (prisoner AZ-258) decide to become the first men to test the vulnerability of their supposed escape proof home ... challenging the bars, walls, and water of the Federal penitentiary located on Alcatraz Island.

                          
                                                      Alcatraz

Theodore Cole is a twenty-five-year-old felon from Oklahoma with burglary, armed robbery, kidnapping, murder and two escape incidents on a record that began when he was fourteen ... he is serving a 50-year sentence.  Ralph Roe is a thirty-two-year-old criminal also from Oklahoma with a resume that includes grand larceny, theft, harboring a fugitive, auto theft, armed robbery, burglary, and kidnapping ... he is serving a 99-year sentence.  Both men are extremely bad apples!   

                      
                                             Roe                                      Cole

Serving out their terms quietly, both with jobs in the prison's Model Shop, Cole with a position as a janitor and Roe with work converting used tires into rubber floor mats, sometime in 1936 the men discover a flaw in their confinement ... the bars in the windows where they work are not made of tool-proof steel and can be parted.  Creating a make-shift saw, the men soon beginning carving away at a special window they have selected for their escape every moment they are not under observation by a guard, covering up their work from discovery with a camouflage mixture of paint chips and putty.  Bars finally cut, the men then wait for an essential element of their plan that they know will arrive sooner or later ... the dense fog San Francisco is notorious for having and in December of 1937, the thick grey cloak they need to leave the island arrives.

                      
                                     Alcatraz Model Shop

A deterrent to escapes, a count of the men working in the Model Shop is made every thirty minutes, and when Officer Joseph Steele makes his rounds at 1:00 in the afternoon, all prisoners are accounted for.  As soon as the officers leaves however, Roe and Cole make their move for freedom ... the cut bars are dislodged, the men climb through a 8 and 3/4 by 8 and 3/4 inches hole, drop five feet to the ground, use a twenty-four-inch Stillson wrench to twist off a padlock on a gate leading through a fence topped by five feet of barbed wire, drop twelve feet from a cliff on to a beach covered in car tires discarded by the Mat Shop, and then vanish into the waters of San Francisco Bay, never to be seen again, both drowning victims of a 7-9 knot ebb tide that is thought to have carried the men out into the Pacific ... at least that is the official story. 

                           
                                                       Cole rap sheet
                                    
                                                     Roe rap sheet

Missed when the count is next taken at 1:30, a massive search of both the island, the waters ringing Alcatraz, and potential landing sights takes place ... and a $500 reward for information leading to the arrest of the men is offered.  Nothing comes of any of it though and when an inmate testifies that he had seen the men floundering in the water, Alcatraz officials and FBI personnel determine the men are dead.  But are they?  The active investigation of the missing men is not discontinued until September of 1974, and over the years there will be reported sightings of the escapees in a North Bergen, New Jersey bar, by a cab driver in Seminole, Oklahoma who claims he gave the outlaws a ride, by a bartender in Petaluma, by two hitchhikers in Tulsa who will identify the men from photos they are shown by police, Warden Johnston will receive a postcard from Colorado signed T. Cole, an inmate will receive a letter with the code the convicts had agreed to send if they successfully escaped that posits "business is good," and in 1941, the San Francisco Chronicle will run a story stating that the men are living in South America.  Did they drown or make it to shore?  To this day no one can say with 100% certainty what happened to Cole and Roe ... and the ghosts of the island aren't talking!

                               

A BIG SCORE IN DENVER

12/18/1922 - At 10:40 on a chilly December morning, one of the most notorious crimes in Colorado history takes place outside the Denver Mint.

                           
                                       U.S. Mint - Denver, Colorado

Most noted for creating coins for the government, the Mint's vaults, located on Colfax Avenue in the Mile High City, also serve as protected storage for any overflow of currency from the small Federal Reserve Bank in the Interstate Trust Building, nearby at 16th and Lawrence ... an added function of the establishment that has somehow become known to a deadly group of professional bank robbers.  A job planned down to the second (a trademark of German bandit Herman Lamm and his proteges, Harvey Bailey and Eddie Bentz), just as $200,000 in ten, eighteen inch long, eight pound packages of five dollar bills has finished being loaded into a mesh-wire cage on the back of the bank's pickup truck for transfer, and the Mint guards have gone back inside their building, a curtained black Buick touring car pulls up and disgorges three black-masked men.  The robbery is on!

                          
                                                Bailey

"Hands Up!"  Two bandits armed with shotguns take up positions behind telephone poles and begin firing when their order is not immediately complied with, while the third outlaw, armed with a pistol, moves the money packages to the gang's getaway car (a fourth outlaw stays behind the wheel of the vehicle and in some accounts there is a fifth bandit).  The gunfire of the crooks is in turn answered by the truck's bank guards and by government agents within the Mint ... a bullet melee that lasts all of ninety seconds, one of which is fatal for sixty-four-year-old Special Officer Charles T. Linton of the Federal Reserve, who takes a point-blank shotgun blast to the chest in the exchange of gunfire (prior to his employment with the Reserve, Linton is a member of the Arapahoe County Sheriff's Office for over twenty-six years, the veteran lawman leaves behind a wife and two sons).  Heist complete, the Buick roars away down Colfax with one outlaw bleeding from a hand wound as he continues to fire his shotgun from the running board of the fleeing car, while another hit thief slumps over in his seat.  A truck is sideswiped leaving the scene of the crime, but the Buick is not harmed enough to stop its flight and the gang soon vanishes into downtown Denver, their escape a success despite Colorado immediately beginning the biggest manhunt in the state's history (it is believed the robbers flee to St. Paul, Minnesota).

                                               
                                                       Linton

Eighteen days later, the bloody getaway car is found in a residential garage at 1631 Gilpin Street ... found containing the frozen corpse of the only participant in the robbery to ever be officially identified, thirty-six-year-old outlaw Nicolas "Chaw Jimmie" Trainor (on parole from the Nebraska State Penitentiary), dead from a massive shotgun wound to the bandit's jaw.  In February of 1923 another discover in the case is made when Secret Service agents raiding a bandit hideout in Minnesota locate $80,000 of cash from the robbery, and an additional $73,000 of bonds taken in a raid on a Walnut Hills, Ohio bank ... loot thought to be in the region for underworld laundering by the criminal kingpin of the region, Daniel "Dapper Dan" Hogan.

                        
                                                      Dapper Dan

Federal authorities will announce the crime has been solved in 1925, but no details about any of the participants are released, and in 1934, Denver Police Chief A. T. Clark claims five men and two women were responsible for the robbery, all stated as being dead or already serving life terms in prison, but again no names or details of the bloody day in front of the Denver Mint are provided to the public.  Other than for Trainor, who the men in the masks were remains a mystery to this day! 

                                        
                                                  Next day headlines

UNDERHILL, UNDERGROUND

12/30/1933 - The honeymoon of Wilbur Underhill, known as the "Tri-State Terror" and "Mad Dog" to authorities, comes to an abrupt and bloody end when a posse made up of federal, county, and city law officers finds the robber and multiple murderer enjoying newly married bliss at a rented cottage in Shawnee, Oklahoma (paid for by loot the outlaw has robbed on his November 18th wedding day from a bank in Frankfort, Kentucky, and a Coalgate, Oklahoma bank plundered on December 13th).

                                     
                                                        Underhill

Tipped off that Underhill, his new bride Hazel Jarrett Hudson (a sister of the outlaw Jarrett Brothers), bandit Ralph Roe, and Roe's girlfriend Eva May Nichols are staying in the small house located at 606 West Dewey Street, an arrest party led by Federal Special Agent Ralph Colvin takes up positions around the clapboard structure in the foggy dark of cold early winter morning ... a raiding party of fifteen men heavily armed with shot guns, machine guns, tear gas rifles, and pistols.  Sneaking up to a bedroom window at the back of the building to determine if their quarry is present, the team of Colvin and Oklahoma City Detective Clarence Hurt spot Underhill in long underwear standing at the foot of a bed his wife is sitting upon just as a neighborhood dog begins barking, causing the outlaw to look out the window.  "This is the law Wilbur.  Stick 'em up!" Hurt yells, and for a moment it appears the bandit is going to comply, but as he begins to raise his arms, Underhill instead quickly whirls around and grabs a specially modified automatic Luger pistol attached to a 31-slug magazine from a nightstand ... then all hell breaks loose.

Hurt responds by firing a tear gas canister into Underhill's chest, knocking the bandit down for a moment, Colvin follows that action up as chemical fumes cloud the room by emptying the clip of his machine gun through the window in three bursts of bullets that hole walls, destroy furniture, shatter a mirror, and chase the outlaw into the bathroom where he returns fire as his wife lies screaming on the floor.  Better safe than sorry, the other officers about the building hear the crash of gunfire and also trigger their own weapons at the house, causing the cottage to shake (over two hundred rounds will smash into the fragile building).  In the barrage that takes place, Roe, sleeping in an adjacent bedroom to Underhill is hit by wounding .45 rounds in his left arm and shoulder, but his girlfriend Nichols is hit even harder.  Jumping out of bed screaming hysterically, the crazed women runs toward the front door and is hit twice in the stomach by machine gun slugs, falls, gets up, runs out the door and goes down again in the muddy front yard when another burst of gunfire hits her in the foot.  She does not get up from her second fall and will eventually die from her wounds at the town's nearby Municipal Hospital.

                                     
                                                         Ralph Roe

The next to tempt Fate going out the front door is Underhill who is equally unlucky.  Hit by numerous rounds fired by the four officers watching the front of the property, the outlaw, wearing only socks and his underwear, crashes to the ground in puddle of mud making his exit.  Prey down, the men move warily forward to place their victim in custody ... but are shocked anyway when the bandit suddenly leaps up and runs into the darkness between two neighboring houses.  Meanwhile, responding to the firing at the front of the house, Colvin and Shawnee Night Chief Frank Byrant leave the backyard and almost run into Underhill as the outlaw makes his exit ... and are surprised that he does not go down when they empty their machine guns at the fleeing killer.

                        
                                 Underhill after an earlier encounter with the law

Gunfire over, Roe surrenders, crawling out of the front door where Oklahoma County Deputy Sheriff George Kerr handcuffs the wounded desperado and then arranges for his transportation to same hospital to which his girlfriend has been taken (Underhill's wife is arrested too, somehow managing to survive the gun battle unscathed).  But it is Tri-State Terror that the posse really wants and soon a house-to-house sweep of Shawnee begins with an additional twenty-four law officers joining in the search for the outlaw, along with bloodhounds from the state prison at McAlester.  The animals however are not needed, for shortly after 7:00 in the morning, R. A. Owens, the manager of a second hand furniture store, calls police headquarters to tell the authorities that a man in only his underwear has broken into the business at 509 East Main Street.  Target located once more, in two cars a six-man posse rushes to the store and finds Underhill laying helpless on a blood-soaked bed, his empty Luger on the floor beside him ... despite suffering from shotgun wounds peppering his body and .45 slugs hitting him in the head, right arm, back, and right leg, with the top of his left ear shot off, the almost naked outlaw has run sixteen blocks through the night's cold in a desperate, but vain attempt to escape his pursuers.  Another temporary patient for the hospital, Underhill is too far gone to save and finally succumbs to his many wounds on the 6th of January at 11:42 in the evening ... his last words are alleged to be, "Tell the boys I'm coming home."

                                
                               "Mad Dog" Underhill

Back at the scene of the gun battle, law enforcement agents find $5,300 in negotiable bonds from Underhill's Frankfort bank job, enough ammunition to start a small war, a Luger with a folding stock, two .45 automatic Colt pistols, a .38 revolver, and in the car parked in the cottage's garage, a .30-.30 rifle, a sawed off Winchester .12 gauge pump action shotgun, a double-barreled shotgun pistol, and a tin pail full of roofing nails suitable for giving flat tires to any pursuit vehicles that might be chasing the bandit ... evidence that a true "mad dog" criminal has finally been put down!

A POINTLESS CHRISTMAS KILLING

12/25/1932 - While making a quick visit to Dallas on Christmas Eve, Clyde Barrow is talked into taking on a new partner in his assorted criminal activities, sixteen-year-old family friend William Daniel "W.D." Jones, who has been hero worshiping the outlaw for months .

                           
                                           Teenage menace Jones

Not waiting to break his new associate in slowly, the next day as a form of initiation, Clyde, with Bonnie waiting in their car, takes Jones into a Temple, Texas grocery store to rob the place.  Jones freezes however at the reality of armed robbery (his prior offenses have been petty thefts and stealing unoccupied cars).  Returning to their vehicle, Clyde is merciless in his browbeating of the wannabe bad boy, so harsh that Jones asks to be taken back home ... a suggestion Clyde takes very poorly, stating that if Jones wants to go home he'll have to steal a car to get there in ... a car Clyde will select.

     
                              Clyde and some of his equipment

Unhappy with his failed protege, to embarrass Jones, Clyde selects a Model A Ford roadster he spies as Bonnie drives the streets of Temple ... a car extremely difficult to start, requiring the driver to along with turning the ignition key, pull out the choke while at the same time using both feet to press down on the accelerator and clutch pedals.  Sure enough, Jones fails to start the car and Clyde takes his place behind the wheel to show the floundering rookie how a real thief operates.

                              
                                                      Jones in 1934

Unfortunately, all the commotion brought on by trying to start the vehicle by this time has drawn the attention of the Christmas celebrating family the Ford actually belongs to ... the family of twenty-seven-year-old Doyle Johnson, the new father of a baby girl.  Seeing two men in the car, Henry Krauser, Johnson's father-in-law, Krauser's son Clarence, and Johnson's wife rush on to the front yard demanding to know what the two men are up to.  Clyde responds by jumping out of the car and brandishing his .45 revolver at the group, saying he will fire on the first person who moves forward.  With the family cowed, he then jumps back into the vehicle and again begins playing with the ignition of the Ford.  

                                       
                                               Jones and Barrow - 1933

It is tragically at this point that Johnson wakes up from the nap he has been taking in a very Grinchy and belligerent mood.  As Bonnie pulls up next to the roadster in the gang's speedy Ford V-8 and demands that the men abandon their car theft, Johnson, trying to protect his ride, runs outside, reaches through the driver side window and grabs Clyde around the neck.  "Get back man or I'll kill you!"  Johnson ignores the warning from the oulaw begins strangling Clyde, and sure enough, the bandit brings his weapon up and fires several rounds into his assailant, the mortal slug a bullet that severs Johnson's spinal column.  Free of the grip around his neck, Clyde roars down the street in the Model A, followed closely by Bonnie.

     
                                                                Clyde Barrow

It is the fourth murder Clyde participates in (his first is the killing of the man who rapes him while he is at Texas' infamous Eastham Prison Farm ... a twenty-nine-year-old convict serving ninety-nine years for a variety of crimes named Ed Crowder who will have his head bashed in by a lead pipe) and its utter pointlessness is immediately on display ... only a few blocks away Clyde ditches the vehicle he has killed to steal and the men vanish in the Ford V-8 driven by Bonnie (and there will be no more discussions about Jones leaving, with his involvement in the killing he is now well past saying goodbye and going home).  A menace to citizens and lawmen alike, the desperado is all of twenty-two-years-old when he takes Johnson's life ... and only two weeks away from murder number five, the shotgun killing of Fort Worth Deputy Malcom Davis.

             
                                  On the road - W.D. Jones and Bonnie Parker

NO MORE BARON LAMM

12/16/1930 - In a cornfield near Sidell, Illinois the criminal career of forty-year-old Herman "Baron" Lamm comes to a bloody conclusion due to a series of unlucky mischances.

                                                 
                                                         The Baron

Called by many criminal historians the "father of modern bank robbery," the German born Lamm brings his experiences in the Prussian Army to his criminal endeavors in America, creating a precise military system of robbing banks called "The Lamm Technique" that includes meticulous study of the site of the job and its employees, creation of and practice driving numerous escape routes, each member of his gang being given a specific assignment, keeping the heist to a time schedule using stopwatches, the hiring of shady race car drivers for his getaways using the fastest vehicles available, attacking with superior weaponry like Thompson machine guns, and multiple rehearsals of the crime to come using full-scale mock-ups of the establishment being hit.  For thirteen years Lamm's methods work like a charm and he and his men take over a million dollars out of Midwest banks.  No plans or practice though can overcome the series of events that take place after Lamm and his gang (seventy-one-year-old G.W. "Dad" Landy, getaway driver W.H. Hunter, twenty-six-year-old gunman Walter Dietrich, and James "Oklahoma Jack" Clark, dressed in overalls and a lumber jacket) withdraw $15,567 from the Citizens State Bank of Clinton, Indiana.    

          
                             Dietrich                                                     Clark

Chaos for the group begins when the local barber, carrying a shotgun to go bird hunting with a friend, is mistaken for an armed vigilante.  Reacting quicker and more wildly than he should, Hunter hops a curb making an escaping U-turn and blows out a tire on the gang's Buick sedan.  Alternate transportation necessary, Lamm and his men then seize the first car that comes along ... a vehicle that can only travel 35 miles-per-hour because a governor has secretly been placed on the motor by the son of the car's owner to prevent his elderly father from driving too fast.  Next up the gang boosts a truck ... a truck which soon dies for lack of water in its radiator.  Another car taken, another car abandoned, the outlaws' last theft is a car that only has one gallon of gas in its soon dry tank.  While all that madness has taken place, the gang has crossed from Indiana into Illinois, machine gunned to death Vermillion County Deputy Sheriff Joe Walker when the lawman tries to stop the men outside the small town of Dana, and finds itself being chased by hundreds of law enforcement officers and heavily armed upset locals as airplanes search the local highways for them from above.  Near the town of Sidell the gang's running finally stops and their bad luck continues when they try to steal the car of Leo Moody, an act of desperation that the belligerent farmer responds to by procuring his rifle and immediately firing on the bandits ... gunfire that like a magnet draws the posse pursuing the outlaws to the farm.  Surrounded by over two hundred men in the cornfield of the property, a massive one-sided gun battle takes place in which Hunter and Lamm are killed, a wounded Landy commits suicide to avoid a return to prison, and Dietrich and Clark eventually surrender.  The Lamm Gang destroyed, the legacy of the Baron however lives on when Dietrich and Clark, serving life terms in the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City, make a deal to teach Lamm's bank robbing techniques to a young fellow convict if he will include them in the escape he is planning ... an inmate named John Herbert Dillinger.

      
                                                 The Baron's protege  

JOHN HAMILTON KILLS A COP

12/14/1933 - Bad timing and the quick draw skills of thirty-four-year-old Canadian-born outlaw and recent Michigan City escapee John Hamilton (aka "Red" or "Three Finger Jack" because the index and middle finger of his right hand are missing due to a childhood sledding accident) cost the city of Chicago one of its finest.  

                                         
                                                          Hamilton

Tipped off that members of the Dillinger Gang are using a green convertible for their escapades about town, the Chicago Police Department tracks the suspect vehicle to the auto shop of Carl A. Blomberg, where it has been in recently for repairs on a faulty muffler.  Told to notify the police if the car should return for more work, the shop owner does exactly that when Hamilton brings the Auburn cabriolet in for straightening of one of the vehicle's fenders, a five dollar job.  Telling the outlaw he doesn't have the right tool for the work, Bloomberg sends Hamilton to Tower Auto Rebuilders at 5320 Broadway ... and then is on the phone with authorities as soon as the bank robber leaves his building.

                     
                                        Nice wheels for cruising Chicago

Cruising in the vicinity of the repair shop, Sergeant William T. Shanley, Patrolman Martin Mullen, and Patrolman Frank Hopkins receive a radio call from Chief of Detectives William Schoemaker to find and stakeout the vehicle, and arrest whoever comes calling for it.  Parking about a block and a half away so as not to give the game away, Mullen stays with the squad car while Shanley and Hopkins wait inside the shop ... and wait, and wait, and wait.  At around 4:00 in the afternoon, the hour the night shift comes on duty, so they can end their day and go home, Shanley sends Hopkins to tell Mullen at the car to call headquarters to bring on another team to continue the surveillance.  And sure enough, moments after he is alone, accompanied by his current girlfriend, Elaine Dekant (unaware that she is dating a notorious criminal, Dekant believes her boyfriend is the son of wealthy family that has just come into his inheritance), Hamilton walks into the shop to reclaim his ride.  A twenty-year veteran of the police force, whether worried that his prey will escape if he waits for backup, or eager to receive his second hero award from the Chicago Tribune (earlier in his career he had been honored for entering a dark store and single-handedly arresting a pair of safecrackers), Shanley accosts the pair as soon as they walk up to the convertible.  Telling Hamilton to keep his hands out of his pockets, the sergeant begins patting down the outlaw for a weapon ... a weapon that is drawn in a rattlesnake quick blur of motion from a hidden shoulder holster and fired twice into Shanley's chest.  

                                                          
                                                              Shanley

Leaving his victim in a rapidly spreading pool of blood, Hamilton narrowly misses Hopkins as the patrolman returns from the call to headquarters, abandoning his girlfriend and escaping through a nearby vacant lot.  Taken to nearby Edgewater Hospital, forty-three-year-old Shanley will die from his wounds fifteen minutes later ... the thirteenth Chicago police officer to perish in the line of duty in 1933, the sergeant will leave behind a widow, two sons, and two daughters.  As a result of the killing, two days later Captain John Stege is given authorization to create and command what becomes known as the Dillinger Squad ... a group of 40 hand-picked police marksman divided in to two working shifts for 24-hour coverage of their only mission (the other shift is run by Sergeant Frank Reynolds, an Irish cop already successful in twelve deadly gunfights with local criminals) ... shoot to kill any member of the Dillinger Gang they locate.

          
                Stege and helpmate

Reading about local developments in the newspaper, the central members of the gang decide disguises might be in order and dye their hair ... Hamilton, Russell Clark, and Harry Pierpont all becoming dark brunettes, while Dillinger goes red up top and also begins growing a mustache.  And just to be on the safe side until the town cools off a bit, they all decide to take a holiday vacation far away from Chicago and head off for some beachside rest and relaxation in Florida.