On April 28, five weeks after Diamond Joe died:
Chicago (the movie) opened at the Granada and the Mabro in the city. Both theaters were equipped to show the newest talkies; both offered stage shows as well as movies; both bought big ads. Their ads had photographs of Phyllis Haver in her role as:
“Roxie Hart—Chicago’s most beautiful murderess . . . a provocative creature of treacherous kisses and whims and vamping ways . . . a shallow vagabond, fascinating but venomous as a serpent . . . a vixen wife who got away with murder and laughed at the law. She gloried in her notoriety as ‘the jazz slayer’ and laughed, unrepentant.”1
Chicago opened on Saturday. On Sunday, Red Hair, starring Clara Bow, opened in nearly a dozen other theaters in the city and the suburbs. (Bow was the Marilyn Monroe of her day; before movie audiences could hear Mae West make suggestive remarks, they could see Bow make them with her eyes and her smile.)
On Sunday night, more than two thousand people bought tickets to see Bow flirt with three middle-aged men (guardians of a younger man to whom Bow was actually attracted) on the screen of the Ritz Theater on Roosevelt Road in suburban Berwyn.2 The Ritz’s nine o’clock show had sold out, but dozens of people were still arriving, trying to buy tickets, as late as 9:15. A car—a new, flashy convertible—pulled up across the street; three young men jumped out and ran across to the ticket booth. The driver stayed at the wheel. Gertrude, the Ritz’s cashier, looked up. She and Pearl Eggleston had been talking about boyfriends. Trying to talk, despite the latecomers. Pearl had a new beau. Pearl was seventeen, an usherette, part time, visiting on her night off.
The young men ran straight at them. Gertrude knew what was coming: They’d try to sweet-talk her, wheedle their way in. They were good-looking, well dressed, drove a nice car. None of that mattered, though: they might be able to get past Gertrude, but not past Ernie, the doorman, or Mr. Bilba, the manager. Gertrude and Pearl watched as the young men charged the booth.
Gertrude was right about the guys not having tickets. They weren’t there to see the show, though. The guy in the gray suit had a sawed-off shotgun; the one in the overcoat had a .38; the one in the dark suit had a .45.
The one with the shotgun pointed it at Ernie Speizer’s head; the one with the .38 stepped to the back of the booth and pulled open the door. The one with the .45 stopped short and shoved his gun through the ticket window. Gertrude raised her hands; Pearl screamed; the .45 went off. The guy with the gun froze, then snapped out of it. He stepped to the back, swept the money Gertrude had been counting into a sack: $700. Mr. Bilba heard Pearl’s scream, heard the shot, came running from the lobby. Back in March, a gang had stuck up the Annetta Theater in Cicero. They stole $500. Mr. Bilba feared the worst.
The bullet from the .45 hit Gertrude’s cash register, ricocheted, then hit Pearl in the stomach. As Mr. Bilba came running, the guy with the shotgun fired both barrels at the theater’s doors. One of the loads just missed Mr. Bilba. The robbers ran back to their car. The driver made a U-turn; the car headed east. Back to Chicago. Pearl died thirty minutes later, in the hospital.
Heavily armed police from Oak Park, Berwyn, and Chicago searched the scene. Charles Levy, Berwyn’s chief, found a .45 casing on the sidewalk. A passerby remembered the car’s license plate—New York, 9-N-435. The next day, two Chicago motorcycle cops found the car, abandoned, in the badlands, southwest of the city’s limits. The car had been stolen in early April.
Berwyn’s City Council announced a $500 reward for information. Chicago’s City Council passed a resolution:
“Whereas the entire city is stunned with horror at the wanton and cold blooded slaying of Miss Pearl Eggleston, the Commissioner of Police is hereby authorized to offer a reward of $500 for her slayers.”3
Berwyn’s mayor wasn’t mollified. “I wish they’d keep their crooks in Chicago,”4 he said. Berwyn was a peaceful place. Everyone had jobs; everyone owned their own homes. New brick bungalows lined new streets. People worked hard, went to Mass on Sunday, went to the movies Sunday night. “The fact that they found the slayer’s car where they did shows where the slayers came from.”5 Chicago—and Cicero—were the sinkholes and fleshpots to the east. If people in Chicago wanted to watch movies about themselves killing each other—let them. People in Berwyn didn’t live that way.
Hundreds of mourners came to Pearl’s funeral. The Reverend Robert Devine spoke to the crowd: “If it were possible that the murder of this innocent girl could result in a clean-up that would make similar crimes impossible, then her death would not be in vain. . . . But I fear that this is impossible. Lawlessness is too firmly rooted.”6 Police from Berwyn and Oak Park and Cicero—even police from Chicago—walked in ranks as escorts to Pearl’s hearse. Bloodletting in the papers, bloodletting in the movies, now bloodletting on Sunday, in a place like Berwyn.
Two weeks passed. A Berwyn police informant overheard two young men arguing in a west-side pool hall in Chicago. The two had played a game; the loser couldn’t pay up. The winner shouted at him: “What have you done with the money from that last job?!”7 The pool hall was a hangout for small-time thieves. The father and son who ran the place loaned weapons to customers for a percentage. The informant knew the two who’d been arguing; he also knew their friends, knew their names, knew their addresses. Reward money for Pearl’s killers had reached $3,900. The informant contacted a Berwyn police lieutenant.
The lieutenant contacted the Chicago police sergeant who’d been assigned Pearl’s case. The lieutenant and the sergeant went looking for the young men from the pool hall.
First they arrested a young car thief named Stanley Thomas, then they arrested two of Thomas’s friends—another car thief named Albert Mas and a Polish immigrant named Stanley Durmaj. Durmaj was a semipro baseball player. An out-of-work semipro baseball player.
Thomas wouldn’t talk. Neither would Mas.
Durmaj did. He told the police everything—including the name of their driver, a young man named John Tulacz who went by the name of Tulip. When the lieutenant and the sergeant went to the pool hall to arrest Tulip, he jumped out a back window and ran.
“I didn’t mean to kill her,” Durmaj said. Shooting the girl had been an accident. He’d never handled a .45 before. Never owned one. He and Mas got their guns from the pool hall.
“I was broke and needed money,” Durmaj said. He hung his head. “I’d been out of a job for some time. I was riding along with a friend of mine . . . when we met Thomas and Mas. They told me they were stick-up men. They asked me if I’d like to join them. . . . We pulled some ordinary stick-ups . . . then we stepped out in a real job. We held up the Annetta in Cicero. It looked like soft money—so we decided to rob the Ritz.
“Thomas had a shotgun. We needed more guns so we went to the pool hall on West 23rd. It was run by the father of a fellow we knew. We borrowed two revolvers . . . a .38 and a .45 Army gun. . . . Thomas stole an automobile for us. . . .
“Something went wrong so we decided to wait. . . . We planned for two weeks before we finally did it. . . . We drove up to the front of the theater. . . . All of us were nervous. . . . At last we decided to get it over with. . . .”
As Durmaj spoke, he began to cry.
“I had my gun in my pocket. Thomas had a shotgun. I walked up to the cashier’s cage and shouted, ‘Stick ‘em up.’
“One of the girls screamed and I pulled the trigger—I didn’t know the gun was cocked. I saw her stagger. I didn’t mean to kill her. I stepped over her, grabbed the dough, then we beat it to the machine. . . . Later that night, we all got drunk.”8
Once Durmaj confessed, Thomas did. “You’ll find the shotgun I used. . . . behind a radiator in my room.”9 Mas was the last to talk. He told police how they’d spent hours wiping down the car they’d stolen, wiping it clean, so police didn’t have anything—not even fingerprints—to use against them.
“I read in the papers that we got $1,400,” Durmaj said. He wanted police to know the truth. “All we got was $700—which gave us only $175 apiece when we split to four ways. I hated knowing that I’d killed a girl and we didn’t get enough to make it worthwhile. I’m glad it’s over now. I suppose it means the chair for us.”10
The next morning a squad of Chicago police detectives took Durmaj, Thomas, and Mas to Berwyn and ordered them to reenact the crime while they watched. A crowd gathered.
News photographers took pictures. The marquee read:
PAT O MALLEY HOUSE OF SCANDAL
SAT + SUN VAUDEVILLE FIVE ACTS.11
Durmaj wept as he pushed his empty .45 through the cashier’s window. He wore a cloth cap and a college letter sweater. He looked gaunt. He pantomimed sweeping cash into an empty sack.
Thomas stood by the Ritz’s front door and clicked both triggers of his empty shotgun. He spun around; he and Durmaj ran back across the street. In the absence of Tulip, Mas sat at the wheel of an empty police car—ready to take his friends back to Chicago.
After the three of them did what they were told to do, police handcuffed them, then stood them against the wall in the lobby. Mr. Bilba, Ernie, and Gertrude identified them on the spot.
A Chicago coroner’s jury indicted them—and Tulip—the next day.
Stanley Thomas asked Attorney W. W. O’Brien to defend him and his friends. O’Brien had long ago recovered from the wounds he’d received when he’d been caught in the ambush that killed Hymie Weiss. O’Brien took the new case for nothing. The crime was sensational—the case was hopeless. Publicity was worth more than attorney fees. (Remember Beulah Annan?)
O’Brien and two experienced assistant state’s attorneys (Harold Levy and Emmet Byrne) spent a week arguing over prospective jurors. Five hundred men passed before them. Claims, excuses, and challenges resulted in only one man being accepted—tentatively—by both sides. Pearl’s death had been so upsetting, public opinion was so outraged—everyone had the same opinion: the defendants deserved to die.
O’Brien took advantage of the slow pace of jury selection: he advised his clients to plead guilty and “throw themselves on the mercy” of the court. Judge Comerford accepted their plea. He would be their jury and their judge.
O’Brien asked Comerford to sentence his clients to life. He argued that Pearl’s death had been an accident: Durmaj had intended only to frighten Gertrude by pointing his gun at her. The .45 had discharged accidentally. The bullet that killed Pearl had hit what was in front of it—not Pearl, not Gertrude, only Gertrude’s cash register. The bullet had broken apart; a ricochet had killed Pearl.
Comerford asked “state alienist” William Herschfield to interview and evaluate the four defendants (Herschfield had been doing such things since the Wanderer case in 1920 and the Leopold and Loeb trial in 1924). Herschfield concluded that:
Albert Mas “had a pronounced dementia praecox make-up. . . . Mas has such an air of bravado that he wouldn’t think of the consequences of his acts.”12 Mas was dangerous, but he wasn’t legally insane.
As to Stanley Thomas: Thomas may have been able to steal cars; he may even have had enough sense to hire attorney O’Brien—but in Dr. Herschfield’s opinion Thomas was “somewhat mentally defective.”
John Tulacz: “A definite psychopathic personality.” Tulip had a criminal mind.
Only Stanley Durmaj was “a normal boy.” (Durmaj was twenty.) According to Herschfield: Durmaj expressed remorse, showed depression. “His contrition was genuine. He entirely lacked the bravado frequently exhibited by the criminal type.”13
Judge Comerford delivered his verdict on July 23, 1928. “It was so quiet in the courtroom when the judge, in his black robe, ascended the bench that, despite the crowd that packed even the courtroom aisles, the ticking of the great clock above the jury bench could be heard. . . .
“The four boys14 were clean, neatly dressed, and sat motionless in their chairs, their panicky eyes focused on the judge as he began to speak. . . .
“ ‘The testimony shows,’ said Judge Comerford, ‘that the bullet fired by the defendant, Durmaj, struck the cash register and was deflected from it into the body of the deceased. . . .’
“There were tears in the eyes of two of the boys as the judge continued reading his sentence. . . .
“ ‘Witnesses for the state testified here that Durmaj said in their presence and in the presence of the prosecutor that at the time he fired the fatal shot he was very nervous and that the revolver went off accidentally when it touched the glass of the cashier’s cage and that he did not plan to shoot anyone. When Durmaj made these statements, he was in the custody of the police. He was alone so far as his friends were concerned. He did not have counsel. His grief was deep and sincere. . . .’
“Durmaj produced a handkerchief and wiped away tears that were slipping down his cheeks. The relatives of the boys, ranged along the inner railing, sat motionless, their eyes fixed on the judge whose voice sounded clearly throughout the courtroom. . . .
“ ‘The facts show clearly,’ said the judge, ‘that there was no cold blooded, deliberate intent to kill, and, while these facts are no defense to the charge of murder, they are proved circumstances of mitigation that I am duty bound to consider in fixing punishment.’ ”15
Comerford sentenced the four “boys” to life. The same sentence that Judge Caverly had imposed on Leopold and Loeb. (At what age do boys become men?)
“As Judge Comerford finished reading . . . the look of fear on Durmaj’s face gave way to one of relief. . . . Durmaj uttered a low ‘Thank you.’ ”16
So much for getting away with murder and laughing at the law.