Nothing happens in the world without an Indiana connection.
That's Doyle's Law, recognized by The Associated Press, reporter Doyle's employer. The Law was explained to me by Robert Shaw, the current AP bureau chief in Indianapolis.Shaw has worked stints in Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee and Oklahoma and he, too, finds unlikely Indiana the best of all news states. And that takes into consideration a lot of floods, tornadoes, murders, mayhem and maulings.
I was dubious. But Shaw said to consider recent headlines. Michael Jackson? Indiana native. Mike Tyson? Indianapolis rape trial. And so on.
It certainly held true in 1933 when Indiana native John Dillinger hogged headlines all over the country with spectacular bank robberies.
We tend to think of tabloid television's preoccupation with lurid crimes as brand new stuff. Sex and violence, invented in 1968. First reported by Geraldo Rivera.
Not so. Roll over, John Wayne Bobbitt. Indiana's own John Dillinger inspired plenty of red ink in the good ol' days. Readers knew all about his sweethearts and parents. Dillinger even wrote his own account of an escape from an "escape-proof" jail.
So perhaps it's inevitable, even right, to find The John Dillinger Historical Wax Museum in little Nashville, a town that caters to tourists who like to see history done up with a wick.
You can wander about a room that must have 300 newspaper articles about Dillinger. It seems he often got credit for robberies that he couldn't possibly have committed, mainly because he was off somewhere else committing others.
But that's the kind of inconvenient infamy Dillinger enjoyed. Here was a crook with a sense of style and humor.
"A jail is just like a nut with a worm in it," Dillinger said. "The worm can always get out."
You can look at this particular worm in wax, all laid out bloody in the make-believe morgue, and in a cheap, ill-fitting suit in his casket. You can see the blood-stained trousers he wore the night he died and the gun of the G-man who shot him.
Also in the museum is Dillinger's first tombstone, chipped away by vandals. It reminds me of the problem they have up in Fairmount, Ind., keeping in one piece the tombstone of native James Dean.
You didn't know James Dean was from Indiana? Of course he was. That's just the way the world works, according to Doyle's Law.