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.”33Estill and Holley’s imprudence notwithstanding, the gang was safelybehind bars.All that remained now was the slow grinding of the legalmachinery, leading inexorably to trials, sentencing, and execution.Dillinger and his men did not disappear from the newspapers, but theywere relegated to inside pages, as prosaic stories about arraignments,legal maneuvers, trial dates, and jury selections trickled in.Journalists raised the possibility of an escape attempt, either at Lima or CrownPoint, then noted the dozens of heavily armed officers guarding theprisoners.Newsreel footage in thousands of theaters underscoredthe point, showing grim-faced men with powerful weapons pacingin front of jails.Harry Pierpont uttered an occasional oath of defi-ance, but the fact that he spoke from behind bars made his wordsseem more pathetic than threatening.The Chicago Police Departmentreassigned its forty-man “Dillinger Squad” to break up rogue laborunions under the new antiracketeering laws.The fact that SheriffHolley was a woman (she took over the job after her husband’s deathjust months before) raised a few eyebrows.As one Associated Pressstory noted, however, she might belong to a bridge club, paint pic-tures, and attend missionary society meetings, yet she was a crackshot at the target range.The Gary (Indiana) Post-Tribune summed it up: “The worst bad man in the country is a meek prisoner of LakeCounty’s woman sheriff.”34After much legal wrangling the trial was set for March 12.Dil-linger’s attorney, Sheriff Holley, Prosecutor Estill, and Judge Murray70 | Dillinger’sWildRideall agreed not to send the prisoner back to Michigan City for safekeep-ing or to change the trial’s venue.The local jail was secure enough.This was their show, and they wanted it to stay in Crown Point.35“John Dillinger Escapes!” read the block-letter headline ofthe afternoon issue of the Gary Post-Tribune on Saturday, March 3:“Uses Wooden Gun in Jail Delivery.” Like most other newspapers, thePost-Tribune illustrated its story with that photo of Dillinger, Estill, and Holley, taken a month earlier.The wise-cracking Chicago DailyNews now captioned the picture, “They Smiled—When He Said He’d Escape.” The International News Service ran a version of the photowith Estill cut out and Holley smiling at Dillinger, and the headlineread, “He Escapes, Jailer in Hysterics.” “Notorious Gangster Escapesfrom County Jail” the Hammond (Indiana) Times declared that same day, followed by “Getaway Is Effected by Colored Man Who CowedMany Guards and Locked Them in Cell.”36All over America newspapers were filled with the news that Dil-linger was at large once again.“Three States Hunting Dillinger,” readthe Chicago Tribune banner on March 4, and below that, “Locks Up Deputies and Flees in Sherif’s [ sic] Car.” The Arizona Star led with“Dillinger Coolest Criminal Alive, Declares His Hostage,” and theSheboygan Press said, “Dillinger’s Record Is Unprecedented.” The New York Times ran a series of headlines down a column on page 1:“Dillinger Escapes Jail Using a Wooden Pistol,” “Flees with NegroKiller,” “Armed with Machine Guns They Are Hunted Near Chicago,”“And Drive Off from Crown Point, Ind., in Woman Sheriff’s Car.” TheTimes summed up by calling the events of March 3 “a daring escape that rivals the exploits of the heroes of Wild West Thrillers.”37By the time Americans went back to work on Monday, the mediahad given them a spectacular story to discuss, one with just enoughdetail to invite speculation.Dillinger escaped, as the Chicago Tribune put it, “aided only by his own desperate courage and a little toy pistol he had made himself.” Reporters described how he carved the fakegun in his cell over the previous month, then blackened it with shoepolish to make it look real [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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