John Dillinger's Last Robbery Was In South Bend

Three weeks before federal agents gunned him down outside the Biograph Theater, Dillinger staged his last bank job on Michigan Street

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED SEPTEMBER 13, 2025

It was just before noon on June 30, 1934, and the sweltering summer scurry of South Bend's downtown was about to be brought to a halt.

Clerks at the Merchants National Bank near Michigan and Wayne shuffled paper and counted cash, the air stale with ink and sweat. Outside, shoppers drifted past storefronts and moviegoers crowded into the State. It was a normal South Bend day, other than that it was a hot one.

Then the doors of the bank slammed open.

None other than John Dillinger stepped inside with his men, shotguns in hand, and the rhythm of the ordinary Saturday collapsed into chaos.

“Hands up! Nobody move!”

The words echoed throughout the marble lobby. The people held their breaths. They knew the robber's face. They'd seen it in the papers. They knew he wasn't bluffing.

Dillinger moved with the swagger of a man who was proud that his own face was in those newspapers. His men — famous gangsters themselves — fanned out, shotguns swinging, their boots echoing on the tile. One vaulted the counter, pressing a barrel into the ribs of a trembling cashier. Another dragged the bank manager toward the vault.

Outside, the summer air suddenly smelled like trouble. Onlookers swarmed, a mass of people who had only ever heard of this kind of thing before. Main Street shopkeepers whispered to each other as they peered through glass. South Bend had read about Dillinger in the papers, but now the headline had kicked open their own front door.

Then the shooting started.

South Bend had been simmering all month. On June 1, the mercury had reached 106 degrees — still the hottest June day the city has ever seen. By the end of the month, the heat had only broken just a little. The city was already at a boil before the bandits showed up.

Not that there's ever a good day for a bank robbery, but this was a particularly bad one. When the city streets turn into a furnace, tempers usually run short, and they definitely run hot.

They did on this day, anyway.

Inside, the thieves worked quickly, efficiently, professionally. Gang member Charles Makley vaulted the counter, forcing tellers at gunpoint to empty their tills. Harry Pierpont, cool and commanding, kept his shotgun leveled on the marble-floored lobby, making sure that no one tried to play the hero. Dillinger himself oversaw the vault, moving with the confidence of a man who'd done this before. In less than two minutes, they had gathered $28,000 in cash.

Outside, Baby Face Nelson stood at the corner of Michigan and Wayne Streets, brandishing a machine gun until the gang could make its getaway.

It didn't take long for the first police officer to make the scene, but he was outmanned and woefully outgunned. Dillinger accomplice Homer Van Meter shot at the first cop he saw, and his shot connected. In a moment, South Bend patrolman Howard Wagner was dead in the street.

Around the corner, jewelry store owner Harry Berg heard the commotion and readied his own gun, firing back toward the robbers — and probably endangering more than a few bystanders.

The gunfire triggered a chain reaction. More police converged on Main Street. Shopkeepers ducked behind counters. Passersby sprinted for cover as bullets tore through glass and brick. Dillinger's gang grabbed bank employees and unlucky customers to use as human shields until they were safely into the getaway car. They tossed tacks on the road behind them to slow down any kind of organized chase.

It had been only a few minutes from beginning to end, but by the time it was all over, a police officer was dead, six civilians were wounded, and the damage to downtown buildings was extensive. Investigators found the getaway car 100 miles away in Goodland, Indiana. By then, the instigators were long gone.

Dillinger had escaped... for the last time.

The verifiably true part of the story ends with Dillinger's dramatic escape from South Bend, guns blazing, tires squealing, and a city left in mourning. The rumors started almost immediately afterward, and they've been repeated for almost 100 years.

Stories claim that Dillinger had been scouting the bank for weeks and that he was a regular visitor to the State Theater just across the street. Other stories tell that he and some of the gang members had been holed up at the Rose Hotel on Sample Street or that the gang maintained a hideout in a barn just south of town. Still another story claims that Dillinger had been spotted stalking the bank president's house three weeks before the robbery.

Other stories claim that Dillinger had accomplices around town, or at least enough friendly figures that they kept silent when they realized what he was up to. Remember, this was the Great Depression, a time when most Americans thought the banks were the enemy. For a lot of people, that made Dillinger a kind of folk hero.

Some of those stories might be true, but we'll never know. Dillinger was a legendary antihero, and people everywhere made wild claims about things that never happened just so they could say that they'd been in his orbit. One oft-repeated legend claims that moviegoers at the State Theater confused the sound of gunshots on the street with an action sequence in the Western they'd gathered to watch on the big screen. Only problem is that the State wasn't showing a Western that day. Instead, they were showing Stolen Sweets, a romantic comedy.

Another legend tells that Dillinger was back in Chicago on Saturday afternoon, just a few hours after the heist at Merchants National. He made no effort to disguise himself when he waltzed into Wrigley Field to catch a Cubs game.

Of course, the Cubs were in Pittsburgh that day.

Around South Bend — and around the United States — Dillinger's fabricated legend was growing by the minute. But soon enough, the man and his legend would both be dead.

South Bend wasn't convinced that it had really been John Dillinger, at least not in the immediate aftermath of the incident. The papers ran reports from eyewitnesses who were sure that they hadn't seen Dillinger's famous face among the gangsters at the bank that day. They bandied other theories about Italian gangsters and the Chicago mob. A day later, they ran reports from other eyewitnesses who were certain it had been Dillinger.

The newspaper turned into a rumor mill.

When ruffians broke into a North Webster doctor's home in the middle of the night and forced him to dress a man's gunshot wounds and then knocked him unconscious after the surgery was over, it was evidence of Dillinger. When a mysterious black sedan was spotted near Bourbon, they were sure it was Dillinger all over again. On July 21, a posse showed up to a Dillinger sighting in Culver, but he wasn't there either.

Instead he was in Chicago, laying low, and itching to get out of the safe house. Dillinger went to see a movie in Lincoln Park on July 22, 1934. The Feds were waiting for him by the time the movie ended, and Dillinger went down in the same kind of gunfire blaze that he'd once visited upon South Bend.

Within a year, all of the men behind the South Bend robbery were dead or in prison, dangerous only in the rumors and legends they left in their wake.