The Girls of Murder City (24 page)

Smith, the papers reported that afternoon, liked to prowl the North Side’s “Bohemia” and had set himself up as Wanda Stopa’s “mentor.” Smith understood the connotations. He continued to deny that he’d had an affair or done anything improper with the girl. “I’m not a bohemian,” he said. “I’m an advertising man.” Wanda was the bohemian, and she was also a “demented girl,” averred Smith. Being an advertising man, he could be convincing. “Miss Stopa, we have learned,” Assistant State’s Attorney Robert McMillan told reporters later in the day, “was a neurotic.”

She was a neurotic with a gun—the best kind for the newspapers. Dozens of reporters, including Maurine Watkins, Genevieve Forbes, and Ione Quinby, fanned out to Wanda’s known haunts to hunt down stories about this latest girl gunner. An
Evening American
reporter targeted the lawyers and clerks at the Federal Building. The hack found plenty who remembered the young woman from her days as an assistant for the district attorney. One described Wanda as a “wild little woman.”

“She liked to be bohemian,” the man said, “and she didn’t care who knew it.”

Another man added: “She often would smoke cigarettes while she was taking dictation and seemed to be proud of it.”

Over in Towertown, Wanda’s artist friends appeared to be impressed by their gunslinging comrade’s actions. It was as if Wanda had struck a blow for them against the status quo—a blow Maurine would describe as “a moth singed in the fires of ‘freedom.’ ” Maurine was hardly alone in her derisive tone.

The shooting gave reporters an opportunity to castigate the dilettantes of Chicago’s North Side artists’ community, which modeled itself on the well-known youth subculture in Greenwich Village that had grown up in opposition to the mainstream ethos. Newspaper staffs were predominantly made up of bootstrappers from working-class families; most reporters never had the means to go to college. They viewed the responsibility-free attitudes of the bohemians, often college dropouts financed by indulgent, well-to-do parents, as beneath contempt. The
American,
under a series of graduation photos of a sweet-looking Wanda, her blue eyes as bright as starbursts even in black-and-white newsprint, pointed out how the pictures “show the Wanda Stopa that was the sincere, ambitious girl student,” before she fell into a rebellious lifestyle. The paper added: “Watch for the pictures of Wanda Stopa—the killer—after she is apprehended and see what ‘dope’ and ‘Bohemia’ have done to this frank, pretty face.”

Every hack covering the story took a dig at Towertown’s young layabouts. “They scoffed at convention and talked about inhibitions,” Quinby said of the community. “They spoke loftily of living their own lives, and phrases of self-conscious daring tumbled from the lips of young flappers asking advice about free love and birth control.” Genevieve Forbes mocked the notion that bohemians were artists, writing, “Anybody could be an artist or poet” in Towertown. “And pretty nearly anybody was.” She added that bohemians “live in tiny rooms, sharing kitchens and baths with other ‘artistic’ tenants. Nobody locks doors, it’s so unfriendly. And trailing kimonos add to the picture.”

Chicago’s police and reporters would have no luck searching for Wanda Stopa among the trailing kimonos of Towertown. Despite walking away from Ernest Woods’s cab before reaching the train station, she did get on a train. As Chicagoans read shocking details about the murder in special editions rushed to press, Wanda was checking into the Hotel Statler in downtown Detroit. She registered as “Mrs. Theodore Glaskow of New York.”

It wasn’t until the next day, Friday, that she was spotted, by a businessman named Eugene Chloupak. The man, in town from Indianapolis, saw Wanda standing at the mail desk in the hotel’s lobby at about noon. He noticed her for the same reason most men did—she was beautiful. But there was also another reason: He’d seen her face in his morning paper. He approached and surreptitiously glanced at the letter in her hand. It was addressed to “Mrs. Inez Stopa”—Harriet Stopa, Wanda’s mother. Folded up in the envelope was about $100 in cash, a Polish government bond, and a $200 insurance policy made out to Harriet Stopa. The letter, in Polish, ended simply,
“Matka, droga matka”
—Mother, dear mother—in a scratchy scrawl.

Chloupak, of course, only saw the address on the envelope, and that wasn’t quite enough to push him into action. He didn’t know what to do. This petite young woman with the sharply cut cheekbones was a wanted woman. He stood there in the lobby, paralyzed. It must have been hard for him to believe that his newspaper had come to life and was standing right next to him. Finally, Chloupak managed to convince himself she was for real, and he told the hotel’s assistant manager about his find. By then, though, Wanda had posted her letter and walked away.

The police, when they arrived at the hotel, assumed Wanda Stopa—or whomever the man saw—had disappeared into the midday crowds out on the sidewalks. In fact, she went upstairs to Room 1156. There, in her room, she collected her few personal items into an orderly pile on the bed: a dressing gown, cold cream, a comb, her diary. The only accessory she left on her person was a gold band with a sapphire set in a red Buddha. She fetched a glass of water from the bathroom and sat down. She added sugar to the water and mixed it in. She then carefully poured another substance into the glass. She closed her eyes and threw the liquid down her throat before she could change her mind.

At 1:30 Wanda placed a call to the house physician. “I am feeling very sick,” she said quietly. That was all. The doctor could tell from the caller’s voice that the situation was urgent. He arrived at her room just moments later. As the door swung open, Wanda was falling backward onto the bed, unconscious.

11

It’s Terrible, but It’s Better

On Friday afternoon, a coroner’s jury at the city morgue in Chicago announced that Wanda Elaine Stopa had fired a revolver at Henry Manning “with murderous intent.” Kenley Smith stood up slowly as the jurors filed out of the room. Smith had sat in the back during the inquest, pale and nervous, keeping his head down and his eyes peeled. The time and place for the inquest had been publicly announced, and he was convinced that Wanda planned to barge into the room, shoot him, and, in a grand final gesture, shoot herself over his lifeless body. Her failure to appear may have been a blow to his ego, but as he stepped from the room, relief replaced disappointment when a reporter pulled him aside. Wanda Stopa, the hack said, had been found dead in Detroit.

“So Wanda has committed suicide?” the distinguished-looking ad man replied. He ran a hand over the top of his slicked-back hair, to press down any stray strands. “I knew it would come,” he said. “It was her ultimate step. Given that psychopathic temperament, it was inevitable that some emotional crisis would cause her to end her life. It happened to be this one. If not this, it would have been some other.”

The news may not have surprised Smith, but it shocked the rest of the city. Everyone had expected Wanda to take her place among the murderesses of the Cook County Jail. Her crime was the most sensational—and the most heartbreaking—of them all. On top of that, she was so beautiful, maybe even more beautiful than Beulah Annan. This was cause for mourning among the newspaper corps. Now police reporters would never get to crowd around Wanda’s cell for daily interviews. Now they wouldn’t get to fight for seats to her trial. In the
Tribune
on Saturday, April 26, just two days after Wanda had burst onto the city’s front pages, Genevieve Forbes wrote:

Wanda Stopa, the Polish girl who wanted to “live her own life,” ended everything by taking her own life yesterday afternoon at 1:30 when she swallowed cyanide of potassium in room 1156 at the Hotel Statler, Detroit.

By now news of Wanda’s epilepsy had broken, and that seemed to explain everything. Epilepsy, the
Tribune
wrote, “is a manifestation of the old motor nerve system, in contrast to the new motor system which obtains in all normal human beings. The old motor system, according to the newest theory, is atavistic and a throw-back in a few individuals to the animal kingdom. On this basis, an epileptic fit is as atavistic a performance, and as far from the human norm, as the Thursday morning murder was atavistic and out of the orbit of the healthy minded individual.”

So that was that. Wanda may have been beautiful and intelligent, but she was also fatally flawed. Her actions were inevitable, predictable. The
American
—followed by the city’s other newspapers—brought this conclusion home by publishing excerpts from unaddressed letters that police found in the Smiths’ Chicago studio. Wanda’s words were deeply emotional, obsessive, hypnotizing:

“You are the one I need. Oh, Bummy dearest, I miss you so! . . . I am nothing without him, only a lonely, tired soul groping in the world. . . . I do not believe I can bear it much longer. . . . Life for most people is lament. . . . How I would love to throw off all this care and go peacefully to sleep.”

The letters went on and on, with metronomic force, a gold mine for the newspapers, which stretched them out over multiple days. The
American
published a selection of the excerpts on their own across the top of the front page, over portraits of Wanda Stopa looking young and gay and unbearably innocent. Kenley Smith, now that he no longer had to worry about Wanda leaping out at him from the bushes, talked openly and frequently to reporters. “I feel sure Wanda was morally and emotionally insane, but that intellectually she was sane as it is possible to be,” he said. Later, he insisted that Wanda’s decision to shoot at his wife “was conceived under the influence of narcotics. I feel sure of that, and I feel sure that she wanted and needed money with which to buy more dope.”

With Wanda’s life splayed so awkwardly before the public, the Stopas felt they had no choice but to respond. “My daughter often begged to be allowed to bring Mr. Smith to our home so she could introduce him to us,” said Wanda’s mother, Harriet Stopa. “But I always refused her. I told her this home was sacred and that she could not bring bums in it, for a gray-haired man who makes love to a little girl when he has a wife at home is nothing but a bum. She used to cry and say she wished she could stop thinking about him. She said he was so brilliant, so well educated, he knew so much about the fine side of living, and that he had taught her so much. She used to tell me everything.”

Wanda’s twenty-two-year-old brother, Henry, his face blasted into a stony mask, tried to find something positive in his sister’s decision to take her own life. He loved her deeply, and so he’d rather see her dead than have her become one of those women on Murderess’ Row being paraded out for the public’s titillation. “Yes, it’s better to be dead than to be added to that list of women held for murder over at the county jail,” he said. “It’s terrible, but it’s better. The thing had to end tragically, and this was the best of the ways.”

The train station was cloaked in low fog and a persistent rain when Wanda Stopa’s body arrived in Chicago early on Sunday morning. Ione Quinby and Maurine Watkins stood in a group with other reporters, waiting for something to happen as the casket, encased in a pine box, was lowered onto the platform. But nothing did. The Stopas apparently had misunderstood the arrangements and expected the body to be delivered to the family home, not just to the station. Men and women climbed down from the passenger cars, popped open umbrellas, and quickly departed. The conductor hustled from the train to the station house and back again. The platform emptied out—except for the reporters. It was a sad sight, the cheap pine box sitting out in the elements, slowly being soaked by rain, no one going near it. Finally, the train screeched back into motion and pulled away as the reporters continued to wait. When it became clear no one was coming to claim the body, railroad staff carried the box to the street and loaded it onto a wagon, bound for a holding pen somewhere, but the reporters flagged down the driver before he could pull the wagon out into the street. They pooled their money to have the casket delivered to its proper destination.