Dear Guide:
You are no doubt tired of hearing this, so I will be brief and not waste much of your time. I believe I read an article by Robert Anton Wilson a ways back regarding the Smithsonian or some D.C. museum housing private parts of famous people — John Dillinger, for example. Is there any truth to this folklore?
Dear Reader:
None that I could discover. What's more, the very idea that so august and respectable an edifice as the Smithsonian Institution would house an exhibit of celebrity genitalia rings absurd. (That said, I should note that there are at least two museums in Washington, D.C. — the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and the National Museum of Health & Medicine at Walter Reed Army Medical Center — where various medical specimens, including diseased or abnormal sexual organs, are on display. But none of those belonged to famous people, so far as I'm aware.)
The patent absurdity of it notwithstanding, Maxim magazine reports that the Smithsonian receives a hundred or more requests per year for viewings of the purportedly pickled penis of Prohibition-era gangster John Dillinger.
What gives?
The posthumous pelvic bulge
There must be a reason for all this prurient interest in the fate of Mr. Dillinger's willie, and as it turns out one needn't look far to find it. For several years running, one of the most-viewed entries on the now-defunct World Sexual Records Web site was the question, "Did John Dillinger have a 20-inch penis?" Clearly, the size of Dillinger's organ is something of an urban legend unto itself. The source of this speculation, evidently, was a photograph taken of Dillinger's shrouded body shortly after he was shot and killed by FBI agents in 1934 (which can be viewed on the Indianapolis Star Web site) featured an abnormally large, er, protrusion in the pelvic region. So prominent was this posthumous bulge — estimated to be anywhere from 13 to 28 inches in length — that one of the pathologists in attendance took it upon himself to preserve the abnormally large organ for posterity. Or so the story goes.
Skeptics have objected all along that the protruberance could be explained by phenomena as unremarkable as a lifted knee or the placement of Dillinger's arm beneath the sheet. Or maybe the entire tableau was concocted for the camera as someone's idea of a joke. We do know there's at least one other morgue photo in which the questionable bulge does not appear. For what it's worth, Dillinger's 1934 autopsy report makes no mention of a detached or missing penis — in fact, it makes no mention of his private parts at all.
None of which is to say that someone with access to the corpse couldn't have made off with the legendary appendage between the autopsy and the burial, and preserved it. Stranger things have happened. Suspended in a quart or so of formaldehyde, John Dillinger's pickled willie would have made a stunning exhibit in a carnival sideshow 50-some-odd years ago — right next to the jar containing Adolf Hitler's brain.
