The Girls of Murder City

by Douglas Perry

  Maurine was joking—but she was also right. For just that reason, a spirit of sisterhood now prevailed among the inmates. The women, “all man-killers,” wrote one New York newspaper, had become “Chicago’s most picturesque group.” Belva offered fashion tips and gave comportment lessons to girls who were about to go before judge and jury. She was “a good stage manager,” Forbes wrote. “When the girl in cell No. 4 was informed that her trial would be the following Tuesday, Belva gave her some really good ideas on costuming, coiffure and general chic. It helped the girl in No. 4, and it whiled away otherwise lonely hours for Belva, with the ‘clothes sense.’ ”

  It was too good to last, of course. Three days after Sabella, Belva, and Beulah walked over to the courthouse together, the Evening Post splashed a headline in massive 96-point type across its front page:

  LOVE-FOILED GIRL SEEKS MAN’S LIFE; KILLS CARETAKER

  BEAUTIFUL EX-DEPUTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY SLAYS AN OUTSIDER IN DEATH STALK FOR AD MAN

  All of the city’s newspapers had similar front-page headlines that Thursday afternoon. Unwilling to be trumped on a guaranteed newsstand seller, the morning papers cranked out special evening bulletins about this latest “beautiful girl slayer,” a young Polish lawyer named Wanda Stopa. Only an hour after the unfortunate caretaker fell, with the girl still on the loose, “bankers, professional and laboring men, and even housewives were reading descriptions of the murderess,” Ione Quinby recalled. The story was an instant sensation, the excitement heightened by the fact that the drama was ongoing, with a massive police search that “for morbid interest and mystery held the attention of the public as no other murder hunt had done in years.”

  The mood at the jail changed at once. The recent camaraderie in the women’s quarters had surprised the guards, who were accustomed to frequent arguments and even physical fights among their charges. The atmosphere had been remarkably placid and supportive for weeks, but there was an unmistakable pecking order underpinning it, with Belva and Beulah at the top and Sabella in her own special category. Now the leading ladies suddenly felt threatened. On April 24, the newspapers only had one subject, page after page, photograph after photograph: the breathtaking love-foiled girl. The jail matrons weren’t at all sure that cellblock harmony could withstand a new beautiful woman on Murderess’ Row.

  Part II

  THE GIRLS OF MURDER CITY

  “And that hat—ah, that hat!” rhapsodized Maurine Watkins in the Chicago Tribune. Belva Gaertner, the “most stylish” of Murderess’ Row, appears in court for all the world to see. (Her white-maned attorney, Thomas D. Nash, sits beside her.)

  CHICAGO DAILY NEWS NEGATIVES COLLECTION, DN-0077649, CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM

  10

  The Love-Foiled Girl

  Thursday, April 24, 1924

  The smoke pulsed like a bleeding sore. It oozed slowly over rooftops and dripped from trees, squeezing out the morning light and leaving only a suffocating gloom. Visitors to the city described it as “a dense atmosphere,” a “sinister power.” They spoke of its aggressive nature, how it swept “across and about them in gusts and swirls, now dropping and now lifting again its grimy curtain.”

  Chicagoans called the problem the “smoke horror.” It was the result of more than fifty years of unfettered industrial development that had put mammoth factories and small manufacturing concerns on almost every block, each belching a vicious cloud of toxins into the air. Everybody complained about it. Chicago had become too cultured and prosperous, civic leaders said, for “this stew of steel and smoke” hanging over everything. Each election season, the mayor and the city council promised to act on the issue. Yet even now, the smoke did still have its purposes. For twenty-three-year-old Wanda Elaine Stopa, the sooty miasma was the perfect attendant for her return to the city. At about seven on Thursday morning, Wanda decamped from a train at the Illinois Central depot on Twelfth Street, stepping back onto Chicago soil for the first time in four months. Carrying only a shoulder bag, she materialized out of the mist and headed for the curb, looking for a taxi. She wore a blue serge suit, a light scarf, and a dark hat. Despite the smoke and her conservative dress, she failed to go completely unnoticed. This was inevitable: She was a striking girl, just an inch over five feet tall, with pronounced Slavic cheekbones and glowing blue eyes, eyes the color of the sky, way up above the city’s black shroud.

  A line of cars idled at the taxi stand out front. Ignoring etiquette, Wanda bypassed the cab at the front and approached one near the back of the queue. It was an old Cadillac without license plates—a rogue cab, someone just trying to make a few extra dollars. She asked the car’s driver, an older man wearing a black cap and a long black coat, if he would drive her to Palos Park. The man, Ernest Woods, said he imagined he could find the way. After some haggling, Wanda agreed to pay $4 an hour, then climbed into the back. Woods eased out of the taxi line and pulled onto Fifty-fifth Street. At Western Avenue, he turned south, and then at 111th he swung west and headed out of the city. The car picked up speed. It rumbled along on the new slab for mile after mile, the tires moaning like an old woman. From time to time, Woods would glance in the rearview mirror. His client seemed to find the drive soothing: She stared as if being pulled toward sleep, her head bobbing on a long, graceful neck, hair swinging like a curtain. She kept her eyes cast down at her knees. After nearly twenty miles, the car turned into bucolic Palos Park. The road narrowed to a single lane. Mature oaks soared into the sky, interlaced at their bases by rustic fences.

  Wanda had sat in silence the entire way from the train station, the window shade fastened in the back, but she did not find the drive soothing. The last time she had been in Chicago, life was unbearable, a constant black agony. The memories swirled like ghosts. “Got up in a cold, lonely room, dressed at seven, went over to breakfast. Alone, all alone with a dreadful sinking in the center,” she had written to her man. “. . . Grandest, dearest, are you coming back this week? Come if you can. Don’t leave your babe too long.” But it had been too long. Months had passed with barely a word from the man Wanda Stopa loved.

  With his passenger lost in thought, Woods stopped the car so he could find a telephone book and look up the address for the name she’d given him. Wanda didn’t respond when the driver told her why he was stopping. Minutes later, the cab jolted down Palos Park’s main street and then pulled in at the little post office. Woods got out of the car and walked over to Harriet Scoffield, who lived next to the post office. The elderly woman was raking leaves and had kneeled on the lawn to check on some flowers. Woods bent down to her. He whispered, “Do you know where the Y. Kenley Smiths live?” The woman pointed down the street and told him to go around the corner. Eighty-ninth Avenue and 123rd Street. As Woods disappeared back into the car, Scoffield climbed to her feet, dusted herself off, and ambled toward the post office. This being a small town, she had to pass along any new information. “There’s company come to your house,” she told Henry Manning, the Smith’s live-in handyman, who happened to be at the mail slot in front of the building. Manning’s eyes popped. He jerked his head around to scan the road just as the Cadillac disappeared from sight. He bolted from the post office, bounding across the neighboring lawn toward the Smith cottage.

  At 8:30, the taxi approached the house, which was set far back from the street in a small alcove cut out of the surrounding woods. Wanda told the driver to stop the car near the end of the driveway. He must turn the machine around and be ready to go, she said, because she had to catch a train and time was short. She gave Woods a $10 bill and told him she’d be right back.

  Wanda, pretty and demure in her blue serge suit, walked up the long, winding drive and knocked on the front door. When it opened, she asked politely for Mr. Smith. The maid said he was not at home, causing Wanda’s eyes to narrow into slits. She bulled past the maid and into the house. She found Mrs. Smith—Vieva Dawley Smith, known to friends as Doodles—in bed, where she was recovering from the flu. Mrs. Smith didn’t seem surprised to se
e Wanda.

  That was when Manning arrived, panting furiously. The handyman was sixty-eight years old and unaccustomed to running. Catching his breath, he tried to position himself in the bedroom doorway, between Smith and the younger woman. He told Wanda that Mrs. Smith was ill and asked her to go into the kitchen. Wanda shook her head slowly. “Right here is good enough for me,” she said. Manning continued to try to coax her out of the bedroom, but she ignored him.

  “Are you going to divorce your husband so I can have him?” she screamed at Kenley Smith’s wife, tears bubbling at the corners of her eyes.

  “Of course not,” Mrs. Smith replied.

  Wanda couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “How am I going to live?” she bellowed. “Who’s going to take care of me?”

  Doodles had never had much patience for Wanda Stopa, not nearly as much as her husband. “You’re a lawyer,” she snapped. “Why don’t you go to work?”

  Wanda was a lawyer, but that wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear. She pulled out a .38 caliber revolver and aimed it at the haughty woman propped up in bed. Manning, trying to stutter out a word, backed toward Smith and stretched out his arms. He urged Wanda to calm down, but it was too late for that. Wanda believed she could thread the needle—or more likely she only saw Kenley’s wife, her tormenter, even with Henry Manning standing right in front of her. Wanda pulled the trigger and the gun issued a massive bang. Smith ducked under the sheets, an instinctive response unbecoming a woman of her intelligence, but when she heard Manning’s body hit the floor, her brain kicked in. She heaved herself up, sprinted for the open window, and—with two more explosions rocking the bedroom—leaped headfirst into the yard. Rolling, she realized Wanda had missed with both shots. She got up, the broken window screen around her neck, and ran.

  A moment later, Wanda appeared at the front door and charged down the path. She looked around for Smith but couldn’t locate her. “I’ll get you yet,” she shouted, “and I’m going downtown now to get your husband.”

  Wanda walked down the drive, climbed into the backseat of the Cadillac, and told Woods to take her back to the train station. Woods started the car. He didn’t notice anything to alarm him; the girl didn’t seem nervous or agitated. He would claim later he was partially deaf and so heard no shots and suspected nothing. The car pulled out onto the road and headed back toward Chicago.

  Once again, they drove in silence, but Wanda’s mind roiled. She needed to calm down; she didn’t want to have a seizure. Wanda had had epileptic fits ever since she was a child. She and her family kept the seizures quiet, for such attacks were widely believed to be a sign of insanity. The stress of the secret weighed on her constantly. She never told anyone, not even her closest friends. Not even Kenley. A mile or so before the station, she insisted Woods pull the cab over. Her train wasn’t leaving for another hour, she told the driver. She would get out here and visit friends in the neighborhood.

  “Live your own life!”

  Wanda Stopa, having just marched into the room on unstable legs, barely got the words out. The party roared on.

  “Are you listening?” she asked. She rose up on her toes. Wanda—her new friends called her by her “more sophisticated” middle name, Elaine—waited. The party stuttered. Dancers slowed up, expelling air. The intellectuals, huddled together on the couch, squinted over their cigarettes. Wanda leaned in, confiding now. “Tomorrow, I’m leaving here for Chicago and when I arrive I’m going to kill a woman—perhaps a man. But anyhow a woman. I’m going to kill her, do you hear?”

  They heard. By now the neckers had disengaged and wiped their mouths, the girls adjusting themselves on their boyfriends’ laps. Wine was quietly swallowed and glasses put down. The music from the phonograph scratched abruptly to nothing. The best party all year in Greenwich Village had taken an unexpected turn.

  Wanda clenched her fists at her sides and pivoted on tiny feet. She had made the decision: She was going back to Chicago, for the first time in four months, to face him. Her white skin tingled. She had been a perfect hostess until now. After all, these were the friends who excited her, the kind of smart, challenging, free people who for most of her twenty-three years she couldn’t imagine really existed. She could be her own person here, utterly removed from the suffocating expectations forced on women in Chicago’s Little Poland. Wanda had been busy during her short time in New York, meeting fellow bohemians, attracting attention at every stop on her exploration of the Village, an enchanted world so much truer, better, than the “sham Bohemia” she’d left in Chicago.

  Wanda was a natural in Greenwich Village. For starters, she looked exquisite in artists’ rags, somehow both hungry and ripe as she scuffed down slick, dirty streets, going nowhere in particular. She luxuriated in the area’s damp, nonelectrified ateliers, never bothered by old-fashioned plumbing or cockroaches or the lumps of candle wax that congealed on the floor. Her only flaw—and make no mistake, it was a doozy—was her determined refusal of all sexual advances. She was hung up on a man.

  It didn’t seem to matter that the man, Mr. Yeremya Kenley Smith of Chicago and Palos Park, Illinois, a thirty-seven-year-old advertising executive and self-described patron of the arts, didn’t return her ardor. Encouraging Kenley to leave his wife, Wanda had written to him that, when he did, “Once a week I will go to your little house, put it in order, bring your laundry, which I will have sent, look over your clothes and mend as may be necessary, and replace them in their proper drawers. . . . At no time during the week except on Saturday, when I shall change your linen and clean house for you, will I intrude on you. I promise, however, to hold myself in readiness to come to you whenever you may wish me, outside of working hours. You may have me when you want me.”

  That letter would have disappointed her new friends if they’d known about it. They were all “Feminists” in New York City. They believed in equality, in free love, in the destruction of all traditions. They believed that marriage was “just a scrap of paper.” Wanda had to write desperate letters to Kenley; she couldn’t help it. But the groveling disappointed her, too. It was exactly how a lovesick girl from Little Poland was expected to act. So she sent her man a box of poisoned candy. He didn’t eat it, though, and neither did his wife. And still she couldn’t stop writing to him. “When I get you back I am never going to leave you go,” she wrote. And: “Your absence is so looming and dark that it takes all my interest in other things away.”

  None of this—this quivering, childish dependence—made sense, not coming from Wanda. Any girl except Wanda. This was the girl that friends in Chicago called “The Light” and “The Fire,” and those names weren’t a joke—not to her group of admirers. Wanda Elaine Stopa was that brilliant. Boy, could she talk! About cubism and Freud and sex—and the future, the beautiful future. In conversational flight, Wanda’s whole body practically vibrated with excitement. Her eyes jumped, her right hand slapped the arm of the chair or the top of the table. She smiled—suddenly, brilliantly—at the apex of a peroration, her whole being blooming when she saw she’d made an impact on her audience. She’d even reach out and squeeze your knee, encouraging you, physically guiding you over to her point of view. This “pleasing little wisp of a girl” surely would have made a great lawyer, a groundbreaker for her sex, if she’d stuck with it. She’d been the first “girl lawyer” ever to work for the state’s attorney and the U.S. district attorney in Chicago. One of her law professors said he’d never had a student of greater promise. Her career, for a woman, was limitless.

  But those were just words now. Her family regretted ever sending her to law school and out into the world. The last time Wanda was back home, on Augusta Street in Little Poland, her widowed mother noticed how pale and thin she had become, how her hand shook when she held a fork. Mrs. Stopa knew what was going on. Even on Augusta Street they had heard about narcotics. Wanda didn’t deny it, didn’t even want to. “Oh, mother, it’s such a good feeling,” she said.

  Besides, dope helped her survive wit
hout Kenley; it helped her plot how to get him for her very own. She knew she wasn’t supposed to care about such things, about trapping a man and tending to his every need. Wanda hated Augusta Street, the squat women in boudoir caps sitting on the stoops, trudging to market and back, always with mewling babies in their arms. The men who looked at their wives with dead stares every evening, exhausted by their lives, completely unthinking and uncommunicative. Wanda shivered at the thought of them. It was an instinctive hatred, a restlessness that she had no ability to control. That was why she had studied so hard—to avoid the same fate as all those girls she grew up with. That was why she went to law school, time and again the only girl in a classroom full of boys. That was why Kenley Smith’s exhortations for the unconventional life, real life, resonated. That was why she went to bed with him.

  She never recovered. Their night together blasted the precepts of free love to pieces, right there. Wanda’s bohemian attitudes, to her own horror, had been exposed as a hoax. She had never truly felt free among the artists of Chicago’s North Side, she realized. The discovery sent her into a hopeless spiral. At first Kenley responded to her constant letters seeking reassurance and love. “I looked in the shop windows today for something you would like but I didn’t see anything,” he wrote in one missive. “One hat was possible, but how could I confirm it without the little Polish bean to check up by? Polka, I hope you have been a little easier these last few days. I pray that I may yet be the springboard from which you dive into the lake of song, laughter and happiness.” But soon Kenley was backpedaling, then running for the hills. “Oh, Toots, I love you, I love you, I love you,” Wanda wrote to him. “I know you dislike to have me write things on paper, but I do not seem to be able to discuss things with you any more without becoming excessively emotional. . . . I feel that my attachment for you is becoming a sort of millstone around your neck; that you never intended it to reach the hectic stage it has. But I am intensely romantic and you are Romance to me!”