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In the wake of the Dillinger gang’s raids at Peru, Auburn, and Greencastle, the state of Indiana descended into something approaching wartime hysteria. Criminals and escaped convicts were nothing new, but the Midwest had never seen anything like this, heavily armed desperadoes in automobiles raiding a state’s armories and banks at will. It was the kind of news people were accustomed to reading from Texas or Oklahoma, not Indiana. Scrambling to mount a defense, Governor Paul McNutt stationed seven hundred National Guardsmen at armories across the state. Guard officials announced they were prepared to deploy tanks, airplanes, and poison gas to fight the gang. Jumpy guardsmen threw up roadblocks across the state, so many that Matt Leach’s boss was obliged to warn Halloween partygoers against doing anything that might cause them to be confused with Dillinger. The Indiana American Legion volunteered to have thirty thousand of its members deputized to patrol the highways.

“Convict gang running wild,” the editor of the Indianapolis News telegraphed his paper’s owners in Washington. “Can you have Homer Cummings offer federal aid to Indiana[?] One sheriff dead, one kidnapped, two police stations robbed of arms, bank raided.”10 The attorney general passed the request to Hoover, whose reaction was cool. Even if he had jurisdiction, which was unclear, Hoover knew the Bureau’s limitations, and he preferred cases he could win; a manhunt like this, requiring a vast commitment of resources toward an uncertain outcome, was a clear loser. “I told [the attorney general’s assistant] we had offered assistance with reference to fingerprint matters,” Hoover wrote in a memo-to-file, “but in so far as helping to catch them is concerned, we were not [going to].”11at

In the Bureau’s absence, responsibility for apprehending the gang fell to Matt Leach and the year-old Indiana State Police. They quickly became a laughingstock. The Indianapolis News ran a cartoon featuring an armed gunman chasing a group of troopers around the state; the caption read, HAPPY HUNTING GROUND. Leach pleaded for more weaponry, and Governor McNutt obliged, handing over $10,000 for bulletproof vests, machine guns, and ten new squad cars. To use them, however, Leach first had to find Dillinger. Without the first clue where the gang would strike next, he attempted to drive a psychological wedge between the gang’s members. A magnet for reporters, Leach gathered a group of Indianapolis journalists and asked for help.

“The real rascal we have to deal with is Pierpont,” Leach said. “He’s a super egotist. We’ll offend him deliberately and start jealousy in the gang. We’ll name it the Dillinger Gang. That will cook Pierpont. He’ll blow his top. After a lot of people have been killed and banks robbed, we’ll wind it up and Pierpont will get the works.”12

It was a harebrained ruse, one that drew chuckles from Pierpont and Dillinger as they settled into their new quarters and read the papers. The happiest days of Dillinger’s life, in fact, were probably those first weeks in Chicago, when his profile was low enough that he could still live in the open. He had money, he had reliable partners, and for the first time since leaving prison, he had a girlfriend.

Her name was Evelyn Frechette, but everyone called her “Billie.” Fivefoot-twoand 120 pounds, with jet-black hair she wore in a bob, the twenty-six-year-old Frechette had tranquil brown eyes and high cheekbones she covered with Max Factor pancake powder to mask acne scars. Like most of the women who found their way into the beds of criminals like Dillinger, she was a refugee from hard times, forced from poor rural upbringings to an uncertain life in the big city.

Frechette was half American Indian, raised on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin, the daughter of French Canadian half-breeds. She graduated from a Catholic-run Indian school in 1924 and eventually drifted to Chicago. By early 1932, she was a quiet young woman with a taste for cheap whiskey working as a hatcheck girl in a Chicago nightclub with her best