John Dillinger's sister shied from spotlight

The last remaining sibling of America's original "Public Enemy No. 1" has died.

Frances Dillinger Thompson died Tuesday at a senior living community in her hometown of Mooresville. She was 92 years old.

Her big brother was John Dillinger, the infamous Depression-area Hoosier bank robber whose exploits would become the stuff of legend. An Indianapolis native, Dillinger and his gang from September 1933 to July 1934 terrorized the Midwest, killing 10 men, robbing banks and police arsenals, and staging three jail breaks, according to the FBI.

John Dillinger Sr. had two children with his first wife Mary Ellen, John Sr. and Audrey. Mary Ellen died when John Jr. was three-years old and John Sr. married Elizabeth "Lizzie" several years later and had three children of their own: Hubert, Doris and Frances.

Thompson didn't know him well. She was 2 when he was first sent to prison and 12 when he was shot dead by FBI agents on July 22, 1934.

But she had several graphic memories of his visits to the family homestead while he was on the run, including a bloody one that Thompson shared with her nephew Jeff Scalf.

"John came home in April 8, 1934, after he'd been shot in Minneapolis," Scalf recalled his aunt saying. "He'd been hit in the leg."

Dillinger had been doctored by the time he got home to his family, who were then living in Mooresville. Feeling better, he at one point took to bouncing his younger sister on his knee. The wound opened up.

"John wasn't angry or anything," Scalf said. "John always liked kids. But Frances remembered that blood started coming out profusely."

He was dead three months later.

As an adult, Thompson led a quiet life despite her brother's infamy. She married her high school sweetheart, Carl, and lived in Mooresville. She got a job in a hospital, and her husband worked as a mechanic.

She became a mother of two, a grandmother of three, and a great grandmother of four.

She did not seek the limelight and even shrank from it, her nephew said, turning away from at least three opportunities to mingle with celebrities. After the 1970 book "Dillinger: Dead or Alive?" suggested the bank robber was alive, Thompson declined an offer to appear on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson.

After looking at photographs purporting to show the living Dillinger, Thompson dismissed them as looking "nothing like" her brother, Scalf said.

The next year Rod Serling traveled to Mooresville while working on the CBS drama "The Last Days of John Dillinger," but Thompson declined to meet him, Scalf said. And in 2008 she passed on the chance to meet Johnny Depp as he prepared to portray Dillinger in the film "Public Enemies."

For years after Dillinger's death in 1934 outside Chicago's Biograph Theater Thompson was the keeper of one of the largest collections of memorabilia connected to her brother.

Items included a letter Dillinger wrote to his father while in jail and a blood-stained dollar bill that was on him when he died.

In 2009, Thompson had decided that she had held on to the collection long enough. In December 2009, 11 Dillinger-related items were auctioned at an arms and militaria auction at Heritage Auctions in Dallas.

Bids for five items failed to meet her pre-auction minimum price. At the time, the auction trove was expected to sell for $600,000 to $800,000.