Billie Frechette - Dillinger’s Girl

Billie Frechette, Chicago 1933

Billie Frechette was a Wisconsin girl. Her father was French and her Mother was Menominee. She lived on the Menominee Reservation in Keshena, Wisconsin until she was 13. After four years in a boarding School for Indian children, she moved to Chicago and during the onset of the great depression fell in with petty criminals. Her first husband, a handsome oddball named Welton, was sentenced to prison in 1933 for committing a mail robbery. In November of that year, she met John Dillinger at a dance hall. "There was something in those eyes that I will never forget. They were piercing and electric, yet there was an amused carefree twinkle in them too. They met my eyes and held me hypnotized for an instant." Frechette was 26, Dillinger was 30.
"John was good to me. He looked after me and bought me all kinds of jewelry and cars and pets, and we went places and saw things, and he gave me everything a girl wants. He treated me like a lady." In the next year, Billie played the role of lover and companion to America's #1 gangster. "Only once did she drive a getaway car, when the St. Paul police had discovered their apartment -- and that was only because Dillinger had been wounded in the leg."
The pair remained together until Frechette was arrested by the Feds on April 9, 1934. Dillinger was dissuaded from rescuing her by fellow gang members. He left the scene "crying like a baby." Billie’s lawyer was the flamboyant Louis Piquette, a fellow Wisconsinite who would be immortalized as the lead male character in the musical CHICAGO.
Frechette served two years in federal prison for harboring a criminal and it was there that she learned of Dillinger's death. She returned to Wisconsin and died on January 13, 1969, in Shawano, Wisconsin. Four years later the John Milius film, Dillinger, featuring Michele Phillips in the role of Frechette was released. The 90’s saw Sherilyn Fenn in the role, and in Johnny Depp’s 2008 film DILLINGER, she was played by French actress, Marion Cotillard.