Having focused on Leopold on Friday, Maurine now turned her attention to Loeb on Saturday. She canvassed his family and friends, finding shocked disbelief at every turn. Loeb, unlike Leopold, had a sweet disposition. He wanted to be liked by everybody.
“He couldn’t have done it. We know he’s innocent,” said one Loeb ally.
“He is innocent and confessed merely to get sleep. It can be repudiated when he comes to trial,” said another.
Maurine granted that the disbelief was to be expected. “ ‘Loeb’ as the name of a murderer falls strangely on Chicago ears,” she wrote. “For the people of that name are written in the book of Chicago’s history as builders and leaders in philanthropy, charity and educational movements.”
“It’s a damned lie!” said Richard Rubel hysterically. “I’m Dick Loeb’s best friend and he couldn’t have done it! For a ransom—!” he looked about at the magnificent home of his millionaire friend, at the garage stocked with limousine, sedan, coupe touring car; at the tennis court where they so often played.
“Why, those boys could have had all the money in the world! Why should they do that?”
Maurine had some theories for Sunday’s paper: “Were they bored by a life which left them nothing to be desired, no obstacle to overcome, no goal to attain? Were they jaded by the jazz-life of gin and girls, so that they needed so terrible a thing as murder to give them new thrills?”
So it seemed. The next day, Monday, June 2, the day before Belva Gaertner’s trial opened, Leopold would say of the murder of Bobby Franks: “It was just an experiment. It is as easy for us to justify as an entomologist in impaling a beetle on a pin.”
Leopold remained cold, clinical, detached. His friend and partner, meanwhile, had fallen into desperate fantasy. “This thing will be the making of me,” Loeb told a police officer on Sunday. “I’ll spend a few years in jail and I’ll be released. I’ll come out to a new life. I’ll go to work and I’ll work hard and I’ll amount to something, have a career.”
17
Hatproof, Sexproof, and Damp
Belva Gaertner wouldn’t get the endless newspaper space for her trial that Beulah Annan did. The Bobby Franks murder case had suddenly heated to the boiling point and was beating out all other stories in competition for the public’s attention. The famous Clarence Darrow had taken over the defense of Leopold and Loeb. Assistant State’s Attorney Bert Cronson, one of the men who’d helped elicit the Midnight Confession from Beulah in April, had been assigned to the Franks case. He was considered the “ace” of the staff, better than McLaughlin or Woods or Harry Pritzker.
Still, the “double divorcee,” as all of the papers constantly and salaciously called Belva, remained front-page news. Editors knew that the “stylish murderess,” with her gorgeous outfits and regal bearing, would provide pictures that no other story could match. Chicagoans still wanted to see and read about her.
As expected, Belva dressed for court with care, determined to impress potential jurors as a woman of the upper classes, the kind of privileged, well-appointed lady who would naturally awe any ordinary man. Downtown’s priciest shops helped out, sending dresses for her to consider, knowing that the outfits would be rapturously described in the newspapers.
Belva arrived at the Criminal Courts Building for jury selection on Tuesday morning, June 3. Paul T. Gilbert of the Evening Post, assisting Ione Quinby with coverage, treated it as if covering an appearance by screen star Mary Pickford.
The case of a negro was continued. A varied assortment of blacks filed out of Judge Lindsay’s courtroom. The defendant shuffled back to the bullpen.
A moment’s silence, then—
“Belva Gaertner.”
A voice from the corridor leading to the county jail re-echoed the call. “Belva.”
A trim figure entered, clad in navy blue. It was Belva Gaertner, the attractive young divorcee in whose sedan one night last March, after a hectic cabaret tour of the south side, the limp body of Walter R. Law, automobile salesman, was found, a steel-jacketed bullet in his head, an automatic pistol on the floor of the car. . . .
The room, packed from end to end, was ready for her. Spectators vying for sight lines huffed and stomped like spooked show horses. A small din erupted as Belva glided, cool and confident, through the door. “Her color was heightened by rouge,” Gilbert wrote. “Her lashes had a touch of mascara. Cosmetics had been applied also to her lips, but the make-up wasn’t overdone. . . . She might have been in a divorce court instead of at the criminal bar.” Court fans seemed universally impressed.
“Say, she’s got the Annan girl skinned a mile!” enthused an eyewitness.
“Not so pretty, but more class,” came the response.
The exchange stuck with Maurine Watkins, who diligently recorded it. “ ‘Class’—that was Belva,” she wrote for the morning paper. “For she lived up to her reputation as ‘the most stylish’ of murderess’ row: a blue twill suit bound with black braid, and white lacy frill down the front; patent leather slippers with shimmering French heels, chiffon gun metal hose. And a hat—ah, that hat! Helmet shaped, with a silver buckle and cockade of ribbon, with one streamer tied jauntily—coquettishly—bewitchingly—under her chin.”
Belva padded softly down the aisle, no doubt pleased to see the courtroom just as full for her as it had been for Beulah. She bowed to the judge. The Daily News wrote, “She looks younger and fresher since her incarceration—hardly like the same woman the police found cowering in her apartment, her clothing covered with the blood of the young married man who had been her companion during the fateful evening.” The paper added that she wore a “smart white blouse” and “white kid gloves, as if for a matinee.” The Daily Journal’s reporter decided that the “chin strap of her bonnet and her fresh white frilled blouse gave her an air of distinction, as did also her immaculate white kid gloves with yellow cuffs.” Belva, her white-gloved hands held out before her, played to the crowd while at the same time appearing to be embarrassed by the attention. “Arrived at court, Belva adjusted her skirts modestly, pulled the choker more tightly around her neck and smiled demurely at everybody in general,” Quinby wrote for the Post. Maurine described the defendant as a “perfect lady” in court.
Chicagoans across the city would be just as impressed as court spectators when papers started rolling off the presses later in the afternoon. As Belva stood alone before the judge, with the court fans no longer near enough to reach out to her and spoil the frame, news photographers exploded into action. The cameras clicked and flashbulbs popped, momentarily blinding everyone. One of the prosecutors, Samuel Hamilton, took offense at the fawning attention. He requested that the photographers be removed. Judge Lindsay, who’d seen worse when presiding over Beulah’s trial, waved him off. “The cameras are not disturbing me nor the defendant nor the men called for jury service as far as I can see,” he said. Belva smiled at the judge, and then gave Hamilton a quick, triumphant glare. Forgotten in all the hullabaloo was a small, thin figure in the front row. Mrs. Freda Law, dressed in black, sat alone, grim-faced and staring straight ahead.
“Are you ready?” Lindsay asked each set of lawyers.
Belva joined her attorneys at the defendant’s table. Judge Lindsay addressed the potential jurors and then turned to the state. “Proceed,” he said.
Hamilton got right to it. He strode up to the nearest juror candidate. “You understand the penalty is death or life imprisonment? Do you think that’s too severe?” he demanded. The man paused, and then answered that he understood the penalty for murder. “If this were to be proved a cold-blooded murder, could you inflict the death penalty?” Hamilton asked.
The man swallowed. “I could.”
With that answer, Freda Law quivered to life. “Mrs. Law, who up to this time had shown little emotion, leaned forward eagerly,” wrote the Post. “Her eyes shone. She trembled slightly.”
Hamilton moved down the line, taking turns with the case’s lead prosecutor, Harry Pritzker. “
Would you be willing to mete out the same punishment to a woman that you would to a man?” they asked each potential juryman.
Faced with this hard-hearted questioning of jurors, and with the comfort most of the men expressed with putting a woman to death, Belva finally showed some anxiety. “She clasped and unclasped the fastener of her fur choker nervously” and stared straight ahead, wrote the Journal. Her lead attorney, Thomas D. Nash, whispered something to her, soothing words.
The lawyer had a knack for calming down clients. For one thing, he looked the part of the quintessential defense attorney. Though just thirty-eight years old, his hair was a forbidding gray, and he had a voice and manner that instinctively provoked confidence. Nash had made a name for himself quickly in Chicago, winning election to the city council in 1911 when he was just twenty-five. In 1920 he was defeated in a run for judge of the municipal court, but the setback hardly dented his political influence. He remained the Nineteenth Ward’s Democratic committeeman, a powerful position, and turned his attention to his thriving criminal law practice. “The list of Tom Nash’s clients reads like a page from the who’s who of vicious criminals,” his opponent for the county board of review would charge in 1928. “Murderers, gun toters, robbers, gangsters and their political tools are included among the crew which pays retainers to Tom Nash.” That was true. Johnny Torrio and Al Capone, among other prominent gangsters, were Nash clients. They came to him because he was good: smart, clever, personable. He could put any man, no matter what charge he faced, at ease.
Nash was just as conscientious about seating a jury as the prosecutors. He took seriously his client’s preference for “worldly” jurors—“the kind of men,” as Belva put it to reporters, “who realize that after a woman has had as many sweethearts as I have had, she can’t love any one enough to shoot him.” Because Belva had been so open about her preferences, the jury selection process sparked an unusual public debate in the newspapers. “She’s wrong,” one policeman told a reporter outside of court. “The kind she should get on a jury is the inexperienced, home man who is used to gentle women. A worldly man knows that the woman who has been on the primrose path is more likely to shoot than any other.” But an automobile salesman said he “could certainly give a woman an impartial break on the story Mrs. Gaertner tells.” Seconded a hotel clerk: “I believe that to a woman of a rosy past, a man is just a man. What they want is a good time and they don’t care who pays for it. She wouldn’t shoot for love.” A coffee-shop owner, on the other hand, opined that “women who have a succession of sweethearts usually display violent attachment for the man who holds their interest for the moment. That’s my observation, and I think Mrs. Gaertner’s argument is all wrong.”
Captain Patrick Kelliher of the Chicago Police expressed the fears of every prosecutor: “A jury of family men probably would not convict her,” he said. “A jury of bachelors would never convict her. The average unmarried man about town has liberal views and is very tolerant of erring women.”
That must have sounded good to Nash and his team, but the commonness of the view also guaranteed that they wouldn’t be able to finagle a jury solely of single men on the make, as Belva hoped. Pritzker and his seconds, Hamilton and H. M. Sharpe, were able prosecutors. Men who seemed vulnerable to irrelevant explanations for a woman’s violent behavior were sent home. The defense, meanwhile, sought to jettison those from the other extreme. One man after another was dismissed after expressing prejudice against any woman who drank liquor or went to clubs. “Would you be prejudiced if it should develop that the lady had been drinking that evening?” Nash asked the jurors, an important question considering Belva’s official statement that she was too drunk on the night of the murder to remember what happened.
There also was one more consideration for the attorneys: the so-called beauty-proof jury, like the one that had set free “Beautiful Beulah” Annan.
“Would you let a stylish hat make you find her ‘not guilty’?” Assistant State’s Attorney Hamilton asked a jury candidate. He asked other potential jurors similar questions about their susceptibility to high fashion and carefully rouged female faces. In the end, everyone the state accepted declared himself suitably armored against such feminine wiles.
Maurine Watkins, after the disaster of Beulah’s trial, found the whole thing a farce. She wrote that many prospective jurors, wanting to be part of the trial at any cost, struggled to come up with what they thought the attorneys wanted to hear, and “the questioning went merrily on to find a hat-proof, sex-proof, and ‘damp’ jury, who would also accept circumstantial evidence as conclusive.” Though she joked about it in the Tribune, Maurine worried that she’d get another “moron jury” that wasn’t capable of doing the right thing. “The essence of Christianity is to think of other people,” she later remarked. “That doesn’t mean to give an easy break. The juryman with his maudlin sentiment may think he’s practicing Christianity when he gives an acquittal and in some instances he may be, but there is just as much Christianity in having your sympathy with the man who was killed and in restraining the individual.”
After a full day, most of the jury had been selected, and the trial was scheduled to get under way the next afternoon. Matrons escorted Belva back to the women’s section of the jail, with reporters striding along behind them in the hope that the defendant would be in a talkative mood before deadline. They were disappointed. Belva smiled and said she felt fine but had nothing more than that to say.
In the morning, Maurine’s report once again made clear her sympathy for the city’s prosecutors. “Demure but with an ‘Air’ at Murder Trial,” the subhead teased. The story itself was even more direct. Like Beulah, Belva was trying to fool jurors with womanly razzmatazz.
Cabaret dancer and twice divorcee, Mrs. Gaertner was as demure as any convent girl—yesterday!—with brown eyes dreamily cast downward. Her lips were closed in a not-quite smile, the contour of her cheek was unbroken by lines, and rejuvenating rouge made her well on the dangerous side of 30.
It was another jazzy, satirical performance—and one that hit hard. Maurine described, in stark contrast to Belva’s rouged, dangerous appearance, the sad, “sweet-faced” widow in the front row, decked in mourning attire, looking younger still than the aggressively made-up Belva and not at all dangerous. Maurine claimed that, of the two women, Mrs. Law “seemed more concerned.”
If Maurine’s eviscerating story in the Tribune bothered Belva or her lawyers, they didn’t show it when they came into court.14 Belva once again looked fabulous, with a new dress “that clung in soft folds to her body.” She smiled dutifully as flashbulbs popped. (“I hear Belva got a lot of compliments on how she looked when she walked into court this morning,” one inmate said to Ione Quinby when the reporter came through the jail later in the day.) With court fans once again blocking the aisle and falling over each other, Judge Lindsay kept the entrance theatrics to a minimum this time. He hurried along the questioning of more juror prospects, and the final four jurors were quickly identified and accepted. At two P.M., after a lunch break, Hamilton and Pritzker launched into their opening statement, declaring that they would prove Belva E. Gaertner had fired the bullet that killed Walter Law and had even tried to dispose of the body before deciding the dead man was too heavy to move.
Nash seemed unperturbed by this salvo. He waived an opening statement. He was counting on the fact, Maurine pointed out, that there were no witnesses: “Just a man found dead, slumped over the steering wheel of Mrs. Gaertner’s car, a bullet in his head from her pistol left lying on the sedan floor.” Maurine added with icy mockery that Belva was expected to testify on her own behalf, and that, with her defense based solely on her lack of memory of the murder, the testimony “will at least be unique.”
First, though, the state presented its evidence. Prosecutors brought out a pair of bloodstained silver dance slippers to show the jury. Belva “stared, chin in hand,” as Assistant State’s Attorney Hamilton insisted that the slippers put her up clo
se with the victim at the time of his death. Taking the stand, Dr. William D. McNally, the coroner’s chemist, described how he did his work, gesturing mindlessly with one of Belva’s slippers, which he held in his hand while giving testimony. “Now, a small strip of fabric was removed and dissolved in a salt solution,” he said. “Then the usual chemical tests were made—placed under a spectroscope, acetic acid, crystals obtained—indicating human blood.”
The newspapers latched onto the stylish footwear. “They had been effective with the green velvet gown she had worn that fatal night. They had carried her through that last dance,” wrote the Daily News, attempting to mimic the humorous bent in Maurine’s stories. Maurine, of course, topped the competition, writing that it was Belva’s “twinkling feet” in those silver slippers that “had danced her into Overbeck’s [sic] heart, when she was Belle Brown, cabaret girl; that had carried her to—and from!—a bridle path romance with Gaertner, wealthy manufacturer; that had stolen her into a ‘palship’ with a young married man—and then to a murder trial.” For all the florid newspaper prose they inspired, however, the slippers proved only that Belva had been at the crime scene, which the defense already acknowledged.
The Girls of Murder City Page 24