Again, Dillinger

Patrolman Jud Pittenger, 54, was strolling leisurely along his beat on Buffalo Street in Warsaw, Ind. one night last week when he noticed two men coming across the street toward him, casting long shadows under the lights. Patrolman Pittenger saw that they carried machineguns. One of the men poked the barrel of his gun in Patrolman Pittenger's belly. When Pittenger tried to push it away, the other man stuck the stock of his gun into the policeman's back.

The first man said, "Don't be a fool. We don't want to kill you."

"I don't want you to kill me. I have a couple of kids at home."

"That's the reason we don't want to kill you," the first man said.

They led Pittenger down an alley. The first man said, "You're the biggest damned fool I ever saw." The other man pulled Pittenger's gun out of its holster, hanging from a Sam Browne belt. He rapped Pittenger three times over the head with it. Then they took Pittenger to the police station, on the second floor over the town offices. The men broke open a door and took four bullet-proof vests and two revolvers. Pittenger saw they were not looking at him. He ran down the steps, falling once and wrenching his knee. Then he ran on again and hid in an alley. The men came out with the guns and vests. They got in a sedan and drove away.

Pittenger hobbled to the nearest telephone. He got the operator and yelled: "DILLINGER!"

The police station at Warsaw was the third that John ("Killer") Dillinger, wanted for five murders and innumerable bank robberies, was supposed to have raided since he broke jail at Crown Point, Ind. March 3. Police in Peru and Auburn said he had stolen guns from them, too. Police in Chicago said they had been fired on by Dillinger at night in Schiller Park the week after he escaped. In a St. Paul apartment house two Federal detectives had let two gunmen and a woman slip through their fingers under a machinegun barrage. They claimed that Dillinger was one of the men, that a picture of him as a sailor and some of his fingerprints were left in the apartment.

If John Dillinger has really been all the places he was reported to have been in the past month, he must leap along the central plains like a demented Indian's ghost. "John has a lot of hoss sense," says his father, a farmer at Mooresville, Ind., "but he's not guilty of half what they accuse him."

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