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1934–2025
Two men who were not there: the city's current retelling — Aaron Helman's account in the South Bend News-Times of September 13, 2025, the fullest modern telling — narrates the robbery with Charles Makley vaulting the Merchants National's counter and Harry Pierpont commanding its lobby. Neither man was in South Bend. Pierpont, Makley and Russell Clark had been convicted in Ohio in March 1934 of the murder of Sheriff Jess Sarber of Lima and were in Ohio custody on June 30, 1934, Pierpont and Makley under sentence of death; Makley was shot dead in the pair's escape attempt that September, and Pierpont was executed on October 17, 1934. The retelling's centerpiece casting fails against the court record, and it is corrected here because the retelling is the version of the robbery South Bend now reads.
The theater story: the same retelling preserves the legend that moviegoers at the State Theater, across Michigan Street from the bank, mistook the gunfire for the Western on the screen — and itself supplies the disproof: the State was not showing a Western that day. The theater's bill, as the local account records it, was Stolen Sweets, a romantic comedy starring Sally Blane and Charles Starrett, under a banner advertising the house's new cooling system. The legend fails on the program.
The ballgame story: a second legend, also carried and answered by the retelling, has Dillinger in Chicago that same Saturday afternoon, undisguised at a Cubs game at Wrigley Field. The Cubs were in Pittsburgh that day. The legend fails on the schedule.
The hideout stories: the remaining lore is of the kind that leaves no paper: that Dillinger had scouted the bank for weeks and was a regular at the State Theater; that the gang had been holed up at the Rose Hotel on Sample Street; that it kept a hideout in a barn just south of town; that Dillinger had been seen watching the bank president's house three weeks before the robbery. No document reached for this section supports any of them, and the FBI's record gives the gang's South Bend presence as the robbery alone. They are printed here as the city's lore, at lore's size — named, and not believed on this evidence.
The rumor mill: in the robbery's first days the city's papers carried eyewitnesses certain they had not seen Dillinger's face among the robbers, and others certain they had, alongside theories of Italian gangsters and the Chicago mob; the Bureau's identification, not the street's, is what settled the question. The weeks after ran the same way: a doctor's home at North Webster broken into in the night and the doctor forced to dress a man's gunshot wounds — the retelling files it among the rumors, and the record reached here neither confirms nor refutes it — and a posse answering a Dillinger sighting at Culver on July 21 that found no one. Dillinger was in Chicago, where he was killed the next day. The sightings are the summer's weather, printed as such.
Sources:
- Aaron Helman, "John Dillinger's Last Robbery Was In South Bend," South Bend News-Times, September 13, 2025 — the modern retelling audited here: its Makley and Pierpont narration; its rumor catalog (the State Theater, the Rose Hotel on Sample Street, the barn, the president's house); the Stolen Sweets program; the Cubs in Pittsburgh; the North Webster and Culver items.
- Federal Bureau of Investigation, "John Dillinger," famous cases narrative, and the Dillinger-gang trial record — Pierpont, Makley and Clark returned to Ohio, convicted of Sheriff Sarber's murder, Pierpont and Makley sentenced to death (March 1934); Makley killed in the September 1934 escape attempt; Pierpont executed October 17, 1934.
- Monon Railroad Historical-Technical Society, South Bend pages — the State Theater's bill that day: Stolen Sweets, Sally Blane and Charles Starrett.