Belva shot her lover in March; Beulah shot hers in April. Belva wasn’t married at the time; the man she shot, Walter Law, was. Walter met Belva when he sold her a car (a Nash). Belva’s ex-husband paid for it. Her ex was thirty years older than Belva—and he was rich. He liked to buy Belva things—nice things—married to her or not.
The man Beulah killed wasn’t married, but Beulah was—to a mechanic, an older guy, named Al. Al worked overtime—ten-, twelve-, sixteen-hour days—to buy things for Beulah. “I was a sucker,” Al said. “Simply a meal ticket.”1 He stuck by her, though. He even said he killed the man. The police didn’t believe him. The man Beulah killed was an ex-con named Harry. She’d met him at work. Harry delivered laundry. He kept up a good front, though—wore nice clothes, said his parents had money. The fact was he’d been in jail in Michigan. He’d deserted his wife—his pregnant wife.
Belva had an interesting face, but Beulah—Beulah was drop-dead beautiful. Red hair, pale, porcelain skin, wide-set blue eyes. She had a son—a seven-year-old—from her first marriage. The boy lived with his father’s folks in Kentucky. Beulah’s mother stood by her; her father said he’d seen it coming.
Beulah and Harry had been drinking when she shot him. They both had the day off. Al was at work. Beulah and Harry got into a fight. She shot him in the back. It took him nearly four hours to die. It took her that long to decide to call her husband. Beulah remembered what she’d done and regretted it. Not Belva.
“Why it’s silly to say I murdered Walter,” Belva said after she was arrested. “I liked him and he loved me—but no woman can love a man enough to kill him. They aren’t worth it . . . There are always plenty more.”2 In fact, Belva and Walter had been drinking—just like Beulah and Harry. The difference was that Belva was an alcoholic—she was so intoxicated she blacked out, had no memory of shooting Walter. She was telling the truth when she said, “I don’t know what happened. I was drunk.”3 What happened was that she and Walter were sitting in the front seat of her car when she shot him in the head.
Beulah went on trial first. There were—as usual—no women on the jury. There were four bachelors, though. The men decided Beulah was innocent.
Three days before the jury acquitted Beulah, a Polish mill worker found the body of little Bobby Franks, stuffed in a culvert, twenty miles south of the city. Nathan Leopold and his boyfriend, Richard Loeb, had kidnapped Bobby, killed him, stripped him, poured acid over his face and his private parts, then left him, facedown, in muddy water.4 The young men’s ambition was to commit a perfect crime. Unfortunately, Leopold dropped his glasses while they were dragging Bobby to the ditch. Beulah’s trial and acquittal shared the front page with the first installments of what the papers called “The Crime of the Century.” By the time Belva went on trial—and was found not guilty—her story shared the headlines with news of Nathan Leopold’s confession. Printed verbatim.
What Belva and Beulah had in common—other than lovers, infatuated older husbands, handguns, and too much to drink—was a Chicago Tribune reporter named Maurine Watkins.
Watkins had gone to college, done graduate work at Radcliffe, then taken a job writing ad copy for Standard Oil. When Watkins applied for work at the Tribune, the paper’s managing editor sent her over to the city desk. A “girl reporter” named Genevieve Forbes had covered the Orthwein murder, as well as the trial of Fred Thompson (Frances Carrick), with such panache that the Tribune’s city editor—a man named Robert Lee—didn’t need to be convinced that women could write about crime. Lee sent Watkins to cover Belva, then Beulah.
Belva had been in the papers, on and off, since 1917, when she sang in cabarets dressed in breast plates, pantaloons, and a feathered headdress; she went by the name of Belle Brown. Beulah was so astonishingly pretty that a newsreel crew came to Chicago to film her, her mother, and her faithful husband, Al. Watkins knew a good thing when she saw it.
Once Belva went free, Watkins—and every reporter in Chicago who could breathe and move a pencil—covered Leopold and Loeb. After they were sentenced in September, Watkins moved to New York and got a job as a newspaper drama and movie critic. She enrolled in Yale’s new Drama School workshop. Students were required to write plays. Watkins called hers A Brave Little Woman. Belva became “Velma”; Beulah became “Roxie Hart.” Watkins’s professor gave her an “A.” It was the first “A” he’d ever given.
A Brave Little Woman became Chicago when it opened on Broadway in 1926. Chicago turned into a 1927 silent film called by the same name. (Cecil B. DeMille directed it. He cast a dark-eyed blonde named Phyllis Haver as Roxie). DeMille’s Chicago led to a 1942 Ginger Rogers movie called Roxie Hart. Almost thirty-five years later, Bob Fosse turned Chicago into a musical. Chicago, the musical, became Chicago, the movie (Renée Zellweger played a blonde-haired Roxie).
Maurine Watkins became a born-again Christian. She wrote screenplays for twenty years, then retired, and moved to Florida to live with her mother. She wrote verse for Hallmark cards and stayed out of sight. She paid a yearly fee to the company that owned the rights to Chicago to prevent it from being revived. She regretted she’d written it. She was ashamed she’d turned what Belva and Beulah had done into a comedy.5
This is how things really began:
A patrolman named Fitzgerald and a sergeant named Quin were walking their beat along Forrestville Avenue, at one o’clock in the morning. There was a call box at the end of the block; they’d check in (“pull the box” is what they called it), go on to the next box, work their shift. Easy work: it was a nice, quiet neighborhood, young families, good salaries, big, solid apartments. Halfway down the block they saw a woman climb into a car; a man was at the wheel; the car’s motor was off. The officers kept walking. Just as they were about to pull the box, they heard three shots. They ran back to the car. The woman was gone. The man was slumped over the wheel. He had a hole in his head. There was fresh blood on the floor. In the blood: a bottle of gin and an automatic pistol.
The officers called their station, then waited for a coroner’s assistant to arrive. The coroner’s assistant lifted the pistol out of the puddle on the floor: three shots had been fired from its magazine. The assistant fished the man’s wallet out of his pants: Walter Law. A car salesman. The station checked the license plate of the Nash. The car belonged to a woman named Gaertner. Belle Brown Oberbeck Gaertner. Belva. She lived down the block.
Belva answered the door wearing a bathrobe. The officers followed her into the living room. The place was packed with furniture. Belva resumed what she’d been doing before the officers arrived: pacing and smoking, pacing and smoking. There was a pile of bloody clothes on the floor: a green velvet dress, a caracul coat (a lamb’s wool coat), a pair of silver slippers.
Belva answered their questions, but she didn’t stop pacing. Of course, she said, she knew the man in the car. “We went driving,” she said. “Mr. Law and I . . . we went to a place on 55th and Cottage Grove and got a quart of gin. Then we went to the Gingham Café and had some drinks and lunch. We left . . . about midnight. Then we drove up Forrestville, right near where I live. Mr. Law said something about hold up men . . . said he was afraid of them. I don’t know what happened next. I remember that I saw blood on his face. I was frightened. He didn’t say anything and I didn’t hear any shots. I just got out of the car and ran away.”6
Fitzgerald and Quin had both seen Belva climb into the Nash. They asked her about that. She said they were wrong. She’d never left the car. They pressed her: Had she gone inside to get the gun, then come back with it? No, she said. She always carried the gun. The gun was hers. She was afraid of robbers. Her husband—her ex-husband—had given it to her. “He gave me that coat, too,” she said, pointing with her toes at the caracul on the floor.
Fitzgerald and Quin took Belva to the station. They kept asking her about Law, about the blood on her clothes, about the gun. “I don’t know,” Belva kept saying. “I don’t know. I was drunk.” They locked her up. “Call William,” she said. “William will know what to do.” William was William Gaertner. “Wealthy manufacturer of scientific instruments.” Belva’s ex.
William was fifty-five and Belva was twenty-six when they met in 1917. Belva was married to a man named Oberbeck; William was lonely. William owned horses and rode in Jackson Park; Belva rented horses and rode there, too. The papers called their courtship “a romance of the bridle paths.” The Chicago Tribune printed pictures of William and Belva on horseback dressed in riding togs.
Belva got a divorce. She and William eloped to Indiana, to Crown Point, a town that specialized in quickie marriages. Three months later, William sought an annulment. Illinois law required that a year elapse between a divorce and a marriage. The interval between Belva’s divorce and her marriage had been less than three months. William wanted out. Belva wanted alimony. William compromised: he remarried Belva, then hired private detectives to spy on her. Belva hired her own detectives to spy on William. William countered by hiring detectives to spy on Belva’s detectives. Belva hired a set of her own. The papers kept track: by the time William and his detectives found Belva in the arms of a man named Lusk, the Gaertners had a total of eight detectives following one another as they spied on their respective employers. The Gaertners’ marriage ended in 1920.
Belva settled for $3,000, most of William’s furniture (including his billiard table), and a car. Since the car was—at that moment—Belva’s only productive asset, she installed a taxi meter in it, bought a green uniform, pinned livery badges to her lapels, and went looking for fares. The papers interviewed her. She posed for pictures seated behind the wheel. A woman in uniform. A liberated woman. “I just can’t take orders from anyone,” she said. “I must be my own boss. . . . I shall not drive at night and I won’t make trips into the suburbs. There are too many hold up men. I can change a tire and do all that . . . but, tell me: is there anything I can do to get the squeak out of these leather puttees?”7
William answered the phone when the police called. He’d been expecting to hear from Belva: she called him every night. He still had a painting of her, dressed in her cabaret outfit, hanging in his study. “What has happened to her now?” William said.
Belva was right about William. He immediately hired three of the city’s best criminal defense attorneys. He acknowledged that he’d bought the gun that Belva said was hers. He admitted that he’d paid for the car that Walter had sold to Belva, the car Walter drove to Belva’s place. All this was true. But everything would be resolved: “I hope for a reconciliation just as soon as possible.”8
Belva came to the coroner’s inquest wearing clean clothes—and seven diamond rings. Walter’s widow, Freda, was there; Freda’s elderly father sat beside her; Freda’s aged mother was at home, looking after the Laws’ baby boy.
Freda testified that Walter was a faithful and devoted husband. Belva testified that he wasn’t: “Sometimes he’d take me out three evenings a week. . . . Walter never did get along with his wife. . . . He often told me that if it weren’t for his little boy, he’d never live with her. . . .”9
“Curly” Brown, the manager of the Gingham Café, testified that Walter and Belva had come in around ten o’clock, ordered three eleven-ounce “family size” bottles of ginger ale, then spent the next two hours there—presumably mixing the Gingham’s ginger ale with the gin that Belva had carried in, hidden in her coat. That gin, according to a chemist employed by the city, had been a mixture of water, juniper juice, and alcohol. “Fortytwo and twenty-six hundredths percent alcohol.”10 The Gingham’s Mr. Brown said that the café had charged the couple $4.30 for their ginger ale. When they left, said Mr. Brown, they seemed perfectly sober.
The state called officers Fitzgerald and Quin, and the coroner’s assistant who’d examined the crime scene. Then it called its star witness: a car salesman named Paul Goodwin. He and Walter worked together. They were friends. Goodwin’s testimony made Belva very upset:
“Walter told me, Monday, that he planned to take out more life insurance. . . .Mrs. Gaertner threatened to kill him. . . . Three weeks before—he told me—she’d locked him in her flat with her and threatened to stab him with a knife unless he stayed there. . . .”11
“That’s just a frame-up on the part of the automobile people,” Belva said. “Me? Threaten him with a knife?? That’s crazy. Why should I ever be angry with him? . . . I’ll tell you the truth about that insurance: A few weeks ago, Walter told me, his wife had her fortune told—and the woman warned her that her husband would die inside of seven weeks. Walter took out the extra insurance just to humor her. . . .”12
It took the coroner’s jury twenty minutes to decide that Belva had killed Walter Law.
The assistant state’s attorney whom Mr. Crowe’s office had sent to the inquest made a statement:
“The motive which the state believes lies behind this case is this: Mrs. Gaertner had ensnared Law. He tried to break away to stick to his wife and family. She killed him rather than lose him. When Law and Mrs. Gaertner returned from the café, she tried to make him enter her apartment. He remembered the time she’d held him there at the point of a knife. He refused. . . .She pulled the gun. . . .He tried to stop her—but couldn’t.”13
(In 1921 the attorney hired by Herbert Ziegler’s widow used a similar argument against Cora Isabelle Orthwein. Said Attorney Dwight McKay: “It was the old, old story of selfish, insane love . . . she clung to him like a leech. . . .she killed him before he could return to his home as husband and father.”)
The Chicago Tribune ran a picture of Walter’s pretty widow sitting with her white-haired father. Belva stood in a picture printed beneath them; she wore her cabaret costume, an Indian maiden dressed like a hoochie-koochie dancer. To Belva’s right, in a picture all his own, sat Mr. Dean O’Banion. Three assistant state’s attorneys stood around him. Everyone looked happy to see one another. The caption: “O’Banion surrenders and denies he ever knew Duffy.”14
Belva went to jail.
Beulah told three different stories at three different times about how—and why—Harry ended up dead, in her apartment. She told her first story after Al—and then the police—arrived. She told her second story after she was interrogated; she told her third when she took the stand in her own defense. A police stenographer had written down Beulah’s first two stories as she told them. The prosecutor read the transcripts aloud at her trial. Beulah told her third story—in her own, little-girl, trembly, southern voice—to the jury. She shed tears and cast sorrowful glances as she spoke. The judge declared that all three of Beulah’s stories were admissible.
Beulah’s first version of events was:
Harry invited himself over. She hardly knew him. She was “greatly surprised” when he walked in, took off his hat and coat, and put his arms around her. “He had a look in his eyes. ‘Gee, Ann. I’m crazy about you,’ ” Harry said. “He tried to make me love him.”15 Beulah begged Harry to leave; he refused; she fled to the bedroom; he followed. Al kept a .38 under his pillow. She reached for it, and, as Harry approached her, she closed her eyes and fired.16
“But he was shot in the back,” police said.
They took Beulah to the station, let her calm down, and sober up. Then, two assistant state’s attorneys and a police captain took Beulah back to her apartment. “What about the blood on the phonograph record? What about the wine and gin bottles and the empty glasses? How come Kronstadt was shot in the back?”
Out came version No. 2:
“You’re right,” said Beulah. “I haven’t been telling the truth. . . . I’d been fooling around with Harry for two months. This morning—as soon as my husband left for work—Harry called me up. I told him I wouldn’t be home, but he came over anyway.”17
Beulah gave Harry money to buy some moonshine. He came back with it after lunch. Half a gallon of it. He was already a little drunk. Beulah told him to leave. He said he would—but first they had to have a little drink. Beulah put on a record. A foxtrot called “Hula Lou.” “Hula Lou has more sweeties than a dog has fleas.”18 “We sat in the flat for quite a while, drinking,” Beulah said. “Then I said, in a joking way, that I was going to quit him. We had an argument. . . . I heard he’d been in jail and I asked him about it. He said he had. I told him he’d always told me he had a lot of money. . . . He jumped up. He said, ‘To hell with you.’ I told him he was a jail bird and didn’t have any money. . . . He said he was through with me and began to put on his coat. When I saw that he meant what he said, my mind went into a whirl and I shot him. Then I started to play the record again. I was nervous, you see.”19
Four hours passed.
Just before five, Beulah called Al at work. “I shot a man, Albert. He tried to make love to me.” Al rushed home. Harry wasn’t quite dead yet. Al called the police. Beulah tried to stop him. A desk sergeant named O’Grady answered the phone. Beulah heard O’Grady’s voice; she grabbed the phone and shrieked, “I just killed my husband.” Harry died thirty minutes later.
Admirers began sending Beulah presents in jail. Flowers, a good steak dinner, a few marriage proposals. Someone even bought her a pair of criminal defense lawyers—a matched set, William Scott and his partner, W. W. O’Brien. At Beulah’s inquest, O’Brien outlined the story that Beulah would later tell jurors: Mrs. Annan and Mr. Kronstadt were in the bedroom when they started to argue. In fact, they were sitting on the bed. Both noticed Albert’s .38 under the pillow. Mr. Kronstadt went for it; Mrs. Annan was quicker. Mr. Kronstadt stood up to leave. Mrs. Annan shot him in the back. “Both went for the gun,” said Mr. O’Brien. “Both sprang for it.”20
Belva was waiting for Beulah when she walked into jail.
So were Elizabeth Unkafer and Sabella Crudelli.
Mrs. Unkafer had just been sentenced to life for killing a streetcar conductor named Sam Belchoff. Belchoff had made the mistake of telling Mrs. Unkafer—while he was sitting in Mrs. Unkafer’s bed—that he was “through with her.” Mrs. Unkafer’s attorneys claimed that she had a “subnormal mind” due to “a social disease.” During her trial, Mrs. Unkafer had talked and mumbled to herself. She hated the way her lawyers described her. “Think I’m going to say I’m crazy? Not much!”
Beulah and Belva tried to ignore her. Mrs. Unkafer didn’t care if they did or not. “If I was crazy,” she said, “they’d have locked me up with some that are worse than I am—no telling what would have happened! I wanted them to shoot me! At State and Madison. Why not? Make a big day of it. . . . Give everyone a front row seat. They gave me life instead.”21
Sabella Nitti Crudelli didn’t talk as much as Mrs. Unkafer. She didn’t know as much English. She and her husband, Peter Crudelli, had both been sentenced to hang, then been granted new trials. Mrs. Crudelli had originally been married to a farmer named Frank Nitti. Peter Crudelli had been Frank’s hired hand. Peter and Sabella had fallen in love, then plotted to kill Frank. Peter had beat Frank to death with a hammer, then he and Sabella had chopped Frank into pieces and thrown them in a river.22 The Illinois Supreme Court decided that there hadn’t been enough evidence to convict the Crudellis.
Sabella knew all about Belva and Beulah. She didn’t think either of them would go to prison. She wasn’t so sure about herself. “Me-choke,” Sabella said. “Me-no gun, no shoot. Me here over a year.”23
Neither Beulah nor Belva stayed in jail very long. Beulah went free one month after she’d killed Harry. Belva walked out of court three months after she shot Walter.
When Belva went on trial, her attorneys decided that silence was their best policy. Since Belva was the only witness—and since Belva really, truly couldn’t remember anything—why complicate matters? Belva’s lawyers made no opening statements, called no witnesses, made no closing arguments. They did, however, make a motion of nolle prosse: they contended—out of the hearing of the jury—that the state had no case. Said the judge: “I haven’t the power to tell the State’s Attorney24 what to do, and therefore deny the motion. But, if the jury should bring a verdict of guilty, I am confident the Supreme Court will reverse the decision, as the evidence is circumstantial: strong enough to arouse suspicion of guilt—but not enough to convict.”25
When Beulah took the stand in her own defense, she added to the story her lawyer, Mr. O’Brien, had told at the inquest: When she and Harry had both reached for the gun, she was fighting to save not just her own life—but the life of her unborn child. She’d told Harry about her “delicate condition” when he came over carrying the liquor. She’d told him—but it hadn’t made a bit of difference to him. She had to shoot Harry—to protect herself and her baby.
Beulah divorced Al in July 1926. She said he’d left her the day she was acquitted.
The day Belva was acquitted, she announced that she and William planned to marry again. “Married him once and that was annulled; married him again and got a divorce; third time’s the charm!”26 The Gaertners’ third marriage lasted eighteen months. In August 1926, William sued for divorce. He said Belva had started drinking again—heavily. He’d reproached her; she’d hit him over the head with a mirror. A few months later, he caught her with another man. She threatened to kill him. William locked himself in his room, then moved out of the house. The judge granted William a divorce.
Six months after Beulah divorced Al, she met a man named Edward Harlib at a party. Ed had been a boxer; he and his brother owned garages. Edward’s family knew who Beulah was and didn’t want him to marry her. The two eloped to Crown Point, Indiana, and were married in January 1927. Edward’s brother, Peter, said Edward was still married to his first wife. Edward and Beulah went to Los Angeles for their honeymoon. Five months after Beulah married Edward, she sued him for divorce. She claimed cruelty—and bigamy. She settled for $5,000 alimony. (As noted: equivalent to ten times that amount today.)
Beulah died ten months later. She gave her name as Dorothy Stevens (Stevens was the name of her first husband) when she checked herself into the Chicago Fresh Air Sanitorium. She had tuberculosis. Beulah’s mother accompanied her body back to Kentucky, where she was buried not far from her family home in Owensboro.
Al moved to Louisville after he left Beulah. Louisville was where he and Beulah had first met. Al got married again—to a woman named Otilla Schaefer. Louisville police arrested Al in October 1934; they charged him with killing Otilla. Al denied it. He said he and Otilla had been home, all day, drinking. He said he went out on an errand; when he came home, Otilla was sick. He called two doctors. Otilla died an hour later. The coroner performed an autopsy. Otilla had been beaten to death.