“I can’t see that it’s anything at all like my case,” said Mrs. Gaertner, the sophisticated divorcee indicted for shooting Law, the young auto salesman, as she twirled about in her red dancing slippers.
“The cases are entirely different,” said Mrs. Annan, quite the ingénue in her girlish checked flannel frock.
Had Belva been twirling about while talking to the Tribune reporter? Hardly likely. She did wear red slippers, though. William had brought them. They were comfortable. They made the cell feel a little homey.
At least the reporter included Beulah in the comparison game with Belva, rather than Sabella or Lela Foster, the other women with murder trials coming up. It didn’t mean, though, that she and Beulah were equals in the eyes of the press, and there’d be no point in pretending otherwise. Belva had understood that from the very first day Beulah stepped through the jail’s doors, back at the beginning of April. The pretty, fragile ones had got in Belva’s way her whole life. The large eyes, the trembling lip, the wee waist you could almost put your hand all the way around—men could never get enough. Men who might have been her husbands. Men who might have been her boyfriends. The thought of it enraged her. But this time, she had decided she wouldn’t fight against the other girl, the prettier girl. She would fight alongside her.
On Beulah’s first day in the jail, Belva began scheming to get her picture taken with the new inmate. They would be best pals all the way. She wasn’t as attractive or as young as Beulah, but if she played it right, she believed the papers would lump them together: “the prettiest women in Cook County Jail.” That was worth something. Here, William’s ready cash came in handy. The “forbidden cabinet,” the one that held the cosmetics taken from new prisoners when they were processed at the jail, now opened for Belva and only her.10 With young, male reporters swaggering around the jail every day, all of the girls wanted access to their beauty products, but only Belva got preferential treatment. “Belva has her powder puff again,” the other inmates would say, clucking respectfully, when they caught sight of Belva looking glam on the cellblock. She was an expert with makeup; she could make herself look a decade younger.
After a couple days of jockeying, Belva got her picture with Beulah. Shots of the duo together appeared in most of the city’s newspapers. Belva looked good—bemused and sleepy-eyed, her head cocked imperiously like the society doyenne she once was, gazing slightly down on her “dear friend,” “Beautiful Beulah” Annan. In every caption she earned equal billing. The Tribune labeled its photo “Killers of Men.” Maurine, knowing full well that everyone was talking about the two cases, reported that the women, incredible as it might seem, “have not talked over their common interests. A man, a woman, liquor and a gun.”
The photos with Beulah had been a significant coup for Belva; they kept her in the headlines. But that was then. Now, a month after those photographs ran, the powder puff wasn’t going to be enough for her to stay in the picture. In the wake of the “Wanda sensation,” and with Elizabeth Unkafer’s conviction playing prominently in all of the papers, Beulah was having her own crisis of confidence. And like Belva, she had decided to do something about it.
On May 8, the day after Unkafer’s conviction, Beulah Annan gathered the press and told them she was pregnant. Harry Kalstedt, she said, had attacked her that fateful day in April after she informed him she was carrying her husband’s child.
Reporters thrilled at the unexpected news—a new twist that would tug at hearts and further goose a story that already obsessed readers. They crowded in on Beulah in the corridor of the women’s section, shooting questions at her. The mother-to-be scolded Belva for spilling her secret, even though Beulah’s announcement was the first that reporters had heard of the pregnancy. Nevertheless, the papers that Thursday afternoon stuck with Beulah’s account: “Mrs. Beulah Annan, young and beautiful slayer of her sweetheart, Harry Kalstedt, today bemoaned the publicity given the fact she is expecting a visit from the stork in the Fall,” wrote the American. The newspaper continued:
Today, when seen in her cell at the county jail, she blamed Mrs. Belva Gaertner, divorcee, awaiting trial for the killing of her sweetheart, Walter Law, married automobile salesman, for disclosing the secret.
“Belva should not have told,” said Mrs. Annan. “But women always tell such things. It was to have been my own little secret, but I just had to confide in someone and I told Belva.”
Roy C. Woods and William F. McLaughlin, assistant state’s attorneys, declared the fact that Mrs. Annan was awaiting motherhood did not change the fact that a murder had been committed.
Assistant State’s Attorney Edward Wilson declared that if Mrs. Annan were convicted and sentenced to death, there was no legal reason why she should not be hanged.
No legal reason? Perhaps that was so, but such a fraught decision hardly would be decided on legal merits. They were talking about an innocent little baby. And with Beulah as its mother, it would certainly be “a most beautiful child,” the Post stated. The day after she disclosed the pregnancy, Beulah announced through her lawyers that she “wants no postponement of her trial on account of her approaching motherhood.” The state responded in kind, bravely insisting, “We are ready to go to trial today.”
The pregnancy revelation surprised Maurine. During the immediate excitement of it all, she hung back, took stock. She decided to chat with some of the other inmates while a group of reporters interviewed Beulah. It seemed that, among the hacks covering the development, Maurine alone was suspicious. In the next day’s Tribune, she hinted that the whole thing was a ruse, hitting with the kind of lacerating sarcasm that was beginning to earn her a following.
What counts with a jury when a woman is on trial for murder?
Youth? Beauty? And if to these she adds approaching motherhood—?
For pretty Mrs. Beulah Annan, who shot her lover, Harry Kohlstedt [sic],11 to the tune of her husband’s phonograph, is expecting a visit from the stork early this fall. This 23 year old murderess, now waiting trial, is making this the basis for a further appeal to clemency.
Maurine went on to suggest that Unkafer’s verdict on Wednesday had prompted Beulah’s announcement, “for the conviction of one of their number broke the monotony of their life and startled them into a worried analysis,” she wrote of the seven inmates remaining on “Murderess’ Row.” The official line from William Scott Stewart, she added, was that Beulah’s “condition has no bearing upon the legality of the case.” But, prompted by Maurine, he had agreed that “it might affect the jury.” Maurine was also alone among the reporting corps in bringing up the “four-term rule,” which Beulah’s attorneys could invoke to prevent the case from being held over for more than four terms of court—meaning Stewart and O’Brien could ensure Beulah went to trial well before the baby was due to arrive. “Will a jury give death—will a jury send to prison—a mother-to-be?” Maurine asked.
She clearly thought Cook County jurymen wouldn’t be able to do so, especially to a mother-to-be as lovely as Beulah May Annan. For weeks, Maurine had reminded readers that Beulah’s story about the Kalstedt shooting—that is, her latest story—didn’t add up. The criticism hadn’t dented the suspected murderess’s popularity at all, and now the reporter was questioning Beulah’s veracity about that most sacred and mysterious of womanly things: pregnancy. People—especially men—wanted to believe Beulah. They were conditioned to believe her.
Maurine’s derisive articles stayed true to the Tribune’s niche in the market—the hanging paper, the paper that didn’t write sob stories—but she also made a good case. It was an unlikely coincidence, after all, that the pregnancy announcement came just days after the massive Wanda Stopa coverage. For a thrilling, salacious week, Wanda had blotted out all of the women of Cook County Jail, even “Beautiful Beulah” Annan. The Polish girl gunner pushed Beulah not just off the front page but out of the papers entirely. The story became so big that twenty-four-year-old Ernest Hemingway, a foreign correspondent for the Toronto
Star, picked up a Marseille newspaper in southern France one day and, to his surprise, found himself reading about his childhood friends’ older brother, Y. Kenley Smith. At his request, his family sent him all of the Tribune’s articles about Wanda Stopa, which they annotated with “suitable moral comments.” Hemingway became caught up in the coverage. “Pity the female Polak lawyer couldn’t shoot when she pulled a gun on Doodles,” he wrote to a friend, still disgusted by the thought of Kenley’s wife eyeing him. The Palos Park shooting and its circumstances were so scandalous that it’s believed they inspired Hemingway to write a short story, “Summer People,” in which a Hemingway-like protagonist engages in anal intercourse with a wild young woman named Kate. Surely that was the kind of “perversion” bohemians undertook, especially the ones who went mad like Wanda Stopa. (“I love it. I love it. I love it,” Kate calls out during the sex act, which of course occurs not in a bed but out in the woods.)
Beulah’s trial had been scheduled to start the Monday after Wanda burst into the news, before her lawyers managed at the last minute to push it back to late May. That original timing must have terrified Beulah. How could she go to trial if all anyone was talking about was Wanda Stopa? But her instincts, as always in seeking press coverage, were pitch-perfect. She later said, “What fooled everybody when I told them in jail that I was going to become a mother was this: We had kept it a secret that the reason I shot Kalstedt was because he would not let me alone when I told him I was going to have a baby.”
No reporter bothered to ask why she would keep such a compelling reason for her violent act a secret. Maurine, for one, had come to believe that her colleagues simply preferred Beulah’s revisionist account of what happened on the night of April 3. There wasn’t much they could do with a hard-hearted confession, but her desperate fight against a brute—that was perfect. There certainly was no denying that Beulah Annan knew how to play pathos for all it was worth. “Albert probably won’t want me back—my life’s ruined anyway; I can never live it down,” she told any reporter who would listen, the tears coming easily. “Even if I went away where nobody knew, you can’t get away from yourself. And I’d always remember that I’d killed him.”
Men riding into work on the streetcar shook their heads and winced at such plangent words, then gazed at the latest picture of the dear murder suspect, who, Maurine noted, “posed prettily for the photographers” every day. Their wives at home snuffled at reading the same words, the tears coming almost as easily as they did to Beulah. Despite Maurine’s caustic commentary and Belva Gaertner’s attempts to regain the spotlight, the Beulah juggernaut could not be stopped. Even William Gaertner’s millions couldn’t help his ex-wife stand out against such exceptional competition. Beulah Annan was simply a natural. A rumor floated around the city’s newsrooms that if Beulah won acquittal, one of the Hollywood movie studios was prepared to offer her a contract. (This surely infuriated Belva, who actually had been a professional performer.) The rumor wasn’t true; there had been no discussions with Hollywood representatives. But Beulah assumed some kind of life in entertainment would be open to her. At the very least, she knew she could be a vaudeville freak act, a term that referred not to mustachioed women but to performers who had box-office drawing power for some reason other than talent. The boxing champion Jack Dempsey was a top-drawer freak act, once making $10,000 in a week. So was Evelyn Nesbit, the infamous object of desire who’d sparked the murder of the noted architect Stanford White. Freak acts cracked bad jokes, talked through songs, told supposedly true stories from their lives, or did a simple soft shoe. Beulah Annan surely could manage that.
13
A Modest Little Housewife
On Thursday, May 22, the bailiff in Judge William Lindsay’s courtroom said the words everyone had been waiting to hear: “Beulah Annan.”
The defendant, her head bare, hands interlaced at her waist, rose and walked toward the bar. She progressed as if at the head of a funeral procession, her head cast slightly downward, steps slow and deliberate. Reporters took up most of the first handful of rows in the packed courtroom, and Beulah exchanged smiles with them as she approached. She passed her husband in the first row. Al leaned forward in his seat, twisting his cap in his hand, a worried gaze fixed on her. She did not meet his eyes.
Beulah knew everyone would be looking at her, the comely expectant mother of Cook County Jail. She didn’t disappoint. Her freshly marcelled hair arced with precision across her forehead. The lace collar of her new blouse suggested innocent modesty but at the breastbone dipped tantalizingly into shadow. “The courtroom was full of appreciative smiles directed toward the lovely girl beside the prisoner’s table,” noted a reporter from out of state. “There were flashes of consideration. The sheiks of the town crowded the spectators’ chairs. The pretty, bob-haired maid assuredly was the fairest thing that had ever graced a murder trial in Chicago.”
The Daily Journal ’s hack appeared equally impressed. He described in detail Beulah’s expertly tailored suit, even her black satin slippers.
Slightly pale from her recent illness but blossoming with the comeliness of face and figure which has spread her name broadcast, Mrs. Annan looked more like a boarding school girl tripping up to the principal’s “carpet” than a defendant in one of Chicago’s most sensational murder trials.
Perhaps there was “method in the madness” that prompted her to enter the courtroom bareheaded. With her flaming red hair showing at its best with a fresh trim and marcel, she made a picture which would rival paintings of the famous Titian.
The Journal’s reporter was right: There was a method to Beulah’s appearance. Her lawyers, Stewart and O’Brien, with the help of a “fashion expert” they’d hired, had carefully thought everything out, including the bare head. A beautiful woman who went bareheaded in public could only be a whore or a goddess. Beulah managed to be both. The “boarding-school girl” look played into a popular male sexual fantasy while also visually showcasing Beulah’s innocence. She looked sweetly childlike and at the same time delectably ripe. The fashion expert earned the fee—Beulah’s outfits would receive as much comment as the evidence presented in court—but the defendant’s beauty alone was undoubtedly enough to do the job. It confirmed a woman’s nature, her innate moral place in the world. Time and again Beulah Annan was described as if she were a work of art: her hair was not simply red but “Titian,” her coy smile that of a “Sphinx” withholding a thrilling riddle.
The male reporters covering her case had long ago come over to her side. The pregnancy announcement simply sealed it. The Post alluded to a metaphor by Alexander Pope, describing Beulah as “a butterfly on a wheel, the center of many curious eyes, some friendly, some hostile. She wore a neat brown dress, with a soft fur piece about her neck.” Her lawyers couldn’t have asked for a better image than that of a helpless, fluttering Beulah, in her neat brown dress, being tortured on a wheel to achieve something as unimportant as a conviction.
It seemed to Maurine Watkins that she was the only one who remembered the ugliness of the killing. While the Journal and the Post remained officially neutral on Beulah, and the Hearst papers sometimes bordered on fawning, Maurine worked herself into a righteous fury. What any decent defense attorney in Chicago wanted in a jury, she believed, was “twelve good morons”—and she was convinced, and horrified, that W. W. O’Brien and William Scott Stewart were going to get them.
Maurine had seen enough of Beulah’s attorneys to know that Beulah was lucky to have them. Stewart and O’Brien had been in partnership together less than two years, but they had proved an excellent team from the start. So far they’d never lost a case—a record rapidly approaching two dozen acquittals in a row. They’d had such success that they were about to set themselves up in the swank new Temple Building in the heart of the Loop. Their rent would be a whopping $350 a month.12
On the face of it, the partners made an unusual pair. O’Brien exuded tough-guy charm; he didn’t so much smile at you as ease his lips in
to a kind of swagger. He was impressive in a quintessentially Chicago way, decked out in colorful shirts, always making a show, the kind of man who kept his hat pulled low over his eyes, winked at attractive young ladies on the street, and dangled a cigarette from his lip as he talked. He had a propensity for going on weeklong benders, surfacing just in time to walk into court.
Stewart wasn’t a teetotaler, but in contrast to his partner, no one ever saw him drunk. A journalist labeled the always well-dressed Stewart “the Beau Brummel of the courtroom.” He was low-key, fastidious, a perfectionist. “There is an atmosphere around every law office,” he would say years later, speaking to young lawyers getting their start. “It is either businesslike or it is not. Avoid those offices which look like hangouts, where those about the office play cards in plain view, smoke cigarettes and keep their hats on. . . . Your client cannot have a very good impression when he walks into such an office. Such people are apt to appear discourteous and not handle messages properly.” He was likely speaking from direct experience.
But in spite of their differing styles, the law partners trusted each other implicitly—and no one else. Stewart’s theory on hiring a secretary for the office was “somewhat like that often given concerning marriage. . . . Get them young and tell them nothing.” He insisted that he and his partner not only tell their girl nothing but also that they should “give her not the slightest responsibility, and drum into her by constant repetition that she should not give out any information.”
The Girls of Murder City Page 18
