The Girls of Murder City (30 page)

No city was nearly so obsessed as Chicago, of course. No detail about Beulah—her dress, her facial expressions, what she listened to on the radio in her cell—was too picayune to be put down in print. So her ascension to the stand on Saturday, May 24, the trial’s second day, was cause for massive coverage, with large front-page photographs and the opening up of two-page spreads inside for blow-by-blow accounts of Beulah telling her tale to her attorney and then squaring off with the prosecutor. The
American
wrote that “Annan had carefully prepared for her ordeal. She was becomingly gowned in another new dress of blue twill that gave her an extremely girlish appearance, and she wore peach-colored stockings to match her Titian hair.”

Beulah looked perfect for the part of innocent victim. Her dress had been chosen only after dozens had been tried on and rejected. It was a conservative dress, but its light fabric softly gripped her chest and hips, giving the jurymen the slightest, but undeniable, suggestion of the sweet hollows that lay beneath, the innocent sexuality that Harry Kalstedt had wanted so badly to corrupt. Assistant State’s Attorney McLaughlin may have been heartened by Beulah’s nervousness the previous day, when the jury wasn’t even in the room, but paradoxically so was Stewart. O’Brien and Stewart had prepped their client well, and now she just had to remember what to say, nothing else. Trembling was allowed, perhaps encouraged. “All you have to do is to tell the truth,” was Stewart’s advice for any defendant with a naturally sympathetic countenance. “A child can tell the truth about something he knows and the child does not need to know anything about courts or the rules of evidence. . . . So I’m not going to try to explain rules of evidence to you; no use bothering you with them. The jury will understand your lack of knowledge on the subject and they will sympathize with your nervousness.”

The value of this advice, needless to say, depended on what the truth was—or what the witness wanted it to be. Maurine Watkins, who had heard all of Beulah’s confessions and statements over the weeks, had made up her mind about the truth and Beulah’s relationship to it. She knew what to expect. The reporter wrote, “Under the glare of motion picture lights—a news weekly—Beulah took the stand. In another new dress—navy twill tied at the side with a childlike moiré bow—with new necklace of crystal and jet, she made her debut as an actress.”

But how could Beulah not have viewed it as a performance? As Maurine noted, she stepped up to the stand with movie cameras grinding. Their lights, dangling from poles in the back of the courtroom, provided a golden spotlight right in the middle of the witness chair. Beulah had observed the setting up of the cameras with frank interest, understanding that it meant her visage would soon flicker in theatrical newsreels across the country. That was an audience of 40 million people each week. But this massive national attention was an abstract concept; the people here right now were very real. Court fans—
Beulah
fans—had begun arriving at the courthouse two hours before the doors opened and rushed for seats as soon as they were allowed inside. A large crowd didn’t make it into Judge Lindsay’s courtroom; bailiffs had to force the doors shut after the room filled past capacity. The lucky ones who did get in sat on windowsills and stood on benches. Unable to see from the back, young women, throwing propriety aside, asked to be boosted up by strange men. The crowd was so primed that Beulah’s appearance in the bright white circle elicited a collective gasp. Necks strained. Men elbowed each other. Was she as beautiful as the papers said? Was she even more beautiful? Beulah, so enamored of attention, for a moment was overwhelmed “and seemed to shrink back in her chair as a [camera] flashlight went off with a bang. Then she clenched her hands and turned her eyes toward her attorney, William Scott Stewart.”

Stewart gave his client a good, hard, long look before he said anything. He knew she needed to come back down to earth. They had specific goals for this testimony. The state was trying to convince the jury that Beulah and Kalstedt had been lovers and that Kalstedt had not been a threat to her that terrible day, inferences that McLaughlin insisted were evident by the fact that Kalstedt was shot in the back. Along with knocking down those allegations, Beulah had to successfully deflect the prosecutorial value of her confessions on the night of the shooting: She had to force the prosecutors to face the defense allegation that they had unfairly tormented her while she was in a state of grief and shock.

Stewart opened with some easy questions: He asked her name, her age, where she lived prior to her arrest, whether she lived there with her husband. Maurine, well on her way to becoming a court expert, knew what the defense was doing: “First a series of colorless fact questions—where did you live, what schools did you attend, etc.—that gives the witness confidence in herself, and accustoms the listeners to her simple, straightforward manner. Then a series of questions to establish her general character. And from these we learn—and so do the jury—that she is no butterfly, but an old-fashioned girl who never smokes, seldom dances and drinks but little—her pet diversions, the prosecution would have us believe, being misconduct and murder.”

Maurine may have been fashioning flippant comments in her head, but the other spectators massed behind the lawyers’ tables treated the beginning of the testimony with due reverence. “Save for the grinding of the cameras, the courtroom was intensely silent,” wrote the
Evening Post.
“Beulah’s husband, Albert, sat with bowed head near Mrs. Mary Neel, the defendant’s mother.” The
Daily News
noted that Beulah “hesitated, eyes downcast, her cheeks delicately flushed. There wasn’t a breath in the courtroom.”

Stewart asked Beulah what had happened that led to the shooting. Beulah focused on her lawyer as he was talking and then lifted her chin to take in the packed room. “Stately and with a calmness that astounded all observers,” the
Daily Journal
’s reporter wrote, she began to tell her story in a “clear, firm voice.” The voice was soft and sweet, her Southern accent as fluffy as black-seed cotton.

She said that Harry Kalstedt, her coworker at Tennant’s Laundry, knocked on the back screen door in the morning. “I opened the inner door and there he stood. He seemed to be intoxicated. He came in and said to me: ‘I hate to do this, but I need money. I have to get some wine.’ I said to him: ‘How much do you need?’ He said: ‘Six dollars.’ I said: ‘I can’t let you have that much; I haven’t got it.’ He said: ‘How much have you got?’ and I went into the bedroom for my pocketbook.” Beulah paused to swallow audibly and then added that she gave Kalstedt a dollar and he left.

Stewart asked if she saw him later in the day.

“Yes. At 2 or a quarter after.”

As Beulah was answering this simple question, the movie-camera lights suddenly snapped off, returning the defendant to the dull overhead lighting that was for everyone else. “The witness seemed to lose their stimulating effect,” an observer noted. Beulah sat there, stunned, as if she’d been insulted. Stewart took a step back, to give his client time to come to terms with what had just happened with the lights. After a moment, he moved in again. He skipped right to the part he knew the jurors wanted to hear most.

“What was said before you jumped off the couch where you were sitting with him in the afternoon?” he asked.

“I had been after him to go, saying, ‘Please leave,’ and finally I said I was going to call my husband.” Beulah was laying on the accent thicker than ever now. “He said, ‘No, you are not,’ and I said, ‘If my husband came in here now he would kill you or both of us.’ He said, ‘Where is the ------ gun?’ [Beulah apparently used an expletive, which was recorded with dashes] and we both moved for the bedroom.”

“Had you been in the bedroom before, that afternoon?”

“No.”

“Was the bed visible from the hall?”

“Yes.”

“Tell what happened.”

“We were almost at the bed. He grabbed for the gun, and I jerked the gun away. He said: ‘Damn you, I’ll kill you,’ or something like that.”

“Did he make any move then, at the time?”

“He came toward me with his hand up.”

“What did you do?”

“I pushed his right shoulder with my left hand”—she said this with deliberate authority, knowing the importance of explaining away the fact that Kalstedt was shot in the back. She continued: “He raised his hand to grab the gun and I shot him.”

Stewart asked what his condition was before she shot.

“He was very much intoxicated.”

“Did you gather you were in danger of receiving bodily harm?”

Beulah leaned forward, her eyes and voice steady. “Yes.”

Stewart nodded at his client, clearly pleased but restraining a smile. He now took a moment, let the mood cool, and then started back in.

“You know this Betty [Bergman], who was a witness here yesterday?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Have you had any trouble with her?”

Beulah’s expression and body language remained neutral. “Well, we were not exactly friends,” she said.

“What was the trouble?”

“Well, one week before [the shooting], she asked for the key to my apartment.”

Stewart, an excellent, understated performer, no doubt gave the jury a look here before turning back to Beulah.

“And you were not good friends after that?”

“No.”

With one sentence, Betty Bergman’s credibility—not to mention her reputation—had been severely compromised, and Beulah’s integrity, with the implication that she had refused her boss’s sordid request, enhanced. And it happened so fast—and was apparently so unexpected—that McLaughlin made no objection. Stewart quickly moved on, circling back to when Kalstedt returned to the apartment.

“Tell what was said from the time Kalstedt came in.”

“He came to the door and said: ‘Are you alone?’ ” she related with cool precision, a story she knew by heart. “Then he stepped into the reception hall. I had been playing the phonograph and lying on the couch when he came in. He had a package under his arm and said: ‘I have brought you some wine,’ and he offered me a drink. As he unwrapped the package, I said: ‘Don’t start anything like that. You have had enough to drink, and my husband is liable to come home.’ He said, ‘To hell with your husband. What do I care about him?’ and took off his hat and overcoat. He said: ‘Just one drink and I’ll go.’ ”

Now they came to the part they knew would be hard to sell. Beulah seemed to almost flounce in her seat, as if girding herself for criticism. She said, “I took one drink with him. Then he said: ‘Let’s have a little jazz.’ He walked to the Victrola and put on a record. He said: ‘Let’s have a little dance.’ And then he said, ‘Come on into the bedroom,’ and I refused and begged him to go. He was intoxicated at the time and went over and sat on the couch. I sat beside him and tried to reason with him, and said: ‘Pull yourself together. My husband will be coming home.’ He said: ‘What the hell do I care about your husband? You know he won’t come.’ I said: ‘Well, then, there’s something else. If nothing else will stop you, maybe this will.’ ”

Beulah suddenly ran out of breath. She appeared on the verge of tears. She turned to face the jury, her eyes pleading.

“Go ahead, Beulah, tell the jury,” Stewart instructed her.

Beulah closed her eyes to gather courage and then opened them as if she were easing awake from an afternoon nap. “I told him of my—delicate condition,” she said, the words sticking to her tongue like wet paper. “But he refused to believe me—and boasted that another woman had fooled him that way, and that he had done time in the penitentiary for her. And I said, ‘You’ll go back to the penitentiary if you don’t leave me alone.’ He said: ‘You’ll never send me back there.’ And I said, ‘I’ll call my husband! And he’ll shoot us both! There’s a gun in there.’ And I pointed to the bedroom. ‘Where’s the gun?’ he asked, ‘let’s see it.’ Then we both started for the gun.” Beulah then repeated the story she’d started her testimony with: “He reached it first,” she said, “but I wrenched it out of his hand. Then he came for me, brandishing his arms. I seized him by the shoulder and spun him around. Then I shot. He sank to the floor and cried, ‘Anne, you have killed me.’ ”

Beulah closed her eyes again, “in horror of the picture,” Maurine would mock in the
Tribune
the next morning. With her “face pale under the glare of the movie lights”—which had been turned back on—she continued, her voice now puny. “I must have lost consciousness then. I remember that he was spattered with blood. I tried to see if he was dead. I rubbed his hands and face . . .”

Stewart gave the jury a moment to absorb the emotional trauma on display. Now it was time to challenge the police’s assertion that Beulah had danced to loud music after the shooting. “Tell what you did then,” he said.

“I heard the needle scratching on the record,” Beulah said. There seemed to be no hesitancy in her narrative, no searching for memories or details. She barely needed her lawyer to prompt her. “The record had stopped playing, but the needle was scratching, so I picked it up. I went into the bedroom, and I don’t know what I did. I seemed to lose all reason. I went over to where he was lying and sat beside him to see if he was dead. I felt his hand and his face. I don’t know how long I sat there. I knew I had to call someone, so I tried to get my husband.”

“Did you call Betty?” Stewart asked.

“No,” she said. “I got the wrong number all the time but I finally got my husband. I don’t remember our conversation.”

Stewart quickly established the sequence of events that followed: Beulah’s husband and the police arriving at the apartment and then her questioning at the Hyde Park police station. He then asked if she returned home.

“Yes, we went back to the apartment and I was asked to change my clothes,” Beulah replied. “Mr. McLaughlin was there and started to ask me how it happened. I said I didn’t remember.”

“Was anything said in the flat before the stenographer started making notes?”

“Yes.”

“Were you questioned after the stenographer started making notes?”