The Girls of Murder City (19 page)

The joy of new parenthood didn’t last long. The baby seemed to ratchet up Beulah’s need for attention, and whenever she could, she went out without her son or husband. She dived into an affair, possibly more than one. It didn’t take Perry long to figure out what was going on. Beulah kept his last letter to her. “You have never showed that you are capable of resisting temptation,” he wrote. He told Beulah she should leave Owensboro, for the sake of their son. “There will always be temptations. . . . I love you. We would have been very happy. I don’t think you would make a good mother.”

Beulah thought about that letter now, all these years later. With tears rolling down her cheeks, she insisted that at heart she was a decent person and a good wife. She should have stayed in the home, she told Ione Quinby, who sat with Beulah in her cell. “If I hadn’t been working, I’d never have met Harry. We were trying, I mean my husband Albert and I, to get ahead. We paid $75 a month rent on our apartment and $75 a month on our furniture. We planned to get a car. Albert makes only $65 a week and we needed money. I love to cook and keep house and go marketing . . .” She stopped and suddenly looked at her questioner in desperation. “Oh, why did I ever take that job? They lie when they say I tried to kiss Harry after . . . after . . . I
didn’t.
All I did was wash his face.”

Quinby found Beulah’s demeanor odd. The woman was dreamy and scattered, laughing one moment and then bursting into tears. “She does not seem to completely realize what she has done. Her mind works vagrantly,” the
Post
reporter observed. Quinby had waited an hour with other reporters that morning while Beulah talked with W. W. O’Brien, who Quinby quipped was “doing his best to engender a touch of cheer” in his client. She knew the lawyer was drilling into Beulah the story she was supposed to give to the press.

Trying to get back on track after her interview with the
Post,
Beulah focused on a key theme with the next reporter. “Well, thinking it all over, I think I would rather have been shot myself,” she told the
Daily News.
“Of course, it all happened so quickly I didn’t have time to think then. Harry had been drinking before he came to the flat, bringing the wine, and he was in a bad temper. I didn’t say anything to him to start a quarrel. He got angry and sprang for the bed. There was a revolver under the pillow. I got it first. If he’d got it he’d have shot me. But I’m sorry now; I think I’d rather it had been me that was killed.”

To another reporter she said she was ending things with Harry, and that had provoked the fight. “I am just a fool,” she said. “I’d been married to Albert four years. I haven’t any excuse except that Harry came into the Tennant laundry, where I worked as a bookkeeper, and I fell in love with him. I met him last October. He seemed fairly to worship me. Then I found out he had served a term in the penitentiary and all my dreams were broken. He knew I was through and that I had found out he wasn’t worth the cost. I was ashamed of the way I had fooled myself. He knew I was going to quit him and words led to words. We both ran to the bedroom, where a revolver was kept. I got there first.”

“I had never shot a gun but once, on New Year’s,” she told still another reporter. “Every day I’d pick it up so carefully. I was afraid of it. I don’t know how I happened to hit him. I don’t know.” Apropos of nothing, she sobbed: “It’s Spring today!”

W. W. O’Brien showed up in the city’s newsrooms shortly before deadline on Saturday, repeating over and over that Beulah would be pleading self-defense and that Harry Kalstedt had spent five years in prison for assaulting a woman. It wasn’t necessary. Beulah may not have always stuck with the rehearsed story, but she’d proven to be a sympathetic interviewee nonetheless. The shame showed on her: It lit her up, coloring her cheeks a deep, invigorating pink, flushing away her guilt. Of course, it could simply have been her flame-colored hair. Redheads held a special place in the typical American male’s fantasies. “Will Her Red Head Vamp the Jury?” the
Daily News
wondered. To the eyes of many reporters, her gorgeous locks painted everything about and around her a rosy hue.

“Forty hours of questioning and cogitation has burned the red-hot coals of remorse and repentance into the soul of Beulah May Annan, red-haired beauty who shot and killed Harry Kolstedt [
sic
], ‘the man whose love was wrecking her life,’ ” the
Evening Post
blared on its front page. It continued:

Behind the bars of the county jail, her eyes ringed with deep purple shadows, her hands clasping and unlocking, Mrs. Annan today turned her face to the once whitewashed ceiling and prayed.

Then:

“I’d rather be in Harry’s place,” she said. “Rather be dead.”

Hearst’s
American
went further still. It made an epic tragedy of the killing—not the tragedy that had befallen Harry Kalstedt and his family, but that of Beulah and her husband. The
American
’s editors knew what made compelling drama for their working-class readers. This sordid killing was part of a heartrending modern love story. “Beautiful Beulah,” lured into the world of jazz and liquor, had broken her marriage vows, like so many young married women forced by financial necessity to work outside the home. But she was repentant, and she and her husband’s love was battered but not broken. “Stunned—almost to the point of desperation—Albert Annan has experienced the shattering of his finest ideal, the pretty girl from the Blue Grass country that he took for his bride four years ago,” the
American
wrote. That ideal was now gone, but still Al clung “tenaciously to a certain faith and belief in the vision of the woman whom he had once thought above all others to be deserving of his confidence.”

Beulah remained a fallen woman in the
American
’s pages, but now she was a fallen woman who could be saved. “A noose around that white neck with Venus lines—that was the shadow on the white cell wall,” the paper wrote. Such a threat would cure any woman of immoral living—and for a woman as beautiful as Beulah, it seemed to be working after just one night behind bars. “It was morning when the numbness became prickly pain in her fingers. And Beulah Annan, the fifteenth woman held in the jail for killing, slowly began to realize that the mad swirl had brought more than dust in her eyes.” Already she had forsworn alcohol and the jazz lifestyle, the
American
insisted.

Maurine Watkins, for her part, was having none of it. She had figured out Beulah Annan right away. Alone among the city’s papers, her inquest story didn’t include any of Beulah’s excuses, sobbing regret, or meandering explanations of self-defense. Alone among the reporters, she wrote that Beulah calmly “played with a piece of paper and softly whistled through it” during damning testimony before the coroner’s jury. “She played again with the paper as the state’s attorney read her confession of intimacy with Kolstedt [
sic
] on three occasions and laughed lightly as the lawyers quarreled over the questioning.” Maurine also fit in Al’s embittered tirade at the police station Thursday night—“Simply a meal ticket!”—which the other reporters, all male, kept out of print.

The
Tribune
’s editors might have expected that Maurine’s refusal to embrace Beulah’s proffered story line would hurt their sales, especially with Hearst’s newspapers pushing the love-triangle melodrama so aggressively. But from the very first day, the Beulah Annan story was so huge it didn’t matter. It was bigger than Kitty Malm and Sabella Nitti combined. It was bigger than Belva Gaertner. It was bigger than any of the gangster shootings that usually dominated page one. With Beulah’s dewy, snapped-open eyes staring out from the front page, newspapers sold out from newsstands across the city on Friday and again on Saturday. Men “gazed at photographs of her lovely, wistful face” and reached down into their pockets for coins. Newsboys came back to the loading bays for extra bundles over and over.

Beulah didn’t seem to notice Maurine’s cynicism. She was too busy reveling in the clamoring attention. It came in wave upon wave. She needed to do nothing but get out of her bunk in the morning and invite the reporters and photographers into her cell. That first day behind bars she received a beautiful red rose from an anonymous admirer. The next day, somebody sent her “a juicy steak, French fried potatoes and cucumber salad.” Letters began to show up at the jail, dozens of them, from men around the country proclaiming their love for her. The story had gone out on the wires and appeared in newspapers everywhere. Belva Gaertner’s trial was scheduled for April 21, just two weeks away, but Thomas Nash, her lead attorney, recognized that the public fascination and sympathy they’d counted on had swung over to the new girl. Nash pushed the trial date back.

Beulah didn’t worry about provoking any jealousy on the cellblock. She believed she deserved the attention. Hopped up on the press’s and the public’s unwavering interest, Beulah, on her third day in jail, posed with dramatic flair for a news photographer. She clutched the cell’s bars with her little fists, her head tilted back as if awaiting a kiss, wide-open eyes gazing rhapsodically toward the heavens. She’d seen a cinema actress pose like that once.

9

Jail School

The
Evening Post
announced that April 21, the day after Easter, was “ladies day” in the Criminal Courts Building. The reason: Beulah Annan, Belva Gaertner, and Sabella Nitti were making an appearance before Judge William Lindsay.

The courts building, two blocks north of the Chicago River, wasn’t anything special. It sulked at the corner of Dearborn and Austin like an emptied fireplug, square and uninspired, with the exception of an understated arched entrance at street level. But the three women didn’t get to come through that lovely entrance like everyone else; they walked across the “bridge of sighs”—an enclosed span facetiously named after the canal crossing in Venice that Byron made famous in
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
This bridge connected the courthouse to the jail behind it, allowing for the safe, stress-free transport of prisoners to court. Judge Lindsay’s courtroom was usually sparsely populated with defendants’ family members, but this Monday morning found it packed with reporters and other observers, filling up the benches and spilling out into the marble-floored hall. There hadn’t been this kind of crowd since Kitty Malm’s trial in February.

Surrounded by deputies, Beulah and Belva swept into the courtroom like exiled royals being returned to power. They knew what to expect. They’d read every line of copy about themselves and seemed to have internalized the coverage. The
real
reality—the hard jail beds, the daily chores, the skittering vermin, the threat of execution—had been replaced by the newspapers’ reality: the romance of their struggle. They now believed, like the newspapers, in innocent womanhood. They believed that modern life degraded values and that bootlegging was evil.

Beulah, as expected, received the most attention. The reporters still wanted to know about “Hula Lou.” Had she really danced with her dead lover to her favorite song, holding his heavy, cold head in her hands? The question was insulting, stupid, inevitable. She did love “Hula Lou,” though. The song got in your bones and stayed there. You couldn’t help but smile and move to it. The Broadway star Mae West had been hired to pose for the song’s cover in 1923, and for good reason. West’s signature dance was the shimmy, which she’d picked up during her time in Chicago before the war. She’d discovered the clubs in the black neighborhoods of the South Side, just a few blocks from where Beulah and Al now lived. West had never seen anyone move like those black couples moved. “They got up from the tables, got out to the dance floor, and stood in one spot with hardly any movement of the feet, just shook their shoulders, torsos, breasts and pelvises,” she said after witnessing the dance for the first time and falling in love with its “naked, aching, sensual agony.” Was it the shimmy that Beulah Annan had danced over the dying body of her boyfriend eighteen days before? She wasn’t saying.