The Girls of Murder City (12 page)

That was Kitty in one pithy statement, and the newspapers knew it. For weeks she had stared at reporters through the jail’s bars, defiant, seemingly without comprehension. Her hair was amateurishly hacked short, arcing across the left side of her forehead like a scythe. When the reporters arrived each day for interviews, she approached the front of her cell slowly, indirectly, like a wary animal—every time the same way. To male reporters in particular, there was no denying that Kitty Malm was a lewd, diseased girl. She’d stare right into a man’s eyes, her face scrunched up as if she were working on a tough math problem. Her attitude and language were vulgar. Men looked at Kitty Malm and thought of the whores who walked North Clark Street after dark.

So had anything really changed? Two weeks after convicting Kitty, Assistant State’s Attorney Pritzker announced that Belva Gaertner was “as guilty as Kitty Malm” and should receive the same treatment from a jury. But the
Tribune
stated the situation bluntly: Katherine Malm was “the only really young woman who’s ever gone over the road”—that is, been convicted of murder. And the reason was that she “wasn’t—well—quite ‘refined.’ ” A respectable lady who shot her husband or boyfriend, on the other hand, a woman like Belva Gaertner, still didn’t scare men: She was a romantic figure, a representation of how much women in general, with their overflowing emotions, loved and needed their men. “My experience makes me know how unreasonable men can be and makes me give the woman every advantage of the doubt,” said one man interviewed about the rash of women shooting their men in Cook County.

It could all be explained through simple biology, newspaper readers were told in the aftermath of the conviction. Kitty Malm—and, needless to say, Sabella Nitti—was not like ordinary, decent women. You could tell simply by looking at her. A woman prone to crime and violence had a “broad nose and cheekbones, full chin and lips, contracted upper frontal skull development and prominent bulging development of the forehead just over the eyes and nose.” That was the conclusion of noted phrenologist Dr. James M. Fitzgerald. His description tended to fit ethnic women more than Anglo women, but the doctor was a little subtler than that in his analysis. Asked by newspapers to examine photographs of murderous women, Fitzgerald insisted that they “all have broad heads. You can put it down as a basic principle that the broad-headed animals eat the narrow-headed ones. . . . All these women are alike in having single-track minds, with imperfect comprehension of consequences. They are ‘show me’ people who have to experience to understand, and the jails are full of this type. Food and sexual interests make a strong appeal to them.”

So which was Belva Gaertner: a broad-headed animal or a narrow-headed one? Being a respectable lady, she planned on keeping a hat on in court, but she knew her life likely depended on her ability to shape the answer to that question, to make men—both jurors and reporters—see what she wanted them to see.

5

No Sweetheart in the World Is Worth Killing

Maurine’s desk sat on the east side of the local room, squeezed between the photo department and the file room. A battered typewriter, a castoff from another reporter, came with it. If she needed anything else, she could call out to a copyboy, though she didn’t like to raise her voice. Genevieve Forbes enjoyed a desk in a more central location, within easy sight of Robert Lee, who handed out the most important assignments. Forbes would thump in and out of the room without a glance toward her junior colleague.

Maurine could hardly have expected anything else from Forbes. Only a handful of girl reporters covered crime in Chicago, and none did so exclusively. This did not engender feelings of sisterhood or cliquishness among them. Being the best female police reporter in a newsroom carried very little cachet, which meant being second best might be cause for transfer to the fashions beat.

Besides, Forbes, thirty years old and unmarried, had some reason for jealousy. The paper’s star reporters, the men who always got the stories Forbes wanted, no longer walked straight through the center of the room. They meandered, weaving their way around to the far corner, where they paused to tie a shoe or laugh at a joke they’d just remembered. Maurine was “so lovely to look at that the men in the local room managed to have to walk by her desk, and of course stop for a cheery word,” observed Fanny Butcher, who worked in the adjacent Sunday room. Butcher amused herself day after day by watching men bump into each other as they looked for something to do near the new girl reporter. Maurine tried to ignore the hovering men, but that rarely discouraged them. If she were tapping away on her typewriter, she could count on someone leaning over her shoulder, perusing a line, and offering a suggestion for improvement.

The attention directed at Maurine couldn’t be entirely attributed to her beauty. She represented a rare challenge in the newsroom. The men dared not pinch her behind or make crude suggestions for assignations, as they would to Fanny Butcher or Forbes. She was different from the other young women on staff. Maurine had never even seen a poker game before joining the
Tribune.
She didn’t drink or smoke. She had trouble meeting a man’s eye. It brought out the romantic spirit—and good manners—in her male coworkers. Teddy Beck, the managing editor, became so frustrated at seeing his reporters crowded around Maurine all the time that he laid down a diktat: “There will be no more women in the local room.” One of the few other women with a desk in the room, Margery Currey, thought that meant she had been fired. She began cleaning out her desk, avoiding eye contact with other reporters to keep from crying, before being told the edict didn’t apply to her. Settled back in front of her Underwood, she noted, “This is one time when my face was my fortune.” Currey, Butcher pointed out, was an excellent journalist, “but ravishingly beautiful she was not.”

Forbes got to stay too. She had proven her value many times over, but there was also simply too much work to do for Beck’s order ever to be implemented: too many murderesses knocking off their boyfriends, too many girl pickpockets and pretty little con artists, too many young women snatched from respectable lives by white slavers or their own dark curiosity.

More than anything else, Forbes and Maurine could thank the Eighteenth Amendment for their burgeoning career opportunities. No one had foreseen that Prohibition would have such disastrous consequences. Chicago’s newspapers had all supported the constitutional amendment and its enforcement law, the Volstead Act, which went into effect in January 1920. But their support hardly convinced anyone that the law was right. Prohibition’s timing had simply been awful. The 1920s began, wrote Burton Rascoe, the
Tribune
’s former literary editor, “in a general atmosphere of cynicism, disillusion and bitterness.” The unprecedented carnage of the World War had touched everyone in one way or another; now few people, especially those under forty, had any tolerance for the tin-eared moralizing of the temperance folks. After Prohibition got under way, alcohol consumption spiked—and continued to rise even as the quality of the spirits plummeted. For a whole generation, across class lines, defying the dry law became an act of self-definition—a necessary rebellion against a sordid, hypocritical ruling class. Illegal production and distribution of alcoholic beverages, centered in Chicago, became one of the biggest industries in the country, with beer sales in the city topping $30 million a month by one accounting.

The official corruption that came with this unprecedented criminal expansion was similarly outsize. Gangsters funneled a million dollars in bribes each month to Chicago’s police, prosecutors, and elected officials. It made the whole city—at least to Maurine’s suddenly jaded eye—a “grand and gory comedy.” When it came to bootleggers, those charged with enforcing the law, at every level, became blind and dumb. Reporters who didn’t overlook this rampant graft suffered. Fred Lovering, of the
Daily Journal,
foolishly broke a story about bribery at the Cook County Jail. The next time the reporter walked into the lockup, guards grabbed him and held him down while prisoners pummeled him. Lovering’s nose was reduced to a blob of flaccid flesh, leaving him with breathing problems, a severe speech impediment, and constant pain for the rest of his life. Maurine was stunned to learn that a warden at a smaller facility called in federal agents “to stop bootlegging in his jail so that he can bring his prisoners to trial sober”—stunned, that is, to discover an honest man running a jail in the county. She found that in every kind of crime—“hijacking and graft scandals . . . frequency of murders, percentage of acquitted, etc.”—Chicago stood out, and that most of it was related to booze.

Bootlegging was an overwhelming problem in Cook County Jail—with the exception, for the most part, of the women’s section. Sitting in a cell less than forty-eight hours after her arrest, Belva Gaertner’s hands shook, and she gulped cup after cup of stale coffee to settle her nerves. This may have been rough on the new inmate, but she quickly recognized it was for the best. The newspapers thrived on Prohibition as much as the bootleggers, though in an entirely different way. For the sob sisters, no story line was more reliably popular than that of the reformed sinner. Belva, with the drinking and the gunplay and the high-profile divorce, was sure to be a huge story, and almost all of the city’s papers began working on her potential redemption.

On March 14, the day after the inquest into Walter Law’s death, the
Daily Journal
declared that Belva had turned to the Lord and gathered the other women inmates to sing hymns. “One number on the programme was a pianologue,” the paper wrote. “The words were spoken by Mrs. Belle Gaertner, held in connection with the killing of Walter Law, and the accompaniment was the tune and faint plaintive words: ‘Where He leads me, I will follow.’ ” Once the singing was over, the
Journal
’s reporter pulled Belva aside:

Mrs. Gaertner, clad in a sober but hopeful black canton dress with Spanish lace sleeves, refused to “talk.” Her attorneys had been there early in the day and left rules to be followed. . . . Mrs. Gaertner admitted reluctantly that she feels well, although the jail cots are not the most comfortable in the world.

The
Journal,
as expected, provided the conventional premise for a girl-gunner story: the predatory man. “Law is to blame for the trouble my daughter is in,” Belva’s mother, Mary Leese, said from the apartment she shared with her daughter. “He was crazy about her and always after her. He came here nights and took her out, and not content with that, he came here often in the daytime. He wouldn’t let her alone.” The elderly woman told the paper that she didn’t understand how Mrs. Law could have been so “hoodwinked” by her husband.

The Hearst papers also stayed with the tried-and-true formula for their coverage of Belva, though their approach differed from the
Journal
’s. They created glamour out of blood and misery. The photo retouchers at the
American
and the
Herald and Examiner
were experts at buffing up pictures of women criminals: painting out wrinkles, eye bags, double chins. In the original photos from the night of the shooting, Belva looked old and exhausted, her skin loose, eyes drooping. This was a woman who’d seen way too much life. Those same photos in Hearst newsprint, however, showed a woman transformed, a lean and fetching beauty—maybe even beautiful enough to be innocent. With their emphasis on sensation and sentimentality, the Hearst newspapers had a stake in their murderesses looking more beautiful than those in the staid
Tribune
and
Daily News,
and their artists competed with each other like rival funeral-home directors.

Following Walter Howey’s imperative to “hype this up,” the
American
and the
Herald and Examiner
further goosed their story packages about Belva with bulging headlines and captions that sported purple prose, all seeking to get the reader emotionally involved in the ongoing drama. The
Herald and Examiner
warned that poisonous alcohol had accounted for more than two hundred deaths in Cook County in 1923. Worse, the fusel oil and industrial solvents in the bootleggers’ “reckless mixtures has created a new type of alcoholism and insanity.” Could this be the reason Belva shot? The
Herald and Examiner
’s sister paper took the possibility seriously, or at least half seriously. The
American
re-created the gin-soaked events leading up to the shooting in a series of cartoon panels. This kind of strip, popular for girl-crime stories, promoted moral behavior—modesty, abstemiousness, familial love—while at the same time wallowing in its opposite. It always featured drawings of a wild-eyed, scantily clad woman holding a smoking gun and an empty bottle of liquor. The typical murderess, one panel exclaimed, “like all girls, faced the old problem of whether to follow the conventions of the world or her own desires.” Belva Gaertner, the reader was told, had had plenty of fun, but now she regretted it.