The Girls of Murder City (31 page)

“I don’t remember seeing him.”

Stewart reminded the jury that McLaughlin wasn’t the first assistant state’s attorney to question Beulah in the apartment that night. Roy Woods had done so earlier, before she’d been taken to the police station. Stewart asked Beulah to describe the conversation with Woods.

“Well, there was some general conversation, and then Mr. Woods said: ‘The mere fact that this man was in your apartment—and that you are married—would indicate that there had been no crime, that is, that it would not have been a crime to have shot him.’ ”

“Later when you were making a statement, what happened with reference to the stenographer?”

“Well, Mr. Woods would sometimes tell the reporter not to take the answer down, then he would talk to me, and later the answer in a different way would be taken down.”

“Had Kalstedt ever been to your home before this day?”

“No.”

“Had you been on any parties with him, or to any places of amusement?”

“No, sir.”

Stewart thanked her. He was satisfied. Beulah had hit her marks and looked appropriately traumatized and helpless throughout. She’d done everything her lawyers could have hoped for. There had never been a “more dramatic story ever told from the witness stand,” the
Daily News
’s reporter declared when he called his story in to an editor. But that was with Stewart asking the questions—questions they’d gone over time and again. Could she hold up under hostile fire?

Assistant State’s Attorney William McLaughlin rose and moved toward her. He was a young prosecutor, but premature baldness and a thin, pinched face made him look slightly menacing. He jabbed a finger and launched right in; he wasn’t going to give her any time to collect her thoughts. Maurine, from her seat in one of the front rows, observed that Beulah was “a trifle nonplused by the opening attack of the prosecution in cross-questioning, for Mr. McLaughlin tried to establish the fact that her ‘story’ had been ‘framed’ by her attorneys.”

“How many drinks did you have, Mrs. Annan?” the prosecutor asked, trying to throw her off stride.

Beulah kept her eyes level, half lidded. “Three or four,” she said. “Each time he offered me a drink he promised he’d go if I would take just that one more.”

“Where were you when your quarrel first began?”

“On the couch.”

“Was he in the center?”

“Yes.”

“Where were you before then?”

“At the doorway. I asked him to leave. He said, ‘I will after you’ve come across.’ ”

“How did you come to be with him?”

“He was on the couch and I went over and sat beside him.”

“What?”
It was like a door suddenly banging shut. McLaughlin said it loud enough, and with enough body English, to startle Beulah—and to focus the jury’s attention. He homed in now, his voice as hard and precise as a needle. “You knew what he was trying to accomplish, yet you went and sat on the couch with him?”

Beulah shifted in her seat. She replied in a childlike voice: “Well, he had said something about going to bed.”

McLaughlin leaned in, bored in. “I want a more direct answer, Mrs. Annan,” he said. “Did you know what he was trying to accomplish?”

“Yes,” she said. It was the wrong answer for any proper woman. A lady, a married woman alone in an apartment with a strange man, would never willingly sit on a couch with him if she recognized he had sexual intentions. But Beulah understood her predicament, and understood her way out of it, better than anyone—including McLaughlin—could have guessed. She was risking her reputation as a respectable married woman, but it was the only answer she could give if she hoped to hold on to a workable narrative.

“Then what happened?” McLaughlin asked.

“I told him to pull himself together and go home, and he said he would as soon as I would come across.”

“Had you been in the bedroom with him?”

“No.”

“Did you tell him your husband might shoot him if he found him there?”

“Yes.”

“Then what happened?”

“He jumped up and began yelling, ‘Where is the gun?’ ”

“Where were you when you were having this argument?”

“I was sitting on the couch.”

“You say he was sitting near the center of the couch?”

“Yes.”

“Where were you sitting?”

“At the end, near the door.”

“What was taking place on the couch?”

Beulah knew all too well what McLaughlin was getting at, and she wasn’t going to help him. “We were talking about his going,” she said, “and I asked him to go, and he said: ‘I will later.’ ”

The prosecutor tried again to get Beulah to admit to passionate grappling on the couch with Kalstedt, but she refused to acknowledge his insinuations. She repeated the same answer over and over. Frustrated, McLaughlin returned to the moment when Kalstedt asked her where the gun was. “Then what occurred?” he asked.

“I got up and started to go to the telephone to call my husband and he started for the bedroom.”

“Did you go to the bedroom?”

“Yes.”

“Who was first?”

“He was one step ahead of me.”

“Why did you go to the bedroom?”

“He was going to shoot me.”

“How did he know where the gun was?”

Stewart objected and it was sustained. McLaughlin started right back up, trying to keep the pressure on.

“Did he get to the door first?”

“Yes, one side of it.”

“Was the gun in plain sight on the bed?”

“Yes.”

“How did you beat him to it?”

“I lunged for it, and I grabbed it.”

McLaughlin expressed surprise that Beulah “should be a step behind Kalstedt in the ‘get-away’ . . . and yet beat him to the gun,” but Beulah ignored the snide tone. Her confidence was on the rise. Stewart had worked the nerves out of her.

“What did you do?” McLaughlin continued.

“I grabbed the gun.”

“Did he grab your wrist?”

“No.”

“What did he do?”

“He put his hand up and said, ‘I’ll kill you yet!’ I put my hand on his right shoulder or arm and pushed him.”

“Have you remembered that ever since the day of the shooting?”

“Yes.”

McLaughlin smirked at Beulah in disgust. Then, as if suddenly realizing how the cross-examination was going, he started banging at her faster and faster, repeating questions and asking a cascade of similar questions. He was probing for inconsistencies, any contradictory statements he could exploit. But as the rapid-fire questioning continued, an unmistakable desperation—or a lack of strategic thinking—became obvious.

“What time was it when you shot Harry Kalstedt?” he asked for the third time.

“About 2:30 or 3, I think.”

“What time was it when you called your husband?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did you do between the time you shot Kalstedt and the time you called your husband?”

“I don’t know how long I sat there. When I came to, I tried to get to the telephone. I knew I had to call somebody.”

“Did you try to get rid of the body?”

“No.” Beulah gave a surprised, querulous look, as if he’d slapped her.

“Where was the gun usually kept?”

“Under the pillow.”

“Did you hear your husband’s reply to Sergeant Murphy’s question about where the gun was kept—that it was in the bureau drawer?”

“No.”

“And did you reply: ‘I don’t know where it was.’ ”

“No.”

“You had not called Betty Bergman that afternoon?”

“No.”

Finally, having exhausted every possible way of asking the same handful of questions, McLaughlin got to the confessions made on the night of the shooting. He went through her statements line by line, and Beulah, still calm, still with that sweet Southern accent, denied practically every word credited to her by the state. She denied that she had said anything to the police about having a romantic relationship with Kalstedt. She denied that she had called him a jailbird and that he had called her foul names in return. She denied telling officers that she shot him because he was walking out on her. “One by one he read her the questions and answers she had made at the Hyde Park police station the night of the murder, in which she confessed killing the man after a jealous quarrel,” Maurine wrote. The
Tribune
reporter cataloged the defendant’s replies, noting how she varied “the defiance of her ‘no’ with a childishly petulant, ‘I don’t remember.’ ” Maurine marveled at how Beulah shamelessly stared down her inquisitor: “She searched him with her shallow eyes: what was back of it all?” This, in fact, was where the whole thing hung by a breath. Beulah Annan had made herself a sympathetic, put-upon figure during her long testimony, but was she so sympathetic that the jury could accept the notion that the police and prosecutors were brazenly lying?

Despite Beulah’s firm denials, McLaughlin would not be deterred from reading every word of each of her confessions. The first statement from the night of the shooting wasn’t too far from the story she was telling today. Kalstedt came to her home early in the afternoon, even though she “barely knew him.” Against her wishes, he took her in his arms and declared, “Gee, Anne, I’m crazy about you.” Scared, she tried to get him to leave and, failing that, retreated to the bedroom. He followed, forcing her to grab up the revolver to protect herself. When, despite her warnings, he continued to approach, “she closed her eyes and shot.”

The police then pointed out that Harry Kalstedt had been shot in the back and thus begat the second confession. Beulah Annan, McLaughlin told the jury, now admitted that she’d been fooling around with Kalstedt for two months. As the two lovers sat drinking, she brought up another boyfriend, a Billy or Johnny, who Beulah said had called her that morning for a “date.” This infuriated Kalstedt, and he jumped to his feet. He and Beulah ran for the bedroom.

“I was ahead of him,” McLaughlin quotes from the confession. “I grabbed for the gun.”

“And what did he grab for?” Beulah’s interviewer asked.

“For what was left—nothing.”

Harry Kalstedt, hardworking laundry deliveryman, never had a chance, McLaughlin told the jury. The prosecutor turned back to the confession. “Did he get his coat and hat?” police asked Beulah that night. “No,” she said, “he didn’t get that far.” He didn’t get that far, McLaughlin said, because she had shot him.

Beulah, incredibly, didn’t get flustered. She sat with a straight back and her hands clasped in her lap while McLaughlin read her own words to her. She looked indignant at times, sometimes sad, always stoic. There would be no more tears from Beulah Annan. “The witness made a favorable impression, controlling her emotions, except during the dramatic crises of her recital, and keeping her voice up,” the
Evening Post
related, as if reviewing a play.

The
Post
understated it. Beulah’s was a bravura performance. Obviously well prepared by Stewart and O’Brien, she had a response to all of the testimony and evidence against her, casting doubt on the motives of the state’s witnesses and the validity of statements the prosecution attributed to her on the night of the shooting. She also questioned the character of Assistant State’s Attorney Woods and the officers at the scene of the killing—and pulled it off. Such accusations were always dicey for a defendant, but they had become increasingly believable to the average Chicagoan. Corruption at all levels of government had exploded since Prohibition, and the public was becoming aware of it, first in slow drips, and now, with the reform-minded Mayor William Dever in office, in a steady stream.

Beulah did all of this while coming across as a small, timid, uncalculating girl—a girl, not a woman, and a remarkably beautiful one at that. It wasn’t easy for a married woman who shot her boyfriend in the back to climb to the moral high ground, but Beulah seemed to have done it. McLaughlin tried mightily to trip her up, to get her to admit that she had said any of the things she had in fact said the night of the shooting. But nothing would move her from her story. More than that, she proved in the cross-examination that she understood what she was saying; she clearly knew why she should admit to some things, even if they showed her in a poor light (such as her acknowledgment that she knew Kalstedt was trying to seduce her), while insisting she couldn’t remember others, like what time she’d called her husband. She was so good on the stand that, even with the confident, evidence-packed case the state put forward, it was now impossible to guess which way the jury might be leaning.

Beulah’s testimony seemed like the trial’s natural denouement, but there was still more to come. The defense called Beulah’s mother, Mary Neel. She was questioned only briefly and, it seemed, pointlessly. “Her dark eyes were drawn and mouth set as she answered the few simple questions as to her name, relation to the defendant, etc.,” Maurine wrote. Next up was Beulah’s husband, Al, who “marched briskly to the stand” as if late for a train. But he would have even less to say than his mother-in-law. Judge Lindsay called the lawyers forward before Al uttered a word. After a brief consultation, he excused Al from the stand. Beulah looked away as Al passed the defendant’s table on his way back to his seat.