Melvin Horace Purvis II (October 24, 1903 – February 29, 1960) was an FBI agent instrumental in capturing bank robbers John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd in 1934.

[8] He applied at the Justice Department and was hired by the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner to the FBI, in December 1926 and began serving there in February 1927.

[9] BOI investigators looking into Purvis' character and background were told that he was honest and industrious and ambitious, but not brilliant or hard-boiled enough to be a "money maker.

[6] He rose quickly through the ranks and by 1932, he had headed the Bureau of Investigation offices in Birmingham, Alabama, then Oklahoma City followed by a move to Cincinnati.

The gang had been arrested the day of Factor's release, their car filled with guns and the equipment used to tie kidnap victims in that era: linen strips and tough window sash cord.

(Factor had been born in Russian Poland but left before the Bolshevik Revolution and refused, at the cost of his citizenship, to register as a citizen of Stalin's USSR.

[20] Early the next morning Mrs. Wanatka got word out to her brother-in-law, Lloyd Voss, to call a federal authority they knew in Chicago.

Hanni, afraid of flying, travelled with his agents by car and brought the tear gas equipment that the planes refused to carry for safety reasons.

Clegg and Purvis simultaneously gave the order to shoot and instead of gangsters, agents killed Eugene Boiseneau, a 33-year-old Civilian Conservation Corps worker, and wounded Tom Morris, a 59-year-old cook at the CCC camp, and gas station attendant John Hoffman.

Agents sent to surround the lodge fell into a ditch in the dark while, unbeknownst to them, Dillinger's gang escaped through rear windows on the second story.

Hanni arrived with the tear gas and agents fired the canisters into the house at daybreak, but the only people left were lodge employees and the gangsters' girlfriends.

Purvis was targeted for negative public attention despite the fact that the authorities from the St. Paul office had jurisdiction and of those both Assistant Director Clegg and Inspector Rorer outranked him.

[24] After this, Hoover put FBI Inspector Samuel P. Cowley on a special assignment to supervise the nationwide manhunt for Dillinger.

[26] The false lead that sent federal agents to Pennsylvania in pursuit of Dillinger came from a Black man named John Kelly.

Purvis told him that he had only witnessed Nathan giving Kelly a stern lecture to "put the fear of God" into the man and scare the truth out of him.

[29] Cowley was in Purvis's office when a call came in from East Chicago Police Captain Timothy O'Neill and Zarkovich on July 21, 1934.

Purvis told her he had no control over her fate, but he, as Special Agent in Charge of the Chicago office of the Department of Investigation, would recommend she not be deported.

[30] Five were posted closest to the entrance: Purvis, agents Herman Hollis and Brown to the south, and Chicago police officers Glen Stretch and Peter Sopsic to the north.

He tore the buttons off his own jacket in reaching for his gun, but it was agents Hollis, Winstead and Clarence Hurt who shot Dillinger.

Had she not furnished the information at the time it was received, it is entirely possible that many other brave officers or even private citizens, employees of banks and others might have been killed before Dillinger could have been apprehended.Hoover had already put Cowley in personal control of all agents involved in investigating the June 1933 Kansas City Massacre.

Purvis got authorization from Cowley in Washington to drop the kidnapping and go to Wellsville to take Richetti into federal custody and pursue his companion, Charles Arthur, AKA "Pretty boy," Floyd.

[2] However, a memo FBI Deputy Associate Director Deke Deloach sent to Administrative Division Assistant Director Jim Mohr the week after Purvis' death referred to a newspaper article that claimed Purvis had quit because he was not promoted to the number 2 or 3 spot in the FBI and that Washington officials quarreled over the vast publicity he received.

"[34] After leaving the FBI Purvis moved to San Francisco where he passed the California bar examination and practiced law for two years.

[35][36][9] This led to him signing on to host the radio show, "Junior G-man: The Melvin Purvis Club" as part of, not just a marketing scheme, but a crusade for social order through combating juvenile delinquency.

[9] In 1938 he settled back in Florence, South Carolina, and on September 14 of that year married his old sweetheart, Marie Rosanne Willcox, daughter of his first law partner.

He interviewed candidates for the Provost Marshal schools in Michigan and Georgia before being assigned as executive officer for Brigadier General Joseph V.D.

When General Patton slapped two soldiers being treated for PTSD in evacuation hospitals, Purvis was sent to interview him on August 10, 1943, as part of the investigation.

Sensitive missions in Italy and northwest Europe followed this assignment, but details of this part of his service were lost in a fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis in 1973.

In this capacity, he returned to Europe and searched Heidelberg on the strength of rumors that Adolf Hitler and Martin Bormann were alive and hiding there.

He worried that he might have a progressive, degenerative bone disease but he had told the Chief Counsel a few weeks previous that he would never commit suicide because he had too much to live for.