The escaped men, rather than simply fleeing, went to free Dillinger. On October 12, 1933, Pierpont, Hamilton, and other Michigan City escapees arrived at the Lima jail. Sheriff Jess Sarber confronted them. During the confrontation, Sarber was shot multiple times and died of his wounds. Dillinger was freed.
The Lima killing was the event that transformed the Dillinger case from a series of bank robberies into a murder case. Sarber, a sixty-year-old small-town Ohio sheriff, had been doing his job. He was shot repeatedly by men who had come specifically to free a prisoner. His death established the operational pattern of the gang: violence when necessary, without hesitation, against anyone who stood between them and their objective.
This willingness to use lethal force was not incidental to the gang’s success. It was part of what made them effective and part of what made them dangerous. Local law enforcement confronting a Dillinger crew raid knew that resistance would be met with gunfire. That knowledge shaped how individual officers and bystanders responded during the robberies themselves.
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## The Mechanics of the Bank Robberies
The Dillinger gang’s bank robberies were not random or improvisational. They reflected a methodology that had been developed and refined through the Michigan City network’s collective experience.
A typical robbery began with reconnaissance. Members of the gang would visit a target bank in advance, posing as customers, to observe the layout, identify vault locations, estimate the number of staff and customers at different times of day, and assess the proximity of police stations and patrol routes.