The Girls Of Murder City Part 9

Beulah's testimony seemed like the trial's natural denouement, but there was still more to come. The defense called Beulah's mother, Mary Neel. She was questioned only briefly and, it seemed, pointlessly. "Her dark eyes were drawn and mouth set as she answered the few simple questions as to her name, relation to the defendant, etc.," Maurine wrote. Next up was Beulah's husband, Al, who "marched briskly to the stand" as if late for a train. But he would have even less to say than his mother-in-law. Judge Lindsay called the lawyers forward before Al uttered a word. After a brief consultation, he excused Al from the stand. Beulah looked away as Al pa.s.sed the defendant's table on his way back to his seat.

The proceedings dragged on through the afternoon and into the evening. Finally, McLaughlin called Roy Woods "as a reb.u.t.tal witness to refute Mrs. Annan's testimony that he had promised her immunity if she would confess to him." McLaughlin was counting on the authority typically attributed to a prosecutor to win the day for the state. He kept his questioning straightforward.

"Did you tell her it was no crime for her to shoot a man in her own house?"

"Most certainly not," Woods said, leveling his gaze at the jury.

"Did you tell her that she couldn't 'frame' anything with you?"

"I did," he said, again with those eyes hard and steady.

The jury stared at Woods like cows. The recused prosecutor made a good witness-better than good. He was a clear-eyed, straight-backed American. He was completely believable. But the jurymen were tired, and they were having trouble concentrating on the witness. Out of the corner of their eyes, a half-turn to their left, they could see Beulah Annan leaning forward, her limpid gaze fixed dreamily on the men who would decide her fate. McLaughlin moved to obscure their view. He asked Woods to repeat himself.

15.

Beautiful-but Not Dumb!

In his closing argument, a.s.sistant State's Attorney William McLaughlin concisely ran through the evidence he had presented over the preceding two days and then turned to the case the defense had put forward. Maurine, sitting in the front row, approved when the prosecutor "pointed out the weak points in [Beulah's] story: that a woman should try to 'soothe' a man who was threatening to attack her by drinking with him; that he knew where the gun was-in a totally strange house; that he was shot in the back."

"No woman living would have stayed in that apartment as long as she did with Kalstedt, constantly repelling his advances, as she says she did," McLaughlin p.r.o.nounced. "A woman who didn't want him there would have run out of the apartment and yelled for help." The jury, McLaughlin said, knew the truth. "You have seen that face, gentlemen. The defendant is not the kind of woman men would tell to go to h.e.l.l. She probably had never heard that before and it angered her. That was why she went for the gun."

Beulah, nervous now that her part in the drama was over, sat beside her lawyers during the state's peroration, her head down, eyes closed. She remained calm, the Daily Journal's reporter marveled, "while a.s.sistant State's Attorney McLaughlin trained the guns of the prosecution on her in his argument." Beulah Annan had lied on the stand, McLaughlin kept insisting, working himself from calm summation into controlled anger. He told the jury that if they believed she lied at any point during her testimony, then they should discount everything she'd had to say on the stand.

McLaughlin appeared confident. He believed he had the evidence on his side and that juries had finally hardened to the wiles of women criminals. But he also recognized O'Brien and Stewart's skills-and the power of Beulah's testimony. With his last words to the jury, he attempted to shame them into doing the right thing. "The verdict is in your hands, and you must decide whether you will permit a woman to commit a crime and let her go because she is good-looking. You must decide whether you want to let another pretty woman go out and say 'I got away with it!' " The prosecutor, the American noted, asked for no particular penalty.

When McLaughlin finished and turned from the jury, William Scott Stewart expelled a silent breath and rose. He was just thirty-four years old, but he possessed a stern physical dignity that gave him a mature, fatherly mien. There was a touch of John Brown in him, too, a mean, controlled righteousness, though he kept it well hidden, back behind his eyes, until just the moment he needed it. He knew Beulah had done well on the witness stand, better than he had expected, but he and O'Brien remained worried about those confessions admitted into evidence. That was where he immediately leveled his fire. He laid into McLaughlin for using " 'mental third-degree' tactics" on Beulah on the night of the shooting, and he excoriated Roy Woods for withdrawing from the case, not mentioning that it was the defense's challenge of Beulah's statement before Woods that caused the prosecutor to withdraw. "The Supreme Court has censured Cook County officials for tolerating this sort of prosecution," he said, "and these a.s.sistant state's attorneys should be ashamed to play these tactics on the defendant and then withdraw from the prosecution in order to be able to testify against her."

Beulah began to sob as Stewart went through just how the police and prosecutors had bullied those confessions out of her, providing an affecting backbeat to Stewart's attack on the state's "third-degree" tactics. When Stewart paused to gather his thoughts, Beulah tried to steady herself but couldn't; her shoulders shook softly, and she dipped her head again. Were the tears a put-on? Maurine Watkins thought so. "Every defense counsel knows the value of tears," the Tribune reporter opined later. Maurine couldn't stand it: "She had played the Victrola while the man she murdered lay dying, she had laughed at the inquest, she had sat calm and composed while they read descriptions of the crime, but she broke down when she heard her attorney's impa.s.sioned account of the suffering she had undergone at the hands of the police and a.s.sistant state's attorneys, who questioned her statements."

W. W. O'Brien took over from his partner to bring home the final message: that Beulah Annan was a virtuous, hardworking girl, a loving and decent wife who had been ruthlessly slandered so that the State's Attorney's Office could rack up a conviction. O'Brien was an expert sentimentalist, and once again it was too much for Beulah. Maurine reported wearily that the defendant was "overcome with emotion when Mr. O'Brien painted the picture of 'this frail little girl, gentlemen, struggling with a drunken brute'-and the jury shook their heads in approbation and chewed their gum more energetically." Stewart and O'Brien made a powerful team, the brain and the heart. McLaughlin, like Maurine Watkins, watched them in sullen silence, his eyes glazed and half-lidded.

At 8:30, Judge Lindsay sent the jury out to consult and reach a verdict. Many of the reporters in the courtroom headed for the phones, figuring a decision wouldn't come that night. Beulah sat on her own in the building's holding cell, her eyes closed much of the time. She didn't want to talk to her lawyers or the matron watching over her. She remained quiet. At one point her shoulders heaved and she clasped her hands together to keep them from trembling. She took a deep breath and looked up at the concrete wall, her eyes dry. She'd willed away the panic. "Will this woman be convicted, or will her looks save her?" the Decatur Review, the voice of central Illinois, asked in its Sunday edition. "The prosecution was careful to ask jurors if they had scruples against convicting a good-looking woman. The twelve accepted answered they are not trembled with the weakness. But it may be that some of the twelve didn't know, and that others of them lied for the woman."

As it turned out, the question was no longer germane even before copies of the Review reached its readers' hands. At 10:20 that night, the jury announced it had reached a decision. Usually a quick verdict meant good news for the prosecution, but McLaughlin didn't look confident anymore. The lawyers in the case, McLaughlin and the recused Woods, Stewart and O'Brien, walked back into the courtroom. The seats behind them filled again. Then the jury filed in. The golden circle that had caressed Beulah Annan during her testimony was gone, and the room sat in gloomy half-light, a miasma of ragged emotion. Fear had crept into Beulah's mind. It seemed to take forever for the crowd to settle and the jurymen to find their seats. An observer watched as Beulah "wrung her hands and shifted about uneasily in her chair." She appeared to be holding back tears. The judge read the verdict to himself in silence, then pa.s.sed the slip of paper to the bailiff. The bailiff read it quickly, loudly, seemingly before comprehending it.

"Not guilty!"

The syllables drifted away like smoke, followed by a gasp-and then a roar. Somebody yelled out something incomprehensible, joyous. Beulah remained expressionless when the verdict was announced, as if stunned, while her lawyers exchanged looks of satisfaction. Beulah's husband, Al, was not nearly so stoical. He wept, his head in his arms.

The defendant climbed to her feet, her head still bare, a smile slipping across her face. The bailiff's words had begun to settle on her: She was a free woman. She beamed at the jurymen and came around the defendant's table. "Oh, I can't thank you!" she exclaimed, reaching out, shaking the hand of the nearest juror. "You don't know, you can't know-but I felt sure that you would-" She moved from man to man, clasping hands with each, making eye contact, exchanging smiles. The handshakes, the words, weren't enough to express what she was feeling. She kissed a juror hard on the cheek, and then another, holding his face with both hands. She didn't care what anyone thought about it.

Al followed along behind his wife, beaming and shaking jurors' hands, blessing them for their forthright work. Reporters rushed into the hall, fighting for the phones again. Photographers took their final shots, the flashbulbs lighting up the room in sudden crackling bursts, and then ran out, well aware that their printing presses across the river were being started up. The remaining spectators, the amateurs, didn't know what to do now that it was over. They wandered in confusion, in ecstasy, in anger. They watched as Beulah agreed to pose for a photograph with the jury. She grasped the jury foreman's hand in a manly shake. The other jurors gathered around, leaning in and smiling. The photograph taken, Beulah broke away from the jurors. The court fans then stepped aside in deference, and Beulah and Al Annan left the courtroom, marching happily into the hallway, arm in arm. They swept out the doors and into the night.

The Tribune's headline writers, working on deadline, kept it simple. "Jury Finds Beulah Annan Is 'Not Guilty,' " the front page stated on Sunday morning. The subhead added, "Self-Defense Plea Gains Her Freedom; Thanks Each Member After Verdict." Maurine, of course, took a harder-edged approach in the story.

Beulah Annan, whose pursuit of wine, men, and jazz music was interrupted by her glibness with the trigger finger, was given freedom last night by her "beauty-proof " jury. . . .

Mr. Annan, who has stood by her from the very night he found [Harry Kalstedt] lying dead in his bedroom, was almost overcome with joy and grat.i.tude.

"I knew my wife would come through all right!" he said, proudly.

That seemed to be the consensus of opinion.

"Another pretty woman gone free!" was the only comment made by a.s.sistant State's Attorney William F. McLaughlin, who prosecuted the case alone after the withdrawal of Roy C. Woods, who was called as a material witness.

"Beautiful-but not dumb!"

For she had talked incessantly: two different versions of the shooting before she came to trial, and the third one-when she took the stand yesterday-was the charm.

Maurine offered no hedges in stating what she thought of the trial's outcome, writing the story as if it were going into her diary. Beulah's testimony-flat-out lies, as far as Maurine was concerned-particularly rankled: " 'That's my story and I'll stick to it,' was her att.i.tude-and she did, till she stepped down demurely from the witness stand with the settled complacency of a school girl who has said her piece." Maurine pointed out that McLaughlin's closing argument, ultimately in vain, had "hinged on the credibility of the witness, who had made three entirely different statements to the jury." (She was counting the confessions Beulah made to police that were read in court.) The verdict stung Maurine. She would later decry the softness of all-male juries, the att.i.tudes that made it possible for Beulah to get away with testimony that contradicted compelling physical evidence and her own previous statements: "Men on a jury generously make allowance for a woman's weakness, both physical and moral; she is unduly influenced, led astray by some man, really not responsible-poor little woman!" Maurine believed that "it feeds a juryman's vanity and s.e.x pride to feel that a woman is weaker and less responsible than a man would be in a similar situation." The whole thing left her feeling sick. She was convinced Beulah was a cold-blooded murderer-and a devious, calculating defendant. Her report on the verdict laid bare the raw feelings of a reporter who'd gotten closer to the story than she probably liked to admit.

The Tribune-surprisingly, and unlike its compet.i.tors-decided not to linger on Beulah Annan. Maurine certainly wanted nothing more to do with the "t.i.tian-haired" beauty and took a pa.s.s on the obligatory postacquittal follow-up piece. Her replacement on the Beulah beat for Sunday, perhaps intimidated at the prospect of following Maurine's beautiful, expressive diatribes, kept his unsigned report brief. In its entirety, it read: Mrs. Beulah Annan, Chicago's prettiest slayer and latest to join the ranks of the free, is trying to seek seclusion "for a few days." Sat.u.r.day night, following her acquittal of the murder of her lover, Harry Kalstedt, she packed up her rather extensive wardrobe and moved from the county jail to "address unknown." She was accompanied by her faithful husband, Al.

The junior reporter didn't look very hard for his quarry. "Address unknown" turned out to be Beulah and Al's apartment on East Forty-sixth Street, where she had famously shot down Harry Kalstedt. Al had long ago cleaned up the b.l.o.o.d.y mess his wife had left behind. Reporters from other papers, local and far afield, found her there on Sunday and met no resistance. Beulah held court for much of the day.

After a night in her own bed for the first time in almost two months, the prettiest woman ever to be tried for murder in Cook County was feeling generous. She didn't take credit for the acquittal. "It was the baby-not me," she told H. H. Robertson, a reporter for the Atlanta Const.i.tution. "I knew that no jury ever would convict me, under the circ.u.mstances." She wasn't feeling as generous about her dead former boyfriend, however. She restated her a.s.sertion that Kalstedt had attacked her when she told him she was pregnant with her husband's child. "Any woman is justified in shooting a man who did what Harry Kalstedt tried to do to me," she said. "The jury realized that." She told another reporter that "I know now better than ever before that a man who goes into the apartment of another man when the husband is away deserves what he gets, no matter what that is, whether he be a man who steals jewels or a man who steals women."

Sitting with thrown-back shoulders in the center of the little apartment, Beulah charmed her journalist callers, as always. "Shaking her t.i.tian hair and relaxing in a dimple smile," wrote Robertson, "Mrs. Annan gazed coyly at her husband and other relatives and said she had learned a lesson." She was a changed woman.

"I'm going to be a devoted wife from now on," she declared. "I am going to forget these terrible things. I am going to prepare for my baby's arrival, and I have sworn an oath that I never again will do anything which might cause reproach to attach itself to my name or to my child's name. The most intense longing which I have is that I prove myself to be a good mother and a true wife. I want to show the whole world what kind of a woman I really am."

The new, devoted wife made it into the next day's papers, but the fawning headlines looked foolish before the sun set. Beulah and Al must have had a terrible fight after reporters left their apartment Sunday, because on Monday afternoon she appeared in a newspaper office with a divorce lawyer in tow. (Perhaps put off by Maurine's biting reports, she conspicuously chose not to go to the city's leading paper, the Tribune.) Sitting with her legs crossed, with reporters and editors gathered around, Beulah announced that she was leaving Al. "He doesn't want me to have a good time," she said. "He never wants to go out anywhere and he doesn't know how to dance. I'm not going to waste the rest of my life with him-he's too slow."

Beulah said she might move to Southern California. The weather there was fine year-round, and the newsreel people had said the camera loved her. Yes, she'd like to be a moving-picture actress, she said. She wanted even more than that: "I want lights, music and good times. I love to dance. I love good food-and I'm going to have them."

Only Beulah and Al knew what transpired between them that turned her professed longing for a quiet life as wife and mother into a desire for the lights of Hollywood. He may have refused to take her out dancing, as she suggested. He may have finally confronted her about her infidelity and wondered aloud who the father of her unborn child was. Or it might simply have been Beulah's internal clock telling her it was time to move on, time to leave Chicago for new opportunities. She had proved to have an excellent sense of timing. She knew when to make an entrance, when to make a surprise revelation-and when to leave the scene for someplace better.

Beulah had gotten out of Kentucky at just the right moment, when the responsibilities of the adult world began to press in on her before she was ready. Now she wanted to get out of Chicago. Something big was happening in the city, bigger than Beulah Annan could ever hope to be. News of Beulah's acquittal received above-the-fold placement on the front page of the Tribune, with a photo of the "fair defendant" with the jury that had just set her free. But it wasn't the top story, as she had expected. A banner headline ran above the trial coverage, with type so large that it blared across the entire width of the page: "All City Hunts Kidnappers."

Parents all over Chicago worried that their children could end up like little Bobby Franks, s.n.a.t.c.hed from the streets and viciously killed. The murderous kidnappers, though unknown, were the talk of the town. And that talk was about to get much louder. At about the time Beulah was packing up her "rather extensive wardrobe" and checking out of the Cook County Jail on Sat.u.r.day night, two brilliant University of Chicago graduate students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, were in a South Side night-club not far from the Annan home, double-dating with two pretty girls. When introduced to another reveler, the c.o.c.ky eighteen-year-old Loeb said, "You've just enjoyed the treat of shaking hands with a murderer."

16.

The Tides of h.e.l.l Maurine Watkins had no time to reflect on what happened in Judge Lindsay's courtroom. While Beulah Annan and her husband celebrated with family members at their little flat on Sunday, the Tribune reporter was five blocks away, at the fortress-like house of Jacob and Flora Franks. Maurine may have been within shouting distance of the Annans' brick apartment building on East Forty-sixth Street, but this block in Kenwood, on the other side of Cottage Grove Avenue, was a different world. No mechanics or a.s.sistant bookkeepers lived here, except in the servants' quarters.

The mood also was completely different. The wealthy men and women of Chicago's South Side were somber, for they had come to see the Franks bury their son, Bobby. The family held the funeral service in their living room. Jacob, widely known as Jake, had been born a Jew, but he and his wife practiced Christian Science. A large crucifix stood prominently on a table. For much of the morning, as family friends, flowers, and telegrams arrived, Flora remained upstairs, but visitors had no doubt about how she was holding up. Her husband, in the living room with their seventeen-year-old daughter, Josephine, winced noticeably as screams of anguish periodically reverberated through the ceiling.

As she did in her report on Wanda Stopa's funeral, Maurine detailed the scripture readings and religious songs that the other papers glossed over or mentioned only for maudlin effect. The rituals of faith and the promise of the afterlife remained more important to Maurine than the tears of those remaining earthbound. (Maurine was one of the very few reporters to show restraint in her coverage. The American even came up with a fictional re-creation of the murder through the eyes of the dead boy himself: "I matched my strength, born of desperation, with that of my fiendish captors, with the tides of h.e.l.l running like molten lava through their accursed veins.") Maurine stuck with a straightforward account of the funeral, though she noted the tension in the air caused by the fact that the murder remained unsolved. There was a bubbling dread, some thirty years after a serial killer had roamed the concourse of the World's Fair in Chicago, that the kidnap-pings were not yet done. "Only relatives, a few close friends, and twenty of Robert's schoolmates from the Harvard private school [an exclusive prep school on the South Side] were admitted at the house, where grief is mingled with horror and fear," Maurine wrote. Eight of Bobby Franks's Harvard friends carried the casket down the front walk and placed it in the hea.r.s.e, an emotionally burdensome task for any fourteen-year-old boy. Bobby's parents and Josephine slipped out a side door, led by a private guard. Fearing for their daughter's safety, Jake and Flora Franks wanted to avoid the three hundred or so people who had gathered in the street to watch the procession depart for the cemetery.

The crowd was nowhere near as large or unruly as the one that had congregated outside the Stopa place a month before. Like the curious gathered around the Franks residence, Maurine also seemed less engaged by Bobby Franks's funeral than by Wanda Stopa's. Maybe it was the setting: The broad hallways and soaring ceilings of the Franks home was unlike any residence she'd known growing up. The family's suffering, even with the killer or killers uncaught and the threat of more violence hanging over them, didn't seem as raw to Maurine as the Polish family's in the little walk-up on Augusta Street. The Stopas had been humiliated as well as grief-stricken. And they didn't have wealth to protect them.

The Franks family's suffering also wasn't the chief concern of the city's other newspapers. They were more interested in playing detective. The Herald and Examiner recognized that all of Chicago had become supremely fascinated by the search for those responsible for Bobby Franks's death. The paper's editors figured it would be a major circulation boon if they could involve in that search not just their police reporters but everyone in the city. In the Monday edition, the Herald and Examiner published a call to action, giving it greater play than the funeral report: How and why was Robert Franks, a fourteen-year-old heir to $4 million, killed? Police investigators may clear that up. But have you a theory now? Can you write a logical theory, telling step by step how the crime was committed and what motivated the partic.i.p.ants? The Herald and Examiner will give a prize of $50 to the reader who writes the best theory. The winner also will be eligible for a share in the $10,000 reward if his theory should aid in the solution of the slaying. The judgment will take place when the slayers are apprehended, if they are, and if they are not, upon the logic and probability of credence obtained in the written theory. The theories should be written in condensed, concise form, cleanly written or typed, on one side of the paper, and should be addressed to the City Editor, Herald and Examiner.

Somewhere in Chicago, behind a desk, or in a street car, or in a foundry, may be a keen a.n.a.lytical mind adapted but not trained to detection and the reconstruction of past events, as a hunter reconstructs the story of the chase from the muddy records of the spoor. It may be yours. Send in your theory.

Just a day before the funeral, Belva Gaertner had been confident that, with Beulah's case decided and soon to be off the front pages, she would now have the spotlight all to herself. A young boy being killed was terrible but hardly unprecedented in Chicago. And the murderer, undoubtedly a simple-minded pervert, uninteresting in every way, was sure to be caught at any moment. Belva had every reason to expect that her impending trial, scheduled to get under way at the beginning of June, would once again make her the leading story in the city. But it wasn't to be. The Herald and Examiner announced that within a few days of its appeal, it had received more than three thousand theories from readers about the Franks murder, with more coming every hour. No one could quite put his finger on it yet, but there was something different about this particular murder. No other news story could possibly compete.

Somehow the police made progress without the aid of the Herald and Examiner's sleuthing readers. Within days of the murder, police turned their attention to d.i.c.k Loeb and Nathan Leopold, after a pair of eyegla.s.ses found near the body was identified as Leopold's. The boys-both from wealthy South Side families, both intellectual prodigies who had graduated from prestigious universities by the age of eighteen-were brought in for questioning on Thursday, May 29, five days after Beulah's acquittal.

From the start, it seemed clear to reporters that the boys were not serious suspects. Police took them to a comfortable downtown hotel to be interviewed, not a police station. Prosecutors provided breaks and restaurant meals. The nineteen-year-old Leopold, in particular, was completely at ease as he faced questions from the police. "He caught them lightly and deftly, answering suavely," observed Maurine, one of the reporters covering the story. "He has not once taken the defensive. No question has shaken his calm or penetrated his urbanity."

The boys, by their relaxed manner and easy smiles, showed that they found the whole thing amusing. They claimed that they had been out birding in the area where the Franks boy was found. Some police officers accepted the explanation without reservation, believing the boys' relationship to the case was pure coincidence. After all, these were future leaders of the city, maybe the country. Still, the questioning continued, with the hope that perhaps Leopold or Loeb had seen something that would prove valuable to the investigation. Leopold's father, as horrified by the murder as the rest of Chicago, publicly promised that the family would cooperate with the police. "While it is a terrible ordeal both to my boy and myself to have him under suspicion, our att.i.tude will be one of helping the investigation rather than r.e.t.a.r.ding it," he told reporters. "And even though my son is subjected to hardships, he should be willing to make sacrifices, and I am also willing for the sake of justice and truth until the authorities are thoroughly satisfied that this supposed clue is groundless. I probably could get my boy out on a writ of habeas corpus, but there is no need for that sort of technical trickery. The suggestion that he had anything to do with this case is too absurd to merit comment."

The questioning of two brilliant sons of Chicago's elite meant that the departure of another woman from the Cook County Jail would slip by almost without notice. Kitty Malm, the most famous gun girl in Chicago just three months before and Belva's best friend behind bars, shipped out to Joliet on the same day that the police brought Leopold and Loeb in to be interviewed. It wasn't just that compelling new events-first Belva, Beulah, and Wanda, now the Franks murder-had overtaken the Wolf Woman's criminal exploits. Since her conviction, Kitty had become "a most docile prisoner," which was hardly interesting to newspaper readers. She was preparing for her time in the state pen by letting go of all resistance, by abandoning everything Otto Malm had taught her about how to handle herself around authority. "You'll not find me making any trouble if they put me under lock and key," she told the jail's matrons. "This rough stuff doesn't get you anything, anyway. If I have to go to prison for a long stretch, I'm going to behave myself and maybe they will let me out sooner."

In March a group of society ladies had made noises about taking Kitty on as a cause, at the very least to get her sentence shortened. The interest pleased Kitty, but witnessing the attention bestowed on Belva, she didn't put much stock in it. "Some other woman might get off, but not me," she said. She was right. Efforts to push her case up to the Supreme Court got nowhere. By May, there was no reason for her to remain at the Cook County Jail. "Kitty Malm was taken to the Joliet penitentiary today, there to spend the remainder of her life," the American reported in a brief buried deep in the back pages. The matrons had brought her three-year-old daughter in on Thursday morning for a "final visit" at the jail. Kitty didn't have much to say to her beloved Tootsie. There was nothing left to say. She hugged Tootsie close and tried, without success, to hold back the tears. The American's reporter said the one-time "tiger woman" now "presented a pathetic little figure" as she was taken out of the jail. "Goodbye, Kitty, and good luck," one of the other prisoners said as she pa.s.sed. The send-off cracked Kitty's already shaky composure: Tears bubbled in her eyes again, and she chomped on her lower lip in hopes of avoiding a breakdown. "Not much luck for me, I guess," she said in response. Tears rolled down her cheeks as the heavy door to the women's quarters swung open and she was marched through. The Evening Post's headline-as in the American, it was buried far back in the paper-declared: "Kitty Malm Sobs as She Starts to Begin Life Term."

Reporter Owen Scott, seeing Kitty carted off in chains, noted the difference from Beulah Annan's triumphant departure from the jail five days before. "Her mistake," he wrote, "was in being 'hard boiled' and none too good looking."

By Friday, thanks to Nathan Leopold and d.i.c.k Loeb, interest in the Franks case had increased still more. The glamorous college boys had impressed everyone during a brief initial exposure to the press the day before, leading the police to make them available for a question-and-answer session with reporters. Leopold and Loeb had shown a remarkable ability to talk philosophy, history, and ethics at a high level, so Maurine's editors gave her a straightforward a.s.signment: to record what they had to say at the press session, in the event that select quotes might be newsworthy, even independent of the Franks investigation.

Maurine, however, had something more in mind. She sensed that there was something unusual about the boys, aside from their wealth, charisma, and intellectual abilities. She was intent on doing "a character a.n.a.lysis, a study of their temperament." She later remembered that "the room was full of reporters and we were each allowed one question. I was the only woman. I asked Leopold, 'What three men do you consider the greatest who ever lived?' He named Nietzsche, Haeckel and Epicurus. I took an absolute gamble in asking it. I wasn't thinking about the crime. I was thinking about my story-how I could get two columns out of one question. So I got the books they had read, their educational background. Nietzsche believed in the superior man, Haeckel taught that there was no immortality of the soul and nothing beyond this life, and Epicurus advocated the right of the individual to do as he pleased."

Could anyone have come up with a more perfect synthesis to express the Chicago Idea? It seemed to Maurine that all Chicagoans thought the same way Nathan Leopold did, even if most of them couldn't articulate it nearly as well. Being guided by your own thoughts and abilities, living out there on the high wire and being rewarded for it: That was the Chicago way. Nothing else counted. If it were sensational enough, whether a scientific breakthrough, a rousing new style of music, or an underworld murder, it would be celebrated. "With that sort of philosophy as a foundation, one could begin to see how they might have done it," Maurine said. She was among the first reporters to seriously consider the possibility. She noted that the boys had mentioned "Oscar Wilde's remark, 'To regret an experience is to nullify it,' " and that they touted a belief that there was no G.o.d.

Leopold did most of the talking during the question-and-answer session. "In clear, precise language," Maurine wrote, "he dictated to the reporters a statement for the papers: 'The police are more than justified in holding me in custody for a limited period, as I am the victim of an unusual set of circ.u.mstances. ' " He added, " 'And won't you thank President Burton [University of Chicago president Ernest DeWitt Burton] and Dean Woodward of the Law School for their expression of sympathy and confidence in me?' "

Leopold, aware that he and Loeb were not going to face challenging questions about the case, brazenly showed off his high-dollar education at the press event. He tossed out the names of obscure philosophers and complex economic theories, the reporters struggling to keep up. (Maurine laughed at her fellow scribes' intellectual compet.i.tion with the college boys, writing that "the most conceited tribe on earth-reporters!-nibbled their pencils and coughed suggestingly [sic] for spelling and definitions!") It seemed obvious to many there that the two brilliant friends just happened to have recently been in the same culvert where Bobby Franks's body was found. In a city of strivers, the wealthy were typically given the benefit of the doubt, and that was the initial response to the eyegla.s.ses discovery. When told that Leopold and Loeb had been brought in as possible suspects, American reporter Howard Mayer, who knew the boys from the University of Chicago, exclaimed, "That's impossible." The early police questioning of the boys yielded nothing to alter that reaction. Prosecutors expected to release them by the weekend. "The most brilliant boy of his age I've ever known," State's Attorney Robert Crowe said of Leopold, possibly to ingratiate himself with the young man and get his defenses down. But Maurine was not fooled.13 She saw a scary narcissism in Nathan Leopold, noticing that he seemed to live "in a world of his own creating, and the people around him are more or less shadows." She immediately recognized the difference between breezy upper-cla.s.s confidence (as exhibited by Leopold's father) and a dark, possibly sociopathic sense of superiority, noting Leopold's "slow, calm smile that admits the hearer cannot grasp his meaning." In Sat.u.r.day's paper she wrote: He has built for himself a world beyond morality, beyond convention-yet he accommodates himself to the world in which he lives. And he does not preach his convictions to others, for he realizes that such meat is only for the strong.

With his friends he smokes and drinks and "takes his pleasure where he finds it."

Based on a single, relatively brief interaction, Maurine proved remarkably perceptive. She took a risk in laying out such a d.a.m.ning interpretation of Leopold from an interview that ranged across centuries of philosophical thought but never got past the superficialities of the Franks investigation. Even though she knew the boys were likely to be released before the morning edition hit the streets, she didn't water down her conclusion. She closed the piece with a swipe at Leopold's touting of experience for its own sake: "If he's not connected with the crime-what an experience! And if he is connected-still it's experience!"

Maurine would find out, shortly after the article went to press, that she got it exactly right. Leopold and Loeb did do it-and, indeed, for no other reason than for the experience. For the thrill of it. Just a few hours after the group interview with reporters, at around one in the morning, d.i.c.k Loeb broke. Leopold, responding to his friend's confession, soon followed. (The same court stenographer who'd recorded Beulah's confession in her apartment on April 3 took down the boys' confessions.) State's Attorney Crowe, hailed in his campaign literature as "Fighting Bob," took charge of the case himself. He knew, or at least strongly suspected, that some of the a.s.sistant state's attorneys on his staff were on the take from gangsters. Dozens of police officers, maybe hundreds, had been corrupted by the Mob. So if the ambitious forty-five-year-old prosecutor, a Yale Law School grad and former chief justice of the criminal court, wanted to become mayor or governor (and he did), he'd have to make headlines with a different kind of sensational case, a case like this one.

"The Franks murder mystery has been solved. The murderers are in custody," Crowe declared outside his office at six in the morning. "Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb have completely and voluntarily confessed. The kidnapping was planned many months ago, but the Franks boy was not the original victim in mind." A hasty collection of reporters, some expressing astonishment, rushed to file the news. The state's attorney was the hero of the moment. Within an hour, most of the city's papers had special editions on the street proclaiming the confessions.

The Tribune gave over almost its entire front page to Leopold and Loeb, justifying it by stating in an editors' note that "the solving of the Franks kidnapping and death brings to notice a crime that is unique in Chicago's annals, and perhaps unprecedented in American criminal history." The editors added: "The diabolical spirit evinced in the planned kidnapping and murder; the wealth and prominence of the families whose sons are involved; the high mental attainments of the youths; the suggestions of perversion; the strange quirks indicated in the confession that the child was slain for a ransom, for experience, for the satisfaction of a desire for 'deep plotting,' combined to set the case in a cla.s.s by itself." The wall-to-wall reports marked only the beginning of the newspaper's obsession with the crime. In the flurry of activity following the confessions, editors directed a team of reporters to track down people who knew Leopold and Loeb. Maurine recalled later that the Tribune wasn't picky about its sources: "Anyone who had ever spoken to either of them was good material."

Having focused on Leopold on Friday, Maurine now turned her attention to Loeb on Sat.u.r.day. She canva.s.sed his family and friends, finding shocked disbelief at every turn. Loeb, unlike Leopold, had a sweet disposition. He wanted to be liked by everybody.

"He couldn't have done it. We know he's innocent," said one Loeb ally.

"He is innocent and confessed merely to get sleep. It can be repudiated when he comes to trial," said another.

Maurine granted that the disbelief was to be expected. " 'Loeb' as the name of a murderer falls strangely on Chicago ears," she wrote. "For the people of that name are written in the book of Chicago's history as builders and leaders in philanthropy, charity and educational movements."

"It's a d.a.m.ned lie!" said Richard Rubel hysterically. "I'm d.i.c.k Loeb's best friend and he couldn't have done it! For a ransom-!" he looked about at the magnificent home of his millionaire friend, at the garage stocked with limousine, sedan, coupe touring car; at the tennis court where they so often played.

"Why, those boys could have had all the money in the world! Why should they do that?"

Maurine had some theories for Sunday's paper: "Were they bored by a life which left them nothing to be desired, no obstacle to overcome, no goal to attain? Were they jaded by the jazz-life of gin and girls, so that they needed so terrible a thing as murder to give them new thrills?"

So it seemed. The next day, Monday, June 2, the day before Belva Gaertner's trial opened, Leopold would say of the murder of Bobby Franks: "It was just an experiment. It is as easy for us to justify as an entomologist in impaling a beetle on a pin."

Leopold remained cold, clinical, detached. His friend and partner, meanwhile, had fallen into desperate fantasy. "This thing will be the making of me," Loeb told a police officer on Sunday. "I'll spend a few years in jail and I'll be released. I'll come out to a new life. I'll go to work and I'll work hard and I'll amount to something, have a career."

17.

Hatproof, s.e.xproof, and Damp Belva Gaertner wouldn't get the endless newspaper s.p.a.ce for her trial that Beulah Annan did. The Bobby Franks murder case had suddenly heated to the boiling point and was beating out all other stories in compet.i.tion for the public's attention. The famous Clarence Darrow had taken over the defense of Leopold and Loeb. a.s.sistant State's Attorney Bert Cronson, one of the men who'd helped elicit the Midnight Confession from Beulah in April, had been a.s.signed to the Franks case. He was considered the "ace" of the staff, better than McLaughlin or Woods or Harry Pritzker.

Still, the "double divorcee," as all of the papers constantly and salaciously called Belva, remained front-page news. Editors knew that the "stylish murderess," with her gorgeous outfits and regal bearing, would provide pictures that no other story could match. Chicagoans still wanted to see and read about her.

As expected, Belva dressed for court with care, determined to impress potential jurors as a woman of the upper cla.s.ses, the kind of privileged, well-appointed lady who would naturally awe any ordinary man. Downtown's priciest shops helped out, sending dresses for her to consider, knowing that the outfits would be rapturously described in the newspapers.

Belva arrived at the Criminal Courts Building for jury selection on Tuesday morning, June 3. Paul T. Gilbert of the Evening Post, a.s.sisting Ione Quinby with coverage, treated it as if covering an appearance by screen star Mary Pickford.

The case of a negro was continued. A varied a.s.sortment of blacks filed out of Judge Lindsay's courtroom. The defendant shuffled back to the bullpen.

A moment's silence, then- "Belva Gaertner."

A voice from the corridor leading to the county jail re-echoed the call. "Belva."

A trim figure entered, clad in navy blue. It was Belva Gaertner, the attractive young divorcee in whose sedan one night last March, after a hectic cabaret tour of the south side, the limp body of Walter R. Law, automobile salesman, was found, a steel-jacketed bullet in his head, an automatic pistol on the floor of the car. . . .

The room, packed from end to end, was ready for her. Spectators vying for sight lines huffed and stomped like spooked show horses. A small din erupted as Belva glided, cool and confident, through the door. "Her color was heightened by rouge," Gilbert wrote. "Her lashes had a touch of mascara. Cosmetics had been applied also to her lips, but the make-up wasn't overdone. . . . She might have been in a divorce court instead of at the criminal bar." Court fans seemed universally impressed.

"Say, she's got the Annan girl skinned a mile!" enthused an eyewitness.

"Not so pretty, but more cla.s.s," came the response.

The exchange stuck with Maurine Watkins, who diligently recorded it. " 'Cla.s.s'-that was Belva," she wrote for the morning paper. "For she lived up to her reputation as 'the most stylish' of murderess' row: a blue twill suit bound with black braid, and white lacy frill down the front; patent leather slippers with shimmering French heels, chiffon gun metal hose. And a hat-ah, that hat! Helmet shaped, with a silver buckle and c.o.c.kade of ribbon, with one streamer tied jauntily-coquettishly-bewitchingly-under her chin."

Belva padded softly down the aisle, no doubt pleased to see the courtroom just as full for her as it had been for Beulah. She bowed to the judge. The Daily News wrote, "She looks younger and fresher since her incarceration-hardly like the same woman the police found cowering in her apartment, her clothing covered with the blood of the young married man who had been her companion during the fateful evening." The paper added that she wore a "smart white blouse" and "white kid gloves, as if for a matinee." The Daily Journal's reporter decided that the "chin strap of her bonnet and her fresh white frilled blouse gave her an air of distinction, as did also her immaculate white kid gloves with yellow cuffs." Belva, her white-gloved hands held out before her, played to the crowd while at the same time appearing to be embarra.s.sed by the attention. "Arrived at court, Belva adjusted her skirts modestly, pulled the choker more tightly around her neck and smiled demurely at everybody in general," Quinby wrote for the Post. Maurine described the defendant as a "perfect lady" in court.