Green Bay Press-Gazette from Green Bay, Wisconsin • Page 115

N-2 Sunday, January 8, 1978 Green Bay Press Gazette Dillinger doubts still linger nv j-itnu a nnnv nominee India DICK KARBON nominee Indian BY who runs a small Green Bay construction company, also says it was not Dillinger who Prtu-GoitlT aroii wnir It was a hot, muggy Sunday night in Chicago July 22, 1934. John Dillinger, the Indiana outlaw who little more than a year before was an unknown ex-convict but now was Public Enemy No. 1, emerged from the artificially cooled Biograph Theater near Ful-lerton and Lincoln avenues. Dillinger was flanked by Polly Hamilton Keele and Anna Sage who was wearing a bright red dress. Chicago police and Justice Department agents closed in.

They were led by Melvin Purvis, the G-Man obsessed with hunting down Dillinger. Shots were fired and Dillinger lay dead, betrayed by the woman in red. The story has been told many times. It was the climax to a movie. But there continue to be those who insist it is not true, those who say Dillinger did not die in Chicago.

Among them is Jay Robert Nash, a former Green Bay resident who co-authored in 1970 a book entitled "Dillinger, Dead or Alive?" Nash claims the dead man was Jimmy Lawrence, a Dillinger look-alike. Today, nearly 44 years after the shooting outside the Biograph, Tony Frechette, a 33-year-old Me was killed. "I know he wasn't killed in Chicago, and you can quote me on that," said Frechette, who is a cousin of the late Evelyn "Billy" Frechette, once considered Dillin-ger's Indian sweetheart. "Evelyn never talked about him as dead, and we talked about it a lot," said Frechette. Is it possible John Dillinger did not die in Chicago? Could he still be alive today? He would be 75.

"Impossible," says 71-year-old Vivian Sickler of Neopit who was Evelyn Frechette's lifelong friend. "It's a damn lie," says Shawano's 87 -year-old Art Tic, who once knew Dillinger and who was Evelyn Frechette's husband from 1965 until her death in 1969. The Dillinger story over the years has become a tangled web of conflicting beliefs. He was born at Indianapolis in 1902. He quit school at the age of 13 to work as a machinist.

For several years, he loafed, hunted, fished and played amateur baseball. In July 1923 he enlisted in the Navy. He deserted in December and was dishonorably discharged. He married a 16-year-old Indiana girl in April 1924. He had his John Dillinger in 1933 He was a wanted man Corpse identified as Dillinger Discrepancies claimed Claimed to California be Dillinger man in 1963.