John Dillinger’s family exhuming his grave to prove corpse is wrong guy

John Dillinger may have escaped justice after all.

The infamous Depression-era bank-robber and jail-breaker’s family is exhuming his body in September on suspicion the corpse occupying his grave is another man — and that the FBI may have killed the wrong person when they gunned down Dillinger in 1934.

Dillinger’s purported niece and nephew Mike Thompson and Carol Thompson Griffith told Indiana state health officials that the have “evidence that demonstrates that the individual who was shot and killed at the Biograph Theater in Chicago on July 22, 1934 may not in fact have been my uncle, John H. Dillinger,” according to an application to crack open the grave.

“It is my belief and opinion that it is critical to learn whether Dillinger lived beyond his reported date of death of July 22, 1934. If he was not killed on that date, I am interested in discovering what happened to him, where he lived, whether he had children, and whether any such children or grandchildren are living today,” they say in the documents.

The man gunned down outside the theater and believed to be Dillinger had a different eye color, ear shape and fingerprints — as well as a heart condition the gangster wasn’t known to have, the kin said.

Dillinger, however, purportedly turned to plastic surgery to evade cops after a string of Midwest bank heists and two escapes from jail.

The History Channel is preparing a documentary on the gangster that will include the exhumation, according to Dan Silberman of A&E Networks.

With Post wires

This article was originally posted here