Queens of the Underworld Who Came Back

by

Milwaukee History

Two mild-mannered Wisconsin women became violent criminals while under the spell of charismatic men who played them like violins. In disbelief, hometown friends and relatives read sensational newspaper stories of felony crime sprees and gunfights with the police. That these young women were able to put all that behind them is something of a miracle. 

The Librarian and the Cult leader

“Are an individual’s characteristics formed by genetics or life experience? Psychologists say both factors play a role and interact in complex ways”. —J.J. Gittes, private investigator

Mary Brunner was born in 1943 to George and Elsie Brunner of Eau Claire. By all accounts she was a good student and lived a perfectly normal small-town life. After graduating from UW–Madison in 1965, she went to California and worked in the library at the University of California, Berkeley. It was there that Brunner met Charles Manson, a 33-year-old career criminal who had been in and out of prison since 1947. Manson moved in with her and she became the first member of the infamous Family. Manson convinced her to quit her job and together they cruised the streets of Los Angeles in search of teenage girls that Manson by himself was too old to attract. 

In April 1968 Brunner was living in a filthy, condemned house in Topanga Canyon when she gave birth to Manson’s child, Valentine. She was assisted by several female members of the Family who also lived in the house. Manson had already fathered children in 1953 and 1956, but Valentine was the first baby born into the Family. Six days later, law enforcement officers summoned to the house found a stolen vehicle and a dozen people dancing nude around a bonfire. Brunner’s son was improperly dressed and shivering, and she was convicted of endangering the life of a child. A kindly judge suspended her sentence providing she and Valentine went back to Wisconsin. 

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But weeks later, Brunner was arrested again, this time for selling narcotics to minors. While out on bail, she was apprehended at a Sears store for purchasing items with a stolen credit card. Her purse was filled with more credit cards and fraudulent IDs. 

In July 1969 she was linked to the murder of Gary Hinman, a musician who owed Manson $1,000. Brunner and some Family members were sent to Hinman’s home to collect the money. Hinman’s visitors became angry when a search of the house failed to turn up any cash. He was found on the floor with his face slashed from ear to chin, and multiple stab wounds in the chest. The word “pig” was written on the wall in his blood. Evidence found at the scene led police to Hinman’s killers. During the trial, Brunner was exonerated by one of the defendants. “Mary was scared to death. She faded into the woodwork during the whole thing,” he said.

It was around this time that Brunner's parents gained full custody of Valentine and took him to Eau Claire.

When Manson and some of his followers were convicted of the infamous Sharon Tate murder, Brunner and six Family members stole 140 rifles from a Western Surplus store, unaware that a clerk tripped the silent alarm. The thieves opened fire on the first police vehicle, shattering the windshield as it approached. More than 100 bullets were exchanged in a gunfight before officers got control of the situation. Subsequent courtroom testimony revealed that the Family planned to hijack a Boeing 747 and kill one passenger every hour until all the of Tate’s killers were released. Brunner was sentenced to 20 years at the California Institution for Women.

After being paroled in 1977, Mary Brunner discovered that the Family had fallen apart without Manson to lead them. She changed her name and dropped out of sight, surfacing in Wisconsin where she has lived for the last 50 years.

The Waitress and the Public Enemy

"There was something in those eyes I’ll never forget. They were piercing and electric and held me hypnotized." —Evelyn Frechette, True Confessions, 1935

If Evelyn Frechette is remembered today, it’s for the six months she spent with John Dillinger, the notorious machine gun-toting criminal who robbed 24 banks during the Depression. But the 25-year-old from Wisconsin had already lived a hardscrabble life full of sorrow and misery by the time she met the charming bank robber. 

Frechette was born in 1907 on the Menominee reservation located about 60 miles from Green Bay. “We were called the wild-rice eaters,” she said. “Our tribe hunted here a long time ago, before the white man came and pushed them around”. Frechette was expected to work on the reservation alongside relatives and neighbors. The children wrote and performed in plays, dressed up in feathers and beads and painted faces.

Frechette attended St. Anthony's Catholic Mission school before going to a South Dakota boarding school for her secondary education. She was hitchhiking her way home when a motorist assaulted her. She was found lying naked by the roadside, beaten and raped. Ashamed to return to Wisconsin, Frechette went to a home for unwed mothers in Chicago where she gave birth to her only child. William Edward Frechette lived for three months before dying of syphilis on July 24, 1928.

She moved to Milwaukee to live with her aunt Anna and found work as a nursemaid, dishwasher, maid, and fry cook. In 1932 she married Welton Spark, a small-time hood. “I wasn't really in love with him, but I was lonesome,” she said. “After the wedding he was sent to Leavenworth for fifteen years.”

Frechette was a cocktail waitress in a northside Chicago dance hall when she met John Dillinger, who’d just finished a nine-year stretch in prison. They became lovers and her life moved into overdrive as Dillinger and a small gang of men knocked over banks in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and South Dakota before fleeing to Tucson, Arizona. An employee at the Congress hotel recognized Dillinger and tipped off Tucson law enforcement officers. He was taken back to Crown Point, Indiana and imprisoned while awaiting trial. Frechette was alleged to have aided a breakout by smuggling money and a wooden pistol into the prison. 

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Now on the run, the couple drove to St. Paul, Minnesota and hid in the Lincoln Court Apartments on Lexington Avenue. A tenant alerted the police and several patrol cars converged on the hideout. Dillinger ran out the back door, guns blazing as he dodged a hailstorm of bullets. Frechette picked him up in their getaway car and sped off. “John shouted to me to take it easy, and I slowed down,” she said. “He didn't want to attract any attention in broad daylight”. At the Lincoln Court Apartments, the FBI found a Thompson submachine gun, two automatic rifles, one .38 caliber Colt automatic with twenty-shot magazine clips, and two bulletproof vests.

In April 1934, Frechette was arrested for her part in the Crown Point breakout while Dillinger, the most wanted man in the country, waited for her a block away. She was represented by the flamboyant Louis Piquette, a fellow Wisconsinite, who did a poor job during her defense. The sleazy Piquette was the inspiration for lawyer Billy Flynn in the musical Chicago. Dillinger was already living with a woman named Polly Hamilton when Frechette was sentenced to two years in prison and fined $2,000. 

After FBI agents killed Dillinger outside the Biograph theater in July 1934, Frechette sold her story to True Confessions, True Romance, and several other sensational magazines, telling them that “by following an impulse of the heart, she lost her freedom”. The Chicago Herald and Examiner quoted her as saying that Dillinger was a real gentleman. “We went places and saw things, and he gave me jewelry and everything a girl could want,” she said. “He treated me like a lady." Loyal to the end, Frechette said, “I’m not sorry I loved him. I'm sorry what it cost me after I was caught”.

After she was released from prison in 1936, Frechette and Dillinger’s father appeared in a carnival show called Crime Doesn’t Pay. Each night a blue haze of cigarette smoke surrounded her as she talked freely about her life with Dillinger and fielded questions from the audience. Whenever one of J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men was seen at the back of the tent, she laughed and pointed him out to the crowd. After the show Frechette sold copies of her prison autobiography for 25 cents. Although Dillinger’s father displayed a bloody shirt and the wooden gun used to escape from jail, it was Evelyn Frechette’s show all the way. At last John Dillinger’s gun moll had emerged from the underworld to become a star. In May 1940, the carnival had a week-long engagement in Milwaukee and set up the tents and midway rides at Holton and Capitol. She left the Crime Doesn’t Pay attraction shortly after.

Frechette returned to the Menominee reservation in Neopit, Wisconsin, and died of cancer on January 13, 1969. Her lover, whose name once dominated the headlines, had killed ten men, wounded seven others, robbed banks and police arsenals, and staged three jail breaks—killing a sheriff during one and wounding two guards in another. Evelyn Frechette was there for almost all of it.

“Maybe I had it coming to me,” she said. “But I kept telling myself I was different. I just fell in love with the wrong man.”