The Girls of Murder City

by Douglas Perry

  Before Harry Kalstedt, it had always been the other way around. Boys loved her; she didn’t love them. They stared at her, followed her, told stupid jokes to make her laugh. Perry Stephens was one of those boys. They grew up together in the fields of rural Kentucky, outside Owensboro. He wasn’t afraid to talk to Beulah, like so many of the boys were. She liked it when he walked alongside her after school, chatting and trying to impress her. She and Perry were just teenagers when they slipped over the border into Indiana and got married. Perry had a good job as an apprentice Linotype operator at the Owensboro Inquirer, and he worshipped her, so why not? On her marriage certificate, dated February 11, 1915, she listed her age as nineteen. A year and a half later, she gave birth to a boy. They named the baby after the father.

  The joy of new parenthood didn’t last long. The baby seemed to ratchet up Beulah’s need for attention, and whenever she could, she went out without her son or husband. She dived into an affair, possibly more than one. It didn’t take Perry long to figure out what was going on. Beulah kept his last letter to her. “You have never showed that you are capable of resisting temptation,” he wrote. He told Beulah she should leave Owensboro, for the sake of their son. “There will always be temptations. . . . I love you. We would have been very happy. I don’t think you would make a good mother.”

  Beulah thought about that letter now, all these years later. With tears rolling down her cheeks, she insisted that at heart she was a decent person and a good wife. She should have stayed in the home, she told Ione Quinby, who sat with Beulah in her cell. “If I hadn’t been working, I’d never have met Harry. We were trying, I mean my husband Albert and I, to get ahead. We paid $75 a month rent on our apartment and $75 a month on our furniture. We planned to get a car. Albert makes only $65 a week and we needed money. I love to cook and keep house and go marketing . . .” She stopped and suddenly looked at her questioner in desperation. “Oh, why did I ever take that job? They lie when they say I tried to kiss Harry after . . . after . . . I didn’t. All I did was wash his face.”

  Quinby found Beulah’s demeanor odd. The woman was dreamy and scattered, laughing one moment and then bursting into tears. “She does not seem to completely realize what she has done. Her mind works vagrantly,” the Post reporter observed. Quinby had waited an hour with other reporters that morning while Beulah talked with W. W. O’Brien, who Quinby quipped was “doing his best to engender a touch of cheer” in his client. She knew the lawyer was drilling into Beulah the story she was supposed to give to the press.

  Trying to get back on track after her interview with the Post, Beulah focused on a key theme with the next reporter. “Well, thinking it all over, I think I would rather have been shot myself,” she told the Daily News. “Of course, it all happened so quickly I didn’t have time to think then. Harry had been drinking before he came to the flat, bringing the wine, and he was in a bad temper. I didn’t say anything to him to start a quarrel. He got angry and sprang for the bed. There was a revolver under the pillow. I got it first. If he’d got it he’d have shot me. But I’m sorry now; I think I’d rather it had been me that was killed.”

  To another reporter she said she was ending things with Harry, and that had provoked the fight. “I am just a fool,” she said. “I’d been married to Albert four years. I haven’t any excuse except that Harry came into the Tennant laundry, where I worked as a bookkeeper, and I fell in love with him. I met him last October. He seemed fairly to worship me. Then I found out he had served a term in the penitentiary and all my dreams were broken. He knew I was through and that I had found out he wasn’t worth the cost. I was ashamed of the way I had fooled myself. He knew I was going to quit him and words led to words. We both ran to the bedroom, where a revolver was kept. I got there first.”

  “I had never shot a gun but once, on New Year’s,” she told still another reporter. “Every day I’d pick it up so carefully. I was afraid of it. I don’t know how I happened to hit him. I don’t know.” Apropos of nothing, she sobbed: “It’s Spring today!”

  W. W. O’Brien showed up in the city’s newsrooms shortly before deadline on Saturday, repeating over and over that Beulah would be pleading self-defense and that Harry Kalstedt had spent five years in prison for assaulting a woman. It wasn’t necessary. Beulah may not have always stuck with the rehearsed story, but she’d proven to be a sympathetic interviewee nonetheless. The shame showed on her: It lit her up, coloring her cheeks a deep, invigorating pink, flushing away her guilt. Of course, it could simply have been her flame-colored hair. Redheads held a special place in the typical American male’s fantasies. “Will Her Red Head Vamp the Jury?” the Daily News wondered. To the eyes of many reporters, her gorgeous locks painted everything about and around her a rosy hue.

  “Forty hours of questioning and cogitation has burned the red-hot coals of remorse and repentance into the soul of Beulah May Annan, red-haired beauty who shot and killed Harry Kolstedt [sic], ‘the man whose love was wrecking her life,’ ” the Evening Post blared on its front page. It continued:

  Behind the bars of the county jail, her eyes ringed with deep purple shadows, her hands clasping and unlocking, Mrs. Annan today turned her face to the once whitewashed ceiling and prayed.

  Then:

  “I’d rather be in Harry’s place,” she said. “Rather be dead.”

  Hearst’s American went further still. It made an epic tragedy of the killing—not the tragedy that had befallen Harry Kalstedt and his family, but that of Beulah and her husband. The American’s editors knew what made compelling drama for their working-class readers. This sordid killing was part of a heartrending modern love story. “Beautiful Beulah,” lured into the world of jazz and liquor, had broken her marriage vows, like so many young married women forced by financial necessity to work outside the home. But she was repentant, and she and her husband’s love was battered but not broken. “Stunned—almost to the point of desperation—Albert Annan has experienced the shattering of his finest ideal, the pretty girl from the Blue Grass country that he took for his bride four years ago,” the American wrote. That ideal was now gone, but still Al clung “tenaciously to a certain faith and belief in the vision of the woman whom he had once thought above all others to be deserving of his confidence.”

  Beulah remained a fallen woman in the American’s pages, but now she was a fallen woman who could be saved. “A noose around that white neck with Venus lines—that was the shadow on the white cell wall,” the paper wrote. Such a threat would cure any woman of immoral living—and for a woman as beautiful as Beulah, it seemed to be working after just one night behind bars. “It was morning when the numbness became prickly pain in her fingers. And Beulah Annan, the fifteenth woman held in the jail for killing, slowly began to realize that the mad swirl had brought more than dust in her eyes.” Already she had forsworn alcohol and the jazz lifestyle, the American insisted.

  Maurine Watkins, for her part, was having none of it. She had figured out Beulah Annan right away. Alone among the city’s papers, her inquest story didn’t include any of Beulah’s excuses, sobbing regret, or meandering explanations of self-defense. Alone among the reporters, she wrote that Beulah calmly “played with a piece of paper and softly whistled through it” during damning testimony before the coroner’s jury. “She played again with the paper as the state’s attorney read her confession of intimacy with Kolstedt [sic] on three occasions and laughed lightly as the lawyers quarreled over the questioning.” Maurine also fit in Al’s embittered tirade at the police station Thursday night—“Simply a meal ticket!”—which the other reporters, all male, kept out of print.

  The Tribune’s editors might have expected that Maurine’s refusal to embrace Beulah’s proffered story line would hurt their sales, especially with Hearst’s newspapers pushing the love-triangle melodrama so aggressively. But from the very first day, the Beulah Annan story was so huge it didn’t matter. It was bigger than Kitty Malm and Sabella Nitti combined. It was bigger than Belva Gaertner. I
t was bigger than any of the gangster shootings that usually dominated page one. With Beulah’s dewy, snapped-open eyes staring out from the front page, newspapers sold out from newsstands across the city on Friday and again on Saturday. Men “gazed at photographs of her lovely, wistful face” and reached down into their pockets for coins. Newsboys came back to the loading bays for extra bundles over and over.

  Beulah didn’t seem to notice Maurine’s cynicism. She was too busy reveling in the clamoring attention. It came in wave upon wave. She needed to do nothing but get out of her bunk in the morning and invite the reporters and photographers into her cell. That first day behind bars she received a beautiful red rose from an anonymous admirer. The next day, somebody sent her “a juicy steak, French fried potatoes and cucumber salad.” Letters began to show up at the jail, dozens of them, from men around the country proclaiming their love for her. The story had gone out on the wires and appeared in newspapers everywhere. Belva Gaertner’s trial was scheduled for April 21, just two weeks away, but Thomas Nash, her lead attorney, recognized that the public fascination and sympathy they’d counted on had swung over to the new girl. Nash pushed the trial date back.

  Beulah didn’t worry about provoking any jealousy on the cellblock. She believed she deserved the attention. Hopped up on the press’s and the public’s unwavering interest, Beulah, on her third day in jail, posed with dramatic flair for a news photographer. She clutched the cell’s bars with her little fists, her head tilted back as if awaiting a kiss, wide-open eyes gazing rhapsodically toward the heavens. She’d seen a cinema actress pose like that once.

  9

  Jail School

  The Evening Post announced that April 21, the day after Easter, was “ladies day” in the Criminal Courts Building. The reason: Beulah Annan, Belva Gaertner, and Sabella Nitti were making an appearance before Judge William Lindsay.

  The courts building, two blocks north of the Chicago River, wasn’t anything special. It sulked at the corner of Dearborn and Austin like an emptied fireplug, square and uninspired, with the exception of an understated arched entrance at street level. But the three women didn’t get to come through that lovely entrance like everyone else; they walked across the “bridge of sighs”—an enclosed span facetiously named after the canal crossing in Venice that Byron made famous in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. This bridge connected the courthouse to the jail behind it, allowing for the safe, stress-free transport of prisoners to court. Judge Lindsay’s courtroom was usually sparsely populated with defendants’ family members, but this Monday morning found it packed with reporters and other observers, filling up the benches and spilling out into the marble-floored hall. There hadn’t been this kind of crowd since Kitty Malm’s trial in February.

  Surrounded by deputies, Beulah and Belva swept into the courtroom like exiled royals being returned to power. They knew what to expect. They’d read every line of copy about themselves and seemed to have internalized the coverage. The real reality—the hard jail beds, the daily chores, the skittering vermin, the threat of execution—had been replaced by the newspapers’ reality: the romance of their struggle. They now believed, like the newspapers, in innocent womanhood. They believed that modern life degraded values and that bootlegging was evil.

  Beulah, as expected, received the most attention. The reporters still wanted to know about “Hula Lou.” Had she really danced with her dead lover to her favorite song, holding his heavy, cold head in her hands? The question was insulting, stupid, inevitable. She did love “Hula Lou,” though. The song got in your bones and stayed there. You couldn’t help but smile and move to it. The Broadway star Mae West had been hired to pose for the song’s cover in 1923, and for good reason. West’s signature dance was the shimmy, which she’d picked up during her time in Chicago before the war. She’d discovered the clubs in the black neighborhoods of the South Side, just a few blocks from where Beulah and Al now lived. West had never seen anyone move like those black couples moved. “They got up from the tables, got out to the dance floor, and stood in one spot with hardly any movement of the feet, just shook their shoulders, torsos, breasts and pelvises,” she said after witnessing the dance for the first time and falling in love with its “naked, aching, sensual agony.” Was it the shimmy that Beulah Annan had danced over the dying body of her boyfriend eighteen days before? She wasn’t saying.

  Beulah, Belva, and Sabella, who’d trailed behind, sat on benches and wooden chairs in the courtroom, looking around for recognizable faces, reporters’ faces. Spectators stood in clusters near them and at the back of the room, hoping to get a good look at Beulah’s pleasing ankles when she stepped up in front of the judge. The scene was something new and strange. Mae West wasn’t a Broadway star anymore. She’d been relegated to a minor-league vaudeville circuit after a string of rapid-fire setbacks and right now was in Texas, appearing fourth on the bill, one slot below “Marcel and his Trained Seal.” Beulah Annan, a complete unknown just three weeks ago, an assistant bookkeeper at a laundry, was a bigger star. Love and understanding shone down on her. “I think in most cases where a man is shot by a woman, he has it coming to him,” one fan told a reporter. Many like-minded men were in the courtroom supporting the beautiful young woman whose lover had it coming. No one seemed to blame Beulah for her predicament. “A woman has to be pretty bad to be as bad as the best men,” a café owner said. Maurine Watkins, witnessing this response to Beulah, decided that, for women, Chicago was “the ideal locale for getting away with murder.” She would floridly reference Beulah’s looks over and over in her articles as a snide dig at the limitations of the male mind and predominant mores.

  As the three women waited, a dour family, the Montanas, stepped before the judge. Five people—three generations of the family—stood accused of killing a policeman during a liquor raid on their home. Normally, a cop killing was page-one news, but the reporters paid little attention to the clan. Photographers surrounded Beulah, Belva, and Sabella and asked them to pose together. They were directed to sit behind a long wooden table, next to each other but fanned out just so—Belva, then Beulah, and finally Sabella.

  The women had come prepared. Belva wore a black Easter bonnet with blue chinstrap ribbons streaming down her back, a blue suit, and a summer fur around her neck. A small smile wormed across her lips as the camera caught her. Beulah, in the center, was as composed as President Coolidge, the famously stoic “Silent Cal” who’d replaced the late Warren Harding last fall. She wore a more modern hat than Belva, which certainly pleased her (though she didn’t let her pleasure show). She was decked out in a fawn-colored suit and, like Belva, had a light fur lying over her shoulder like a napping pet, its snout nuzzling happily in her collar. While Belva and Beulah attempted to strike dignified poses—the poses of proper women rudely detained against their will—Sabella, the third wheel, beamed like a child. She couldn’t help herself. It was a good day. She wasn’t going to be hanged today. A week after standing before the state Supreme Court, she was now seeking bail.

  Men and women had stared as Sabella Nitti entered the courtroom right behind Belva and Beulah. There was no way to know if it was in admiration of the company she was keeping or in disgust that a convicted murderess might soon be set free. Belva and Beulah were in court to ask that their cases be held on call. Their respective lawyers had other cases to complete. But Sabella had already had her day in court. Chicagoans, fed a diet of news stories over the past nine months that characterized Sabella as “dirty,” “repulsive,” and “animal-like,” found themselves conflicted about the Italian woman’s fate. Sabella had never received the kind of coverage her two companions enjoyed. Even when indicating their likely guilt, reporters lauded Beulah and Belva for their beauty and bearing, attributes that opened the door to the possibility of innocence. Not so Sabella. No reporter ever entertained the thought that she might be innocent. After a four-day trial in the summer of 1923, she was convicted by a jury of twelve respectable men and sentenced to die.

 
Yet “ladies day” at the court belonged to Sabella Nitti anyway. “Beulah has been told she’s beautiful. Belva knows she’s stylish,” pointed out the Tribune. “Sabelle is neither—and she’s happy.”7

  It was so unlikely, and yet it was true. Sabella Nitti walked into the courthouse with her two more glamorous cellmates, and she felt as if she were walking on clouds. Her joy expressed itself in her dress as well as her attitude. During her trial, she went to court in the rags she’d been wearing when arrested, the makeshift clothing of a poor farm woman. She looked worn, old, pathetic. Today, following Belva and Beulah, Sabella stepped before Judge Lindsay in a tailored black dress, her hair professionally curled, and with a small gray hat fixed to the top of her head. The transformation was amazing—and completely unexpected. It may have saved her life.

  The person most responsible for Sabella Nitti’s makeover was a twenty-three-year-old attorney who had recently set up her own practice because no law firm would hire her. Nine months before Sabella made her bravura Easter Monday court appearance, Helen Cirese had walked into the women’s section of the Cook County Jail for the first time to meet her new client. The steel door closed behind her, and the wheel handle turned and then caught with an echoing thuck. She stared, mesmerized, at the two rows of cramped, ill-lit cells, one on each side of her, and at the cracked cement floor that rolled into a shimmering nothingness. Before “stylish” Belva Gaertner, before “beautiful” Beulah Annan, Cirese made an impression on the reporters who trawled the downtown jail for news. Tall and slender, she wore a white blouse under a long, thin vest that was pinned to her hips by a belt. A large feathered cloche sat low against her brow, giving her face a childlike cast. She was a dear sight standing there, nervous, holding her bag in front of her. Her photo appeared in the Tribune the next day, and she cut it out and saved it.