Article: The girls of murder city

By GINGER ADAMS OTIS
Last Updated: 12:30 AM, August 8, 2010
Posted: 12:30 AM, August 8, 2010
It was called Murderess Row, the section of the Cook County Jail in Chicago reserved for women waiting to stand trial for murder — and in 1924, it was the place to be.

Women in the Windy City seemed to have gone mad. There were over a dozen women in lockdown, most of them for killing a husband or lover.

The good-looking ones rarely did hard time — but got the full attention of the rabid local press.

Women like Sabella Nitti, a poor Italian immigrant who spoke no English and was accused of beating her farmer husband to death with a hammer and chopping him into pieces — with the help of her lover — were household names.

In the 1920s, just four years after the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote, all-male juries still had a hard time believing a female could be a cold-blooded killer — especially a white, attractive woman, writes Douglas Perry in “The Girls of Murder City.”

Perry chronicles the crimes of the true-life women who became “Roxie Hart” and “Velma Kelly” for the hit Broadway play “Chicago,” which later became a Bob Fosse Broadway musical and more recently a movie starring Rene Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

It was the Prohibition-era Jazz Age, when gin and guns frequently mixed, and women were pushing societal boundaries like never before. Women in Chicago, Perry says, “had become dangerous, especially to their husbands or boyfriends.”

The police might have been worried, but the tabloids loved it.

“Everyone in the city wanted to read about the fairest killers in the land,” Perry says. “These women embodied the city’s wild, rebellious side, a side that appeared to be on the verge of overwhelming everything else. Chicago took its cultural obsessions to extremes, from jazz to politics to architecture. Most of all, in the middle of the Prohibition, the city reveled in its contempt for the law.”

The cult of the celebrity criminal was born, starting with “Big Anna” Piculine, who killed her husband when he made the fatal error of saying he preferred slimmer women. There was also Mary Wesenak, or “Moonshine Mary,” who got pinched for peddling poisoned whiskey.

Kitty Malm, “The Tiger Girl,” was the toughest of all the killers on Murderess Row. Malm may have pumped a round into an innocent man during a stick-up, or her mobster boyfriend may have done it; she liked to keep her options open.

But the most famous of them all had to be Beulah Annan, “the prettiest murderess” in Cook County, and Belva Gaertner, “the most stylish woman” on the cellblock, the press said.

Their stories would become tabloid fodder for intrepid “girl” reporter Maurine Watkins, a minister’s daughter from Indiana who shot to fame by covering Beulah and Belva’s stories for the Chicago Tribune. She later wrote the play “Chicago” based on her exclusive jailhouse interviews with the women.

Watkins was dismayed by the blatant sexism that allowed women like Beulah and Belva to literally get away with murder — and she set out to change men’s mind about the killers. She made fun of the magnificent murderers, writes Perry, and got their stories on the front page of her paper.

But the reaction wasn’t what she expected. Instead of condemning the women, the public adored them.

Men sent flowers to the jail, made impassioned offers of marriage, even tried to help pay for their defense lawyers. Soon more than a dozen “murderesses” strutted in Cook County jail ahead of their trials, says Perry. For them, crime paid.

Belva Gaertner, the “most stylish” of them all, got off scot-free.

In the play and film version of “Chicago,” her character is Velma Kelly, a wickedly beautiful cabaret singer who shot her husband and sister when she found them in bed together.

In reality, “Beautiful” Belva wasn’t particularly attractive, says Perry.

“Her face was a sad, ill-conceived thing, all features slightly out of proper proportion. But arrogant eyes shined out from it, and there was that full, passionate mouth, a mouth that could inspire a reckless hunger in the most happily married man,” he writes.

Belva ruled the cellblock almost from the day she was hauled in, drunk and in a blood-splattered slip, charged with shooting her lover Walter Law in a fit of jealousy and rage. Even in prison, she was the life of the party.

“No woman can love a man enough to kill him. They aren’t worth it, because there are always plenty more,” she drawled to Watkins during a jailhouse interview.

“Walter was just a kid, 29, and I’m 38. Why should I have worried whether he loved me or whether he left me? Gin and guns — either one is bad enough, but together they get you in a dickens of a mess, don’t they?”

There were no witnesses to Belva’s alleged crime (besides Belva herself, and she claimed to have been dead drunk at the time). Belva — a thrice-divorced cabaret singer whose stage name was Belle Brown — is believed to have shot Law, who was married and had a child, as he sat in the front seat of her car near Chicago’s North Shore. His corpse was discovered in her car next to an empty gin bottle and a gun with three rounds missing.

Belva was found passed out in her apartment the next morning in her blood-covered clothes.

Belva was hauled into jail, and spent her three months on Murderess Row making up bon mots to tell the papers and trading quips with other cellmates.

Her ex-husband, a wealthy industrialist named William Gaertner, came crawling back in her hour of need and paid for her defense team. Belva had previously gained notoriety when, during her first divorce from Gaertner, she admitted to using a horsewhip on the older man during their lovemaking sessions.

Gaertner’s lawyers astutely read the all-male jury and realized there was no need to offer a defense for Belva.

With no witnesses and no material evidence that clearly fingered Belva, her lawyers simply posited that Law had killed himself in the front seat of her car, and a drunken, panicked Belva fled to her home and blacked out. Belva was acquitted in June 1924 — three months after the killing.

Beautiful Beulah Annan was the Roxie Hart of real-life Chicago. Like her celluloid counterpart, Beulah was delicate and fine-boned. A vision, writes Perry, and she knew it.

“At every opportunity she posed for the news photographers. She would rub her lips . . . pull her shoulders in and down to highlight her fragile frame. The image proved irresistible: the thin straight nose, the high cheekbones . . . the gorgeous red hair that rolled off her head like a prairie fire,” Perry says.

This ethereal beauty — who was married to a mechanic — had shot her lover, Harry Kalstedt, point-blank in the back on April 3, 1924, as they argued in her apartment. Then she sat for about four hours listening to a foxtrot song (“Hula Lou”) again and again while watching Kalstedt’s slow death. She later called her husband to say she’d shot a man who tried to attack her.

Beulah never bothered trying to muster up much of a defense for her actions.

Once her wistful gaze appeared on the tabloids’ front pages, her acquittal was inevitable. She got fan mail by the bucket full, along with flowers, and even once a hot steak dinner from Chicago’s best restaurant. Everyone on Murderess Row knew she’d never be convicted.

“Maybe that’s why Beulah didn’t make a run for it. She’d just washed the blood off her hands and waited for the authorities to show up,” Perry says.

Beulah even confessed to the murder at first, then later told police it was self-defense. An even later version had her and Kalstedt arguing because he said he was going to leave her. Her final story, told at trial, was that she told Kalstedt she was pregnant, they struggled and reached for the gun on the bed, and he somehow got shot in the back.

Through it all her faithful, cuckolded husband stood by her. She was acquitted on May 25, 1924, and that same day said, “I have left my husband. He is too slow.”

She officially divorced him in 1926, married and divorced another man a year or so later.

Beulah didn’t have long to enjoy her freedom. She died of tuberculosis four years after she was freed. Belva fared better — but never found peace. She remarried Gaertner — 31 years her senior — after her acquittal, but it wasn’t a happy union. Gaertner said Belva was abusive and an alcoholic, and that she threatened to murder him when he stumbled upon her in bed with another man. He soon filed for divorce again. Belva wound up living with her sister Ethal Kraushaar in California. She died of natural causes in May 1965, at the age of 80.

Both women dropped off the radar as soon as they were set free. The tabloids that had made their every move a front-page story for months had no use for them outside of jail — that was the downside to the celebrity criminal narrative both women helped create.

Yet Beulah and Belva did more than impact popular culture — they actually changed the US legal system.

The extreme favoritism they’d received from the all-male juries was too blatant to ignore, writes Perry. It ignited a fierce debate on whether women should — at last — be allowed to serve on juries.

One headline, a week after Belva’s acquittal, declared: “A Woman Jury To Try Woman Slayers Urged: Claim Now that Pretty Girls Get Free, Ugly Ones Sent to Pen.”

Women’s groups lobbied hard for women to get on juries, including the lawyer for Sabella Nitti, the Italian woman on Murderess Row who spent over a year waiting for her case to be heard, while Beulah and Bevla were in and out in about three months.

Illinois took some convincing, but seven years later, in 1931, it passed a law to allow women jurors. The state supreme court knocked it down. Finally, in 1939, the legislature passed a law allowing women to serve.

There was a final irony even to that small step forward in the equality wars, Perry notes.

“In the four months after women began being admitted to Illinois juries in 1939, the percentage of men asking to be excused from serving dropped dramatically,” he notes. The Chicago Tribune found that men “have suddenly become delighted to serve as jurors. And the only reason the jury commissioners and court officials can even suggest is this: the women jurors.”

The Girls of Murder City

by Douglas Perry

Viking