The Girls Of Murder City Part 5

Jail School The Evening Post announced that April 21, the day after Easter, was "ladies day" in the Criminal Courts Building. The reason: Beulah Annan, Belva Gaertner, and Sabella Nitti were making an appearance before Judge William Lindsay.

The courts building, two blocks north of the Chicago River, wasn't anything special. It sulked at the corner of Dearborn and Austin like an emptied fireplug, square and uninspired, with the exception of an understated arched entrance at street level. But the three women didn't get to come through that lovely entrance like everyone else; they walked across the "bridge of sighs"-an enclosed span facetiously named after the ca.n.a.l crossing in Venice that Byron made famous in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. This bridge connected the courthouse to the jail behind it, allowing for the safe, stress-free transport of prisoners to court. Judge Lindsay's courtroom was usually spa.r.s.ely populated with defendants' family members, but this Monday morning found it packed with reporters and other observers, filling up the benches and spilling out into the marble-floored hall. There hadn't been this kind of crowd since Kitty Malm's trial in February.

Surrounded by deputies, Beulah and Belva swept into the courtroom like exiled royals being returned to power. They knew what to expect. They'd read every line of copy about themselves and seemed to have internalized the coverage. The real reality-the hard jail beds, the daily ch.o.r.es, the skittering vermin, the threat of execution-had been replaced by the newspapers' reality: the romance of their struggle. They now believed, like the newspapers, in innocent womanhood. They believed that modern life degraded values and that bootlegging was evil.

Beulah, as expected, received the most attention. The reporters still wanted to know about "Hula Lou." Had she really danced with her dead lover to her favorite song, holding his heavy, cold head in her hands? The question was insulting, stupid, inevitable. She did love "Hula Lou," though. The song got in your bones and stayed there. You couldn't help but smile and move to it. The Broadway star Mae West had been hired to pose for the song's cover in 1923, and for good reason. West's signature dance was the s.h.i.+mmy, which she'd picked up during her time in Chicago before the war. She'd discovered the clubs in the black neighborhoods of the South Side, just a few blocks from where Beulah and Al now lived. West had never seen anyone move like those black couples moved. "They got up from the tables, got out to the dance floor, and stood in one spot with hardly any movement of the feet, just shook their shoulders, torsos, b.r.e.a.s.t.s and pelvises," she said after witnessing the dance for the first time and falling in love with its "naked, aching, sensual agony." Was it the s.h.i.+mmy that Beulah Annan had danced over the dying body of her boyfriend eighteen days before? She wasn't saying.

Beulah, Belva, and Sabella, who'd trailed behind, sat on benches and wooden chairs in the courtroom, looking around for recognizable faces, reporters' faces. Spectators stood in cl.u.s.ters near them and at the back of the room, hoping to get a good look at Beulah's pleasing ankles when she stepped up in front of the judge. The scene was something new and strange. Mae West wasn't a Broadway star anymore. She'd been relegated to a minor-league vaudeville circuit after a string of rapid-fire setbacks and right now was in Texas, appearing fourth on the bill, one slot below "Marcel and his Trained Seal." Beulah Annan, a complete unknown just three weeks ago, an a.s.sistant bookkeeper at a laundry, was a bigger star. Love and understanding shone down on her. "I think in most cases where a man is shot by a woman, he has it coming to him," one fan told a reporter. Many like-minded men were in the courtroom supporting the beautiful young woman whose lover had it coming. No one seemed to blame Beulah for her predicament. "A woman has to be pretty bad to be as bad as the best men," a cafe owner said. Maurine Watkins, witnessing this response to Beulah, decided that, for women, Chicago was "the ideal locale for getting away with murder." She would floridly reference Beulah's looks over and over in her articles as a snide dig at the limitations of the male mind and predominant mores.

As the three women waited, a dour family, the Montanas, stepped before the judge. Five people-three generations of the family-stood accused of killing a policeman during a liquor raid on their home. Normally, a cop killing was page-one news, but the reporters paid little attention to the clan. Photographers surrounded Beulah, Belva, and Sabella and asked them to pose together. They were directed to sit behind a long wooden table, next to each other but fanned out just so-Belva, then Beulah, and finally Sabella.

The women had come prepared. Belva wore a black Easter bonnet with blue chinstrap ribbons streaming down her back, a blue suit, and a summer fur around her neck. A small smile wormed across her lips as the camera caught her. Beulah, in the center, was as composed as President Coolidge, the famously stoic "Silent Cal" who'd replaced the late Warren Harding last fall. She wore a more modern hat than Belva, which certainly pleased her (though she didn't let her pleasure show). She was decked out in a fawn-colored suit and, like Belva, had a light fur lying over her shoulder like a napping pet, its snout nuzzling happily in her collar. While Belva and Beulah attempted to strike dignified poses-the poses of proper women rudely detained against their will-Sabella, the third wheel, beamed like a child. She couldn't help herself. It was a good day. She wasn't going to be hanged today. A week after standing before the state Supreme Court, she was now seeking bail.

Men and women had stared as Sabella Nitti entered the courtroom right behind Belva and Beulah. There was no way to know if it was in admiration of the company she was keeping or in disgust that a convicted murderess might soon be set free. Belva and Beulah were in court to ask that their cases be held on call. Their respective lawyers had other cases to complete. But Sabella had already had her day in court. Chicagoans, fed a diet of news stories over the past nine months that characterized Sabella as "dirty," "repulsive," and "animal-like," found themselves conflicted about the Italian woman's fate. Sabella had never received the kind of coverage her two companions enjoyed. Even when indicating their likely guilt, reporters lauded Beulah and Belva for their beauty and bearing, attributes that opened the door to the possibility of innocence. Not so Sabella. No reporter ever entertained the thought that she might be innocent. After a four-day trial in the summer of 1923, she was convicted by a jury of twelve respectable men and sentenced to die.

Yet "ladies day" at the court belonged to Sabella Nitti anyway. "Beulah has been told she's beautiful. Belva knows she's stylish," pointed out the Tribune. "Sabelle is neither-and she's happy."7 It was so unlikely, and yet it was true. Sabella Nitti walked into the courthouse with her two more glamorous cellmates, and she felt as if she were walking on clouds. Her joy expressed itself in her dress as well as her att.i.tude. During her trial, she went to court in the rags she'd been wearing when arrested, the makes.h.i.+ft clothing of a poor farm woman. She looked worn, old, pathetic. Today, following Belva and Beulah, Sabella stepped before Judge Lindsay in a tailored black dress, her hair professionally curled, and with a small gray hat fixed to the top of her head. The transformation was amazing-and completely unexpected. It may have saved her life.

The person most responsible for Sabella Nitti's makeover was a twenty-three-year-old attorney who had recently set up her own practice because no law firm would hire her. Nine months before Sabella made her bravura Easter Monday court appearance, Helen Cirese had walked into the women's section of the Cook County Jail for the first time to meet her new client. The steel door closed behind her, and the wheel handle turned and then caught with an echoing thuck. She stared, mesmerized, at the two rows of cramped, ill-lit cells, one on each side of her, and at the cracked cement floor that rolled into a s.h.i.+mmering nothingness. Before "stylish" Belva Gaertner, before "beautiful" Beulah Annan, Cirese made an impression on the reporters who trawled the downtown jail for news. Tall and slender, she wore a white blouse under a long, thin vest that was pinned to her hips by a belt. A large feathered cloche sat low against her brow, giving her face a childlike cast. She was a dear sight standing there, nervous, holding her bag in front of her. Her photo appeared in the Tribune the next day, and she cut it out and saved it.

It was late summer of 1923, and Cirese had every reason to believe that powerful men were arrayed against her. She and five other young Italian lawyers had just taken on Sabella Nitti's appeal, pro bono. The state's attorney and the police were determined to make sure the new defense team failed. It embarra.s.sed them that some 90 percent of the women ever tried for murder in the jurisdiction had walked free. And none-until Sabella-had ever been sentenced to death. Chicago's police chief declared that when women "kill wantonly, no effort should be spared in the interest of justice."

The lawyers who'd volunteered for Sabella's case had decided that Cirese, the lone woman among them, would be the best emissary to the scared, bereft inmate, who spoke barely any English. Sabella, who was somewhere in her forties, had been convicted of helping Peter Crudelle, a farmhand and possibly her lover at the time, murder her husband. In early July of 1922, Sabella had reported Frank Nitti missing to the police in Stickney, a town on the edge of Cook County. The next day, when the police told her they could not find her husband, "she wept and pulled her hair and scratched her face." The father of children ranging in age from three to twenty-five never returned to his little farm. In March 1923, Sabella married Crudelle, but they would not live happily together for long. Two months after the marriage, police found a badly decomposed body in a sewer catch basin and identified it as Frank Nitti. Sabella and her fifteen-year-old son, Charlie, were brought in for questioning. After a long inquisition, Charlie told police that Crudelle had murdered his father on Sabella's orders and that he and Crudelle had disposed of the body. Sabella, not understanding what her son was saying in English, said that whatever Charlie told them was true. On May 25, 1923, the state indicted Sabella Nitti, Peter Crudelle, and Charlie Nitti for murder. Sabella and Peter Crudelle were convicted. (After Charlie testified, charges against him were dropped.) Sabella didn't comprehend the verdict when it was read. The next day, when an interpreter informed her that she had been condemned to hang, she cried out in terror and fainted.

Then a strange thing happened. People throughout the country became interested in Sabella. The Los Angeles Times put her on the front page: For the first time in the history of Illinois, a woman has been given the death penalty for murder. More than thirty women have been tried for slaying their husbands or lovers and some have been convicted-three rare cases in which the defendants were unattractive and one a negress.8 In every case where the murderess was young and pretty, she was acquitted. The death penalty in Illinois is carried out by hanging.

For months Sabella had been reviled in Chicago as a dirty, vicious killer. Now, almost overnight, the death sentence had made her a national cause celebre. Those in favor of the sentence argued it was past time for Illinois to treat its women criminals in the same manner as its men, and who better than this grotesque foreigner to be the first to swing? New York, they pointed out, had executed a woman more than twenty years before, in 1899. But humanitarians used the sentence as a rallying cry. The wife of one of the jurors soon announced she would "go home to mother" if the Italian woman was hanged. Religious leaders made impa.s.sioned pleas for mercy. After weeks of being ignored by her fellow inmates, Sabella suddenly was "a woman of importance in the jail," wrote Genevieve Forbes. "All those others who were waiting trial for robbery with a gun, for accessory to burglary and other more or less pallid charges, became, almost unconsciously, willing handmaidens ministering to this nationally famous woman."

Sabella didn't realize any of this. Twice she tried to commit suicide, first by choking herself, and then, when that failed, by ramming her head repeatedly into a cell wall, leaving spatters of blood on the wall and red rivers coursing down her face.

For days after the verdict, Sabella sobbed and moaned and tore at her hair, until finally she managed to calm herself and come to terms with her terrible fate. "Me choke," she told anyone who'd listen, a doleful look on her face. With her limited English she got it just right. Hanging made it past the "cruel and unusual punishment" restriction in the Const.i.tution in part because the neck was supposed to be broken by the body's drop from the trapdoor. As often as not, though, the noose didn't catch just right, and instead the condemned prisoner choked to death-a ghastly, protracted, dry-drowning spectacle. "This takes from eight to fourteen minutes," pointed out Daily News reporter Ben Hecht, who'd witnessed a fair number of hangings in Chicago.

While he hangs choking, the white-covered body begins to spin slowly. The white-hooded head tilts to one side and a stretch of purpled neck becomes visible. Then the rope begins to vibrate and hum like a hive of bees. After this the white robe begins to expand and deflate as if it were being blown up by a leaky bicycle pump. Following the turning, spinning, humming, and pumping up of the white robe comes the climax of the hanging. This is the throat of the hanging man letting out a last strangled cry or moan of life.

Hecht referred to the hanging man not simply out of linguistic convention; he did so because when he wrote the pa.s.sage, it was almost inconceivable that a responsible prosecutor would seek the ultimate penalty for a woman or that a civilized jury would impose it. There had been more than a hundred executions in Cook County since 1840, when records began being kept. Leaders in the Italian community did not think it a coincidence that the first woman so condemned would be a poor, unattractive, non-English-speaking Italian immigrant. Faced with one of their own being put to death, Cirese and the other five lawyers (an attorney named Rocco de Stefano would serve as lead counsel) stepped forward.

The court agreed to hear a motion to set aside the verdict. Judge Joseph B. David postponed the execution, which had been scheduled for October 12, 1923-Columbus Day. But Judge David didn't put much stock in Sabella's chances. "This is a grave matter," he said. "I will consent to hear you, but there is not one chance in one hundred that the sentence will be vacated and a new trial granted."

The defense team's argument before the state Supreme Court wasn't going to be original. The lawyers planned to prove that Sabella's trial attorney, Eugene Moran, had been incompetent. They insisted that Sabella, whose court request for new counsel was signed with an X, "could not understand Mr. Moran, he could not understand her, and they had great difficulty in making themselves understood even through interpreters." They also planned to show that the evidence the prosecution used to convict was suspect. The lawyers believed the identification of the body had been a sham-there was good reason to doubt that the corpse found in the catch basin was Frank Nitti. They planned to argue that the testimony of Charlie Nitti, Sabella's son, had been coerced, and that the motive put forward by the prosecution, namely the subsequent marriage of Sabella and Peter Crudelle, hardly const.i.tuted proof of anything.

Sabella's conviction, her defense team believed, had been a.s.sured by the ethnic and cla.s.s biases commonplace in the country. Much of the reporting on the case, especially Forbes's coverage in the Tribune, had been offensive, showing the kind of vicious stereotyping that had led to U.S. immigration laws being changed to limit the numbers of southern Europeans coming into the country. Sabella's poverty, illiteracy, and inability to speak English had fatally wounded her case. Who she was, in the eyes of your typical Cook County juror, showed in her face and dress and posture. Sabella herself understood this, having watched two pretty blonde sisters-Mrs. Anna McGinnis and Mrs. Myna Pioch-walk out the jail door a month before she was convicted. "Nice face-swell clothes-shoot man-go home," she said in despair to her fellow inmates. "Me do nothing-me choke."

The fact of one's gender was a valuable piece of "evidence" for any woman charged with a violent crime in Illinois. But Sabella Nitti, derided by Forbes as a "repulsive animal," was barely granted even that qualification. Sabella had sat in court during her trial, quietly moaning, utterly uncomprehending. In the eyes of decent society in general and of Forbes in particular, she was like a demon in physical form: different, alien, dangerous. "Her cheap, faded blouse hikes up from her sagging black skirt, in spite of the st.u.r.dy safety pin," Forbes wrote during the trial. "Her hair, lots of it, is matted into a festoon of snails, hairpins and side combs."

Forbes's coverage of the trial shocked Cirese, who read the Tribune every day. Even Sabella's fellow prisoners were outraged. A group of them wrote a letter to the Tribune in defense of Sabella, signing it "Comrades of Mrs. Nitti." They took exception to descriptions of Sabella as a "dirty, disheveled woman," insisting that she was in fact "one of the cleanest women in the department, in her cell and her personal appearance. Therefore, Mrs. Nitti cannot be cla.s.sed as a 'dirty, repulsive woman.' She is the mother of two small girls and has shown her motherly spirit here with the girls always."

A motherly spirit, of course, mattered not a whit if you were viewed as little better than an animal. Helen Cirese knew what she had to do. She knew what meant the most to Illinois' all-male juries-everyone did. "A jury isn't blind, and a pretty woman's never been convicted in Cook County," one of the women inmates told Maurine Watkins at the jail. ("Gallant old Cook County!" Maurine responded in print.) It was easy to mock the typical jury's predilection for pretty women, but it would be unwise-and poor lawyering-to ignore it. Cirese's most important job on Sabella's case would have nothing to do with writing briefs or making courtroom arguments. It was to make sure Sabella Nitti was as pretty and demure as she could be.

Cirese came to the jail every week, sat with Sabella, gained her trust, and slowly began to turn her into a new person. By March 1924, Ione Quinby noticed the transformation under way. "If Mrs. Sabella Nitti-Crudelle ever gets out of prison, she will go forth a wonderfully improved woman," the Post reporter wrote. "Hers is probably one of the few cases on record where it has been established beyond all doubt that long confinement behind bars did the prisoner any good." Sabella had never had store-bought shoes before going to jail. She'd never had a mirror or a pillow. If she could have her two youngest children with her, Sabella told Quinby in halting English, she'd never want to leave.

"We simply reconditioned her," Cirese later said. "I got a hairdresser to fix her up every day. We bought her a blue suit and a flesh colored silk blouse. We taught her to speak English, and when she walked into that courtroom she was beautiful-beautiful and innocent. I'll never forget how she looked. You wouldn't have known her."

After a year behind bars, Sabella Nitti looked and felt great, better than ever in her whole life. And the one chance in a hundred came through. Early in April, six months after Sabella was supposed to have swung from the gallows, the Illinois Supreme Court reversed the trial verdict and remanded the case to the Cook County court, insisting on "a further investigation with competent counsel representing the accused. Safety and justice require that this cause be submitted to another jury." Many court observers believed this decision had more than a little to do with Sabella's new look. "When she came to the county jail, she appeared to be fully capable of murder," observed Quinby. "But she doesn't now."

With the Sabella Nitti case, Helen Cirese began building a unique law practice-a woman criminal-defense attorney, a rare enough thing, specializing in women clients. In the spring of 1924, as she waited for Sabella's retrial to be scheduled, she took up another, even more hopeless case, this one without the a.s.sistance of a team of lawyers. In December, Mrs. Lela Foster had been arrested and charged with the murder of her husband. Just before the victim died, the man told police his wife had done it. Lela, in an account that mirrored Beulah Annan's, said her husband had threatened her with a revolver and that she shot him after they struggled for possession of the gun. She said that he regularly beat her up and that she had the bruises to prove it. Still, Lela couldn't expect to get much sympathy from jurors or the newspapers. (The press almost entirely ignored the case.) This was because Lela, who was white, had married a Negro. Maybe the dead man got what he deserved, went the popular thinking, but so did she. What did she expect from marrying a "c.o.o.n"? The fear of miscegenation was so great that the state could boast of witnesses who claimed Mrs. Foster "chewed the end of lead bullets to make the wounds bigger." Up to this point, the only mention of the case in the papers was a brief item stating that it was "believed to be the first time that an alleged murderess has been represented by a woman attorney."

The prospect of women attorneys representing women murder suspects before all-male juries was almost as terrifying as interracial coupling. One Virginia newspaper, commenting on the situation in Chicago after the state Supreme Court's ruling on Sabella's case, wrote that "now that fair women attorneys, full of feminine wiles, have been added to the equation, conviction of pretty lady killers is hardly even hoped for."

That was fine with Cirese. She would take all the help she could get. She was young and unconsciously graceful, with an imperious Roman nose and preternaturally full lips. If that counted as feminine wiles, she'd happily use them to help get clients out of jail. After all, nothing had come easily in her young professional life so far, which was no reflection on her skills. Too many lawyers and judges simply didn't believe women belonged in the courtroom in any official capacity. Most female lawyers could, at best, land jobs as court stenographers. "Women make good law students. . . . They can pa.s.s the examinations, including the Bar examinations, with honors and flying colors," opined William Scott Stewart, Beulah's attorney. "But conditions are such that they do not seem to me equipped for the actual knock-down and drag-out fight required in the actual trial of lawsuits." Stewart's opinion was entirely ordinary and uncontroversial in the legal community.

Cirese, less than three years out of DePaul University's law school, was determined to prove Stewart wrong. Sabella's retrial would be soon, likely in May, before Lela Foster's trial. Of course, Sabella, in a very real way, already could be counted a success. Now that she could communicate to a fair degree with her fellow inmates, she was noticeably happier. Of the women on the cellblock, Kitty Malm was the nicest to the Italian woman; she always made an effort to get a smile out of her. One of the girls dubbed Kitty the Girl with the Big Heart. Elizabeth Unkafer, who had shot down her boyfriend in February, would also smile at Sabella, but Elizabeth would smile at the wall and her big toe. She scrubbed the jail floor day after day, her matted mop of red hair in her eyes, flabby cheeks flapping, mumbling to herself, having a conversation. Her attorneys planned to have the forty-six-year-old woman plead insanity at her trial. She had, after all, said she'd killed her beau "because it was in the Bible that I had to." Belva Gaertner, meanwhile, gave Sabella coins for making up her bed every morning and doing other ch.o.r.es for her. She seemed to genuinely like Sabella. When the good news came down about the Italian woman winning a retrial, Kitty and Belva were the first to meet her when she returned to the jail. Belva organized a celebratory party and led the festivities.

Best of all, Sabella Nitti wasn't just innocent-that was how the women of the jail interpreted the higher court decision-she was also beautiful now, or at least presentable. If it helped sway Supreme Court justices, it would surely make the difference in a new trial. After the American photographer took a "ladies day" portrait with the three women inmates, he positioned Sabella for her own picture. Her changed appearance was dramatic enough to warrant it. The inmate the American had derided as a "bent old woman, with a face like sandpaper," is sitting erect and smiling in the photograph. She looks like a respectable suburban housewife on a pleasant spring outing. In the background, in the corner of the frame, Beulah gazes blandly off into the distance.

Genevieve Forbes, for one, didn't like the precedent Sabella Nitti and Helen Cirese had established. Sabella had learned how to dress with style, how to apply makeup, how to give herself a manicure. She had also begun to learn how to speak English. This hardly should have been considered groundbreaking trial preparation, but it helped change the atmosphere at the jail. It changed the whole point of the inmates being there. Many of the women at Cook County Jail didn't really have lawyers. Judges a.s.signed private defense attorneys to cases with indigent defendants. It wasn't unusual for a lawyer, if unable to extract a fee from the defendant's relatives, to put up a token defense at best or persuade his client to plead guilty. But now the inmates in the women's quarters realized that they didn't have to just helplessly wait around for a sentence to be imposed on them. They could do something. They could learn. They could go to what Forbes derisively labeled jail school. If Sabella could do it, any of them could. "A horrible looking creature she was," Forbes wrote with her typical sensitivity, "with skin like elephant hide, nails split to the quick and the dirt ingrained deep in the cracks of her hands. Her hair was matted; her skirt sagged to a big safety pin." Then, Forbes wrote, "Sabelle went to the jail school. She learned to understand English, then to speak it, presently to write it." She learned beauty tips, the reporter went on, such as "the value of lemon juice to whiten skin."

Influenced by Sabella's success before the Supreme Court and the wave of press attention bestowed on Belva and Beulah, the other women prisoners enrolled in jail school, too. They cut each other's hair in the latest style. They discussed how to wear cosmetics. They gave themselves and each other manicures. Friends and lawyers brought in new outfits for the inmates, and the women conducted impromptu fas.h.i.+on shows on the block to choose the best clothing for their trials. "They study every effect, turn, and change," Maurine Watkins noted, "and who can say it's time wasted?" Maurine certainly didn't think it was. In court, even more than in life, clothes made the woman, especially the woman murder defendant. "Colorful clothes would mark her as a brazen hussy flaunting herself in the public eye and black would be interpreted as a hypocritical pose," Maurine later wrote. "Yes, there's need for an Emily Post on murder etiquette."

Maurine was joking-but she was also right. For just that reason, a spirit of sisterhood now prevailed among the inmates. The women, "all man-killers," wrote one New York newspaper, had become "Chicago's most picturesque group." Belva offered fas.h.i.+on tips and gave comportment lessons to girls who were about to go before judge and jury. She was "a good stage manager," Forbes wrote. "When the girl in cell No. 4 was informed that her trial would be the following Tuesday, Belva gave her some really good ideas on costuming, coiffure and general chic. It helped the girl in No. 4, and it whiled away otherwise lonely hours for Belva, with the 'clothes sense.' "

It was too good to last, of course. Three days after Sabella, Belva, and Beulah walked over to the courthouse together, the Evening Post splashed a headline in ma.s.sive 96-point type across its front page: LOVE-FOILED GIRL SEEKS MAN'S LIFE; KILLS CARETAKER BEAUTIFUL EX-DEPUTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY SLAYS AN OUTSIDER IN DEATH STALK FOR AD MAN.

All of the city's newspapers had similar front-page headlines that Thursday afternoon. Unwilling to be trumped on a guaranteed newsstand seller, the morning papers cranked out special evening bulletins about this latest "beautiful girl slayer," a young Polish lawyer named Wanda Stopa. Only an hour after the unfortunate caretaker fell, with the girl still on the loose, "bankers, professional and laboring men, and even housewives were reading descriptions of the murderess," Ione Quinby recalled. The story was an instant sensation, the excitement heightened by the fact that the drama was ongoing, with a ma.s.sive police search that "for morbid interest and mystery held the attention of the public as no other murder hunt had done in years."

The mood at the jail changed at once. The recent camaraderie in the women's quarters had surprised the guards, who were accustomed to frequent arguments and even physical fights among their charges. The atmosphere had been remarkably placid and supportive for weeks, but there was an unmistakable pecking order underpinning it, with Belva and Beulah at the top and Sabella in her own special category. Now the leading ladies suddenly felt threatened. On April 24, the newspapers only had one subject, page after page, photograph after photograph: the breathtaking love-foiled girl. The jail matrons weren't at all sure that cellblock harmony could withstand a new beautiful woman on Murderess' Row.

Part II

THE GIRLS OF MURDER CITY.

"And that hat-ah, that hat!" rhapsodized Maurine Watkins in the Chicago Tribune. Belva Gaertner, the "most stylish" of Murderess' Row, appears in court for all the world to see. (Her white-maned attorney, Thomas D. Nash, sits beside her.) CHICAGO DAILY NEWS NEGATIVES COLLECTION, DN-0077649, CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM.

10.

The Love-Foiled Girl.

Thursday, April 24, 1924.

The smoke pulsed like a bleeding sore. It oozed slowly over rooftops and dripped from trees, squeezing out the morning light and leaving only a suffocating gloom. Visitors to the city described it as "a dense atmosphere," a "sinister power." They spoke of its aggressive nature, how it swept "across and about them in gusts and swirls, now dropping and now lifting again its grimy curtain."

Chicagoans called the problem the "smoke horror." It was the result of more than fifty years of unfettered industrial development that had put mammoth factories and small manufacturing concerns on almost every block, each belching a vicious cloud of toxins into the air. Everybody complained about it. Chicago had become too cultured and prosperous, civic leaders said, for "this stew of steel and smoke" hanging over everything. Each election season, the mayor and the city council promised to act on the issue. Yet even now, the smoke did still have its purposes. For twenty-three-year-old Wanda Elaine Stopa, the sooty miasma was the perfect attendant for her return to the city. At about seven on Thursday morning, Wanda decamped from a train at the Illinois Central depot on Twelfth Street, stepping back onto Chicago soil for the first time in four months. Carrying only a shoulder bag, she materialized out of the mist and headed for the curb, looking for a taxi. She wore a blue serge suit, a light scarf, and a dark hat. Despite the smoke and her conservative dress, she failed to go completely unnoticed. This was inevitable: She was a striking girl, just an inch over five feet tall, with p.r.o.nounced Slavic cheekbones and glowing blue eyes, eyes the color of the sky, way up above the city's black shroud.

A line of cars idled at the taxi stand out front. Ignoring etiquette, Wanda bypa.s.sed the cab at the front and approached one near the back of the queue. It was an old Cadillac without license plates-a rogue cab, someone just trying to make a few extra dollars. She asked the car's driver, an older man wearing a black cap and a long black coat, if he would drive her to Palos Park. The man, Ernest Woods, said he imagined he could find the way. After some haggling, Wanda agreed to pay $4 an hour, then climbed into the back. Woods eased out of the taxi line and pulled onto Fifty-fifth Street. At Western Avenue, he turned south, and then at 111th he swung west and headed out of the city. The car picked up speed. It rumbled along on the new slab for mile after mile, the tires moaning like an old woman. From time to time, Woods would glance in the rearview mirror. His client seemed to find the drive soothing: She stared as if being pulled toward sleep, her head bobbing on a long, graceful neck, hair swinging like a curtain. She kept her eyes cast down at her knees. After nearly twenty miles, the car turned into bucolic Palos Park. The road narrowed to a single lane. Mature oaks soared into the sky, interlaced at their bases by rustic fences.

Wanda had sat in silence the entire way from the train station, the window shade fastened in the back, but she did not find the drive soothing. The last time she had been in Chicago, life was unbearable, a constant black agony. The memories swirled like ghosts. "Got up in a cold, lonely room, dressed at seven, went over to breakfast. Alone, all alone with a dreadful sinking in the center," she had written to her man. ". . . Grandest, dearest, are you coming back this week? Come if you can. Don't leave your babe too long." But it had been too long. Months had pa.s.sed with barely a word from the man Wanda Stopa loved.

With his pa.s.senger lost in thought, Woods stopped the car so he could find a telephone book and look up the address for the name she'd given him. Wanda didn't respond when the driver told her why he was stopping. Minutes later, the cab jolted down Palos Park's main street and then pulled in at the little post office. Woods got out of the car and walked over to Harriet Scoffield, who lived next to the post office. The elderly woman was raking leaves and had kneeled on the lawn to check on some flowers. Woods bent down to her. He whispered, "Do you know where the Y. Kenley Smiths live?" The woman pointed down the street and told him to go around the corner. Eighty-ninth Avenue and 123rd Street. As Woods disappeared back into the car, Scoffield climbed to her feet, dusted herself off, and ambled toward the post office. This being a small town, she had to pa.s.s along any new information. "There's company come to your house," she told Henry Manning, the Smith's live-in handyman, who happened to be at the mail slot in front of the building. Manning's eyes popped. He jerked his head around to scan the road just as the Cadillac disappeared from sight. He bolted from the post office, bounding across the neighboring lawn toward the Smith cottage.

At 8:30, the taxi approached the house, which was set far back from the street in a small alcove cut out of the surrounding woods. Wanda told the driver to stop the car near the end of the driveway. He must turn the machine around and be ready to go, she said, because she had to catch a train and time was short. She gave Woods a $10 bill and told him she'd be right back.

Wanda, pretty and demure in her blue serge suit, walked up the long, winding drive and knocked on the front door. When it opened, she asked politely for Mr. Smith. The maid said he was not at home, causing Wanda's eyes to narrow into slits. She bulled past the maid and into the house. She found Mrs. Smith-Vieva Dawley Smith, known to friends as Doodles-in bed, where she was recovering from the flu. Mrs. Smith didn't seem surprised to see Wanda.

That was when Manning arrived, panting furiously. The handyman was sixty-eight years old and unaccustomed to running. Catching his breath, he tried to position himself in the bedroom doorway, between Smith and the younger woman. He told Wanda that Mrs. Smith was ill and asked her to go into the kitchen. Wanda shook her head slowly. "Right here is good enough for me," she said. Manning continued to try to coax her out of the bedroom, but she ignored him.

"Are you going to divorce your husband so I can have him?" she screamed at Kenley Smith's wife, tears bubbling at the corners of her eyes.

"Of course not," Mrs. Smith replied.

Wanda couldn't believe what she was hearing. "How am I going to live?" she bellowed. "Who's going to take care of me?"

Doodles had never had much patience for Wanda Stopa, not nearly as much as her husband. "You're a lawyer," she snapped. "Why don't you go to work?"

Wanda was a lawyer, but that wasn't the answer she wanted to hear. She pulled out a .38 caliber revolver and aimed it at the haughty woman propped up in bed. Manning, trying to stutter out a word, backed toward Smith and stretched out his arms. He urged Wanda to calm down, but it was too late for that. Wanda believed she could thread the needle-or more likely she only saw Kenley's wife, her tormenter, even with Henry Manning standing right in front of her. Wanda pulled the trigger and the gun issued a ma.s.sive bang. Smith ducked under the sheets, an instinctive response unbecoming a woman of her intelligence, but when she heard Manning's body hit the floor, her brain kicked in. She heaved herself up, sprinted for the open window, and-with two more explosions rocking the bedroom-leaped headfirst into the yard. Rolling, she realized Wanda had missed with both shots. She got up, the broken window screen around her neck, and ran.

A moment later, Wanda appeared at the front door and charged down the path. She looked around for Smith but couldn't locate her. "I'll get you yet," she shouted, "and I'm going downtown now to get your husband."

Wanda walked down the drive, climbed into the backseat of the Cadillac, and told Woods to take her back to the train station. Woods started the car. He didn't notice anything to alarm him; the girl didn't seem nervous or agitated. He would claim later he was partially deaf and so heard no shots and suspected nothing. The car pulled out onto the road and headed back toward Chicago.

Once again, they drove in silence, but Wanda's mind roiled. She needed to calm down; she didn't want to have a seizure. Wanda had had epileptic fits ever since she was a child. She and her family kept the seizures quiet, for such attacks were widely believed to be a sign of insanity. The stress of the secret weighed on her constantly. She never told anyone, not even her closest friends. Not even Kenley. A mile or so before the station, she insisted Woods pull the cab over. Her train wasn't leaving for another hour, she told the driver. She would get out here and visit friends in the neighborhood.

"Live your own life!"

Wanda Stopa, having just marched into the room on unstable legs, barely got the words out. The party roared on.

"Are you listening?" she asked. She rose up on her toes. Wanda-her new friends called her by her "more sophisticated" middle name, Elaine-waited. The party stuttered. Dancers slowed up, expelling air. The intellectuals, huddled together on the couch, squinted over their cigarettes. Wanda leaned in, confiding now. "Tomorrow, I'm leaving here for Chicago and when I arrive I'm going to kill a woman-perhaps a man. But anyhow a woman. I'm going to kill her, do you hear?"

They heard. By now the neckers had disengaged and wiped their mouths, the girls adjusting themselves on their boyfriends' laps. Wine was quietly swallowed and gla.s.ses put down. The music from the phonograph scratched abruptly to nothing. The best party all year in Greenwich Village had taken an unexpected turn.

Wanda clenched her fists at her sides and pivoted on tiny feet. She had made the decision: She was going back to Chicago, for the first time in four months, to face him. Her white skin tingled. She had been a perfect hostess until now. After all, these were the friends who excited her, the kind of smart, challenging, free people who for most of her twenty-three years she couldn't imagine really existed. She could be her own person here, utterly removed from the suffocating expectations forced on women in Chicago's Little Poland. Wanda had been busy during her short time in New York, meeting fellow bohemians, attracting attention at every stop on her exploration of the Village, an enchanted world so much truer, better, than the "sham Bohemia" she'd left in Chicago.

Wanda was a natural in Greenwich Village. For starters, she looked exquisite in artists' rags, somehow both hungry and ripe as she scuffed down slick, dirty streets, going nowhere in particular. She luxuriated in the area's damp, nonelectrified ateliers, never bothered by old-fas.h.i.+oned plumbing or c.o.c.kroaches or the lumps of candle wax that congealed on the floor. Her only flaw-and make no mistake, it was a doozy-was her determined refusal of all s.e.xual advances. She was hung up on a man.

It didn't seem to matter that the man, Mr. Yeremya Kenley Smith of Chicago and Palos Park, Illinois, a thirty-seven-year-old advertising executive and self-described patron of the arts, didn't return her ardor. Encouraging Kenley to leave his wife, Wanda had written to him that, when he did, "Once a week I will go to your little house, put it in order, bring your laundry, which I will have sent, look over your clothes and mend as may be necessary, and replace them in their proper drawers. . . . At no time during the week except on Sat.u.r.day, when I shall change your linen and clean house for you, will I intrude on you. I promise, however, to hold myself in readiness to come to you whenever you may wish me, outside of working hours. You may have me when you want me."

That letter would have disappointed her new friends if they'd known about it. They were all "Feminists" in New York City. They believed in equality, in free love, in the destruction of all traditions. They believed that marriage was "just a sc.r.a.p of paper." Wanda had to write desperate letters to Kenley; she couldn't help it. But the groveling disappointed her, too. It was exactly how a lovesick girl from Little Poland was expected to act. So she sent her man a box of poisoned candy. He didn't eat it, though, and neither did his wife. And still she couldn't stop writing to him. "When I get you back I am never going to leave you go," she wrote. And: "Your absence is so looming and dark that it takes all my interest in other things away."

None of this-this quivering, childish dependence-made sense, not coming from Wanda. Any girl except Wanda. This was the girl that friends in Chicago called "The Light" and "The Fire," and those names weren't a joke-not to her group of admirers. Wanda Elaine Stopa was that brilliant. Boy, could she talk! About cubism and Freud and s.e.x-and the future, the beautiful future. In conversational flight, Wanda's whole body practically vibrated with excitement. Her eyes jumped, her right hand slapped the arm of the chair or the top of the table. She smiled-suddenly, brilliantly-at the apex of a peroration, her whole being blooming when she saw she'd made an impact on her audience. She'd even reach out and squeeze your knee, encouraging you, physically guiding you over to her point of view. This "pleasing little wisp of a girl" surely would have made a great lawyer, a groundbreaker for her s.e.x, if she'd stuck with it. She'd been the first "girl lawyer" ever to work for the state's attorney and the U.S. district attorney in Chicago. One of her law professors said he'd never had a student of greater promise. Her career, for a woman, was limitless.

But those were just words now. Her family regretted ever sending her to law school and out into the world. The last time Wanda was back home, on Augusta Street in Little Poland, her widowed mother noticed how pale and thin she had become, how her hand shook when she held a fork. Mrs. Stopa knew what was going on. Even on Augusta Street they had heard about narcotics. Wanda didn't deny it, didn't even want to. "Oh, mother, it's such a good feeling," she said.

Besides, dope helped her survive without Kenley; it helped her plot how to get him for her very own. She knew she wasn't supposed to care about such things, about trapping a man and tending to his every need. Wanda hated Augusta Street, the squat women in boudoir caps sitting on the stoops, trudging to market and back, always with mewling babies in their arms. The men who looked at their wives with dead stares every evening, exhausted by their lives, completely unthinking and uncommunicative. Wanda s.h.i.+vered at the thought of them. It was an instinctive hatred, a restlessness that she had no ability to control. That was why she had studied so hard-to avoid the same fate as all those girls she grew up with. That was why she went to law school, time and again the only girl in a cla.s.sroom full of boys. That was why Kenley Smith's exhortations for the unconventional life, real life, resonated. That was why she went to bed with him.

She never recovered. Their night together blasted the precepts of free love to pieces, right there. Wanda's bohemian att.i.tudes, to her own horror, had been exposed as a hoax. She had never truly felt free among the artists of Chicago's North Side, she realized. The discovery sent her into a hopeless spiral. At first Kenley responded to her constant letters seeking rea.s.surance and love. "I looked in the shop windows today for something you would like but I didn't see anything," he wrote in one missive. "One hat was possible, but how could I confirm it without the little Polish bean to check up by? Polka, I hope you have been a little easier these last few days. I pray that I may yet be the springboard from which you dive into the lake of song, laughter and happiness." But soon Kenley was backpedaling, then running for the hills. "Oh, Toots, I love you, I love you, I love you," Wanda wrote to him. "I know you dislike to have me write things on paper, but I do not seem to be able to discuss things with you any more without becoming excessively emotional. . . . I feel that my attachment for you is becoming a sort of millstone around your neck; that you never intended it to reach the hectic stage it has. But I am intensely romantic and you are Romance to me!"

Romance. Wanda actually used that word-and meant it. Even though bohemia had no room for such sentiment. Free booze and food and s.e.x were enough for this lot. She gazed at a girl in green who just moments before had been flinging herself about in a fevered dance, large metallic earrings swinging in rhythm with her body. Wanda turned and stared down a hulking young man, the same one who had climbed onto her kitchen table earlier and belted out a song. It all seemed so stupid now, these people, bohemia, art, New York City.

"I'm going to kill her, do you hear?" Wanda shouted. "Shoot her because she refused to give up the man I love." She felt herself sweating, a stinging p.r.i.c.kle along her brow and under her arms. But it felt good to say it out loud. To acknowledge that she was in love and that there was no hope.

"You talk about life, about freedom," she continued, her voice hoa.r.s.e. "You make me tired with your synthetic emotions and your words. G.o.d, you're naive! You think you're sophisticated, but you're just shallow children . . ."

Wanda stopped. She glared at these men and women she'd invited to her apartment. She wasn't getting through to them. They thought she was giving a performance; that was what you did in the Village. She looked down at herself, as if surprised by her body. She was wearing the best gown she owned, a sleek semibackless dress that teased out the delightful curves in her frame. Her bronze hair s.h.i.+mmered under the light. She had a gorgeous orange shawl wrapped around her shoulders and waist and thighs, setting her alight, a beautiful girl on a pyre. She didn't know it, but just the day before, Easter Monday, three women accused of killing their men-Belva Gaertner, Beulah Annan, and Sabella Nitti-had appeared in court together in her hometown. They'd created a bit of a happening. If Wanda had stayed in Chicago, if she'd still been working as a court stenographer for the state's attorney, she'd have witnessed the scene up close. She could have told her brothers and mother about it, enthralled them the way she used to do after spending the day at the library gathering knowledge. Instead she was in a strange city, surrounded by strangers, people whom, just an hour before, she'd been desperate to have like her. Wanda yanked a bracelet off her arm. Then another. "Here," she called out, "take these to remember me by."

Her arms were packed with bracelets, her own unique style, and she slid them off one by one and threw them at her guests. Next came her necklaces, tossed to the ceiling. They clinked on the floor, where scrabbling hands quickly scooped them up. Finally she tore off her rings and flicked them away. She stood there in the center of it all, jewel-less and barefoot amid silence. Her guests stared at her, waiting for more.

The moment was broken, inevitably, by a drunkard. The man lurched forward, wrapped Wanda in his arms. "Atta girl, that's the way to talk," he said. The two of them swooned, and everything hung there for a few seconds, right on the edge, the grinning lout and the grim-faced hostess staring at each other. Then the room burst into laughter and cheers, and the party jerked haltingly back into motion. A dancer swung past them. The drunk continued to hold Wanda. "But listen, kid," he said, leaning in close. "When you shoot, shoot straight, because dead ones don't tell tales."

Wanda filed the advice away. She stepped from him and walked out of the room. She didn't return. The party cranked up to full volume again.

Some hours later, alone at last, Wanda took stock. There were overturned chairs, empty bottles, sandwich detritus. Wine blotched the carpet. Wanda slipped her gown off her shoulders and let it drop to the floor. She used to enjoy being naked. It was a sign of her freedom, her maturity. She picked up the phone and put through a long-distance call. When her man came on the line, Wanda said, "I am coming to see you for a final show-down." He hung up on her. Wanda went into the back of the apartment. She washed, climbed into a clean skirt and blouse, added rouge to her cheeks so she wouldn't scare any children. She eased a revolver into her bag. Hefting on a coat, she headed out to buy a train ticket to Chicago.

The city was in a panic. News from Palos Park, picked up by radio stations, had spread with surprising rapidity. Reports warned that Wanda Stopa, gun in hand, "had disappeared as quickly and completely as though the earth had opened up and swallowed her." Towertown, the North Side bohemian enclave near the old water tower, flooded with policemen, both uniformed and plainclothes, all on the lookout for the woman. Police wired descriptions of Wanda and the man driving the cab to authorities across the country. The initial a.s.sumption was that the driver was Vladimir "Ted" Glaskoff, who, police had learned, was Wanda's estranged husband. Wanda had married him two years ago because he promised to take her into the heart of bohemian life, but within weeks, he had left her and skipped town. Glaskoff, who claimed to be a Russian count displaced by the Bolshevik Revolution, got married frequently; it was the easiest way to get the naive girls into bed.

"Spurned Portia Forgets Law," a Chicago American teaser announced just hours after Wanda had fled Palos Park. The banner headline across the front page read: "Girl Lawyer Shoots at Wife of 'Friend,' Kills Old Man." The paper breathlessly related that "Police squads were sent in pursuit of the Stopa girl's taxicab and a special detail was sent to guard the offices of the John H. Dunham & Co. advertising agency, room 1916, Wrigley Building, where [Y. Kenley] Smith is employed."

"What were her thoughts as she strode up the gravel path to his home?" the American wondered. "What drove her there, she, a woman with a law training, who would not be expected to take justice in her hands?"

Less than an hour after the shooting, Kenley Smith walked into the state's attorney's office in the Loop and asked for protection. He had been at a dentist's office when his wife called and warned him that Wanda Stopa was headed his way. "That woman has been after me for two years," Smith told the prosecutors. "She was disillusioned about my physical attractions. She wanted me to divorce my wife and marry her, and I refused. I was her warm friend."

Prosecutors quizzed him about the nature of their relations.h.i.+p. Smith said that he had been taken by Wanda's "amazing intelligence." He admitted to giving her money and sending her to New York City, adding that he wanted to help "get her away from the ne'er-do-well husband she had married, emotionally." A year before, Wanda had needed a place to live, and the Smiths' apartment in the city was available, so he and his wife rented it to her. The Smiths had a history of giving shelter to young artists, including Ernest Hemingway, who was a friend of Kenley's younger siblings. (Hemingway claimed that Doodles, whom he found repulsive, made s.e.xual advances toward him during his stay at the apartment in 1920.) Grudgingly, as the questions continued, Kenley Smith confessed that, even after Wanda had moved in, he would still sleep at the flat on nights when he had to stay late at the office. "But," he insisted, "it was all very platonic." The prosecutors, who knew Wanda from her days as an a.s.sistant in the office, expressed surprise, which got Smith's back up. "Now, get this straight," he huffed. "I'll draw you a diagram to show you the living room that separated my room from Miss Stopa's studio."

Smith, the papers reported that afternoon, liked to prowl the North Side's "Bohemia" and had set himself up as Wanda Stopa's "mentor." Smith understood the connotations. He continued to deny that he'd had an affair or done anything improper with the girl. "I'm not a bohemian," he said. "I'm an advertising man." Wanda was the bohemian, and she was also a "demented girl," averred Smith. Being an advertising man, he could be convincing. "Miss Stopa, we have learned," a.s.sistant State's Attorney Robert McMillan told reporters later in the day, "was a neurotic."

She was a neurotic with a gun-the best kind for the newspapers. Dozens of reporters, including Maurine Watkins, Genevieve Forbes, and Ione Quinby, fanned out to Wanda's known haunts to hunt down stories about this latest girl gunner. An Evening American reporter targeted the lawyers and clerks at the Federal Building. The hack found plenty who remembered the young woman from her days as an a.s.sistant for the district attorney. One described Wanda as a "wild little woman."

"She liked to be bohemian," the man said, "and she didn't care who knew it."

Another man added: "She often would smoke cigarettes while she was taking dictation and seemed to be proud of it."

Over in Towertown, Wanda's artist friends appeared to be impressed by their gunslinging comrade's actions. It was as if Wanda had struck a blow for them against the status quo-a blow Maurine would describe as "a moth singed in the fires of 'freedom.' " Maurine was hardly alone in her derisive tone.

The shooting gave reporters an opportunity to castigate the dilettantes of Chicago's North Side artists' community, which modeled itself on the well-known youth subculture in Greenwich Village that had grown up in opposition to the mainstream ethos. Newspaper staffs were predominantly made up of bootstrappers from working-cla.s.s families; most reporters never had the means to go to college. They viewed the responsibility-free att.i.tudes of the bohemians, often college dropouts financed by indulgent, well-to-do parents, as beneath contempt. The American, under a series of graduation photos of a sweet-looking Wanda, her blue eyes as bright as starbursts even in black-and-white newsprint, pointed out how the pictures "show the Wanda Stopa that was the sincere, ambitious girl student," before she fell into a rebellious lifestyle. The paper added: "Watch for the pictures of Wanda Stopa-the killer-after she is apprehended and see what 'dope' and 'Bohemia' have done to this frank, pretty face."

Every hack covering the story took a dig at Towertown's young layabouts. "They scoffed at convention and talked about inhibitions," Quinby said of the community. "They spoke loftily of living their own lives, and phrases of self-conscious daring tumbled from the lips of young flappers asking advice about free love and birth control." Genevieve Forbes mocked the notion that bohemians were artists, writing, "Anybody could be an artist or poet" in Towertown. "And pretty nearly anybody was." She added that bohemians "live in tiny rooms, sharing kitchens and baths with other 'artistic' tenants. n.o.body locks doors, it's so unfriendly. And trailing kimonos add to the picture."

Chicago's police and reporters would have no luck searching for Wanda Stopa among the trailing kimonos of Towertown. Despite walking away from Ernest Woods's cab before reaching the train station, she did get on a train. As Chicagoans read shocking details about the murder in special editions rushed to press, Wanda was checking into the Hotel Statler in downtown Detroit. She registered as "Mrs. Theodore Glaskow of New York."