AP

"I know he's a bad baby and a jailbreaker but I can handle him," Sheriff Lillian Holley said of John Dillinger, according to a 1934 issue of TIME. The notorious gangster had been taken to Indiana, where he was wanted for killing a policeman, following his capture in Arizona in January of that year. Only months earlier, his cohorts had helped him break out of an Ohio jail where he had been serving time for bank robbery. Yet contrary to the authorities' boasts, the Crown Point, Ind., jail was as escape-proof as the Titanic was unsinkable. On March 3, 1934, Dillinger, the FBI recounts, used "what he claimed later was a wooden gun he had whittled" to break out. And he imprisoned guards before driving away  in the sheriff's car. "If I ever see John Dillinger," Holley was also quoted as saying, "I'll shoot him dead with my own pistol. This is too ridiculous to talk about." In July that same year, after an intense manhunt, Dillinger was shot dead, outside the Biograph theater in Chicago.

Read more of TIME's 1934 coverage of "desperado John Dillinger."

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