A Wide Place in the Road

This week in the magazine, Alex Kotlowitz writes about Ray Bowman and Billy Kirkpatrick, a team of bank robbers who operated in the United States for fifteen years—one year less than Jesse James and his gang— before they were captured, in 1997. Their take of $4.46 million from a Washington State bank was the largest in U.S. history. In this piece, from 1934, James Finan visits the home town of John Dillinger, who was for many years the most famous outlaw in America; it appeared in the magazine only months before he was gunned down in Chicago by F.B.I. agents.

MOORESVILLE, IND., MAY 13

The gas-station attendant at Indianapolis told me I'd miss Mooresville at night. "It's just a wide place in the road," he said.

Mooresville is not as bad as that. It's like a quiet crossing in Mamaroneck on a Sunday afternoon. Four concrete corners, and a traffic light in the centre. A row of shops, a post office, and avenues of maple-lined streets leading back into the countryside again. Seventeen hundred and seventy-four fairly good citizens and one very bad citizen call it home.
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