The Girls Of Murder City Part 4

"How much did you drink?" they asked her.

"Half a gallon."

"The two of you?"

"Yes. We had an argument."

"What about?"

Al wasn't at the apartment with them-Beulah had no idea where he was-so she told the men everything about Harry. They'd been intimate, she and Harry Kalstedt. She loved him, but she had begun to realize that he didn't deserve it, that he didn't really care for her. She said she had tried to make Harry jealous by pretending there was another man she was running around with.

"Did he say anything to you about your having done things that you shouldn't?" her inquisitors asked.

"Oh, yes, and I said to him: 'Well, you're nothing!' "

"Did you call him anything?"

"Yes." Beulah told them what she'd said, seemingly unembarra.s.sed to admit to the use of coa.r.s.e language.

"What did he say then?"

"He jumped up." He was angry, Beulah said. She could tell that. She and Harry both looked toward the bedroom. He saw Al's gun in there. Al usually kept it under the pillow, but it was in plain sight now.

"Then you say he jumped up?" Murname prompted her.

"I was ahead of him," Beulah said. "I grabbed for the gun."

"And what did he grab for?"

"For what was left-nothing."

"Did he get his coat and hat?"

"No, he didn't get that far."

"Why didn't he get that far?"

"Darned good reason."

"What was it?"

"I shot him."

Murname, Cronson, and McLaughlin seemed content all at once, and Beulah clearly didn't know why. It wasn't because she was giving them "come-on eyes," though she was, just out of habit. It was because she had all but put a noose around her neck. Beulah sighed. She probably wouldn't have cared even if she'd understood their smiles. There was some kind of protective s.h.i.+eld around her. The anger was gone; so was the fear. For the moment she was at peace.

The four of them headed back to the station, the three men quietly exuberant. They had her. Sabella Nitti and Katherine Malm had proved that women, finally, weren't safe in front of juries anymore, and now they had a pretty one to go along with the society lady, Belva Gaertner. Cronson and McLaughlin were going to bust the idea that you couldn't convict a beautiful woman in Cook County. Back at the station, flush with pride at securing a confession, they told the Daily News reporter that Beulah Annan was a "modern Salome."

By this point, Beulah could barely keep her eyes open, but still she wanted to talk. The late-night interview at the apartment, which would come to be known as the Midnight Confession, had somehow freed her. Now she had a lot to say. She wanted to tell everybody about what she'd been through with Harry Kalstedt.

"Harry was my greatest love, and rather than see him leave me, I killed him," she told the police matron looking after her at the station. A tear rolled down her cheek as the matron led her to a holding cell. She looked at her jailers, a marked woman but defiant.

"I am glad I did it," she said. "It ended an affair that was wrecking my life."

The next day, Friday, all of the newspapers. .h.i.t hard.

"Mrs. Beulah Annan, termed by her questioners 'a modern Salome,' sat quietly this morning in the matron's room at the South Clark Street police station," wrote the Daily News. She "greeted visitors with an imperturbable glance from under long lashes drooping over half-closed eyes. . . . Out of her eyes had gone every trace of the fire that must have illuminated them yesterday, when, she told Roy Woods, a.s.sistant state's attorney, she danced to the tune of jazz records a pa.s.sionate death dance with the body of the man she had shot and killed."

Now there was a gruesome image. A beautiful young vixen, swaying to a jazz beat with her dead lover in her arms, "raising the head of the victim and implanting kisses on his cold lips."

It wasn't quite true, but it was too good to pa.s.s up. The Journal and the Post offered similar "death dance" scenes, with Beulah lost in a traumatized "whirl." In the Tribune, Maurine wrote that the popular ditty "Hula Lou" was "the death song of Harry Kolstedt [sic], 29 years old, of 808 East 49th street, whom Mrs. Annan shot because he had terminated their little wine party by announcing that he was through with her." She added mischievously that after playing the Hawaiian song over and over, Beulah then "began to wonder about her husband. What would he say when he came home and found a dead man lying in his bedroom?"

The American, however, topped them all by moving beyond the jazz theme. It borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe for an operatic re-creation of the guilt-filled hours that pa.s.sed between the shooting and Beulah calling her husband: Laughter-a woman's laughter from the apartment across the way-mocked her. The clock, ticking steadily-stolidly-sternly, took on a voice that said: "Mur-der, mur-der, mur-der, mur-der, mur . . ."

The phonograph had run down. The woman rose. Anything-anything but that clock. Ah!-6 The story that went out on the Universal Press wire-and got picked up by newspapers across the country-was just as compelling, if not quite as fanciful.

CHICAGO-A grotesque dance over the body of the man she killed was described by Mrs. Beulah Annan, pretty 24-year-old slayer of Harry Kalstedt, of Minneapolis. Mrs. Annan admitted shooting Kalstedt Thursday night when, piqued by her attempt to rouse his jealousy, he threatened to leave her.

"I tantalized him with a story of an imaginary lover, to see what he would do," said Mrs. Annan. "When he reached for his overcoat to leave, I shot him. I was in a mad ecstasy, after I saw him drop to the floor. I was glad that I had killed him."

In the afternoon, Beulah met her attorneys and prepared to go before a coroner's jury. William Scott Stewart and his partner, W. W. O'Brien, had come on the case that morning, with some reluctance. The two lawyers always fretted about getting stiffed for the bill. Sometimes it seemed that running down payment from clients took as much time as trying cases. Stewart, at the age of thirty-four, and O'Brien, a decade older, demanded cash up front, though for the right client, they still accepted partial payment, along with an acceptable explanation for how the rest would be raised. Al Annan didn't have an acceptable explanation-no wealthy family members, no significant a.s.sets he could liquidate. But after seeing Beulah Annan's picture in the morning papers, Stewart and O'Brien decided to make an exception. They took the case.

Like many criminal defense attorneys, Stewart and O'Brien initially made their reputations as prosecutors. Stewart's name was better. He was so successful with murder cases during his time as an a.s.sistant state's attorney that he became known as the hanging prosecutor. The first high-profile prosecution he handled was the Carl Wanderer case in 1920. Wanderer was a veteran of the World War and an upstanding citizen. He worked hard and never smoked, drank, or gambled. Then a "raggedy stranger" jumped him and his pregnant wife, Ruth, when they were coming home one night. The man shot Ruth, and he would have shot Wanderer, but the former soldier knew how to handle himself. The raggedy stranger ended up dead. "I got him, honey. I got him," the newspapers quoted Wanderer as saying while his wife lay dying in his arms. Except he likely said no such thing. He was too busy making sure his wife was dead. In the days that followed, as the papers hailed him as a gallant and tragic hero, the police tracked the gun the stranger had used, an army-issue Colt .45, to Wanderer's cousin. Soon the hero cracked, admitting he'd grown tired of his wife and had enlisted the help of a b.u.m in a scheme to kill her. "I didn't want her anymore," Wanderer said of his wife. "I killed her so no one else would have her." The papers understandably turned on him and elevated Stewart as a replacement hero. The prosecution earned banner headlines. So did the hanging, when Wanderer, goaded by a reporter who said he enjoyed the condemned man's singing voice, eased into the chorus of his favorite song, "Old Pal," just before the trap door was hatched.

Stewart may have been expert at gaining convictions, but he had no trouble making the switch to defense work; in fact, he felt more comfortable with it. Lanky, with a long, rawboned face, the lawyer looked like a man you could trust, a valuable attribute when representing men (and women) accused of heinous crimes. His commitment to professionalism, as he defined it, was absolute. Devotedly married and the father of a young son, he prided himself on being a reliable man on the darkest of days, believing he was saving lives, like a doctor. He prepared for each court appearance, no matter how trifling, as if his career depended on it. The graduate of Chicago's undistinguished John Marshall Law School viewed his success as a lawyer, and his growing acceptance as an intellectual force in the community, as inevitable. "I am a great believer in original construction," he liked to say. "We are born with bones and muscles, a certain physical equipment, plus a mental power which might be called the motor, with a fairly fixed horsepower. This horsepower is called intelligence. It may be improved a little by mental exercise, but no school or study can give brains."

Stewart's partner in private practice would never have the standing-or perhaps the mental horsepower-that Stewart did. W. W. O'Brien graduated from the University of Notre Dame's law school in 1900, but he didn't feel called to the bar. Instead, he worked as a theatrical promoter for twelve years, "making three or four hundred dollars a week." He eventually came back to the law through politics. He proved to be an effective campaigner for Democratic mayor Carter Harrison Jr., which led to a patronage job in the city's Corporation Counsel's office. After a brief stint with the state's attorney, he felt confident in setting up his own defense practice.

Unlike Stewart, who loved the law and his own intellect above all else, O'Brien's paramount interest was women. He married a performer, Louise Dolly, in 1905 and divorced her twelve years later after cheating on her with numerous women. As soon as the divorce was finalized, he married a woman named Margaret Meehan, but that union was annulled within a year. In 1922, he married a third time-a beautiful nurse, Zoe Patrick. O'Brien succeeded in court for the same reason he succeeded with women. He was fun. He loved the theatricality of trial work. He aspired to be the next Charles Erbstein, the flamboyant Chicago defense attorney who had defended twenty-two women accused of murder and saw each one acquitted. (The same Charles Erbstein who represented Belva Gaertner in her 1920 divorce.) Erbstein's legal career was winding down by the early 1920s, and in many ways the always entertaining O'Brien was the ideal successor. There was just one problem: a strong scent of corruption trailed him. In 1922, two a.s.sistant state's attorneys accused him of trying to bribe them on behalf of a client, the pickpocket "Lucky Chubby" Lardner. O'Brien faced disbarment hearings but held on to his license. A year later, he stared down another bribery accusation.

These weren't the only signs of trouble. O'Brien also had a knack for getting shot. In 1921, he caught his first bullet while drinking in a saloon frequented by gangsters. He refused to cooperate with the police investigation. Two years later, it happened again. He was standing on the corner of Fifty-ninth and Halsted when some fifteen shots were fired. O'Brien didn't know if it was a machine gun or multiple gunners, but the police had no doubt that he was the target. If so, he was amazingly lucky: Only one shot hit him, catching him high up on the leg, perilously close to the groin. He again refused to answer police questions about the shooting.

Al Annan quickly got over feeling sorry for himself. He was a practical man. He loved Beulah-that was what mattered. "I haven't much money," he told reporters when he came downtown in the morning to secure Stewart and O'Brien's services, "but I'll spend my last dime in helping Beulah. I'll stick to the finish."

Al had begun frantically searching for loans. About the time Beulah was confessing to Murname, Cronson, and McLaughlin Thursday night, Al placed a call to Beulah's native Kentucky, rousting her father, John Sheriff, from bed. But he would get no help from Sheriff, a prosperous farmer in the Ohio River Valley. Beulah's father would not go to Chicago to see his daughter, and he would not send money. Both his former wife, Beulah's mother, and his present wife beseeched him to change his mind, but he wouldn't. Beulah had gotten herself in trouble before, and she would get in trouble again. "Beulah wanted a gay life, and she's had it," he said. "I don't think my wife and I should die in the poorhouse to pay for her folly." John Sheriff was a hard man.

Beulah may have been estranged from her father, but she still took after him. The distraught young woman they'd brought into the Hyde Park police station after the shooting, the woman who'd broken down and confessed at length, was gone by Friday afternoon. In her place stood a placid, steely doppelganger. Before the inquest at Boydston's undertaking parlor started, Beulah posed for photographers in the entrance hall. She had washed up and changed clothes again. She looked ravis.h.i.+ng, the expression on her face somehow both stoic and melancholic. She wore a light brown dress, a darker brown coat, black shoes, and, wrote Maurine, a "brown georgette hat that turned back with a youthful flare." Al held his hand over his face whenever the lens was pointed toward him. From the next room could be heard strains of "Nearer, My G.o.d to Thee," played for the funeral of a former soldier.

Inside the room where the inquest would be held, Maurine sat down next to Beulah. She asked her how she felt.

"I wish they'd let me see him," Beulah said. Picturing Harry Kalstedt laid out in a coffin, she offered Maurine a frown. "Still," she added, "it would only make me feel worse."

Maurine asked Beulah where she was from; she no doubt recognized the accent. Beulah told her she'd grown up in Kentucky, near Owensboro. The two women likely bonded over their shared bluegra.s.s roots. Beulah said she'd been married to Al for four years and had been married once before. She had a seven-year-old son still in Kentucky, living with "his father's people." She hadn't seen the boy since he was an infant. She had married that first time when she was sixteen, she said.

Other reporters moved in to get their time with the accused. Beulah accommodated them with patience and good humor. "I didn't love Harry so much-but he brought me wine and made a fuss over me and thought I was pretty," she said, her husband just a few seats away. "I don't think I ever loved anybody very much. You know how it is-you keep looking and looking all the time for someone you can really love." She gazed longingly at the reporter, a look that suggested maybe he was the one. She was beginning to make an impact, as she knew she would. The male reporters and sob sisters, seeing her calmed down and dressed up, felt the gravitational pull of Beulah May Annan-that soft Southern accent, lilting and plangent, coming out of that perfect face. Maurine, writing another page-one story, the first that would carry her byline, also recognized the reaction Beulah provoked: "They say she's the prettiest woman ever accused of murder in Chicago-young, slender, with bobbed auburn hair; wide-set, appealing blue eyes; tip-tilted nose; translucent skin, faintly, very faintly rouged; an ingenuous smile; refined features, intelligent expression-an 'awfully nice girl' and more than usually pretty."

Would the fact that she was more than usually pretty be enough to set her free? Probably not at the inquest, where the state only had to show there was evidence-any evidence-to hold her over for a grand jury. a.s.sistant State's Attorney Roy Woods laid out the events of the previous day before the coroner. Mr. Harry Kalstedt, he said, told Mrs. Annan he was through with her, but she didn't let him walk out. She grabbed up a revolver that her husband kept in the bedroom and fired at her boyfriend, hitting him in the back.

"Both went for the gun!" W. W. O'Brien called out. "Both sprang for it." He and Stewart, sitting with Beulah at the front of the room, had already established the outlines of their defense. They would present their client as a "virtuous working girl" caught up in a crazy age. They had already discovered that Harry Kalstedt had a criminal record; the dead man had spent five years in a Minnesota prison for a.s.sault before moving to Chicago to work for his brother-in-law at the laundry.

Whether Kalstedt and Beulah both sprang for the gun or not, there was no question about what had happened after Beulah fired the fatal bullet: nothing. The inquest established that almost three hours pa.s.sed from the time of the shooting until Beulah called her husband at five in the afternoon. Dr. Clifford Oliver testified that he arrived at the apartment at 6:20; he said Kalstedt had been dead only about a half hour. Woods made clear what that meant: Beulah had watched her boyfriend succ.u.mb to a slow, agonizing death and had done nothing to help him.

The inquest dragged on, and Beulah grew bored. She stared off into s.p.a.ce and occasionally turned and smiled at reporters. Finally, late in the afternoon, the jury reached a decision. They concluded that Beulah Annan was responsible for Harry Kalstedt's death, having fired the gun "by her own hand." The case would now go to the grand jury and then certainly to trial. Beulah rose, traded a few words with O'Brien, and headed toward the door with her police escort. Al, who'd sat a row behind Beulah, wringing his hands throughout the proceeding, leaped up and stepped into the aisle to intercept her.

The Daily Journal found Al's undiminished love for his wife, less than twenty-four hours after learning she'd been unfaithful, moving. The paper wrote: He pressed a $5 bill into her hand as they took her away, and those near him knew he had borrowed that from a friend who sat near him during the inquest.

"I'll see you Sunday, honey," he said as they parted. He did not know that no visitors are allowed at the jail on Sunday.

After the inquest, the police moved Beulah to the Cook County Jail, where she would share a section of the women's block with about a half-dozen inmates, including Katherine Malm, Sabella Nitti, and Belva Gaertner. ("Murderesses have such lovely names," Maurine mused.) Beulah was still wearing the clothes she had on for the coroner's jury, her "smart fawn gown," naked hose, and georgette hat. She stayed in her cell all evening, while the other inmates did their daily ch.o.r.es, ate in the dining hall, and played cards.

In the morning, Sabella clomped past the cell. She stopped at the sound of weeping. There was a lot of crying in the women's quarters of the jail, a lot of screaming and rending of hair, but this soft sob seemed to get to the Italian woman. It was so poignant. She squatted on her thick calves and squinted into the poorly lit cell. She could make out Beulah's profile. Sabella had begun to understand some words and phrases in English. The other inmates were right: The new girl was beautiful. Sabella s.h.i.+fted her weight, put a hand against the bars. "You pretty-pretty," she croaked. "You speak English. They won't kill you-why you cry?" Beulah swiveled her head slightly, but at the sight of Sabella grimacing at her, she turned away.

Sabella saw that the new girl wasn't alone in the cell. Beulah had turned back to a reporter. She was giving an interview. "Poor thing," Beulah told the reporter, as Sabella, chastened, moved away. "She's a lost soul-n.o.body cares about her."

It was easy to reach that conclusion if you read the Tribune, as Beulah did every morning. The paper had set Genevieve Forbes loose on Sabella Nitti the previous summer, with horrifically memorable results. Forbes mocked Sabella throughout her trial, denigrating her appearance, her background, and her confusion at proceedings conducted entirely in English. When the Italian immigrant was convicted, Forbes capped a frenzied week of vitriol toward her subject, writing, "Twelve jurors branded Mrs. Sabelle [sic] Nitti 'husband killer' and established a precedent for the state of Illinois at 3 o'clock yesterday afternoon by giving the death penalty to the dumb, crouching, animal-like Italian peasant, found guilty of the murder of Frank Nitti. . . . Prosecutor Smith in urging the death penalty had challenged them to forget that Sabelle Nitti was a woman. But as they filed out it was, perhaps, hard not to remember that she was a woman-a cruel, dirty, repulsive woman."

Beulah Annan would not get the same treatment, from Genevieve Forbes or anyone else. She was not repulsive, no matter what she may have done. The city's newspapers, which on principle agreed with each other as infrequently as possible, were unanimous in declaring Beulah "the prettiest girl" ever on Murderess' Row. Reporters, watching as Sabella peered into Beulah's cell, even conscripted the condemned woman into helping make the case. The American, in a page-one headline sweeping across the width of the paper, declared: MRS. NITTI CONSOLES BEULAH.

"LADY SLAYER" TOLD NOT TO WORRY FOR "BEAUTY WILL WIN"

8.

Her Mind Works Vagrantly Beulah had caught up on her reading by the time she spoke with reporters again.

"Twenty-three, not twenty-nine," she scolded a Daily Journal scribe on Sat.u.r.day afternoon. "Oh, don't accuse me of such a thing. Murder is bad enough." She repeated the correction of her age to every reporter she saw.

Her years on earth established, Beulah got down to even more pressing business. Now that she had met with her lawyers, key elements of her story changed. Harry Kalstedt wasn't walking out on her anymore. And the gun wasn't kept in the bureau drawer, no matter what Al said. Harry was, however, still angry with her for calling him a jailbird. "Harry said, 'You won't call me a name like that,' and he started toward the bedroom," she told a group of reporters gathered at her cell. "There was only one thing he could have been going for. The gun was there-in plain sight. It had been kept under the pillow, where it was always kept, but the pillow was turned back and it showed. I ran, and as he reached out to pick the gun up off the bed, I reached around him and grabbed it. Then I shot. They say I shot him in the back, but it must have been sort of under the arm."

Like Sabella before her, Belva Gaertner lingered outside Beulah's cell. The "divorcee of page one notoriety" was drawn to the commotion, the herd of reporters, not to any weeping. It had been just three weeks since Belva hit the city's front pages, and her trial was still a couple of weeks off, but she was suddenly old news and knew it. She had introduced herself to Beulah before the hacks arrived. She suggested they have a picture taken together, but Beulah put her off. The newcomer said she was too distraught. Beulah had read every article she could find about Belva and believed she had learned from the older woman's mistakes and successes with the press. She now sat before reporters, hunched forward, long arms wrapped around herself. Somebody, maybe Belva, brought her a plate of food, but she waved it away. "No, no, no. It would choke me." The thought of what she'd done to her husband made her want to die, she said. It "must have been a blow for him to discover what had been going on behind his back." Her eyes filled with tears. She said she felt very ashamed: "My husband says he'll see me through. I wouldn't blame him if he didn't."

Reporters pressed Beulah about her relations.h.i.+p with Harry Kalstedt and why she had stepped out on her husband. She listened to the questions while staring at her hands and sighing. She struggled to answer them, trying to remember her lawyers' instructions.

"I suppose it is true that a man may drift into any woman's life at some time and overpower one with his personality," she said. "Before you know it, without any intention to misstep, you find yourself completely engulfed. That was the way it was with Harry." She said she'd hoped that somehow her illicit romance would "turn out like in the story books. But I guess it never does."

Al wasn't sure what role he was supposed to be playing in his wife's storybook. He had refused to talk to reporters at the inquest on Friday-"just shook his head sadly to all questions," Maurine wrote. But while Beulah held court in her cell, Sonia Lee, one of the American's sob sisters, tracked Al down at the garage on Baltimore Avenue where he worked as a mechanic. Lee had decided that this loyal husband deserved as much attention as his wayward wife.

Al was still wary of reporters, but when asked direct questions by a well-dressed young woman gazing intently into his face, he could only do the polite thing and answer. "I can't believe it, I can't," he said. "When I met her, it was in Louisville. She was all that I thought a woman could be. Shortly after she came to Chicago. I followed two weeks later. Then we were married. I gave her every cent I made and she worked too. Our income was sufficient to provide a very comfortable home, and I believe she made the best of our union until this"-he clenched the wrench that he held in his hand-"until he came along."

Next up was Al's boss, R. M. Love. Albert Annan, the man told Lee, was quiet and decent. He worked hard and never complained: "He puts in overtime and Sundays and never offers a murmur. Just for her." The garage manager, his answers obviously guided and shaped by the reporter, said that "Annan rushed up to me at about 4:30 Thursday afternoon. 'My wife just phoned me and said she shot a man!' he gasped. 'My G.o.d, she must not-I'll take the blame!' That's the kind of four-square man that he is. Every boy here in the garage is willing to give his last cent to help him out."

Beulah noticed the saint treatment the American and other papers gave Al, and it bothered her. She couldn't help feeling this whole thing was his fault. A part of her believed Al had made her cheat. He never wanted to take her out dancing or on romantic walks. He never wanted to take her anywhere. He just slumped in his chair in the evening, whimpering about how hard he worked. Beulah had felt this disaster coming on for months and months. She could flip back through her diary, if she'd had it with her, and see the proof. It had started more than six months back, right after she met Harry. She'd written it all down in looping cursive, day after day: Sun. Oct. 7: Daddy and I had an argument. He told me to go to h.e.l.l and I went out-didn't come home.

Mon. Oct. 8: Al called me at the office. Said we would be friends until next Sat. I got "stewed" before coming home.

Daddy. It wasn't a reference to her husband. Al was never Daddy. Harry was Daddy. Was he ever! Al, maybe, could be Mommy. She sometimes felt he was as weak as a woman. What would he say if he knew how Harry had made her feel, if she'd spelled it out for him, what they did right there in their apartment, on their bed, for months?

Beulah could come up with a long list of reasons to think poorly of her husband. Two years ago, she and Al had taken a trip to Michigan, and a burglar had come right into their room and grabbed the watch and chain she'd given him for Christmas. He also took her engagement ring and a pretty cameo ring with diamonds set at the top and bottom. Al did nothing. Just slept. The burglar snuck off into the night without a worry in the world. Yeah, Al bought a gun after that and kept it in the bedroom, but Beulah didn't believe he could use it, even to protect her. She was the one who used it.

A day after Sonia Lee had camped out at the garage to get her exclusive with Al, Beulah strayed from her rote story. She explained to the Journal that her infidelity was, in a way, for her husband's sake. "I didn't want to hurt Albert," she said. "He works often until 8 or 9 o'clock at night, when it is too late for us to go out anywhere, because he always had to go to work early in the morning." She "never led a gay life," she said, insistent on dispelling that notion, but she had to go out sometimes, for her own sanity. So when Harry Kalstedt came along, she took advantage of his kindness and interest. She should have known nothing good could have come of it. Sitting in her cell, she added, "When my present husband and I were not altogether happy, I said little, and I thought I loved Harry and could keep things going smoothly. That's largely the trouble that brings most of the women in here. They fall in love with the wrong man."

The wrong man. Beulah had thought it many times as Harry dozed beside her late in the afternoon, after work or on her day off. She'd get out of bed, go over to the window without getting dressed, and look for Al coming down the sidewalk-hoping to see him, longing to hear his footsteps on the stairs, with Harry there in the bed. She wanted everything to be revealed; she wanted to force Harry to declare himself for her. It was terrible not knowing how he felt about her. It was like physical torture-the skin breaking and peeling away, the blood just about to bubble to the surface. It was more awful still to be unable to tell anyone how she felt. To not even be able to tell Harry that she loved him, she truly loved him.

Before Harry Kalstedt, it had always been the other way around. Boys loved her; she didn't love them. They stared at her, followed her, told stupid jokes to make her laugh. Perry Stephens was one of those boys. They grew up together in the fields of rural Kentucky, outside Owensboro. He wasn't afraid to talk to Beulah, like so many of the boys were. She liked it when he walked alongside her after school, chatting and trying to impress her. She and Perry were just teenagers when they slipped over the border into Indiana and got married. Perry had a good job as an apprentice Linotype operator at the Owensboro Inquirer, and he wors.h.i.+pped her, so why not? On her marriage certificate, dated February 11, 1915, she listed her age as nineteen. A year and a half later, she gave birth to a boy. They named the baby after the father.

The joy of new parenthood didn't last long. The baby seemed to ratchet up Beulah's need for attention, and whenever she could, she went out without her son or husband. She dived into an affair, possibly more than one. It didn't take Perry long to figure out what was going on. Beulah kept his last letter to her. "You have never showed that you are capable of resisting temptation," he wrote. He told Beulah she should leave Owensboro, for the sake of their son. "There will always be temptations. . . . I love you. We would have been very happy. I don't think you would make a good mother."

Beulah thought about that letter now, all these years later. With tears rolling down her cheeks, she insisted that at heart she was a decent person and a good wife. She should have stayed in the home, she told Ione Quinby, who sat with Beulah in her cell. "If I hadn't been working, I'd never have met Harry. We were trying, I mean my husband Albert and I, to get ahead. We paid $75 a month rent on our apartment and $75 a month on our furniture. We planned to get a car. Albert makes only $65 a week and we needed money. I love to cook and keep house and go marketing . . ." She stopped and suddenly looked at her questioner in desperation. "Oh, why did I ever take that job? They lie when they say I tried to kiss Harry after . . . after . . . I didn't. All I did was wash his face."

Quinby found Beulah's demeanor odd. The woman was dreamy and scattered, laughing one moment and then bursting into tears. "She does not seem to completely realize what she has done. Her mind works vagrantly," the Post reporter observed. Quinby had waited an hour with other reporters that morning while Beulah talked with W. W. O'Brien, who Quinby quipped was "doing his best to engender a touch of cheer" in his client. She knew the lawyer was drilling into Beulah the story she was supposed to give to the press.

Trying to get back on track after her interview with the Post, Beulah focused on a key theme with the next reporter. "Well, thinking it all over, I think I would rather have been shot myself," she told the Daily News. "Of course, it all happened so quickly I didn't have time to think then. Harry had been drinking before he came to the flat, bringing the wine, and he was in a bad temper. I didn't say anything to him to start a quarrel. He got angry and sprang for the bed. There was a revolver under the pillow. I got it first. If he'd got it he'd have shot me. But I'm sorry now; I think I'd rather it had been me that was killed."

To another reporter she said she was ending things with Harry, and that had provoked the fight. "I am just a fool," she said. "I'd been married to Albert four years. I haven't any excuse except that Harry came into the Tennant laundry, where I worked as a bookkeeper, and I fell in love with him. I met him last October. He seemed fairly to wors.h.i.+p me. Then I found out he had served a term in the penitentiary and all my dreams were broken. He knew I was through and that I had found out he wasn't worth the cost. I was ashamed of the way I had fooled myself. He knew I was going to quit him and words led to words. We both ran to the bedroom, where a revolver was kept. I got there first."

"I had never shot a gun but once, on New Year's," she told still another reporter. "Every day I'd pick it up so carefully. I was afraid of it. I don't know how I happened to hit him. I don't know." Apropos of nothing, she sobbed: "It's Spring today!"

W. W. O'Brien showed up in the city's newsrooms shortly before deadline on Sat.u.r.day, repeating over and over that Beulah would be pleading self-defense and that Harry Kalstedt had spent five years in prison for a.s.saulting a woman. It wasn't necessary. Beulah may not have always stuck with the rehea.r.s.ed story, but she'd proven to be a sympathetic interviewee nonetheless. The shame showed on her: It lit her up, coloring her cheeks a deep, invigorating pink, flus.h.i.+ng away her guilt. Of course, it could simply have been her flame-colored hair. Redheads held a special place in the typical American male's fantasies. "Will Her Red Head Vamp the Jury?" the Daily News wondered. To the eyes of many reporters, her gorgeous locks painted everything about and around her a rosy hue.

"Forty hours of questioning and cogitation has burned the red-hot coals of remorse and repentance into the soul of Beulah May Annan, red-haired beauty who shot and killed Harry Kolstedt [sic], 'the man whose love was wrecking her life,' " the Evening Post blared on its front page. It continued: Behind the bars of the county jail, her eyes ringed with deep purple shadows, her hands clasping and unlocking, Mrs. Annan today turned her face to the once whitewashed ceiling and prayed.

Then: "I'd rather be in Harry's place," she said. "Rather be dead."

Hearst's American went further still. It made an epic tragedy of the killing-not the tragedy that had befallen Harry Kalstedt and his family, but that of Beulah and her husband. The American's editors knew what made compelling drama for their working-cla.s.s readers. This sordid killing was part of a heartrending modern love story. "Beautiful Beulah," lured into the world of jazz and liquor, had broken her marriage vows, like so many young married women forced by financial necessity to work outside the home. But she was repentant, and she and her husband's love was battered but not broken. "Stunned-almost to the point of desperation-Albert Annan has experienced the shattering of his finest ideal, the pretty girl from the Blue Gra.s.s country that he took for his bride four years ago," the American wrote. That ideal was now gone, but still Al clung "tenaciously to a certain faith and belief in the vision of the woman whom he had once thought above all others to be deserving of his confidence."

Beulah remained a fallen woman in the American's pages, but now she was a fallen woman who could be saved. "A noose around that white neck with Venus lines-that was the shadow on the white cell wall," the paper wrote. Such a threat would cure any woman of immoral living-and for a woman as beautiful as Beulah, it seemed to be working after just one night behind bars. "It was morning when the numbness became p.r.i.c.kly pain in her fingers. And Beulah Annan, the fifteenth woman held in the jail for killing, slowly began to realize that the mad swirl had brought more than dust in her eyes." Already she had forsworn alcohol and the jazz lifestyle, the American insisted.

Maurine Watkins, for her part, was having none of it. She had figured out Beulah Annan right away. Alone among the city's papers, her inquest story didn't include any of Beulah's excuses, sobbing regret, or meandering explanations of self-defense. Alone among the reporters, she wrote that Beulah calmly "played with a piece of paper and softly whistled through it" during d.a.m.ning testimony before the coroner's jury. "She played again with the paper as the state's attorney read her confession of intimacy with Kolstedt [sic] on three occasions and laughed lightly as the lawyers quarreled over the questioning." Maurine also fit in Al's embittered tirade at the police station Thursday night-"Simply a meal ticket!"-which the other reporters, all male, kept out of print.

The Tribune's editors might have expected that Maurine's refusal to embrace Beulah's proffered story line would hurt their sales, especially with Hearst's newspapers pus.h.i.+ng the love-triangle melodrama so aggressively. But from the very first day, the Beulah Annan story was so huge it didn't matter. It was bigger than Kitty Malm and Sabella Nitti combined. It was bigger than Belva Gaertner. It was bigger than any of the gangster shootings that usually dominated page one. With Beulah's dewy, snapped-open eyes staring out from the front page, newspapers sold out from newsstands across the city on Friday and again on Sat.u.r.day. Men "gazed at photographs of her lovely, wistful face" and reached down into their pockets for coins. Newsboys came back to the loading bays for extra bundles over and over.

Beulah didn't seem to notice Maurine's cynicism. She was too busy reveling in the clamoring attention. It came in wave upon wave. She needed to do nothing but get out of her bunk in the morning and invite the reporters and photographers into her cell. That first day behind bars she received a beautiful red rose from an anonymous admirer. The next day, somebody sent her "a juicy steak, French fried potatoes and cuc.u.mber salad." Letters began to show up at the jail, dozens of them, from men around the country proclaiming their love for her. The story had gone out on the wires and appeared in newspapers everywhere. Belva Gaertner's trial was scheduled for April 21, just two weeks away, but Thomas Nash, her lead attorney, recognized that the public fascination and sympathy they'd counted on had swung over to the new girl. Nash pushed the trial date back.

Beulah didn't worry about provoking any jealousy on the cellblock. She believed she deserved the attention. Hopped up on the press's and the public's unwavering interest, Beulah, on her third day in jail, posed with dramatic flair for a news photographer. She clutched the cell's bars with her little fists, her head tilted back as if awaiting a kiss, wide-open eyes gazing rhapsodically toward the heavens. She'd seen a cinema actress pose like that once.

9.