The Girls of Murder City (11 page)

“Men are quitters,” Kitty told Belva in disgust, her lip curling into an ugly sneer. “They’re long on talk, but, Lord, when it comes to the show-down, they’re yellow.”

Even with Otto turning on Kitty, her lawyer, Jay J. McCarthy, had gone into her trial feeling confident. He pointed out to her that Otto was the career criminal, not her, and that Otto had confessed to the Delson shooting, again not her. Plus, Kitty was the young mother of a two-year-old girl, who would sit in court beside her grandmother each day looking adorable and sad. Most important of all, McCarthy reminded his client that Illinois’ all-male juries were averse to punishing women, even when they weren’t young mothers. The lawyer figured Kitty would be free in a couple of days. He was so confident of it that he rejected a prosecution plea offer of fourteen years.

The lawyer’s confidence was contagious. “Hang me? That’s a joke,” Kitty told a group of reporters as jury selection began. “Say, nobody in the world would hang a girl for bein’ in an alley with a guy who pulls a gun and shoots.” The
Tribune
’s Genevieve Forbes noted how the former waitress sashayed into court as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

She flopped her abundant fur wrap over the back of the chair as if she were making herself comfortable before the feature picture in a motion-picture house started. And the purple silk lining sprawled over the knees of the bailiff behind her, much as it might have swept over another seat in a theater.

Then Kitty took off her hat, a small black straw, in the favored cloche shape, with a bit of lace veil over her large brown eyes. She shook her black bobbed hair, jiggled around in her seat, and settled down to wait, and to read.

That breezy attitude didn’t last long, however. On Thursday, February 21, the trial got under way. The first sign that this one might turn out differently than other girl-gunner cases was the simple fact that the newspapers’ nicknames worked. Everyone wanted to get a look at the dangerous Wolf Woman, the ferocious Tiger Girl. Dozens of men and women assembled in the corridor of the Criminal Courts Building for the trial’s start. When the doors to Judge Walter Steffen’s courtroom opened, the crowd pushed forward, jamming the doorway and blocking the hall outside. The room quickly filled. It’s likely that Maurine Watkins was one of the spectators who squeezed into the packed room. It would have been hard for her to resist going over to the courthouse whenever her work schedule allowed (and it typically did, for she often worked the night shift). She’d started her new career as a police reporter right when one of the most sensational “girl slayer” trials in Chicago history was starting. But Katherine Malm was Genevieve Forbes’s story; Forbes had stayed on top of it ever since the night of November 3, when Lehman, the young watchman at the Delson sweater factory, was shot down. The boy uttered his last words at the Alexian Brothers Hospital that night, with a policeman and a prosecutor leaning over him and Forbes a step behind, a pencil hovering over her notepad. From her first day on the job, Maurine dreamed about getting this kind of story—and worried she never would. How often did a Kitty Malm come along?

With his opening statement, Assistant State’s Attorney Harry Pritzker tried to preempt any ideas Hearst’s sob sisters might have had about presenting Kitty as a victim. “Mrs. Malm is the hardest woman ever to walk into a courtroom,” he said. “The evidence will show that she fired the shots that killed Lehman. We will ask that she receive the heaviest penalty the state can inflict.” Kitty was struggling to keep her attention on this attack when the prosecution brought in a .38 caliber revolver for the jury to see, the one she was supposed to have used to kill the watchman. They placed a holster next to it. Uninterested in the gun, Kitty turned away—and caught sight of Blanche King standing in the back of the room. Kitty, surprised, smiled. She had figured she’d never see her friend again. King started down the courtroom aisle supported by a nurse. Three months before, Kitty had avoided a police dragnet after Otto’s capture and escaped to Indianapolis. That was where she’d met King; they shared a room at a boardinghouse. The two young women hit it off right away. Before returning to Chicago and surrendering in hopes of saving Otto and seeing her daughter, Kitty tearfully said good-bye to Blanche, she thought forever. Pritzker stood up and announced that Miss King, despite ill health, had come from Indianapolis to testify in the interests of justice. Kitty looked at her attorney in confusion.

King was sworn in, and Pritzker asked her how she knew the defendant.

The witness sat up straight. “The twenty-second of last November,” she said, her voice full of pep, her head swiveling to take in the dozens of eyes gazing upon her. “I was boarding at 128 West Walnut Street, in Indianapolis, and the landlord, Victor Capron, took me to the ‘Chicago girl’s room’ and said, ‘Blanche, meet Kitty.’ ”

“Did you ever see the defendant with any guns?” Pritzker asked.

“Yes, two.”

“Where?”

“In my room.”

“Did she have any names for them?”

For a moment King looked as though she were about to laugh. Her heart rate spiked at the excitement. The nurse stood just a couple of steps away. “Yes,” King said, her breath coming in rapid bursts, “ ‘Little Betsy’ and ‘Big Bertha.’ ” She identified the gun on display as “Big Bertha.”

“Tell us about this revolver.”

“She had it strapped around her waist part of the time in that holster.”

“How many times did you see her with it?”

“Every day.”

McCarthy, unprepared for the surprise witness, offered no objections. It was his first murder trial. When the witness was asked whether the defendant had ever said anything about being on the run, King answered with a happy child’s blurt: “You bet!” She said that Kitty announced to her, “I hate coppers, and I’ll kill any who comes to take me.” The only times Kitty didn’t have her hand on one of her pistols, she added, was “when she was eating, when she was sleeping, and one other time.” King looked to the reporters in the front row, smiling.

Kitty, unbelieving, sat throughout the testimony with her eyes riveted on King. She wanted to scream. She wanted to jump up and yell, “Liar!” but she didn’t. She sat there in shock, her mouth wrenched open. Blanche King, on the other hand, was exuberant. After her testimony ended, she waited around in the hallway until every reporter there had a chance to talk to her. Her nurse stood nearby. Along with a variety of long-standing physical ailments, King also had mental problems.

Assistant State’s Attorney Pritzker no longer had to worry about the Hearst papers. King’s testimony was so dramatic, and so damaging to the defense, that the sob sisters never got a chance to do their work. The reports that splashed across Chicago’s front pages were straightforward, in-your-face crime writing worthy of coverage of the city’s most vicious gangsters.

“Katherine Baluk Malm, on trial for her life in the court of Judge Walter P. Steffen, carried two guns on her hip like a girl in a dime novel, and wore a dress with buckles that enabled her to slip in, open quickly and draw her weapons. Moreover, she hated ‘coppers’ and swore that if she saw one he’d drop.”

That was the normally staid
Daily News.

The imagery was simply too good to pass up. All of the city’s papers used variations on King’s dramatic description of how the Tiger Girl carried her guns. (Forbes, in the
Tribune,
declared that Kitty “carried a gun where most girls hide their love letters.”) Kitty read some of the coverage the next day and spent the weekend in her cell crying uncontrollably.

On Monday, Kitty arrived in court to find chaos. Public interest in the trial, high from the start, had turned fanatical. Reporters fought their way into the courtroom. The
Evening Post
reported that “some 200 would-be spectators thronged the corridors of the Criminal Courts building” in hopes of seeing Kitty Malm in the flesh. Once bailiffs cleared the way, the defendant entered with her head down. She wore a sexy new black dress, procured by her lawyer, that emphasized her small waist and ignored her smaller bosom. But she walked stiffly to the defendant’s table. There was nothing extra to her gait, no oomph to catch the eye of the average juryman, as McCarthy undoubtedly had hoped when he picked out the dress. The crowd gaped anyway. Kitty, they now believed, was the real thing after all: a killer.

Kitty, stepping up to the stand on shaky legs, did her best to knock down her former friend’s testimony. “I never carried or fired a gun in my life,” she said, her voice quavering. She acknowledged that she had been friendly with Blanche King but denied saying any of the things King attributed to her. Just thinking about Blanche’s betrayal caused her eyes to well up, and she knew Otto was waiting out in the hall to say even worse things about her. She began to hyperventilate. Judge Steffen had to stop the testimony over and over so that the defendant could gain control of her emotions and make her answers intelligible to the jury. The
Tribune
wrote that “Mrs. Malm’s testimony came as the sensation of the trial,” but most spectators left disappointed. They didn’t want denials and tears. They didn’t want to hear about Kitty’s love for her daughter. They had taken time off from work or household chores to listen to the Wolf Woman tell exactly how she shot that watchman dead.

The jury wanted the same thing. After just an hour and twenty minutes, the foreman, Walter H. Harper, rapped softly on the door of the jury room. After four ballots, they were ready with a verdict. The lawyers, the defendant, and a still-large contingent of court fans filed back into the courtroom. Harper handed a piece of paper to the court clerk. The clerk unfolded it and read: “We, the jury, find the defendant, Katherine Baluk Malm, guilty of murder in manner and form as charged in the indictment, and we fix her punish—”

The rest of the word was drowned out by Kitty’s scream. She clutched her arms and fell in on herself, as if she’d taken a blow to the stomach. McCarthy steadied her. The clerk, who’d looked up at the sound, returned to the piece of paper. “Fix her punishment at imprisonment in the penitentiary for the term of her natural life.”

“Expressions of surprise were heard all over the courtroom,” wrote the
Post.
It had finally happened: a conviction. Kitty screamed again, deeper, angry. She shook her head violently. When McCarthy and the bailiffs tried to calm her, she threw them off: “Keep away! I don’t want to see anybody.” The circuitry in her brain suddenly snapped. She dropped in a dead faint, hitting the floor as if she’d jumped from a third-floor window. Spectators in the crowded courtroom pushed forward, oblivious to Judge Steffen banging his gavel. Kitty lay rigid, lost in blackness. Despite repeated efforts, lawyers and guards couldn’t revive her. “While the confusion was at the height, deputy sheriffs lifted the woman from the floor and put her on a chair,” Forbes wrote. “Then they carried chair and all to the prisoner’s elevator and down to the ‘bridge’ of the jail.” They hefted her across the street. She woke in her cell, confused, trying to sort out what had happened.

“My God! What did they do?” she asked.

That was a good question. All of the women on Murderess’ Row had to be wondering exactly what that jury had done. Was everything different now because of Katherine Malm? Were juries now willing to convict women of murder, after years of refusing to do so? The state’s attorney’s office said yes: Murderous women would now—at last—pay the penalty in Cook County just as men did.

For prosecutors, however, building on this single verdict surely would be problematic. Yes, Kitty was a young white woman and she’d been convicted, but she wasn’t like so many of the women who’d been set free in recent years, especially the high-profile ones. Cora Orthwein had been a St. Louis society lady before divorce and booze caused her to “fall” from respectability and ultimately to shoot down her low-life boyfriend. Then there was Anna McGinnis, who’d been acquitted of knocking off her husband the previous summer. She was young and beautiful and had perfect manners. Times may have been changing, but the Victorian feminine ideal still loomed large in the typical juryman’s psyche. He couldn’t help but be disposed toward demure ladies with pretty figures and good pedigrees. Poor, uneducated girls like Kitty Malm, on the other hand, were a grave social danger. They were “physically and mentally contaminated,” insisted one of the first scholarly reports on female criminality,
The Cause and Cure of Crime.
The social activist Belle Moskowitz declared that “the girl whose temperament and disposition crave unnatural forms of excitement is nearly beyond the bounds of salvation. . . . She may affect the well being of others.”