The Girls of Murder City Page 2

  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. Assuming 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 competition. “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 assignment, 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 fashion-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 shift. 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 classified 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 anchored 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-assistant 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 Hell, 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 competitive 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 trimming, 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 advertisements.

  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 “ambassadors 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 managin
g 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 attitudes. 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 fashionable 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 impassive, 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 dashing 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 prepubescence 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, Saturday. 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 prostitutes and police sergeants would be drawn to this lovely, petite 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 assigned 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 sex.” 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 sa
ved. 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.