Dillinger’s father, John Wilson Dillinger, was brought to the morgue to view the body. His reported reaction upon seeing his son’s face — “That’s not my boy” — has been widely cited by conspiracy theorists who argue that the wrong man was shot and that Dillinger escaped. The elder Dillinger’s sister Audrey Hancock also viewed the body. Contemporary accounts indicate that Hancock did identify the body as her brother’s.
The father’s reaction has been attributed to various causes: grief, shock, the effect of the facial surgeries on his son’s appearance, and the natural difficulty of recognizing a face that has been surgically altered and then damaged by the gunshot wound that killed him. Autopsy records noted that the fatal wound entered the back of the neck and exited below the right eye, which would have caused visible damage to the right side of the face.
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## The Forensic Record: Identifying the Dead Man
Beyond the family identification, which was ambiguous, the FBI conducted formal forensic identification of the body. This process relied primarily on fingerprinting — the same technology that had been central to the Bureau’s growing crime laboratory infrastructure throughout the early 1930s.
Dillinger had an existing fingerprint record on file from multiple prior arrests: his 1924 conviction in Indiana, his later arrests, and the routine fingerprinting that accompanied his various incarcerations. The FBI had a known, documented, multi-impression fingerprint card for John Herbert Dillinger.
The examiner comparing the postmortem impressions against that known card encountered the altered condition of the fingertips immediately. A fingerprint-division memo documented what was visible: “unexplained differences” between the impressions taken from the body and the known Dillinger fingerprint record. The memo attributed those differences to the acid treatment the fingers had received.