W. W. Wilcox, Kalstedt’s brother-in-law, who worked at Tennant’s Laundry and was present in the apartment when Woods questioned Beulah in the kitchen, testified that the defendant had not been coerced to give a statement the night of the shooting. Nor, he said, was she promised immunity. “However, she tried to get it. She asked Woods if he couldn’t ‘frame’ it to look like an accident, and Woods said, ‘You don’t frame anything with me.’ ” Wilcox then put the dagger in, insisting that Beulah had frequently smiled and seemed calm and flirtatious while talking to Woods and the police, with Kalstedt still lying in a bloody pool on the floor. (The American headlined one of its trial stories in that afternoon’s paper, “First Witness in Kalstedt Slaying Says Annan Girl Tried Beauty on Prosecutor.”)
On cross-examination, O’Brien returned to the dead man’s prison record.
“He was in the St. Cloud reformatory,” Wilcox answered.
“For what reason?”
“Wife desertion,” Wilcox said.
O’Brien was doing his best, but the prosecution had come out hard and strong. The evidence continued to pile up against Beulah. Sergeant Malachi Murphy of the Hyde Park station told of arriving outside the Annan’s apartment building at eight on the night of the shooting and hearing music—the song “Hula Lou”—blaring from inside the flat. A bloodstained phonograph record was then admitted into evidence. Betty Bergman, Beulah’s boss, took the stand and related the phone conversation she’d had with the defendant when Beulah called the Tennant Laundry office on the afternoon of April 3. Beulah had asked for “Moo”—Kalstedt—and sounded “stewed.” Bergman told her he wasn’t there, and then Beulah asked for “Billy”—W. W. Wilcox, Kalstedt’s brother-in-law. When Bergman said he wasn’t in the office either, Beulah rang off.
Assistant State’s Attorney McLaughlin repeated the time that Bergman said Beulah had called: 4:10 in the afternoon. The jury gaped—McLaughlin made sure they understood that at the time Beulah called Betty Bergman, Kalstedt was spread out on the floor in her apartment, dying.
Court stenographer Albert Allen stepped up to the stand “to read his notes.” Allen was present when Beulah explained what happened that afternoon, he testified. He said she had claimed to be surprised when Kalstedt came into the apartment, because she barely knew him. He read Beulah’s words from his notes: “ ‘Don’t come in,’ I warned him, but as he came on I shot. He sank to the floor, crying, ‘Oh, Anne, you’ve killed me.’ I must have fainted then, for I don’t remember what happened. When I recovered my senses I saw blood stains on my gown.” The statement ended with Beulah’s denial that she’d shot Kalstedt in the back. Allen said the defendant had made the statements “voluntarily, understanding that they might be used against her in court.” He insisted that Woods had never promised her leniency or immunity in exchange for a confession.
Court was still in session when reporters for the evening papers rushed out to file their stories. Large front-page slots were being held for their accounts. As Beulah’s trial began, coverage of her shifted, to one degree or another, from romantic melodrama to more straightforward news reporting. The papers laid out the day’s events in court and, if generally sympathetic to the defense, left overt opinion to the side.
The Tribune, however, continued to lean hard on its unique slant. Maurine recognized that her satirical sense of humor had made her pieces about Beulah stand out from the competition, but that wasn’t why she continued to prick the defendant. “In news articles, you are not allowed to write editorials—to my everlasting regret, because I have a preacher’s mind,” she would tell an interviewer two years after Beulah’s trial. It was a nice line, but in practice Maurine never paid attention to such professional dictates. That “preacher’s mind” was very much in evidence right from the beginning of her reporting career, and her editors never seemed bothered by it. When writing about Beulah in particular, her articles took on the flavor of indictments. She was convinced of Beulah’s guilt and wanted to do whatever she could to effect the right verdict. Her report from the first day of the trial was a case in point: a masterpiece of concise, clearly articulated rhetoric, significantly more powerful than what William McLaughlin had come up with for his opening statement to the jury. “ ‘Beautiful’ Beulah Annan’s chance for freedom was lessened yesterday,” Maurine began, “when Judge Lindsay ruled, after an extended hearing, that the confessions she had made to the police the night following the murder of Harry Kalstedt, April 3, were admissible as evidence.”
“I’m the only witness,” Beulah has boasted, “Harry’s dead and they’ll have to believe my story.”
But which one?
The confession she made to Assistant State’s Attorney Roy C. Woods (with a court reporter present) in her apartment at 9 o’clock the night of the crime, when she said that she shot Kalstedt, whom she barely knew, to save her honor as he approached her in attack?
Or the statement that she made at the Hyde Park police station (also with court reporters present) three hours later? Then she broke down and admitted that she shot him in the back. The man was about to leave her after a jealous quarrel, she said. Will the jury believe that?
Or will the jury credit the story that she’ll tell in court, a plea of self-defense: “We both grabbed for the revolver!”—when she takes the stand today?
No one who read the Tribune on Saturday morning, no matter how fetching the photograph spread across the front page (and the picture of Beulah was fetching indeed), could have come away with any doubt about which story to believe. The defendant, Maurine Watkins made clear, was guilty as sin.
14
Anne, You Have Killed Me
Beulah Annan, her hands and clothes spattered with blood, spun the record on the phonograph again, moved to the open window, and squinted out at the afternoon sun. The music hopped behind her:
Her name was Hula Lou, the kind of gal who never could be true. Got a Hula smile, and lots of Hula hair. She Hula Hulas here and Hula Hulas there.
Beulah’s hips twitched. It was an infectious song. Outside, on the sidewalk in front of the building, a group of schoolgirls held hands and twirled each other to the music, their giggles echoing through the adjacent alley. Inside, Beulah did the same on her own.
Except Beulah wasn’t giggling. She was thinking about Harry—or to be more accurate, she was forgetting about him. His face was already fading away: the dark eyes becoming an amorphous mass, the slicked-back hair parting on its own and falling away, the snapping white teeth leaching into nothingness. It was as though she’d never known him at all or he was a figment of her imagination. Maybe he was.
“Did you shoot this man, Harry Kalstedt?” William Scott Stewart asked.
Beulah’s eyes popped, as if the lawyer had startled her. Settling again into her seat, she glanced at Stewart from under fluttering lashes and took a deep breath. She responded slowly, “in a low, silvery voice,” drawing out each syllable. “I did,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because he was going to shoot me.”
It had begun. Chicagoans had been waiting for this moment for weeks. Not just Chicagoans, in fact. Reports on Sabella Nitti’s and Kitty Malm’s trials had gone out on the news wires, but they’d received limited exposure outside the city. Beulah Annan, “the prettiest slayer of Murderess’ Row,” on the other hand, had caught the fancy of editors and readers throughout the country. Her face had become front-page fodder in New York and California and dozens of places in between. Some papers, such as the Atlanta Constitution, sent reporters to Chicago for the trial. National newsreel companies had also come to town, setting up their cameras and lights in the back of the courtroom. “The case of Beulah Annan is one of the most remarkable ever to win the interest of an eager public,” stated the Washington Post.
No city was nearly so obsessed as Chicago, of course. No detail about Beulah—her dress, her facial expressions, what she listened to on the radio in her cell—was too picayune to be put down in print. So her
ascension to the stand on Saturday, May 24, the trial’s second day, was cause for massive coverage, with large front-page photographs and the opening up of two-page spreads inside for blow-by-blow accounts of Beulah telling her tale to her attorney and then squaring off with the prosecutor. The American wrote that “Annan had carefully prepared for her ordeal. She was becomingly gowned in another new dress of blue twill that gave her an extremely girlish appearance, and she wore peach-colored stockings to match her Titian hair.”
Beulah looked perfect for the part of innocent victim. Her dress had been chosen only after dozens had been tried on and rejected. It was a conservative dress, but its light fabric softly gripped her chest and hips, giving the jurymen the slightest, but undeniable, suggestion of the sweet hollows that lay beneath, the innocent sexuality that Harry Kalstedt had wanted so badly to corrupt. Assistant State’s Attorney McLaughlin may have been heartened by Beulah’s nervousness the previous day, when the jury wasn’t even in the room, but paradoxically so was Stewart. O’Brien and Stewart had prepped their client well, and now she just had to remember what to say, nothing else. Trembling was allowed, perhaps encouraged. “All you have to do is to tell the truth,” was Stewart’s advice for any defendant with a naturally sympathetic countenance. “A child can tell the truth about something he knows and the child does not need to know anything about courts or the rules of evidence. . . . So I’m not going to try to explain rules of evidence to you; no use bothering you with them. The jury will understand your lack of knowledge on the subject and they will sympathize with your nervousness.”
The value of this advice, needless to say, depended on what the truth was—or what the witness wanted it to be. Maurine Watkins, who had heard all of Beulah’s confessions and statements over the weeks, had made up her mind about the truth and Beulah’s relationship to it. She knew what to expect. The reporter wrote, “Under the glare of motion picture lights—a news weekly—Beulah took the stand. In another new dress—navy twill tied at the side with a childlike moiré bow—with new necklace of crystal and jet, she made her debut as an actress.”
But how could Beulah not have viewed it as a performance? As Maurine noted, she stepped up to the stand with movie cameras grinding. Their lights, dangling from poles in the back of the courtroom, provided a golden spotlight right in the middle of the witness chair. Beulah had observed the setting up of the cameras with frank interest, understanding that it meant her visage would soon flicker in theatrical newsreels across the country. That was an audience of 40 million people each week. But this massive national attention was an abstract concept; the people here right now were very real. Court fans—Beulah fans—had begun arriving at the courthouse two hours before the doors opened and rushed for seats as soon as they were allowed inside. A large crowd didn’t make it into Judge Lindsay’s courtroom; bailiffs had to force the doors shut after the room filled past capacity. The lucky ones who did get in sat on windowsills and stood on benches. Unable to see from the back, young women, throwing propriety aside, asked to be boosted up by strange men. The crowd was so primed that Beulah’s appearance in the bright white circle elicited a collective gasp. Necks strained. Men elbowed each other. Was she as beautiful as the papers said? Was she even more beautiful? Beulah, so enamored of attention, for a moment was overwhelmed “and seemed to shrink back in her chair as a [camera] flashlight went off with a bang. Then she clenched her hands and turned her eyes toward her attorney, William Scott Stewart.”
Stewart gave his client a good, hard, long look before he said anything. He knew she needed to come back down to earth. They had specific goals for this testimony. The state was trying to convince the jury that Beulah and Kalstedt had been lovers and that Kalstedt had not been a threat to her that terrible day, inferences that McLaughlin insisted were evident by the fact that Kalstedt was shot in the back. Along with knocking down those allegations, Beulah had to successfully deflect the prosecutorial value of her confessions on the night of the shooting: She had to force the prosecutors to face the defense allegation that they had unfairly tormented her while she was in a state of grief and shock.
Stewart opened with some easy questions: He asked her name, her age, where she lived prior to her arrest, whether she lived there with her husband. Maurine, well on her way to becoming a court expert, knew what the defense was doing: “First a series of colorless fact questions—where did you live, what schools did you attend, etc.—that gives the witness confidence in herself, and accustoms the listeners to her simple, straightforward manner. Then a series of questions to establish her general character. And from these we learn—and so do the jury—that she is no butterfly, but an old-fashioned girl who never smokes, seldom dances and drinks but little—her pet diversions, the prosecution would have us believe, being misconduct and murder.”
Maurine may have been fashioning flippant comments in her head, but the other spectators massed behind the lawyers’ tables treated the beginning of the testimony with due reverence. “Save for the grinding of the cameras, the courtroom was intensely silent,” wrote the Evening Post. “Beulah’s husband, Albert, sat with bowed head near Mrs. Mary Neel, the defendant’s mother.” The Daily News noted that Beulah “hesitated, eyes downcast, her cheeks delicately flushed. There wasn’t a breath in the courtroom.”
Stewart asked Beulah what had happened that led to the shooting. Beulah focused on her lawyer as he was talking and then lifted her chin to take in the packed room. “Stately and with a calmness that astounded all observers,” the Daily Journal’s reporter wrote, she began to tell her story in a “clear, firm voice.” The voice was soft and sweet, her Southern accent as fluffy as black-seed cotton.
She said that Harry Kalstedt, her coworker at Tennant’s Laundry, knocked on the back screen door in the morning. “I opened the inner door and there he stood. He seemed to be intoxicated. He came in and said to me: ‘I hate to do this, but I need money. I have to get some wine.’ I said to him: ‘How much do you need?’ He said: ‘Six dollars.’ I said: ‘I can’t let you have that much; I haven’t got it.’ He said: ‘How much have you got?’ and I went into the bedroom for my pocketbook.” Beulah paused to swallow audibly and then added that she gave Kalstedt a dollar and he left.
Stewart asked if she saw him later in the day.
“Yes. At 2 or a quarter after.”
As Beulah was answering this simple question, the movie-camera lights suddenly snapped off, returning the defendant to the dull overhead lighting that was for everyone else. “The witness seemed to lose their stimulating effect,” an observer noted. Beulah sat there, stunned, as if she’d been insulted. Stewart took a step back, to give his client time to come to terms with what had just happened with the lights. After a moment, he moved in again. He skipped right to the part he knew the jurors wanted to hear most.
“What was said before you jumped off the couch where you were sitting with him in the afternoon?” he asked.
“I had been after him to go, saying, ‘Please leave,’ and finally I said I was going to call my husband.” Beulah was laying on the accent thicker than ever now. “He said, ‘No, you are not,’ and I said, ‘If my husband came in here now he would kill you or both of us.’ He said, ‘Where is the ------ gun?’ [Beulah apparently used an expletive, which was recorded with dashes] and we both moved for the bedroom.”
“Had you been in the bedroom before, that afternoon?”
“No.”
“Was the bed visible from the hall?”
“Yes.”
“Tell what happened.”
“We were almost at the bed. He grabbed for the gun, and I jerked the gun away. He said: ‘Damn you, I’ll kill you,’ or something like that.”
“Did he make any move then, at the time?”
“He came toward me with his hand up.”
“What did you do?”
“I pushed his right shoulder with my left hand”—she said this with deliberate authority, knowing the importance of explaining away the fact
that Kalstedt was shot in the back. She continued: “He raised his hand to grab the gun and I shot him.”
Stewart asked what his condition was before she shot.
“He was very much intoxicated.”
“Did you gather you were in danger of receiving bodily harm?”
Beulah leaned forward, her eyes and voice steady. “Yes.”
Stewart nodded at his client, clearly pleased but restraining a smile. He now took a moment, let the mood cool, and then started back in.
“You know this Betty [Bergman], who was a witness here yesterday?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Have you had any trouble with her?”
Beulah’s expression and body language remained neutral. “Well, we were not exactly friends,” she said.
“What was the trouble?”
“Well, one week before [the shooting], she asked for the key to my apartment.”
Stewart, an excellent, understated performer, no doubt gave the jury a look here before turning back to Beulah.
“And you were not good friends after that?”
“No.”
With one sentence, Betty Bergman’s credibility—not to mention her reputation—had been severely compromised, and Beulah’s integrity, with the implication that she had refused her boss’s sordid request, enhanced. And it happened so fast—and was apparently so unexpected—that McLaughlin made no objection. Stewart quickly moved on, circling back to when Kalstedt returned to the apartment.
“Tell what was said from the time Kalstedt came in.”
“He came to the door and said: ‘Are you alone?’ ” she related with cool precision, a story she knew by heart. “Then he stepped into the reception hall. I had been playing the phonograph and lying on the couch when he came in. He had a package under his arm and said: ‘I have brought you some wine,’ and he offered me a drink. As he unwrapped the package, I said: ‘Don’t start anything like that. You have had enough to drink, and my husband is liable to come home.’ He said, ‘To hell with your husband. What do I care about him?’ and took off his hat and overcoat. He said: ‘Just one drink and I’ll go.’ ”
The Girls of Murder City Page 20