Dillinger was extradited to Lake County, Indiana, to face the O’Malley murder charge. He was placed in the county jail in Crown Point — a facility that Sheriff Lillian Holley had recently described as escape-proof. Holley’s confidence was not unusual; Crown Point was considered one of the most secure county jail facilities in the Midwest.
John Dillinger departed from it on March 3, 1934.
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## The Wooden Gun and the Federal Jurisdiction
The Crown Point escape became one of the defining legends of the Dillinger story — not primarily because of what it accomplished, but because of what Dillinger claimed he had used to accomplish it.
He said he used a gun carved from a piece of wood and darkened with shoe polish. He used it, he later claimed, to threaten a prison trustee and then other guards, make his way out of the secured cell block, arm himself with real guns from the jail’s weapons room, and walk out of a facility that had been declared escape-proof.
The wooden gun story was widely reported and widely disbelieved. Investigators and prison officials suspected that a real gun had been smuggled in. The specific source of that firearm — whether it was real or constructed — was never definitively established, and the dispute was academic by the time it was investigated; Dillinger was out and moving.
What mattered for the subsequent federal manhunt was what he did immediately after escaping: he drove away in Sheriff Holley’s car. The car crossed the Indiana-Illinois state line, making the escape a federal offense under the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act — commonly known as the Dyer Act. The moment Dillinger crossed that state line, the FBI had jurisdiction.