The Girls of Murder City (27 page)

Beulah’s trial had been scheduled to start the Monday after Wanda burst into the news, before her lawyers managed at the last minute to push it back to late May. That original timing must have terrified Beulah. How could she go to trial if all anyone was talking about was Wanda Stopa? But her instincts, as always in seeking press coverage, were pitch-perfect. She later said, “What fooled everybody when I told them in jail that I was going to become a mother was this: We had kept it a secret that the reason I shot Kalstedt was because he would not let me alone when I told him I was going to have a baby.”

No reporter bothered to ask why she would keep such a compelling reason for her violent act a secret. Maurine, for one, had come to believe that her colleagues simply preferred Beulah’s revisionist account of what happened on the night of April 3. There wasn’t much they could do with a hard-hearted confession, but her desperate fight against a brute—that was perfect. There certainly was no denying that Beulah Annan knew how to play pathos for all it was worth. “Albert probably won’t want me back—my life’s ruined anyway; I can never live it down,” she told any reporter who would listen, the tears coming easily. “Even if I went away where nobody knew, you can’t get away from yourself. And I’d always remember that I’d killed him.”

Men riding into work on the streetcar shook their heads and winced at such plangent words, then gazed at the latest picture of the dear murder suspect, who, Maurine noted, “posed prettily for the photographers” every day. Their wives at home snuffled at reading the same words, the tears coming almost as easily as they did to Beulah. Despite Maurine’s caustic commentary and Belva Gaertner’s attempts to regain the spotlight, the Beulah juggernaut could not be stopped. Even William Gaertner’s millions couldn’t help his ex-wife stand out against such exceptional competition. Beulah Annan was simply a natural. A rumor floated around the city’s newsrooms that if Beulah won acquittal, one of the Hollywood movie studios was prepared to offer her a contract. (This surely infuriated Belva, who actually had been a professional performer.) The rumor wasn’t true; there had been no discussions with Hollywood representatives. But Beulah assumed some kind of life in entertainment would be open to her. At the very least, she knew she could be a vaudeville freak act, a term that referred not to mustachioed women but to performers who had box-office drawing power for some reason other than talent. The boxing champion Jack Dempsey was a top-drawer freak act, once making $10,000 in a week. So was Evelyn Nesbit, the infamous object of desire who’d sparked the murder of the noted architect Stanford White. Freak acts cracked bad jokes, talked through songs, told supposedly true stories from their lives, or did a simple soft shoe. Beulah Annan surely could manage that.

13

A Modest Little Housewife

On Thursday, May 22, the bailiff in Judge William Lindsay’s courtroom said the words everyone had been waiting to hear: “Beulah Annan.”

The defendant, her head bare, hands interlaced at her waist, rose and walked toward the bar. She progressed as if at the head of a funeral procession, her head cast slightly downward, steps slow and deliberate. Reporters took up most of the first handful of rows in the packed courtroom, and Beulah exchanged smiles with them as she approached. She passed her husband in the first row. Al leaned forward in his seat, twisting his cap in his hand, a worried gaze fixed on her. She did not meet his eyes.

Beulah knew everyone would be looking at her, the comely expectant mother of Cook County Jail. She didn’t disappoint. Her freshly marcelled hair arced with precision across her forehead. The lace collar of her new blouse suggested innocent modesty but at the breastbone dipped tantalizingly into shadow. “The courtroom was full of appreciative smiles directed toward the lovely girl beside the prisoner’s table,” noted a reporter from out of state. “There were flashes of consideration. The sheiks of the town crowded the spectators’ chairs. The pretty, bob-haired maid assuredly was the fairest thing that had ever graced a murder trial in Chicago.”

The
Daily Journal
’s hack appeared equally impressed. He described in detail Beulah’s expertly tailored suit, even her black satin slippers.

Slightly pale from her recent illness but blossoming with the comeliness of face and figure which has spread her name broadcast, Mrs. Annan looked more like a boarding school girl tripping up to the principal’s “carpet” than a defendant in one of Chicago’s most sensational murder trials.

Perhaps there was “method in the madness” that prompted her to enter the courtroom bareheaded. With her flaming red hair showing at its best with a fresh trim and marcel, she made a picture which would rival paintings of the famous Titian.

The
Journal
’s reporter was right: There was a method to Beulah’s appearance. Her lawyers, Stewart and O’Brien, with the help of a “fashion expert” they’d hired, had carefully thought everything out, including the bare head. A beautiful woman who went bareheaded in public could only be a whore or a goddess. Beulah managed to be both. The “boarding-school girl” look played into a popular male sexual fantasy while also visually showcasing Beulah’s innocence. She looked sweetly childlike and at the same time delectably ripe. The fashion expert earned the fee—Beulah’s outfits would receive as much comment as the evidence presented in court—but the defendant’s beauty alone was undoubtedly enough to do the job. It confirmed a woman’s nature, her innate moral place in the world. Time and again Beulah Annan was described as if she were a work of art: her hair was not simply red but “Titian,” her coy smile that of a “Sphinx” withholding a thrilling riddle.

The male reporters covering her case had long ago come over to her side. The pregnancy announcement simply sealed it. The
Post
alluded to a metaphor by Alexander Pope, describing Beulah as “a butterfly on a wheel, the center of many curious eyes, some friendly, some hostile. She wore a neat brown dress, with a soft fur piece about her neck.” Her lawyers couldn’t have asked for a better image than that of a helpless, fluttering Beulah, in her neat brown dress, being tortured on a wheel to achieve something as unimportant as a conviction.

It seemed to Maurine Watkins that she was the only one who remembered the ugliness of the killing. While the
Journal
and the
Post
remained officially neutral on Beulah, and the Hearst papers sometimes bordered on fawning, Maurine worked herself into a righteous fury. What any decent defense attorney in Chicago wanted in a jury, she believed, was “twelve good morons”—and she was convinced, and horrified, that W. W. O’Brien and William Scott Stewart were going to get them.

Maurine had seen enough of Beulah’s attorneys to know that Beulah was lucky to have them. Stewart and O’Brien had been in partnership together less than two years, but they had proved an excellent team from the start. So far they’d never lost a case—a record rapidly approaching two dozen acquittals in a row. They’d had such success that they were about to set themselves up in the swank new Temple Building in the heart of the Loop. Their rent would be a whopping $350 a month.
¹²

On the face of it, the partners made an unusual pair. O’Brien exuded tough-guy charm; he didn’t so much smile at you as ease his lips into a kind of swagger. He was impressive in a quintessentially Chicago way, decked out in colorful shirts, always making a show, the kind of man who kept his hat pulled low over his eyes, winked at attractive young ladies on the street, and dangled a cigarette from his lip as he talked. He had a propensity for going on weeklong benders, surfacing just in time to walk into court.

Stewart wasn’t a teetotaler, but in contrast to his partner, no one ever saw him drunk. A journalist labeled the always well-dressed Stewart “the Beau Brummel of the courtroom.” He was low-key, fastidious, a perfectionist. “There is an atmosphere around every law office,” he would say years later, speaking to young lawyers getting their start. “It is either businesslike or it is not. Avoid those offices which look like hangouts, where those about the office play cards in plain view, smoke cigarettes and keep their hats on. . . . Your client cannot have a very good impression when he walks into such an office. Such people are apt to appear discourteous and not handle messages properly.” He was likely speaking from direct experience.

But in spite of their differing styles, the law partners trusted each other implicitly—and no one else. Stewart’s theory on hiring a secretary for the office was “somewhat like that often given concerning marriage. . . . Get them young and tell them nothing.” He insisted that he and his partner not only tell their girl nothing but also that they should “give her not the slightest responsibility, and drum into her by constant repetition that she should not give out any information.”

Stewart and O’Brien didn’t seem to need any help, from a secretary or anyone else. They were smart, efficient lawyers. They were each making at least $20,000 annually by 1924, an impressive haul. They didn’t take any case for the publicity—unless they were sure they could win it. Stewart liked to say that “it is difficult to catch a good lawyer on the wrong side of a case.” Innocence was not necessarily the right side, though he never ruled it out. “When your client claims to be innocent, do not despair, even when things look black,” he said. “He may in fact be innocent.”

There was no obvious reason for the two lawyers to be so confident that they were on the right side of the Beulah Annan case. Sure, she was beautiful, and O’Brien and Stewart were getting a lot of publicity with her, especially after her pregnancy announcement. But this was a woman who had admitted to cuckolding her husband and shooting her lover when the man attempted to walk out on her. In the past year, Sabella Nitti, Kitty Malm, and now Elizabeth Unkafer had been convicted of murder, a sudden and dramatic reversal of tradition. On top of that, O’Brien and Stewart were essentially a two-man band, whereas, “In Chicago,” Stewart pointed out, “the prosecutor has about sixty assistants, in addition to clerks, stenographers, investigators and police.” Roy Woods and William McLaughlin, the assistant state’s attorneys trying Beulah’s case, were considered to be among the best in the office.

Despite such challenges, the two men showed only confidence in public and in their meetings with Beulah. O’Brien, in particular, seemed enthusiastic about defending the case. He liked Beulah—he liked women as a rule—and killer women were becoming a specialty. (He would represent thirteen female murder suspects in his career.) Stewart would do the heavy lifting on the case; he’d deal with the actual evidence. But O’Brien was going to throw the gut punch. He planned to argue that Beulah was a “virtuous working girl . . . a modest little housewife” who’d been lured astray by booze. He may have even believed it. Beulah, her choice in a husband notwithstanding, seemed to get to tough guys the most. That little smile of hers, her gaze direct but unfocused, inevitably turned them to jelly. O’Brien needed some tough guys on the jury. He could talk to them man to man.