The Girls Of Murder City Part 2

"We had been married for four years and my husband was devoted to me. We celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary only last Friday."

"He was always a perfect gentleman, and I certainly never had any occasion to threaten his life. . . . He told me that the reason he wanted his insurance increased was because his wife had asked him to. About three weeks ago she went to a fortune teller and found out that her husband was going to die suddenly within eighteen days."

"No, I don't want her to hang. But I don't want her to go to jail for a month or two and then step out."

The two women could have gone on this way for some time, offering details and opinions about Walter Law, his marriage, and what should happen next, but after only twenty minutes, the coroner's jury returned. The interviews ended abruptly.

"Walter Law," the jury declared, "came to his death in the automobile of Mrs. Belva Gaertner from a bullet fired by Mrs. Belva Gaertner."

Freda Law buried her head in her father-in-law's embrace. Belva stared straight ahead and then blinked slowly. A reporter asked her a question, but she didn't hear him. If she had come in giggling, she wasn't going to leave that way.

The day after William caught her in bed with another man, Belva returned home as if nothing unusual had occurred. Over the three years of their marriage, she never showed any sign of feeling guilty. She never offered a hint that she regretted any of her actions. She did what she wanted, and that made it right.

Belva strolled up the front walk of the Gaertner estate, her head high, as expertly put together as always. She had no plans to talk to William about the events of the previous night; she was just going to go on with her life-with their life. But on this morning she was met with a surprise. The front door was locked. She knocked but received no reply. She banged and banged, and finally she heard shoes stepping toward the door. When it was opened, she found not a familiar, apologetic servant but a hard, strange face-a private detective-staring out at her. He wouldn't let her enter.

Belva, steaming with such fury that her floppy hat risked burning to a cinder on her head, stomped downtown, where she employed a burly guardian of her own. They returned to the house and forced their way inside. William, hiding upstairs, called the police in a panic.

A car rolled up not long after. "What's the matter?" the officer asked when he found a standoff in the marbled foyer.

Belva wheeled on the uniformed policeman, startled at the extreme measures her husband was taking. First a private bullyboy, now an official one. "I don't know of any reason why we need the services of the police force here," she snapped.

William gave her a reason: This wasn't her home anymore. "She wants to stay in the flat," he told the officer.

"Who is she?"

"My wife," William said.

Ah. With that, the officer decided it was time to move on. The police hated domestic disputes, especially when they involved wealthy men who had influence. He advised them to take it up with their lawyers, then turned and beat a quick retreat back to the station house.

William already had a lawyer on retainer. He would be filing for divorce, citing cruelty. Belva went out and got her own lawyer-Charles Erbstein, perhaps the best-known attorney in the city. She also hired a set of private eyes to match those that William had. The dispute, inevitably, hit the papers. The Tribune, breaking the story on April 9, 1920, a.s.sumed the necessary mocking tone: Eight detectives are comfortably ensconced at the home of Mr. and Mrs. William Gaertner, 5474 Hyde Park boulevard. Mr. Gaertner filed suit for divorce last week and invited Mrs. Gaertner to leave. When she declined, he summoned the police. They were neutral.

Then he retained a private detective to watch the home. Mrs. Gaertner retaliated by employing one to protect her interests and watch the other. The husband came back with one more. She then supplemented hers as an a.s.sistant. That made it two and two. But Mr. Gaertner added a couple more and so did Mrs. Gaertner.

Now she is consistently followed as was Mary by her little lamb. The eight sleuths accompany her to the theaters, the shopping district, the telephone, even to the mail box.

"It's a rather trying situation," Belva told the American. "You see, between my husband's corps of detectives and my own crew I hardly know where I'm at. I need help."

She admitted she was "having a deuce of a time" remembering which detectives were hers and which his, and, bonding with a female reporter from the Chicago Evening Post, she asked how the reporter would handle the state of affairs. Ione Quinby, a cherubic twenty-eight-year-old with fas.h.i.+onable black bangs, took the question seriously. She looked about the expansive manse, with its high ceilings, marble floors, and expensive furniture beyond her imagination. There was a lot of territory to cover in this one building and a lot of opportunity for a bad apple to nick some pretty finery. "It seems to me," Quinby said, "you should get a couple of neutral d.i.c.ks to keep an eye on both crews."

It wasn't the best advice. Neutrality was hardly practical-loyalty went to whomever signed the checks, and private detectives didn't come cheap. So the status quo prevailed, and that meant William had the upper hand. But Belva would not be driven from the estate. She took a small room in the house for herself and the few things that were truly important to her. William's detectives didn't dare go in there, but they lingered on the lawn outside her window at night, smoking cigarettes and watching for movement behind the curtain. The detectives kept copious notes of her activities, and when she wasn't doing much, they lolled on the plush furniture. If Belva headed for the front door unexpectedly, a mad scramble would bunch up the Kermanshah rugs behind her. "Don't overexert yourselves," she'd tell them. "I'm going to my sister's. The phone number is Kenwood 137586."

Soon enough, the story went national. It was too amusing to pa.s.s up. Wags called the Gaertner estate "the House of a Thousand Detectives." The Courier and Reporter of Waterloo, Iowa, trilled that Belva now had "no more privacy than a goldfish. There are detectives to the right of her, 'd.i.c.ks' to the left of her, sleuths in front of her. They follow her about like conscience, making notes of everything she does, checking the routine of her daily life like so many eager Boswells."

Belva, enjoying the attention and always good for a laugh, joined right in. "I've gotten so used to detectives that if they were to be called off I'd miss the dear things," she said. The reporters loved Belva: She was a hoot, and she treated them as guests, offering tea and snacks.

She treated her "d.i.c.ks" better. She knew that bought companions could still be enjoyable companions, and so she embraced them as long-lost friends and playmates. The detectives joined her on shopping trips, ostensibly to keep an eye on William's watchers, who were trailing behind, but really so she'd have someone other than the salesgirls to talk to. They would "promenade on each side of her" down Michigan Avenue, trying to look professional while Belva cracked wise and smiled broadly at anyone who gave them a funny look. She even played billiards with her detectives-and showily not with William's detectives-until William, in a snit, hid the b.a.l.l.s.

It wasn't all just fun and games for Belva. She was playing to win. Shortly after the newspapers took up the story, Belva announced that she would prove in court that her husband had beaten her with a horsewhip. The whip would be presented, she said, as "Exhibit A." More than that, the beatings went both ways, because William wasn't just an abusive husband, he was a s.e.xual deviant. "Sure, I whipped my millionaire husband," she said, ratcheting up the story's salaciousness, "but it was he himself who gave me the whip and begged me, yes, even forced me, to do it." She showed reporters the whip, turning it over and over in her hand. "It was he who made me use it," she said. "It was he who forced me to the terrible and disgusting task of beating him. Twice I consented. After that I refused. If that is cruelty, his charges are true."

No doubt William considered this a low blow, but Belva believed she had no choice. However much she joked and laughed with reporters, she thought she was fighting for her life. She had convinced herself-almost-that it wasn't her infidelity that undermined her marriage but William's jealous company men. She publicly accused Robert McGearald, Gaertner's secretary, of trying to break her and William up.

It was scandalous stuff, and reporters girded for an explosive court case that could run on the front page for days. But then, on May 6, the first day of the divorce trial, Belva suddenly pulled back. She decided she couldn't do it. She would not be testifying, she said. She would not contest the suit. She gave no reason, not even to her lawyer, maybe because, after everything that had come out, she realized it would be too hard for people to believe. She had married William because he loved her, truly loved her, and to Belva "that was everything." It had been a shock when she discovered it wasn't. She had broken William's heart-and her own as well. That was enough.

In answering questions posed by his lawyer, William Gaertner talked about the last straw. "My wife had been away from home for three nights," he said in open court. "She told me she had stayed at the home of women friends. On the night of March 30, with W.C. Dannenberg and others, I trailed her to 5345 Prairie Avenue, where we found her with a man who said he was Edward Lusk."

"Where was Mr. Lusk?"

"Behind a door," William said.

The judge had heard all he needed to hear. William Gaertner, a respected man in the community, an important man, had been humiliated by his wife. The court granted the divorce. Belva received $3,000, a car, and a selection of the household's furniture. Not much of a settlement when your husband was worth, excluding his thriving business, more than half a million dollars.

Belva sighed extravagantly. She gazed off into the distance, annoyed that she had to answer the question. In the past, she always had been able to win over the press with her gaiety, as she did during her divorce from William. But this was different. After the things that were said at the inquest, she recognized that happy flirtatiousness wasn't appropriate.

"The story is simply ridiculous," she told the reporter from the Daily News. She was sitting in a ten-by-five cell at the Cook County Jail, her new home now that the coroner's jury had p.r.o.nounced judgment. Reporters surrounded her. "I never threatened Law," she said. "True enough, I was fond of him-" Genevieve Forbes, incredulous, cut in. She asked Belva if she was saying she hadn't menaced Walter Law with a knife.

Belva turned from the Daily News's hack to the Tribune's. "Me threaten him with a knife? That's crazy. He was always a courteous gentleman to me. Why should I ever be angry with him?"

Belva leaned back against the bare cell wall. She'd been surprised at the coroner's jury's decision but had recovered quickly. After the inquest ended, she put her shoulders back and strode out of the Wabash Avenue station, an officer on each arm. A pack of reporters followed them over to the jail. Now Katherine Malm, her new cellmate, sat nearby, listening intently, a look of admiration on her face. Belva was the only inmate "dressed up" in the women's section of the jail. She wouldn't receive her gray jail uniform, and thus have to give up her stylish outfit, until later in the day. To the Daily News reporter's eyes, she "was a picture of self-possession, a woman of the world," especially compared to the Malm girl.

"It gives me an awfully blank feeling to be accused of murdering another woman's husband," Belva said. Caught up in defending herself, she hadn't noticed how the male reporters were drinking her in, but now suddenly she did. She apologized for how she looked. "You see, they have taken away all my powder and makeup and my rings and money, too," she said.

A stout Italian woman walked past the cell hefting a basket of laundry. Belva glanced up. She knew who the inmate was. Sabella Nitti had been convicted of murdering her husband and sentenced to die. She would be the first woman ever to hang in Illinois. Sabella now awaited an appeal before the state Supreme Court.

"I hope they won't put me to work," Belva said, watching the condemned woman disappear around the corner with the laundry. "I hate to work."

4.

Hang Me? That's a Joke Katherine Malm, "Kitty" to her friends, was happy to have a new cellmate. When the jail matrons brought Belva in, closely followed by reporters, Kitty made herself useful, squeezing through the crush of bodies to fetch a stale currant bun for her.

Belva tore into the bread with barely an acknowledgment of her attendant. It may have taken her a minute to recognize that this pale, black-haired girl, dressed in the formless striped uniform issued by the jail, was the same young woman who had dominated every front page in the city just two weeks before. Everybody-all of Chicago-knew who Katherine Malm was. Her trial had been a sensation. After the reporters left, Belva looked her cellmate over. Kitty didn't seem to be anything like how the papers described her. They called her the Wolf Woman and the Tiger Girl, but Belva could see nothing vicious about this small-boned nineteen-year-old, who sat as still as the air and offered a hopeful smile every time Belva looked her way.3 Prosecutors had finally ended the embarra.s.sing string of girl-gunner acquittals in Cook County when they convicted Kitty Malm. The streak had stood at twenty-nine in the summer of 1923 when Sabella Nitti was convicted of murdering her husband, but the newspapers didn't consider that a true win for the state. Sabella was a poor, rough-looking, middle-aged ethnic woman who spoke almost no English. In the Tribune, Genevieve Forbes derided her as "seamy-faced," "gibbering," and a "cruel animal." Many reporters barely considered her human. Like Negro defendants, Sabella was an easy target for any prosecutor. There was simply no comparison between her case and the trial of a white, American woman. There'd never been a time when it was easy to convict a white woman in Cook County, especially a young white woman. An earlier streak, this one of husband killers, had stretched to thirty-five consecutive acquittals before finally ending in 1919, when a middle-aged Swedish immigrant was found guilty. The acquittals were so consistent, year after year, that a reporter could state baldly that "women can't be convicted of murder in Cook County." So Kitty Malm-young and white and at least not unattractive-was the state's prize catch. She and her man, Otto Malm, had tried to rob a sweater factory back in November and ended up killing a security guard. Otto, who had a long rap sheet, confessed, but not Kitty, who decided to trust in Illinois' all-male juries. To the state's attorney's office, her conviction was public proof that the days of women getting away with murder were finally over.

Belva Gaertner, the well-mannered society divorcee, and the ragam.u.f.fin Tiger Girl seemed an odd pair, but their backgrounds actually had a lot in common-more than Belva would ever publicly admit. They both had had emotionally perilous childhoods. At fourteen, Belva found herself dumped at the state orphanage in Normal after her widowed mother slipped into abject poverty. At twelve, Kitty dropped out of the fifth grade to work in a factory, instructed by her mother that there was "no need for girls to go far in school." They both also had a weakness for men that got them in trouble. The day after Belva arrived at the jail, Kitty received a divorce summons from her legal husband, Max Baluk. (She'd married Otto Malm illegally after leaving Max.) "Defendant Katherine Baluk, for a considerable time past, has given herself over to adulterous practices, wholly regardless of her marriage vows," the bill read. It went on to accuse her not just of committing adultery with Otto Malm, but also with "divers [sic] other lewd men, whose names are to your orator unknown." Kitty understood enough of what she was reading that she burst into tears. She got the gist: Max hated her. This shouldn't have surprised her-Max had beaten her throughout their relations.h.i.+p, until she took their new baby and fled to a flophouse-but it still hurt to see it written down on paper. Max now claimed that their two-year-old daughter, "Tootsie," wasn't his, that Kitty had left him because "she had a good time with another fellow" and got pregnant. Kitty showed the legal doc.u.ment to Belva, and the two women, despite a nearly twenty-year age difference, bonded over their poor treatment by men. "Fellows, always fellows," Kitty said.

Soon Belva and Kitty were playing cards together in their cell, smiling and laughing for news photographers, Kitty talking endlessly about her travails. The younger woman had just one piece of advice-a warning, really-for Belva: Get ready to hear everyone you know lie about you. That was what happened to her, she said. In November, Otto had told police the truth-that he had killed Edward Lehman, the watchman at the Delson sweater factory on Lincoln Avenue, during the botched robbery attempt. He even admitted he'd accidentally hit Kitty with one of his shots, leaving her with a raw wound on her head where the bullet grazed her. For her part, Kitty, still desperately in love with Otto, went further for her man. To show her devotion to Otto after his confession, and to help him get free of the law, she tried to commit suicide shortly after being arrested, hanging herself with a bedsheet. A jail matron cut her down just as she was starting to turn blue. "You can now tell them that I done the shooting so they will let you go to take care of baby forever, but please quit the racket and raise Tootsie in an honest way for your departing mama's sake," she wrote to Otto in a suicide letter. A few days later, Otto discovered he might be executed for murder. He quickly adjusted his memory about what had happened at the Delson factory. Kitty had been shooting too, he now said, and "it was the shot from her gun that killed the watchman; she done it." Otto sold her out, just like that.

"Men are quitters," Kitty told Belva in disgust, her lip curling into an ugly sneer. "They're long on talk, but, Lord, when it comes to the show-down, they're yellow."

Even with Otto turning on Kitty, her lawyer, Jay J. McCarthy, had gone into her trial feeling confident. He pointed out to her that Otto was the career criminal, not her, and that Otto had confessed to the Delson shooting, again not her. Plus, Kitty was the young mother of a two-year-old girl, who would sit in court beside her grandmother each day looking adorable and sad. Most important of all, McCarthy reminded his client that Illinois' all-male juries were averse to punis.h.i.+ng women, even when they weren't young mothers. The lawyer figured Kitty would be free in a couple of days. He was so confident of it that he rejected a prosecution plea offer of fourteen years.

The lawyer's confidence was contagious. "Hang me? That's a joke," Kitty told a group of reporters as jury selection began. "Say, n.o.body in the world would hang a girl for bein' in an alley with a guy who pulls a gun and shoots." The Tribune's Genevieve Forbes noted how the former waitress sashayed into court as if she didn't have a care in the world.

She flopped her abundant fur wrap over the back of the chair as if she were making herself comfortable before the feature picture in a motion-picture house started. And the purple silk lining sprawled over the knees of the bailiff behind her, much as it might have swept over another seat in a theater.

Then Kitty took off her hat, a small black straw, in the favored cloche shape, with a bit of lace veil over her large brown eyes. She shook her black bobbed hair, jiggled around in her seat, and settled down to wait, and to read.

That breezy att.i.tude didn't last long, however. On Thursday, February 21, the trial got under way. The first sign that this one might turn out differently than other girl-gunner cases was the simple fact that the newspapers' nicknames worked. Everyone wanted to get a look at the dangerous Wolf Woman, the ferocious Tiger Girl. Dozens of men and women a.s.sembled in the corridor of the Criminal Courts Building for the trial's start. When the doors to Judge Walter Steffen's courtroom opened, the crowd pushed forward, jamming the doorway and blocking the hall outside. The room quickly filled. It's likely that Maurine Watkins was one of the spectators who squeezed into the packed room. It would have been hard for her to resist going over to the courthouse whenever her work schedule allowed (and it typically did, for she often worked the night s.h.i.+ft). She'd started her new career as a police reporter right when one of the most sensational "girl slayer" trials in Chicago history was starting. But Katherine Malm was Genevieve Forbes's story; Forbes had stayed on top of it ever since the night of November 3, when Lehman, the young watchman at the Delson sweater factory, was shot down. The boy uttered his last words at the Alexian Brothers Hospital that night, with a policeman and a prosecutor leaning over him and Forbes a step behind, a pencil hovering over her notepad. From her first day on the job, Maurine dreamed about getting this kind of story-and worried she never would. How often did a Kitty Malm come along?

With his opening statement, a.s.sistant State's Attorney Harry Pritzker tried to preempt any ideas Hearst's sob sisters might have had about presenting Kitty as a victim. "Mrs. Malm is the hardest woman ever to walk into a courtroom," he said. "The evidence will show that she fired the shots that killed Lehman. We will ask that she receive the heaviest penalty the state can inflict." Kitty was struggling to keep her attention on this attack when the prosecution brought in a .38 caliber revolver for the jury to see, the one she was supposed to have used to kill the watchman. They placed a holster next to it. Uninterested in the gun, Kitty turned away-and caught sight of Blanche King standing in the back of the room. Kitty, surprised, smiled. She had figured she'd never see her friend again. King started down the courtroom aisle supported by a nurse. Three months before, Kitty had avoided a police dragnet after Otto's capture and escaped to Indianapolis. That was where she'd met King; they shared a room at a boardinghouse. The two young women hit it off right away. Before returning to Chicago and surrendering in hopes of saving Otto and seeing her daughter, Kitty tearfully said good-bye to Blanche, she thought forever. Pritzker stood up and announced that Miss King, despite ill health, had come from Indianapolis to testify in the interests of justice. Kitty looked at her attorney in confusion.

King was sworn in, and Pritzker asked her how she knew the defendant.

The witness sat up straight. "The twenty-second of last November," she said, her voice full of pep, her head swiveling to take in the dozens of eyes gazing upon her. "I was boarding at 128 West Walnut Street, in Indianapolis, and the landlord, Victor Cap.r.o.n, took me to the 'Chicago girl's room' and said, 'Blanche, meet Kitty.' "

"Did you ever see the defendant with any guns?" Pritzker asked.

"Yes, two."

"Where?"

"In my room."

"Did she have any names for them?"

For a moment King looked as though she were about to laugh. Her heart rate spiked at the excitement. The nurse stood just a couple of steps away. "Yes," King said, her breath coming in rapid bursts, " 'Little Betsy' and 'Big Bertha.' " She identified the gun on display as "Big Bertha."

"Tell us about this revolver."

"She had it strapped around her waist part of the time in that holster."

"How many times did you see her with it?"

"Every day."

McCarthy, unprepared for the surprise witness, offered no objections. It was his first murder trial. When the witness was asked whether the defendant had ever said anything about being on the run, King answered with a happy child's blurt: "You bet!" She said that Kitty announced to her, "I hate coppers, and I'll kill any who comes to take me." The only times Kitty didn't have her hand on one of her pistols, she added, was "when she was eating, when she was sleeping, and one other time." King looked to the reporters in the front row, smiling.

Kitty, unbelieving, sat throughout the testimony with her eyes riveted on King. She wanted to scream. She wanted to jump up and yell, "Liar!" but she didn't. She sat there in shock, her mouth wrenched open. Blanche King, on the other hand, was exuberant. After her testimony ended, she waited around in the hallway until every reporter there had a chance to talk to her. Her nurse stood nearby. Along with a variety of long-standing physical ailments, King also had mental problems.

a.s.sistant State's Attorney Pritzker no longer had to worry about the Hearst papers. King's testimony was so dramatic, and so damaging to the defense, that the sob sisters never got a chance to do their work. The reports that splashed across Chicago's front pages were straightforward, in-your-face crime writing worthy of coverage of the city's most vicious gangsters.

"Katherine Baluk Malm, on trial for her life in the court of Judge Walter P. Steffen, carried two guns on her hip like a girl in a dime novel, and wore a dress with buckles that enabled her to slip in, open quickly and draw her weapons. Moreover, she hated 'coppers' and swore that if she saw one he'd drop."

That was the normally staid Daily News.

The imagery was simply too good to pa.s.s up. All of the city's papers used variations on King's dramatic description of how the Tiger Girl carried her guns. (Forbes, in the Tribune, declared that Kitty "carried a gun where most girls hide their love letters.") Kitty read some of the coverage the next day and spent the weekend in her cell crying uncontrollably.

On Monday, Kitty arrived in court to find chaos. Public interest in the trial, high from the start, had turned fanatical. Reporters fought their way into the courtroom. The Evening Post reported that "some 200 would-be spectators thronged the corridors of the Criminal Courts building" in hopes of seeing Kitty Malm in the flesh. Once bailiffs cleared the way, the defendant entered with her head down. She wore a s.e.xy new black dress, procured by her lawyer, that emphasized her small waist and ignored her smaller bosom. But she walked stiffly to the defendant's table. There was nothing extra to her gait, no oomph to catch the eye of the average juryman, as McCarthy undoubtedly had hoped when he picked out the dress. The crowd gaped anyway. Kitty, they now believed, was the real thing after all: a killer.

Kitty, stepping up to the stand on shaky legs, did her best to knock down her former friend's testimony. "I never carried or fired a gun in my life," she said, her voice quavering. She acknowledged that she had been friendly with Blanche King but denied saying any of the things King attributed to her. Just thinking about Blanche's betrayal caused her eyes to well up, and she knew Otto was waiting out in the hall to say even worse things about her. She began to hyperventilate. Judge Steffen had to stop the testimony over and over so that the defendant could gain control of her emotions and make her answers intelligible to the jury. The Tribune wrote that "Mrs. Malm's testimony came as the sensation of the trial," but most spectators left disappointed. They didn't want denials and tears. They didn't want to hear about Kitty's love for her daughter. They had taken time off from work or household ch.o.r.es to listen to the Wolf Woman tell exactly how she shot that watchman dead.

The jury wanted the same thing. After just an hour and twenty minutes, the foreman, Walter H. Harper, rapped softly on the door of the jury room. After four ballots, they were ready with a verdict. The lawyers, the defendant, and a still-large contingent of court fans filed back into the courtroom. Harper handed a piece of paper to the court clerk. The clerk unfolded it and read: "We, the jury, find the defendant, Katherine Baluk Malm, guilty of murder in manner and form as charged in the indictment, and we fix her punish-"

The rest of the word was drowned out by Kitty's scream. She clutched her arms and fell in on herself, as if she'd taken a blow to the stomach. McCarthy steadied her. The clerk, who'd looked up at the sound, returned to the piece of paper. "Fix her punishment at imprisonment in the penitentiary for the term of her natural life."

"Expressions of surprise were heard all over the courtroom," wrote the Post. It had finally happened: a conviction. Kitty screamed again, deeper, angry. She shook her head violently. When McCarthy and the bailiffs tried to calm her, she threw them off: "Keep away! I don't want to see anybody." The circuitry in her brain suddenly snapped. She dropped in a dead faint, hitting the floor as if she'd jumped from a third-floor window. Spectators in the crowded courtroom pushed forward, oblivious to Judge Steffen banging his gavel. Kitty lay rigid, lost in blackness. Despite repeated efforts, lawyers and guards couldn't revive her. "While the confusion was at the height, deputy sheriffs lifted the woman from the floor and put her on a chair," Forbes wrote. "Then they carried chair and all to the prisoner's elevator and down to the 'bridge' of the jail." They hefted her across the street. She woke in her cell, confused, trying to sort out what had happened.

"My G.o.d! What did they do?" she asked.

That was a good question. All of the women on Murderess' Row had to be wondering exactly what that jury had done. Was everything different now because of Katherine Malm? Were juries now willing to convict women of murder, after years of refusing to do so? The state's attorney's office said yes: Murderous women would now-at last-pay the penalty in Cook County just as men did.

For prosecutors, however, building on this single verdict surely would be problematic. Yes, Kitty was a young white woman and she'd been convicted, but she wasn't like so many of the women who'd been set free in recent years, especially the high-profile ones. Cora Orthwein had been a St. Louis society lady before divorce and booze caused her to "fall" from respectability and ultimately to shoot down her low-life boyfriend. Then there was Anna McGinnis, who'd been acquitted of knocking off her husband the previous summer. She was young and beautiful and had perfect manners. Times may have been changing, but the Victorian feminine ideal still loomed large in the typical juryman's psyche. He couldn't help but be disposed toward demure ladies with pretty figures and good pedigrees. Poor, uneducated girls like Kitty Malm, on the other hand, were a grave social danger. They were "physically and mentally contaminated," insisted one of the first scholarly reports on female criminality, The Cause and Cure of Crime. The social activist Belle Moskowitz declared that "the girl whose temperament and disposition crave unnatural forms of excitement is nearly beyond the bounds of salvation. . . . She may affect the well being of others."

That was Kitty in one pithy statement, and the newspapers knew it. For weeks she had stared at reporters through the jail's bars, defiant, seemingly without comprehension. Her hair was amateurishly hacked short, arcing across the left side of her forehead like a scythe. When the reporters arrived each day for interviews, she approached the front of her cell slowly, indirectly, like a wary animal-every time the same way. To male reporters in particular, there was no denying that Kitty Malm was a lewd, diseased girl. She'd stare right into a man's eyes, her face scrunched up as if she were working on a tough math problem. Her att.i.tude and language were vulgar. Men looked at Kitty Malm and thought of the wh.o.r.es who walked North Clark Street after dark.

So had anything really changed? Two weeks after convicting Kitty, a.s.sistant State's Attorney Pritzker announced that Belva Gaertner was "as guilty as Kitty Malm" and should receive the same treatment from a jury. But the Tribune stated the situation bluntly: Katherine Malm was "the only really young woman who's ever gone over the road"-that is, been convicted of murder. And the reason was that she "wasn't-well-quite 'refined.' " A respectable lady who shot her husband or boyfriend, on the other hand, a woman like Belva Gaertner, still didn't scare men: She was a romantic figure, a representation of how much women in general, with their overflowing emotions, loved and needed their men. "My experience makes me know how unreasonable men can be and makes me give the woman every advantage of the doubt," said one man interviewed about the rash of women shooting their men in Cook County.

It could all be explained through simple biology, newspaper readers were told in the aftermath of the conviction. Kitty Malm-and, needless to say, Sabella Nitti-was not like ordinary, decent women. You could tell simply by looking at her. A woman p.r.o.ne to crime and violence had a "broad nose and cheekbones, full chin and lips, contracted upper frontal skull development and prominent bulging development of the forehead just over the eyes and nose." That was the conclusion of noted phrenologist Dr. James M. Fitzgerald. His description tended to fit ethnic women more than Anglo women, but the doctor was a little subtler than that in his a.n.a.lysis. Asked by newspapers to examine photographs of murderous women, Fitzgerald insisted that they "all have broad heads. You can put it down as a basic principle that the broad-headed animals eat the narrow-headed ones. . . . All these women are alike in having single-track minds, with imperfect comprehension of consequences. They are 'show me' people who have to experience to understand, and the jails are full of this type. Food and s.e.xual interests make a strong appeal to them."

So which was Belva Gaertner: a broad-headed animal or a narrow-headed one? Being a respectable lady, she planned on keeping a hat on in court, but she knew her life likely depended on her ability to shape the answer to that question, to make men-both jurors and reporters-see what she wanted them to see.

5.

No Sweetheart in the World Is Worth Killing Maurine's desk sat on the east side of the local room, squeezed between the photo department and the file room. A battered typewriter, a castoff from another reporter, came with it. If she needed anything else, she could call out to a copyboy, though she didn't like to raise her voice. Genevieve Forbes enjoyed a desk in a more central location, within easy sight of Robert Lee, who handed out the most important a.s.signments. Forbes would thump in and out of the room without a glance toward her junior colleague.

Maurine could hardly have expected anything else from Forbes. Only a handful of girl reporters covered crime in Chicago, and none did so exclusively. This did not engender feelings of sisterhood or cliquishness among them. Being the best female police reporter in a newsroom carried very little cachet, which meant being second best might be cause for transfer to the fas.h.i.+ons beat.

Besides, Forbes, thirty years old and unmarried, had some reason for jealousy. The paper's star reporters, the men who always got the stories Forbes wanted, no longer walked straight through the center of the room. They meandered, weaving their way around to the far corner, where they paused to tie a shoe or laugh at a joke they'd just remembered. Maurine was "so lovely to look at that the men in the local room managed to have to walk by her desk, and of course stop for a cheery word," observed f.a.n.n.y Butcher, who worked in the adjacent Sunday room. Butcher amused herself day after day by watching men b.u.mp into each other as they looked for something to do near the new girl reporter. Maurine tried to ignore the hovering men, but that rarely discouraged them. If she were tapping away on her typewriter, she could count on someone leaning over her shoulder, perusing a line, and offering a suggestion for improvement.

The attention directed at Maurine couldn't be entirely attributed to her beauty. She represented a rare challenge in the newsroom. The men dared not pinch her behind or make crude suggestions for a.s.signations, as they would to f.a.n.n.y Butcher or Forbes. She was different from the other young women on staff. Maurine had never even seen a poker game before joining the Tribune. She didn't drink or smoke. She had trouble meeting a man's eye. It brought out the romantic spirit-and good manners-in her male coworkers. Teddy Beck, the managing editor, became so frustrated at seeing his reporters crowded around Maurine all the time that he laid down a diktat: "There will be no more women in the local room." One of the few other women with a desk in the room, Margery Currey, thought that meant she had been fired. She began cleaning out her desk, avoiding eye contact with other reporters to keep from crying, before being told the edict didn't apply to her. Settled back in front of her Underwood, she noted, "This is one time when my face was my fortune." Currey, Butcher pointed out, was an excellent journalist, "but ravis.h.i.+ngly beautiful she was not."

Forbes got to stay too. She had proven her value many times over, but there was also simply too much work to do for Beck's order ever to be implemented: too many murderesses knocking off their boyfriends, too many girl pickpockets and pretty little con artists, too many young women s.n.a.t.c.hed from respectable lives by white slavers or their own dark curiosity.

More than anything else, Forbes and Maurine could thank the Eighteenth Amendment for their burgeoning career opportunities. No one had foreseen that Prohibition would have such disastrous consequences. Chicago's newspapers had all supported the const.i.tutional amendment and its enforcement law, the Volstead Act, which went into effect in January 1920. But their support hardly convinced anyone that the law was right. Prohibition's timing had simply been awful. The 1920s began, wrote Burton Rascoe, the Tribune's former literary editor, "in a general atmosphere of cynicism, disillusion and bitterness." The unprecedented carnage of the World War had touched everyone in one way or another; now few people, especially those under forty, had any tolerance for the tin-eared moralizing of the temperance folks. After Prohibition got under way, alcohol consumption spiked-and continued to rise even as the quality of the spirits plummeted. For a whole generation, across cla.s.s lines, defying the dry law became an act of self-definition-a necessary rebellion against a sordid, hypocritical ruling cla.s.s. Illegal production and distribution of alcoholic beverages, centered in Chicago, became one of the biggest industries in the country, with beer sales in the city topping $30 million a month by one accounting.

The official corruption that came with this unprecedented criminal expansion was similarly outsize. Gangsters funneled a million dollars in bribes each month to Chicago's police, prosecutors, and elected officials. It made the whole city-at least to Maurine's suddenly jaded eye-a "grand and gory comedy." When it came to bootleggers, those charged with enforcing the law, at every level, became blind and dumb. Reporters who didn't overlook this rampant graft suffered. Fred Lovering, of the Daily Journal, foolishly broke a story about bribery at the Cook County Jail. The next time the reporter walked into the lockup, guards grabbed him and held him down while prisoners pummeled him. Lovering's nose was reduced to a blob of flaccid flesh, leaving him with breathing problems, a severe speech impediment, and constant pain for the rest of his life. Maurine was stunned to learn that a warden at a smaller facility called in federal agents "to stop bootlegging in his jail so that he can bring his prisoners to trial sober"-stunned, that is, to discover an honest man running a jail in the county. She found that in every kind of crime-"hijacking and graft scandals . . . frequency of murders, percentage of acquitted, etc."-Chicago stood out, and that most of it was related to booze.

Bootlegging was an overwhelming problem in Cook County Jail-with the exception, for the most part, of the women's section. Sitting in a cell less than forty-eight hours after her arrest, Belva Gaertner's hands shook, and she gulped cup after cup of stale coffee to settle her nerves. This may have been rough on the new inmate, but she quickly recognized it was for the best. The newspapers thrived on Prohibition as much as the bootleggers, though in an entirely different way. For the sob sisters, no story line was more reliably popular than that of the reformed sinner. Belva, with the drinking and the gunplay and the high-profile divorce, was sure to be a huge story, and almost all of the city's papers began working on her potential redemption.

On March 14, the day after the inquest into Walter Law's death, the Daily Journal declared that Belva had turned to the Lord and gathered the other women inmates to sing hymns. "One number on the programme was a pianologue," the paper wrote. "The words were spoken by Mrs. Belle Gaertner, held in connection with the killing of Walter Law, and the accompaniment was the tune and faint plaintive words: 'Where He leads me, I will follow.' " Once the singing was over, the Journal's reporter pulled Belva aside: Mrs. Gaertner, clad in a sober but hopeful black canton dress with Spanish lace sleeves, refused to "talk." Her attorneys had been there early in the day and left rules to be followed. . . . Mrs. Gaertner admitted reluctantly that she feels well, although the jail cots are not the most comfortable in the world.

The Journal, as expected, provided the conventional premise for a girl-gunner story: the predatory man. "Law is to blame for the trouble my daughter is in," Belva's mother, Mary Leese, said from the apartment she shared with her daughter. "He was crazy about her and always after her. He came here nights and took her out, and not content with that, he came here often in the daytime. He wouldn't let her alone." The elderly woman told the paper that she didn't understand how Mrs. Law could have been so "hoodwinked" by her husband.

The Hearst papers also stayed with the tried-and-true formula for their coverage of Belva, though their approach differed from the Journal's. They created glamour out of blood and misery. The photo retouchers at the American and the Herald and Examiner were experts at buffing up pictures of women criminals: painting out wrinkles, eye bags, double chins. In the original photos from the night of the shooting, Belva looked old and exhausted, her skin loose, eyes drooping. This was a woman who'd seen way too much life. Those same photos in Hearst newsprint, however, showed a woman transformed, a lean and fetching beauty-maybe even beautiful enough to be innocent. With their emphasis on sensation and sentimentality, the Hearst newspapers had a stake in their murderesses looking more beautiful than those in the staid Tribune and Daily News, and their artists competed with each other like rival funeral-home directors.