The Girls Of Murder City Part 6

It wasn't until the next day, Friday, that she was spotted, by a businessman named Eugene Chloupak. The man, in town from Indianapolis, saw Wanda standing at the mail desk in the hotel's lobby at about noon. He noticed her for the same reason most men did-she was beautiful. But there was also another reason: He'd seen her face in his morning paper. He approached and surrept.i.tiously glanced at the letter in her hand. It was addressed to "Mrs. Inez Stopa"-Harriet Stopa, Wanda's mother. Folded up in the envelope was about $100 in cash, a Polish government bond, and a $200 insurance policy made out to Harriet Stopa. The letter, in Polish, ended simply, "Matka, droga matka"-Mother, dear mother-in a scratchy scrawl.

Chloupak, of course, only saw the address on the envelope, and that wasn't quite enough to push him into action. He didn't know what to do. This pet.i.te young woman with the sharply cut cheekbones was a wanted woman. He stood there in the lobby, paralyzed. It must have been hard for him to believe that his newspaper had come to life and was standing right next to him. Finally, Chloupak managed to convince himself she was for real, and he told the hotel's a.s.sistant manager about his find. By then, though, Wanda had posted her letter and walked away.

The police, when they arrived at the hotel, a.s.sumed Wanda Stopa-or whomever the man saw-had disappeared into the midday crowds out on the sidewalks. In fact, she went upstairs to Room 1156. There, in her room, she collected her few personal items into an orderly pile on the bed: a dressing gown, cold cream, a comb, her diary. The only accessory she left on her person was a gold band with a sapphire set in a red Buddha. She fetched a gla.s.s of water from the bathroom and sat down. She added sugar to the water and mixed it in. She then carefully poured another substance into the gla.s.s. She closed her eyes and threw the liquid down her throat before she could change her mind.

At 1:30 Wanda placed a call to the house physician. "I am feeling very sick," she said quietly. That was all. The doctor could tell from the caller's voice that the situation was urgent. He arrived at her room just moments later. As the door swung open, Wanda was falling backward onto the bed, unconscious.

11.

It's Terrible, but It's Better On Friday afternoon, a coroner's jury at the city morgue in Chicago announced that Wanda Elaine Stopa had fired a revolver at Henry Manning "with murderous intent." Kenley Smith stood up slowly as the jurors filed out of the room. Smith had sat in the back during the inquest, pale and nervous, keeping his head down and his eyes peeled. The time and place for the inquest had been publicly announced, and he was convinced that Wanda planned to barge into the room, shoot him, and, in a grand final gesture, shoot herself over his lifeless body. Her failure to appear may have been a blow to his ego, but as he stepped from the room, relief replaced disappointment when a reporter pulled him aside. Wanda Stopa, the hack said, had been found dead in Detroit.

"So Wanda has committed suicide?" the distinguished-looking ad man replied. He ran a hand over the top of his slicked-back hair, to press down any stray strands. "I knew it would come," he said. "It was her ultimate step. Given that psychopathic temperament, it was inevitable that some emotional crisis would cause her to end her life. It happened to be this one. If not this, it would have been some other."

The news may not have surprised Smith, but it shocked the rest of the city. Everyone had expected Wanda to take her place among the murderesses of the Cook County Jail. Her crime was the most sensational-and the most heartbreaking-of them all. On top of that, she was so beautiful, maybe even more beautiful than Beulah Annan. This was cause for mourning among the newspaper corps. Now police reporters would never get to crowd around Wanda's cell for daily interviews. Now they wouldn't get to fight for seats to her trial. In the Tribune on Sat.u.r.day, April 26, just two days after Wanda had burst onto the city's front pages, Genevieve Forbes wrote: Wanda Stopa, the Polish girl who wanted to "live her own life," ended everything by taking her own life yesterday afternoon at 1:30 when she swallowed cyanide of pota.s.sium in room 1156 at the Hotel Statler, Detroit.

By now news of Wanda's epilepsy had broken, and that seemed to explain everything. Epilepsy, the Tribune wrote, "is a manifestation of the old motor nerve system, in contrast to the new motor system which obtains in all normal human beings. The old motor system, according to the newest theory, is atavistic and a throw-back in a few individuals to the animal kingdom. On this basis, an epileptic fit is as atavistic a performance, and as far from the human norm, as the Thursday morning murder was atavistic and out of the orbit of the healthy minded individual."

So that was that. Wanda may have been beautiful and intelligent, but she was also fatally flawed. Her actions were inevitable, predictable. The American-followed by the city's other newspapers-brought this conclusion home by publishing excerpts from unaddressed letters that police found in the Smiths' Chicago studio. Wanda's words were deeply emotional, obsessive, hypnotizing: "You are the one I need. Oh, b.u.mmy dearest, I miss you so! . . . I am nothing without him, only a lonely, tired soul groping in the world. . . . I do not believe I can bear it much longer. . . . Life for most people is lament. . . . How I would love to throw off all this care and go peacefully to sleep."

The letters went on and on, with metronomic force, a gold mine for the newspapers, which stretched them out over multiple days. The American published a selection of the excerpts on their own across the top of the front page, over portraits of Wanda Stopa looking young and gay and unbearably innocent. Kenley Smith, now that he no longer had to worry about Wanda leaping out at him from the bushes, talked openly and frequently to reporters. "I feel sure Wanda was morally and emotionally insane, but that intellectually she was sane as it is possible to be," he said. Later, he insisted that Wanda's decision to shoot at his wife "was conceived under the influence of narcotics. I feel sure of that, and I feel sure that she wanted and needed money with which to buy more dope."

With Wanda's life splayed so awkwardly before the public, the Stopas felt they had no choice but to respond. "My daughter often begged to be allowed to bring Mr. Smith to our home so she could introduce him to us," said Wanda's mother, Harriet Stopa. "But I always refused her. I told her this home was sacred and that she could not bring b.u.ms in it, for a gray-haired man who makes love to a little girl when he has a wife at home is nothing but a b.u.m. She used to cry and say she wished she could stop thinking about him. She said he was so brilliant, so well educated, he knew so much about the fine side of living, and that he had taught her so much. She used to tell me everything."

Wanda's twenty-two-year-old brother, Henry, his face blasted into a stony mask, tried to find something positive in his sister's decision to take her own life. He loved her deeply, and so he'd rather see her dead than have her become one of those women on Murderess' Row being paraded out for the public's t.i.tillation. "Yes, it's better to be dead than to be added to that list of women held for murder over at the county jail," he said. "It's terrible, but it's better. The thing had to end tragically, and this was the best of the ways."

The train station was cloaked in low fog and a persistent rain when Wanda Stopa's body arrived in Chicago early on Sunday morning. Ione Quinby and Maurine Watkins stood in a group with other reporters, waiting for something to happen as the casket, encased in a pine box, was lowered onto the platform. But nothing did. The Stopas apparently had misunderstood the arrangements and expected the body to be delivered to the family home, not just to the station. Men and women climbed down from the pa.s.senger cars, popped open umbrellas, and quickly departed. The conductor hustled from the train to the station house and back again. The platform emptied out-except for the reporters. It was a sad sight, the cheap pine box sitting out in the elements, slowly being soaked by rain, no one going near it. Finally, the train screeched back into motion and pulled away as the reporters continued to wait. When it became clear no one was coming to claim the body, railroad staff carried the box to the street and loaded it onto a wagon, bound for a holding pen somewhere, but the reporters flagged down the driver before he could pull the wagon out into the street. They pooled their money to have the casket delivered to its proper destination.

As the reporters were haggling with the wagon driver, people began to arrive at the Stopa family's third-floor walk-up at 1505 Augusta Street. It was mostly people from the neighborhood: old men who'd known her father; Wanda's childhood friends, some of them toting children; her brothers' work colleagues and schoolmates. Once the casket arrived at the flat and was properly arranged in the front parlor, mourners and reporters lined up before it. They offered condolences to the family and peered down at the dead girl, whose face glowed under two huge candles that flickered at the head and foot of the casket. The apartment was filled with flowers, including a floral basket from the Kent College of Law-even though Kent wasn't Wanda's alma mater9-and one from "the boys at the district attorney's office." The somber scene moved Maurine. She was more understanding of Wanda, so much like Maurine in her love for home and her need to leave it, than she ever could be of Belva or Beulah. The reporter remained impa.s.sive as she watched, but later in the day she would carve out a carefully composed report, elegiac without being sentimental: And Wanda came home at last.

"Bohemian freedom," morphine and love, murder, suicide, and then-back in the Little Poland she had deserted for Chicago's Bohemia; back with the mother and brothers she had left for a glamorous "count" who married her, and for a business man who didn't; back with the friends "a thousand years behind the times" she had forsaken for others "who speak my language and understand."

Maurine, pinned in by a long, meandering queue that filled the stairway to the apartment, had to wait for hours before filing her story. The family expected the mourners to be gone by early afternoon, but at noon the line stretched down the block like a picket of soldiers. Wanda's mother and two brothers expressed surprise at seeing unfamiliar faces coming up the stairs, but they accepted that Wanda had known many people they'd never met. Some hours later, though, the line outside, inexplicably, had grown longer still. The small parlor filled beyond capacity, until the carpet was soaked and pictures on the walls knocked askew. The family realized these were not Wanda's friends. The viewing had become something that had nothing to do with mourning the death of a young woman. The newspapers, with their breathless coverage of Wanda and the shooting, had brought out hundreds of thrill seekers. "All day they came in steady streams; strangers, laughing and chewing gum, curious to see Chicago's latest, youngest, 'brainiest' murderess," Quinby observed. She, Maurine, and other reporters worked the line just inside the parlor, taking notes, asking for reactions. Looking down on the dead girl, Quinby noted "an expression of supreme triumph on her beautifully molded face. Knowing the legal penalty for murder, which she had woven in the emotional pattern of her brief explorative life, she had made her exit with a finesse that made her appear more a figure of fiction than fact."

The procession of Chicagoans outside the Stopa home seemed to be in agreement with the reporter's sentiment. They had come to see the denouement of a cinema story. Inching up the stairs and through the parlor, the citizens of the city debated the life they had fervently read about over the past four days, feeling as if they were intimates of the young woman they'd never met. "The true story," one said, "will never be known. Smith made love to her, promised to marry her, grew tired and cast her off; her heart didn't mend in four months and she came back-"

Someone interrupted. "Not to kill Smith but to shoot herself in his presence."

She was "naive as a child," offered another.

Hour after hour, people came through the apartment and gazed down on Wanda smiling in death in her mother's parlor, the murky room lighted only by the holy candles. The church had refused to provide services, someone from the neighborhood whispered. "Wanda would not mind," came the reply, in tempered disapproval, "for she gave up the church, too, in her quest for 'freedom.' "

Late in the day, Maurine worked up the nerve to approach Harriet Stopa. "She wanted to spare us the agony of a long trial, the disgrace of a sentence and perhaps years of suffering," Mrs. Stopa told Maurine quietly as they stood next to the body. "When she realized what she had done-that she had committed murder-when she came to her senses-"

Harriet Stopa, stoic through the gum snappers and the gigglers and the old women who looked at her with despairing righteousness, at last could stand no more. Maurine had nudged her over the edge. Mrs. Stopa sat, put her head to her lap and sobbed: "My poor little girl! My poor little girl!"

And still, the line outside grew. It seemed to be self-replicating, a single, inexhaustible organism marching forward. Here and there, the crowd broke off into individuals who, impatient, rushed around the building and up the back staircase, only to find the rear door locked. They put their shoulders into the door-bang!-in case it was just stuck, startling family members on the other side. Around the front, tempers began to flare. The banister on the tight stairway leading to the apartment rocked against the pressure of dozens of hands and arms. Policemen walking their beat in the afternoon recognized the potential for trouble and called in for help. "At 8 o'clock," wrote Maurine, "5,000 persons swarmed in front of the building at 1505 Augusta Street, and squads of policemen were sweating in the business of maintaining order. Ten abreast, the 'mourners' were packed in a line that was two blocks long."

Two hours later, the Stopas called the police in desperation. They feared the officers on the scene were being overwhelmed by the mob. Central Station told them reinforcements already had been dispatched. Soon, thirty fresh policemen arrived and rushed forward as a human wall, swinging their clubs. The crowd gasped and fell back. "There were screams, laughter, a few curses," Maurine related. "Two women were clubbed by the police. For a time it seemed that the crowd would win out, and a call was sent in to the fire department. The [fire wagon] arrived just as the throng began to disperse."

The Stopas wouldn't get much of a respite. The funeral was two days later, and it would be even worse than the viewing. The curious began showing up shortly after dawn on Tuesday. The newspapers, with their lurid descriptions of Little Poland disintegrating into chaos over the weekend, convinced thousands more people to make the trek out to the Northwest Side to see what all the excitement was about. Men and women settled in for a siege-or for a picnic. They wouldn't be disappointed.

"Battle Crowds at Wanda Rites!" screamed the front page of the American, in huge type that dwarfed the newspaper's nameplate. The battle was still raging when the edition rolled off the presses that afternoon. In the morning, Maurine had headed back out to the Stopa residence for another round of interviews, but this time it wouldn't be so easy to get in. She found her progress blocked by more than "10,000 morbid sensation seekers" who had congregated on and around Augusta Street to see Wanda's body taken to Bohemian National Cemetery.

Maurine wasn't exaggerating: There were thousands of people pressing in on the small apartment building. This was group madness, a sight so incredible, it stayed with the reporter for years. The crowd rolled and bucked outside the building, spilling out of Augusta Street into Ashland Avenue. A phalanx of policemen and firemen walled off some of the adjacent streets in a vain effort to keep the throng contained. Peanut vendors skirted the periphery of the crowd, quickly selling off their product and squeezing out of the crush to race off and restock. Maurine was thunderstruck at how, in death, everybody seemed to love Wanda Stopa. It no longer mattered that the woman had shot and killed an innocent man; it mattered only that her beautiful face and mournful words appeared above the fold of every newspaper in the city. The problem wasn't so much public att.i.tudes toward crime, she decided, "but in the fact that no one considers the crime." She recognized the same moral blindness coloring public opinion toward Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, two murderesses who remained very much alive.

Ione Quinby, also back for another day of exhaustive Wanda coverage, found it impossible to fight her way through the mob. Everyone wanted to be right in front of the building when the body was brought out, keeping the Post reporter from getting near the entrance. "The only path I found was through the alley at the back, and entrance from this pa.s.sage to the house was to be effected only by scaling a brick wall five feet high," she later remembered.

Getting around the crowd and over the wall-not an easy climb in a tight ankle-length skirt-was only the first challenge Quinby faced. She now had to bring out her acting skills. After the sick voyeurism on display at the viewing, the Stopas weren't letting anyone in but family and close friends; they placed their largest men at the doors to block anyone else from entering. The men had been given instructions to turn back, preferably with a thump to the head, any artist from Towertown or other interloper who dared make an appearance. Thinking on her feet, Quinby hid her notebook and insisted to the door-minder that she was a friend of Wanda's from law school. The man hesitated just long enough for Quinby to duck inside and run up the stairs to the apartment. Her hopes for an exclusive were short-lived, though, for when Quinby stepped into the Stopa parlor again, she found that Maurine Watkins also had somehow managed to get in.

The Catholic Church had indeed refused to send a priest, so a Baptist minister, the Reverend John Frydryk, conducted a brief service in the house. Frydryk preached his sermon in Polish, but Maurine, always interested in the word of G.o.d, took pains to write some of it down and get it translated. The minister took John 11:21 as his text: "Lord, if Thou hadst been here, my brother had not died!" The small group of mourners did their best to concentrate on the minister's quiet, solemn words and to ignore the "sensation seekers" leaning over balconies and fire escapes in reckless attempts to peer into the Stopa living room.

When Frydryk finished, the pallbearers-six of Wanda's childhood friends-stepped forward. As they began to walk carefully toward the stairs with the coffin, the front door was opened and the tumult outside rushed forward in ear-popping screams and t.i.tters. Grasping hands a.s.saulted all of the pallbearers as they stepped down the stairs. The people outside began to shift in response to the casket's arrival, some moving toward it, others trying to inch away to give it room. Bodies ground together like tectonic plates. A grotesque sound burbled up, a collective gasp and squeak, the unnatural expulsions wrought by body upon body slamming together unnaturally, necks twisting and bobbing to the point of muscle breakdown. A detail of policemen pushed through the crowd to the white hea.r.s.e idling at the curb, clearing a path for the pallbearers. Most of the people fell back, but some resisted, their torsos contorted in their effort to get closer, seemingly on the verge of the kind of fit that Wanda Stopa was now famous for.

Right behind the coffin, Mrs. Stopa and her sons and then the rest of the family marched darkly into the maw. The Reverend Frydryk handed Quinby a wreath of flowers with instructions to take it to the hea.r.s.e. "I did," the reporter later said, "forcing my way along the front of the house, but on the way two women s.n.a.t.c.hed several of the roses, mementoes, I suppose, to be pressed in their sc.r.a.pbooks. Another tried to rip off one of the tulle ribbons and gave me an angry shove when I tore it out of her grasp." The reporter was relieved when she reached the hea.r.s.e, her responsibility fulfilled. "It was a funeral that would have interested Wanda; an Augusta Street rid of its inhibitions," she said.

With great effort, the hea.r.s.e pulled away from the curb and left behind the crowds and the peanut vendors and the police cordon. The family undoubtedly thought the worst of it was finally over, but at the cemetery they discovered another five thousand Chicagoans waiting. Mrs. Stopa and her sons, Henry and Walter, gaped at the sight of still more people blocking their way. Standing at the gravesite, they tried to disregard the crowds through extreme concentration on their grief. They kept their heads down and held on to one another, just trying to get through the day. Henry was the first to break. Wanda's brother, just a year younger than his dead sister, had expressed rage in the past four days but produced no tears. Now the tears came, violently, uncontrollably. He collapsed onto the coffin and pushed away everyone who tried to help him back on his feet.

Edward T. Lee, dean of the John Marshall Law School and Wanda's mentor before she disappeared into bohemia, offered some last words before the coffin was lowered into the earth. He had come to testify, he said, "to her lovely character, her brilliant mind, her eager pursuit of her studies, her lofty and n.o.ble ambition."

Sobbing punctuated this expression of Wanda Stopa's lost potential. Dean Lee described the murder as a "great misfortune" but added that Wanda was now relieved of the burden of what she'd done. "The law has been fulfilled: it cannot follow the dead," he said. "The moral guilt is beyond our power to judge-Christ only could speak on such occasion and he would say: 'Let him that is without sin cast the first stone.' " Maurine wrote down the professor's heavenly invocation, obviously concerned with Wanda's journey ahead in the afterlife.

After Lee had finished, there was nothing left to say. The only sounds now were "Nearer, My G.o.d, to Thee" being played quietly from somewhere behind the family and the soft clop of dirt being dropped down onto the casket-until a child interrupted the somber moment, exclaiming something to his mother. That was when Walter Stopa broke. Harriet Stopa's seventeen-year-old son slapped the child, suddenly and ruthlessly. The boy's mother, a woman named Anna Konpke, objected. "Mrs. Stopa's nerves gave way" then, Maurine related, "and she promptly gave the mother three blows, breaking her eyegla.s.ses."

The woman and her child were rushed away from the gravesite to a nearby open area, where reporters descended on them. Mrs. Konpke didn't know who the Stopas were or anything about Wanda Stopa, she said. She had come to the cemetery to visit her son's grave and noticed the teeming mob rolling like a wave across the grounds. Curiosity, she said, got the best of her-" just like all the rest of them."

12.

What Fooled Everybody William Gaertner came to see his Belva almost every day at the jail. He a.s.sured her everything was going to turn out fine. After all, she had arguably the best defense attorney in Chicago and without question the best connected. Thomas Nash, a former alderman, represented the city's biggest names. Three years ago, he had helped secure acquittals in the "Black Sox" World Series game-fixing trial-and everyone knew those boys were guilty.

By the second week of May, however, even Nash's reputation wasn't enough to make Belva feel better. She'd had the start of her trial postponed back in April when Beulah Annan was taking up all the air. Now her new date loomed, and the mood at the Cook County Jail had only gotten worse. On May 7, a jury convicted Elizabeth Unkafer of killing her lover and sentenced her to life in prison. Lizzie was a loon; she'd said she committed the murder because it was G.o.d's will. Still, she continued a distressing trend. Over the past two months, Cook County's all-male juries inexplicably had become unafraid of convicting women. Before Lizzie Unkafer, Mary Wezenak was convicted of manslaughter for serving poisonous whiskey. Before "Moonshine Mary," Kitty Malm was sent "over the road." Before Kitty, Sabella Nitti had started it all last summer.

More distressing still was the similarity between Belva's case and Unkafer's. Maurine Watkins had noticed and, right after Unkafer's conviction, asked about it. Belva told the reporter there was no comparison between the two cases, not that her protestation did any good. She opened the paper the next morning and saw that Maurine had written it up in her own weird little way, as always.

Of the four awaiting trial, the cases of Mrs. Annan and Mrs. Belva Gaertner would seem most similar to Elizabeth Unkafer's; each is accused of shooting a man, not her husband, with whom her relations were at least questioned: each is supposed to be a "woman scorned" who shot the man "rather than lose him." But neither was at all disconcerted by Mrs. Unkafer's sentence.

"I can't see that it's anything at all like my case," said Mrs. Gaertner, the sophisticated divorcee indicted for shooting Law, the young auto salesman, as she twirled about in her red dancing slippers.

"The cases are entirely different," said Mrs. Annan, quite the ingenue in her girlish checked flannel frock.

Had Belva been twirling about while talking to the Tribune reporter? Hardly likely. She did wear red slippers, though. William had brought them. They were comfortable. They made the cell feel a little homey.

At least the reporter included Beulah in the comparison game with Belva, rather than Sabella or Lela Foster, the other women with murder trials coming up. It didn't mean, though, that she and Beulah were equals in the eyes of the press, and there'd be no point in pretending otherwise. Belva had understood that from the very first day Beulah stepped through the jail's doors, back at the beginning of April. The pretty, fragile ones had got in Belva's way her whole life. The large eyes, the trembling lip, the wee waist you could almost put your hand all the way around-men could never get enough. Men who might have been her husbands. Men who might have been her boyfriends. The thought of it enraged her. But this time, she had decided she wouldn't fight against the other girl, the prettier girl. She would fight alongside her.

On Beulah's first day in the jail, Belva began scheming to get her picture taken with the new inmate. They would be best pals all the way. She wasn't as attractive or as young as Beulah, but if she played it right, she believed the papers would lump them together: "the prettiest women in Cook County Jail." That was worth something. Here, William's ready cash came in handy. The "forbidden cabinet," the one that held the cosmetics taken from new prisoners when they were processed at the jail, now opened for Belva and only her.10 With young, male reporters swaggering around the jail every day, all of the girls wanted access to their beauty products, but only Belva got preferential treatment. "Belva has her powder puff again," the other inmates would say, clucking respectfully, when they caught sight of Belva looking glam on the cellblock. She was an expert with makeup; she could make herself look a decade younger.

After a couple days of jockeying, Belva got her picture with Beulah. Shots of the duo together appeared in most of the city's newspapers. Belva looked good-bemused and sleepy-eyed, her head c.o.c.ked imperiously like the society doyenne she once was, gazing slightly down on her "dear friend," "Beautiful Beulah" Annan. In every caption she earned equal billing. The Tribune labeled its photo "Killers of Men." Maurine, knowing full well that everyone was talking about the two cases, reported that the women, incredible as it might seem, "have not talked over their common interests. A man, a woman, liquor and a gun."

The photos with Beulah had been a significant coup for Belva; they kept her in the headlines. But that was then. Now, a month after those photographs ran, the powder puff wasn't going to be enough for her to stay in the picture. In the wake of the "Wanda sensation," and with Elizabeth Unkafer's conviction playing prominently in all of the papers, Beulah was having her own crisis of confidence. And like Belva, she had decided to do something about it.

On May 8, the day after Unkafer's conviction, Beulah Annan gathered the press and told them she was pregnant. Harry Kalstedt, she said, had attacked her that fateful day in April after she informed him she was carrying her husband's child.

Reporters thrilled at the unexpected news-a new twist that would tug at hearts and further goose a story that already obsessed readers. They crowded in on Beulah in the corridor of the women's section, shooting questions at her. The mother-to-be scolded Belva for spilling her secret, even though Beulah's announcement was the first that reporters had heard of the pregnancy. Nevertheless, the papers that Thursday afternoon stuck with Beulah's account: "Mrs. Beulah Annan, young and beautiful slayer of her sweetheart, Harry Kalstedt, today bemoaned the publicity given the fact she is expecting a visit from the stork in the Fall," wrote the American. The newspaper continued: Today, when seen in her cell at the county jail, she blamed Mrs. Belva Gaertner, divorcee, awaiting trial for the killing of her sweetheart, Walter Law, married automobile salesman, for disclosing the secret.

"Belva should not have told," said Mrs. Annan. "But women always tell such things. It was to have been my own little secret, but I just had to confide in someone and I told Belva."

Roy C. Woods and William F. McLaughlin, a.s.sistant state's attorneys, declared the fact that Mrs. Annan was awaiting motherhood did not change the fact that a murder had been committed.

a.s.sistant State's Attorney Edward Wilson declared that if Mrs. Annan were convicted and sentenced to death, there was no legal reason why she should not be hanged.

No legal reason? Perhaps that was so, but such a fraught decision hardly would be decided on legal merits. They were talking about an innocent little baby. And with Beulah as its mother, it would certainly be "a most beautiful child," the Post stated. The day after she disclosed the pregnancy, Beulah announced through her lawyers that she "wants no postponement of her trial on account of her approaching motherhood." The state responded in kind, bravely insisting, "We are ready to go to trial today."

The pregnancy revelation surprised Maurine. During the immediate excitement of it all, she hung back, took stock. She decided to chat with some of the other inmates while a group of reporters interviewed Beulah. It seemed that, among the hacks covering the development, Maurine alone was suspicious. In the next day's Tribune, she hinted that the whole thing was a ruse, hitting with the kind of lacerating sarcasm that was beginning to earn her a following.

What counts with a jury when a woman is on trial for murder?

Youth? Beauty? And if to these she adds approaching motherhood-?

For pretty Mrs. Beulah Annan, who shot her lover, Harry Kohlstedt [sic],11 to the tune of her husband's phonograph, is expecting a visit from the stork early this fall. This 23 year old murderess, now waiting trial, is making this the basis for a further appeal to clemency.

Maurine went on to suggest that Unkafer's verdict on Wednesday had prompted Beulah's announcement, "for the conviction of one of their number broke the monotony of their life and startled them into a worried a.n.a.lysis," she wrote of the seven inmates remaining on "Murderess' Row." The official line from William Scott Stewart, she added, was that Beulah's "condition has no bearing upon the legality of the case." But, prompted by Maurine, he had agreed that "it might affect the jury." Maurine was also alone among the reporting corps in bringing up the "four-term rule," which Beulah's attorneys could invoke to prevent the case from being held over for more than four terms of court-meaning Stewart and O'Brien could ensure Beulah went to trial well before the baby was due to arrive. "Will a jury give death-will a jury send to prison-a mother-to-be?" Maurine asked.

She clearly thought Cook County jurymen wouldn't be able to do so, especially to a mother-to-be as lovely as Beulah May Annan. For weeks, Maurine had reminded readers that Beulah's story about the Kalstedt shooting-that is, her latest story-didn't add up. The criticism hadn't dented the suspected murderess's popularity at all, and now the reporter was questioning Beulah's veracity about that most sacred and mysterious of womanly things: pregnancy. People-especially men-wanted to believe Beulah. They were conditioned to believe her.

Maurine's derisive articles stayed true to the Tribune's niche in the market-the hanging paper, the paper that didn't write sob stories-but she also made a good case. It was an unlikely coincidence, after all, that the pregnancy announcement came just days after the ma.s.sive Wanda Stopa coverage. For a thrilling, salacious week, Wanda had blotted out all of the women of Cook County Jail, even "Beautiful Beulah" Annan. The Polish girl gunner pushed Beulah not just off the front page but out of the papers entirely. The story became so big that twenty-four-year-old Ernest Hemingway, a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, picked up a Ma.r.s.eille newspaper in southern France one day and, to his surprise, found himself reading about his childhood friends' older brother, Y. Kenley Smith. At his request, his family sent him all of the Tribune's articles about Wanda Stopa, which they annotated with "suitable moral comments." Hemingway became caught up in the coverage. "Pity the female Polak lawyer couldn't shoot when she pulled a gun on Doodles," he wrote to a friend, still disgusted by the thought of Kenley's wife eyeing him. The Palos Park shooting and its circ.u.mstances were so scandalous that it's believed they inspired Hemingway to write a short story, "Summer People," in which a Hemingway-like protagonist engages in a.n.a.l intercourse with a wild young woman named Kate. Surely that was the kind of "perversion" bohemians undertook, especially the ones who went mad like Wanda Stopa. ("I love it. I love it. I love it," Kate calls out during the s.e.x act, which of course occurs not in a bed but out in the woods.) Beulah's trial had been scheduled to start the Monday after Wanda burst into the news, before her lawyers managed at the last minute to push it back to late May. That original timing must have terrified Beulah. How could she go to trial if all anyone was talking about was Wanda Stopa? But her instincts, as always in seeking press coverage, were pitch-perfect. She later said, "What fooled everybody when I told them in jail that I was going to become a mother was this: We had kept it a secret that the reason I shot Kalstedt was because he would not let me alone when I told him I was going to have a baby."

No reporter bothered to ask why she would keep such a compelling reason for her violent act a secret. Maurine, for one, had come to believe that her colleagues simply preferred Beulah's revisionist account of what happened on the night of April 3. There wasn't much they could do with a hard-hearted confession, but her desperate fight against a brute-that was perfect. There certainly was no denying that Beulah Annan knew how to play pathos for all it was worth. "Albert probably won't want me back-my life's ruined anyway; I can never live it down," she told any reporter who would listen, the tears coming easily. "Even if I went away where n.o.body knew, you can't get away from yourself. And I'd always remember that I'd killed him."

Men riding into work on the streetcar shook their heads and winced at such plangent words, then gazed at the latest picture of the dear murder suspect, who, Maurine noted, "posed prettily for the photographers" every day. Their wives at home snuffled at reading the same words, the tears coming almost as easily as they did to Beulah. Despite Maurine's caustic commentary and Belva Gaertner's attempts to regain the spotlight, the Beulah juggernaut could not be stopped. Even William Gaertner's millions couldn't help his ex-wife stand out against such exceptional compet.i.tion. Beulah Annan was simply a natural. A rumor floated around the city's newsrooms that if Beulah won acquittal, one of the Hollywood movie studios was prepared to offer her a contract. (This surely infuriated Belva, who actually had been a professional performer.) The rumor wasn't true; there had been no discussions with Hollywood representatives. But Beulah a.s.sumed some kind of life in entertainment would be open to her. At the very least, she knew she could be a vaudeville freak act, a term that referred not to mustachioed women but to performers who had box-office drawing power for some reason other than talent. The boxing champion Jack Dempsey was a top-drawer freak act, once making $10,000 in a week. So was Evelyn Nesbit, the infamous object of desire who'd sparked the murder of the noted architect Stanford White. Freak acts cracked bad jokes, talked through songs, told supposedly true stories from their lives, or did a simple soft shoe. Beulah Annan surely could manage that.

13.

A Modest Little Housewife On Thursday, May 22, the bailiff in Judge William Lindsay's courtroom said the words everyone had been waiting to hear: "Beulah Annan."

The defendant, her head bare, hands interlaced at her waist, rose and walked toward the bar. She progressed as if at the head of a funeral procession, her head cast slightly downward, steps slow and deliberate. Reporters took up most of the first handful of rows in the packed courtroom, and Beulah exchanged smiles with them as she approached. She pa.s.sed her husband in the first row. Al leaned forward in his seat, twisting his cap in his hand, a worried gaze fixed on her. She did not meet his eyes.

Beulah knew everyone would be looking at her, the comely expectant mother of Cook County Jail. She didn't disappoint. Her freshly marcelled hair arced with precision across her forehead. The lace collar of her new blouse suggested innocent modesty but at the breastbone dipped tantalizingly into shadow. "The courtroom was full of appreciative smiles directed toward the lovely girl beside the prisoner's table," noted a reporter from out of state. "There were flashes of consideration. The sheiks of the town crowded the spectators' chairs. The pretty, bob-haired maid a.s.suredly was the fairest thing that had ever graced a murder trial in Chicago."

The Daily Journal 's hack appeared equally impressed. He described in detail Beulah's expertly tailored suit, even her black satin slippers.

Slightly pale from her recent illness but blossoming with the comeliness of face and figure which has spread her name broadcast, Mrs. Annan looked more like a boarding school girl tripping up to the princ.i.p.al's "carpet" than a defendant in one of Chicago's most sensational murder trials.

Perhaps there was "method in the madness" that prompted her to enter the courtroom bareheaded. With her flaming red hair showing at its best with a fresh trim and marcel, she made a picture which would rival paintings of the famous t.i.tian.

The Journal's reporter was right: There was a method to Beulah's appearance. Her lawyers, Stewart and O'Brien, with the help of a "fashion expert" they'd hired, had carefully thought everything out, including the bare head. A beautiful woman who went bareheaded in public could only be a wh.o.r.e or a G.o.ddess. Beulah managed to be both. The "boarding-school girl" look played into a popular male s.e.xual fantasy while also visually showcasing Beulah's innocence. She looked sweetly childlike and at the same time delectably ripe. The fashion expert earned the fee-Beulah's outfits would receive as much comment as the evidence presented in court-but the defendant's beauty alone was undoubtedly enough to do the job. It confirmed a woman's nature, her innate moral place in the world. Time and again Beulah Annan was described as if she were a work of art: her hair was not simply red but "t.i.tian," her coy smile that of a "Sphinx" withholding a thrilling riddle.

The male reporters covering her case had long ago come over to her side. The pregnancy announcement simply sealed it. The Post alluded to a metaphor by Alexander Pope, describing Beulah as "a b.u.t.terfly on a wheel, the center of many curious eyes, some friendly, some hostile. She wore a neat brown dress, with a soft fur piece about her neck." Her lawyers couldn't have asked for a better image than that of a helpless, fluttering Beulah, in her neat brown dress, being tortured on a wheel to achieve something as unimportant as a conviction.

It seemed to Maurine Watkins that she was the only one who remembered the ugliness of the killing. While the Journal and the Post remained officially neutral on Beulah, and the Hearst papers sometimes bordered on fawning, Maurine worked herself into a righteous fury. What any decent defense attorney in Chicago wanted in a jury, she believed, was "twelve good morons"-and she was convinced, and horrified, that W. W. O'Brien and William Scott Stewart were going to get them.

Maurine had seen enough of Beulah's attorneys to know that Beulah was lucky to have them. Stewart and O'Brien had been in partnership together less than two years, but they had proved an excellent team from the start. So far they'd never lost a case-a record rapidly approaching two dozen acquittals in a row. They'd had such success that they were about to set themselves up in the sw.a.n.k new Temple Building in the heart of the Loop. Their rent would be a whopping $350 a month.12 On the face of it, the partners made an unusual pair. O'Brien exuded tough-guy charm; he didn't so much smile at you as ease his lips into a kind of swagger. He was impressive in a quintessentially Chicago way, decked out in colorful shirts, always making a show, the kind of man who kept his hat pulled low over his eyes, winked at attractive young ladies on the street, and dangled a cigarette from his lip as he talked. He had a propensity for going on weeklong benders, surfacing just in time to walk into court.

Stewart wasn't a teetotaler, but in contrast to his partner, no one ever saw him drunk. A journalist labeled the always well-dressed Stewart "the Beau Brummel of the courtroom." He was low-key, fastidious, a perfectionist. "There is an atmosphere around every law office," he would say years later, speaking to young lawyers getting their start. "It is either businesslike or it is not. Avoid those offices which look like hangouts, where those about the office play cards in plain view, smoke cigarettes and keep their hats on. . . . Your client cannot have a very good impression when he walks into such an office. Such people are apt to appear discourteous and not handle messages properly." He was likely speaking from direct experience.

But in spite of their differing styles, the law partners trusted each other implicitly-and no one else. Stewart's theory on hiring a secretary for the office was "somewhat like that often given concerning marriage. . . . Get them young and tell them nothing." He insisted that he and his partner not only tell their girl nothing but also that they should "give her not the slightest responsibility, and drum into her by constant repet.i.tion that she should not give out any information."

Stewart and O'Brien didn't seem to need any help, from a secretary or anyone else. They were smart, efficient lawyers. They were each making at least $20,000 annually by 1924, an impressive haul. They didn't take any case for the publicity-unless they were sure they could win it. Stewart liked to say that "it is difficult to catch a good lawyer on the wrong side of a case." Innocence was not necessarily the right side, though he never ruled it out. "When your client claims to be innocent, do not despair, even when things look black," he said. "He may in fact be innocent."

There was no obvious reason for the two lawyers to be so confident that they were on the right side of the Beulah Annan case. Sure, she was beautiful, and O'Brien and Stewart were getting a lot of publicity with her, especially after her pregnancy announcement. But this was a woman who had admitted to cuckolding her husband and shooting her lover when the man attempted to walk out on her. In the past year, Sabella Nitti, Kitty Malm, and now Elizabeth Unkafer had been convicted of murder, a sudden and dramatic reversal of tradition. On top of that, O'Brien and Stewart were essentially a two-man band, whereas, "In Chicago," Stewart pointed out, "the prosecutor has about sixty a.s.sistants, in addition to clerks, stenographers, investigators and police." Roy Woods and William McLaughlin, the a.s.sistant state's attorneys trying Beulah's case, were considered to be among the best in the office.

Despite such challenges, the two men showed only confidence in public and in their meetings with Beulah. O'Brien, in particular, seemed enthusiastic about defending the case. He liked Beulah-he liked women as a rule-and killer women were becoming a specialty. (He would represent thirteen female murder suspects in his career.) Stewart would do the heavy lifting on the case; he'd deal with the actual evidence. But O'Brien was going to throw the gut punch. He planned to argue that Beulah was a "virtuous working girl . . . a modest little housewife" who'd been lured astray by booze. He may have even believed it. Beulah, her choice in a husband notwithstanding, seemed to get to tough guys the most. That little smile of hers, her gaze direct but unfocused, inevitably turned them to jelly. O'Brien needed some tough guys on the jury. He could talk to them man to man.

The prospective jurors filed into the room and took their seats right after Beulah. They sat up straight in their best suits, their eyes moving between Beulah at the defendant's table and whichever lawyer was asking them questions. The crackpots in the jury pool were weeded out first, those with blatant bloodl.u.s.t, or simply l.u.s.t, for the defendant. "Too d.a.m.ned many women gettin' away with murder," said one man who was dismissed by the defense. Another man exclaimed, "Kalstedt got what was coming to him-the fool! In a married woman's apartment!" He was sent home by the state.

Maurine seemed amused by the cynical attempt at jury packing by both sides, noting that the selection process had nothing to do with producing justice. The reporter watched Beulah as Stewart quizzed the prospective jurors. The defendant nodded her head when she liked a juror and offered a "pouting 'no' " when she found one off-putting. Maurine imagined Stewart consulting with his client on the selection of jurors through surrept.i.tious glances over to the defendant's table. The men accepted by the defense, Maurine wrote, were "a good looking lot, comparatively young, and not too 'hard boiled'-for Beulah herself pa.s.sed on them. And she's a connoisseur in men!"

The jury selection moved along slowly, ultimately taking the entire day. Beulah grew bored. She "leaned wearily on one white hand-with Raphaelite profile turned toward the jury-and pensively sighed now and then." But she perked up when the prosecution indicated its plan of attack for the trial. "Would the fact that the defendant and the deceased had been drinking wine together before the murder influence your judgment?" each juror was asked, eliciting a gasp from Beulah's mother, Mary Neel, who sat "mopping her eyes" in the front row, next to her son-in-law. Woods and McLaughlin wanted to present Beulah as a wild, drunken woman. They recognized the potential payoff of linking Harry Kalstedt's death to the loosening of moral standards in the country.

It was a logical approach, considering widespread perceptions about the state of the city. Three days earlier, federal agents had raided a factory on the West Side. They confiscated hundreds of barrels of beer, taking into custody two of Chicago's highest-profile bootleggers, Johnny Torrio and Dean O'Banion. The operation scored heavy newspaper coverage, but no one had illusions about either of the gangsters ever standing trial-at least not a trial that had any possibility of conviction. In a follow-up raid, this one at the Stock Yards Inn, officers were forced to level their rifles at dozens of saloon patrons who had become incensed when they realized the feds were emptying the place of all its booze. The enraged drinkers rocked the police wagon, almost overturning it before being forced back. Worse yet, as jury selection for Beulah's trial got under way that Thursday morning, news about the kidnapping of a fourteen-year-old prep-school student flashed through the city's newsrooms. The boy, Bobby Franks, was from a wealthy South Side family, which had received a ransom letter. This was followed within the hour by news of the discovery of a boy's body. The Tribune immediately offered $5,000 for exclusive information about the crime. As Beulah's jury selection continued, the story of the kidnapping hit the front page of the city's afternoon papers.

Stories like these terrified the average, law-abiding citizen, the type of man who proudly made the time to serve on a jury when called. He read the newspaper every day and could only conclude from its pages that the men around him, on the streetcar and sidewalk, in the office and factory, increasingly were out of control. Anything-literally anything-could happen. And anything, the state insisted, meant it wasn't just men who were dangerous. Even beautiful young women now committed heinous crimes. They would prove, the prosecutors told the newly impaneled jury at the end of the day, that Beulah Annan was responsible for "a cold-blooded, dastardly murder" as horrible as the one inflicted on little Bobby Franks.

The twelve men who would get to pa.s.s judgment on Beulah reported for duty on Friday. The newspapers printed the names and addresses of all of them. They included a bank clerk, a mechanical adjuster, two accountants, a tool inspector, and a real estate broker. Maurine pointed out in the Tribune that the defense "favored bachelors, to a count of five," but Stewart and O'Brien took offense at the implication. "We are not relying on the beauty of this woman to prove her guiltless," they told reporters before heading into the courtroom. "We will prove she shot this intruder in self-defense."

Right off, Beulah was called to the stand, but without the jury in the room. Before the trial could get under way, Judge Lindsay had a decision to make: Could the confessions Beulah gave the day of the shooting-especially the most damaging one, the one the newspapers called the Midnight Confession-be used against her? O'Brien and Stewart argued that the confessions were legally worthless because they had been obtained by coercion-by "third-degree methods"-while Beulah was drunk. a.s.sistant State's Attorney William McLaughlin responded that the statements had been validly obtained and should be used in court, despite the fact that, at least with the initial confession, "she was palpably 'ginned up.' "