The Girls of Murder City (4 page)

Lee stood, too, and insisted that she sit back down. He knew how to treat a lady. He wouldn’t have her running off to the toilet in tears. Maurine crouched on the edge of her seat. The editor sat and looked her over again. She was so small. Her body had a sullen prepubescence about it, as though it had been stunted by cigarettes or some dread childhood disease. It was thrilling.

“I don’t believe you’ll like newspaper work,” he said.

Maurine nodded. “I don’t believe I will.”

They understood each other, then. Lee told her she was hired. Fifty dollars a week; she could start the next day, Saturday. He rose again and showed her out.

Maurine must have left the building in a daze. She surely knew it never happened like this. Just getting to interview for a reporter position in Chicago was an impressive feat. The typical job seeker, standing around in the hall day after day for an editor who never came out, “began to feel that the newspaper world must be controlled by a secret cult or order.” The
Tribune,
the biggest, most successful paper of all, was the toughest place to secure a slot, especially for women who wanted to be in the newsroom. Unlike William Randolph Hearst’s rags, the
Tribune
didn’t run sob stories. It didn’t play to its women readers’ innate decency with sentimental tales of woe. That was what Maurine liked about it: It was “a real hanging paper—out for conviction always.” The
Tribune
’s crime reporters had to be fearless and hard-hearted. They had to have all the skills of the police detectives they were trying to stay a step ahead of. (Indeed, reporters often impersonated officers to get witnesses to talk.) Most police reporters were hired from the City News Bureau, which handled routine crime news for all of the local papers, or from the suburban dailies. Or they first proved themselves as picture chasers, which sometimes involved breaking into the homes of murder victims and grabbing family portraits off walls. Young Miss Watkins, so angelic-looking and proper, could hardly be expected to do such a thing.

In fact, that was what her new editor was counting on. Reporters had to be tough. Sometimes they had to shake information out of sources. It was necessary, but it also made people distrust and fear newspapermen. Robert Lee sensed that Maurine Watkins could crack the nut a different way. He bet that thieves and prostitutes and police sergeants would be drawn to this lovely, petite woman, to her small-town manners and “soft, blurred speech,” and would confide in her without truly realizing they were talking to a reporter. Who would expect such an attractive young lady to be a police hack? That wasn’t what newspaperwomen did. Almost all of the women to be found in newsrooms “languish over the society column of the daily newspaper,” pointed out
New York Times
reporter Anne McCormick. “They give advice to the lovelorn. They edit household departments. Clubs, cooking and clothes are recognized as subjects particularly fitting to their intelligence.”

Clubs, cooking, and clothes. Those were women’s spheres—no one would argue that. But, as with most things, Chicago was different. In the nation’s second city, more and more women were showing up in the dock for murder and other violent crimes. These were the subjects Maurine would be writing about. Male reporters often took offense when assigned to a “girl bandit” or husband-killer story, but somebody had to cover the female-crime phenomenon. The number of killings committed by women had jumped 400 percent in just forty years, now making up fully 10 percent of the total. This was a significant cause for concern to many newspaper readers. It suggested that something about Chicago was destroying the feminine temperament. Violence, after all, was an unnatural act for a woman. A normal woman couldn’t decide to commit murder or plot a killing. This was why, argued an Illinois state’s attorney, when one did abandon the norm, “she sinks lower and goes further in brutality and cruelty than the other sex.” The violent woman was by definition mentally diseased, irreparably defective.

That was one theory, anyway. Another, far more popular one held that men, more brutal than ever in this terrible modern age, pushed them into it. William Randolph Hearst embraced this position. In the pages of his two Chicago newspapers, the
Herald and Examiner
and the
American,
women didn’t kill out of anger or greed or insanity. They were overwhelmed by alcohol or by feminine emotions, or both, and so were not responsible. Even the fallen woman was, at heart, good and could be saved. Hearst hired “sob sisters” like Patricia Dougherty (who wrote under the pseudonym Princess Pat) and Sonia Lee to warn girls to keep out of trouble. “It’s a grand object lesson in steering clear of life, my job is,” Hearst reporter Mildred Gilman would lament in her autobiographical novel,
Sob Sister.
Perhaps so, but it made for heart-tugging journalism. Who could forget Cora Orthwein crying out to the police after killing her cheating sweetheart back in 1921? “I shot him,” she wailed. “I loved him and I killed him. It was all I could do.” The sob sisters at the
Herald and Examiner
described Cora’s sorrow-filled beauty and pointed out how, during her exclusive interview with the paper, she unconsciously “touched a scar on her lip” caused by her late boyfriend’s fist. “I never drank as much as I have, lately,” she said. “He kept wanting me to drink. Friends argued with him not to keep piling the liquor into me.” As was widely expected, it worked out for her in the end. The
Tribune
noted before she went on trial that “Cook County juries have been regardful of women defendants” for years, especially when there was any hint of physical or emotional abuse by a man. Less than an hour after closing arguments, Cora Orthwein was acquitted.

Maurine wasn’t supposed to be interested in such depraved women. She wasn’t a girl from the neighborhood, like Ginny Forbes. She had been raised by doting, respectable parents in a quiet town, far from the big city. Her father, George Wilson Watkins, Crawfordsville’s minister, had sent his only child to Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, a school affiliated with their Disciples of Christ faith, to study Greek and the Latin poets.
¹
The Reverend Watkins wanted to keep his daughter in a religious, culturally conservative environment, as well as cultivate her Southern roots. She had been born in Louisville, about seventy-five miles from Lexington, at her grandmother’s house.

For years Maurine thought she wanted the same things for herself that her father did. She had been a dedicated, obedient student throughout her life, with a particular facility for languages and a deep devotion to the study of the Bible. From a young age she envisioned a quiet life of academic and religious accomplishment. She had headed back north after her junior year, to be closer to home, and in 1919 graduated first in her class from Butler University in Indianapolis.

That fall Maurine moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to do graduate work in the classics at Radcliffe College. Greek, the language of the New Testament, would be her focus. “If more people knew the Greek, they wouldn’t misinterpret the Bible,” she told her cousin, Dorotha Watkins. Maurine intended to get an advanced degree at the well-regarded women’s college and then move to Greece to commit herself to research work. But it took only a matter of days in Cambridge before the plan’s foundation cracked and started to crumble. Walking to and from classes on Radcliffe’s verdant campus, she “began looking at some of the people who had their Ph.D.s and decided I wasn’t as keen about it as I had imagined.” Her course work barely under way, she had a sinking feeling that she’d committed herself to the wrong path.

The spark for this abrupt change in attitude came from one simple administrative action: her acceptance into George Pierce Baker’s prestigious playwriting workshop. Baker, a professor in the English department at Harvard University, was Eugene O’Neill’s mentor and the best-known drama teacher in the country. Maurine had held out little hope of acceptance when she applied for the workshop. She dared not dream of a life as a writer. During her high school years and into college, she enjoyed writing short stories and plays, but the activity’s most powerful draw was simply that it was something she could do alone. Maurine had always felt easily overwhelmed in social situations. Even now, in her twenties, she was happiest when holed up in her room at her parents’ house, lost in thought, writing down high-minded stories about morality and personal responsibility in perfect, looping script. When she found out she was one of Baker’s chosen few, she could only have viewed it as a sign—a belated turning point in her life. Baker brought her into a workshop where some of the students had already had plays professionally produced, and all of them had dedicated themselves to serious writing.

George Pierce Baker’s passion for the theater, for its power and social purpose, thrilled her. Through dramatic interpretation, Baker said, writers made the world better. Nothing could have focused Maurine’s interest more. It spoke to her evangelizing background. Living on the East Coast for the first time, she found herself wondering, “What on earth has happened to religion!” The country had become godless and corrupt. She was convinced “the only thing that will cure the present condition is a real application of Christianity.” Suddenly her quiet writing avocation, for years a sideline to her academic pursuits, seemed not just a legitimate ambition, but an urgent one. Art was an obligation, Baker told her. The fifty-four-year-old professor warned his students against bogging down in academic theories. He advocated finding out about “your great, bustling, crowded American life of the present day.”

Maurine took this as a literal call to action. Baker was encouraging her to get out of her own head, to experience life, but for Maurine, her professor’s exhortations also acted as a spur to engage evil—the real thing, out in the real world. It was a relief for her finally to be given permission to do what she’d always felt called to do. Baker likely suggested newspaper work. He believed it was excellent training for a serious writer. (His prize student, O’Neill, had worked as a reporter.) Once that seed had been planted, Maurine knew where she had to go. Chicago was Bedlam: debauched, violent, unimaginable—and full of exciting opportunities. It was a city, Theodore Dreiser wrote in his 1923 memoir,
A Book About Myself,
“which had no traditions but which was making them, and this was the very thing which everyone seemed to understand and rejoice in. Chicago was like no other city in the world—so said they all.”

So Maurine went to Chicago. She withdrew from her classics program, packed up her small wardrobe, and left, just like that. Scared but determined to overcome her fears, she arrived in her new city knowing not a soul, a true missionary for God and for art. She picked out an apartment to rent on the North Side, across the street from St. Chrysostom’s Episcopal Church on North Dearborn. It wasn’t her church, but the proximity to a holy place surely eased her anxiety at settling in such a large, dangerous city. St. Chrysostom’s was a gem, with its stone courtyard, its low-slung Gothic cathedral, and its triangular stained-glass windows. Lying in bed on the morning of her first day as a police reporter, listening to the bell clang with sonorous vitality from the top of the church’s tower, Maurine could have been back in Crawfordsville, her mother a moment from bursting through the door to roust her in excited anticipation of the day’s sermon. Except now Maurine knew that when she sat in church on Sunday, she wouldn’t be a passive receptacle. She would be an avenging angel. Or she could be, if given the chance by her editors. She needed a murder—one good murder.

“Being a conscientious person, I never prayed for a murder,” she later said. “But I hoped that if there was one I’d be assigned to it.”

She wouldn’t have to hope for long. This was Chicago.

2

The Variable Feminine Mechanism

In the first hour of Wednesday, March 12, a new Nash sedan rumbled down Cottage Grove Avenue on Chicago’s South Side. It was the only car on the road. Belva Gaertner slouched low in the passenger seat and pulled her knees up toward the glove box. She wanted Walter Law to have a glimpse of her calves. Belva was thirty-eight years old, nearly ten years older than Walter, and twice a divorcée, but she still had beautiful legs. She would allow Walter to reach out and massage them. In fact, she would allow him to do anything he wanted to do. But he didn’t stroke her leg. Instead, he gripped the steering wheel and refused to look at her.