When Dillinger’s fingertips healed in the weeks following the May procedure, the results confirmed what experts in fingerprint science already understood: the patterns returned. The centers were more obscured than before. But the edges remained, and enough of the overall pattern survived to allow comparison.
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## The Final Months: South Bend, Chicago, and Anna Sage
In June 1934, with his new face and partially treated fingertips, Dillinger continued operating. On June 22, 1934 — his thirty-first birthday — he was at Chicago’s French Casino with his girlfriend Polly Hamilton, apparently unconcerned by the ongoing federal manhunt. The FBI officially designated him Public Enemy Number One on that date.
The final major bank robbery came eight days later, on June 30, 1934, when the gang hit the Merchants National Bank in South Bend, Indiana, taking $30,000. During the robbery, South Bend police officer Howard Wagner was killed, and Homer Van Meter was shot and seriously wounded. The South Bend robbery was notable for its violence and for the evidence it provided that the gang was not operating at peak capability — Van Meter’s wound and the increased chaos of the escape suggested a crew under sustained pressure.
After South Bend, Dillinger moved through Chicago, living with Polly Hamilton and maintaining contact with Anna Sage, a Romanian-born woman who operated a brothel in Gary, Indiana, and had known Hamilton.
Sage’s situation in July 1934 was urgent. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service had been pursuing deportation proceedings against her, citing her conviction for operating a house of prostitution as grounds to declare her an undesirable alien who should be returned to Romania. She faced the genuine prospect of losing everything she had built in the United States.