All right. DID John Dillinger escape from the Crown Point, Indiana, jail using a wooden gun on March 3, 1934? Certainly no Hollywood scriptwriter would dare write such a scenario, but it has gone down in history as one of the most brazen breakouts ever.

The Crown Point escape was actually John's second flight from incarceration. On May 22, 1933, a 29 year-old John Herbert Dillinger had been paroled after serving 9 years for robbing a grocer in his hometown of Mooresville, Indiana. Almost immediately after his parole he began robbing banks and for this perfidy he was arrested on September 22 in Dayton, Ohio.

Four days later some of his old friends who were incarcerated in the Indiana State Penitentiary escaped using guns supposedly smuggled in at John's direction. On October 12 and repaying the favor, three of the men, Harry Pierpont, Charles Makley, and Russell Clark, all dressed up in snappy fedoras and pressy suits showed up at the Allen County sheriff's office. They were, they said, law officers transferring John to the State Prison.

Sheriff Jesse Sarber would have been glad to be shut of John and he didn't doubt their identity. But he said he had to see their credentials. Harry then pulled a gun and said those were credentials enough. What happened next isn't clear but Sheriff Sarber was killed and Dillinger escaped with the others.

The gang went back to robbing banks but then on January 25, 1935, they were arrested again in Tucson. They just didn't seem to get the message that if you keep robbing banks you're going to get thrown in the slammer.

John was flown to Indiana - protesting volubly that he was being "shanghaied" - and on January 30, he was placed in the - quote - "escape proof jail" - unquote - at Crown Point. Among the charges was not just bank robbery but murder of a law officer.

The story was big news and it was at Crown Point that the famous photos and film were made of John standing between district attorney Robert Estill and Sheriff Lillian Holley. The picture of Public Enemy #1 who was under indictment for bank robbery and murder standing with a companionable arm on Robert's shoulder completely destroyed Robert's promising political career.

The accounts of what happened next are not entirely consistent but agree on the main points and the following gives the basics as reconstructed from various sources. On Saturday, May 3, 1934, John and fourteen other prisoners were in the exercise cell of the jail. At 9:15, after the guard Sam Calhoon and two others entered the cell, John drew what Sam and the others thought was a small pistol. John took the keys and with the help of a young African American inmate named Henry Youngblood ordered Sam and the guards into the cell and locked them in with the other prisoners.

At that point, Ernest Blunk, who was the county's fingerprint expert, came walking by. He was quickly nabbed by John who ordered him to summon the jail's warden Lou Baker. When Warden Baker showed up Johnnie locked him in with the rest. This process continued and eventually there were a total of eighteen men - guards and prisoners - locked in the exercise cell.

John and Henry with Ernest in tow went to the main office and took a haul of (real) weapons. They then made their way to the garage where mechanic Edward Saager was at his job. Asked which was the fastest car, Edward pointed to the one used by Sheriff Holley. Since Ernest was in the group, at first Edward didn't realize it was a jailbreak - that is he didn't until he was ordered at gunpoint into the car.

Rather than speed away, John told Ernest to take it easy and stick to the 30 mile an hour speed limit. After much convoluted driving along gravel roads John let Ernest and Edward go, and John and Henry drove on toward Chicago. John, as we know, kept robbing banks and was finally - quote - "captured" - unquote - on July 22, 1934, outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago.

Alright. Did John use a wooden gun in what is likely the most famous jailbreak in history?

There are some historians who say the wooden gun story was true. One of the earliest stories was put forth by an Indiana government official and said that John had carved it from the top slat of a washboard. It may seem incredible that such a - quote - "wooden gun" - unquote - which was nothing more than a barrel and a trigger guard stained black - would pass muster as a real weapon. But when held in the hand it did look like a small calibre pistol. At least it did if you didn't look too closely.

John's family also maintained the "escape gun" was made of wood. They said that John had given it to them on one of his surreptitious visits back home, and they were keeping it in a vault. Complicating matters is that John's "authentic wooden gun" seems to have behaved like relics of the saints. That is, it seems to have multiplied over the years and more than one person says they may have the original. The story is made even more complicated by the suggestion that when John gave the gun to his father, his dad carved a duplicate to display publicly while he kept the original under wraps.

On the other hand the story that a prisoner could escape by brandishing a rather crude non-facsimile of a pistol brought considerable criticism to the sheriff's department. So wooden gun doubters began asserting that John's gun was real and had been smuggled in. That was by no means impossible as we saw when John (allegedly) got guns smuggled in to the Indiana State Prison so Harry and the rest could escape. Certainly a couple of years after John's escape, a prisoner in Greensboro, North Carolina, attempted a "wooden gun" escape and didn't fool anyone.

Certainly the official government investigation completely pooh-poohed the wooden gun story as nothing but a "Dillinger Myth". The findings stated the gun was indeed real and mostly likely was smuggled in by John's visitors. Some have pointed to his girlfriend Billie Frechette; others to John's lawyer, Louis Piquett.

It wasn't just the authorities who doubted John could cow an entire sheriff's department with a wooden facsimile. Only three days after the breakout Mary Kinder, the girlfriend of Harry Pierpont, expressed doubt about the story. Instead she said she thought John had bought his way out. This suspicion was shared by others since given the sheer effrontery of the escape it made sense that John had help from the inside. After all, if you grease the right palms, anything is possible. Later stories (admittedly of scanty documentation) gave a figure that someone on the jail's staff was paid $11,000 to help John escape.

Despite the stories that John was seen as a latter day Robin Hood, at the time the newspapers were not particularly sympathetic to Dillinger or his friends. The papers would refer to John as the nation's criminal, No. 1 Public Enemy, a desperado, a gunman, a slayer, and a wandering bum. But they also acknowledged he had been able to make the police force look like amateurs.

Naturally a lot of criticism fell on the sheriff, Lillian Holley. The papers - or at least the reporters who wrote the stories - made the expected comments how the woman sheriff "went into hysterics" after Dillinger escaped. Such comments weren't made about the warden who was actually in charge of the jail's security.

Lillian, we must point out, never expected or aspired to be sheriff of Lake County, Indiana. Her husband, Roy (called "Doc" by his friends) had been elected sheriff in 1929 and had servied four years. However, when attempting to make an arrest, Sheriff Holley himself had been killed. Lillian was appointed to complete his term.

In any case, the investigation cleared Sheriff Holley saying she was most likely a victim of circumstances of which she had no control. Certainly she wasn't a mysterious and hypothetical "inside" co-conspirator, and today few people think there was inside collusion from anyone. As far as catching Dillinger there was little Lillian could do as she had no jurisdiction outside Lake County and no one expected Dillinger to stick around.

Ultimately Lillian had the last laugh - literally. John Dillinger, as we know, could not have laughed after July 22, 1934. He was 31. Lillian, though, continued to laugh until June 12, 1994. She was 103.

So we finally come to he conclusion whether John Dillinger used a wooden gun in his famous jailbreak from the Lake County, Indiana, jail at Crown Point on March 3, 1934.

Maybe.¹

References and Further Reading

"Dillinger Loose; Hunted by Posse - No. 1 Public Enemy of Nation Breaks Out of Crown Pointail, Brandishing Wooden Gun", The Indianapolis Times, March 3, 1934, Page 1.

"Wood Gun Called Dillinger Myth", Associated Press, Washington [D. C.] Evening Star, April 5, 1935.

"John Dillinger's Escape from a Crown Point Jail Cell Made Headlines 86 Years Ago This Week", Alison Martin, Chicago Sun-Times, March 4, 2020.

"Dillinger's Wooden Gun", Hillary Smith, The Times of Northwest Indiana Times, August 3, 2014.

"Dillinger Bought Way Out - Had No Need for 'Wooden Gun,' Infers Mary Kinder", The Indianapolis Times, March 6, 1934, Page 3.

"Do You Know That?", The Skyland North Carolina Post, January 24, 1935, Page 8.

"Dillinger's Escape Was Outside Job", Henderson North Carolina Post, April 5, 1935, Page 3.

"Officer Not Impressed by Wooden Gun", Neal Taflinger, [Salisbury North] Carolina Watchman, July 24, 1936, Page 5

"Cameras Follow Dillinger and His Trail of Crime", The Indianapolis Times, July 23, 1934, Page 8.

"Debunking the Myths Surrounding John Dillinger, Indiana's Most Wanted Man", Neal Taflinger, Indianapolis Star, August 31, 2017.

"87 Years Later, the Car Dillinger Stole in Crown Point is Returned", Chicago Tribune, April 4, 2021.