They Both Reached for the Gun: Beulah Annan, Maurine Watkins and the Trial That Became Chicago

A tawdry backstreet affair; a drunken lover's quarrel raging inside an arid and shabby South Side Chicago flat on a weekday afternoon in April 1924, and the sudden discharge of a Smith & Wesson revolver ended the life of Harry Kalsted, a no-account ex-con and child abandoner from Minnesota. The shooter, Beulah Mae Annan, a married woman of vivacious tendency born just outside of Owensboro, Kentucky, nestled deep in the state's bourbon distillery region delivered the fatal shot, or did she?In a state of intoxication and in deep panic gazing upon the dead man, Beulah elected to call her cuckolded husband, Al Annan, preferring to avoid the police for the moment. Beulah waited four hours to place her desperate call to Annan admitting to what she had done. During those four hours, she frantically paced the room, serenaded by records spinning on her Victrola while calculating the means to hide her culpability. Under intense police questioning, Annan initially said she did not know how it happened but then asserted that Kalsted was just a work acquaintance stopping by for a casual visit, nothing more.He made improper advances, she said, with threatening moves against her inside the bedroom. Annan explained she had killed Kalsted because of her fear of becoming a rape victim. Jaded police reporters and detectives were skeptical of her alibi. After all, it seemed quite clear to them that the couple were engaged in an extramarital affair. But who actually reached for the gun, the enraged lover or Beulah? That was a puzzlement becoming the main focus of the criminal trial to follow.On any given day, Chicago's sensationalistic tabloid press filled their pages with lured stories like this one. Front-page, fast-breaking crime accounts printed in blazing red thirty-six-point-type headlines sold later-afternoon, rush-hour, evening newspapers to a voyeuristic public eager to digest every salacious detail. In April 1924, as it so happened, there had been a recent spate of killings of men by angry wives and jilted girlfriends. Some of these crimes resulted from barbarous physical assaults committed by violent men, others were borne out of jealousy, heat of the moment passion, desperation, or petty drunken quarrels. The Kalsted–Annan affray seemed hardly remarkable or even noteworthy in the daily grind of so many of these garden-variety big city homicides.If not for the ambitious motivations of Kentucky-born playwright and screenwriter Maurine Dallas Watkins covering courthouse trials for the Chicago Tribune at the dawn of her journalistic career, the Annan–Kalsted affray would not be remembered today or made worthy of any further consideration.Watkins detected an old and familiar pattern to the outcome of Cook County criminal trials (and similar trials conducted on a national level) involving accused murderesses. Chivalrous all-male juries, with rare exception, simply refused to convict women of capital murder with execution as a likely outcome. Time after time, female killers standing before the bar of justice who had seemingly been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in courtroom deliberation were adjudged innocent and let go or sentenced to a reduced charge.In Illinois state history, only two women paid the supreme price: thirty-seven-year-old Marie Katten Porter of Belleville for the 1937 murder of her brother William during an insurance swindle and Elizabeth “Betsey” Reed of Lawrenceville in 1845 after being found guilty of poisoning her husband, John King.Across the US, public attitudes toward the execution of women had softened since the harsh proceedings against alleged coconspirator Mary Surratt for her role in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Her conviction resulted in a gallows hanging. The memory of Surratt lived on in the minds of many a sympathetic male juror through the coming generations.Watkins—cynical, unwavering, and controversial—decried an apparent judicial double standard based on sex from a feminist perspective. She noted with disdain the special jailhouse privileges accorded to accused murderesses, particularly if the accused were young, glamorous, personable, and of good humor. Beulah Annan, just twenty-three at the time, was exceptionally beautiful and evoked strong sympathy from her admirers in the Cook County Jail and in the press. Doubts about her guilt swirled as the trial approached.In contrast, and at the same time, inmate Sabella Nitti-Crudelle, an uneducated, vulgar, and defiant Italian immigrant lacking social refinements, glamor, and beauty occupied a cell along “murderesses row.” A jury of men convicted her and her second husband of capital crime in 1923 for the murder of her first husband. Judge Joseph David unsparingly imposed a sentence of death.Nitti-Crudelle's shabby appearance and rough manner had soured the jury. On the brink of becoming the first Cook County woman to perish on the gallows, Nitti-Crudelle was granted a second trial and a reprieve a year later but only after she had cleaned up her appearance, received a makeover, and finally appeared presentable to the court. In other words, be pretty, be feminine, and walk free. Collectively, these cases were a powerful exposure of prevailing sexism in the judicial system.Watkins was unequivocal. She shared no such feelings of pity or sympathy for Annan, Nitti-Crudelle, or any of the other inmates of murderesses row including the stylish ex-cabaret singer Belva Gaertner who had murdered her lover inside a parked automobile and Katherine “Kitty Malm” Baluk who swore to all that she had never carried a gun.In the belief that the prosecution had not adequately proven its case against Annan, with the evidence described as ambiguous, the accused was granted acquittal. Watkins, a young woman from the southern Bible Belt shrouded with deep religious convictions—quite an incongruent anomaly in the roistering, gin-fueled backdrop of corrupt, crime-ridden 1920s Chicago, was indignant. This was, after all, the era of the front pages of newspapers spotlighting a cast of alcohol-soaked characters and smart aleck male reporters who packed a fifth of hooch inside their desk drawers.Watkins stern disapproval of such loose behavior swirling about her is evident in her press coverage. And she never forgot about this case or lost track of the murderesses. She fictionalized them in her 1926 stage play Chicago—a personal censorship, albeit written with low-brow, tongue-in-cheek humor against a system and occurrences she had personally observed inside the jail and the courtroom.The semifictionalized story of Annan and the other murderesses portrayed on both stage and celluloid is a farcical yarn filled with wit, satire, and scathing mockery of Windy City jurisprudence. Cecil B. DeMille lensed a1927 silent film based on the Watkins play, with a comedic remake, Roxie Hart, coming in 1942. Rob Marshall's successful 2002 Hollywood musical Chicago brought it all back to life, forever memorializing a shabby incident and an ugly crime occurring in an amoral period of history.Mr. Cosgrove, perhaps overly sympathetic to Beulah Annan, although her insistence the shooting was a matter of self-defense could never be substantiated (or fully believed), castigates Watkins and her fellow front pagers for perpetuating damaging falsehoods and the “tendency of the press to turn murder trials into entertainment events” (p. 168).Murder, sex, sin, and scandal sold newspapers of the sensational tabloid variety and always have. Beat writers and tabloid city editors were not of the same frame of mind as New York Times or Chicago Tribune editorialists focused on foreign wars, economics, and politics. Not their job. Their task was to play it up for all it was worth; thus, exaggeration, invented quotes, florid description and made-up scenarios were common. Were Chicago readers of that era perceptive or intuitive enough to understand that? As Cosgrove suggests, it amounted to public entertainment—a real-life stage play.The author expresses strong disdain for Watkins and her colleagues as they “targeted the impotent—insignificant women whose social influence was nil, and ordinary citizens who answered the call to jury duty” (p. 169). Can an accused killer rightfully or wrongfully be described as insignificant in light of the presentation of compelling facts suggesting otherwise, or veniremen seated in the jury box choosing sympathy over evidence? These are hard questions he has left for readers to ponder.Cosgrove devoted considerable investigative time probing dusty police records and long forgotten and previously hidden aspects of the case. His exhaustive research fortifies the essential story with fascinating interviews and anecdotes tapped from Annan family history and the peripheral characters elevating the book to much more than a simple tabloid retelling.The author of many books, most recently Fortune and Faith in Old Chicago: A Dual Biography of Mayor Augustus Garrett and Seminary Founder Eliza Clark Garrett, Cosgrove has brought forth a fascinating and detailed glimpse of a frivolous decade adding to a lengthening historiography of 1920s misdeeds.