When the ambulance doors swung open outside the Skadutsky Funeral Home on November 28, 1934, the men waiting inside had no idea what was about to roll out at them. Wrapped in a cheap, mud-stained Native American patterned blanket was the body of Lester Gillis. The world knew him by another name: Baby Face Nelson. Just twenty-four hours earlier, on November 27, 1934, he had been J.

Edgar Hoover’s undisputed Public Enemy Number One. Now he lay dressed in nothing but death on a steel table. The crew at the Chicago funeral home had the grim task of dealing with the gory aftermath of his seventeen bullet wounds. It would become one of the most difficult embalming jobs of the 1930s, a stomach-turning nightmare that tested the limits of twentieth-century mortuary science.

Nelson hadn’t just been shot. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had turned him into a human sieve. To understand what the undertaker was up against, you had to know what those seventeen bullets actually did to him during his final shootout with federal agents, a gunfight that came to be known as the Battle of Barrington. FBI agent Herman Hollis had been working with a heavy-duty shotgun that day.

He sent a blast of large-caliber buckshot into Nelson’s lower half, and a swarm of shotgun pellets ripped through his legs. By the time the pellets were done, Nelson’s thighs were nothing but jagged, open lacerations. But the shot that actually ended his life came from a Thompson submachine gun. The heavy .

45 caliber bullet tore clean through his abdomen, obliterating his internal organs and severing major blood vessels along the way. Here was the cruel twist: Nelson didn’t die right then and there. His legendary rage kept him on his feet long enough to kill both federal lawmen. Then John Paul Chase, who had been riding with the gang, hauled him into the getaway car.

As Chase sped off, Nelson spent his final hours slowly bleeding out internally in a safe house. His wife, Helen Gillis, was right there with him, watching him wither away. After he took his last breath, Chase and Helen did something calculated. They stripped him completely naked to destroy any forensic evidence on his clothing.

Then they drove his body out to the edge of a cemetery and dumped him in a muddy, freezing ditch. By the time police found him, the cold air had caused postmortem lividity: his blood had pooled violently in the lower portions of his body, leaving behind deep purple discolorations that would never fade. His bare skin was caked in hard mud and dried blood from the road. That left the mortician staring at every one of those wounds without anything to soften the blow.

All that damage created a mechanical crisis inside the funeral home. Here’s how embalming is supposed to work: you pump chemical preservation fluid into the arterial system, and the body’s own blood vessels distribute it everywhere it needs to go. The leftover blood drains out through the veins. It’s a simple principle of physics.

It all depends on the circulatory system holding pressure like a garden hose. But Baby Face Nelson’s garden hose was demolished. He had seventeen open wounds puncturing his skin and muscles. A submachine gun bullet had shredded his abdominal arteries.

The body couldn’t hold pressure. The undertaker hooked up the embalming machine and started pumping from the neck into the carotid artery. The fluid didn’t circulate. Instead, it found the path of least resistance, just like water finding its way downhill.

It went geysering back out of all seventeen bullet wounds across the torso and legs. So the mortician had to play a slow, gruesome game of hide and seek. He used metal tools to dig into the cold, torn flesh of every single wound. The broken blood vessels inside had to be found and tied shut with tight knots of string.

Then there was the massive hole in the belly that the Thompson machine gun had left behind. He used big needles to stitch through the deep muscles and pull them together to plug the gap. The leg wounds, saturated with jagged shotgun pellets, required dozens of individual clamps. It was the sort of meticulous work one might imagine in a beauty parlor, someone putting curlers in your hair, except it was being done all over a dead man’s body with surgical thread and metal.

The workspace was incredibly messy. Old dark blood mixed with the sharp, eye-watering fumes of early-generation formaldehyde. All of it happened in a very small, poorly ventilated basement room. But the bullet holes weren’t the only thing the mortician had to contend with.

Before he could even start the real embalming work, he had a serious scrubbing job ahead of him. Soap and stiff brushes were needed just to wash off the ditch water and find some clean skin underneath. Then came the inside cleaning. Nelson had spent hours bleeding into his own belly, and the cavity inside was full of old, trapped blood.

Blood sitting inside a warm body for hours rots fast and starts to smell terrible. That’s the same reason roadkill smells the way it does. To fix it, the mortician used a tool called a trocar: a long, sharp metal rod attached to a surgical pump. He forcefully plunged the metal spike into Nelson’s stomach, then moved it back and forth to punch holes in the organ, letting the pump drain out pounds of rotten blood and other fluids.

Once the cavity was hollowed out, he poured highly concentrated cavity-cleaning chemicals directly into the torso to dry everything out from the inside. The mortician had to do all this delicate, gruesome surgery in the middle of pure chaos. The funeral home was a fortress under siege. Earlier that year, the FBI had suffered an embarrassing failure when the gang escaped during the Little Bohemia Lodge raid.

Ever since, J. Edgar Hoover had been obsessed with destroying these outlaws. FBI agent Melvin Purvis had already gunned down John Dillinger outside the Biograph Theater that summer. Nelson was the top target left alive.

Now he was dead, and Hoover’s armed agents stood directly over the embalming table, watching the mortician’s every move. They even forced the undertaker to stop working so they could press ink onto Nelson’s cold, dead fingers for identification cards. After that came the bright flash of photographs: his face, and every single bullet wound, for the official files. Outside the room, the scene was just as intense.

The moment the public found out Baby Face Nelson was inside, thousands of morbidly curious people swarmed the streets. They pushed against the windows just to catch a glimpse of the dead monster. Police had to form a human wall to keep the rowdy crowd from rushing the doors or breaking the glass. Finally came the restorative art.

Nelson’s family wanted a private burial, and the undertaker had to make that boyish face look presentable for his mother. His face hadn’t been hit by bullets, but the pain of his death had left him looking pale and hollow. The mortician injected special liquids under the skin of his cheeks to plump them back up, a technique that would one day be known by a different name in beauty parlors across the country. He closed the eyelids and wired the jaws shut from the inside so the mouth wouldn’t drop open.

Then, to complete the transformation, he applied heavy makeup to cover up the pale skin and hide all the colors of death. When the mortician finally finished, he dressed the gangster in a clean suit. Nelson probably looked like a painted-up clown by that time, or at least not quite so dead. But the circus was far from over.

When the body was moved into the chapel, the actual funeral service had to be kept under lock and key. Nelson’s mother and his close relatives wanted a quiet, traditional Catholic service. They locked the doors to the public. Only a small handful of family members were allowed inside.

Because his face had been repaired so well, he looked peaceful in his plain casket, which completely hid the violent way he died. The biggest thing missing from that funeral was his wife, Helen Gillis. The FBI had called her just a few days before the service. While her husband was being prayed over, she was locked away in a federal holding cell, completely unavailable to say an official last goodbye.

When the short service ended, the family had to sneak the casket out the back door of the funeral home. Outside on the pavement, gawkers and reporters and photographers were still waiting to catch a glimpse. A small line of cars drove out to St. Joseph Catholic Cemetery in River Grove, Illinois.

There were no grand speeches or gangster tributes. He was quickly lowered into a regular family plot alongside his relatives. To this day, he rests under a simple stone that reads: “Lester G. Gillis.

” Not a single mention of the name Baby Face Nelson. To the public, he’s a movie villain who went down fighting in a blaze of glory. But to the tired morticians who spent hours covered in his blood, plugging seventeen holes in a ruined body, he was nothing more than an unforgettable, grotesque mess of a workday.