The criminal demand for the procedure persisted because the theoretical logic was sound — destroy the ridges and the fingerprint cannot be matched — but the available implementation failed to achieve the necessary depth of tissue damage. The operations that criminal doctors were willing and able to perform did not go deep enough to destroy the dermal template.
The cases collectively constituted a body of evidence that the FBI’s forensic science division — the Bureau’s technical arm that was expanding rapidly in the 1930s — incorporated into its educational materials and published accounts. The 1934 Hoover-commissioned committee report and subsequent publications in the Law Enforcement Bulletin made the point repeatedly: fingerprint alteration as practiced by criminal operators does not work.
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## The Identity Rumors: What They Say and What the Evidence Shows
The ambiguities of the Biograph shooting — the father’s “That’s not my boy,” the disputed autopsy details, the plastic surgery that had altered the face, the body displayed in a chaotic morgue setting — have supported a persistent alternative claim: that the man killed at the Biograph was not John Dillinger but a small-time criminal named Jimmy Lawrence, who resembled Dillinger and had been dating Billie Frechette’s circle of associates, and that Dillinger survived and lived out his life in obscurity.
This theory is primarily associated with Jay Robert Nash, whose 1983 book *The Dillinger Dossier* argued at length that Dillinger had orchestrated his own escape from the Biograph situation by ensuring that a lookalike was in position to be shot while Dillinger disappeared. Nash’s argument drew on the autopsy discrepancies, the father’s reaction, and circumstantial evidence about Jimmy Lawrence.