The Girls of Murder City (43 page)

There was at least one immediate and unexpected benefit of the new law. In the four months after women began being admitted to Illinois juries in September of 1939, the percentage of men asking to be excused from serving dropped dramatically. “Chicago men have suddenly become delighted to serve as jurors,” wrote the
Tribune.
“And the only reason the jury commissioners and court officials can even suggest is this: The women jurors.”

Beulah Annan
never made it to Hollywood. Her popularity with the press collapsed almost as soon as she left the Cook County Jail, causing her to retreat from the spotlight. Many reporters had bought into W. W. O’Brien’s reimagining of her as a naive innocent, and they didn’t appreciate looking like suckers when Beulah walked out on Al right after her acquittal. “It was with a gesture of contempt for his unworldliness that she announced that she was through with him,” the
Washington Post
sneeringly wrote in July 1924. “He is, she observed, too old-fashioned, too conservative, for one so sophisticated, so beautiful as herself.”

It didn’t help that she never gave birth to the child she had so publicly announced she was carrying while awaiting trial. There’s no evidence that she was ever pregnant. In January 1927, six months after her divorce from Al was finalized, Beulah moved to Indiana and married twenty-six-year-old boxer Edward Harlib, reportedly “despite the bitter opposition of Harlib’s family.” The marriage lasted less than four months. At a divorce hearing, Beulah told of “blackened eyes and broken ribs at the hands of her former pugilist husband,” but she didn’t claim spousal abuse as the impetus for the court action. It was her discovery that Harlib had never divorced his first wife. Beulah returned to Chicago and took a small apartment with her mother.

Chicago
opened in the city that fall, but Beulah didn’t attend the play. By then, she found herself bedridden on and off for weeks, her strength sapped. Early the following year, doctors diagnosed tuberculosis, and she entered the Chicago Fresh Air Sanitarium. She registered under the name Dorothy Stephens. By now she was barely recognizable. “She wasn’t very beautiful,” said a friend. “She was thin and faded. All she seemed to care for besides her mother were her canaries and cats.” Just weeks after her arrival at the sanitarium, less than four years after she’d dominated Chicago’s front pages, “Beautiful Beulah” Annan died. The press didn’t report it until nearly a week later. On March 14, 1928, the
Tribune
wrote, “Chicago, so long and so vividly aware of her existence, first as the central figure of a lurid murder trial and later in the thinly disguised role of the heroine of the sensational stage and screen success, ‘Chicago,’ was totally unaware of her passing.”

Al Annan,
alone and saddled with Beulah’s legal bills, cut a pathetic figure in the weeks after his wife walked out on him. “I cannot make myself realize that Beulah has given me up,” he said. “When we married we took solemn vows that it was for better or for worse, and that it was to exist until death parted us. . . . I shall love Beulah with a love that cannot be destroyed. Beulah is no different than any other woman. She is naturally weak and needs protection. She will come back to me.”

Al would be disappointed on that score, but Maurine Watkins, for one, refused to offer any sympathy. She mused publicly that Al’s willingness to endure so much abuse from his wife “may mean that men are more faithful than women—or merely that they enjoy more the glamour of heroic martyrdom.”

Ten years after Beulah left him, Al, now forty-nine years old, was convicted of manslaughter for beating to death a woman named Otilla Griffin during a drunken argument in the apartment they shared in Chicago. He struck her at about three in the afternoon but didn’t call police until three hours later. Al never served any time, however. The judge granted a request for a new trial, and two weeks later the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. William Scott Stewart helped with the defense.

Belva Gaertner
remarried William Gaertner in May 1925. This one didn’t turn out any better than the previous attempt. After moving into a luxurious new North Side apartment with her husband, she took to getting drunk every night. She also set out on a new round of adulterous affairs. William, now sixty years old, tried to be firm this time, but when he confronted her about her drinking, she flew into a rage and hit him in the head with a mirror.

The breaking point of the marriage came on July 5, 1926, when William returned from work and found a strange man in his bedroom. Belva, upon realizing her husband was home, “shrieked and leaped at him.” She screamed that she would kill him, and William took the drunken outburst seriously enough that he retreated to an empty room and locked the door. This cowardice apparently infuriated Belva even more, for her “assault upon the door was so ferocious that he barricaded himself with chairs and bed.” When William finally escaped the apartment, he didn’t come back. He filed for divorce later in the month.

In response to her husband’s suit, Belva claimed that it was William, not she, who had an “extreme and abnormal sex passion,” and that her husband’s perversion had left her nerves “sorely and permanently impaired.” But, as with Beulah, the Fourth Estate could no longer be swayed to her side. She received overwhelming bad press, with one newspaper calling her husband the “most patient soul” since Job. Another paper referred to her as a “cave-girl.”

After the divorce, Belva eventually relocated to Southern California to be near her sister. She traveled to New York, Europe, and Cuba for extended vacations but stayed out of the newspapers. She never married again. After years of seeking solace in the arms of others, she may have finally found some contentment on her own. When William Gaertner died in 1948, nearly twenty years before Belva, he left the bulk of his estate to her.

Katherine Malm
was a model prisoner at Joliet State Penitentiary. She became proficient in typewriting and shorthand in hopes of a career as a stenographer one day. Known for being cheerful and helpful, she gained trusty status and worked as a clerk in the prison’s main office.

During the first year of Kitty’s imprisonment, the
Chicago Evening Post
sent Ione Quinby to the prison every month to check in on her. Quinby often brought Kitty’s three-year-old daughter with her. “Each time,” the reporter recalled years later, “I would pick up Tootsie, telling her that we were going to see her mother in a hospital. I remember that the first time we drove up in a cab, Tootsie cried, ‘What a beautiful hospital!’ It was a big, gray-stone, fortress-like place.”

Kitty tried to win early release in 1930 and 1931, failing both times. In response, Quinby began to agitate for her parole, saying that Kitty was “no more a murderess than I am.” Elsie Walther, a prisoner advocate working for the Church Mission of Christ, became an ardent supporter and secured the backing of Chicago’s Episcopal bishop. Even the man who prosecuted Kitty, Harry Pritzker, joined the effort to secure parole for her.

But luck still wasn’t with her. On December 19, 1932, the parole board again rejected her application for release. Just days later, she fell ill. What appeared to be a cold or the flu turned out to be pneumonia. Kitty’s mother and daughter were hastily summoned to her bedside in Joliet’s infirmary. Katherine Walters Baluk (Malm) died on December 27. She was twenty-eight years old.

Otto Malm,
like Kitty, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1924. But while Kitty’s reputation improved behind bars, Otto’s only worsened. In 1931, he was involved in riots at Stateville Penitentiary and declared insane by the state of Illinois. He was given an additional life sentence after killing a convict.

In 1931,
Ione Quinby
saw her first and only book published, by Covici Friede.
Murder for Love,
about female murderers, included a chapter on Wanda Stopa, but because of Quinby’s belief in Kitty Malm’s innocence, not one on Kitty. The following year, the
Chicago Evening Post
folded, putting Quinby out of work in the midst of the Depression. Also in 1932, she married a fellow journalist, Bruce Griggs, but just thirteen months after the marriage, Griggs died in an automobile accident.

In 1933, the
Milwaukee Journal
hired Quinby. She soon began an advice column as “Mrs. Griggs” that would make her a statewide celebrity in Wisconsin. In a 1953 profile,
Coronet
magazine stated that she had “helped countless girls in trouble, and has had many babies named for her out of gratitude.” Year after year, Quinby’s column remained the paper’s most popular. “Whenever we had a tour come through the newsroom, the one person everyone always wanted to see was Ione Quinby Griggs,” remembers fellow reporter Jackie Loohauis-Bennett. “They’d stop near her desk and watch her there typing away.”

Quinby wrote her column for more than fifty years, until her retirement in 1985 at the age of ninety-four.

By the summer of 1924,
Genevieve Forbes
could feel her status as the top “girl reporter” at the
Tribune
slipping away. Even after Maurine Watkins left the paper, Forbes’s confidence never quite returned. Convinced she was failing on the women’s crime beat, she declared in 1927, “Once upon a time, perhaps, there was a lovely lady behind the bars who told the story of her life more easily, honestly, and spaciously to the woman reporter than to the man. But I’ve never met her.” She argued that women in jail would much rather please a male reporter, despite “the stalwart assurances of some lady reporters that they can get the ‘woman angle’ where masculine tactics fail.”

Forbes met her future husband, fellow reporter John Herrick, while working on the Leopold-Loeb case, and in 1930 they moved to Washington, D.C., to cover politics. After World War II, she and Herrick turned to the theater, with little success, leaving her “more deeply and depressingly convinced than ever that I write badly.”

W. W. O’Brien
’s greatest triumph came a year after Beulah Annan’s acquittal, with the sensational “Millionaire Orphan” murder trial. He and William Scott Stewart won an acquittal for William D. Shepherd, who was accused of poisoning his wealthy young charge, Billy McClintock. O’Brien, along with his partner, was now one of the most prominent and sought-after defense attorneys in Chicago.

The following year, in 1926, O’Brien represented the bootlegger Joe Saltis, who faced a murder charge. Saltis was allied with Hymie Weiss, who had become Al Capone’s greatest competitor and enemy. After jury selection for the case, O’Brien was walking with Weiss in front of the Holy Name Cathedral on North State Street when gunfire crackled above them. “You better lay down, Willie,” the imperturbable Weiss told O’Brien. It was the last thing the gangster ever said. Weiss fell, a bullet in his forehead. O’Brien, wounded in the stomach, chest, and arm, survived, thanks to a two-inch-thick stack of folded papers in his inside coat pocket that kept a bullet from reaching his heart. O’Brien would win the Saltis case, but it proved to be his last major victory. He had begun drinking heavily, causing his wife to walk out on him. He and Stewart ended their partnership, and the big cases stopped coming his way.

In 1932, for reasons he never satisfactorily explained, O’Brien ran for governor of Illinois as an independent and received less than two thousand votes. Four years later, he was disbarred after he was caught trying to remove evidence from the state’s attorney’s office. The high-profile lawyer who had dazzled juries for years went to work as a salesman for the Midwest Exterminating Company. In 1939, in an attempt to regain his law license, he would testify that he had had “a mental collapse; that . . . he indulged in the use of intoxicating liquors to a considerable extent.” He lost his teeth, and his heart started to give him trouble. He claimed that he had “no bank account and no money.” In 1944, facing new legal troubles, he disappeared.

William Scott Stewart,
like his former partner, also had difficulty holding on to success. In 1929, he was sentenced to three months in the county jail for contempt of court for attempting to prevent a state’s witness from appearing in court. Two years later, he beat back a bar recommendation that he receive a one-year suspension for his role in a city corruption case.

Stewart defended gangsters through much of the 1930s, including Roger “the Terrible” Touhy, “Golf Bag” Sam Hunt, and Paul “the Waiter” Ricca. Working for the Mob took its toll. Stewart and his wife divorced in 1945, and he became estranged from his son and daughter. He died of a heart attack in 1964 at the age of seventy-four. The
Tribune
headlined its obituary “William Scott Stewart Dies Broke, Alone.”

On June 16, 1924,
Sabella Nitti
was released on bail. She returned to her small farm in Stickney to await retrial, but the second trial never happened. On December 1, the state’s attorney’s office dropped the charges against her and her husband, Peter Crudelle.

One month after Sabella’s release on bail, her lawyer,
Helen Cirese,
scored another unlikely victory: Lela Foster was acquitted of murder. The victory thrilled the young attorney as much as—maybe even more than—it did her client, and her law practice thrived. “ ‘The woman in law’—and straightaway one visualizes a stern, formidable, unromantic person, in a misplaced profession,” Cirese wrote in a local women’s magazine that November. She didn’t consider herself misplaced at all, she insisted. “Have you ever seen the look of hopeless anxiety, of utter misery upon the face of an accused prisoner? Have you, then, seen the looks on that same face when twelve solemn men slowly file in and inform the court their verdict is ‘Not Guilty’? The mingled joy, the relief, the moist eyes, the trembling lips, the simple words of thanks—that is truly romance—the romance of law.”