The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
JUNE 30, 1934
The Dillinger gang's last robbery was committed in this city, and it is the one entry in this page that is a pointer by design: bank robbery belongs to its own leg of this history, where the case is told in full. What stands here is the discipline of the record. On June 30, 1934, the gang robbed the Merchants National Bank in South Bend, and Patrolman Howard Wagner was killed. Later accounts attribute the fatal shooting to Homer Van Meter, the Fort Wayne member of the gang — but no man was ever arrested or tried for the South Bend killing: the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s own summary of the robbery names three participants — Dillinger, Nelson and Van Meter — and all three were dead within five months, killed in other confrontations in other places, none of them ever in custody for this robbery. A sentence carried in later accounts, that a Jack Perkins was tried for the killing and acquitted, stands on no FBI file, court record or named account behind it, and the name Perkins appears nowhere in the Bureau’s record of the case. That is the whole of what the adjudicated record supports, and every fuller version of the day must be measured against it.
Sources:
- Federal Bureau of Investigation — the Bureau’s published summary of the Merchants National robbery of 30 June 1934, naming Dillinger, Nelson and Van Meter as the participants; no arrest and no trial stands in the record