Melvin Purvis built his reputation as the FBI agent who brought down some of America’s most notorious bank robbers, yet his success ultimately cost him his career and left a legacy shadowed by mystery. The South Carolina native led the manhunts that resulted in the deaths of John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd, earning public acclaim that made his own boss, J. Edgar Hoover, deeply resentful. Born in Timmonsville, South Carolina, Purvis was the fifth of eight children born to a tobacco farmer and businessman.
He earned a law degree from the University of South Carolina School of Law and briefly practiced as a lawyer before joining the Bureau of Investigation in 1927. He led offices in Cincinnati, Birmingham, and Oklahoma City before Hoover placed him in charge of the Chicago office in 1932. Purvis was a known sharpshooter with a strong educational background. His rise to national prominence began when Hoover gave him orders on March 6, 1934, to build an informant network and put forth every effort to capture John Dillinger.
Dillinger had escaped from the Crown Point, Indiana jail on March 3, 1934, and crossed state lines in a stolen car, making his capture a federal matter. Hoover had initially hesitated to pursue Dillinger because he lacked confidence in his agents’ ability to catch him. When political pressure forced him to act, he reportedly protected himself by criticizing Purvis for not having acted earlier. The first major operation against Dillinger ended in disaster.
On April 24, 1934, special agents arrived at Little Bohemia, Wisconsin, where the gang was hiding. The lodge’s dog began barking as the agents approached, and Purvis ordered his men to surround the building without a map of the area. The darkness caused two agents to get caught in a barbed wire fence while two others fell into a ditch. When a car pulled away from the lodge, agents opened fire on it.
The three men inside were not gang members but civilians from the local Civilian Conservation Corps. One of them, Eugene Boiseneau, was killed, while John Hoffman and John Morris were wounded. Gunfire erupted from the lodge’s second floor, and the agents returned fire, but the Dillinger gang escaped. Baby Face Nelson killed one agent and wounded two others during the getaway.
Purvis acknowledged the operation had failed and offered his resignation, but Hoover refused to accept it. The breakthrough came months later. On July 22, 1934, Anna Sage, who owned a Chicago brothel, called Purvis and told him that Dillinger had invited her and Polly Hamilton to the movies that evening at the Biograph Theater. Purvis rushed his men to the theater and had every exit covered.
East Chicago police officers joined the federal agents at the scene. When Dillinger left the theater, Purvis lit his cigar and struck a match as a signal that he had spotted the fugitive. Purvis, who was slightly behind Dillinger, ordered him to put his hands up. Dillinger turned, began moving faster toward an alley, and reached into his pocket.
The agents opened fire, hitting Dillinger twice. Purvis never fired a shot. He refused to credit any single agent for the shooting, saying he wanted to protect the agent from potential revenge. He compared the operation to a military effort where every agent contributed equally and deserved equal recognition.
The success made Purvis a national figure. As “the man who got Dillinger,” he received admiring mail from across the country. His fame, however, briefly surpassed Hoover’s own, and the FBI director grew intensely jealous. Hoover insisted that no single employee could be responsible for solving a case, emphasizing that cooperative efforts broke cases.
He publicly stated that Purvis had been demoted and that agent Samuel P. Cowley had taken over the Dillinger case. Baby Face Nelson later shot Cowley, and Purvis visited him in the hospital just before he died. Hoover placed Purvis under intense scrutiny and assigned him increasingly complex cases.
A year after the Dillinger shooting, Purvis announced his resignation. Despite receiving numerous job offers in law enforcement and related fields, Hoover reportedly sabotaged his attempts to find work. The press and public reacted to the resignation with confusion and outreach, with many assuming Purvis had left because of disagreements with Hoover’s direction. Hoover reportedly called Purvis and urged him to stop the rumors because they were damaging both his reputation and the Bureau’s.
Purvis complied and refused to criticize Hoover publicly. Purvis married Marie Roseanne Wilcox, and the couple had three sons. In 1936, he published a memoir titled “American Agent” about his investigative work. During World War II, he served as an intelligence officer for the U.
S. Army, rising to the rank of colonel, and helped gather evidence for the Nuremberg trials against Nazi leaders. Purvis died at his home in Florence, South Carolina, on February 29, 1960, from a gunshot wound to the head. The weapon was the pistol his fellow agents had given him when he left the FBI.
The precise cause of his death remains debated. Before the autopsy and coroner’s inquest were complete, the FBI intervened and declared the death a suicide. But there was no note, and later evidence suggested Purvis may have been cleaning the firearm when it accidentally discharged while he tried to remove a tracer bullet jammed in the chamber. The family physician contested the suicide verdict, noting that Purvis had muscle control issues and was taking medication for a back problem, and said there was always a chance the shooting was an accident.
The coroner’s inquest later concluded the wound was self-inflicted but could not establish whether it was intentional. Hoover never offered the Purvis family his condolences and declined to send an official FBI delegation to the funeral. In a telegram sent to Hoover shortly afterward, Purvis’s widow wrote, “We are honored that you ignored Melvin’s death. Your jealousy hurt him very much, but until the end I think he loved you.
” Despite the tragic circumstances of his final years, Purvis remains remembered as the man who got Dillinger.