The Girls of Murder City (29 page)

Every man there, every man on the jury, knew how one little drink led to another. Many lives had been ruined this way. Everyone had a brother or cousin or friend whose life had unraveled or was unraveling because of drink. It was the scourge of the age, made even worse by Prohibition. Drink made decent people do bad things, and it made bad people do unspeakable things. Innocent women were victimized by it every day. O’Brien sketched a dark but vivid tableau. Harry Kalstedt, he insisted, was one of the bad people turned even worse by booze. He was a bully, a pervert, a convict. An out-of-control drunk. “Fascinated, the jury followed him down the path of ‘another little drink,’ ” wrote Maurine, “until Kalstedt threatened to attack her, boasting that he had served time for ‘having his way with a woman’—‘that’s the kind of man he was!’ Then, according to her attorney, Beulah, in a frenzy, started—O no, not for the gun, but the telephone, to tell her husband the danger she was in! And it was then Kalstedt went for the gun—conveniently parked on the bed—but she had the inside track! And in the struggle she turned around and that’s how he was shot in the back! (Attorney Stewart posed to show just how it was done.)”

Maurine, with the promiscuous exclamation points and melodramatic phrasing, wasn’t trying to play the sob sister. She was mocking O’Brien for laying out such an implausible series of events: Beulah agreeing to drink with Kalstedt after the drunken “fiend” had forced his way into her flat, Al’s gun left out in plain sight on the bed, Kalstedt breaking for the gun first but Beulah still getting to it, Kalstedt ending up shot in the back because he and Beulah had spun like dancers while fighting for the weapon. There’s no way to know if Maurine’s readers picked up on her ridicule. The real sob sisters, after all, pounded out their accounts with the same outsize enthusiasm, just without the irony. Over at the
American,
O’Brien’s speech was related as simple fact: “He put on a jazz record and made advances to her. She pleaded with him: ‘If nothing else will stop you, maybe this will,’ she said, and told him she was an expectant mother. He ignored her pleas, told her he had served a penitentiary sentence for attacking one woman. There was a struggle. Both reached for the gun.”

O’Brien paused when he said this, and then reiterated that vital piece of information. “Both reached for the gun,” he said, making clear that it was in plain sight on the bed in the next room. “But he was ahead of her. She fought for her life and in the struggle shot him in the back.” The silence that followed this statement was complete. The lawyer was done. With a nod, he turned from the jury and sat heavily at the defense table. The jurymen sat back, thoroughly wrung out. William W. O’Brien was convincing. He believed in Beulah as the virtuous working girl, the good girl gone terribly bad and, because of her beauty and trusting nature, inevitably wrong. Beulah, tears welling in her eyes, her chin quivering slightly, believed too.

The state fought back with eyewitnesses: Policemen laid out what they saw and heard in Beulah’s apartment that day; the coroner established a time of death—several hours after the shooting—and mentioned the record she played over and over. “Several witnesses were called,” the
Post
wrote, “each describing his impressions of the scene immediately following the death of Kalstedt when Beulah, in order to quiet her nerves, placed the ‘Hula Lou’ record on her phonograph, and awaited the arrival of the bluecoats.”

W. W. Wilcox, Kalstedt’s brother-in-law, who worked at Tennant’s Laundry and was present in the apartment when Woods questioned Beulah in the kitchen, testified that the defendant had not been coerced to give a statement the night of the shooting. Nor, he said, was she promised immunity. “However, she tried to get it. She asked Woods if he couldn’t ‘frame’ it to look like an accident, and Woods said, ‘You don’t frame anything with me.’ ” Wilcox then put the dagger in, insisting that Beulah had frequently smiled and seemed calm and flirtatious while talking to Woods and the police, with Kalstedt still lying in a bloody pool on the floor. (The
American
headlined one of its trial stories in that afternoon’s paper, “First Witness in Kalstedt Slaying Says Annan Girl Tried Beauty on Prosecutor.”)

On cross-examination, O’Brien returned to the dead man’s prison record.

“He was in the St. Cloud reformatory,” Wilcox answered.

“For what reason?”

“Wife desertion,” Wilcox said.

O’Brien was doing his best, but the prosecution had come out hard and strong. The evidence continued to pile up against Beulah. Sergeant Malachi Murphy of the Hyde Park station told of arriving outside the Annan’s apartment building at eight on the night of the shooting and hearing music—the song “Hula Lou”—blaring from inside the flat. A bloodstained phonograph record was then admitted into evidence. Betty Bergman, Beulah’s boss, took the stand and related the phone conversation she’d had with the defendant when Beulah called the Tennant Laundry office on the afternoon of April 3. Beulah had asked for “Moo”—Kalstedt—and sounded “stewed.” Bergman told her he wasn’t there, and then Beulah asked for “Billy”—W. W. Wilcox, Kalstedt’s brother-in-law. When Bergman said he wasn’t in the office either, Beulah rang off.

Assistant State’s Attorney McLaughlin repeated the time that Bergman said Beulah had called: 4:10 in the afternoon. The jury gaped—McLaughlin made sure they understood that at the time Beulah called Betty Bergman, Kalstedt was spread out on the floor in her apartment, dying.

Court stenographer Albert Allen stepped up to the stand “to read his notes.” Allen was present when Beulah explained what happened that afternoon, he testified. He said she had claimed to be surprised when Kalstedt came into the apartment, because she barely knew him. He read Beulah’s words from his notes: “ ‘Don’t come in,’ I warned him, but as he came on I shot. He sank to the floor, crying, ‘Oh, Anne, you’ve killed me.’ I must have fainted then, for I don’t remember what happened. When I recovered my senses I saw blood stains on my gown.” The statement ended with Beulah’s denial that she’d shot Kalstedt in the back. Allen said the defendant had made the statements “voluntarily, understanding that they might be used against her in court.” He insisted that Woods had never promised her leniency or immunity in exchange for a confession.

Court was still in session when reporters for the evening papers rushed out to file their stories. Large front-page slots were being held for their accounts. As Beulah’s trial began, coverage of her shifted, to one degree or another, from romantic melodrama to more straightforward news reporting. The papers laid out the day’s events in court and, if generally sympathetic to the defense, left overt opinion to the side.

The
Tribune,
however, continued to lean hard on its unique slant. Maurine recognized that her satirical sense of humor had made her pieces about Beulah stand out from the competition, but that wasn’t why she continued to prick the defendant. “In news articles, you are not allowed to write editorials—to my everlasting regret, because I have a preacher’s mind,” she would tell an interviewer two years after Beulah’s trial. It was a nice line, but in practice Maurine never paid attention to such professional dictates. That “preacher’s mind” was very much in evidence right from the beginning of her reporting career, and her editors never seemed bothered by it. When writing about Beulah in particular, her articles took on the flavor of indictments. She was convinced of Beulah’s guilt and wanted to do whatever she could to effect the right verdict. Her report from the first day of the trial was a case in point: a masterpiece of concise, clearly articulated rhetoric, significantly more powerful than what William McLaughlin had come up with for his opening statement to the jury. “ ‘Beautiful’ Beulah Annan’s chance for freedom was lessened yesterday,” Maurine began, “when Judge Lindsay ruled, after an extended hearing, that the confessions she had made to the police the night following the murder of Harry Kalstedt, April 3, were admissible as evidence.”

“I’m the only witness,” Beulah has boasted, “Harry’s dead and they’ll have to believe my story.”

But which one?

The confession she made to Assistant State’s Attorney Roy C. Woods (with a court reporter present) in her apartment at 9 o’clock the night of the crime, when she said that she shot Kalstedt, whom she barely knew, to save her honor as he approached her in attack?

Or the statement that she made at the Hyde Park police station (also with court reporters present) three hours later? Then she broke down and admitted that she shot him in the back. The man was about to leave her after a jealous quarrel, she said. Will the jury believe that?

Or will the jury credit the story that she’ll tell in court, a plea of self-defense: “We both grabbed for the revolver!”—when she takes the stand today?

No one who read the
Tribune
on Saturday morning, no matter how fetching the photograph spread across the front page (and the picture of Beulah was fetching indeed), could have come away with any doubt about which story to believe. The defendant, Maurine Watkins made clear, was guilty as sin.

14

Anne, You Have Killed Me

Beulah Annan, her hands and clothes spattered with blood, spun the record on the phonograph again, moved to the open window, and squinted out at the afternoon sun. The music hopped behind her:

Her name was Hula Lou, the kind of gal who never could be true. Got a Hula smile, and lots of Hula hair. She Hula Hulas here and Hula Hulas there.

Beulah’s hips twitched. It was an infectious song. Outside, on the sidewalk in front of the building, a group of schoolgirls held hands and twirled each other to the music, their giggles echoing through the adjacent alley. Inside, Beulah did the same on her own.

Except Beulah wasn’t giggling. She was thinking about Harry—or to be more accurate, she was forgetting about him. His face was already fading away: the dark eyes becoming an amorphous mass, the slicked-back hair parting on its own and falling away, the snapping white teeth leaching into nothingness. It was as though she’d never known him at all or he was a figment of her imagination. Maybe he was.

“Did you shoot this man, Harry Kalstedt?” William Scott Stewart asked.

Beulah’s eyes popped, as if the lawyer had startled her. Settling again into her seat, she glanced at Stewart from under fluttering lashes and took a deep breath. She responded slowly, “in a low, silvery voice,” drawing out each syllable. “I did,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because he was going to shoot me.”

It had begun. Chicagoans had been waiting for this moment for weeks. Not just Chicagoans, in fact. Reports on Sabella Nitti’s and Kitty Malm’s trials had gone out on the news wires, but they’d received limited exposure outside the city. Beulah Annan, “the prettiest slayer of Murderess’ Row,” on the other hand, had caught the fancy of editors and readers throughout the country. Her face had become front-page fodder in New York and California and dozens of places in between. Some papers, such as the
Atlanta Constitution,
sent reporters to Chicago for the trial. National newsreel companies had also come to town, setting up their cameras and lights in the back of the courtroom. “The case of Beulah Annan is one of the most remarkable ever to win the interest of an eager public,” stated the
Washington Post.