Death masks served several purposes in an era before high-quality photography was universally available and before the forensic documentation procedures that are now standard had been fully developed. They provided a three-dimensional record of the decedent’s facial features that photographs could not fully capture. They also served as evidence in contexts where the identity of the decedent might later be challenged.
The death masks of Dillinger became objects of morbid fascination in the years following his death, joining the wooden gun and other artifacts associated with the case in the complex cultural afterlife of the story. They appear in subsequent historical accounts as physical evidence of the death and as objects whose existence helped rebut the alternative theory — a cast of the dead man’s face, produced the night of the death, made from the actual body.
The masks are not, of course, fingerprint evidence. But they are part of the broader evidentiary record that placed a specific person at the Cook County morgue on the morning of July 23, 1934.
—
## The O’Malley Murder and the Legal Jeopardy That Preceded Death
It is worth stepping back to consider the specific legal position that John Dillinger occupied in July 1934, because that position helps explain why the FBI’s operation at the Biograph was designed as it was and why the identification afterward was so important.
Dillinger was wanted on multiple charges across multiple jurisdictions. The East Chicago murder charge — the killing of Officer William Patrick O’Malley on January 15, 1934 — was the most serious single charge against him and carried the possibility of execution in Indiana. The federal Dyer Act charge arising from the Crown Point escape gave the FBI its jurisdiction. Additional charges accumulated as the spring of 1934 progressed and more bank robberies were attributed to the gang.