The Girls of Murder City

by Douglas Perry

  These weren’t the only signs of trouble. O’Brien also had a knack for getting shot. In 1921, he caught his first bullet while drinking in a saloon frequented by gangsters. He refused to cooperate with the police investigation. Two years later, it happened again. He was standing on the corner of Fifty-ninth and Halsted when some fifteen shots were fired. O’Brien didn’t know if it was a machine gun or multiple gunners, but the police had no doubt that he was the target. If so, he was amazingly lucky: Only one shot hit him, catching him high up on the leg, perilously close to the groin. He again refused to answer police questions about the shooting.

  Al Annan quickly got over feeling sorry for himself. He was a practical man. He loved Beulah—that was what mattered. “I haven’t much money,” he told reporters when he came downtown in the morning to secure Stewart and O’Brien’s services, “but I’ll spend my last dime in helping Beulah. I’ll stick to the finish.”

  Al had begun frantically searching for loans. About the time Beulah was confessing to Murname, Cronson, and McLaughlin Thursday night, Al placed a call to Beulah’s native Kentucky, rousting her father, John Sheriff, from bed. But he would get no help from Sheriff, a prosperous farmer in the Ohio River Valley. Beulah’s father would not go to Chicago to see his daughter, and he would not send money. Both his former wife, Beulah’s mother, and his present wife beseeched him to change his mind, but he wouldn’t. Beulah had gotten herself in trouble before, and she would get in trouble again. “Beulah wanted a gay life, and she’s had it,” he said. “I don’t think my wife and I should die in the poorhouse to pay for her folly.” John Sheriff was a hard man.

  Beulah may have been estranged from her father, but she still took after him. The distraught young woman they’d brought into the Hyde Park police station after the shooting, the woman who’d broken down and confessed at length, was gone by Friday afternoon. In her place stood a placid, steely doppelgänger. Before the inquest at Boydston’s undertaking parlor started, Beulah posed for photographers in the entrance hall. She had washed up and changed clothes again. She looked ravishing, the expression on her face somehow both stoic and melancholic. She wore a light brown dress, a darker brown coat, black shoes, and, wrote Maurine, a “brown georgette hat that turned back with a youthful flare.” Al held his hand over his face whenever the lens was pointed toward him. From the next room could be heard strains of “Nearer, My God to Thee,” played for the funeral of a former soldier.

  Inside the room where the inquest would be held, Maurine sat down next to Beulah. She asked her how she felt.

  “I wish they’d let me see him,” Beulah said. Picturing Harry Kalstedt laid out in a coffin, she offered Maurine a frown. “Still,” she added, “it would only make me feel worse.”

  Maurine asked Beulah where she was from; she no doubt recognized the accent. Beulah told her she’d grown up in Kentucky, near Owensboro. The two women likely bonded over their shared bluegrass roots. Beulah said she’d been married to Al for four years and had been married once before. She had a seven-year-old son still in Kentucky, living with “his father’s people.” She hadn’t seen the boy since he was an infant. She had married that first time when she was sixteen, she said.

  Other reporters moved in to get their time with the accused. Beulah accommodated them with patience and good humor. “I didn’t love Harry so much—but he brought me wine and made a fuss over me and thought I was pretty,” she said, her husband just a few seats away. “I don’t think I ever loved anybody very much. You know how it is—you keep looking and looking all the time for someone you can really love.” She gazed longingly at the reporter, a look that suggested maybe he was the one. She was beginning to make an impact, as she knew she would. The male reporters and sob sisters, seeing her calmed down and dressed up, felt the gravitational pull of Beulah May Annan—that soft Southern accent, lilting and plangent, coming out of that perfect face. Maurine, writing another page-one story, the first that would carry her byline, also recognized the reaction Beulah provoked: “They say she’s the prettiest woman ever accused of murder in Chicago—young, slender, with bobbed auburn hair; wide-set, appealing blue eyes; tip-tilted nose; translucent skin, faintly, very faintly rouged; an ingenuous smile; refined features, intelligent expression—an ‘awfully nice girl’ and more than usually pretty.”

  Would the fact that she was more than usually pretty be enough to set her free? Probably not at the inquest, where the state only had to show there was evidence—any evidence—to hold her over for a grand jury. Assistant State’s Attorney Roy Woods laid out the events of the previous day before the coroner. Mr. Harry Kalstedt, he said, told Mrs. Annan he was through with her, but she didn’t let him walk out. She grabbed up a revolver that her husband kept in the bedroom and fired at her boyfriend, hitting him in the back.

  “Both went for the gun!” W. W. O’Brien called out. “Both sprang for it.” He and Stewart, sitting with Beulah at the front of the room, had already established the outlines of their defense. They would present their client as a “virtuous working girl” caught up in a crazy age. They had already discovered that Harry Kalstedt had a criminal record; the dead man had spent five years in a Minnesota prison for assault before moving to Chicago to work for his brother-in-law at the laundry.

  Whether Kalstedt and Beulah both sprang for the gun or not, there was no question about what had happened after Beulah fired the fatal bullet: nothing. The inquest established that almost three hours passed from the time of the shooting until Beulah called her husband at five in the afternoon. Dr. Clifford Oliver testified that he arrived at the apartment at 6:20; he said Kalstedt had been dead only about a half hour. Woods made clear what that meant: Beulah had watched her boyfriend succumb to a slow, agonizing death and had done nothing to help him.

  The inquest dragged on, and Beulah grew bored. She stared off into space and occasionally turned and smiled at reporters. Finally, late in the afternoon, the jury reached a decision. They concluded that Beulah Annan was responsible for Harry Kalstedt’s death, having fired the gun “by her own hand.” The case would now go to the grand jury and then certainly to trial. Beulah rose, traded a few words with O’Brien, and headed toward the door with her police escort. Al, who’d sat a row behind Beulah, wringing his hands throughout the proceeding, leaped up and stepped into the aisle to intercept her.

  The Daily Journal found Al’s undiminished love for his wife, less than twenty-four hours after learning she’d been unfaithful, moving. The paper wrote:

  He pressed a $5 bill into her hand as they took her away, and those near him knew he had borrowed that from a friend who sat near him during the inquest.

  “I’ll see you Sunday, honey,” he said as they parted. He did not know that no visitors are allowed at the jail on Sunday.

  After the inquest, the police moved Beulah to the Cook County Jail, where she would share a section of the women’s block with about a half-dozen inmates, including Katherine Malm, Sabella Nitti, and Belva Gaertner. (“Murderesses have such lovely names,” Maurine mused.) Beulah was still wearing the clothes she had on for the coroner’s jury, her “smart fawn gown,” naked hose, and georgette hat. She stayed in her cell all evening, while the other inmates did their daily chores, ate in the dining hall, and played cards.

  In the morning, Sabella clomped past the cell. She stopped at the sound of weeping. There was a lot of crying in the women’s quarters of the jail, a lot of screaming and rending of hair, but this soft sob seemed to get to the Italian woman. It was so poignant. She squatted on her thick calves and squinted into the poorly lit cell. She could make out Beulah’s profile. Sabella had begun to understand some words and phrases in English. The other inmates were right: The new girl was beautiful. Sabella shifted her weight, put a hand against the bars. “You pretty-pretty,” she croaked. “You speak English. They won’t kill you—why you cry?” Beulah swiveled her head slightly, but at the sight of Sabella grimacing at her, she turned away.

  Sabella saw that the new
girl wasn’t alone in the cell. Beulah had turned back to a reporter. She was giving an interview. “Poor thing,” Beulah told the reporter, as Sabella, chastened, moved away. “She’s a lost soul—nobody cares about her.”

  It was easy to reach that conclusion if you read the Tribune, as Beulah did every morning. The paper had set Genevieve Forbes loose on Sabella Nitti the previous summer, with horrifically memorable results. Forbes mocked Sabella throughout her trial, denigrating her appearance, her background, and her confusion at proceedings conducted entirely in English. When the Italian immigrant was convicted, Forbes capped a frenzied week of vitriol toward her subject, writing, “Twelve jurors branded Mrs. Sabelle [sic] Nitti ‘husband killer’ and established a precedent for the state of Illinois at 3 o’clock yesterday afternoon by giving the death penalty to the dumb, crouching, animal-like Italian peasant, found guilty of the murder of Frank Nitti. . . . Prosecutor Smith in urging the death penalty had challenged them to forget that Sabelle Nitti was a woman. But as they filed out it was, perhaps, hard not to remember that she was a woman—a cruel, dirty, repulsive woman.”

  Beulah Annan would not get the same treatment, from Genevieve Forbes or anyone else. She was not repulsive, no matter what she may have done. The city’s newspapers, which on principle agreed with each other as infrequently as possible, were unanimous in declaring Beulah “the prettiest girl” ever on Murderess’ Row. Reporters, watching as Sabella peered into Beulah’s cell, even conscripted the condemned woman into helping make the case. The American, in a page-one headline sweeping across the width of the paper, declared:

  MRS. NITTI CONSOLES BEULAH

  “LADY SLAYER” TOLD NOT TO WORRY FOR “BEAUTY WILL WIN”

  8

  Her Mind Works Vagrantly

  Beulah had caught up on her reading by the time she spoke with reporters again.

  “Twenty-three, not twenty-nine,” she scolded a Daily Journal scribe on Saturday afternoon. “Oh, don’t accuse me of such a thing. Murder is bad enough.” She repeated the correction of her age to every reporter she saw.

  Her years on earth established, Beulah got down to even more pressing business. Now that she had met with her lawyers, key elements of her story changed. Harry Kalstedt wasn’t walking out on her anymore. And the gun wasn’t kept in the bureau drawer, no matter what Al said. Harry was, however, still angry with her for calling him a jailbird. “Harry said, ‘You won’t call me a name like that,’ and he started toward the bedroom,” she told a group of reporters gathered at her cell. “There was only one thing he could have been going for. The gun was there—in plain sight. It had been kept under the pillow, where it was always kept, but the pillow was turned back and it showed. I ran, and as he reached out to pick the gun up off the bed, I reached around him and grabbed it. Then I shot. They say I shot him in the back, but it must have been sort of under the arm.”

  Like Sabella before her, Belva Gaertner lingered outside Beulah’s cell. The “divorcee of page one notoriety” was drawn to the commotion, the herd of reporters, not to any weeping. It had been just three weeks since Belva hit the city’s front pages, and her trial was still a couple of weeks off, but she was suddenly old news and knew it. She had introduced herself to Beulah before the hacks arrived. She suggested they have a picture taken together, but Beulah put her off. The newcomer said she was too distraught. Beulah had read every article she could find about Belva and believed she had learned from the older woman’s mistakes and successes with the press. She now sat before reporters, hunched forward, long arms wrapped around herself. Somebody, maybe Belva, brought her a plate of food, but she waved it away. “No, no, no. It would choke me.” The thought of what she’d done to her husband made her want to die, she said. It “must have been a blow for him to discover what had been going on behind his back.” Her eyes filled with tears. She said she felt very ashamed: “My husband says he’ll see me through. I wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t.”

  Reporters pressed Beulah about her relationship with Harry Kalstedt and why she had stepped out on her husband. She listened to the questions while staring at her hands and sighing. She struggled to answer them, trying to remember her lawyers’ instructions.

  “I suppose it is true that a man may drift into any woman’s life at some time and overpower one with his personality,” she said. “Before you know it, without any intention to misstep, you find yourself completely engulfed. That was the way it was with Harry.” She said she’d hoped that somehow her illicit romance would “turn out like in the story books. But I guess it never does.”

  Al wasn’t sure what role he was supposed to be playing in his wife’s storybook. He had refused to talk to reporters at the inquest on Friday—“just shook his head sadly to all questions,” Maurine wrote. But while Beulah held court in her cell, Sonia Lee, one of the American’s sob sisters, tracked Al down at the garage on Baltimore Avenue where he worked as a mechanic. Lee had decided that this loyal husband deserved as much attention as his wayward wife.

  Al was still wary of reporters, but when asked direct questions by a well-dressed young woman gazing intently into his face, he could only do the polite thing and answer. “I can’t believe it, I can’t,” he said. “When I met her, it was in Louisville. She was all that I thought a woman could be. Shortly after she came to Chicago. I followed two weeks later. Then we were married. I gave her every cent I made and she worked too. Our income was sufficient to provide a very comfortable home, and I believe she made the best of our union until this”—he clenched the wrench that he held in his hand—“until he came along.”

  Next up was Al’s boss, R. M. Love. Albert Annan, the man told Lee, was quiet and decent. He worked hard and never complained: “He puts in overtime and Sundays and never offers a murmur. Just for her.” The garage manager, his answers obviously guided and shaped by the reporter, said that “Annan rushed up to me at about 4:30 Thursday afternoon. ‘My wife just phoned me and said she shot a man!’ he gasped. ‘My God, she must not—I’ll take the blame!’ That’s the kind of four-square man that he is. Every boy here in the garage is willing to give his last cent to help him out.”

  Beulah noticed the saint treatment the American and other papers gave Al, and it bothered her. She couldn’t help feeling this whole thing was his fault. A part of her believed Al had made her cheat. He never wanted to take her out dancing or on romantic walks. He never wanted to take her anywhere. He just slumped in his chair in the evening, whimpering about how hard he worked. Beulah had felt this disaster coming on for months and months. She could flip back through her diary, if she’d had it with her, and see the proof. It had started more than six months back, right after she met Harry. She’d written it all down in looping cursive, day after day:

  Sun. Oct. 7: Daddy and I had an argument. He told me to go to hell and I went out—didn’t come home.

  Mon. Oct. 8: Al called me at the office. Said we would be friends until next Sat. I got “stewed” before coming home.

  Daddy. It wasn’t a reference to her husband. Al was never Daddy. Harry was Daddy. Was he ever! Al, maybe, could be Mommy. She sometimes felt he was as weak as a woman. What would he say if he knew how Harry had made her feel, if she’d spelled it out for him, what they did right there in their apartment, on their bed, for months?

  Beulah could come up with a long list of reasons to think poorly of her husband. Two years ago, she and Al had taken a trip to Michigan, and a burglar had come right into their room and grabbed the watch and chain she’d given him for Christmas. He also took her engagement ring and a pretty cameo ring with diamonds set at the top and bottom. Al did nothing. Just slept. The burglar snuck off into the night without a worry in the world. Yeah, Al bought a gun after that and kept it in the bedroom, but Beulah didn’t believe he could use it, even to protect her. She was the one who used it.

  A day after Sonia Lee had camped out at the garage to get her exclusive with Al, Beulah strayed from her rote story. She explained to the Journal that her infid
elity was, in a way, for her husband’s sake. “I didn’t want to hurt Albert,” she said. “He works often until 8 or 9 o’clock at night, when it is too late for us to go out anywhere, because he always had to go to work early in the morning.” She “never led a gay life,” she said, insistent on dispelling that notion, but she had to go out sometimes, for her own sanity. So when Harry Kalstedt came along, she took advantage of his kindness and interest. She should have known nothing good could have come of it. Sitting in her cell, she added, “When my present husband and I were not altogether happy, I said little, and I thought I loved Harry and could keep things going smoothly. That’s largely the trouble that brings most of the women in here. They fall in love with the wrong man.”

  The wrong man. Beulah had thought it many times as Harry dozed beside her late in the afternoon, after work or on her day off. She’d get out of bed, go over to the window without getting dressed, and look for Al coming down the sidewalk—hoping to see him, longing to hear his footsteps on the stairs, with Harry there in the bed. She wanted everything to be revealed; she wanted to force Harry to declare himself for her. It was terrible not knowing how he felt about her. It was like physical torture—the skin breaking and peeling away, the blood just about to bubble to the surface. It was more awful still to be unable to tell anyone how she felt. To not even be able to tell Harry that she loved him, she truly loved him.