True Crime

Then in 1959 one of Purvis’ most famous cases belatedly, publicly, unraveled. A judge released Roger Touhy, saying the kidnapping charges Purvis had brought years before were a fabrication devised by organized crime; twenty-three days after his release, Touhy was murdered by mob hit men.

Melvin Purvis, it was later said, read with morbid interest every newspaper and magazine piece he could assemble on the incident. At the same time he was suffering from mental depression, for which he took electroshock therapy. On February 29, 1960, he shot himself in the head with a .45 automatic.

Some reporters were quick to say this was the gun Purvis had carried the night he “shot” Dillinger. Of course, Melvin hadn’t fired a shot that night; nor did he or anyone else kill Dillinger.

No, gun buff that he was, Purvis selected something from his vast collection, specifically a chrome-plated .45, that he knew would do what he wanted it to: kill him.

I noted Purvis’ passing with interest and a little sadness. I didn’t dislike Purvis, really. He was no coward, certainly—he’d gone head-to-head with Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Volney Davis, Doc Barker and others, and come out on top. He’d even done some good investigative work, in the year following the Biograph. But he’d been used by the Outfit, unwittingly, and seeing one of his most famous cases come publicly undone, as it had with Touhy, must’ve been the straw.

Or one of them.

In October 1959, a letter arrived at A-1 Detective Agency addressed to Jimmy Lawrence, care of Nathan Heller.

It said: “Sleep easy. I’m not much for grudges—decided not to even the score. Wish you were here.”

It was signed “JD,” and had no address; just a California postmark.

Later I learned a longer letter had been sent to the Indianapolis Star, with a picture of a white-haired man who might be “Dillinger, twenty-five years later”; and yet another letter with picture to Emil Wanatka, the owner of the Little Bohemia Lodge, for the Dillinger Museum there. Both letters included information about Anna Sage, Jimmy Lawrence and Dillinger that was not common public knowledge.

I don’t know if my letter came from the same old guy who sent letters to the Star and Wanatka. But maybe Melvin Purvis received a similar letter, in early 1960.

And maybe J. Edgar did, as well. It makes me smile to think so, anyway. By the time such a letter might have arrived, the director’s famous displays of ghoulish memorabilia were not just to be found in the FBI Museum, but in the very anteroom where visitors waited for admission to Hoover’s office. Hoover would pass each day glass-cased enshrined mementos of that triumphant night at the Biograph: a straw hat, Polly Hamilton’s picture, gold-rimmed glasses, a cellophane-wrapped La Corona-Belvedere cigar. And of course facsimiles of the famous death mask.

The mask those student morticians made back at the Cook County Morgue.

Despite its extensive basis in history, this book is a work of fiction, and a few liberties have been taken with the facts, though as few as possible—and any blame for inaccuracies is my own, reflecting, I hope, the limitations of my conflicting source material, and the need to telescope certain minor events to make for a more smoothly flowing narrative. When fictional events have been included, an attempt has been made to graft them logically onto history, without contradicting known facts or the behavior patterns of the parties involved.