John Dillinger’s 1933 Essex Terraplane. Photo courtesy Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum.
John Dillinger was America’s most notorious bank robber, and having selected that form of livelihood, had to know a thing or two about fast cars. The Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum in Auburn, Indiana, is now displaying a getaway car that was actually owned by the dapper Hoosier outlaw, something of an early American muscle car, a 1933 Essex Terraplane powered by a stout Hudson straight-eight.
The Terraplane is on loan from the National Museum of Crime and Punishment in Washington, D.C., where it had been a permanent exhibit. Dillinger bought it in March 1934, just a few months before he was killed by the FBI outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago. Late in March, Dillinger escaped a law enforcement trap in St. Paul, Minnesota, that ended in gunfire. Two bullets from a police revolver pierced the Terraplane’s front cowl; the damage is still visible today. Dillinger used the car until the following month, when he and his brother, Hubert, crashed it in an Indiana field.
Dillinger was born and raised in the Indianapolis area, before turning to a life of crime, leading an existence as a fugitive. There is a prominent connection between Dillinger and Auburn. He was arrested by police in Ohio and confined to a jail in Lima. Members of his gang, posing as Indiana corrections officers, entered the jail and broke him out, killing Allen County, Ohio, Sheriff Jess Sarber in the process. The gang members fled across the state line into Indiana, where they raided the Auburn police station, stealing guns, ammunition and bulletproof vests. A historical marker outside the former station commemorates the incident today.
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