His wife Beryl divorced him in 1929, while he was still serving his sentence. He was eventually paroled on May 10, 1933, nearly nine and a half years after the failed Mooresville robbery, having served the minimum of his sentence. He was twenty-nine years old, trained in bank robbery by some of its most capable practitioners, and unwilling to return to the kind of marginal working-class life he’d left behind.
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## The 1933 Crime Spree: Learning the Trade
Dillinger’s post-parole career in bank robbery was methodical in its early stages. He was paroled to attend to his stepmother, who was dying, but she was already gone when he arrived. He returned to crime quickly.
His first confirmed post-parole bank robbery was on June 10, 1933, at the National Bank of New Carlisle, Ohio. The haul was $10,600. By August he had added two more banks in Indiana — the First National Bank in Montpelier and the Citizens National Bank in Bluffton — and the Massachusetts Avenue State Bank in Indianapolis. Each robbery was relatively quick, relatively efficient, and produced moderate but meaningful sums.
The October 1933 robbery of the Central National Bank in Greencastle, Indiana — which produced $75,000, by far the largest single take of his career — demonstrated the planning capability that made Dillinger’s crew distinctive. They came in with enough force to control the room quickly, moved out efficiently, and were gone before local law enforcement could mount an effective response.
Meanwhile, Dillinger worked to free his Michigan City associates. When he was jailed in Dayton, Ohio in September 1933 and held in the Lima jail awaiting extradition, Pierpont and other Michigan City men — using weapons that investigators later concluded had been smuggled in through contacts — escaped from the Indiana prison and came to free Dillinger. On October 12, 1933, they did exactly that, breaking into the Lima jail. During the escape, they shot and fatally wounded Sheriff Jess Sarber. Sarber’s death marked the first killing directly tied to the Dillinger network.