On November 28, 1934, the body of Lester Gillis arrived at the Sadowski Funeral Home in Chicago. The world knew him as Baby Face Nelson, and just one day earlier, he had been J. Edgar Hoover’s undisputed Public Enemy Number One. Now, he lay on a steel table with 17 bullet wounds, and the embalming team faced one of the most gruesome jobs in 1930s mortuary history.
Nelson’s final shootout, known as the Battle of Barrington, had left his body in ruins. FBI agent Herman Hollis had blasted him with a shotgun, sending large-caliber buckshot ripping through his thighs. A Thompson submachine gun round then tore through his abdomen, obliterating internal organs and severing major blood vessels. Despite the damage, Nelson stayed on his feet long enough to kill both federal agents before being driven away by John Paul Chase.
Nelson spent his final hours bleeding internally at a safe house, with his wife Helen at his side. After he died, Chase and Helen stripped the body completely naked to destroy forensic evidence. Then they dumped him in a muddy, freezing ditch near a cemetery. By the time police recovered the body, it was caked in mud and blood, and postmortem lividity had left deep purple discoloration across his skin.
The embalming process should have been straightforward. Chemical preservatives are pumped into the arterial system, and the blood vessels distribute the fluid throughout the body. But Nelson’s circulatory system was demolished. When the undertaker began pumping embalming fluid into the carotid artery, it did not circulate. Instead, it geysered back out through all 17 bullet wounds.
The mortician had to work slowly, digging into each torn wound with metal tools to find broken blood vessels and tie them shut with string. The massive hole in Nelson’s abdomen required deep stitching through muscle tissue. His legs, saturated with shotgun pellets, needed dozens of individual clamps. All of this happened in a small, poorly ventilated basement room filled with the sharp fumes of early-generation formaldehyde.
Before the real work could begin, the body had to be cleaned. Soap and stiff brushes were used to scrub away the ditch water and dried blood. Then came the internal cavity. Nelson had spent hours bleeding into his own belly, and the trapped blood had begun to rot. The mortician used a trocar, a long metal rod attached to a surgical pump, to plunge into the abdomen and drain out the fluid. Once the cavity was hollowed, concentrated chemicals were poured inside to dry everything out.
The scene outside the funeral home was chaos. The FBI had suffered a public failure earlier that year during the Little Bohemia Lodge raid, and Hoover was obsessed with destroying the remaining outlaws. With Nelson dead, armed federal agents stood over the embalming table, watching every move. They stopped the mortician mid-procedure to press Nelson’s cold fingers onto ink cards for identification and to photograph his face and every bullet wound for official files.
Meanwhile, word spread that Baby Face Nelson was inside the funeral home. Thousands of morbidly curious onlookers swarmed the streets, pressing against the windows. Police formed a human wall to keep the crowd from rushing the doors.
Finally came the restorative work. Nelson’s face had not been hit by bullets, but death had left him pale and hollow. The mortician injected fluids under the skin of his cheeks to plump them back up, closed his eyelids, and wired his jaws shut from the inside. Heavy makeup was applied to cover the discoloration and make him look less dead. When it was done, Nelson was dressed in a clean suit and placed in a plain casket.
The funeral service was kept private. Nelson’s mother and close relatives wanted a quiet Catholic ceremony, so the doors were locked to the public. Only a small group of family members attended. His wife Helen was not among them. She had been taken into federal custody days earlier and was held in a cell while her husband was laid to rest.
After the short service, the casket was sneaked out the back door to avoid the waiting press. A small line of cars drove to St. Joseph Catholic Cemetery in River Grove, Illinois. Nelson was lowered into a family plot without speeches or tributes. His gravestone reads simply, “Lester G. Gillis.” There is no mention of Baby Face Nelson anywhere on it.
To the public, he remains a movie villain who went down in a blaze of glory. But to the morticians who spent hours plugging 17 holes in his ruined body, he was something else entirely: an unforgettable, grotesque workday that tested the limits of their craft.