The Girls of Murder City

by Douglas Perry

  The Tribune officially remained above such sensational treatment of the news, but Maurine felt confident she had the ability to match Hearst anyway. Even without imaginative photo retouchers and headline writers helping her, she could still break out of the standard Tribune style and be creative on her own. Her colleague at the paper, Genevieve Forbes, was already stretching the boundaries of newspaper form—“for an editor may give you your assignment, but you give yourself your style,” the veteran newswoman said. Forbes’s style was often clumsy, but at her best she expertly combined the hang-’em-now attitude the Tribune took with all accused killers and the sob-sister sentimentality of the Hearst papers. With her report on the Law inquest, the intense, insecure Forbes, who had started out at the Tribune as an editorial assistant, showed Maurine how it was done. Her story focused not on the inquest itself, like Maurine’s report, but on Freda Law’s reaction to the cool, smirking woman who’d killed her husband. She wrote:

  When they talked of gin and blood, Mrs. Law trembled as if she might faint, huddled close to her father-in-law, and tried to keep from crying. It was her grief for her dead husband, she indicated. When they spoke of the divorcee’s nocturnal visits with Law to south side cabarets . . . Mrs. Law pushed herself forward and sneered across the table at the older, more vivacious woman with the seven diamond rings. It was her hatred for her husband’s alleged slayer, she admitted.

  Forbes, whose stories about Kitty Malm and Sabella Nitti helped lead to convictions, went on to describe how Belva was plainly dressed at the inquest because her “best caracul coat, her chic white hat and her modish green dress are ruined with blood. So she wears a brown sport dress, a plain black coat with a fur collar and a brown sport hat. Seven diamond rings and a wristwatch have been washed clean of Walter Law’s blood. They sparkle more brightly from that cleaning, as she uses her hands to gesture.”

  Maurine understood the lesson: If a girl reporter wanted to compete for the front page of the Tribune, she had to write tough, hard-hitting prose while also being as entertaining as the “sensation sheets,” even if that meant taking occasional liberties to make a strong case. (Belva, for example, wasn’t wearing the wristwatch from the night of the killing at the inquest. Its faceplate had been cracked, and it no longer worked.) As it turned out, in both temperament and experience, Maurine was ideally suited to this approach. Her companion inquest article, straightforward and factual, paled in comparison with Forbes’s, but she wasn’t cowed by having a veteran reporter encroach on her story. The next day, with her third piece on Belva in as many days, Maurine found her voice. Having sat with Belva in her cell for much of the evening, she let the alleged murderess tell her own story, while the omniscient and unseen reporter narrated. Instead of going for pathos, like the Journal and the Hearst newspapers, Maurine allowed Belva’s unconscious self-absorption to take center stage. She slyly poked fun at—and holes in—everything her subject said. “No sweetheart in the world is worth killing—especially when you’ve had a flock of them—and the world knows it,” Maurine began in the Friday, March 14, edition.

  That is one of the musings of Mrs. Belva Gaertner in her county jail cell and it is why—so she says—a “broad minded” jury is all that is needed to free her of the charge of murdering Walter Law.

  The latest alleged lady murderess of Cook county, in whose car young Law was found shot to death as a finale to three months of wild gin parties with Belva while his wife sat at home unsuspecting, isn’t a bit worried over the case.

  “Why, it’s silly to say I murdered Walter,” she said during a lengthy discourse on love, gin, guns, sweeties, wives, and husbands. “I liked him and he loved me—but no woman can love a man enough to kill him. They aren’t worth it, because there are always plenty more. Walter was just a kid—29 and I’m 38. Why should I have worried whether he loved me or whether he left me?”

  Then the double divorcee of frequent newspaper notoriety turned to the question of juries.

  “Now, that coroner’s jury that held me for murder,” she said. “That was bum. They were narrow-minded old birds—bet they never heard a jazz band in their lives. Now, if I’m tried, I want worldly men, broad-minded men, men who know what it is to get out a bit. Why, no one like that would convict me.”

  It was a breakout performance for Maurine—incisive and brutally effective, an exemplar of the Tribune’s executioner’s style. Most of all, the story proved to Robert Lee that his instincts about Maurine had been right. Everyone wanted to confide in her and help her out, including a high-profile murder suspect. Belva had revealed herself to the young Tribune scribe in a way she hadn’t to anyone else, providing the most beautiful quotes any crime reporter could hope for.

  “I wish I could remember just what happened,” she said to Maurine, just as she had to so many other reporters when pressed for details of the bloody night. Except then she offered something more: “We got drunk and he got killed with my gun in my car. But gin and guns—either one is bad enough, but together they get you in a dickens of a mess, don’t they? Now, if I hadn’t had a gun, or if Walter hadn’t had the gin . . .” Belva let the thought go unfinished. “Of course,” she added, “it’s too bad for Walter’s wife, but husbands always cause women trouble.”

  Belva must have been surprised when she read the story the next morning. She thought she’d been careful, and she no doubt thought she and Maurine had had an understanding. But the sweet-faced little reporter showed her subject no consideration in exchange for opening up to her; Maurine made clear to her newspaper’s tens of thousands of readers that Belva caused as much trouble as the worst possible husband. She highlighted Belva’s gay laughter during the interview—how she “chortled in jail, [while] plans were completed for young Law’s funeral today.” More than that, Maurine purposely did not acknowledge that Belva actually made a decent point in the interview. Walter Law was married and almost a decade younger than Belva. Why should she have worried whether he loved her or not? Belva surely knew Walter wasn’t going to leave his wife and son for her. And if her history proved anything, it was that she knew there was always another man waiting down at the end of the bar.

  It made for a compelling argument, and Belva’s lawyers—and the Hearst papers—were giving it a good, hard look. But that simply didn’t matter to Maurine. She worked for the paper that was “out for conviction always,” and she believed in her mission. Belva Gaertner, one way or another, had led a man to his moral destruction and death. Whatsoever a woman soweth, that shall she also reap.

  Maurine stuck mostly to the courthouse, the jail, and the police stations on her beat. This was the established, safe way for a woman to cover crime, and it served her strengths. She wasn’t really a reporter, after all—she’d never been trained. She was a writer. The problem was that Belva Gaertner and the world in which the stylish divorcée lived existed almost entirely in Maurine’s head. Maurine took in what Belva said, studied her while she said it, and then used her imagination to fill in the details.

  Maurine’s (and Genevieve Forbes’s) chief competition on the girl-crime beat, on the other hand, had no qualms about getting out on the street. Ione Quinby of the Evening Post was a familiar face in the Levee, the vice district in the near South Side’s First Ward. There’d been hundreds of brothels, saloons, and opium dens operating in the district at its height, before the war, when Quinby started her journalism career. A young woman walking in the Levee always had to worry about being thumped on the head by a white slaver, but Quinby did it anyway. The upside was too big. The 1911 Vice Commission calculated that “Chicago’s vice annually destroys the souls of 5,000 young women.” Some of those five thousand souls each year became Quinby’s most titillating stories. The reporter even embraced the entrepreneurial spirit of the Levee. In her purse, unknown to her employer, Quinby kept mimeographs of a legal document. Coming upon a newly arrested girl at the Wabash Avenue or Harrison Street police station, she’d place the contract before the suspect and ask her to sign. It
gave Quinby permission to write and sell the woman’s life story. Most suspects, uneducated and scared, would sign without realizing they had a choice. A couple of months later a “My Life in Crime” story—often written in the first person—would appear in True Detective or Master Detective magazine. The story was always a cracker. Quinby had a way, a colleague said, “of prying the details of unhappy marriages, unrequited love, and secret sex experiences out of the most non-communicative murderesses; they would confide facts to her which they had withheld even from their own attorneys.”

  Maurine must have been surprised—and heartened—upon meeting her competitor. The thirty-two-year-old Quinby was Chicago’s foremost chronicler of “murderesses,” rivaled only by Forbes. But like Maurine, there was nothing imposing about her. “The Post’s little bob-haired reporter,” as Quinby’s paper promoted her, stood barely five feet tall and had a chubby, little boy’s face, with crinkling eyes and a grin that split her mouth like a gorge. She reveled in police sergeants and competing reporters underestimating her. She’d march through the Post’s newsroom when she had a good story going, pumping herself up by repeating over and over to herself: “Hoo-boy, hoo-boy!” One fellow scribe remarked that there “is a certain little toss of her head when she talks and a tiny little compression of her lips that denote a strength that one might not suspect in one so small.”

  Despite Quinby’s pleasant, open-faced personality, Maurine didn’t try to befriend her. The two reporters recognized each other as budding rivals, particularly on the Belva Gaertner story. Quinby had become friendly with Belva during the suspected murderess’s divorce case in 1920, a big advantage for the Post hack. Indeed, back then, just before woman suffrage became law, Quinby saw “Mrs. Belle Gaertner” as a kind of feminist heroine. When her divorce from William was finalized that spring, leaving her with a paltry settlement, Belva didn’t go in search of another millionaire husband, as would be expected. Instead, she undertook a new career: taxi driver. It was a novel—to some, a scandalous—choice for a woman. Motor cars were booming in popularity, but many people still couldn’t fathom driving one. They were terrifying, futuristic machines. Driving a car was certainly unladylike. But Belva, always cheerful and stubborn, took no mind of such fuddy-duddy thinking. A taxi was a grand idea, she thought, especially as she was the rare woman who had a bead on her true nature. “Well, I just can’t take orders from anyone,” she said. “Therefore I can’t hold a job. I must be my own boss. So I decided that as a taxi driver I’d be my own boss, make enough to live on, and still have the pleasure of the car.”

  A woman who couldn’t take orders—that was a story. Quinby spent a day with Belva soon after she got her livery license. Any man walking by the taxi stand where Belva stood beside her machine, “clad in a trim chauffeur’s suit of green,” had to stop and stare, the reporter wrote. “What else could he do, under the combined barrage of two impelling dimples, a row of perfect pearly teeth in their cherry-lined frame and two laughing, lustrous eyes?” In the spring of 1920, Belva was a symbol of a daring, new, “modern” way of life—one in which automobiles whisked girls out of their neighborhoods, out of their parents’ orbit, and into the world; one where jazz pounded and thumped in clubs every night, working people into a dangerous, animal state. Almost everything about this modern life seemed to be fast—breathtakingly fast, sometimes scary fast—and that included young city girls like Quinby herself, the “flappers.” They talked fast; they walked fast. They smoked furiously and flirted constantly. They wore rouge and lipstick—their “cherry-lined frames”—and skirts that showed their legs. They went out to the dance halls on their own. None of them wore corsets. It was, said one commentator, “sex o’clock in America.”

  Maurine, growing up in her small Midwestern town and going to school in the South and in Indianapolis (Chicagoans derided the Indiana capital as Nap Town), experienced almost none of this churning change that so thrilled Belva Gaertner and Ione Quinby. Maurine could have stayed in Crawfordsville and avoided it almost altogether. Proponents of the old ways, after all, weren’t simply giving up. Doctors warned that the “flapper lifestyle”—such as wearing makeup and spending late nights dancing and petting—threatened “severe internal derangement and general ill-health.” School boards across the country put the hammer down on female teachers, with contracts that required them to be in bed by eight P.M. and prohibited them from wearing skirts above the ankle, bobbing their hair, or smoking cigarettes. The Evening American reported that the “faculty at Northwestern University has decided that for a pretty coed to display a pretty knee in a picture is ‘unfavorable publicity.’ ”

  This was the side Maurine’s parents were on, and Maurine never contradicted her parents. She certainly never considered bobbing her hair or displaying a pretty knee. She didn’t like to think of herself as beautiful. Beauty was for the Divine, and Maurine, a devout girl, a minister’s daughter, could never think of herself as Divine. Young Crawfordsville ladies strove to be respectable, not beautiful. Maurine went to church every Sunday and prayed for guidance. Her parents could be proud of her.

  And yet . . . here she was in Chicago—the Jazz Capital, the “abattoir by the lake.” The city had a way of overwhelming the individual, of breaking down his or her opposition. Young men and women arrived in Chicago from across the world and promptly lost their identities—or reforged them into tougher, more vital versions of themselves. There was little use in resisting. Already Maurine had decided that she would make an awful wife and so told suitors she “would not do that to anyone.” In Chicago, she found she could be freer than she ever thought possible, more open-minded and outgoing. Soon after starting at the Tribune, she wrote a glowing profile of Aletta Jacobs, a radical doctor from Holland who vigorously supported birth control, something Maurine’s church just as vigorously opposed. Maurine knew all about how birth control was “race suicide”—it had been one of Theodore Roosevelt’s pet issues—but she now appeared unconcerned. She also attended a conference for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, where the fervor of the socialist group’s members impressed her, especially a “smiling blonde with brilliant blue eyes” who told her of the “beautifully moral pacifistic resistance of the laborers.”

  The foundation on which Maurine had been raised seemed to shake with every passing day, more so than her parents back in Crawfordsville possibly could have imagined. The fledgling reporter wasn’t just exposed to controversial reformers like Aletta Jacobs and socialists. She had swiftly developed a new, wholly unexpected interest: murder. It was a fascination that would have horrified everyone she grew up with. Just a few weeks earlier, it would have horrified Maurine, too. It still did, in fact, but now she tamped down that horror with the kind of twinkling bravado all of her fellow reporters seemed to sport so easily. She didn’t have it in her to demand information from battered victims or grief-stricken family members as if it were owed to her, but she could pretend to be unmoved by the bloody events she wrote about. And sometimes—after hours of standing around at police stations and battling for the phone to call in reports—she actually was. She became numb, and it was liberating. Maurine decided that murder was more accepted in Chicago than anywhere else in the country. Gun-toting gangsters—Johnny Torrio, Dean O’Banion, the Capone brothers—were among the biggest celebrities in the city. Chicagoans rejected the notion, common in Crawfordsville, that a man had to be a sociopath or brain-damaged to kill another person. Instead, violence could simply be a necessary response to the environment. One of Maurine’s early assignments was the case of fifteen-year-old Dominick Galluzzo, a “sober, earnest-eyed” boy who’d been pushed to his limit by an abusive father and so shot him down. The coroner’s jury determined the shooting a justifiable homicide. So did Maurine, who enthusiastically listed the dead man’s transgressions, such as calling his wife “an ugly old thing” in front of her coworkers at a candy factory. In Chicago, the young reporter had noticed, murder “doesn’t put anyone in a flurry.
” Thanks to the newspapers, it was a part of daily conversation, and as often as not, that conversation included an approving nod or laugh.

  Maurine nodded and laughed, too. She couldn’t help it. She liked the Chicago attitude. She liked nerve. Chicagoans certainly had that. On the East Coast, titled Europeans and wealthy industrialists still dominated the public eye. But in this wild city, democracy ruled. To get star treatment in “Murder City,” Maurine noted, all you had to do was pull a gun, for “Chicago, bless her heart, will swallow anything with enough gore and action.” Maurine herself eagerly gorged on as much as she could. Being a reporter in a big city, a city where no one knew her, gave her courage. She would even develop a kind of crush on a gangster, later saying that the “nicest man I met during the time I was doing newspaper work was supposed to be the toughest gunman in Chicago’s West Side. He was like something you read about, such a charming, courteous man. . . . I might add that he was the only man I ever met in the newspaper world who, when he swore, apologized for it.” Maurine interviewed the gangster in a hospital room after he’d been shot three times, noting that he got out of bed to greet her “with as much casual grace as any continental actor in lavender pajamas.”

  “I had to ask him a lot of questions that were none of my business,” she said. “He acted so sorry not to be able to answer them that I felt like weeping. I asked him who shot him, but the only way we could ever have found out was by watching to see who was the next man ‘bumped off.’ ”4