The Girls of Murder City

by Douglas Perry

  It was late summer of 1923, and Cirese had every reason to believe that powerful men were arrayed against her. She and five other young Italian lawyers had just taken on Sabella Nitti’s appeal, pro bono. The state’s attorney and the police were determined to make sure the new defense team failed. It embarrassed them that some 90 percent of the women ever tried for murder in the jurisdiction had walked free. And none—until Sabella—had ever been sentenced to death. Chicago’s police chief declared that when women “kill wantonly, no effort should be spared in the interest of justice.”

  The lawyers who’d volunteered for Sabella’s case had decided that Cirese, the lone woman among them, would be the best emissary to the scared, bereft inmate, who spoke barely any English. Sabella, who was somewhere in her forties, had been convicted of helping Peter Crudelle, a farmhand and possibly her lover at the time, murder her husband. In early July of 1922, Sabella had reported Frank Nitti missing to the police in Stickney, a town on the edge of Cook County. The next day, when the police told her they could not find her husband, “she wept and pulled her hair and scratched her face.” The father of children ranging in age from three to twenty-five never returned to his little farm. In March 1923, Sabella married Crudelle, but they would not live happily together for long. Two months after the marriage, police found a badly decomposed body in a sewer catch basin and identified it as Frank Nitti. Sabella and her fifteen-year-old son, Charlie, were brought in for questioning. After a long inquisition, Charlie told police that Crudelle had murdered his father on Sabella’s orders and that he and Crudelle had disposed of the body. Sabella, not understanding what her son was saying in English, said that whatever Charlie told them was true. On May 25, 1923, the state indicted Sabella Nitti, Peter Crudelle, and Charlie Nitti for murder. Sabella and Peter Crudelle were convicted. (After Charlie testified, charges against him were dropped.) Sabella didn’t comprehend the verdict when it was read. The next day, when an interpreter informed her that she had been condemned to hang, she cried out in terror and fainted.

  Then a strange thing happened. People throughout the country became interested in Sabella. The Los Angeles Times put her on the front page:

  For the first time in the history of Illinois, a woman has been given the death penalty for murder. More than thirty women have been tried for slaying their husbands or lovers and some have been convicted—three rare cases in which the defendants were unattractive and one a negress.8 In every case where the murderess was young and pretty, she was acquitted. The death penalty in Illinois is carried out by hanging.

  For months Sabella had been reviled in Chicago as a dirty, vicious killer. Now, almost overnight, the death sentence had made her a national cause célèbre. Those in favor of the sentence argued it was past time for Illinois to treat its women criminals in the same manner as its men, and who better than this grotesque foreigner to be the first to swing? New York, they pointed out, had executed a woman more than twenty years before, in 1899. But humanitarians used the sentence as a rallying cry. The wife of one of the jurors soon announced she would “go home to mother” if the Italian woman was hanged. Religious leaders made impassioned pleas for mercy. After weeks of being ignored by her fellow inmates, Sabella suddenly was “a woman of importance in the jail,” wrote Genevieve Forbes. “All those others who were waiting trial for robbery with a gun, for accessory to burglary and other more or less pallid charges, became, almost unconsciously, willing handmaidens ministering to this nationally famous woman.”

  Sabella didn’t realize any of this. Twice she tried to commit suicide, first by choking herself, and then, when that failed, by ramming her head repeatedly into a cell wall, leaving spatters of blood on the wall and red rivers coursing down her face.

  For days after the verdict, Sabella sobbed and moaned and tore at her hair, until finally she managed to calm herself and come to terms with her terrible fate. “Me choke,” she told anyone who’d listen, a doleful look on her face. With her limited English she got it just right. Hanging made it past the “cruel and unusual punishment” restriction in the Constitution in part because the neck was supposed to be broken by the body’s drop from the trapdoor. As often as not, though, the noose didn’t catch just right, and instead the condemned prisoner choked to death—a ghastly, protracted, dry-drowning spectacle. “This takes from eight to fourteen minutes,” pointed out Daily News reporter Ben Hecht, who’d witnessed a fair number of hangings in Chicago.

  While he hangs choking, the white-covered body begins to spin slowly. The white-hooded head tilts to one side and a stretch of purpled neck becomes visible. Then the rope begins to vibrate and hum like a hive of bees. After this the white robe begins to expand and deflate as if it were being blown up by a leaky bicycle pump. Following the turning, spinning, humming, and pumping up of the white robe comes the climax of the hanging. This is the throat of the hanging man letting out a last strangled cry or moan of life.

  Hecht referred to the hanging man not simply out of linguistic convention; he did so because when he wrote the passage, it was almost inconceivable that a responsible prosecutor would seek the ultimate penalty for a woman or that a civilized jury would impose it. There had been more than a hundred executions in Cook County since 1840, when records began being kept. Leaders in the Italian community did not think it a coincidence that the first woman so condemned would be a poor, unattractive, non-English-speaking Italian immigrant. Faced with one of their own being put to death, Cirese and the other five lawyers (an attorney named Rocco de Stefano would serve as lead counsel) stepped forward.

  The court agreed to hear a motion to set aside the verdict. Judge Joseph B. David postponed the execution, which had been scheduled for October 12, 1923—Columbus Day. But Judge David didn’t put much stock in Sabella’s chances. “This is a grave matter,” he said. “I will consent to hear you, but there is not one chance in one hundred that the sentence will be vacated and a new trial granted.”

  The defense team’s argument before the state Supreme Court wasn’t going to be original. The lawyers planned to prove that Sabella’s trial attorney, Eugene Moran, had been incompetent. They insisted that Sabella, whose court request for new counsel was signed with an X, “could not understand Mr. Moran, he could not understand her, and they had great difficulty in making themselves understood even through interpreters.” They also planned to show that the evidence the prosecution used to convict was suspect. The lawyers believed the identification of the body had been a sham—there was good reason to doubt that the corpse found in the catch basin was Frank Nitti. They planned to argue that the testimony of Charlie Nitti, Sabella’s son, had been coerced, and that the motive put forward by the prosecution, namely the subsequent marriage of Sabella and Peter Crudelle, hardly constituted proof of anything.

  Sabella’s conviction, her defense team believed, had been assured by the ethnic and class biases commonplace in the country. Much of the reporting on the case, especially Forbes’s coverage in the Tribune, had been offensive, showing the kind of vicious stereotyping that had led to U.S. immigration laws being changed to limit the numbers of southern Europeans coming into the country. Sabella’s poverty, illiteracy, and inability to speak English had fatally wounded her case. Who she was, in the eyes of your typical Cook County juror, showed in her face and dress and posture. Sabella herself understood this, having watched two pretty blonde sisters—Mrs. Anna McGinnis and Mrs. Myna Pioch—walk out the jail door a month before she was convicted. “Nice face—swell clothes—shoot man—go home,” she said in despair to her fellow inmates. “Me do nothing—me choke.”

  The fact of one’s gender was a valuable piece of “evidence” for any woman charged with a violent crime in Illinois. But Sabella Nitti, derided by Forbes as a “repulsive animal,” was barely granted even that qualification. Sabella had sat in court during her trial, quietly moaning, utterly uncomprehending. In the eyes of decent society in general and of Forbes in particular, she was like a demon in physical form: differe
nt, alien, dangerous. “Her cheap, faded blouse hikes up from her sagging black skirt, in spite of the sturdy safety pin,” Forbes wrote during the trial. “Her hair, lots of it, is matted into a festoon of snails, hairpins and side combs.”

  Forbes’s coverage of the trial shocked Cirese, who read the Tribune every day. Even Sabella’s fellow prisoners were outraged. A group of them wrote a letter to the Tribune in defense of Sabella, signing it “Comrades of Mrs. Nitti.” They took exception to descriptions of Sabella as a “dirty, disheveled woman,” insisting that she was in fact “one of the cleanest women in the department, in her cell and her personal appearance. Therefore, Mrs. Nitti cannot be classed as a ‘dirty, repulsive woman.’ She is the mother of two small girls and has shown her motherly spirit here with the girls always.”

  A motherly spirit, of course, mattered not a whit if you were viewed as little better than an animal. Helen Cirese knew what she had to do. She knew what meant the most to Illinois’ all-male juries—everyone did. “A jury isn’t blind, and a pretty woman’s never been convicted in Cook County,” one of the women inmates told Maurine Watkins at the jail. (“Gallant old Cook County!” Maurine responded in print.) It was easy to mock the typical jury’s predilection for pretty women, but it would be unwise—and poor lawyering—to ignore it. Cirese’s most important job on Sabella’s case would have nothing to do with writing briefs or making courtroom arguments. It was to make sure Sabella Nitti was as pretty and demure as she could be.

  Cirese came to the jail every week, sat with Sabella, gained her trust, and slowly began to turn her into a new person. By March 1924, Ione Quinby noticed the transformation under way. “If Mrs. Sabella Nitti-Crudelle ever gets out of prison, she will go forth a wonderfully improved woman,” the Post reporter wrote. “Hers is probably one of the few cases on record where it has been established beyond all doubt that long confinement behind bars did the prisoner any good.” Sabella had never had store-bought shoes before going to jail. She’d never had a mirror or a pillow. If she could have her two youngest children with her, Sabella told Quinby in halting English, she’d never want to leave.

  “We simply reconditioned her,” Cirese later said. “I got a hairdresser to fix her up every day. We bought her a blue suit and a flesh colored silk blouse. We taught her to speak English, and when she walked into that courtroom she was beautiful—beautiful and innocent. I’ll never forget how she looked. You wouldn’t have known her.”

  After a year behind bars, Sabella Nitti looked and felt great, better than ever in her whole life. And the one chance in a hundred came through. Early in April, six months after Sabella was supposed to have swung from the gallows, the Illinois Supreme Court reversed the trial verdict and remanded the case to the Cook County court, insisting on “a further investigation with competent counsel representing the accused. Safety and justice require that this cause be submitted to another jury.” Many court observers believed this decision had more than a little to do with Sabella’s new look. “When she came to the county jail, she appeared to be fully capable of murder,” observed Quinby. “But she doesn’t now.”

  With the Sabella Nitti case, Helen Cirese began building a unique law practice—a woman criminal-defense attorney, a rare enough thing, specializing in women clients. In the spring of 1924, as she waited for Sabella’s retrial to be scheduled, she took up another, even more hopeless case, this one without the assistance of a team of lawyers. In December, Mrs. Lela Foster had been arrested and charged with the murder of her husband. Just before the victim died, the man told police his wife had done it. Lela, in an account that mirrored Beulah Annan’s, said her husband had threatened her with a revolver and that she shot him after they struggled for possession of the gun. She said that he regularly beat her up and that she had the bruises to prove it. Still, Lela couldn’t expect to get much sympathy from jurors or the newspapers. (The press almost entirely ignored the case.) This was because Lela, who was white, had married a Negro. Maybe the dead man got what he deserved, went the popular thinking, but so did she. What did she expect from marrying a “coon”? The fear of miscegenation was so great that the state could boast of witnesses who claimed Mrs. Foster “chewed the end of lead bullets to make the wounds bigger.” Up to this point, the only mention of the case in the papers was a brief item stating that it was “believed to be the first time that an alleged murderess has been represented by a woman attorney.”

  The prospect of women attorneys representing women murder suspects before all-male juries was almost as terrifying as interracial coupling. One Virginia newspaper, commenting on the situation in Chicago after the state Supreme Court’s ruling on Sabella’s case, wrote that “now that fair women attorneys, full of feminine wiles, have been added to the equation, conviction of pretty lady killers is hardly even hoped for.”

  That was fine with Cirese. She would take all the help she could get. She was young and unconsciously graceful, with an imperious Roman nose and preternaturally full lips. If that counted as feminine wiles, she’d happily use them to help get clients out of jail. After all, nothing had come easily in her young professional life so far, which was no reflection on her skills. Too many lawyers and judges simply didn’t believe women belonged in the courtroom in any official capacity. Most female lawyers could, at best, land jobs as court stenographers. “Women make good law students. . . . They can pass the examinations, including the Bar examinations, with honors and flying colors,” opined William Scott Stewart, Beulah’s attorney. “But conditions are such that they do not seem to me equipped for the actual knock-down and drag-out fight required in the actual trial of lawsuits.” Stewart’s opinion was entirely ordinary and uncontroversial in the legal community.

  Cirese, less than three years out of DePaul University’s law school, was determined to prove Stewart wrong. Sabella’s retrial would be soon, likely in May, before Lela Foster’s trial. Of course, Sabella, in a very real way, already could be counted a success. Now that she could communicate to a fair degree with her fellow inmates, she was noticeably happier. Of the women on the cellblock, Kitty Malm was the nicest to the Italian woman; she always made an effort to get a smile out of her. One of the girls dubbed Kitty the Girl with the Big Heart. Elizabeth Unkafer, who had shot down her boyfriend in February, would also smile at Sabella, but Elizabeth would smile at the wall and her big toe. She scrubbed the jail floor day after day, her matted mop of red hair in her eyes, flabby cheeks flapping, mumbling to herself, having a conversation. Her attorneys planned to have the forty-six-year-old woman plead insanity at her trial. She had, after all, said she’d killed her beau “because it was in the Bible that I had to.” Belva Gaertner, meanwhile, gave Sabella coins for making up her bed every morning and doing other chores for her. She seemed to genuinely like Sabella. When the good news came down about the Italian woman winning a retrial, Kitty and Belva were the first to meet her when she returned to the jail. Belva organized a celebratory party and led the festivities.

  Best of all, Sabella Nitti wasn’t just innocent—that was how the women of the jail interpreted the higher court decision—she was also beautiful now, or at least presentable. If it helped sway Supreme Court justices, it would surely make the difference in a new trial. After the American photographer took a “ladies day” portrait with the three women inmates, he positioned Sabella for her own picture. Her changed appearance was dramatic enough to warrant it. The inmate the American had derided as a “bent old woman, with a face like sandpaper,” is sitting erect and smiling in the photograph. She looks like a respectable suburban housewife on a pleasant spring outing. In the background, in the corner of the frame, Beulah gazes blandly off into the distance.

  Genevieve Forbes, for one, didn’t like the precedent Sabella Nitti and Helen Cirese had established. Sabella had learned how to dress with style, how to apply makeup, how to give herself a manicure. She had also begun to learn how to speak English. This hardly should have been considered groundbreaking trial preparation, but it helpe
d change the atmosphere at the jail. It changed the whole point of the inmates being there. Many of the women at Cook County Jail didn’t really have lawyers. Judges assigned private defense attorneys to cases with indigent defendants. It wasn’t unusual for a lawyer, if unable to extract a fee from the defendant’s relatives, to put up a token defense at best or persuade his client to plead guilty. But now the inmates in the women’s quarters realized that they didn’t have to just helplessly wait around for a sentence to be imposed on them. They could do something. They could learn. They could go to what Forbes derisively labeled jail school. If Sabella could do it, any of them could. “A horrible looking creature she was,” Forbes wrote with her typical sensitivity, “with skin like elephant hide, nails split to the quick and the dirt ingrained deep in the cracks of her hands. Her hair was matted; her skirt sagged to a big safety pin.” Then, Forbes wrote, “Sabelle went to the jail school. She learned to understand English, then to speak it, presently to write it.” She learned beauty tips, the reporter went on, such as “the value of lemon juice to whiten skin.”

  Influenced by Sabella’s success before the Supreme Court and the wave of press attention bestowed on Belva and Beulah, the other women prisoners enrolled in jail school, too. They cut each other’s hair in the latest style. They discussed how to wear cosmetics. They gave themselves and each other manicures. Friends and lawyers brought in new outfits for the inmates, and the women conducted impromptu fashion shows on the block to choose the best clothing for their trials. “They study every effect, turn, and change,” Maurine Watkins noted, “and who can say it’s time wasted?” Maurine certainly didn’t think it was. In court, even more than in life, clothes made the woman, especially the woman murder defendant. “Colorful clothes would mark her as a brazen hussy flaunting herself in the public eye and black would be interpreted as a hypocritical pose,” Maurine later wrote. “Yes, there’s need for an Emily Post on murder etiquette.”