Deputy Ernest Blunk was suspected of involvement and was tried but acquitted for lack of evidence despite evidence that he had received payment from Dillinger’s connections. Attorney’s investigator Arthur O’Leary, who claimed to have delivered a hand-carved wooden replica to the jail on the morning of the escape, provided one account of how the initial deception was performed.
The key legal fact of the escape was not how it was done but what Dillinger did immediately afterward: he took Sheriff Holley’s car and drove it across the state line. The National Motor Vehicle Theft Act — the Dyer Act — made transporting a stolen vehicle in interstate commerce a federal crime. By crossing into Illinois in Holley’s car, Dillinger had given the FBI its jurisdictional hook.
The federal fugitive status that resulted from the Dyer Act charge was what allowed the FBI to designate Dillinger a priority and deploy national resources against him. Without that interstate crossing, the case would have remained primarily an Indiana matter. With it, the full apparatus of federal law enforcement was legally authorized to pursue him anywhere in the country.
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## Reading the Known Card: What Was on File
The comparison that established Dillinger’s identity from the postmortem prints depended on the existence of a good known record. That record came from his prior arrests and incarcerations, which had generated multiple sets of fingerprint impressions over the previous decade.
The 1924 Indiana arrest and conviction had produced the first formal fingerprint record. His subsequent incarcerations at the Indiana State Reformatory in Pendleton and the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City added to the record. His 1933 arrest in Dayton, Ohio, generated another set of impressions. The Tucson arrest in January 1934 generated another. Each arrest at which fingerprints were taken added to the known record for John Herbert Dillinger.