Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [79]
By the following spring he was back in Mooresville, telling his family he had received a medical discharge due to hay fever. Dillinger then decided to give marriage a try, wedding a sixteen-year-old named Beryl Hovious. They lived at her family’s farm for a time, then took an apartment in Martinsville, but domestic life did nothing to settle Dillinger. He had no job, no focus, and no future. He went back to his old routines, hanging around pool halls.
The night that changed Dillinger’s life forever came on a Saturday—September 6, 1924. He had gone out drinking with one of his pool hall pals, a thirty-one-year-old ex-con named Ed Singleton. Fueled by stupidity and alcohol, they decided to mug an elderly Mooresville grocer named Frank Morgan, a friend of Dillinger’s family; Dillinger had been told Morgan carried cash home after work. Morgan was walking home that night when Dillinger stepped out of an alley by the Mooresville Christian Church and struck him over the head with a large bolt wrapped in a handkerchief. When Morgan fell and began shouting for help, Dillinger pulled a pistol. It went off. Dillinger ran. Singleton, waiting in a car nearby, drove off, abandoning him.
On Monday a deputy sheriff drove out to the Dillinger farmhouse and arrested him. A prosecutor suggested the judge might be lenient if Dillinger pled guilty and apologized. Dillinger went along, not even bothering to hire a lawyer. It was a fatal misjudgment. Judge Joseph W. Williams decided to make an example of him, sentencing Dillinger to a jaw-dropping sentence of ten to twenty years in a state reformatory. The Dillingers were floored, the more so when Ed Singleton hired a lawyer, wangled a new judge, and, despite Dillinger’s testimony against him, received a sentence of two to fourteen years; Singleton ultimately served two. “When we got the word,” Audrey recalled, “my dad just about keeled over. It liked to kill him. I think he died of a broken heart. And when John got that sentence, it just seemed like he went from bad to worse.”2
In late 1924 Dillinger arrived at Indiana’s Pendleton Reformatory a bitter young man. In his first weeks at Pendleton, Dillinger tried twice to escape. Once he was caught hiding in a trash pile. Another time, while being transported to Mooresville to testify against Singleton, he lit out down an alley and was recaptured within minutes.
Dillinger’s career would be defined by a series of close friendships. Two of the most influential he made at Pendleton. One was Harry “Pete” Pierpont, a strikingly handsome hard case with piercing gray eyes doing ten to twenty-one years for a bank robbery in Kokomo, Indiana.al Another was Homer Van Meter, a tall, gangly runaway from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who was to be Dillinger’s longest-running associate. A loner and a bit of a flake, Van Meter had a harder childhood than Dillinger, running away to Chicago in the sixth grade. He worked as a bellboy until convicted of stealing a car at seventeen. Paroled a year later, he was free for two months before he and a pal were arrested for robbing passengers on a train in Toledo. “This fellow is a criminal of the most dangerous type,” a Pendleton official wrote. “Moral sense is perverted and he has no intention of following anything but a life of crime . . . He is a murderer at heart, and if society is to be safeguarded, his type must be confined throughout their natural lives.”
His friendships with Pierpont and Van Meter hardened Dillinger. When the two were transferred to the state prison at Michigan City, Dillinger asked to be transferred, too. On July 15, 1929, he got his wish. He was twenty-six. The transfer introduced Dillinger to a wide new world of crime. In Pendleton the inmates had been kids—stickup artists and car thieves. At Michigan City the men were older, their crimes more serious. There were raw-boned bank men out of Texas and Oklahoma,