It wasn’t all just fun and games for Belva. She was playing to win. Shortly after the newspapers took up the story, Belva announced that she would prove in court that her husband had beaten her with a horsewhip. The whip would be presented, she said, as “Exhibit A.” More than that, the beatings went both ways, because William wasn’t just an abusive husband, he was a sexual deviant. “Sure, I whipped my millionaire husband,” she said, ratcheting up the story’s salaciousness, “but it was he himself who gave me the whip and begged me, yes, even forced me, to do it.” She showed reporters the whip, turning it over and over in her hand. “It was he who made me use it,” she said. “It was he who forced me to the terrible and disgusting task of beating him. Twice I consented. After that I refused. If that is cruelty, his charges are true.”
No doubt William considered this a low blow, but Belva believed she had no choice. However much she joked and laughed with reporters, she thought she was fighting for her life. She had convinced herself—almost—that it wasn’t her infidelity that undermined her marriage but William’s jealous company men. She publicly accused Robert McGearald, Gaertner’s secretary, of trying to break her and William up.
It was scandalous stuff, and reporters girded for an explosive court case that could run on the front page for days. But then, on May 6, the first day of the divorce trial, Belva suddenly pulled back. She decided she couldn’t do it. She would not be testifying, she said. She would not contest the suit. She gave no reason, not even to her lawyer, maybe because, after everything that had come out, she realized it would be too hard for people to believe. She had married William because he loved her, truly loved her, and to Belva “that was everything.” It had been a shock when she discovered it wasn’t. She had broken William’s heart—and her own as well. That was enough.
In answering questions posed by his lawyer, William Gaertner talked about the last straw. “My wife had been away from home for three nights,” he said in open court. “She told me she had stayed at the home of women friends. On the night of March 30, with W.C. Dannenberg and others, I trailed her to 5345 Prairie Avenue, where we found her with a man who said he was Edward Lusk.”
“Where was Mr. Lusk?”
“Behind a door,” William said.
The judge had heard all he needed to hear. William Gaertner, a respected man in the community, an important man, had been humiliated by his wife. The court granted the divorce. Belva received $3,000, a car, and a selection of the household’s furniture. Not much of a settlement when your husband was worth, excluding his thriving business, more than half a million dollars.
Belva sighed extravagantly. She gazed off into the distance, annoyed that she had to answer the question. In the past, she always had been able to win over the press with her gaiety, as she did during her divorce from William. But this was different. After the things that were said at the inquest, she recognized that happy flirtatiousness wasn’t appropriate.
“The story is simply ridiculous,” she told the reporter from the Daily News. She was sitting in a ten-by-five cell at the Cook County Jail, her new home now that the coroner’s jury had pronounced judgment. Reporters surrounded her. “I never threatened Law,” she said. “True enough, I was fond of him—” Genevieve Forbes, incredulous, cut in. She asked Belva if she was saying she hadn’t menaced Walter Law with a knife.
Belva turned from the Daily News’s hack to the Tribune’s. “Me threaten him with a knife? That’s crazy. He was always a courteous gentleman to me. Why should I ever be angry with him?”
Belva leaned back against the bare cell wall. She’d been surprised at the coroner’s jury’s decision but had recovered quickly. After the inquest ended, she put her shoulders back and strode out of the Wabash Avenue station, an officer on each arm. A pack of reporters followed them over to the jail. Now Katherine Malm, her new cellmate, sat nearby, listening intently, a look of admiration on her face. Belva was the only inmate “dressed up” in the women’s section of the jail. She wouldn’t receive her gray jail uniform, and thus have to give up her stylish outfit, until later in the day. To the Daily News reporter’s eyes, she “was a picture of self-possession, a woman of the world,” especially compared to the Malm girl.
“It gives me an awfully blank feeling to be accused of murdering another woman’s husband,” Belva said. Caught up in defending herself, she hadn’t noticed how the male reporters were drinking her in, but now suddenly she did. She apologized for how she looked. “You see, they have taken away all my powder and makeup and my rings and money, too,” she said.
A stout Italian woman walked past the cell hefting a basket of laundry. Belva glanced up. She knew who the inmate was. Sabella Nitti had been convicted of murdering her husband and sentenced to die. She would be the first woman ever to hang in Illinois. Sabella now awaited an appeal before the state Supreme Court.
“I hope they won’t put me to work,” Belva said, watching the condemned woman disappear around the corner with the laundry. “I hate to work.”
4
Hang Me? That’s a Joke
Katherine Malm, “Kitty” to her friends, was happy to have a new cellmate. When the jail matrons brought Belva in, closely followed by reporters, Kitty made herself useful, squeezing through the crush of bodies to fetch a stale currant bun for her.
Belva tore into the bread with barely an acknowledgment of her attendant. It may have taken her a minute to recognize that this pale, black-haired girl, dressed in the formless striped uniform issued by the jail, was the same young woman who had dominated every front page in the city just two weeks before. Everybody—all of Chicago—knew who Katherine Malm was. Her trial had been a sensation. After the reporters left, Belva looked her cellmate over. Kitty didn’t seem to be anything like how the papers described her. They called her the Wolf Woman and the Tiger Girl, but Belva could see nothing vicious about this small-boned nineteen-year-old, who sat as still as the air and offered a hopeful smile every time Belva looked her way.3
Prosecutors had finally ended the embarrassing string of girl-gunner acquittals in Cook County when they convicted Kitty Malm. The streak had stood at twenty-nine in the summer of 1923 when Sabella Nitti was convicted of murdering her husband, but the newspapers didn’t consider that a true win for the state. Sabella was a poor, rough-looking, middle-aged ethnic woman who spoke almost no English. In the Tribune, Genevieve Forbes derided her as “seamy-faced,” “gibbering,” and a “cruel animal.” Many reporters barely considered her human. Like Negro defendants, Sabella was an easy target for any prosecutor. There was simply no comparison between her case and the trial of a white, American woman. There’d never been a time when it was easy to convict a white woman in Cook County, especially a young white woman. An earlier streak, this one of husband killers, had stretched to thirty-five consecutive acquittals before finally ending in 1919, when a middle-aged Swedish immigrant was found guilty. The acquittals were so consistent, year after year, that a reporter could state baldly that “women can’t be convicted of murder in Cook County.” So Kitty Malm—young and white and at least not unattractive—was the state’s prize catch. She and her man, Otto Malm, had tried to rob a sweater factory back in November and ended up killing a security guard. Otto, who had a long rap sheet, confessed, but not Kitty, who decided to trust in Illinois’ all-male juries. To the state’s attorney’s office, her conviction was public proof that the days of women getting away with murder were finally over.
Belva Gaertner, the well-mannered society divorcée, and the ragamuffin Tiger Girl seemed an odd pair, but their backgrounds actually had a lot in common—more than Belva would ever publicly admit. They both had had emotionally perilous childhoods. At fourteen, Belva found herself dumped at the state orphanage in Normal after her widowed mother slipped into abject poverty. At twelve, Kitty dropped out of the fifth grade to work in a factory, instructed by her mother that there was “no need for girls to go far in school.” They both also had a weakness for men that got them in trouble
. The day after Belva arrived at the jail, Kitty received a divorce summons from her legal husband, Max Baluk. (She’d married Otto Malm illegally after leaving Max.) “Defendant Katherine Baluk, for a considerable time past, has given herself over to adulterous practices, wholly regardless of her marriage vows,” the bill read. It went on to accuse her not just of committing adultery with Otto Malm, but also with “divers [sic] other lewd men, whose names are to your orator unknown.” Kitty understood enough of what she was reading that she burst into tears. She got the gist: Max hated her. This shouldn’t have surprised her—Max had beaten her throughout their relationship, until she took their new baby and fled to a flophouse—but it still hurt to see it written down on paper. Max now claimed that their two-year-old daughter, “Tootsie,” wasn’t his, that Kitty had left him because “she had a good time with another fellow” and got pregnant. Kitty showed the legal document to Belva, and the two women, despite a nearly twenty-year age difference, bonded over their poor treatment by men. “Fellows, always fellows,” Kitty said.
Soon Belva and Kitty were playing cards together in their cell, smiling and laughing for news photographers, Kitty talking endlessly about her travails. The younger woman had just one piece of advice—a warning, really—for Belva: Get ready to hear everyone you know lie about you. That was what happened to her, she said. In November, Otto had told police the truth—that he had killed Edward Lehman, the watchman at the Delson sweater factory on Lincoln Avenue, during the botched robbery attempt. He even admitted he’d accidentally hit Kitty with one of his shots, leaving her with a raw wound on her head where the bullet grazed her. For her part, Kitty, still desperately in love with Otto, went further for her man. To show her devotion to Otto after his confession, and to help him get free of the law, she tried to commit suicide shortly after being arrested, hanging herself with a bedsheet. A jail matron cut her down just as she was starting to turn blue. “You can now tell them that I done the shooting so they will let you go to take care of baby forever, but please quit the racket and raise Tootsie in an honest way for your departing mama’s sake,” she wrote to Otto in a suicide letter. A few days later, Otto discovered he might be executed for murder. He quickly adjusted his memory about what had happened at the Delson factory. Kitty had been shooting too, he now said, and “it was the shot from her gun that killed the watchman; she done it.” Otto sold her out, just like that.
“Men are quitters,” Kitty told Belva in disgust, her lip curling into an ugly sneer. “They’re long on talk, but, Lord, when it comes to the show-down, they’re yellow.”
Even with Otto turning on Kitty, her lawyer, Jay J. McCarthy, had gone into her trial feeling confident. He pointed out to her that Otto was the career criminal, not her, and that Otto had confessed to the Delson shooting, again not her. Plus, Kitty was the young mother of a two-year-old girl, who would sit in court beside her grandmother each day looking adorable and sad. Most important of all, McCarthy reminded his client that Illinois’ all-male juries were averse to punishing women, even when they weren’t young mothers. The lawyer figured Kitty would be free in a couple of days. He was so confident of it that he rejected a prosecution plea offer of fourteen years.
The lawyer’s confidence was contagious. “Hang me? That’s a joke,” Kitty told a group of reporters as jury selection began. “Say, nobody in the world would hang a girl for bein’ in an alley with a guy who pulls a gun and shoots.” The Tribune’s Genevieve Forbes noted how the former waitress sashayed into court as if she didn’t have a care in the world.
She flopped her abundant fur wrap over the back of the chair as if she were making herself comfortable before the feature picture in a motion-picture house started. And the purple silk lining sprawled over the knees of the bailiff behind her, much as it might have swept over another seat in a theater.
Then Kitty took off her hat, a small black straw, in the favored cloche shape, with a bit of lace veil over her large brown eyes. She shook her black bobbed hair, jiggled around in her seat, and settled down to wait, and to read.
That breezy attitude didn’t last long, however. On Thursday, February 21, the trial got under way. The first sign that this one might turn out differently than other girl-gunner cases was the simple fact that the newspapers’ nicknames worked. Everyone wanted to get a look at the dangerous Wolf Woman, the ferocious Tiger Girl. Dozens of men and women assembled in the corridor of the Criminal Courts Building for the trial’s start. When the doors to Judge Walter Steffen’s courtroom opened, the crowd pushed forward, jamming the doorway and blocking the hall outside. The room quickly filled. It’s likely that Maurine Watkins was one of the spectators who squeezed into the packed room. It would have been hard for her to resist going over to the courthouse whenever her work schedule allowed (and it typically did, for she often worked the night shift). She’d started her new career as a police reporter right when one of the most sensational “girl slayer” trials in Chicago history was starting. But Katherine Malm was Genevieve Forbes’s story; Forbes had stayed on top of it ever since the night of November 3, when Lehman, the young watchman at the Delson sweater factory, was shot down. The boy uttered his last words at the Alexian Brothers Hospital that night, with a policeman and a prosecutor leaning over him and Forbes a step behind, a pencil hovering over her notepad. From her first day on the job, Maurine dreamed about getting this kind of story—and worried she never would. How often did a Kitty Malm come along?
With his opening statement, Assistant State’s Attorney Harry Pritzker tried to preempt any ideas Hearst’s sob sisters might have had about presenting Kitty as a victim. “Mrs. Malm is the hardest woman ever to walk into a courtroom,” he said. “The evidence will show that she fired the shots that killed Lehman. We will ask that she receive the heaviest penalty the state can inflict.” Kitty was struggling to keep her attention on this attack when the prosecution brought in a .38 caliber revolver for the jury to see, the one she was supposed to have used to kill the watchman. They placed a holster next to it. Uninterested in the gun, Kitty turned away—and caught sight of Blanche King standing in the back of the room. Kitty, surprised, smiled. She had figured she’d never see her friend again. King started down the courtroom aisle supported by a nurse. Three months before, Kitty had avoided a police dragnet after Otto’s capture and escaped to Indianapolis. That was where she’d met King; they shared a room at a boardinghouse. The two young women hit it off right away. Before returning to Chicago and surrendering in hopes of saving Otto and seeing her daughter, Kitty tearfully said good-bye to Blanche, she thought forever. Pritzker stood up and announced that Miss King, despite ill health, had come from Indianapolis to testify in the interests of justice. Kitty looked at her attorney in confusion.
King was sworn in, and Pritzker asked her how she knew the defendant.
The witness sat up straight. “The twenty-second of last November,” she said, her voice full of pep, her head swiveling to take in the dozens of eyes gazing upon her. “I was boarding at 128 West Walnut Street, in Indianapolis, and the landlord, Victor Capron, took me to the ‘Chicago girl’s room’ and said, ‘Blanche, meet Kitty.’ ”
“Did you ever see the defendant with any guns?” Pritzker asked.
“Yes, two.”
“Where?”
“In my room.”
“Did she have any names for them?”
For a moment King looked as though she were about to laugh. Her heart rate spiked at the excitement. The nurse stood just a couple of steps away. “Yes,” King said, her breath coming in rapid bursts, “ ‘Little Betsy’ and ‘Big Bertha.’ ” She identified the gun on display as “Big Bertha.”
“Tell us about this revolver.”
“She had it strapped around her waist part of the time in that holster.”
“How many times did you see her with it?”
“Every day.”
McCarthy, unprepared for the surprise witness, offered no objections. It was his first murder trial. When the witness was
asked whether the defendant had ever said anything about being on the run, King answered with a happy child’s blurt: “You bet!” She said that Kitty announced to her, “I hate coppers, and I’ll kill any who comes to take me.” The only times Kitty didn’t have her hand on one of her pistols, she added, was “when she was eating, when she was sleeping, and one other time.” King looked to the reporters in the front row, smiling.
Kitty, unbelieving, sat throughout the testimony with her eyes riveted on King. She wanted to scream. She wanted to jump up and yell, “Liar!” but she didn’t. She sat there in shock, her mouth wrenched open. Blanche King, on the other hand, was exuberant. After her testimony ended, she waited around in the hallway until every reporter there had a chance to talk to her. Her nurse stood nearby. Along with a variety of long-standing physical ailments, King also had mental problems.
Assistant State’s Attorney Pritzker no longer had to worry about the Hearst papers. King’s testimony was so dramatic, and so damaging to the defense, that the sob sisters never got a chance to do their work. The reports that splashed across Chicago’s front pages were straightforward, in-your-face crime writing worthy of coverage of the city’s most vicious gangsters.
The Girls of Murder City Page 7