John Herbert Dillinger was born on June 22, 1903, in Indianapolis, Indiana. He grew up in Mooresville, a small town in the southwestern part of the state, after his family moved there when he was a child. His mother, Mollie, died when John was three. His father, John Wilson Dillinger, eventually remarried, and John grew up in a household shaped by that loss and that transition.
By most accounts, Dillinger was not especially unusual as a young man — he was athletic, sociable, and not particularly focused on the future. He left school after the seventh grade, worked at an Indianapolis machine shop, and drifted into the kind of petty trouble that characterized the margins of working-class life in a Midwestern city in the early 1920s.
The event that sent his life onto its defining trajectory came in September 1923. He stole a car. Almost caught by police, he fled into the Navy the following day, enlisting as a way of escaping consequences. He lasted a few months before deserting his ship in Boston and returning to Indiana. The Navy gave him a dishonorable discharge.
Back in Mooresville in 1924, he married a sixteen-year-old named Beryl Hovious, a marriage that would last five years without substantially stabilizing his behavior. The event that ended his chance at an ordinary life came on September 6, 1924: Dillinger and an older ex-convict named Edgar Singleton attempted to rob a Mooresville grocer named Frank Morgan as the man walked home from his store.
The robbery failed. Morgan fought back. Dillinger was caught. When he appeared in court, his father advised him to plead guilty and throw himself on the court’s mercy. The judge sentenced Dillinger to ten to twenty years on one count and two to fourteen years on a second, to be served concurrently. Edgar Singleton, who hired an attorney and pled not guilty, received a much lighter sentence.