The Girls of Murder City (10 page)

It wasn’t the best advice. Neutrality was hardly practical—loyalty went to whomever signed the checks, and private detectives didn’t come cheap. So the status quo prevailed, and that meant William had the upper hand. But Belva would not be driven from the estate. She took a small room in the house for herself and the few things that were truly important to her. William’s detectives didn’t dare go in there, but they lingered on the lawn outside her window at night, smoking cigarettes and watching for movement behind the curtain. The detectives kept copious notes of her activities, and when she wasn’t doing much, they lolled on the plush furniture. If Belva headed for the front door unexpectedly, a mad scramble would bunch up the Kermanshah rugs behind her. “Don’t overexert yourselves,” she’d tell them. “I’m going to my sister’s. The phone number is Kenwood 137586.”

Soon enough, the story went national. It was too amusing to pass up. Wags called the Gaertner estate “the House of a Thousand Detectives.” The
Courier and Reporter
of Waterloo, Iowa, trilled that Belva now had “no more privacy than a goldfish. There are detectives to the right of her, ‘dicks’ to the left of her, sleuths in front of her. They follow her about like conscience, making notes of everything she does, checking the routine of her daily life like so many eager Boswells.”

Belva, enjoying the attention and always good for a laugh, joined right in. “I’ve gotten so used to detectives that if they were to be called off I’d miss the dear things,” she said. The reporters loved Belva: She was a hoot, and she treated them as guests, offering tea and snacks.

She treated her “dicks” better. She knew that bought companions could still be enjoyable companions, and so she embraced them as long-lost friends and playmates. The detectives joined her on shopping trips, ostensibly to keep an eye on William’s watchers, who were trailing behind, but really so she’d have someone other than the salesgirls to talk to. They would “promenade on each side of her” down Michigan Avenue, trying to look professional while Belva cracked wise and smiled broadly at anyone who gave them a funny look. She even played billiards with her detectives—and showily not with William’s detectives—until William, in a snit, hid the balls.

It wasn’t all just fun and games for Belva. She was playing to win. Shortly after the newspapers took up the story, Belva announced that she would prove in court that her husband had beaten her with a horsewhip. The whip would be presented, she said, as “Exhibit A.” More than that, the beatings went both ways, because William wasn’t just an abusive husband, he was a sexual deviant. “Sure, I whipped my millionaire husband,” she said, ratcheting up the story’s salaciousness, “but it was he himself who gave me the whip and begged me, yes, even forced me, to do it.” She showed reporters the whip, turning it over and over in her hand. “It was he who made me use it,” she said. “It was he who forced me to the terrible and disgusting task of beating him. Twice I consented. After that I refused. If that is cruelty, his charges are true.”

No doubt William considered this a low blow, but Belva believed she had no choice. However much she joked and laughed with reporters, she thought she was fighting for her life. She had convinced herself—almost—that it wasn’t her infidelity that undermined her marriage but William’s jealous company men. She publicly accused Robert McGearald, Gaertner’s secretary, of trying to break her and William up.

It was scandalous stuff, and reporters girded for an explosive court case that could run on the front page for days. But then, on May 6, the first day of the divorce trial, Belva suddenly pulled back. She decided she couldn’t do it. She would not be testifying, she said. She would not contest the suit. She gave no reason, not even to her lawyer, maybe because, after everything that had come out, she realized it would be too hard for people to believe. She had married William because he loved her, truly loved her, and to Belva “that was everything.” It had been a shock when she discovered it wasn’t. She had broken William’s heart—and her own as well. That was enough.

In answering questions posed by his lawyer, William Gaertner talked about the last straw. “My wife had been away from home for three nights,” he said in open court. “She told me she had stayed at the home of women friends. On the night of March 30, with W.C. Dannenberg and others, I trailed her to 5345 Prairie Avenue, where we found her with a man who said he was Edward Lusk.”

“Where was Mr. Lusk?”

“Behind a door,” William said.

The judge had heard all he needed to hear. William Gaertner, a respected man in the community, an important man, had been humiliated by his wife. The court granted the divorce. Belva received $3,000, a car, and a selection of the household’s furniture. Not much of a settlement when your husband was worth, excluding his thriving business, more than half a million dollars.

Belva sighed extravagantly. She gazed off into the distance, annoyed that she had to answer the question. In the past, she always had been able to win over the press with her gaiety, as she did during her divorce from William. But this was different. After the things that were said at the inquest, she recognized that happy flirtatiousness wasn’t appropriate.

“The story is simply ridiculous,” she told the reporter from the
Daily News.
She was sitting in a ten-by-five cell at the Cook County Jail, her new home now that the coroner’s jury had pronounced judgment. Reporters surrounded her. “I never threatened Law,” she said. “True enough, I was fond of him—” Genevieve Forbes, incredulous, cut in. She asked Belva if she was saying she hadn’t menaced Walter Law with a knife.

Belva turned from the
Daily News
’s hack to the
Tribune
’s. “Me threaten him with a knife? That’s crazy. He was always a courteous gentleman to me. Why should I ever be angry with him?”

Belva leaned back against the bare cell wall. She’d been surprised at the coroner’s jury’s decision but had recovered quickly. After the inquest ended, she put her shoulders back and strode out of the Wabash Avenue station, an officer on each arm. A pack of reporters followed them over to the jail. Now Katherine Malm, her new cellmate, sat nearby, listening intently, a look of admiration on her face. Belva was the only inmate “dressed up” in the women’s section of the jail. She wouldn’t receive her gray jail uniform, and thus have to give up her stylish outfit, until later in the day. To the
Daily News
reporter’s eyes, she “was a picture of self-possession, a woman of the world,” especially compared to the Malm girl.

“It gives me an awfully blank feeling to be accused of murdering another woman’s husband,” Belva said. Caught up in defending herself, she hadn’t noticed how the male reporters were drinking her in, but now suddenly she did. She apologized for how she looked. “You see, they have taken away all my powder and makeup and my rings and money, too,” she said.

A stout Italian woman walked past the cell hefting a basket of laundry. Belva glanced up. She knew who the inmate was. Sabella Nitti had been convicted of murdering her husband and sentenced to die. She would be the first woman ever to hang in Illinois. Sabella now awaited an appeal before the state Supreme Court.

“I hope they won’t put me to work,” Belva said, watching the condemned woman disappear around the corner with the laundry. “I hate to work.”

4

Hang Me? That’s a Joke

Katherine Malm, “Kitty” to her friends, was happy to have a new cellmate. When the jail matrons brought Belva in, closely followed by reporters, Kitty made herself useful, squeezing through the crush of bodies to fetch a stale currant bun for her.

Belva tore into the bread with barely an acknowledgment of her attendant. It may have taken her a minute to recognize that this pale, black-haired girl, dressed in the formless striped uniform issued by the jail, was the same young woman who had dominated every front page in the city just two weeks before. Everybody—all of Chicago—knew who Katherine Malm was. Her trial had been a sensation. After the reporters left, Belva looked her cellmate over. Kitty didn’t seem to be anything like how the papers described her. They called her the Wolf Woman and the Tiger Girl, but Belva could see nothing vicious about this small-boned nineteen-year-old, who sat as still as the air and offered a hopeful smile every time Belva looked her way.
³

Prosecutors had finally ended the embarrassing string of girl-gunner acquittals in Cook County when they convicted Kitty Malm. The streak had stood at twenty-nine in the summer of 1923 when Sabella Nitti was convicted of murdering her husband, but the newspapers didn’t consider that a true win for the state. Sabella was a poor, rough-looking, middle-aged ethnic woman who spoke almost no English. In the
Tribune,
Genevieve Forbes derided her as “seamy-faced,” “gibbering,” and a “cruel animal.” Many reporters barely considered her human. Like Negro defendants, Sabella was an easy target for any prosecutor. There was simply no comparison between her case and the trial of a white,
American
woman. There’d never been a time when it was easy to convict a white woman in Cook County, especially a young white woman. An earlier streak, this one of husband killers, had stretched to thirty-five consecutive acquittals before finally ending in 1919, when a middle-aged Swedish immigrant was found guilty. The acquittals were so consistent, year after year, that a reporter could state baldly that “women can’t be convicted of murder in Cook County.” So Kitty Malm—young and white and at least not unattractive—was the state’s prize catch. She and her man, Otto Malm, had tried to rob a sweater factory back in November and ended up killing a security guard. Otto, who had a long rap sheet, confessed, but not Kitty, who decided to trust in Illinois’ all-male juries. To the state’s attorney’s office, her conviction was public proof that the days of women getting away with murder were finally over.

Belva Gaertner, the well-mannered society divorcée, and the ragamuffin Tiger Girl seemed an odd pair, but their backgrounds actually had a lot in common—more than Belva would ever publicly admit. They both had had emotionally perilous childhoods. At fourteen, Belva found herself dumped at the state orphanage in Normal after her widowed mother slipped into abject poverty. At twelve, Kitty dropped out of the fifth grade to work in a factory, instructed by her mother that there was “no need for girls to go far in school.” They both also had a weakness for men that got them in trouble. The day after Belva arrived at the jail, Kitty received a divorce summons from her legal husband, Max Baluk. (She’d married Otto Malm illegally after leaving Max.) “Defendant Katherine Baluk, for a considerable time past, has given herself over to adulterous practices, wholly regardless of her marriage vows,” the bill read. It went on to accuse her not just of committing adultery with Otto Malm, but also with “divers [
sic
] other lewd men, whose names are to your orator unknown.” Kitty understood enough of what she was reading that she burst into tears. She got the gist: Max hated her. This shouldn’t have surprised her—Max had beaten her throughout their relationship, until she took their new baby and fled to a flophouse—but it still hurt to see it written down on paper. Max now claimed that their two-year-old daughter, “Tootsie,” wasn’t his, that Kitty had left him because “she had a good time with another fellow” and got pregnant. Kitty showed the legal document to Belva, and the two women, despite a nearly twenty-year age difference, bonded over their poor treatment by men. “Fellows, always fellows,” Kitty said.

Soon Belva and Kitty were playing cards together in their cell, smiling and laughing for news photographers, Kitty talking endlessly about her travails. The younger woman had just one piece of advice—a warning, really—for Belva: Get ready to hear everyone you know lie about you. That was what happened to her, she said. In November, Otto had told police the truth—that he had killed Edward Lehman, the watchman at the Delson sweater factory on Lincoln Avenue, during the botched robbery attempt. He even admitted he’d accidentally hit Kitty with one of his shots, leaving her with a raw wound on her head where the bullet grazed her. For her part, Kitty, still desperately in love with Otto, went further for her man. To show her devotion to Otto after his confession, and to help him get free of the law, she tried to commit suicide shortly after being arrested, hanging herself with a bedsheet. A jail matron cut her down just as she was starting to turn blue. “You can now tell them that I done the shooting so they will let you go to take care of baby forever, but please quit the racket and raise Tootsie in an honest way for your departing mama’s sake,” she wrote to Otto in a suicide letter. A few days later, Otto discovered he might be executed for murder. He quickly adjusted his memory about what had happened at the Delson factory. Kitty had been shooting too, he now said, and “it was the shot from her gun that killed the watchman; she done it.” Otto sold her out, just like that.