The Girls of Murder City (17 page)

The story that went out on the Universal Press wire—and got picked up by newspapers across the country—was just as compelling, if not quite as fanciful.

CHICAGO—A grotesque dance over the body of the man she killed was described by Mrs. Beulah Annan, pretty 24-year-old slayer of Harry Kalstedt, of Minneapolis. Mrs. Annan admitted shooting Kalstedt Thursday night when, piqued by her attempt to rouse his jealousy, he threatened to leave her.

“I tantalized him with a story of an imaginary lover, to see what he would do,” said Mrs. Annan. “When he reached for his overcoat to leave, I shot him. I was in a mad ecstasy, after I saw him drop to the floor. I was glad that I had killed him.”

In the afternoon, Beulah met her attorneys and prepared to go before a coroner’s jury. William Scott Stewart and his partner, W. W. O’Brien, had come on the case that morning, with some reluctance. The two lawyers always fretted about getting stiffed for the bill. Sometimes it seemed that running down payment from clients took as much time as trying cases. Stewart, at the age of thirty-four, and O’Brien, a decade older, demanded cash up front, though for the right client, they still accepted partial payment, along with an acceptable explanation for how the rest would be raised. Al Annan didn’t have an acceptable explanation—no wealthy family members, no significant assets he could liquidate. But after seeing Beulah Annan’s picture in the morning papers, Stewart and O’Brien decided to make an exception. They took the case.

Like many criminal defense attorneys, Stewart and O’Brien initially made their reputations as prosecutors. Stewart’s name was better. He was so successful with murder cases during his time as an assistant state’s attorney that he became known as the hanging prosecutor. The first high-profile prosecution he handled was the Carl Wanderer case in 1920. Wanderer was a veteran of the World War and an upstanding citizen. He worked hard and never smoked, drank, or gambled. Then a “raggedy stranger” jumped him and his pregnant wife, Ruth, when they were coming home one night. The man shot Ruth, and he would have shot Wanderer, but the former soldier knew how to handle himself. The raggedy stranger ended up dead. “I got him, honey. I got him,” the newspapers quoted Wanderer as saying while his wife lay dying in his arms. Except he likely said no such thing. He was too busy making sure his wife was dead. In the days that followed, as the papers hailed him as a gallant and tragic hero, the police tracked the gun the stranger had used, an army-issue Colt .45, to Wanderer’s cousin. Soon the hero cracked, admitting he’d grown tired of his wife and had enlisted the help of a bum in a scheme to kill her. “I didn’t want her anymore,” Wanderer said of his wife. “I killed her so no one else would have her.” The papers understandably turned on him and elevated Stewart as a replacement hero. The prosecution earned banner headlines. So did the hanging, when Wanderer, goaded by a reporter who said he enjoyed the condemned man’s singing voice, eased into the chorus of his favorite song, “Old Pal,” just before the trap door was hatched.

Stewart may have been expert at gaining convictions, but he had no trouble making the switch to defense work; in fact, he felt more comfortable with it. Lanky, with a long, rawboned face, the lawyer looked like a man you could trust, a valuable attribute when representing men (and women) accused of heinous crimes. His commitment to professionalism, as he defined it, was absolute. Devotedly married and the father of a young son, he prided himself on being a reliable man on the darkest of days, believing he was saving lives, like a doctor. He prepared for each court appearance, no matter how trifling, as if his career depended on it. The graduate of Chicago’s undistinguished John Marshall Law School viewed his success as a lawyer, and his growing acceptance as an intellectual force in the community, as inevitable. “I am a great believer in original construction,” he liked to say. “We are born with bones and muscles, a certain physical equipment, plus a mental power which might be called the motor, with a fairly fixed horsepower. This horsepower is called intelligence. It may be improved a little by mental exercise, but no school or study can give brains.”

Stewart’s partner in private practice would never have the standing—or perhaps the mental horsepower—that Stewart did. W. W. O’Brien graduated from the University of Notre Dame’s law school in 1900, but he didn’t feel called to the bar. Instead, he worked as a theatrical promoter for twelve years, “making three or four hundred dollars a week.” He eventually came back to the law through politics. He proved to be an effective campaigner for Democratic mayor Carter Harrison Jr., which led to a patronage job in the city’s Corporation Counsel’s office. After a brief stint with the state’s attorney, he felt confident in setting up his own defense practice.

Unlike Stewart, who loved the law and his own intellect above all else, O’Brien’s paramount interest was women. He married a performer, Louise Dolly, in 1905 and divorced her twelve years later after cheating on her with numerous women. As soon as the divorce was finalized, he married a woman named Margaret Meehan, but that union was annulled within a year. In 1922, he married a third time—a beautiful nurse, Zoe Patrick. O’Brien succeeded in court for the same reason he succeeded with women. He was fun. He loved the theatricality of trial work. He aspired to be the next Charles Erbstein, the flamboyant Chicago defense attorney who had defended twenty-two women accused of murder and saw each one acquitted. (The same Charles Erbstein who represented Belva Gaertner in her 1920 divorce.) Erbstein’s legal career was winding down by the early 1920s, and in many ways the always entertaining O’Brien was the ideal successor. There was just one problem: a strong scent of corruption trailed him. In 1922, two assistant state’s attorneys accused him of trying to bribe them on behalf of a client, the pickpocket “Lucky Chubby” Lardner. O’Brien faced disbarment hearings but held on to his license. A year later, he stared down another bribery accusation.

These weren’t the only signs of trouble. O’Brien also had a knack for getting shot. In 1921, he caught his first bullet while drinking in a saloon frequented by gangsters. He refused to cooperate with the police investigation. Two years later, it happened again. He was standing on the corner of Fifty-ninth and Halsted when some fifteen shots were fired. O’Brien didn’t know if it was a machine gun or multiple gunners, but the police had no doubt that he was the target. If so, he was amazingly lucky: Only one shot hit him, catching him high up on the leg, perilously close to the groin. He again refused to answer police questions about the shooting.

Al Annan quickly got over feeling sorry for himself. He was a practical man. He loved Beulah—that was what mattered. “I haven’t much money,” he told reporters when he came downtown in the morning to secure Stewart and O’Brien’s services, “but I’ll spend my last dime in helping Beulah. I’ll stick to the finish.”

Al had begun frantically searching for loans. About the time Beulah was confessing to Murname, Cronson, and McLaughlin Thursday night, Al placed a call to Beulah’s native Kentucky, rousting her father, John Sheriff, from bed. But he would get no help from Sheriff, a prosperous farmer in the Ohio River Valley. Beulah’s father would not go to Chicago to see his daughter, and he would not send money. Both his former wife, Beulah’s mother, and his present wife beseeched him to change his mind, but he wouldn’t. Beulah had gotten herself in trouble before, and she would get in trouble again. “Beulah wanted a gay life, and she’s had it,” he said. “I don’t think my wife and I should die in the poorhouse to pay for her folly.” John Sheriff was a hard man.

Beulah may have been estranged from her father, but she still took after him. The distraught young woman they’d brought into the Hyde Park police station after the shooting, the woman who’d broken down and confessed at length, was gone by Friday afternoon. In her place stood a placid, steely doppelgänger. Before the inquest at Boydston’s undertaking parlor started, Beulah posed for photographers in the entrance hall. She had washed up and changed clothes again. She looked ravishing, the expression on her face somehow both stoic and melancholic. She wore a light brown dress, a darker brown coat, black shoes, and, wrote Maurine, a “brown georgette hat that turned back with a youthful flare.” Al held his hand over his face whenever the lens was pointed toward him. From the next room could be heard strains of “Nearer, My God to Thee,” played for the funeral of a former soldier.

Inside the room where the inquest would be held, Maurine sat down next to Beulah. She asked her how she felt.

“I wish they’d let me see him,” Beulah said. Picturing Harry Kalstedt laid out in a coffin, she offered Maurine a frown. “Still,” she added, “it would only make me feel worse.”

Maurine asked Beulah where she was from; she no doubt recognized the accent. Beulah told her she’d grown up in Kentucky, near Owensboro. The two women likely bonded over their shared bluegrass roots. Beulah said she’d been married to Al for four years and had been married once before. She had a seven-year-old son still in Kentucky, living with “his father’s people.” She hadn’t seen the boy since he was an infant. She had married that first time when she was sixteen, she said.

Other reporters moved in to get their time with the accused. Beulah accommodated them with patience and good humor. “I didn’t love Harry so much—but he brought me wine and made a fuss over me and thought I was pretty,” she said, her husband just a few seats away. “I don’t think I ever loved anybody very much. You know how it is—you keep looking and looking all the time for someone you can really love.” She gazed longingly at the reporter, a look that suggested maybe he was the one. She was beginning to make an impact, as she knew she would. The male reporters and sob sisters, seeing her calmed down and dressed up, felt the gravitational pull of Beulah May Annan—that soft Southern accent, lilting and plangent, coming out of that perfect face. Maurine, writing another page-one story, the first that would carry her byline, also recognized the reaction Beulah provoked: “They say she’s the prettiest woman ever accused of murder in Chicago—young, slender, with bobbed auburn hair; wide-set, appealing blue eyes; tip-tilted nose; translucent skin, faintly, very faintly rouged; an ingenuous smile; refined features, intelligent expression—an ‘awfully nice girl’ and more than usually pretty.”

Would the fact that she was more than usually pretty be enough to set her free? Probably not at the inquest, where the state only had to show there was evidence—any evidence—to hold her over for a grand jury. Assistant State’s Attorney Roy Woods laid out the events of the previous day before the coroner. Mr. Harry Kalstedt, he said, told Mrs. Annan he was through with her, but she didn’t let him walk out. She grabbed up a revolver that her husband kept in the bedroom and fired at her boyfriend, hitting him in the back.

“Both went for the gun!” W. W. O’Brien called out. “Both sprang for it.” He and Stewart, sitting with Beulah at the front of the room, had already established the outlines of their defense. They would present their client as a “virtuous working girl” caught up in a crazy age. They had already discovered that Harry Kalstedt had a criminal record; the dead man had spent five years in a Minnesota prison for assault before moving to Chicago to work for his brother-in-law at the laundry.

Whether Kalstedt and Beulah both sprang for the gun or not, there was no question about what had happened after Beulah fired the fatal bullet: nothing. The inquest established that almost three hours passed from the time of the shooting until Beulah called her husband at five in the afternoon. Dr. Clifford Oliver testified that he arrived at the apartment at 6:20; he said Kalstedt had been dead only about a half hour. Woods made clear what that meant: Beulah had watched her boyfriend succumb to a slow, agonizing death and had done nothing to help him.

The inquest dragged on, and Beulah grew bored. She stared off into space and occasionally turned and smiled at reporters. Finally, late in the afternoon, the jury reached a decision. They concluded that Beulah Annan was responsible for Harry Kalstedt’s death, having fired the gun “by her own hand.” The case would now go to the grand jury and then certainly to trial. Beulah rose, traded a few words with O’Brien, and headed toward the door with her police escort. Al, who’d sat a row behind Beulah, wringing his hands throughout the proceeding, leaped up and stepped into the aisle to intercept her.

The
Daily Journal
found Al’s undiminished love for his wife, less than twenty-four hours after learning she’d been unfaithful, moving. The paper wrote:

He pressed a $5 bill into her hand as they took her away, and those near him knew he had borrowed that from a friend who sat near him during the inquest.

“I’ll see you Sunday, honey,” he said as they parted. He did not know that no visitors are allowed at the jail on Sunday.