The theory has a significant structural problem: the fingerprint identification. Lawrence and Dillinger would not have shared fingerprints. If the postmortem fingerprints matched the known Dillinger record — including surviving ridge detail on the peripheral areas that confirmed the patterns — then the man killed was Dillinger, regardless of what the father said or what the autopsy noted about eye color.
The 2019 family effort to have the body exhumed for DNA testing ran into a different kind of obstacle: the body, buried in 1934, was reportedly interred under five feet of concrete and steel that had been added over the decades to prevent desecration by souvenir hunters. The physical barriers to exhumation were substantial. Modern DNA analysis, which could definitively settle the identity question, was not applied.
Absent DNA comparison, the fingerprint identification remains the strongest single piece of forensic evidence establishing the identity of the man killed at the Biograph. The memo documenting “unexplained differences” attributable to acid damage, combined with the positive identification from surviving ridges, is the contemporaneous forensic record. The 2019 examination by retired investigators who reported more than ten matching identifiers per finger added modern corroboration of the original finding.
The identity rumors are not supported by documentary evidence proportionate to their persistence. They are supported primarily by the natural human interest in the possibility that a famous criminal outsmarted his pursuers, combined with the genuine ambiguities of a chaotic night in 1934.
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## Melvin Purvis: The Agent Who Got Dillinger
The public face of the FBI’s Dillinger operation was Melvin Purvis, the Special Agent in Charge of the Chicago field office, who became briefly the most famous law enforcement officer in America following the Biograph shooting.