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Dad:

I got here all right and find I still have some friends that won’t sell me out. Would like to have stayed longer at the house. I enjoyed seeing your [sic] and the girls so much. I have been over lots of country but home always looks good to me . . . This sure keeps a fellow moving. I will be leaving soon and you will not need worry any more. Tell the girls hello. Hope everybody is well.

JOHNNIE20

“How is Johnnie?” Mr. Dillinger asked.

“He’s fine, Mr. Dillinger,” O’Leary said.

The elder Dillinger walked out to his barn. After a moment he returned with a package wrapped in newspaper. Inside, O’Leary found $3,000; it was the money Dillinger had given his father after the Fostoria robbery. “If you see Johnnie when you get back,” Hubert told O’Leary, “mention to him that Art McGinnis is at the filling station with me.”21 O’Leary promised he would.

There is no indication in FBI files that agents watching the Dillinger home noted O’Leary’s visit; if they had, they might have followed him back to Jimmy Probasco’s house in Chicago that night. Art McGinnis, however, had his suspicions. The next day, Earl Connelley called Washington to report “that some private individual endeavoring to locate Dillinger has represented himself as a Government Officer, in contacting John Dillinger’s half-brother, Hubert. Mr. Connelley states that he has an informant advising that an unknown person took Hubert away for several hours yesterday and talked to him.”22 The FBI never learned the person’s identity; presumably, this was O’Leary.

When he returned to Chicago that night, O’Leary found Dillinger at Probasco’s house, pacing from room to room in a foul mood. They had heard the news on the radio, he said. It was Tommy Carroll.

Waterloo, Iowa Thursday, June 7

Carroll and his girlfriend Jean Delaney had taken a trip through Iowa, intending to end up at Delaney’s parents’ home in St. Paul. After spending the night outside Cedar Rapids, they were cruising through the town of Waterloo when they had car trouble and stopped at a filling station to have the car serviced. Afterward, about lunchtime, a Waterloo police detective named Emil Steffen took a call from the station’s mechanic, who said he had just worked on a bronze Hudson and had seen a rifle and a collection of license plates beneath a floor mat. He said the driver looked like a “tough customer.”

Detective Steffen grabbed another officer, P. E. Walker, and went cruising the streets of Waterloo, looking for the car. They couldn’t find it, and after an hour or so returned to the police station downtown. There, parked across the street, they saw the car. They pulled up beside it and waited. After a bit they saw a young man and a pretty blonde approach the car. As the detectives watched, Carroll opened the passenger door of the Hudson, allowing Delaney to slide in. Then he walked around to the driver’s-side door.

The detectives stepped out of their car. “Hey!” Officer Walker said. “Just a minute there. Who are you?”

“Who are you?” Carroll said.

“Police officers,” Walker said.

Carroll took a step backward and reached beneath his coat. Thinking he was going for a gun, Walker charged. Just as Carroll drew his pistol, Walker swung his fist and smashed him in the nose. Carroll fell onto his rear, by the curb. In an instant he was up, the gun in his right hand. He ran onto the sidewalk. Detective Steffen drew his revolver and fired. From a distance of about fifteen feet, his bullet struck Carroll beneath the left armpit. Delaney screamed.

Dropping his gun, Carroll stumbled away from the sidewalk, into an alley. Detective Steffen set his feet and fired three times; two of the bullets struck home. Carroll fell on his side in the alley.

Steffen ran up. Standing over the fallen man, he demanded to know his name. “Tommy Carroll,” he rasped. Carroll refused to answer any more questions. “I got seven hundred dollars on me,” he said. “Be sure the little girl gets it. She doesn’t know what it’s all about.”

They placed