The Girls of Murder City

by Douglas Perry

  “Did you tell her it was no crime for her to shoot a man in her own house?”

  “Most certainly not,” Woods said, leveling his gaze at the jury.

  “Did you tell her that she couldn’t ‘frame’ anything with you?”

  “I did,” he said, again with those eyes hard and steady.

  The jury stared at Woods like cows. The recused prosecutor made a good witness—better than good. He was a clear-eyed, straight-backed American. He was completely believable. But the jurymen were tired, and they were having trouble concentrating on the witness. Out of the corner of their eyes, a half-turn to their left, they could see Beulah Annan leaning forward, her limpid gaze fixed dreamily on the men who would decide her fate. McLaughlin moved to obscure their view. He asked Woods to repeat himself.

  15

  Beautiful—but Not Dumb!

  In his closing argument, Assistant State’s Attorney William McLaughlin concisely ran through the evidence he had presented over the preceding two days and then turned to the case the defense had put forward. Maurine, sitting in the front row, approved when the prosecutor “pointed out the weak points in [Beulah’s] story: that a woman should try to ‘soothe’ a man who was threatening to attack her by drinking with him; that he knew where the gun was—in a totally strange house; that he was shot in the back.”

  “No woman living would have stayed in that apartment as long as she did with Kalstedt, constantly repelling his advances, as she says she did,” McLaughlin pronounced. “A woman who didn’t want him there would have run out of the apartment and yelled for help.” The jury, McLaughlin said, knew the truth. “You have seen that face, gentlemen. The defendant is not the kind of woman men would tell to go to hell. She probably had never heard that before and it angered her. That was why she went for the gun.”

  Beulah, nervous now that her part in the drama was over, sat beside her lawyers during the state’s peroration, her head down, eyes closed. She remained calm, the Daily Journal’s reporter marveled, “while Assistant State’s Attorney McLaughlin trained the guns of the prosecution on her in his argument.” Beulah Annan had lied on the stand, McLaughlin kept insisting, working himself from calm summation into controlled anger. He told the jury that if they believed she lied at any point during her testimony, then they should discount everything she’d had to say on the stand.

  McLaughlin appeared confident. He believed he had the evidence on his side and that juries had finally hardened to the wiles of women criminals. But he also recognized O’Brien and Stewart’s skills—and the power of Beulah’s testimony. With his last words to the jury, he attempted to shame them into doing the right thing. “The verdict is in your hands, and you must decide whether you will permit a woman to commit a crime and let her go because she is good-looking. You must decide whether you want to let another pretty woman go out and say ‘I got away with it!’ ” The prosecutor, the American noted, asked for no particular penalty.

  When McLaughlin finished and turned from the jury, William Scott Stewart expelled a silent breath and rose. He was just thirty-four years old, but he possessed a stern physical dignity that gave him a mature, fatherly mien. There was a touch of John Brown in him, too, a mean, controlled righteousness, though he kept it well hidden, back behind his eyes, until just the moment he needed it. He knew Beulah had done well on the witness stand, better than he had expected, but he and O’Brien remained worried about those confessions admitted into evidence. That was where he immediately leveled his fire. He laid into McLaughlin for using “ ‘mental third-degree’ tactics” on Beulah on the night of the shooting, and he excoriated Roy Woods for withdrawing from the case, not mentioning that it was the defense’s challenge of Beulah’s statement before Woods that caused the prosecutor to withdraw. “The Supreme Court has censured Cook County officials for tolerating this sort of prosecution,” he said, “and these assistant state’s attorneys should be ashamed to play these tactics on the defendant and then withdraw from the prosecution in order to be able to testify against her.”

  Beulah began to sob as Stewart went through just how the police and prosecutors had bullied those confessions out of her, providing an affecting backbeat to Stewart’s attack on the state’s “third-degree” tactics. When Stewart paused to gather his thoughts, Beulah tried to steady herself but couldn’t; her shoulders shook softly, and she dipped her head again. Were the tears a put-on? Maurine Watkins thought so. “Every defense counsel knows the value of tears,” the Tribune reporter opined later. Maurine couldn’t stand it: “She had played the Victrola while the man she murdered lay dying, she had laughed at the inquest, she had sat calm and composed while they read descriptions of the crime, but she broke down when she heard her attorney’s impassioned account of the suffering she had undergone at the hands of the police and assistant state’s attorneys, who questioned her statements.”

  W. W. O’Brien took over from his partner to bring home the final message: that Beulah Annan was a virtuous, hardworking girl, a loving and decent wife who had been ruthlessly slandered so that the State’s Attorney’s Office could rack up a conviction. O’Brien was an expert sentimentalist, and once again it was too much for Beulah. Maurine reported wearily that the defendant was “overcome with emotion when Mr. O’Brien painted the picture of ‘this frail little girl, gentlemen, struggling with a drunken brute’—and the jury shook their heads in approbation and chewed their gum more energetically.” Stewart and O’Brien made a powerful team, the brain and the heart. McLaughlin, like Maurine Watkins, watched them in sullen silence, his eyes glazed and half-lidded.

  At 8:30, Judge Lindsay sent the jury out to consult and reach a verdict. Many of the reporters in the courtroom headed for the phones, figuring a decision wouldn’t come that night. Beulah sat on her own in the building’s holding cell, her eyes closed much of the time. She didn’t want to talk to her lawyers or the matron watching over her. She remained quiet. At one point her shoulders heaved and she clasped her hands together to keep them from trembling. She took a deep breath and looked up at the concrete wall, her eyes dry. She’d willed away the panic. “Will this woman be convicted, or will her looks save her?” the Decatur Review, the voice of central Illinois, asked in its Sunday edition. “The prosecution was careful to ask jurors if they had scruples against convicting a good-looking woman. The twelve accepted answered they are not trembled with the weakness. But it may be that some of the twelve didn’t know, and that others of them lied for the woman.”

  As it turned out, the question was no longer germane even before copies of the Review reached its readers’ hands. At 10:20 that night, the jury announced it had reached a decision. Usually a quick verdict meant good news for the prosecution, but McLaughlin didn’t look confident anymore. The lawyers in the case, McLaughlin and the recused Woods, Stewart and O’Brien, walked back into the courtroom. The seats behind them filled again. Then the jury filed in. The golden circle that had caressed Beulah Annan during her testimony was gone, and the room sat in gloomy half-light, a miasma of ragged emotion. Fear had crept into Beulah’s mind. It seemed to take forever for the crowd to settle and the jurymen to find their seats. An observer watched as Beulah “wrung her hands and shifted about uneasily in her chair.” She appeared to be holding back tears. The judge read the verdict to himself in silence, then passed the slip of paper to the bailiff. The bailiff read it quickly, loudly, seemingly before comprehending it.

  “Not guilty!”

  The syllables drifted away like smoke, followed by a gasp—and then a roar. Somebody yelled out something incomprehensible, joyous. Beulah remained expressionless when the verdict was announced, as if stunned, while her lawyers exchanged looks of satisfaction. Beulah’s husband, Al, was not nearly so stoical. He wept, his head in his arms.

  The defendant climbed to her feet, her head still bare, a smile slipping across her face. The bailiff’s words had begun to settle on her: She was a free woman. She beamed at the jurymen and came around the defendant’s table. �
��Oh, I can’t thank you!” she exclaimed, reaching out, shaking the hand of the nearest juror. “You don’t know, you can’t know—but I felt sure that you would—” She moved from man to man, clasping hands with each, making eye contact, exchanging smiles. The handshakes, the words, weren’t enough to express what she was feeling. She kissed a juror hard on the cheek, and then another, holding his face with both hands. She didn’t care what anyone thought about it.

  Al followed along behind his wife, beaming and shaking jurors’ hands, blessing them for their forthright work. Reporters rushed into the hall, fighting for the phones again. Photographers took their final shots, the flashbulbs lighting up the room in sudden crackling bursts, and then ran out, well aware that their printing presses across the river were being started up. The remaining spectators, the amateurs, didn’t know what to do now that it was over. They wandered in confusion, in ecstasy, in anger. They watched as Beulah agreed to pose for a photograph with the jury. She grasped the jury foreman’s hand in a manly shake. The other jurors gathered around, leaning in and smiling. The photograph taken, Beulah broke away from the jurors. The court fans then stepped aside in deference, and Beulah and Al Annan left the courtroom, marching happily into the hallway, arm in arm. They swept out the doors and into the night.

  The Tribune’s headline writers, working on deadline, kept it simple. “Jury Finds Beulah Annan Is ‘Not Guilty,’ ” the front page stated on Sunday morning. The subhead added, “Self-Defense Plea Gains Her Freedom; Thanks Each Member After Verdict.” Maurine, of course, took a harder-edged approach in the story.

  Beulah Annan, whose pursuit of wine, men, and jazz music was interrupted by her glibness with the trigger finger, was given freedom last night by her “beauty-proof ” jury. . . .

  Mr. Annan, who has stood by her from the very night he found [Harry Kalstedt] lying dead in his bedroom, was almost overcome with joy and gratitude.

  “I knew my wife would come through all right!” he said, proudly.

  That seemed to be the consensus of opinion.

  “Another pretty woman gone free!” was the only comment made by Assistant State’s Attorney William F. McLaughlin, who prosecuted the case alone after the withdrawal of Roy C. Woods, who was called as a material witness.

  “Beautiful—but not dumb!”

  For she had talked incessantly: two different versions of the shooting before she came to trial, and the third one—when she took the stand yesterday—was the charm.

  Maurine offered no hedges in stating what she thought of the trial’s outcome, writing the story as if it were going into her diary. Beulah’s testimony—flat-out lies, as far as Maurine was concerned—particularly rankled: “ ‘That’s my story and I’ll stick to it,’ was her attitude—and she did, till she stepped down demurely from the witness stand with the settled complacency of a school girl who has said her piece.” Maurine pointed out that McLaughlin’s closing argument, ultimately in vain, had “hinged on the credibility of the witness, who had made three entirely different statements to the jury.” (She was counting the confessions Beulah made to police that were read in court.)

  The verdict stung Maurine. She would later decry the softness of all-male juries, the attitudes that made it possible for Beulah to get away with testimony that contradicted compelling physical evidence and her own previous statements: “Men on a jury generously make allowance for a woman’s weakness, both physical and moral; she is unduly influenced, led astray by some man, really not responsible—poor little woman!” Maurine believed that “it feeds a juryman’s vanity and sex pride to feel that a woman is weaker and less responsible than a man would be in a similar situation.” The whole thing left her feeling sick. She was convinced Beulah was a cold-blooded murderer—and a devious, calculating defendant. Her report on the verdict laid bare the raw feelings of a reporter who’d gotten closer to the story than she probably liked to admit.

  The Tribune—surprisingly, and unlike its competitors—decided not to linger on Beulah Annan. Maurine certainly wanted nothing more to do with the “Titian-haired” beauty and took a pass on the obligatory postacquittal follow-up piece. Her replacement on the Beulah beat for Sunday, perhaps intimidated at the prospect of following Maurine’s beautiful, expressive diatribes, kept his unsigned report brief. In its entirety, it read:

  Mrs. Beulah Annan, Chicago’s prettiest slayer and latest to join the ranks of the free, is trying to seek seclusion “for a few days.” Saturday night, following her acquittal of the murder of her lover, Harry Kalstedt, she packed up her rather extensive wardrobe and moved from the county jail to “address unknown.” She was accompanied by her faithful husband, Al.

  The junior reporter didn’t look very hard for his quarry. “Address unknown” turned out to be Beulah and Al’s apartment on East Forty-sixth Street, where she had famously shot down Harry Kalstedt. Al had long ago cleaned up the bloody mess his wife had left behind. Reporters from other papers, local and far afield, found her there on Sunday and met no resistance. Beulah held court for much of the day.

  After a night in her own bed for the first time in almost two months, the prettiest woman ever to be tried for murder in Cook County was feeling generous. She didn’t take credit for the acquittal. “It was the baby—not me,” she told H. H. Robertson, a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution. “I knew that no jury ever would convict me, under the circumstances.” She wasn’t feeling as generous about her dead former boyfriend, however. She restated her assertion that Kalstedt had attacked her when she told him she was pregnant with her husband’s child. “Any woman is justified in shooting a man who did what Harry Kalstedt tried to do to me,” she said. “The jury realized that.” She told another reporter that “I know now better than ever before that a man who goes into the apartment of another man when the husband is away deserves what he gets, no matter what that is, whether he be a man who steals jewels or a man who steals women.”

  Sitting with thrown-back shoulders in the center of the little apartment, Beulah charmed her journalist callers, as always. “Shaking her Titian hair and relaxing in a dimple smile,” wrote Robertson, “Mrs. Annan gazed coyly at her husband and other relatives and said she had learned a lesson.” She was a changed woman.

  “I’m going to be a devoted wife from now on,” she declared. “I am going to forget these terrible things. I am going to prepare for my baby’s arrival, and I have sworn an oath that I never again will do anything which might cause reproach to attach itself to my name or to my child’s name. The most intense longing which I have is that I prove myself to be a good mother and a true wife. I want to show the whole world what kind of a woman I really am.”

  The new, devoted wife made it into the next day’s papers, but the fawning headlines looked foolish before the sun set. Beulah and Al must have had a terrible fight after reporters left their apartment Sunday, because on Monday afternoon she appeared in a newspaper office with a divorce lawyer in tow. (Perhaps put off by Maurine’s biting reports, she conspicuously chose not to go to the city’s leading paper, the Tribune.) Sitting with her legs crossed, with reporters and editors gathered around, Beulah announced that she was leaving Al. “He doesn’t want me to have a good time,” she said. “He never wants to go out anywhere and he doesn’t know how to dance. I’m not going to waste the rest of my life with him—he’s too slow.”

  Beulah said she might move to Southern California. The weather there was fine year-round, and the newsreel people had said the camera loved her. Yes, she’d like to be a moving-picture actress, she said. She wanted even more than that: “I want lights, music and good times. I love to dance. I love good food—and I’m going to have them.”

  Only Beulah and Al knew what transpired between them that turned her professed longing for a quiet life as wife and mother into a desire for the lights of Hollywood. He may have refused to take her out dancing, as she suggested. He may have finally confronted her about her infidelity and wondered aloud who the father of her unborn child was. Or
it might simply have been Beulah’s internal clock telling her it was time to move on, time to leave Chicago for new opportunities. She had proved to have an excellent sense of timing. She knew when to make an entrance, when to make a surprise revelation—and when to leave the scene for someplace better.

  Beulah had gotten out of Kentucky at just the right moment, when the responsibilities of the adult world began to press in on her before she was ready. Now she wanted to get out of Chicago. Something big was happening in the city, bigger than Beulah Annan could ever hope to be. News of Beulah’s acquittal received above-the-fold placement on the front page of the Tribune, with a photo of the “fair defendant” with the jury that had just set her free. But it wasn’t the top story, as she had expected. A banner headline ran above the trial coverage, with type so large that it blared across the entire width of the page: “All City Hunts Kidnappers.”

  Parents all over Chicago worried that their children could end up like little Bobby Franks, snatched from the streets and viciously killed. The murderous kidnappers, though unknown, were the talk of the town. And that talk was about to get much louder. At about the time Beulah was packing up her “rather extensive wardrobe” and checking out of the Cook County Jail on Saturday night, two brilliant University of Chicago graduate students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, were in a South Side night-club not far from the Annan home, double-dating with two pretty girls. When introduced to another reveler, the cocky eighteen-year-old Loeb said, “You’ve just enjoyed the treat of shaking hands with a murderer.”