Romance. Wanda actually used that word—and meant it. Even though bohemia had no room for such sentiment. Free booze and food and sex were enough for this lot. She gazed at a girl in green who just moments before had been flinging herself about in a fevered dance, large metallic earrings swinging in rhythm with her body. Wanda turned and stared down a hulking young man, the same one who had climbed onto her kitchen table earlier and belted out a song. It all seemed so stupid now, these people, bohemia, art, New York City.
“I’m going to kill her, do you hear?” Wanda shouted. “Shoot her because she refused to give up the man I love.” She felt herself sweating, a stinging prickle along her brow and under her arms. But it felt good to say it out loud. To acknowledge that she was in love and that there was no hope.
“You talk about life, about freedom,” she continued, her voice hoarse. “You make me tired with your synthetic emotions and your words. God, you’re naïve! You think you’re sophisticated, but you’re just shallow children . . .”
Wanda stopped. She glared at these men and women she’d invited to her apartment. She wasn’t getting through to them. They thought she was giving a performance; that was what you did in the Village. She looked down at herself, as if surprised by her body. She was wearing the best gown she owned, a sleek semibackless dress that teased out the delightful curves in her frame. Her bronze hair shimmered under the light. She had a gorgeous orange shawl wrapped around her shoulders and waist and thighs, setting her alight, a beautiful girl on a pyre. She didn’t know it, but just the day before, Easter Monday, three women accused of killing their men—Belva Gaertner, Beulah Annan, and Sabella Nitti—had appeared in court together in her hometown. They’d created a bit of a happening. If Wanda had stayed in Chicago, if she’d still been working as a court stenographer for the state’s attorney, she’d have witnessed the scene up close. She could have told her brothers and mother about it, enthralled them the way she used to do after spending the day at the library gathering knowledge. Instead she was in a strange city, surrounded by strangers, people whom, just an hour before, she’d been desperate to have like her. Wanda yanked a bracelet off her arm. Then another. “Here,” she called out, “take these to remember me by.”
Her arms were packed with bracelets, her own unique style, and she slid them off one by one and threw them at her guests. Next came her necklaces, tossed to the ceiling. They clinked on the floor, where scrabbling hands quickly scooped them up. Finally she tore off her rings and flicked them away. She stood there in the center of it all, jewel-less and barefoot amid silence. Her guests stared at her, waiting for more.
The moment was broken, inevitably, by a drunkard. The man lurched forward, wrapped Wanda in his arms. “Atta girl, that’s the way to talk,” he said. The two of them swooned, and everything hung there for a few seconds, right on the edge, the grinning lout and the grim-faced hostess staring at each other. Then the room burst into laughter and cheers, and the party jerked haltingly back into motion. A dancer swung past them. The drunk continued to hold Wanda. “But listen, kid,” he said, leaning in close. “When you shoot, shoot straight, because dead ones don’t tell tales.”
Wanda filed the advice away. She stepped from him and walked out of the room. She didn’t return. The party cranked up to full volume again.
Some hours later, alone at last, Wanda took stock. There were overturned chairs, empty bottles, sandwich detritus. Wine blotched the carpet. Wanda slipped her gown off her shoulders and let it drop to the floor. She used to enjoy being naked. It was a sign of her freedom, her maturity. She picked up the phone and put through a long-distance call. When her man came on the line, Wanda said, “I am coming to see you for a final show-down.” He hung up on her. Wanda went into the back of the apartment. She washed, climbed into a clean skirt and blouse, added rouge to her cheeks so she wouldn’t scare any children. She eased a revolver into her bag. Hefting on a coat, she headed out to buy a train ticket to Chicago.
The city was in a panic. News from Palos Park, picked up by radio stations, had spread with surprising rapidity. Reports warned that Wanda Stopa, gun in hand, “had disappeared as quickly and completely as though the earth had opened up and swallowed her.” Towertown, the North Side bohemian enclave near the old water tower, flooded with policemen, both uniformed and plainclothes, all on the lookout for the woman. Police wired descriptions of Wanda and the man driving the cab to authorities across the country. The initial assumption was that the driver was Vladimir “Ted” Glaskoff, who, police had learned, was Wanda’s estranged husband. Wanda had married him two years ago because he promised to take her into the heart of bohemian life, but within weeks, he had left her and skipped town. Glaskoff, who claimed to be a Russian count displaced by the Bolshevik Revolution, got married frequently; it was the easiest way to get the naive girls into bed.
“Spurned Portia Forgets Law,” a Chicago American teaser announced just hours after Wanda had fled Palos Park. The banner headline across the front page read: “Girl Lawyer Shoots at Wife of ‘Friend,’ Kills Old Man.” The paper breathlessly related that “Police squads were sent in pursuit of the Stopa girl’s taxicab and a special detail was sent to guard the offices of the John H. Dunham & Co. advertising agency, room 1916, Wrigley Building, where [Y. Kenley] Smith is employed.”
“What were her thoughts as she strode up the gravel path to his home?” the American wondered. “What drove her there, she, a woman with a law training, who would not be expected to take justice in her hands?”
Less than an hour after the shooting, Kenley Smith walked into the state’s attorney’s office in the Loop and asked for protection. He had been at a dentist’s office when his wife called and warned him that Wanda Stopa was headed his way. “That woman has been after me for two years,” Smith told the prosecutors. “She was disillusioned about my physical attractions. She wanted me to divorce my wife and marry her, and I refused. I was her warm friend.”
Prosecutors quizzed him about the nature of their relationship. Smith said that he had been taken by Wanda’s “amazing intelligence.” He admitted to giving her money and sending her to New York City, adding that he wanted to help “get her away from the ne’er-do-well husband she had married, emotionally.” A year before, Wanda had needed a place to live, and the Smiths’ apartment in the city was available, so he and his wife rented it to her. The Smiths had a history of giving shelter to young artists, including Ernest Hemingway, who was a friend of Kenley’s younger siblings. (Hemingway claimed that Doodles, whom he found repulsive, made sexual advances toward him during his stay at the apartment in 1920.) Grudgingly, as the questions continued, Kenley Smith confessed that, even after Wanda had moved in, he would still sleep at the flat on nights when he had to stay late at the office. “But,” he insisted, “it was all very platonic.” The prosecutors, who knew Wanda from her days as an assistant in the office, expressed surprise, which got Smith’s back up. “Now, get this straight,” he huffed. “I’ll draw you a diagram to show you the living room that separated my room from Miss Stopa’s studio.”
Smith, the papers reported that afternoon, liked to prowl the North Side’s “Bohemia” and had set himself up as Wanda Stopa’s “mentor.” Smith understood the connotations. He continued to deny that he’d had an affair or done anything improper with the girl. “I’m not a bohemian,” he said. “I’m an advertising man.” Wanda was the bohemian, and she was also a “demented girl,” averred Smith. Being an advertising man, he could be convincing. “Miss Stopa, we have learned,” Assistant State’s Attorney Robert McMillan told reporters later in the day, “was a neurotic.”
She was a neurotic with a gun—the best kind for the newspapers. Dozens of reporters, including Maurine Watkins, Genevieve Forbes, and Ione Quinby, fanned out to Wanda’s known haunts to hunt down stories about this latest girl gunner. An Evening American reporter targeted the lawyers and clerks at the Federal Building. The hack found plenty who remembered the young woman from her days as an assistant
for the district attorney. One described Wanda as a “wild little woman.”
“She liked to be bohemian,” the man said, “and she didn’t care who knew it.”
Another man added: “She often would smoke cigarettes while she was taking dictation and seemed to be proud of it.”
Over in Towertown, Wanda’s artist friends appeared to be impressed by their gunslinging comrade’s actions. It was as if Wanda had struck a blow for them against the status quo—a blow Maurine would describe as “a moth singed in the fires of ‘freedom.’ ” Maurine was hardly alone in her derisive tone.
The shooting gave reporters an opportunity to castigate the dilettantes of Chicago’s North Side artists’ community, which modeled itself on the well-known youth subculture in Greenwich Village that had grown up in opposition to the mainstream ethos. Newspaper staffs were predominantly made up of bootstrappers from working-class families; most reporters never had the means to go to college. They viewed the responsibility-free attitudes of the bohemians, often college dropouts financed by indulgent, well-to-do parents, as beneath contempt. The American, under a series of graduation photos of a sweet-looking Wanda, her blue eyes as bright as starbursts even in black-and-white newsprint, pointed out how the pictures “show the Wanda Stopa that was the sincere, ambitious girl student,” before she fell into a rebellious lifestyle. The paper added: “Watch for the pictures of Wanda Stopa—the killer—after she is apprehended and see what ‘dope’ and ‘Bohemia’ have done to this frank, pretty face.”
Every hack covering the story took a dig at Towertown’s young layabouts. “They scoffed at convention and talked about inhibitions,” Quinby said of the community. “They spoke loftily of living their own lives, and phrases of self-conscious daring tumbled from the lips of young flappers asking advice about free love and birth control.” Genevieve Forbes mocked the notion that bohemians were artists, writing, “Anybody could be an artist or poet” in Towertown. “And pretty nearly anybody was.” She added that bohemians “live in tiny rooms, sharing kitchens and baths with other ‘artistic’ tenants. Nobody locks doors, it’s so unfriendly. And trailing kimonos add to the picture.”
Chicago’s police and reporters would have no luck searching for Wanda Stopa among the trailing kimonos of Towertown. Despite walking away from Ernest Woods’s cab before reaching the train station, she did get on a train. As Chicagoans read shocking details about the murder in special editions rushed to press, Wanda was checking into the Hotel Statler in downtown Detroit. She registered as “Mrs. Theodore Glaskow of New York.”
It wasn’t until the next day, Friday, that she was spotted, by a businessman named Eugene Chloupak. The man, in town from Indianapolis, saw Wanda standing at the mail desk in the hotel’s lobby at about noon. He noticed her for the same reason most men did—she was beautiful. But there was also another reason: He’d seen her face in his morning paper. He approached and surreptitiously glanced at the letter in her hand. It was addressed to “Mrs. Inez Stopa”—Harriet Stopa, Wanda’s mother. Folded up in the envelope was about $100 in cash, a Polish government bond, and a $200 insurance policy made out to Harriet Stopa. The letter, in Polish, ended simply, “Matka, droga matka”—Mother, dear mother—in a scratchy scrawl.
Chloupak, of course, only saw the address on the envelope, and that wasn’t quite enough to push him into action. He didn’t know what to do. This petite young woman with the sharply cut cheekbones was a wanted woman. He stood there in the lobby, paralyzed. It must have been hard for him to believe that his newspaper had come to life and was standing right next to him. Finally, Chloupak managed to convince himself she was for real, and he told the hotel’s assistant manager about his find. By then, though, Wanda had posted her letter and walked away.
The police, when they arrived at the hotel, assumed Wanda Stopa—or whomever the man saw—had disappeared into the midday crowds out on the sidewalks. In fact, she went upstairs to Room 1156. There, in her room, she collected her few personal items into an orderly pile on the bed: a dressing gown, cold cream, a comb, her diary. The only accessory she left on her person was a gold band with a sapphire set in a red Buddha. She fetched a glass of water from the bathroom and sat down. She added sugar to the water and mixed it in. She then carefully poured another substance into the glass. She closed her eyes and threw the liquid down her throat before she could change her mind.
At 1:30 Wanda placed a call to the house physician. “I am feeling very sick,” she said quietly. That was all. The doctor could tell from the caller’s voice that the situation was urgent. He arrived at her room just moments later. As the door swung open, Wanda was falling backward onto the bed, unconscious.
11
It’s Terrible, but It’s Better
On Friday afternoon, a coroner’s jury at the city morgue in Chicago announced that Wanda Elaine Stopa had fired a revolver at Henry Manning “with murderous intent.” Kenley Smith stood up slowly as the jurors filed out of the room. Smith had sat in the back during the inquest, pale and nervous, keeping his head down and his eyes peeled. The time and place for the inquest had been publicly announced, and he was convinced that Wanda planned to barge into the room, shoot him, and, in a grand final gesture, shoot herself over his lifeless body. Her failure to appear may have been a blow to his ego, but as he stepped from the room, relief replaced disappointment when a reporter pulled him aside. Wanda Stopa, the hack said, had been found dead in Detroit.
“So Wanda has committed suicide?” the distinguished-looking ad man replied. He ran a hand over the top of his slicked-back hair, to press down any stray strands. “I knew it would come,” he said. “It was her ultimate step. Given that psychopathic temperament, it was inevitable that some emotional crisis would cause her to end her life. It happened to be this one. If not this, it would have been some other.”
The news may not have surprised Smith, but it shocked the rest of the city. Everyone had expected Wanda to take her place among the murderesses of the Cook County Jail. Her crime was the most sensational—and the most heartbreaking—of them all. On top of that, she was so beautiful, maybe even more beautiful than Beulah Annan. This was cause for mourning among the newspaper corps. Now police reporters would never get to crowd around Wanda’s cell for daily interviews. Now they wouldn’t get to fight for seats to her trial. In the Tribune on Saturday, April 26, just two days after Wanda had burst onto the city’s front pages, Genevieve Forbes wrote:
Wanda Stopa, the Polish girl who wanted to “live her own life,” ended everything by taking her own life yesterday afternoon at 1:30 when she swallowed cyanide of potassium in room 1156 at the Hotel Statler, Detroit.
By now news of Wanda’s epilepsy had broken, and that seemed to explain everything. Epilepsy, the Tribune wrote, “is a manifestation of the old motor nerve system, in contrast to the new motor system which obtains in all normal human beings. The old motor system, according to the newest theory, is atavistic and a throw-back in a few individuals to the animal kingdom. On this basis, an epileptic fit is as atavistic a performance, and as far from the human norm, as the Thursday morning murder was atavistic and out of the orbit of the healthy minded individual.”
So that was that. Wanda may have been beautiful and intelligent, but she was also fatally flawed. Her actions were inevitable, predictable. The American—followed by the city’s other newspapers—brought this conclusion home by publishing excerpts from unaddressed letters that police found in the Smiths’ Chicago studio. Wanda’s words were deeply emotional, obsessive, hypnotizing:
“You are the one I need. Oh, Bummy dearest, I miss you so! . . . I am nothing without him, only a lonely, tired soul groping in the world. . . . I do not believe I can bear it much longer. . . . Life for most people is lament. . . . How I would love to throw off all this care and go peacefully to sleep.”
The letters went on and on, with metronomic force, a gold mine for the newspapers, which stretched them out over multiple days. The American published a selection of the ex
cerpts on their own across the top of the front page, over portraits of Wanda Stopa looking young and gay and unbearably innocent. Kenley Smith, now that he no longer had to worry about Wanda leaping out at him from the bushes, talked openly and frequently to reporters. “I feel sure Wanda was morally and emotionally insane, but that intellectually she was sane as it is possible to be,” he said. Later, he insisted that Wanda’s decision to shoot at his wife “was conceived under the influence of narcotics. I feel sure of that, and I feel sure that she wanted and needed money with which to buy more dope.”
With Wanda’s life splayed so awkwardly before the public, the Stopas felt they had no choice but to respond. “My daughter often begged to be allowed to bring Mr. Smith to our home so she could introduce him to us,” said Wanda’s mother, Harriet Stopa. “But I always refused her. I told her this home was sacred and that she could not bring bums in it, for a gray-haired man who makes love to a little girl when he has a wife at home is nothing but a bum. She used to cry and say she wished she could stop thinking about him. She said he was so brilliant, so well educated, he knew so much about the fine side of living, and that he had taught her so much. She used to tell me everything.”
The Girls of Murder City Page 16