Free Republic

In the first couple of pages of her 1987 memoir Being and Becoming, Myrna Loy gets down to business. Talking about the sex lives of Hollywood stars such as herself, she tells us that "any business involving so many beautiful and high-strung people working together on such intense and intimate terms is bound to breed an easy promiscuity. God knows I've fended off my share of amorous men – attractive, desirable men." She goes on to provide a short list: John Barrymore ("just because he felt like a little redhead now and then didn't incline me to join the club..."),...

An Indiana judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit filed by a relative of famed 1930s gangster John Dillinger seeking to dig up his body to confirm it is actually him. In a tan-walled Marion County courtroom, Superior Court Judge Timothy Oakes entertained arguments from the Crown Hill Cemetery, where Dillinger’s body is buried, which claimed that it has a right under state law to deny the exhumation of any body. The fight over digging up Dillinger’s remains came after the gangster’s nephew Michael Thompson filed a lawsuit in August claiming the cemetery is wrongfully preventing him from exhuming the body...

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — The body of 1930s gangster John Dillinger is set to be exhumed from an Indianapolis cemetery more than 85 years after he was killed by FBI agents. The Indiana State Department of Health approved a permit July 3 that Dillinger’s nephew, Michael C. Thompson, sought to have the body exhumed from Crown Hill Cemetery and reinterred there.

Gangster John Dillinger’s lifelong career of crime—he robbed at least 12 banks and four police departments and was accused of shooting and killing an East Chicago police officer while escaping one bank robbery—ended, with his life, eighty years ago today outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago, Illinois. Agents from the Division of Investigation (DOI) of the Justice Department (DOJ), a predecessor to the FBI, surrounded the theater based on a tip from an informant and then shot and killed him when he resisted arrest outside.

INDIANAPOLIS – Jeffrey Scalf is looking out for No. 1 – Public Enemy No. 1, that is. Scalf is fighting over the rights to the name and image of his distant relative John Dillinger, the Depression-era bank robber who was gunned down by G-men nearly 70 years ago. He has sued – or threatened to sue – those making money off the gangster and those who portray him as a murderer, saying he wants to protect Dillinger's reputation as an asset for future generations. "It's kind of like owning an automobile and then someone steals it," said the 46-year-old employee...