The Girls Of Murder City Part 1

The girls of Murder City.

Fame, l.u.s.t, and the beautiful killers who inspired Chicago.

Douglas Perry.

Prologue.

Thursday, April 24, 1924.

The most beautiful women in the city were murderers.

The radio said so. The newspapers, when they arrived, would surely say worse. Beulah Annan peered through the bars of cell 657 in the women's quarters of the Cook County Jail. She liked being called beautiful for the entire city to hear. She'd greedily consumed every word said and written about her, cut out and saved the best pictures. She took pride in the coverage. But that was when she was the undisputed "prettiest murderess" in all of Cook County. Now everything had changed. She knew that today, for almost the first time since her arrest almost three weeks ago, there wouldn't be a picture of her in any of the newspapers. There was a new girl gunner on the scene, a gorgeous Polish girl named Wanda Stopa.

Depressed, Beulah chanced getting undressed. It was the middle of the day, but the stiff prison uniform made her skin itch, and the reporters weren't going to come for interviews now. They were all out chasing the new girl. Beulah sat on her bunk and listened. The cellblock was quiet, stagnant. On a normal day, the rest of the inmates would have gone to the recreation room after lunch to sing hymns. Beulah never joined them; she preferred to retreat to a solitary spot with the jail radio, which she'd claimed as her own. She listened to fox-trots. She liked to do as she pleased.

It was Belva Gaertner, "the most stylish" woman on the block, who had begun the daily hymn-singing ritual. That was back in March, the day after she staggered into jail, dead-eyed and elephant-tongued, too drunk-or so she claimed-to remember shooting her boyfriend in the head. None of the girls could fathom that stumbleb.u.m Belva now. On the b.l.o.o.d.y night of her arrival, it had taken the society divorcee only a few hours of sleep to regain her composure. The next day, she sat sidesaddle against the cell wall, one leg slung imperiously over the other, heavy-lidded eyes offering a strange, exuberant glint. Reporters crowded in on her, eager to hear what she had to say. This was the woman who, at her divorce trial four years before, had publicly admitted to using a horsewhip on her wealthy elderly husband during lovemaking. Had she hoped to make herself a widow before he could divorce her? Now you had to wonder.

"I'm feeling very well," Belva told the reporters. "Naturally I should prefer to receive you all in my own apartment; jails are such horrid places. But"-she looked around and emitted a small laugh-"one must make the best of such things."

And so one did. Belva's rehabilitation began right there, and it continued unabated to this day. Faith would see her through this ordeal, she told any reporter who pa.s.sed by her cell. This terrible, unfortunate experience made her appreciate all the more the life she once had with her wonderful ex-husband-solid, reliable William Gaertner, the millionaire scientist and businessman who had provided her with lawyers and was determined to marry her again, despite her newly proven skill with a revolver. He believed Belva had changed.

Maybe she had, but either way, she was still quite different from the other girls at the jail. She came from better stock and made sure they all knew it. Even an inmate as ferocious as Katherine Malm-the "Wolf Woman"-deferred to Belva. Cla.s.s was a powerful thing; it triggered an instinctive obeisance from women accustomed to coming through the service entrance-or, in this lot's case, through the smashed-in window. Belva, it seemed, had just the right measure of contempt in her face to cow anybody, including unrepentant murderesses. She was not beautiful like perfect, young Beulah Annan. Her face was a sad, ill-conceived thing, all the features slightly out of proper proportion. But arrogant eyes s.h.i.+ned out from it, and there was that full, pa.s.sionate mouth, a mouth that could inspire a reckless hunger in the most happily married man. She'd proved that many times over. When Belva woke from her blackout on the morning of March 12, new to the jail, still wearing her blood-spattered slip, she'd wanly asked for food. The Wolf Woman, supposedly the tough girl of the women's quarters, hurried to bring her a currant bun.

"Here, Mrs. Gaertner," she'd said with a welcoming smile, eyes crinkled in understanding, "eat this and pretend it's chicken. . . . It makes it easy to swallow." With that, Katherine Malm set the tone. By the end of the week, the other girls were vying for the privilege of making Belva's bed and was.h.i.+ng her clothes.

To her credit, Belva adapted easily to her new surroundings. The lack of privacy didn't seem to bother her. The women's section of the jail, an L-shaped nook on the fourth floor of a ma.s.sive, rotting, rat-infested facility downtown, was crowded even before her arrival, and not just because of the presence of Mrs. Anna Piculine. "Big Anna," the press said, was the largest woman ever jailed on a murder charge. She'd killed her husband when he said he'd prefer a slimmer woman. Then there was Mrs. Elizabeth Unkafer, charged with murdering her lover after her cuckolded husband collapsed in grief at learning of her infidelity. And Mary Wezenak-"Moons.h.i.+ne Mary"-the first woman to be tried in Cook County for selling poisonous whiskey. Nearly a dozen others also bunked on what was now being called "Murderess' Row," and more were sure to come. Women in the city seemed to have gone mad. They'd become dangerous, especially to their husbands and boyfriends. After the police had trundled Beulah into jail, the director of the Chicago Crime Commission felt compelled to publicly dismiss the recent rash of killings by women. The ladies of Cook County, he said, were "just bunching their hits at this time." He insisted there was nothing to worry about.

The newspapers certainly weren't worried; they celebrated the crowded conditions on Murderess' Row. Everyone in the city wanted to read about the fairest killers in the land. These women embodied the city's wild, rebellious side, a side that appeared to be on the verge of overwhelming everything else. Chicago in the spring of 1924 was something new, a city for the future. It thrived like nowhere else. Evidence of the postwar depression of 1920-21 couldn't be found anywhere. The city pulsed with industrial development. Factories operated twenty-four hours a day. Empty lots turned into whole neighborhoods almost overnight. Motor cars were so plentiful that Michigan Avenue traffic backed up daily more than half a mile to the Chicago River. And yet this exciting, prosperous city terrified many observers. Chicago took its cultural obsessions to extremes, from jazz to politics to architecture. Most of all, in the midst of Prohibition, the city reveled in its contempt for the law. The newly elected reform mayor, witnessing a mobster funeral attended by thousands of fascinated citizens, would exclaim later that year: "I am staggered by this state of affairs. Are we living by the code of the Dark Ages or is Chicago part of an American Commonwealth?"

It truly was difficult to tell. Gangsterism, celebrity, s.e.x, art, music-anything dodgy or gauche or modern boomed in the city. That included feminism. Women in Chicago experienced unmatched freedoms, not won gradually-as was the case for the suffragettes-but achieved in short order, on the sly. Respectable saloons before Prohibition didn't admit women; speakeasies welcomed them. Skirts appeared to be higher here than anywhere else. Even Oak Park high school girls brazenly petted with boys, forcing the wealthy suburb's police superintendent to threaten to arrest the parents of "baby vamps." Religious leaders-and newspapers-drew a connection between the new freedoms and the increasing numbers of inmates in Cook County Jail's women's section.

I can hear my Savior calling,

I can hear my Savior calling,

I can hear my Savior calling,

"Take thy cross and follow, follow Me."

Where He leads me, I will follow,

Where He leads me, I will follow,

Where He leads me, I will follow,

I'll go with him, with him, all the way.

Those killer women made a sweet sound. Belva, the "queen of the Loop cabarets" before Mr. Gaertner came along, knew how to carry a tune, and she gave herself the solos. And now that she had grown accustomed to "jail java" instead of gin, and the tremors had subsided, she sang with confidence. Katherine Malm was game, too, her voice soaring, dueling for the light, right up there with Big Anna's booming alto.

Not everyone, though, had the spirit of the Lord. Beulah Annan didn't see anything uplifting about being in jail. "How can they?" she'd bleated on her first day in the pen, shuddering at all those raspy voices trying to sound angelic. The hymns made her think of her childhood in rural Kentucky. She was an angel, for sure, back then, leaning her cheek against her mother's elbow during services, the prettiest little girl in town. She was an angel still, as far as her husband, Al, was concerned. All she had to do was turn those big eyes on him, her mouth puckering as she began to cry, just as she had when he came home to a dead man on the floor and learned that his wife had been running around on him. She'd done a lot of crying since that day-to no avail. Her dear Harry-the man she should have married-was still dead. Beulah could hide alone in her cell, she could squeeze her eyes shut and bury her face in her bunk in the middle of the day, but she could not get her brain to change what had happened.

The jail itself was an effective reminder. It a.s.saulted newcomers with its simple reality. The bare stone walls that rose into sticky blackness. The small, steel cells, one after another, each one interlaced with string for drying wet towels, underwear, and uniform blouses. A smell permeated the block-an inst.i.tutional smell, old and irretrievably unclean-as though vomit had perpetually just been wiped up somewhere nearby. Plus the smells and sounds of the women themselves, the sudden blasts of argument, the hawking up of phlegm, the moronic giggles and beany toots. A choir hardly made up for it all. On that first day, having exhausted herself from hours of desperate babbling to the police and the state's attorney and reporters-confessing volubly, endlessly, reenacting her crime over and over-Beulah barely moved for hours. She took no food and confessed no more, just cried alone in her cell, softly but monotonously, like a faucet that wouldn't quite turn off. At one point Sabella Nitti, an immigrant woman convicted of killing her husband with a six-pound hammer, stopped in front of the cell and stared in at the weeping young woman. There was not a great deal of sympathy in Sabella's old, worn face. "The writer who visits these prisoners week after week noticed a faint atmosphere of resentfulness when pretty Beulah Annan recently was added to the group," one reporter wrote soon after Beulah arrived on April 4. "The others thought of the effect her beauty might have on the jury which tried her."

It was a legitimate grudge. Only men made up the jury pool in Illinois, and when it came to judging women, it seemed men only truly cared about one thing: beauty. And Beulah was a vision. She knew it, too. At every opportunity she posed for the news photographers. She would rub her lips into a respectable frown, pull her shoulders in and down to highlight her fragile frame. The image proved irresistible: the thin straight nose; the high cheekbones, so high and sharp they seemed to force her eyes wide open; the gorgeous red hair that rolled off her head like a prairie fire. Once Beulah's wistful gaze began staring out at newspaper readers, fan mail arrived by the bucketful, along with flowers and even a steak dinner. Odds were, she wouldn't be convicted. The pretty ones never were-not once in Cook County's history. Maybe that was why Beulah didn't make a run for it. She'd just washed the blood off her hands and waited for the authorities to show up.

"Sorry? Who wouldn't be?" Beulah liked to say when asked how she felt about killing her boyfriend, shot squarely in the back. "But what is there to do? We can all be sorry after it's done. If only we could go back. If only we could! It's so little we get out of cheating. But the pleasure looks big, for the moment, doesn't it?"

The singing in the rec room went on without Beulah every day, but it barely got started on this Thursday afternoon before petering out. Everyone's thoughts were elsewhere. The hymns would have to wait. The inmates, instead of singing, started to debate, laying out the possible fates for beautiful Wanda Elaine Stopa, the next girl to join Murderess' Row. a.s.suming the police ever found her. The cops had no idea where she was. This morning she had shot her boyfriend, or maybe she shot his wife, and then she disappeared. The whole cellblock seemed to be leaning forward, expectant. When the evening papers arrived in a couple of hours, the inmates would find out what had happened. They'd get to see pictures of this girl the entire city was talking about.

Beulah couldn't bear it. She sat in her cell in a pique. Ever since she'd arrived, it had been all about her and Belva. They were the stars of Murderess' Row, and Beulah, the pretty one, always took pride of place. Now, suddenly, there was real compet.i.tion. "Another Chicago girl went gunning today," one newspaper blared across the front page of a special edition, which was blasting through the presses at this very moment. Outside the steel bars of the Cook County Jail, out in the free world, Wanda Stopa was on the run. Beulah wanted her to keep on running-far, far away.

Part I.

A MAD ECSTASY.

Beulah Annan, unself-conscious at the Hyde Park police station despite wearing little more than a slip, provides a killer look for the camera.

CHICAGO DAILY NEWS NEGATIVES COLLECTION, DN-0077649, CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM.

1.

A Grand Object Lesson.

Out in the hallway, young men stood in a haphazard line, trying to look eager and nonchalant at the same time. They were regulars outside the Chicago Tribune newsroom, waiting around each day, hoping a big story would break so that they might get a fill-in a.s.signment, a chance to prove themselves. They usually waited for hours and then went home disappointed. Maurine Watkins stepped past them, quiet as a breath. She kept her head down in modesty, obscuring her face in an explosion of dark locks. No one seemed to notice her. Wearing a long, loose-fitting dress, she didn't look like the fas.h.i.+on-conscious young women who typically came through the building seeking positions. She looked like a country girl. She walked into the room; the men stayed in the hall.

It was the first day of February 1924, and Maurine had come to the local room, the Tribune's main newsroom, for an appointment. Nerves played havoc with her vocal cords as she stood before the reception desk, but that was to be expected. She'd never tried for a job like this one before. Her parents, her teachers and friends back home, could hardly imagine why she would want it.

Maurine, after all, wasn't applying to be a switchboard operator, the position most frequently sought by women coming to the Tribune. The company had fifteen operators who handled some twelve thousand calls a day, a volume that took them to the edge of exhaustion every s.h.i.+ft. She also wasn't hoping to sell want ads. This was another job considered suited to women, because the ad taker, like the switchboard operator, had to be helpful and considerate. The Tribune received hundreds of want-ad orders each day, continuous evidence of the paper's absolute dominance in the Middle West's largest advertising market. Ads could be placed not just at the Tribune's two downtown buildings but also in many groceries and drugstores in the city. And anyone in the metropolitan area with telephone access could reach the paper's cla.s.sified desk by calling Central 100. Keeping track of all of this advertising activity was a mammoth undertaking. Each want-ad order, before being filled, had to be checked against the advertiser files in the Auditing Division to make sure the customer had no outstanding payments, another task handled by women. They spent all day, every day, flipping through huge audit books, which were anch.o.r.ed to the tops of desks by steel poles, allowing the pages to revolve for easy searching.

These were all good jobs for a respectable young single woman, jobs important to the welfare of one of the preeminent companies in a city that boasted of dozens of nationally important enterprises. But Maurine, at twenty-seven years of age, was here for something different. She wanted to be a reporter. A police reporter, no less, something only one woman at the paper-the formidable Miss Genevieve Forbes-could claim as part of her beat. Maurine didn't know how difficult it was to achieve what she wanted-the men out in the hall would have done anything just for an editorial-a.s.sistant position-but now, standing inside the doorway, she shrank at the sight of the reporters' den laid out in front of her. This was hardly like the newspaper they had back in Crawfordsville, the small town in west-central Indiana where she grew up. The Tribune claimed to be the World's Greatest Newspaper, and now Maurine saw why.

The Tribune Plant Building, inside and out, always impressed first-time visitors, even if it wasn't quite in the heart of Chicago's roaring downtown. Its six stories rose up at Austin Avenue and St. Clair Street, with its loading docks now barricaded from Michigan Avenue by a construction site. Railroad tracks ran along the building's south side for easy distribution of bulk materials. Wagons rumbled out of its eastern cargo bays. The Plant stood at the southern terminus of a mile-long stretch of industrial and warehouse buildings that began in Little h.e.l.l, the Italian slum. South of the Plant, across the Chicago River in the "Loop," was where the real action could be found. That was where the Board of Trade went full tilt every weekday. That was where Marshall Field, so wealthy he could give a million dollars to endow the Columbian Museum of Chicago, operated his grand department store. Just a few miles farther south, in the Stockyards, the Armours and Swifts bought, prepared, and packed meat for the entire nation. Even farther south was the Pullman Company and its celebrated model town, now incorporated into the city. The Tribune's board, however, believed in the North Side's future. The new Wrigley Building sat directly across the street from the Tribune Plant, proof that the four-year-old Michigan Avenue Bridge had become the natural spillover point for the increasingly crowded Loop. In fact, the Plant Building, which opened for business on December 12, 1920, was only the beginning for the Tribune Company. In front of it, facing Michigan Avenue, stood the skeleton of a thirty-six-story tower, what the company insisted would be "the world's most beautiful office building."

The Plant Building may have been only a temporary corporate headquarters, destined ultimately to be the haunches of the "Tribune Monument," but it nevertheless had been built to make an impression. In 1924, most people still did business in person, and that meant management wanted customers to walk away from an encounter with the Chicago Tribune with the certainty that great things happened there. Each of the half dozen viciously compet.i.tive daily newspapers in the city endeavored to ensure, by sheer physical impressiveness, that every citizen who walked into its building would want to be a part of the enterprise, if only as a reader. The young writer Theodore Dreiser, seeking employment at a Chicago newspaper before the turn of the century, was poleaxed by the sumptuousness on display in the lobbies: Most of them-the great ones-were ornate, floreate, with onyx or chalcedony wall tr.i.m.m.i.n.g, flambeaus of bronze or copper on the walls, lights in imitation of mother-of-pearl in the ceilings-in short, all the gorgeous-ness of the Sultan's court brought to the outer counters where people subscribed or paid for advertis.e.m.e.nts.

Dreiser, given to flights of fancy, imagined that beyond those royal lobbies were veritable "wonderlands in which all concerned were prosperous and happy." He thought reporters the equivalent of "amba.s.sadors and prominent men generally. Their lives were laid among great people-the rich, the famous, the powerful-and because of their position and facility of expression and mental force they were received everywhere as equals." If he could only secure a position at a newspaper, he was certain he would be happy for the rest of his days.

Maurine wasn't so naive as that, but she nevertheless expected something memorable-and she wasn't disappointed. The Tribune's local room hummed and trembled like a train car. All the best men worked here: the managing editor and city editor, the police, county building and political reporters, the rewrite battery and senior copyreaders. Urgency and efficiency dominated. Pneumatic tubes popped with incoming reports from the City News Bureau and with outgoing ad copy to the Old Tribune Building in the Loop. Nine steam tables, weighing more than seven tons each, hissed violently from the next room, as if some terrible sea creature were being tamed in a cage. Basket conveyors rolled between the local room and the composing room a floor below, metal crossties for the pulleys squealing. Fifty-five Linotype machines, in double and triple rows next to the composing room, could be heard clacking away like cast-iron crickets, a sound so relentless it invaded dreams.

And everywhere-literally, everywhere-men. Maurine had never seen so many men in one place. They barked into telephones, leaped up, slammed hats on their heads, and strode from the room. They whooped and hollered and smoked cigarettes. They used foul language. The managing editor sat in the middle of the maelstrom and gave orders, without ever raising his voice. He had no reason to yell: The reporters, editors, and copyreaders feared and admired him. Edward "Teddy" Beck was a Kansan by upbringing but a Victorian gentleman by temperament, which meant he knew that such a manly shambles as a newsroom should be off-limits to delicate womanhood.

It wasn't Beck, though, whom Maurine had to convince. She had written a letter to the city editor, Robert M. Lee, a smart and challenging letter, and he had responded that she should call on him at the paper. Not that she could expect Lee to be an easy sell either, especially once he got a look at her. Most of the women who wanted to work at newspapers were tough girls, with the necessary "large and commanding" physical presence to match their att.i.tudes. Maurine, on the other hand, was tiny-barely over five feet tall. She was also beautiful, with iridescent blue-gray eyes in a face as round and sweet as a baby's. Still more set her apart. All the girls today wore their hair bobbed in mock-boy style-"cropheads," Virginia Woolf derisively called them-but not Maurine. Her hair billowed off her forehead in confused revolt, twisting and spinning until corralled into a mangled cloud in the back. The fas.h.i.+onable girls also wore short skirts that showed off their calves, and thin blouses that fell directly on the skin. Maurine dressed only in conservative outfits. And if all of that wasn't strange enough, there was something else, something that made her especially unsuited to the position she sought. Her shyness was palpable.

No, she had never been a reporter before, she admitted, sitting across from the city editor. She barely got the words out.

"Had any newspaper experience at all?" Lee asked.

"No."

"Know anything about journalism?"

"I took it in college."

Lee looked the young woman over, trying to get a bead on her. The appraisal unnerved Maurine. She forced her hands to stay in her lap, took a deep breath. Lee tried another tack: He asked her why she thought she could make it as a police reporter at a professional paper, specifically at one of the country's most admired and aggressive papers. Maurine's mouth ticked open, but no words came out. She was too frightened to answer. Lee's gaze remained impa.s.sive, and Maurine realized she had made a terrible mistake by coming. This was a serious operation, employing trained and dedicated staff. A Tribune reporter had famously tracked the absconding banker Paul Stensland to Africa and brought him back for trial. Finley Peter Dunne, whose Mr. Dooley sketches had been a favorite of President Roosevelt's, had worked for the Tribune. Ring Lardner was a Tribune man. The das.h.i.+ng Floyd Gibbons lost an eye covering the World War for the Tribune. Who was she, Maurine Watkins of Crawfordsville, Indiana, to think she could be a reporter here? She stood up and tried to get an apology unstuck from her throat.

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

"I don't believe you'll like newspaper work," he said.

Maurine nodded. "I don't believe I will."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Being a conscientious person, I never prayed for a murder," she later said. "But I hoped that if there was one I'd be a.s.signed to it."

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

2.

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