Stewart and O’Brien didn’t seem to need any help, from a secretary or anyone else. They were smart, efficient lawyers. They were each making at least $20,000 annually by 1924, an impressive haul. They didn’t take any case for the publicity—unless they were sure they could win it. Stewart liked to say that “it is difficult to catch a good lawyer on the wrong side of a case.” Innocence was not necessarily the right side, though he never ruled it out. “When your client claims to be innocent, do not despair, even when things look black,” he said. “He may in fact be innocent.”
There was no obvious reason for the two lawyers to be so confident that they were on the right side of the Beulah Annan case. Sure, she was beautiful, and O’Brien and Stewart were getting a lot of publicity with her, especially after her pregnancy announcement. But this was a woman who had admitted to cuckolding her husband and shooting her lover when the man attempted to walk out on her. In the past year, Sabella Nitti, Kitty Malm, and now Elizabeth Unkafer had been convicted of murder, a sudden and dramatic reversal of tradition. On top of that, O’Brien and Stewart were essentially a two-man band, whereas, “In Chicago,” Stewart pointed out, “the prosecutor has about sixty assistants, in addition to clerks, stenographers, investigators and police.” Roy Woods and William McLaughlin, the assistant state’s attorneys trying Beulah’s case, were considered to be among the best in the office.
Despite such challenges, the two men showed only confidence in public and in their meetings with Beulah. O’Brien, in particular, seemed enthusiastic about defending the case. He liked Beulah—he liked women as a rule—and killer women were becoming a specialty. (He would represent thirteen female murder suspects in his career.) Stewart would do the heavy lifting on the case; he’d deal with the actual evidence. But O’Brien was going to throw the gut punch. He planned to argue that Beulah was a “virtuous working girl . . . a modest little housewife” who’d been lured astray by booze. He may have even believed it. Beulah, her choice in a husband notwithstanding, seemed to get to tough guys the most. That little smile of hers, her gaze direct but unfocused, inevitably turned them to jelly. O’Brien needed some tough guys on the jury. He could talk to them man to man.
The prospective jurors filed into the room and took their seats right after Beulah. They sat up straight in their best suits, their eyes moving between Beulah at the defendant’s table and whichever lawyer was asking them questions. The crackpots in the jury pool were weeded out first, those with blatant bloodlust, or simply lust, for the defendant. “Too damned many women gettin’ away with murder,” said one man who was dismissed by the defense. Another man exclaimed, “Kalstedt got what was coming to him—the fool! In a married woman’s apartment!” He was sent home by the state.
Maurine seemed amused by the cynical attempt at jury packing by both sides, noting that the selection process had nothing to do with producing justice. The reporter watched Beulah as Stewart quizzed the prospective jurors. The defendant nodded her head when she liked a juror and offered a “pouting ‘no’ ” when she found one off-putting. Maurine imagined Stewart consulting with his client on the selection of jurors through surreptitious glances over to the defendant’s table. The men accepted by the defense, Maurine wrote, were “a good looking lot, comparatively young, and not too ‘hard boiled’—for Beulah herself passed on them. And she’s a connoisseur in men!”
The jury selection moved along slowly, ultimately taking the entire day. Beulah grew bored. She “leaned wearily on one white hand—with Raphaelite profile turned toward the jury—and pensively sighed now and then.” But she perked up when the prosecution indicated its plan of attack for the trial. “Would the fact that the defendant and the deceased had been drinking wine together before the murder influence your judgment?” each juror was asked, eliciting a gasp from Beulah’s mother, Mary Neel, who sat “mopping her eyes” in the front row, next to her son-in-law. Woods and McLaughlin wanted to present Beulah as a wild, drunken woman. They recognized the potential payoff of linking Harry Kalstedt’s death to the loosening of moral standards in the country.
It was a logical approach, considering widespread perceptions about the state of the city. Three days earlier, federal agents had raided a factory on the West Side. They confiscated hundreds of barrels of beer, taking into custody two of Chicago’s highest-profile bootleggers, Johnny Torrio and Dean O’Banion. The operation scored heavy newspaper coverage, but no one had illusions about either of the gangsters ever standing trial—at least not a trial that had any possibility of conviction. In a follow-up raid, this one at the Stock Yards Inn, officers were forced to level their rifles at dozens of saloon patrons who had become incensed when they realized the feds were emptying the place of all its booze. The enraged drinkers rocked the police wagon, almost overturning it before being forced back. Worse yet, as jury selection for Beulah’s trial got under way that Thursday morning, news about the kidnapping of a fourteen-year-old prep-school student flashed through the city’s newsrooms. The boy, Bobby Franks, was from a wealthy South Side family, which had received a ransom letter. This was followed within the hour by news of the discovery of a boy’s body. The Tribune immediately offered $5,000 for exclusive information about the crime. As Beulah’s jury selection continued, the story of the kidnapping hit the front page of the city’s afternoon papers.
Stories like these terrified the average, law-abiding citizen, the type of man who proudly made the time to serve on a jury when called. He read the newspaper every day and could only conclude from its pages that the men around him, on the streetcar and sidewalk, in the office and factory, increasingly were out of control. Anything—literally anything—could happen. And anything, the state insisted, meant it wasn’t just men who were dangerous. Even beautiful young women now committed heinous crimes. They would prove, the prosecutors told the newly impaneled jury at the end of the day, that Beulah Annan was responsible for “a cold-blooded, dastardly murder” as horrible as the one inflicted on little Bobby Franks.
The twelve men who would get to pass judgment on Beulah reported for duty on Friday. The newspapers printed the names and addresses of all of them. They included a bank clerk, a mechanical adjuster, two accountants, a tool inspector, and a real estate broker. Maurine pointed out in the Tribune that the defense “favored bachelors, to a count of five,” but Stewart and O’Brien took offense at the implication. “We are not relying on the beauty of this woman to prove her guiltless,” they told reporters before heading into the courtroom. “We will prove she shot this intruder in self-defense.”
Right off, Beulah was called to the stand, but without the jury in the room. Before the trial could get under way, Judge Lindsay had a decision to make: Could the confessions Beulah gave the day of the shooting—especially the most damaging one, the one the newspapers called the Midnight Confession—be used against her? O’Brien and Stewart argued that the confessions were legally worthless because they had been obtained by coercion—by “third-degree methods”—while Beulah was drunk. Assistant State’s Attorney William McLaughlin responded that the statements had been validly obtained and should be used in court, despite the fact that, at least with the initial confession, “she was palpably ‘ginned up.’ ”
Patricia Dougherty, writing as Princess Pat in the American, noted that the “portion of Mrs. Annan’s confession which the defense fought hardest to keep from the jury was her admission of close friendship with Kalstedt, just prior to the quarrel which she settled with a revolver.” In William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, sob sisters spared no bloody detail in describing a brutal killing, but they mentioned a murderous wife’s alleged unfaithfulness with delicacy, if at all. O’Brien and Stewart would have expected nothing less of a responsible reporter. Murder happened every day, but a woman running around on her husband was a scandal. The very idea of it cut deep into the heart of every married man who headed to work in the morning, leaving his wife with the whole day rolling out before her. A jury, made up only of men, would have little
sympathy for a wanton woman, and the defense knew it. “We’re not trying a case of adultery, judge,” O’Brien said.
On the stand, Beulah now had a chance to frame the case herself. Gazing out at the rows of spectators, at the men standing shoulder to shoulder in the back of the room, she appeared “radiant in her titian-red hair, which chimed with a fur piece that hugged her neck,” wrote the Evening Post. But even with the jury absent, she was nervous. She smiled at the lawyers, and at the reporters in the front row, but she was trembling. Her bottom lip heaved as she tried to maintain composure. She touched her face, caressing herself, fingertips fluttering along her jawline and then flying away to pet at her hair. She paused frequently to take small gulps of air as she spoke. Responding to a question from Stewart, Beulah said that Assistant State’s Attorney Roy Woods had stood in her kitchen after the shooting and told her that he “wanted her to make a complete statement because she had nothing to fear, since she had shot a man in her own home.”
“Who was the first person to arrive at your apartment after the shooting?” Stewart asked.
“Officer Torpy.”
“What was said?”
“Well, he said, ‘Where is the gun?’ And my husband handed him the gun. I don’t remember much else.”
“Whom did you see next?”
“State’s Attorney Woods.”
“You fainted in the meantime?”
“Yes.”
“What did Mr. Woods say?”
“Well, we went into the kitchen and he said, ‘Don’t you know me?’ I replied: ‘No.’ He told me not to be afraid, that I had shot a man in my own house and had nothing to fear.”
Maurine Watkins, sitting near the front with her colleagues, wrote that the testimony “was uncontradicted by the state, since Mr. Woods, as prosecutor in the case, could not take the stand.” But the lack of a rebuttal seemed like a very small victory for the defense. Beulah had said the right things but in the wrong way: breathless, distracted, almost giddy. Stewart continued to press the argument for the exclusion of the confessions, but Beulah, settled back at the defendant’s table after the questioning, appeared to have recognized that she’d been shaky when she needed to be firm. “The luck,” the Evening Post wrote, “seemed to be going against Beulah, who was not any too sure of herself and who, during the palaver, dabbed at her eyes occasionally with a perfumed lace handkerchief and leaned her pretty head on the shoulder of her defender, Mr. O’Brien.”
The Post was right: The luck went against her. “Her statements are entirely too vague,” Judge Lindsay declared. “Moreover, it is peculiar that she was so intoxicated that she didn’t know what had happened a few hours after the crime, and today has a perfect recollection of minute details.” The judge made his ruling: “I believe the statements are competent and admissible and that it is a matter for the defense to rebut them during the trial.”
This was a serious blow to Beulah’s defense. If the confessions had been excluded, O’Brien and Stewart would have started with a blank canvas. They could have taken control of the story line through a moving opening statement and, with chutzpah and momentum, carried it through to the end, presenting the defendant as an unsophisticated country girl and Kalstedt as a dangerous man. Now, however, they would have to play defense—an aggressive, risky defense. The confessions allowed the state to make the case about adultery, as well as murder. McLaughlin and Woods now had damning evidence—Beulah’s own words—that she shot Kalstedt because he told her he was through with her. The defense would be forced to depend thoroughly on Beulah’s ability to refute her previous statements when she took the stand. It would be a high-wire act, with all of Chicago watching.
It wasn’t a complete sweep for the prosecution, however. Woods’s conversation with Beulah in her kitchen was certain to come up again. And because Beulah had now given, under oath, a different version of what was said than the state’s, Woods withdrew from the case so that he could testify, if necessary. This removed from the prosecution the lawyer who probably knew the facts and details of the case better than anyone else in the state’s attorney’s office. Stewart viewed it as a victory, if only because it was an “embarrassing situation” for Woods. He also believed that if he and O’Brien played it right, it could be “psychologically contributory to the verdict.”
The admissibility of the confessions decided, the jury was brought into the courtroom. The lawyers started right in with opening statements. O’Brien got to his feet. The more emotional, theatrical member of the team would handle the opening for the defense; the cooler, more paternal Stewart would then take on much of the key questioning and share the closing with his partner.
“It is true that a jazz record was being played at maddening tempo as Beulah Annan shot Harry Kalstedt, but only to drown out the tumult caused by this drink-crazed fiend who invaded her apartment, and so save herself from scandal,” said O’Brien, launching into his statement with melodramatic brio. The lawyer had a habit of slapping his fist into an open palm to help him punctuate key words and phrases. He now started punching at his hand viciously. “Kalstedt forced his way into her apartment,” he said, the fist coming down with a smack. “He came there at eight in the morning, badly intoxicated. She pleaded with him to go away and avoid a scandal. He cursed her and demanded money, mentioning six dollars. Finally, to get rid of him, she gave him a dollar.”
By the end of each speech, O’Brien’s left hand must have been bruised and numb from the beating it took, but he always succeeded in keeping his juries leaning forward. Maurine noted that “Tears slowly came to Beulah’s eyes as O’Brien told how Kalstedt, a regular ‘bum,’ had come to her apartment early the morning of the shooting, and had tried to borrow a few dollars to get booze.”
“At three in the afternoon,” O’Brien continued, “he again forced an entrance. He had a bottle of wine under his arm. They had a drink.” The lawyer, confident that he had this jury in his hands, gave them an empathetic look. He wasn’t trying to fool anyone, the look said; he was telling it like it was. As proof, he was about to admit that his client made a terrible error in judgment that night. “She foolishly took a drink,” he said, “ just to humor him and get him to go, and played the Victrola to drown his loud talking. But he started to make love to her, improper advances—and then they took another little drink.”
Every man there, every man on the jury, knew how one little drink led to another. Many lives had been ruined this way. Everyone had a brother or cousin or friend whose life had unraveled or was unraveling because of drink. It was the scourge of the age, made even worse by Prohibition. Drink made decent people do bad things, and it made bad people do unspeakable things. Innocent women were victimized by it every day. O’Brien sketched a dark but vivid tableau. Harry Kalstedt, he insisted, was one of the bad people turned even worse by booze. He was a bully, a pervert, a convict. An out-of-control drunk. “Fascinated, the jury followed him down the path of ‘another little drink,’ ” wrote Maurine, “until Kalstedt threatened to attack her, boasting that he had served time for ‘having his way with a woman’—‘that’s the kind of man he was!’ Then, according to her attorney, Beulah, in a frenzy, started—O no, not for the gun, but the telephone, to tell her husband the danger she was in! And it was then Kalstedt went for the gun—conveniently parked on the bed—but she had the inside track! And in the struggle she turned around and that’s how he was shot in the back! (Attorney Stewart posed to show just how it was done.)”
Maurine, with the promiscuous exclamation points and melodramatic phrasing, wasn’t trying to play the sob sister. She was mocking O’Brien for laying out such an implausible series of events: Beulah agreeing to drink with Kalstedt after the drunken “fiend” had forced his way into her flat, Al’s gun left out in plain sight on the bed, Kalstedt breaking for the gun first but Beulah still getting to it, Kalstedt ending up shot in the back because he and Beulah had spun like dancers while fighting for the weapon. There’s no way to know if Maurine’s read
ers picked up on her ridicule. The real sob sisters, after all, pounded out their accounts with the same outsize enthusiasm, just without the irony. Over at the American, O’Brien’s speech was related as simple fact: “He put on a jazz record and made advances to her. She pleaded with him: ‘If nothing else will stop you, maybe this will,’ she said, and told him she was an expectant mother. He ignored her pleas, told her he had served a penitentiary sentence for attacking one woman. There was a struggle. Both reached for the gun.”
O’Brien paused when he said this, and then reiterated that vital piece of information. “Both reached for the gun,” he said, making clear that it was in plain sight on the bed in the next room. “But he was ahead of her. She fought for her life and in the struggle shot him in the back.” The silence that followed this statement was complete. The lawyer was done. With a nod, he turned from the jury and sat heavily at the defense table. The jurymen sat back, thoroughly wrung out. William W. O’Brien was convincing. He believed in Beulah as the virtuous working girl, the good girl gone terribly bad and, because of her beauty and trusting nature, inevitably wrong. Beulah, tears welling in her eyes, her chin quivering slightly, believed too.
The state fought back with eyewitnesses: Policemen laid out what they saw and heard in Beulah’s apartment that day; the coroner established a time of death—several hours after the shooting—and mentioned the record she played over and over. “Several witnesses were called,” the Post wrote, “each describing his impressions of the scene immediately following the death of Kalstedt when Beulah, in order to quiet her nerves, placed the ‘Hula Lou’ record on her phonograph, and awaited the arrival of the bluecoats.”
The Girls of Murder City Page 19
