Decades later, vehicle John Dillinger stole in Crown Point returned
Lake County Sheriff Lillian Hatch Holley, according to those who knew her and her family, would never have wanted to see again the car Public Enemy No. 1 John Dillinger stole from her 87 years ago.
Legend has it that Holley. the first and only woman to serve as Lake County sheriff as she filled out the term of her husband, who died in office, remained so furious at the thought of Dillinger’s name that she had a reporter who asked her about the bank robber kicked out of an event she was attending.
When she died at 103 in 1994, she took her feelings about Dillinger’s great escape with her, but the idea that anyone would want to celebrate the Ford V8, would’ve infuriated her, according to Don Kasper, husband to Carol Brown, Officer William Patrick O’Malley’s granddaughter.
O’Malley was the East Chicago police officer gunned down by the Dillinger gang after a bank robbery in January 1934.
Mark Love, of Avondale, Arizona, whose late father co-owned a collection of Dillinger artifacts, believes, however, that the car is a great honor to her and a huge part of history that belongs in Northwest Indiana. Hundreds of spectators agreed as they crowded around the car when Love pulled up in front of the Old Sheriff’s House on Main Street in Crown Point Saturday morning.
The story behind finding the stolen car, which Dillinger and his cellmate, Herbert Youngblood, left running on Ardmore Avenue in Chicago after he’d busted out of Lake County’s “impenetrable jail” using a wooden handgun, was almost as fantastic as the escape itself, said Roger Pace, who with Love coordinated the homecoming parade that started from the Lake County Government Complex and ended at the Old Sheriff ’s House. For years, Love followed up on every lead he got about the car could be; most thought it had been sold for scrap decades prior, he said.
With the help of a detective he hired, he eventually pinged the car’s VIN number at a Maine Department of Motor Vehicles,
Pace said. Love caught up with the owner, who told him that his own father purchased the Ford V8 at a police auction when they were living in Milwaukee, and he’d brought it to Maine with the intent to restore it eventually.
“(The previous owner) had plated it only for a year; the Maine BMV only keeps VIN numbers for 10 years and they were on year six (when Love found it),” Pace said. “Had Mark not discovered it, there was a high probability of it being lost forever.”
Once Love purchased the vehicle, he restored it using almost all original parts, Love said. Doing so wasn’t cheap; Love said it cost “hundreds of thousands of dollars” over the 27 years he hunted for the car. But it was all money well spent.
“It was an act of God that I found it, and I wish my father were alive to see it,” Love said. “Today is surreal for me and he would’ve been very proud.”
Dillinger’s nephew, Michael Thompson — of Morovia, Indiana, who in 2020 dropped a lawsuit to have Dillinger’s body exhumed from his grave in
Indianapolis’s Crown Hill Cemetery — and his son, Travis Thompson, traveled north to see a little part of their own history in the flesh. Dillinger, Michael Thompson said, persuaded his own mom to name Michael Thompson’s mom after the woman he wanted to marry.
“He died 20 years before I was born, and my mom said he was a typical brother — always taking her to the movies and teasing her and her sister,” he said.
Dillinger pleaded guilty to attempting to rob a Mooresville grocer and served 8 ½ years, according to the FBI.
After being released, Michael Thompson said, “I think he became bitter. And then the Great Depression hit, and people had to do what they had to survive.”
After being paroled in 1933, Dillinger almost immediately robbed a bank in Bluffton, Ohio, according to the FBI.
Great-nephew Travis Thompson, who lives in Danville, Indiana, said seeing the car provided a kind of closure for him.
“(Dillinger) was the reason I become a police officer. I wanted to give the family a different name than what people associated us with,” he said.
Plans for the car’s permanent home are just about ironed out, Pace said, but it will be brought out for events across the country in order to honor Holley and law enforcement. All proceeds raised by the Ford V8 will be given to Concerns of Police Survivors, at not-for-profit dedicated to assisting law enforcement families, Pace said.