For Dillinger’s own legal situation, the Sarber killing added moral weight to the case against him even though he had not fired the shots. He had been in the jail being freed when Sarber was shot. The liberation of a prisoner that required killing a sheriff was substantially different, legally and morally, from the liberation of a prisoner through a simple jailbreak.
The subsequent killing of Officer O’Malley in January 1934 — Dillinger personally shooting a responding officer during the East Chicago bank robbery — added a second murder charge directly attributable to Dillinger himself.
By the time the Biograph operation was being planned, Dillinger was wanted not only as a federal fugitive but as a suspected murderer in multiple jurisdictions. The legal system waiting for him, if captured, was one with no good outcomes from his perspective.
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## The Files and What They Show
The documentary record of the Dillinger case — spread across FBI files, state court records, newspaper archives, and academic publications — is extensive but uneven. Some events are richly documented. Others have significant gaps.
The fingerprint identification, specifically, falls into the uneven category. The fact of the identification is well-documented. The contemporaneous FBI memo noting “unexplained differences” attributable to acid and declaring a positive identification from surviving ridges is a documented source. The Cummins 1935 academic analysis is a documented source. The 2019 modern comparison is a documented source.
But specific details of the postmortem fingerprinting process — who took the impressions, when and where exactly they were taken, what comparison methodology was used, and what specific minutiae were identified as matching between the postmortem and known prints — are not fully documented in the accessible record. The chain of custody on the fingerprint card has the gaps noted above.