The Girls of Murder City (33 page)

“Beautiful—but not dumb!”

For she had talked incessantly: two different versions of the shooting before she came to trial, and the third one—when she took the stand yesterday—was the charm.

Maurine offered no hedges in stating what she thought of the trial’s outcome, writing the story as if it were going into her diary. Beulah’s testimony—flat-out lies, as far as Maurine was concerned—particularly rankled: “ ‘That’s my story and I’ll stick to it,’ was her attitude—and she did, till she stepped down demurely from the witness stand with the settled complacency of a school girl who has said her piece.” Maurine pointed out that McLaughlin’s closing argument, ultimately in vain, had “hinged on the credibility of the witness, who had made three entirely different statements to the jury.” (She was counting the confessions Beulah made to police that were read in court.)

The verdict stung Maurine. She would later decry the softness of all-male juries, the attitudes that made it possible for Beulah to get away with testimony that contradicted compelling physical evidence and her own previous statements: “Men on a jury generously make allowance for a woman’s weakness, both physical and moral; she is unduly influenced, led astray by some man, really not responsible—poor little woman!” Maurine believed that “it feeds a juryman’s vanity and sex pride to feel that a woman is weaker and less responsible than a man would be in a similar situation.” The whole thing left her feeling sick. She was convinced Beulah was a cold-blooded murderer—and a devious, calculating defendant. Her report on the verdict laid bare the raw feelings of a reporter who’d gotten closer to the story than she probably liked to admit.

The
Tribune
—surprisingly, and unlike its competitors—decided not to linger on Beulah Annan. Maurine certainly wanted nothing more to do with the “Titian-haired” beauty and took a pass on the obligatory postacquittal follow-up piece. Her replacement on the Beulah beat for Sunday, perhaps intimidated at the prospect of following Maurine’s beautiful, expressive diatribes, kept his unsigned report brief. In its entirety, it read:

Mrs. Beulah Annan, Chicago’s prettiest slayer and latest to join the ranks of the free, is trying to seek seclusion “for a few days.” Saturday night, following her acquittal of the murder of her lover, Harry Kalstedt, she packed up her rather extensive wardrobe and moved from the county jail to “address unknown.” She was accompanied by her faithful husband, Al.

The junior reporter didn’t look very hard for his quarry. “Address unknown” turned out to be Beulah and Al’s apartment on East Forty-sixth Street, where she had famously shot down Harry Kalstedt. Al had long ago cleaned up the bloody mess his wife had left behind. Reporters from other papers, local and far afield, found her there on Sunday and met no resistance. Beulah held court for much of the day.

After a night in her own bed for the first time in almost two months, the prettiest woman ever to be tried for murder in Cook County was feeling generous. She didn’t take credit for the acquittal. “It was the baby—not me,” she told H. H. Robertson, a reporter for the
Atlanta Constitution.
“I knew that no jury ever would convict me, under the circumstances.” She wasn’t feeling as generous about her dead former boyfriend, however. She restated her assertion that Kalstedt had attacked her when she told him she was pregnant with her husband’s child. “Any woman is justified in shooting a man who did what Harry Kalstedt tried to do to me,” she said. “The jury realized that.” She told another reporter that “I know now better than ever before that a man who goes into the apartment of another man when the husband is away deserves what he gets, no matter what that is, whether he be a man who steals jewels or a man who steals women.”

Sitting with thrown-back shoulders in the center of the little apartment, Beulah charmed her journalist callers, as always. “Shaking her Titian hair and relaxing in a dimple smile,” wrote Robertson, “Mrs. Annan gazed coyly at her husband and other relatives and said she had learned a lesson.” She was a changed woman.

“I’m going to be a devoted wife from now on,” she declared. “I am going to forget these terrible things. I am going to prepare for my baby’s arrival, and I have sworn an oath that I never again will do anything which might cause reproach to attach itself to my name or to my child’s name. The most intense longing which I have is that I prove myself to be a good mother and a true wife. I want to show the whole world what kind of a woman I really am.”

The new, devoted wife made it into the next day’s papers, but the fawning headlines looked foolish before the sun set. Beulah and Al must have had a terrible fight after reporters left their apartment Sunday, because on Monday afternoon she appeared in a newspaper office with a divorce lawyer in tow. (Perhaps put off by Maurine’s biting reports, she conspicuously chose not to go to the city’s leading paper, the
Tribune
.) Sitting with her legs crossed, with reporters and editors gathered around, Beulah announced that she was leaving Al. “He doesn’t want me to have a good time,” she said. “He never wants to go out anywhere and he doesn’t know how to dance. I’m not going to waste the rest of my life with him—he’s too slow.”

Beulah said she might move to Southern California. The weather there was fine year-round, and the newsreel people had said the camera loved her. Yes, she’d like to be a moving-picture actress, she said. She wanted even more than that: “I want lights, music and good times. I love to dance. I love good food—and I’m going to have them.”

Only Beulah and Al knew what transpired between them that turned her professed longing for a quiet life as wife and mother into a desire for the lights of Hollywood. He may have refused to take her out dancing, as she suggested. He may have finally confronted her about her infidelity and wondered aloud who the father of her unborn child was. Or it might simply have been Beulah’s internal clock telling her it was time to move on, time to leave Chicago for new opportunities. She had proved to have an excellent sense of timing. She knew when to make an entrance, when to make a surprise revelation—and when to leave the scene for someplace better.

Beulah had gotten out of Kentucky at just the right moment, when the responsibilities of the adult world began to press in on her before she was ready. Now she wanted to get out of Chicago. Something big was happening in the city, bigger than Beulah Annan could ever hope to be. News of Beulah’s acquittal received above-the-fold placement on the front page of the
Tribune,
with a photo of the “fair defendant” with the jury that had just set her free. But it wasn’t the top story, as she had expected. A banner headline ran above the trial coverage, with type so large that it blared across the entire width of the page: “All City Hunts Kidnappers.”

Parents all over Chicago worried that their children could end up like little Bobby Franks, snatched from the streets and viciously killed. The murderous kidnappers, though unknown, were the talk of the town. And that talk was about to get much louder. At about the time Beulah was packing up her “rather extensive wardrobe” and checking out of the Cook County Jail on Saturday night, two brilliant University of Chicago graduate students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, were in a South Side night-club not far from the Annan home, double-dating with two pretty girls. When introduced to another reveler, the cocky eighteen-year-old Loeb said, “You’ve just enjoyed the treat of shaking hands with a murderer.”

16

The Tides of Hell

Maurine Watkins had no time to reflect on what happened in Judge Lindsay’s courtroom. While Beulah Annan and her husband celebrated with family members at their little flat on Sunday, the
Tribune
reporter was five blocks away, at the fortress-like house of Jacob and Flora Franks. Maurine may have been within shouting distance of the Annans’ brick apartment building on East Forty-sixth Street, but this block in Kenwood, on the other side of Cottage Grove Avenue, was a different world. No mechanics or assistant bookkeepers lived here, except in the servants’ quarters.

The mood also was completely different. The wealthy men and women of Chicago’s South Side were somber, for they had come to see the Franks bury their son, Bobby. The family held the funeral service in their living room. Jacob, widely known as Jake, had been born a Jew, but he and his wife practiced Christian Science. A large crucifix stood prominently on a table. For much of the morning, as family friends, flowers, and telegrams arrived, Flora remained upstairs, but visitors had no doubt about how she was holding up. Her husband, in the living room with their seventeen-year-old daughter, Josephine, winced noticeably as screams of anguish periodically reverberated through the ceiling.

As she did in her report on Wanda Stopa’s funeral, Maurine detailed the scripture readings and religious songs that the other papers glossed over or mentioned only for maudlin effect. The rituals of faith and the promise of the afterlife remained more important to Maurine than the tears of those remaining earthbound. (Maurine was one of the very few reporters to show restraint in her coverage. The
American
even came up with a fictional re-creation of the murder through the eyes of the dead boy himself: “I matched my strength, born of desperation, with that of my fiendish captors, with the tides of hell running like molten lava through their accursed veins.”)

Maurine stuck with a straightforward account of the funeral, though she noted the tension in the air caused by the fact that the murder remained unsolved. There was a bubbling dread, some thirty years after a serial killer had roamed the concourse of the World’s Fair in Chicago, that the kidnap-pings were not yet done. “Only relatives, a few close friends, and twenty of Robert’s schoolmates from the Harvard private school [an exclusive prep school on the South Side] were admitted at the house, where grief is mingled with horror and fear,” Maurine wrote. Eight of Bobby Franks’s Harvard friends carried the casket down the front walk and placed it in the hearse, an emotionally burdensome task for any fourteen-year-old boy. Bobby’s parents and Josephine slipped out a side door, led by a private guard. Fearing for their daughter’s safety, Jake and Flora Franks wanted to avoid the three hundred or so people who had gathered in the street to watch the procession depart for the cemetery.

The crowd was nowhere near as large or unruly as the one that had congregated outside the Stopa place a month before. Like the curious gathered around the Franks residence, Maurine also seemed less engaged by Bobby Franks’s funeral than by Wanda Stopa’s. Maybe it was the setting: The broad hallways and soaring ceilings of the Franks home was unlike any residence she’d known growing up. The family’s suffering, even with the killer or killers uncaught and the threat of more violence hanging over them, didn’t seem as raw to Maurine as the Polish family’s in the little walk-up on Augusta Street. The Stopas had been humiliated as well as grief-stricken. And they didn’t have wealth to protect them.

The Franks family’s suffering also wasn’t the chief concern of the city’s other newspapers. They were more interested in playing detective. The
Herald and Examiner
recognized that all of Chicago had become supremely fascinated by the search for those responsible for Bobby Franks’s death. The paper’s editors figured it would be a major circulation boon if they could involve in that search not just their police reporters but everyone in the city. In the Monday edition, the
Herald and Examiner
published a call to action, giving it greater play than the funeral report:

How and why was Robert Franks, a fourteen-year-old heir to $4 million, killed? Police investigators may clear that up. But have you a theory now? Can you write a logical theory, telling step by step how the crime was committed and what motivated the participants? The
Herald and Examiner
will give a prize of $50 to the reader who writes the best theory. The winner also will be eligible for a share in the $10,000 reward if his theory should aid in the solution of the slaying. The judgment will take place when the slayers are apprehended, if they are, and if they are not, upon the logic and probability of credence obtained in the written theory. The theories should be written in condensed, concise form, cleanly written or typed, on one side of the paper, and should be addressed to the City Editor,
Herald and Examiner
.