The Girls of Murder City

by Douglas Perry

  Wanda’s twenty-two-year-old brother, Henry, his face blasted into a stony mask, tried to find something positive in his sister’s decision to take her own life. He loved her deeply, and so he’d rather see her dead than have her become one of those women on Murderess’ Row being paraded out for the public’s titillation. “Yes, it’s better to be dead than to be added to that list of women held for murder over at the county jail,” he said. “It’s terrible, but it’s better. The thing had to end tragically, and this was the best of the ways.”

  The train station was cloaked in low fog and a persistent rain when Wanda Stopa’s body arrived in Chicago early on Sunday morning. Ione Quinby and Maurine Watkins stood in a group with other reporters, waiting for something to happen as the casket, encased in a pine box, was lowered onto the platform. But nothing did. The Stopas apparently had misunderstood the arrangements and expected the body to be delivered to the family home, not just to the station. Men and women climbed down from the passenger cars, popped open umbrellas, and quickly departed. The conductor hustled from the train to the station house and back again. The platform emptied out—except for the reporters. It was a sad sight, the cheap pine box sitting out in the elements, slowly being soaked by rain, no one going near it. Finally, the train screeched back into motion and pulled away as the reporters continued to wait. When it became clear no one was coming to claim the body, railroad staff carried the box to the street and loaded it onto a wagon, bound for a holding pen somewhere, but the reporters flagged down the driver before he could pull the wagon out into the street. They pooled their money to have the casket delivered to its proper destination.

  As the reporters were haggling with the wagon driver, people began to arrive at the Stopa family’s third-floor walk-up at 1505 Augusta Street. It was mostly people from the neighborhood: old men who’d known her father; Wanda’s childhood friends, some of them toting children; her brothers’ work colleagues and schoolmates. Once the casket arrived at the flat and was properly arranged in the front parlor, mourners and reporters lined up before it. They offered condolences to the family and peered down at the dead girl, whose face glowed under two huge candles that flickered at the head and foot of the casket. The apartment was filled with flowers, including a floral basket from the Kent College of Law—even though Kent wasn’t Wanda’s alma mater9—and one from “the boys at the district attorney’s office.” The somber scene moved Maurine. She was more understanding of Wanda, so much like Maurine in her love for home and her need to leave it, than she ever could be of Belva or Beulah. The reporter remained impassive as she watched, but later in the day she would carve out a carefully composed report, elegiac without being sentimental:

  And Wanda came home at last.

  “Bohemian freedom,” morphine and love, murder, suicide, and then—back in the Little Poland she had deserted for Chicago’s Bohemia; back with the mother and brothers she had left for a glamorous “count” who married her, and for a business man who didn’t; back with the friends “a thousand years behind the times” she had forsaken for others “who speak my language and understand.”

  Maurine, pinned in by a long, meandering queue that filled the stairway to the apartment, had to wait for hours before filing her story. The family expected the mourners to be gone by early afternoon, but at noon the line stretched down the block like a picket of soldiers. Wanda’s mother and two brothers expressed surprise at seeing unfamiliar faces coming up the stairs, but they accepted that Wanda had known many people they’d never met. Some hours later, though, the line outside, inexplicably, had grown longer still. The small parlor filled beyond capacity, until the carpet was soaked and pictures on the walls knocked askew. The family realized these were not Wanda’s friends. The viewing had become something that had nothing to do with mourning the death of a young woman. The newspapers, with their breathless coverage of Wanda and the shooting, had brought out hundreds of thrill seekers. “All day they came in steady streams; strangers, laughing and chewing gum, curious to see Chicago’s latest, youngest, ‘brainiest’ murderess,” Quinby observed. She, Maurine, and other reporters worked the line just inside the parlor, taking notes, asking for reactions. Looking down on the dead girl, Quinby noted “an expression of supreme triumph on her beautifully molded face. Knowing the legal penalty for murder, which she had woven in the emotional pattern of her brief explorative life, she had made her exit with a finesse that made her appear more a figure of fiction than fact.”

  The procession of Chicagoans outside the Stopa home seemed to be in agreement with the reporter’s sentiment. They had come to see the denouement of a cinema story. Inching up the stairs and through the parlor, the citizens of the city debated the life they had fervently read about over the past four days, feeling as if they were intimates of the young woman they’d never met. “The true story,” one said, “will never be known. Smith made love to her, promised to marry her, grew tired and cast her off; her heart didn’t mend in four months and she came back—”

  Someone interrupted. “Not to kill Smith but to shoot herself in his presence.”

  She was “naive as a child,” offered another.

  Hour after hour, people came through the apartment and gazed down on Wanda smiling in death in her mother’s parlor, the murky room lighted only by the holy candles. The church had refused to provide services, someone from the neighborhood whispered. “Wanda would not mind,” came the reply, in tempered disapproval, “for she gave up the church, too, in her quest for ‘freedom.’ ”

  Late in the day, Maurine worked up the nerve to approach Harriet Stopa. “She wanted to spare us the agony of a long trial, the disgrace of a sentence and perhaps years of suffering,” Mrs. Stopa told Maurine quietly as they stood next to the body. “When she realized what she had done—that she had committed murder—when she came to her senses—”

  Harriet Stopa, stoic through the gum snappers and the gigglers and the old women who looked at her with despairing righteousness, at last could stand no more. Maurine had nudged her over the edge. Mrs. Stopa sat, put her head to her lap and sobbed: “My poor little girl! My poor little girl!”

  And still, the line outside grew. It seemed to be self-replicating, a single, inexhaustible organism marching forward. Here and there, the crowd broke off into individuals who, impatient, rushed around the building and up the back staircase, only to find the rear door locked. They put their shoulders into the door—bang!—in case it was just stuck, startling family members on the other side. Around the front, tempers began to flare. The banister on the tight stairway leading to the apartment rocked against the pressure of dozens of hands and arms. Policemen walking their beat in the afternoon recognized the potential for trouble and called in for help. “At 8 o’clock,” wrote Maurine, “5,000 persons swarmed in front of the building at 1505 Augusta Street, and squads of policemen were sweating in the business of maintaining order. Ten abreast, the ‘mourners’ were packed in a line that was two blocks long.”

  Two hours later, the Stopas called the police in desperation. They feared the officers on the scene were being overwhelmed by the mob. Central Station told them reinforcements already had been dispatched. Soon, thirty fresh policemen arrived and rushed forward as a human wall, swinging their clubs. The crowd gasped and fell back. “There were screams, laughter, a few curses,” Maurine related. “Two women were clubbed by the police. For a time it seemed that the crowd would win out, and a call was sent in to the fire department. The [fire wagon] arrived just as the throng began to disperse.”

  The Stopas wouldn’t get much of a respite. The funeral was two days later, and it would be even worse than the viewing. The curious began showing up shortly after dawn on Tuesday. The newspapers, with their lurid descriptions of Little Poland disintegrating into chaos over the weekend, convinced thousands more people to make the trek out to the Northwest Side to see what all the excitement was about. Men and women settled in for a siege—or for a picnic. They wouldn’t be disappointed.

>   “Battle Crowds at Wanda Rites!” screamed the front page of the American, in huge type that dwarfed the newspaper’s nameplate. The battle was still raging when the edition rolled off the presses that afternoon. In the morning, Maurine had headed back out to the Stopa residence for another round of interviews, but this time it wouldn’t be so easy to get in. She found her progress blocked by more than “10,000 morbid sensation seekers” who had congregated on and around Augusta Street to see Wanda’s body taken to Bohemian National Cemetery.

  Maurine wasn’t exaggerating: There were thousands of people pressing in on the small apartment building. This was group madness, a sight so incredible, it stayed with the reporter for years. The crowd rolled and bucked outside the building, spilling out of Augusta Street into Ashland Avenue. A phalanx of policemen and firemen walled off some of the adjacent streets in a vain effort to keep the throng contained. Peanut vendors skirted the periphery of the crowd, quickly selling off their product and squeezing out of the crush to race off and restock. Maurine was thunderstruck at how, in death, everybody seemed to love Wanda Stopa. It no longer mattered that the woman had shot and killed an innocent man; it mattered only that her beautiful face and mournful words appeared above the fold of every newspaper in the city. The problem wasn’t so much public attitudes toward crime, she decided, “but in the fact that no one considers the crime.” She recognized the same moral blindness coloring public opinion toward Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, two murderesses who remained very much alive.

  Ione Quinby, also back for another day of exhaustive Wanda coverage, found it impossible to fight her way through the mob. Everyone wanted to be right in front of the building when the body was brought out, keeping the Post reporter from getting near the entrance. “The only path I found was through the alley at the back, and entrance from this passage to the house was to be effected only by scaling a brick wall five feet high,” she later remembered.

  Getting around the crowd and over the wall—not an easy climb in a tight ankle-length skirt—was only the first challenge Quinby faced. She now had to bring out her acting skills. After the sick voyeurism on display at the viewing, the Stopas weren’t letting anyone in but family and close friends; they placed their largest men at the doors to block anyone else from entering. The men had been given instructions to turn back, preferably with a thump to the head, any artist from Towertown or other interloper who dared make an appearance. Thinking on her feet, Quinby hid her notebook and insisted to the door-minder that she was a friend of Wanda’s from law school. The man hesitated just long enough for Quinby to duck inside and run up the stairs to the apartment. Her hopes for an exclusive were short-lived, though, for when Quinby stepped into the Stopa parlor again, she found that Maurine Watkins also had somehow managed to get in.

  The Catholic Church had indeed refused to send a priest, so a Baptist minister, the Reverend John Frydryk, conducted a brief service in the house. Frydryk preached his sermon in Polish, but Maurine, always interested in the word of God, took pains to write some of it down and get it translated. The minister took John 11:21 as his text: “Lord, if Thou hadst been here, my brother had not died!” The small group of mourners did their best to concentrate on the minister’s quiet, solemn words and to ignore the “sensation seekers” leaning over balconies and fire escapes in reckless attempts to peer into the Stopa living room.

  When Frydryk finished, the pallbearers—six of Wanda’s childhood friends—stepped forward. As they began to walk carefully toward the stairs with the coffin, the front door was opened and the tumult outside rushed forward in ear-popping screams and titters. Grasping hands assaulted all of the pallbearers as they stepped down the stairs. The people outside began to shift in response to the casket’s arrival, some moving toward it, others trying to inch away to give it room. Bodies ground together like tectonic plates. A grotesque sound burbled up, a collective gasp and squeak, the unnatural expulsions wrought by body upon body slamming together unnaturally, necks twisting and bobbing to the point of muscle breakdown. A detail of policemen pushed through the crowd to the white hearse idling at the curb, clearing a path for the pallbearers. Most of the people fell back, but some resisted, their torsos contorted in their effort to get closer, seemingly on the verge of the kind of fit that Wanda Stopa was now famous for.

  Right behind the coffin, Mrs. Stopa and her sons and then the rest of the family marched darkly into the maw. The Reverend Frydryk handed Quinby a wreath of flowers with instructions to take it to the hearse. “I did,” the reporter later said, “forcing my way along the front of the house, but on the way two women snatched several of the roses, mementoes, I suppose, to be pressed in their scrapbooks. Another tried to rip off one of the tulle ribbons and gave me an angry shove when I tore it out of her grasp.” The reporter was relieved when she reached the hearse, her responsibility fulfilled. “It was a funeral that would have interested Wanda; an Augusta Street rid of its inhibitions,” she said.

  With great effort, the hearse pulled away from the curb and left behind the crowds and the peanut vendors and the police cordon. The family undoubtedly thought the worst of it was finally over, but at the cemetery they discovered another five thousand Chicagoans waiting. Mrs. Stopa and her sons, Henry and Walter, gaped at the sight of still more people blocking their way. Standing at the gravesite, they tried to disregard the crowds through extreme concentration on their grief. They kept their heads down and held on to one another, just trying to get through the day. Henry was the first to break. Wanda’s brother, just a year younger than his dead sister, had expressed rage in the past four days but produced no tears. Now the tears came, violently, uncontrollably. He collapsed onto the coffin and pushed away everyone who tried to help him back on his feet.

  Edward T. Lee, dean of the John Marshall Law School and Wanda’s mentor before she disappeared into bohemia, offered some last words before the coffin was lowered into the earth. He had come to testify, he said, “to her lovely character, her brilliant mind, her eager pursuit of her studies, her lofty and noble ambition.”

  Sobbing punctuated this expression of Wanda Stopa’s lost potential. Dean Lee described the murder as a “great misfortune” but added that Wanda was now relieved of the burden of what she’d done. “The law has been fulfilled: it cannot follow the dead,” he said. “The moral guilt is beyond our power to judge—Christ only could speak on such occasion and he would say: ‘Let him that is without sin cast the first stone.’ ” Maurine wrote down the professor’s heavenly invocation, obviously concerned with Wanda’s journey ahead in the afterlife.

  After Lee had finished, there was nothing left to say. The only sounds now were “Nearer, My God, to Thee” being played quietly from somewhere behind the family and the soft clop of dirt being dropped down onto the casket—until a child interrupted the somber moment, exclaiming something to his mother. That was when Walter Stopa broke. Harriet Stopa’s seventeen-year-old son slapped the child, suddenly and ruthlessly. The boy’s mother, a woman named Anna Konpke, objected. “Mrs. Stopa’s nerves gave way” then, Maurine related, “and she promptly gave the mother three blows, breaking her eyeglasses.”

  The woman and her child were rushed away from the gravesite to a nearby open area, where reporters descended on them. Mrs. Konpke didn’t know who the Stopas were or anything about Wanda Stopa, she said. She had come to the cemetery to visit her son’s grave and noticed the teeming mob rolling like a wave across the grounds. Curiosity, she said, got the best of her—“ just like all the rest of them.”

  12

  What Fooled Everybody

  William Gaertner came to see his Belva almost every day at the jail. He assured her everything was going to turn out fine. After all, she had arguably the best defense attorney in Chicago and without question the best connected. Thomas Nash, a former alderman, represented the city’s biggest names. Three years ago, he had helped secure acquittals in the “Black Sox” World Series game-fixing trial—and everyone knew those boys were guil
ty.

  By the second week of May, however, even Nash’s reputation wasn’t enough to make Belva feel better. She’d had the start of her trial postponed back in April when Beulah Annan was taking up all the air. Now her new date loomed, and the mood at the Cook County Jail had only gotten worse. On May 7, a jury convicted Elizabeth Unkafer of killing her lover and sentenced her to life in prison. Lizzie was a loon; she’d said she committed the murder because it was God’s will. Still, she continued a distressing trend. Over the past two months, Cook County’s all-male juries inexplicably had become unafraid of convicting women. Before Lizzie Unkafer, Mary Wezenak was convicted of manslaughter for serving poisonous whiskey. Before “Moonshine Mary,” Kitty Malm was sent “over the road.” Before Kitty, Sabella Nitti had started it all last summer.

  More distressing still was the similarity between Belva’s case and Unkafer’s. Maurine Watkins had noticed and, right after Unkafer’s conviction, asked about it. Belva told the reporter there was no comparison between the two cases, not that her protestation did any good. She opened the paper the next morning and saw that Maurine had written it up in her own weird little way, as always.

  Of the four awaiting trial, the cases of Mrs. Annan and Mrs. Belva Gaertner would seem most similar to Elizabeth Unkafer’s; each is accused of shooting a man, not her husband, with whom her relations were at least questioned: each is supposed to be a “woman scorned” who shot the man “rather than lose him.” But neither was at all disconcerted by Mrs. Unkafer’s sentence.