The Girls of Murder City

by Douglas Perry

  “I told him I would shoot,” she said in a whisper. “He kept coming toward me anyway, so there was nothing else for me to do but shoot him.”

  “In the back?” one of the officers asked.

  Beulah didn’t seem to hear him. She stood still, a tuning fork whanging in her head. Then she bent slightly at the knees, and her head tipped back, as if she were taking a drink after a long trek through the desert. She dropped—a dead-away faint. No one caught her.

  Conscious thought—perception of the world—began to return. There were men in her apartment—she could hear them talking. Some seemed to be talking to her. Beulah looked through a doorway and saw shoes—polished shoes, gleaming in the light from the kitchen.

  Assistant State’s Attorney Roy Woods introduced himself. “Don’t you know me?” he asked, hovering over her.

  Beulah realized she looked a mess: her cheeks splotchy from crying, her nose red, breasts like crashed dirigibles. “No,” she said.

  “I am Roy C. Woods.” He added that he knew Mr. Wilcox and was a customer of Tennant’s Laundry.

  Mr. Wilcox? This man knew Harry’s brother-in-law? Had he come into the laundry when she was cashiering? Her confusion must have shown on her face, for Woods told her not to be afraid. You shot a man, an intruder, he said. Was that correct?

  Beulah liked the sound of that. It was no crime to shoot a trespasser in your own home. She peered up at Mr. Woods. He was still wearing his coat and hat. Could they “frame it” to look like an accident? she asked.

  Woods took a step back, shocked. The woman was hysterical. That was obvious. Still. “You don’t ‘frame’ anything with me,” he told her.

  Albert Allen, the stenographer there to record what was said by witnesses and possible suspects, asked her why she had done it. Beulah turned to him, her eyes pleading. Her body shook, tears dripped down her face again. She said she didn’t know why.

  She put her face in her hands and, for the first time in her life, wished all the men would go away.

  7

  A Modern Salome

  Al Annan couldn’t keep control of his emotions anymore. “I’ve been a sucker, that’s all! Simply a meal ticket!” He held his head, clutched at it. What had happened that afternoon, and what it meant, had finally sunk in. He was distraught. “I’ve worked ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day and took home every cent of my money,” he raged in the Hyde Park police station. “We’d bought our furniture for the little apartment on time and it was all paid off but a hundred dollars. I thought she was happy. I didn’t know . . .”

  Maurine Watkins, there at the station with a handful of other reporters, wrote down what Al said to the police officers, to the walls, to himself, but she apparently didn’t approach him for an interview. Such naked emotion from a man may have unnerved or embarrassed her. The Daily Journal’s reporter stepped up to Al and asked a question. Al turned to him suddenly, as if jerking awake. “I guess I was too slow for her,” he replied. “I don’t get any kick out of cabarets, dancing and rotten liquor. I like quiet home life. Beulah wanted excitement all the time.”

  At some point, the hacks left Al and walked down the corridor to the small matron’s room where women suspects were held. Beulah sat alone, a guard near the door. The reporters introduced themselves to Chicago’s latest girl gunner.

  This one wasn’t at all like Belva Gaertner, or even Kitty Malm—Maurine could tell that right away. The young, slender woman, with “wide blue eyes and a halo of auburn curls, freshly marcelled,” wore an open, light-colored coat over a low-cut nightdress, the curve of a nearly naked breast heaving tantalizingly in full view. Beulah sat before the reporters without shame, seemingly oblivious to her disrobement. She tilted her head slightly, and a wan, buttery smile spread over her lips.5

  She launched into her story. “He came into my apartment this afternoon and made himself at home,” she said. “Although I scarcely knew him, he tried to make me love him. I told him I would shoot. He kept coming anyway, and I—I did shoot him.” Beulah looked longingly at her audience, tears stippling the corners of her eyes. “I didn’t know—I didn’t realize—I—I . . .” She stopped, collected herself. I had to do it, she finally said. I didn’t have a choice.

  The reporters didn’t believe the woman’s story any more than her husband did. Neither did the police, but getting her to break wasn’t as easy as they’d expected. She said the same thing over and over: Harry Kalstedt was advancing on her, and when he wouldn’t stop, she shot to “save her honor.” Finally, late in the evening, after most of the reporters had called in their stories, Captain Edward Murname, along with assistant state’s attorneys Bert Cronson and William McLaughlin, took her back to the apartment so she could change clothes. Then they walked her through the events of the afternoon again, step-by-step. They pounded her with questions, made her look at the blood pooled in the corner, where Harry had lain for hours, and asked her to point out what had happened where.

  Why, they asked, were there wine bottles and empty glasses if she didn’t know Harry Kalstedt or invite him in? Why was he shot in the back if he had rushed at her? Why had she waited for hours after the shooting before calling police?

  Beulah couldn’t stand it. Reliving it again, right there in the apartment where it happened, was too much. She began to sob as it all came back to her. Harry’s voice hung in the air: “My God, you’ve shot me!” he’d called out when she pulled the trigger. It wasn’t the grunt of pain that was so horrifying. It was the shock in his voice at the realization that she would do such a thing, that she would actually shoot him. Because he loved her. He really loved her. Beulah had realized that as soon as she’d shot, and she tried to take it back. “No, you’re all right—you’re not shot,” she said, as Harry twisted, reached out for nothing, and fell against the wall.

  “You are right, I haven’t been telling the truth,” Beulah told the three men, not even trying to control the sobbing anymore. “I’d been fooling around with Harry for two months. This morning, as soon as my husband left for work, Harry called me up. I told him I wouldn’t be home, but he came over anyway. We sat in the flat for quite a time, drinking. Then I said in a joking way that I was going to quit him. He said he was through with me and began to put on his coat. When I saw he meant what he said, my mind went into a whirl and I shot him. Then I started playing the record. I was nervous, you see.”

  Beulah said she sat next to Harry on the floor and washed his face and kissed him. After the shooting, she became “distracted and started to cry. I was afraid the neighbors would hear me. So I put on the record and took Harry in my arms, and cried and cried.” In time she was cried out, which led her back to the phonograph. “I went to it and started it over again. I couldn’t stand the quiet.” She danced mindlessly and tried not to cry and didn’t look at Harry anymore. After a couple of hours, she realized she had to do something about him, so she decided to call her husband. “I kept calling numbers but I couldn’t seem to remember his,” she said. A voice over the line, unbidden, told her to try directory assistance. She finally got Al on the phone and told him to come home.

  Beulah was worn out. They took a break, and then the prosecutors and the police captain made her go over it again, as if for the first time. She had calmed down by this late hour; she seemed to have settled something in her mind.

  “How much did you drink?” they asked her.

  “Half a gallon.”

  “The two of you?”

  “Yes. We had an argument.”

  “What about?”

  Al wasn’t at the apartment with them—Beulah had no idea where he was—so she told the men everything about Harry. They’d been intimate, she and Harry Kalstedt. She loved him, but she had begun to realize that he didn’t deserve it, that he didn’t really care for her. She said she had tried to make Harry jealous by pretending there was another man she was running around with.

  “Did he say anything to you about your having done things that you shouldn’t?” her in
quisitors asked.

  “Oh, yes, and I said to him: ‘Well, you’re nothing!’ ”

  “Did you call him anything?”

  “Yes.” Beulah told them what she’d said, seemingly unembarrassed to admit to the use of coarse language.

  “What did he say then?”

  “He jumped up.” He was angry, Beulah said. She could tell that. She and Harry both looked toward the bedroom. He saw Al’s gun in there. Al usually kept it under the pillow, but it was in plain sight now.

  “Then you say he jumped up?” Murname prompted her.

  “I was ahead of him,” Beulah said. “I grabbed for the gun.”

  “And what did he grab for?”

  “For what was left—nothing.”

  “Did he get his coat and hat?”

  “No, he didn’t get that far.”

  “Why didn’t he get that far?”

  “Darned good reason.”

  “What was it?”

  “I shot him.”

  Murname, Cronson, and McLaughlin seemed content all at once, and Beulah clearly didn’t know why. It wasn’t because she was giving them “come-on eyes,” though she was, just out of habit. It was because she had all but put a noose around her neck. Beulah sighed. She probably wouldn’t have cared even if she’d understood their smiles. There was some kind of protective shield around her. The anger was gone; so was the fear. For the moment she was at peace.

  The four of them headed back to the station, the three men quietly exuberant. They had her. Sabella Nitti and Katherine Malm had proved that women, finally, weren’t safe in front of juries anymore, and now they had a pretty one to go along with the society lady, Belva Gaertner. Cronson and McLaughlin were going to bust the idea that you couldn’t convict a beautiful woman in Cook County. Back at the station, flush with pride at securing a confession, they told the Daily News reporter that Beulah Annan was a “modern Salome.”

  By this point, Beulah could barely keep her eyes open, but still she wanted to talk. The late-night interview at the apartment, which would come to be known as the Midnight Confession, had somehow freed her. Now she had a lot to say. She wanted to tell everybody about what she’d been through with Harry Kalstedt.

  “Harry was my greatest love, and rather than see him leave me, I killed him,” she told the police matron looking after her at the station. A tear rolled down her cheek as the matron led her to a holding cell. She looked at her jailers, a marked woman but defiant.

  “I am glad I did it,” she said. “It ended an affair that was wrecking my life.”

  The next day, Friday, all of the newspapers hit hard.

  “Mrs. Beulah Annan, termed by her questioners ‘a modern Salome,’ sat quietly this morning in the matron’s room at the South Clark Street police station,” wrote the Daily News. She “greeted visitors with an imperturbable glance from under long lashes drooping over half-closed eyes. . . . Out of her eyes had gone every trace of the fire that must have illuminated them yesterday, when, she told Roy Woods, assistant state’s attorney, she danced to the tune of jazz records a passionate death dance with the body of the man she had shot and killed.”

  Now there was a gruesome image. A beautiful young vixen, swaying to a jazz beat with her dead lover in her arms, “raising the head of the victim and implanting kisses on his cold lips.”

  It wasn’t quite true, but it was too good to pass up. The Journal and the Post offered similar “death dance” scenes, with Beulah lost in a traumatized “whirl.” In the Tribune, Maurine wrote that the popular ditty “Hula Lou” was “the death song of Harry Kolstedt [sic], 29 years old, of 808 East 49th street, whom Mrs. Annan shot because he had terminated their little wine party by announcing that he was through with her.” She added mischievously that after playing the Hawaiian song over and over, Beulah then “began to wonder about her husband. What would he say when he came home and found a dead man lying in his bedroom?”

  The American, however, topped them all by moving beyond the jazz theme. It borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe for an operatic re-creation of the guilt-filled hours that passed between the shooting and Beulah calling her husband:

  Laughter—a woman’s laughter from the apartment across the way—mocked her. The clock, ticking steadily—stolidly—sternly, took on a voice that said:

  “Mur-der, mur-der, mur-der, mur-der, mur . . .”

  The phonograph had run down. The woman rose. Anything—anything but that clock. Ah!—6

  The story that went out on the Universal Press wire—and got picked up by newspapers across the country—was just as compelling, if not quite as fanciful.

  CHICAGO—A grotesque dance over the body of the man she killed was described by Mrs. Beulah Annan, pretty 24-year-old slayer of Harry Kalstedt, of Minneapolis. Mrs. Annan admitted shooting Kalstedt Thursday night when, piqued by her attempt to rouse his jealousy, he threatened to leave her.

  “I tantalized him with a story of an imaginary lover, to see what he would do,” said Mrs. Annan. “When he reached for his overcoat to leave, I shot him. I was in a mad ecstasy, after I saw him drop to the floor. I was glad that I had killed him.”

  In the afternoon, Beulah met her attorneys and prepared to go before a coroner’s jury. William Scott Stewart and his partner, W. W. O’Brien, had come on the case that morning, with some reluctance. The two lawyers always fretted about getting stiffed for the bill. Sometimes it seemed that running down payment from clients took as much time as trying cases. Stewart, at the age of thirty-four, and O’Brien, a decade older, demanded cash up front, though for the right client, they still accepted partial payment, along with an acceptable explanation for how the rest would be raised. Al Annan didn’t have an acceptable explanation—no wealthy family members, no significant assets he could liquidate. But after seeing Beulah Annan’s picture in the morning papers, Stewart and O’Brien decided to make an exception. They took the case.

  Like many criminal defense attorneys, Stewart and O’Brien initially made their reputations as prosecutors. Stewart’s name was better. He was so successful with murder cases during his time as an assistant state’s attorney that he became known as the hanging prosecutor. The first high-profile prosecution he handled was the Carl Wanderer case in 1920. Wanderer was a veteran of the World War and an upstanding citizen. He worked hard and never smoked, drank, or gambled. Then a “raggedy stranger” jumped him and his pregnant wife, Ruth, when they were coming home one night. The man shot Ruth, and he would have shot Wanderer, but the former soldier knew how to handle himself. The raggedy stranger ended up dead. “I got him, honey. I got him,” the newspapers quoted Wanderer as saying while his wife lay dying in his arms. Except he likely said no such thing. He was too busy making sure his wife was dead. In the days that followed, as the papers hailed him as a gallant and tragic hero, the police tracked the gun the stranger had used, an army-issue Colt .45, to Wanderer’s cousin. Soon the hero cracked, admitting he’d grown tired of his wife and had enlisted the help of a bum in a scheme to kill her. “I didn’t want her anymore,” Wanderer said of his wife. “I killed her so no one else would have her.” The papers understandably turned on him and elevated Stewart as a replacement hero. The prosecution earned banner headlines. So did the hanging, when Wanderer, goaded by a reporter who said he enjoyed the condemned man’s singing voice, eased into the chorus of his favorite song, “Old Pal,” just before the trap door was hatched.

  Stewart may have been expert at gaining convictions, but he had no trouble making the switch to defense work; in fact, he felt more comfortable with it. Lanky, with a long, rawboned face, the lawyer looked like a man you could trust, a valuable attribute when representing men (and women) accused of heinous crimes. His commitment to professionalism, as he defined it, was absolute. Devotedly married and the father of a young son, he prided himself on being a reliable man on the darkest of days, believing he was saving lives, like a doctor. He prepared for each court appearance, no matter how trifling, as if his career depended on it. The g
raduate of Chicago’s undistinguished John Marshall Law School viewed his success as a lawyer, and his growing acceptance as an intellectual force in the community, as inevitable. “I am a great believer in original construction,” he liked to say. “We are born with bones and muscles, a certain physical equipment, plus a mental power which might be called the motor, with a fairly fixed horsepower. This horsepower is called intelligence. It may be improved a little by mental exercise, but no school or study can give brains.”

  Stewart’s partner in private practice would never have the standing—or perhaps the mental horsepower—that Stewart did. W. W. O’Brien graduated from the University of Notre Dame’s law school in 1900, but he didn’t feel called to the bar. Instead, he worked as a theatrical promoter for twelve years, “making three or four hundred dollars a week.” He eventually came back to the law through politics. He proved to be an effective campaigner for Democratic mayor Carter Harrison Jr., which led to a patronage job in the city’s Corporation Counsel’s office. After a brief stint with the state’s attorney, he felt confident in setting up his own defense practice.

  Unlike Stewart, who loved the law and his own intellect above all else, O’Brien’s paramount interest was women. He married a performer, Louise Dolly, in 1905 and divorced her twelve years later after cheating on her with numerous women. As soon as the divorce was finalized, he married a woman named Margaret Meehan, but that union was annulled within a year. In 1922, he married a third time—a beautiful nurse, Zoe Patrick. O’Brien succeeded in court for the same reason he succeeded with women. He was fun. He loved the theatricality of trial work. He aspired to be the next Charles Erbstein, the flamboyant Chicago defense attorney who had defended twenty-two women accused of murder and saw each one acquitted. (The same Charles Erbstein who represented Belva Gaertner in her 1920 divorce.) Erbstein’s legal career was winding down by the early 1920s, and in many ways the always entertaining O’Brien was the ideal successor. There was just one problem: a strong scent of corruption trailed him. In 1922, two assistant state’s attorneys accused him of trying to bribe them on behalf of a client, the pickpocket “Lucky Chubby” Lardner. O’Brien faced disbarment hearings but held on to his license. A year later, he stared down another bribery accusation.