The Girls of Murder City (20 page)

Beulah, Belva, and Sabella, who’d trailed behind, sat on benches and wooden chairs in the courtroom, looking around for recognizable faces, reporters’ faces. Spectators stood in clusters near them and at the back of the room, hoping to get a good look at Beulah’s pleasing ankles when she stepped up in front of the judge. The scene was something new and strange. Mae West wasn’t a Broadway star anymore. She’d been relegated to a minor-league vaudeville circuit after a string of rapid-fire setbacks and right now was in Texas, appearing fourth on the bill, one slot below “Marcel and his Trained Seal.” Beulah Annan, a complete unknown just three weeks ago, an assistant bookkeeper at a laundry, was a bigger star. Love and understanding shone down on her. “I think in most cases where a man is shot by a woman, he has it coming to him,” one fan told a reporter. Many like-minded men were in the courtroom supporting the beautiful young woman whose lover had it coming. No one seemed to blame Beulah for her predicament. “A woman has to be pretty bad to be as bad as the best men,” a café owner said. Maurine Watkins, witnessing this response to Beulah, decided that, for women, Chicago was “the ideal locale for getting away with murder.” She would floridly reference Beulah’s looks over and over in her articles as a snide dig at the limitations of the male mind and predominant mores.

As the three women waited, a dour family, the Montanas, stepped before the judge. Five people—three generations of the family—stood accused of killing a policeman during a liquor raid on their home. Normally, a cop killing was page-one news, but the reporters paid little attention to the clan. Photographers surrounded Beulah, Belva, and Sabella and asked them to pose together. They were directed to sit behind a long wooden table, next to each other but fanned out just so—Belva, then Beulah, and finally Sabella.

The women had come prepared. Belva wore a black Easter bonnet with blue chinstrap ribbons streaming down her back, a blue suit, and a summer fur around her neck. A small smile wormed across her lips as the camera caught her. Beulah, in the center, was as composed as President Coolidge, the famously stoic “Silent Cal” who’d replaced the late Warren Harding last fall. She wore a more modern hat than Belva, which certainly pleased her (though she didn’t let her pleasure show). She was decked out in a fawn-colored suit and, like Belva, had a light fur lying over her shoulder like a napping pet, its snout nuzzling happily in her collar. While Belva and Beulah attempted to strike dignified poses—the poses of proper women rudely detained against their will—Sabella, the third wheel, beamed like a child. She couldn’t help herself. It was a good day. She wasn’t going to be hanged today. A week after standing before the state Supreme Court, she was now seeking bail.

Men and women had stared as Sabella Nitti entered the courtroom right behind Belva and Beulah. There was no way to know if it was in admiration of the company she was keeping or in disgust that a convicted murderess might soon be set free. Belva and Beulah were in court to ask that their cases be held on call. Their respective lawyers had other cases to complete. But Sabella had already had her day in court. Chicagoans, fed a diet of news stories over the past nine months that characterized Sabella as “dirty,” “repulsive,” and “animal-like,” found themselves conflicted about the Italian woman’s fate. Sabella had never received the kind of coverage her two companions enjoyed. Even when indicating their likely guilt, reporters lauded Beulah and Belva for their beauty and bearing, attributes that opened the door to the possibility of innocence. Not so Sabella. No reporter ever entertained the thought that she might be innocent. After a four-day trial in the summer of 1923, she was convicted by a jury of twelve respectable men and sentenced to die.

Yet “ladies day” at the court belonged to Sabella Nitti anyway. “Beulah has been told she’s beautiful. Belva knows she’s stylish,” pointed out the
Tribune.
“Sabelle is neither—and she’s happy.”
⁷

It was so unlikely, and yet it was true. Sabella Nitti walked into the courthouse with her two more glamorous cellmates, and she felt as if she were walking on clouds. Her joy expressed itself in her dress as well as her attitude. During her trial, she went to court in the rags she’d been wearing when arrested, the makeshift clothing of a poor farm woman. She looked worn, old, pathetic. Today, following Belva and Beulah, Sabella stepped before Judge Lindsay in a tailored black dress, her hair professionally curled, and with a small gray hat fixed to the top of her head. The transformation was amazing—and completely unexpected. It may have saved her life.

The person most responsible for Sabella Nitti’s makeover was a twenty-three-year-old attorney who had recently set up her own practice because no law firm would hire her. Nine months before Sabella made her bravura Easter Monday court appearance, Helen Cirese had walked into the women’s section of the Cook County Jail for the first time to meet her new client. The steel door closed behind her, and the wheel handle turned and then caught with an echoing
thuck.
She stared, mesmerized, at the two rows of cramped, ill-lit cells, one on each side of her, and at the cracked cement floor that rolled into a shimmering nothingness. Before “stylish” Belva Gaertner, before “beautiful” Beulah Annan, Cirese made an impression on the reporters who trawled the downtown jail for news. Tall and slender, she wore a white blouse under a long, thin vest that was pinned to her hips by a belt. A large feathered cloche sat low against her brow, giving her face a childlike cast. She was a dear sight standing there, nervous, holding her bag in front of her. Her photo appeared in the
Tribune
the next day, and she cut it out and saved it.

It was late summer of 1923, and Cirese had every reason to believe that powerful men were arrayed against her. She and five other young Italian lawyers had just taken on Sabella Nitti’s appeal, pro bono. The state’s attorney and the police were determined to make sure the new defense team failed. It embarrassed them that some 90 percent of the women ever tried for murder in the jurisdiction had walked free. And none—until Sabella—had ever been sentenced to death. Chicago’s police chief declared that when women “kill wantonly, no effort should be spared in the interest of justice.”

The lawyers who’d volunteered for Sabella’s case had decided that Cirese, the lone woman among them, would be the best emissary to the scared, bereft inmate, who spoke barely any English. Sabella, who was somewhere in her forties, had been convicted of helping Peter Crudelle, a farmhand and possibly her lover at the time, murder her husband. In early July of 1922, Sabella had reported Frank Nitti missing to the police in Stickney, a town on the edge of Cook County. The next day, when the police told her they could not find her husband, “she wept and pulled her hair and scratched her face.” The father of children ranging in age from three to twenty-five never returned to his little farm. In March 1923, Sabella married Crudelle, but they would not live happily together for long. Two months after the marriage, police found a badly decomposed body in a sewer catch basin and identified it as Frank Nitti. Sabella and her fifteen-year-old son, Charlie, were brought in for questioning. After a long inquisition, Charlie told police that Crudelle had murdered his father on Sabella’s orders and that he and Crudelle had disposed of the body. Sabella, not understanding what her son was saying in English, said that whatever Charlie told them was true. On May 25, 1923, the state indicted Sabella Nitti, Peter Crudelle, and Charlie Nitti for murder. Sabella and Peter Crudelle were convicted. (After Charlie testified, charges against him were dropped.) Sabella didn’t comprehend the verdict when it was read. The next day, when an interpreter informed her that she had been condemned to hang, she cried out in terror and fainted.

Then a strange thing happened. People throughout the country became interested in Sabella. The
Los Angeles Times
put her on the front page:

For the first time in the history of Illinois, a woman has been given the death penalty for murder. More than thirty women have been tried for slaying their husbands or lovers and some have been convicted—three rare cases in which the defendants were unattractive and one a negress.
⁸
In every case where the murderess was young and pretty, she was acquitted. The death penalty in Illinois is carried out by hanging.

For months Sabella had been reviled in Chicago as a dirty, vicious killer. Now, almost overnight, the death sentence had made her a national cause célèbre. Those in favor of the sentence argued it was past time for Illinois to treat its women criminals in the same manner as its men, and who better than this grotesque foreigner to be the first to swing? New York, they pointed out, had executed a woman more than twenty years before, in 1899. But humanitarians used the sentence as a rallying cry. The wife of one of the jurors soon announced she would “go home to mother” if the Italian woman was hanged. Religious leaders made impassioned pleas for mercy. After weeks of being ignored by her fellow inmates, Sabella suddenly was “a woman of importance in the jail,” wrote Genevieve Forbes. “All those others who were waiting trial for robbery with a gun, for accessory to burglary and other more or less pallid charges, became, almost unconsciously, willing handmaidens ministering to this nationally famous woman.”

Sabella didn’t realize any of this. Twice she tried to commit suicide, first by choking herself, and then, when that failed, by ramming her head repeatedly into a cell wall, leaving spatters of blood on the wall and red rivers coursing down her face.

For days after the verdict, Sabella sobbed and moaned and tore at her hair, until finally she managed to calm herself and come to terms with her terrible fate. “Me choke,” she told anyone who’d listen, a doleful look on her face. With her limited English she got it just right. Hanging made it past the “cruel and unusual punishment” restriction in the Constitution in part because the neck was supposed to be broken by the body’s drop from the trapdoor. As often as not, though, the noose didn’t catch just right, and instead the condemned prisoner choked to death—a ghastly, protracted, dry-drowning spectacle. “This takes from eight to fourteen minutes,” pointed out
Daily News
reporter Ben Hecht, who’d witnessed a fair number of hangings in Chicago.

While he hangs choking, the white-covered body begins to spin slowly. The white-hooded head tilts to one side and a stretch of purpled neck becomes visible. Then the rope begins to vibrate and hum like a hive of bees. After this the white robe begins to expand and deflate as if it were being blown up by a leaky bicycle pump. Following the turning, spinning, humming, and pumping up of the white robe comes the climax of the hanging. This is the throat of the hanging man letting out a last strangled cry or moan of life.

Hecht referred to the hanging
man
not simply out of linguistic convention; he did so because when he wrote the passage, it was almost inconceivable that a responsible prosecutor would seek the ultimate penalty for a woman or that a civilized jury would impose it. There had been more than a hundred executions in Cook County since 1840, when records began being kept. Leaders in the Italian community did not think it a coincidence that the first woman so condemned would be a poor, unattractive, non-English-speaking Italian immigrant. Faced with one of their own being put to death, Cirese and the other five lawyers (an attorney named Rocco de Stefano would serve as lead counsel) stepped forward.

The court agreed to hear a motion to set aside the verdict. Judge Joseph B. David postponed the execution, which had been scheduled for October 12, 1923—Columbus Day. But Judge David didn’t put much stock in Sabella’s chances. “This is a grave matter,” he said. “I will consent to hear you, but there is not one chance in one hundred that the sentence will be vacated and a new trial granted.”

The defense team’s argument before the state Supreme Court wasn’t going to be original. The lawyers planned to prove that Sabella’s trial attorney, Eugene Moran, had been incompetent. They insisted that Sabella, whose court request for new counsel was signed with an X, “could not understand Mr. Moran, he could not understand her, and they had great difficulty in making themselves understood even through interpreters.” They also planned to show that the evidence the prosecution used to convict was suspect. The lawyers believed the identification of the body had been a sham—there was good reason to doubt that the corpse found in the catch basin was Frank Nitti. They planned to argue that the testimony of Charlie Nitti, Sabella’s son, had been coerced, and that the motive put forward by the prosecution, namely the subsequent marriage of Sabella and Peter Crudelle, hardly constituted proof of anything.

Sabella’s conviction, her defense team believed, had been assured by the ethnic and class biases commonplace in the country. Much of the reporting on the case, especially Forbes’s coverage in the
Tribune,
had been offensive, showing the kind of vicious stereotyping that had led to U.S. immigration laws being changed to limit the numbers of southern Europeans coming into the country. Sabella’s poverty, illiteracy, and inability to speak English had fatally wounded her case. Who she was, in the eyes of your typical Cook County juror, showed in her face and dress and posture. Sabella herself understood this, having watched two pretty blonde sisters—Mrs. Anna McGinnis and Mrs. Myna Pioch—walk out the jail door a month before she was convicted. “Nice face—swell clothes—shoot man—go home,” she said in despair to her fellow inmates. “Me do nothing—me choke.”