The Girls of Murder City (37 page)

Belva was taken from the courtroom and placed in the adjacent prisoner bull pen, some ten feet from the room where the jurors were beginning their deliberations. Nash expected her wait to be short. Seeing as he had mounted no active defense, a swift decision would be a good sign. He’d simply asserted that the prosecution had no case—no meaningful evidence, no eyewitnesses. If the jury reached the same conclusion, they should do so quickly. There was either evidence or there wasn’t.

So when the minutes ticked into hours, Belva’s composure began to fray. She paced in the small holding cell, wondering what the jurors could be discussing behind that door. Were some of them “narrow-minded old birds” who’d lied about their opinion of liquor so that they wouldn’t be dismissed from the jury? She knew self-righteous fanatics could be convincing when they got going; they could shame anybody. Belva chain-smoked cigarettes and, like Beulah before her, avoided chatting with the matron minding her, hoping to fight off a burgeoning hysteria. Her mind reeled with the possibilities, the rest of her life behind bars rolling out before her.

At last, shortly before midnight, the jurors sent word that they had a verdict. It had taken them nearly seven hours to reach a decision—“much longer,” noted the
Daily News,
“than it takes most ‘woman-proof ’ juries.” When guards led Belva back into the courtroom, dark circles slashed under her eyes. She looked shaken, scared. She chanced a look at her sister, Malinda, who stood in the back.

The jury entered a few minutes later, tired and grim. Tension gathered about the defendant’s table; Belva, rocking slightly, seemed prepared for the worst. A piece of paper was passed to the bailiff, on to the judge, and then back again. The jury foreman now unfolded it as if he had no idea what it said. When he announced the verdict—“Not guilty,” in a clear, echoing voice—Belva let out a gasp and clutched at her stomach. She “laughed and cried in one breath” and swung around to see her lawyers’ reactions. “I’m so happy,” she managed, her voice breaking. She sat, as if exhausted, and then climbed to her feet. “I want to leave this place and get some air.” Suddenly overcome by emotion, she hugged a deputy sheriff, surprising the man, who reflexively returned the embrace. She bounded over to the jury. She thanked them, tears in her eyes, reaching out to grasp their hands. As Belva posed for pictures with the jury, Walter Law’s widow once again went almost unnoticed. Freda Law cried softly, hugging herself and her sister in the back of the room. When a reporter approached, she lashed out. “There’s no justice in Illinois!” she spat. “No justice! Walter paid—why shouldn’t she?” She quickly left the courtroom. Harry Pritzker saw Mrs. Law storm out. Defeated, appalled at the verdict, he didn’t want to talk to the press. “Women—just women,” he said, shaking his head as he gathered his papers and marched from the room.

After the courtroom had emptied, Belva crossed the bridge of sighs to the Cook County Jail, Malinda a step behind her. She packed her “wardrobe” and said good-bye to the inmates. She waved off the reporters who followed her on this final trek to the jail. “I’m going to remarry Mr. Gaertner and forget all this on a second honeymoon to Europe,” she said, as she glided out of the building and into the early morning air.

William Gaertner didn’t yet know that he was about to marry again. Up past his bedtime, he had gone home before the verdict came in.

Even with the Leopold-Loeb drama gripping the city, Belva Gaertner earned prime placement on the city’s front pages on Friday. The
Daily Journal
trumpeted: “Belva ‘Checks Out’ of Jail.” The
Daily News
reported stolidly, “Jury Takes Eight Ballots; ‘I’m So Happy,’ She Declares After Verdict.” The
Evening Post
offered the blandest headline—“Mrs. Gaertner Given Freedom on Murder Charge”—and the blandest report. Ione Quinby, her work consistently overshadowed by Maurine’s sharp coverage of the Beulah and Belva trials, had done the unthinkable: She gave over the prized verdict story to a junior colleague.

In the
Tribune,
unsurprisingly, Maurine did not hide her disgust at seeing a second murderess walk free. For the first time, a sour, humorless note dominated her prose.

Belva Gaertner, another of those women who messed things up by adding a gun to her fondness for gin and men, was acquitted last night at 12:10 o’clock of the murder of Walter Law. “So drunk she didn’t remember” whether she shot the man found dead in her sedan at Forrestville avenue and 50th street March 12—

But after six and one-half hours and eight ballots the jury said she didn’t.

Maurine was angry, just like after Beulah’s acquittal. She couldn’t believe it had happened again. But she tried not to wallow in her fury. The next day, Saturday, June 7, she wrote a follow-up that showed she had managed to take a breath and find her sense of humor again. With Belva’s acquittal on Thursday night, and with Leopold and Loeb indicted for murder just a few hours later on Friday, she recognized that the women’s quarters of the Cook County Jail would no longer be the focus of the city’s attention. An era had passed. “Only four women, the fewest in years, are now waiting trial for murder—for they’re getting out even faster than they’re getting in!” Maurine wrote. “And the two who walked to freedom in the last two weeks, ‘pretty’ Beulah Annan and ‘stylish’ Belva Gaertner, robbed the women’s quarters of their claims to distinction and plunged murderess’ row into oblivion.”

Maurine jokingly lamented that the pretty and interesting girl gunners, which the city once supplied in seemingly inexhaustible numbers, were all gone from the jail. Two of the remaining murder suspects were black women, and the other two—Helen Cirese’s clients, Sabella Nitti and Lela Foster—were middle-aged and dowdy. Makeup and new clothes surely wouldn’t be enough for any of these four to gain acquittal, Maurine wrote, for they “will lack the advice of Belva, known even in some other circles as an expert in dress.”

18

A Grand and Gorgeous Show

Five days after Belva walked out of the Cook County Jail for the last time, Maurine returned to Nathan Leopold and Dick Loeb. The “boy killers” continued to rule every newspaper in the city, and correspondents began to arrive from around the country to report on the case.

Even now, after nearly two weeks in jail, Leopold and Loeb lacked the barest semblance of remorse. These intelligent young men, brought up with every advantage, had done what they’d done purely for the “experience,” they said, as a sort of personal scientific experiment. Said Loeb, “I know I should feel sorry I killed that young boy and all that, but I just don’t feel it. I didn’t have much feeling about this from the first. That’s why I could do it. There was nothing inside of me to stop me.”

Reading such an admission sickened people across the country, Maurine included. Sent out to cover the boys’ arraignment, Maurine attacked from the first sentence. She noted that it was Loeb’s nineteenth birthday, but “Dickie” didn’t much interest her. The good-looking boy seemed pathetic, desperate to be liked—the weak half of the malevolent duo. It was the haughty Leopold, with his slicked-back hair, swarthy complexion, and smug, half-lidded gaze, who truly repulsed her.

Maurine had little interest in imparting any actual news with her report; she was out simply to ridicule, to hit the two wealthy criminals where she knew it would hurt them most: their egos. (The approach apparently worked. Even twenty-five years later, Leopold would profess a deep hatred for the
Chicago Tribune.
) The reporter, taking a shot at Leopold’s atheism, snorted that “it was a big day in itself to Mr. Nathan Leopold Jr., that gentleman who first won fame because ‘he loved the birdies so.’ How it must have delighted his egocentric soul—your pardon, Leopold!—his egocentric
mind,
to know that the crowd had begun gathering before 7 o’clock that morning. By 9—an hour before the performance—there were S.R.O. signs and the hallway to Judge Caverly’s court was jammed with sturdy determinists who broke down the door for a chance glimpse.”

The crowd, in fact, astounded Maurine almost as much as Leopold did. She watched as court fans, even more than had turned out for Beulah and Belva, jockeyed for position in the hallway of the Criminal Courts Building three hours before the arraignment, and then, when the doors opened, rushed for seats as if fleeing a tornado. She scrutinized men and women “packed in separate quarters like a Quaker meeting”: “gum-chewing flappers” and “housewives sentimentally inclined” on the right, men “with loud ties and shifting eyes” on the left. Even courthouse professionals, who dealt with degenerates every day, wanted to see these killers: “Lawyers and stenographers from other courts lined the walls and filled the benches. Reporters sat—or stood—on tables and chairs, and cameramen formed an impregnable line back of the ‘bench.’ ” Leopold’s father, Nathan Leopold Sr., found himself surrounded by reporters. He had nothing to say to them. “Why come to me?” he croaked, tears in his eyes, still unable to fathom what his son had done and what had happened to his family. “What did I do? Why come to me?”

For weeks Maurine had been tinkering with an idea for a stage play based on the Beulah Annan case. She wanted to create a deeply cynical satire of the celebrity mania that she saw as the dominant feature of twentieth-century urban life. The sight before her only confirmed that she had chosen the right subject. Maurine didn’t bother approaching the senior Leopold like the other reporters. By now supremely confident in her satiric style, she remained an observer and posed the whole scene as the equivalent of a play. Labeling Leopold “the Master” and Loeb “his dutiful friend,” she wrote, “The judge entered; Superior Court, criminal branch No. 1, was opened. Camera men poised their flashlights. All turned breathless to the door that leads from the ‘bridge of sighs.’ ”

The stage was set. “The Master” entered. Accompanied by his dutiful friend and their two attendants—faithful attendants chained to their wrists by “come-ons.”

Still poised and self-possessed. And prison life, where they’ve done without wine, women and song, has helped them physically. Both were carefully groomed, and Dick wore a brand new suit for the “party.” His brown eyes searched the crowd half fearfully for his brother, Allan, and the weak, sensuous mouth half parted.

But the “hypnotic” eyes of Nathan, with the whites gleaming ’neath the pupil, sought no one. He swept the crowd with a glance; just a mob, important only because they wanted to see him.

The boys’ guards—their “faithful attendants”—had to put their shoulders down like halfbacks to ward off the pushing, grasping spectators. The guards pulled the boys down the aisle to the bench. Judge John R. Caverly glowered down on them. He reminded them that they had been indicted for murder and then asked if they pleaded guilty or not guilty.

“Not guilty, sir,” said Leopold, followed by Loeb, straining to match his friend’s tone of cool indifference: “Not guilty, sir.” (“They never forgot the ‘sir,’ ” Maurine pointed out. “Millionaires are bringing etiquette to our courts!”) With the pleading out of the way, State’s Attorney Crowe requested a trial date of July 15. The redoubtable Clarence Darrow, however, demurred. “We need time to prepare the case, and time,” the defense attorney said, indicating with a flick of his eyes the mob behind him, “for public sentiment to die down.” Darrow got a promise of time, and then Leopold and Loeb were led out of the courtroom and back to the jail. “The crowd,” wrote Maurine, “filtered out slowly. Satisfied: they had seen the millionaire murder confessors.”