The Girls of Murder City (26 page)

After Lee had finished, there was nothing left to say. The only sounds now were “Nearer, My God, to Thee” being played quietly from somewhere behind the family and the soft clop of dirt being dropped down onto the casket—until a child interrupted the somber moment, exclaiming something to his mother. That was when Walter Stopa broke. Harriet Stopa’s seventeen-year-old son slapped the child, suddenly and ruthlessly. The boy’s mother, a woman named Anna Konpke, objected. “Mrs. Stopa’s nerves gave way” then, Maurine related, “and she promptly gave the mother three blows, breaking her eyeglasses.”

The woman and her child were rushed away from the gravesite to a nearby open area, where reporters descended on them. Mrs. Konpke didn’t know who the Stopas were or anything about Wanda Stopa, she said. She had come to the cemetery to visit her son’s grave and noticed the teeming mob rolling like a wave across the grounds. Curiosity, she said, got the best of her—“ just like all the rest of them.”

12

What Fooled Everybody

William Gaertner came to see his Belva almost every day at the jail. He assured her everything was going to turn out fine. After all, she had arguably the best defense attorney in Chicago and without question the best connected. Thomas Nash, a former alderman, represented the city’s biggest names. Three years ago, he had helped secure acquittals in the “Black Sox” World Series game-fixing trial—and everyone knew those boys were guilty.

By the second week of May, however, even Nash’s reputation wasn’t enough to make Belva feel better. She’d had the start of her trial postponed back in April when Beulah Annan was taking up all the air. Now her new date loomed, and the mood at the Cook County Jail had only gotten worse. On May 7, a jury convicted Elizabeth Unkafer of killing her lover and sentenced her to life in prison. Lizzie was a loon; she’d said she committed the murder because it was God’s will. Still, she continued a distressing trend. Over the past two months, Cook County’s all-male juries inexplicably had become unafraid of convicting women. Before Lizzie Unkafer, Mary Wezenak was convicted of manslaughter for serving poisonous whiskey. Before “Moonshine Mary,” Kitty Malm was sent “over the road.” Before Kitty, Sabella Nitti had started it all last summer.

More distressing still was the similarity between Belva’s case and Unkafer’s. Maurine Watkins had noticed and, right after Unkafer’s conviction, asked about it. Belva told the reporter there was no comparison between the two cases, not that her protestation did any good. She opened the paper the next morning and saw that Maurine had written it up in her own weird little way, as always.

Of the four awaiting trial, the cases of Mrs. Annan and Mrs. Belva Gaertner would seem most similar to Elizabeth Unkafer’s; each is accused of shooting a man, not her husband, with whom her relations were at least questioned: each is supposed to be a “woman scorned” who shot the man “rather than lose him.” But neither was at all disconcerted by Mrs. Unkafer’s sentence.

“I can’t see that it’s anything at all like my case,” said Mrs. Gaertner, the sophisticated divorcee indicted for shooting Law, the young auto salesman, as she twirled about in her red dancing slippers.

“The cases are entirely different,” said Mrs. Annan, quite the ingénue in her girlish checked flannel frock.

Had Belva been twirling about while talking to the
Tribune
reporter? Hardly likely. She did wear red slippers, though. William had brought them. They were comfortable. They made the cell feel a little homey.

At least the reporter included Beulah in the comparison game with Belva, rather than Sabella or Lela Foster, the other women with murder trials coming up. It didn’t mean, though, that she and Beulah were equals in the eyes of the press, and there’d be no point in pretending otherwise. Belva had understood that from the very first day Beulah stepped through the jail’s doors, back at the beginning of April. The pretty, fragile ones had got in Belva’s way her whole life. The large eyes, the trembling lip, the wee waist you could almost put your hand all the way around—men could never get enough. Men who might have been her husbands. Men who might have been her boyfriends. The thought of it enraged her. But this time, she had decided she wouldn’t fight against the other girl, the prettier girl. She would fight alongside her.

On Beulah’s first day in the jail, Belva began scheming to get her picture taken with the new inmate. They would be best pals all the way. She wasn’t as attractive or as young as Beulah, but if she played it right, she believed the papers would lump them together: “the prettiest women in Cook County Jail.” That was worth something. Here, William’s ready cash came in handy. The “forbidden cabinet,” the one that held the cosmetics taken from new prisoners when they were processed at the jail, now opened for Belva and only her.
¹⁰
With young, male reporters swaggering around the jail every day, all of the girls wanted access to their beauty products, but only Belva got preferential treatment. “Belva has her powder puff again,” the other inmates would say, clucking respectfully, when they caught sight of Belva looking glam on the cellblock. She was an expert with makeup; she could make herself look a decade younger.

After a couple days of jockeying, Belva got her picture with Beulah. Shots of the duo together appeared in most of the city’s newspapers. Belva looked good—bemused and sleepy-eyed, her head cocked imperiously like the society doyenne she once was, gazing slightly down on her “dear friend,” “Beautiful Beulah” Annan. In every caption she earned equal billing. The
Tribune
labeled its photo “Killers of Men.” Maurine, knowing full well that everyone was talking about the two cases, reported that the women, incredible as it might seem, “have not talked over their common interests. A man, a woman, liquor and a gun.”

The photos with Beulah had been a significant coup for Belva; they kept her in the headlines. But that was then. Now, a month after those photographs ran, the powder puff wasn’t going to be enough for her to stay in the picture. In the wake of the “Wanda sensation,” and with Elizabeth Unkafer’s conviction playing prominently in all of the papers, Beulah was having her own crisis of confidence. And like Belva, she had decided to do something about it.

On May 8, the day after Unkafer’s conviction, Beulah Annan gathered the press and told them she was pregnant. Harry Kalstedt, she said, had attacked her that fateful day in April after she informed him she was carrying her husband’s child.

Reporters thrilled at the unexpected news—a new twist that would tug at hearts and further goose a story that already obsessed readers. They crowded in on Beulah in the corridor of the women’s section, shooting questions at her. The mother-to-be scolded Belva for spilling her secret, even though Beulah’s announcement was the first that reporters had heard of the pregnancy. Nevertheless, the papers that Thursday afternoon stuck with Beulah’s account: “Mrs. Beulah Annan, young and beautiful slayer of her sweetheart, Harry Kalstedt, today bemoaned the publicity given the fact she is expecting a visit from the stork in the Fall,” wrote the
American.
The newspaper continued:

Today, when seen in her cell at the county jail, she blamed Mrs. Belva Gaertner, divorcee, awaiting trial for the killing of her sweetheart, Walter Law, married automobile salesman, for disclosing the secret.

“Belva should not have told,” said Mrs. Annan. “But women always tell such things. It was to have been my own little secret, but I just had to confide in someone and I told Belva.”

Roy C. Woods and William F. McLaughlin, assistant state’s attorneys, declared the fact that Mrs. Annan was awaiting motherhood did not change the fact that a murder had been committed.

Assistant State’s Attorney Edward Wilson declared that if Mrs. Annan were convicted and sentenced to death, there was no legal reason why she should not be hanged.

No legal reason? Perhaps that was so, but such a fraught decision hardly would be decided on legal merits. They were talking about an innocent little baby. And with Beulah as its mother, it would certainly be “a most beautiful child,” the
Post
stated. The day after she disclosed the pregnancy, Beulah announced through her lawyers that she “wants no postponement of her trial on account of her approaching motherhood.” The state responded in kind, bravely insisting, “We are ready to go to trial today.”

The pregnancy revelation surprised Maurine. During the immediate excitement of it all, she hung back, took stock. She decided to chat with some of the other inmates while a group of reporters interviewed Beulah. It seemed that, among the hacks covering the development, Maurine alone was suspicious. In the next day’s
Tribune,
she hinted that the whole thing was a ruse, hitting with the kind of lacerating sarcasm that was beginning to earn her a following.

What counts with a jury when a woman is on trial for murder?

Youth? Beauty? And if to these she adds approaching motherhood—?

For pretty Mrs. Beulah Annan, who shot her lover, Harry Kohlstedt [
sic
],
¹¹
to the tune of her husband’s phonograph, is expecting a visit from the stork early this fall. This 23 year old murderess, now waiting trial, is making this the basis for a further appeal to clemency.

Maurine went on to suggest that Unkafer’s verdict on Wednesday had prompted Beulah’s announcement, “for the conviction of one of their number broke the monotony of their life and startled them into a worried analysis,” she wrote of the seven inmates remaining on “Murderess’ Row.” The official line from William Scott Stewart, she added, was that Beulah’s “condition has no bearing upon the legality of the case.” But, prompted by Maurine, he had agreed that “it might affect the jury.” Maurine was also alone among the reporting corps in bringing up the “four-term rule,” which Beulah’s attorneys could invoke to prevent the case from being held over for more than four terms of court—meaning Stewart and O’Brien could ensure Beulah went to trial well before the baby was due to arrive. “Will a jury give death—will a jury send to prison—a mother-to-be?” Maurine asked.

She clearly thought Cook County jurymen wouldn’t be able to do so, especially to a mother-to-be as lovely as Beulah May Annan. For weeks, Maurine had reminded readers that Beulah’s story about the Kalstedt shooting—that is, her latest story—didn’t add up. The criticism hadn’t dented the suspected murderess’s popularity at all, and now the reporter was questioning Beulah’s veracity about that most sacred and mysterious of womanly things: pregnancy. People—especially men—wanted to believe Beulah. They were conditioned to believe her.

Maurine’s derisive articles stayed true to the
Tribune
’s niche in the market—the hanging paper, the paper that didn’t write sob stories—but she also made a good case. It was an unlikely coincidence, after all, that the pregnancy announcement came just days after the massive Wanda Stopa coverage. For a thrilling, salacious week, Wanda had blotted out all of the women of Cook County Jail, even “Beautiful Beulah” Annan. The Polish girl gunner pushed Beulah not just off the front page but out of the papers entirely. The story became so big that twenty-four-year-old Ernest Hemingway, a foreign correspondent for the
Toronto Star,
picked up a Marseille newspaper in southern France one day and, to his surprise, found himself reading about his childhood friends’ older brother, Y. Kenley Smith. At his request, his family sent him all of the
Tribune
’s articles about Wanda Stopa, which they annotated with “suitable moral comments.” Hemingway became caught up in the coverage. “Pity the female Polak lawyer couldn’t shoot when she pulled a gun on Doodles,” he wrote to a friend, still disgusted by the thought of Kenley’s wife eyeing him. The Palos Park shooting and its circumstances were so scandalous that it’s believed they inspired Hemingway to write a short story, “Summer People,” in which a Hemingway-like protagonist engages in anal intercourse with a wild young woman named Kate. Surely that was the kind of “perversion” bohemians undertook, especially the ones who went mad like Wanda Stopa. (“I love it. I love it. I love it,” Kate calls out during the sex act, which of course occurs not in a bed but out in the woods.)