Harry Pierpont, who had been the organizing intelligence behind the Michigan City prison break and the original Dillinger liberation from the Lima jail, was tried in Ohio for the murder of Sheriff Jess Sarber and convicted. He was executed in the electric chair at Ohio State Penitentiary in January 1934 — before Dillinger died, as it happened, while Dillinger was still running.
John “Red” Hamilton, who had been wounded in the Mason City bank robbery in March 1934, died of those wounds in the weeks following. His associates buried his body and reportedly poured lye over it in an attempt to prevent identification. His remains were eventually found and identified.
—
## The Public Record of Fingerprint Alteration Cases
The FBI’s systematic documentation of fingerprint alteration attempts in the 1930s produced a body of case material that became the foundation for a larger technical and legal literature on the subject.
The cases were not limited to the high-profile Public Enemy examples. Criminals throughout the 1930s made various attempts to alter their prints — through acid, through cutting, through burning, and through combinations of these methods. The Bureau’s identification division, which processed millions of fingerprint cards during this period, regularly encountered prints that showed evidence of attempted alteration.
The documentation of these cases was incorporated into training materials and published in the Law Enforcement Bulletin, the Bureau’s journal directed at law enforcement professionals nationwide. The consistent finding across the documented cases was that surface-level alteration, however aggressively applied, produced only partial and temporary modification of the ridge patterns. The peripheral areas survived. The dermis was not destroyed. The identification remained possible.