Shared Reads: The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago

The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago by Douglas Perry (Viking, 2010) is a book that is really more than the sum of its parts. Ostensibly about accused murderesses Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, the raw material that would later be transformed into the characters Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly, and the reporter who was inspired by them, Maurine Watkins. In actuality the book captures a glittering moment in 1924 when six women’s life hung in the balance as they awaited trail in the Cook County Jail and a dozen Chicago newspapers, staffed for the first time with ambitious, modern, female reporters, competed fiercely for stories, doing whatever it took to secure a scoop and a coveted byline on the front page.

            Beulah Annan, 24, was the star, considered the “prettiest woman ever charged with murder in Chicago,” garnered loads of ink after killing her paramour in her family apartment. After she shot her man she put the jazz age record, Hula Lou, on the phonograph and then telephoned her husband at work. Belva Gaertner, 40, the “most stylish” woman in the Cook County Jail, was a former vaudeville performer who had already made headlines during a scandalous divorce from her wealthy industrialist husband, William Gaertner. She was accused of shooting and killing her married paramour after a drunken evening out and about.

            Illinois had been fairly notorious for its reluctance to convict women, no matter how weighted in favor of conviction the evidence might seem, but there were ominous signs on the horizon. While Belva Gaertner and Beulah Annan waited in jail. Two of their comrades, Katherine Malm, a gangster girl who acted as lookout in a fatal robbery, was convicted and sentenced to life, and Sabella Nitti, an immigrant woman who was convicted of conspiring with her illicit lover to murder her husband and sentenced to hang. Rounding out this cast of characters was Elizabeth Unkafer, held for the shooting death of her boyfriend, Lela Foster, who had shot and killed her husband. We also find the gorgeous, unstable, twenty-three year old Wanda Stopa, daughter of a respectable, Polish working-class family, the first “girl lawyer” to work in the State’s attorney’s office, shooting through the story like a comet. Wanda, who fancied herself a Bohemian, shot and killed an elderly workman who interfered with her attempt to kill the wife of her older, married, advertising executive boyfriend. Wanda then led police on a manhunt accompanied by screaming headlines before she took her own life at a Detroit hotel.

            Covering these trials was Maurine Watkins, beautiful in her own right, who came to Chicago by way of Radcliffe, Butler, Transylvania U and Crawfordsville, Indiana and walked right into the office of the city editor of the Chicago Tribune and talked herself into a job. Maurine joined a sisterhood of sorts with Genevieve Forbes of the Daily Tribune, Ione Quinby of the Evening Post and Sonia Lee of the American, all of whom specialized, for a time, in writing about female criminality.      

            For a while it was the Roaring Twenties personified with booze and flappers and a new freedom that women were determined to experience and Perry does a fine job in capturing that staccato tenor of the times.

            In sensational trials, both Belva Gaertner and Beulah Annan were found not guilty by their respective all-male juries but contrary to popular perception they did not go on to star in vaudeville either separately or as a team. Belva Gaertner remarried her wealthy ex-husband, who had remained smitten by his ex-wife and who bankrolled her defense, and then divorced him again. Beulah divorced her faithful husband after the baby she claimed to be carrying during her trial never materialized and married and divorced a boxer, her third husband, who beat her. She divorced the boxer and shortly thereafter she died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-seven. She is buried in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Utica, Daviess County, Kentucky.

            Maurine Watkins did not stay long in Chicago, or work long as a reporter. The fad for glamorizing female murderers came to a screeching halt with a crime that both fascinated and repulsed Chicago and gripped the imagination of the entire Nation – the murder of little Bobby Franks, son of retired millionaire industrialist Jacob Franks, by two individuals, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Leopold and Loeb were the teenage sons of equally wealthy Chicago families. Intellectually precocious, they fancied themselves Nietzschen Supermen determined to prove themselves beyond the pale of mere mortals by committing what they presumed would be the perfect crime. They were caught after Leopold’s distinctive eyeglasses were found at the scene of the murder and other evidence quickly fell into place. Richard Loeb’s father, a lawyer and Vice President at Sears & Roebuck, hired famed attorney Clarence Darrow to defend the pair. Against all odds Darrow saved the two from hanging and secured sentences of life in prison instead. Dickie Loeb met the letter of that punishment in 1936 after he was slashed 50 times in the shower with a straight razor by fellow prisoner James E. Day and died. Day claimed self-defense and was never charged with the killing of Loeb while Nathan Leopold was paroled to Puerto Rico where he died in 1971.     

            With Leopold and Loeb stepping into the spotlight murder in Chicago didn’t seem nearly as lighthearted as before and the female reporters who specialized in crimes committed by women were reassigned or walked away. It didn’t help that with Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner acquitted, Sabella Nitta and Kitty Malm in State Prison, and Wanda Stopa dead at her own hand, the only women left at the Cook County Jail were old and ethnic which didn’t hold the same allure as Jazz Babies on a Bender. After covering the Leopold and Loeb trial, Maurine Watkins was reassigned to write movie reviews.

During her time at Radcliffe she had taken a playwriting course from George Pierce Baker at Harvard. By the end of 1924 Professor Baker had moved on to the newly established Department of Drama at Yale and Watkins was percolating an idea for a play based on her experiences as a reporter. That play was Chicago and it became a smash hit.

Maurine Watkins was never able to replicate the stage success of Chicago. Soon she was off to Hollywood where she dabbled in screenplays and short stories before moving to Jacksonville, Florida and committing herself to Christian endeavors and raising scholarships for students wishing to pursue studies in the Greek language or the Bible. She died of lung cancer in 1969 at the age of seventy-three. Deeply disappointed in both the 1927 silent version of Chicago starring Phyllis Haver, and the 1942 Ginger Rogers vehicle, Roxie Hart, Watkins refused to license her play as a musical in her lifetime but in 1975 her estate sold the rights to Bob Fosse who turned it into a smash hit on Broadway starring Gwen Verdon as Roxie Hart and Chita Rivera as Velma Kelly. It ran for 936 performances plus a tour. Twenty years later it was revived to equally great acclaim and in 2002 a movie version of Chicago starring Catherine Zeta Jones as Velma and Renee Zellweger as Roxie won six of its twelve Oscar nominations.

Douglas Perry has written an engaging romp of a book with serious undertones touching on criminals and the culture of celebrity. Mr. Perry does include some photographs in his book but he has a mildly annoying habit of describing particular photos in great details and then not including those photos in the book. I also would have liked for him to have shown more thorough follow-through on all the women mentioned in the book but overall I found The Girls of Murder City to be a fast and enjoyable read that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to anyone interested in the era.
 - Laura Wilkerson