Purvis had been with the Bureau for nearly a decade before the Dillinger case. He was physically slight, well-dressed, and not the prototype of the hard-edged federal agent his public image suggested. But he was an effective field supervisor, and the Chicago office’s work throughout the spring and summer of 1934 — including the cultivation of Anna Sage as an informant — reflected operational competence.
The relationship between Purvis and Hoover deteriorated significantly after the Dillinger shooting. Purvis received substantial public credit for the operation — journalists wrote about him as the man who got Dillinger, and the press lionized him in ways that implicitly competed with Hoover’s preferred narrative of the Bureau as an institutional achievement rather than the work of individual agents. Hoover was notoriously hostile to agents who attracted more personal attention than the director himself.
Purvis resigned from the FBI in 1935. He worked in various capacities afterward and died in 1960 of a gunshot wound. The circumstances were ruled a suicide; members of his family have disputed that conclusion.
His role in the Dillinger case — specifically, the development of the Anna Sage informant relationship and the organization of the Biograph stakeout — was documented in contemporaneous records and his own later accounts. His identification of Dillinger in the crowd outside the theater, his cigar-lighting signal, and his account of taking the pistol from Dillinger’s hand after the agent fell are part of the operational record.
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## The Legacy of the Dillinger Fingerprints in Forensic Science
The Dillinger fingerprint case occupied a distinct position in the development of American forensic science, not simply as a dramatic story but as a data point in the ongoing technical discussion about fingerprint evidence and its limits.