The marquee reading *Manhattan Melodrama* on the night of Dillinger’s death has become one of the iconic images associated with the case. The film’s story — a district attorney and a gangster who had grown up together, whose paths diverge and ultimately collide — has been repeatedly noted as a kind of thematic frame for the event, though the resonance is entirely retrospective. Dillinger, who died in an alley, did not select the film for its thematic appropriateness to his situation.
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## The Formal Science of Fingerprinting in 1934
The FBI’s fingerprint identification infrastructure in 1934 was significantly more developed than casual accounts of the period sometimes suggest. The Bureau’s Identification Division had been accumulating records since the early years of the century, and by 1934 it maintained one of the largest fingerprint repositories in the world.
The system in use in 1934 was the Henry System of classification, developed by Sir Edward Henry in India at the end of the nineteenth century and adopted by Scotland Yard in 1901. The Henry System classifies fingerprints based on the pattern types (arch, loop, whorl) of each finger, allowing a trained examiner to quickly narrow a large collection to a small group of records for direct comparison.
The comparison technique — the matching of specific ridge characteristics between a questioned print and a known record — did not require a complete fingerprint to function. It required sufficient legible ridge detail in any area of the print to allow identification of multiple matching minutiae between the questioned and known samples.