Read The Girls of Murder City Online

Authors: Douglas Perry

Tags: #Biography, #History, #Non-Fiction

The Girls of Murder City (32 page)

BOOK: The Girls of Murder City
13.01Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

The proceedings dragged on through the afternoon and into the evening. Finally, McLaughlin called Roy Woods “as a rebuttal witness to refute Mrs. Annan’s testimony that he had promised her immunity if she would confess to him.” McLaughlin was counting on the authority typically attributed to a prosecutor to win the day for the state. He kept his questioning straightforward.

“Did you tell her it was no crime for her to shoot a man in her own house?”

“Most certainly not,” Woods said, leveling his gaze at the jury.

“Did you tell her that she couldn’t ‘frame’ anything with you?”

“I did,” he said, again with those eyes hard and steady.

The jury stared at Woods like cows. The recused prosecutor made a good witness—better than good. He was a clear-eyed, straight-backed American. He was completely believable. But the jurymen were tired, and they were having trouble concentrating on the witness. Out of the corner of their eyes, a half-turn to their left, they could see Beulah Annan leaning forward, her limpid gaze fixed dreamily on the men who would decide her fate. McLaughlin moved to obscure their view. He asked Woods to repeat himself.

15

Beautiful—but Not Dumb!

In his closing argument, Assistant State’s Attorney William McLaughlin concisely ran through the evidence he had presented over the preceding two days and then turned to the case the defense had put forward. Maurine, sitting in the front row, approved when the prosecutor “pointed out the weak points in [Beulah’s] story: that a woman should try to ‘soothe’ a man who was threatening to attack her by drinking with him; that he knew where the gun was—in a totally strange house; that he was shot in the back.”

“No woman living would have stayed in that apartment as long as she did with Kalstedt, constantly repelling his advances, as she says she did,” McLaughlin pronounced. “A woman who didn’t want him there would have run out of the apartment and yelled for help.” The jury, McLaughlin said, knew the truth. “You have seen that face, gentlemen. The defendant is not the kind of woman men would tell to go to hell. She probably had never heard that before and it angered her. That was why she went for the gun.”

Beulah, nervous now that her part in the drama was over, sat beside her lawyers during the state’s peroration, her head down, eyes closed. She remained calm, the
Daily Journal
’s reporter marveled, “while Assistant State’s Attorney McLaughlin trained the guns of the prosecution on her in his argument.” Beulah Annan had lied on the stand, McLaughlin kept insisting, working himself from calm summation into controlled anger. He told the jury that if they believed she lied at any point during her testimony, then they should discount everything she’d had to say on the stand.

McLaughlin appeared confident. He believed he had the evidence on his side and that juries had finally hardened to the wiles of women criminals. But he also recognized O’Brien and Stewart’s skills—and the power of Beulah’s testimony. With his last words to the jury, he attempted to shame them into doing the right thing. “The verdict is in your hands, and you must decide whether you will permit a woman to commit a crime and let her go because she is good-looking. You must decide whether you want to let another pretty woman go out and say ‘I got away with it!’ ” The prosecutor, the
American
noted, asked for no particular penalty.

When McLaughlin finished and turned from the jury, William Scott Stewart expelled a silent breath and rose. He was just thirty-four years old, but he possessed a stern physical dignity that gave him a mature, fatherly mien. There was a touch of John Brown in him, too, a mean, controlled righteousness, though he kept it well hidden, back behind his eyes, until just the moment he needed it. He knew Beulah had done well on the witness stand, better than he had expected, but he and O’Brien remained worried about those confessions admitted into evidence. That was where he immediately leveled his fire. He laid into McLaughlin for using “ ‘mental third-degree’ tactics” on Beulah on the night of the shooting, and he excoriated Roy Woods for withdrawing from the case, not mentioning that it was the defense’s challenge of Beulah’s statement before Woods that caused the prosecutor to withdraw. “The Supreme Court has censured Cook County officials for tolerating this sort of prosecution,” he said, “and these assistant state’s attorneys should be ashamed to play these tactics on the defendant and then withdraw from the prosecution in order to be able to testify against her.”

Beulah began to sob as Stewart went through just how the police and prosecutors had bullied those confessions out of her, providing an affecting backbeat to Stewart’s attack on the state’s “third-degree” tactics. When Stewart paused to gather his thoughts, Beulah tried to steady herself but couldn’t; her shoulders shook softly, and she dipped her head again. Were the tears a put-on? Maurine Watkins thought so. “Every defense counsel knows the value of tears,” the
Tribune
reporter opined later. Maurine couldn’t stand it: “She had played the Victrola while the man she murdered lay dying, she had laughed at the inquest, she had sat calm and composed while they read descriptions of the crime, but she broke down when she heard her attorney’s impassioned account of the suffering she had undergone at the hands of the police and assistant state’s attorneys, who questioned her statements.”

W. W. O’Brien took over from his partner to bring home the final message: that Beulah Annan was a virtuous, hardworking girl, a loving and decent wife who had been ruthlessly slandered so that the State’s Attorney’s Office could rack up a conviction. O’Brien was an expert sentimentalist, and once again it was too much for Beulah. Maurine reported wearily that the defendant was “overcome with emotion when Mr. O’Brien painted the picture of ‘this frail little girl, gentlemen, struggling with a drunken brute’—and the jury shook their heads in approbation and chewed their gum more energetically.” Stewart and O’Brien made a powerful team, the brain and the heart. McLaughlin, like Maurine Watkins, watched them in sullen silence, his eyes glazed and half-lidded.

At 8:30, Judge Lindsay sent the jury out to consult and reach a verdict. Many of the reporters in the courtroom headed for the phones, figuring a decision wouldn’t come that night. Beulah sat on her own in the building’s holding cell, her eyes closed much of the time. She didn’t want to talk to her lawyers or the matron watching over her. She remained quiet. At one point her shoulders heaved and she clasped her hands together to keep them from trembling. She took a deep breath and looked up at the concrete wall, her eyes dry. She’d willed away the panic. “Will this woman be convicted, or will her looks save her?” the
Decatur Review,
the voice of central Illinois, asked in its Sunday edition. “The prosecution was careful to ask jurors if they had scruples against convicting a good-looking woman. The twelve accepted answered they are not trembled with the weakness. But it may be that some of the twelve didn’t know, and that others of them lied for the woman.”

As it turned out, the question was no longer germane even before copies of the
Review
reached its readers’ hands. At 10:20 that night, the jury announced it had reached a decision. Usually a quick verdict meant good news for the prosecution, but McLaughlin didn’t look confident anymore. The lawyers in the case, McLaughlin and the recused Woods, Stewart and O’Brien, walked back into the courtroom. The seats behind them filled again. Then the jury filed in. The golden circle that had caressed Beulah Annan during her testimony was gone, and the room sat in gloomy half-light, a miasma of ragged emotion. Fear had crept into Beulah’s mind. It seemed to take forever for the crowd to settle and the jurymen to find their seats. An observer watched as Beulah “wrung her hands and shifted about uneasily in her chair.” She appeared to be holding back tears. The judge read the verdict to himself in silence, then passed the slip of paper to the bailiff. The bailiff read it quickly, loudly, seemingly before comprehending it.

“Not guilty!”

The syllables drifted away like smoke, followed by a gasp—and then a roar. Somebody yelled out something incomprehensible, joyous. Beulah remained expressionless when the verdict was announced, as if stunned, while her lawyers exchanged looks of satisfaction. Beulah’s husband, Al, was not nearly so stoical. He wept, his head in his arms.

The defendant climbed to her feet, her head still bare, a smile slipping across her face. The bailiff’s words had begun to settle on her: She was a free woman. She beamed at the jurymen and came around the defendant’s table. “Oh, I can’t thank you!” she exclaimed, reaching out, shaking the hand of the nearest juror. “You don’t know, you can’t know—but I felt sure that you would—” She moved from man to man, clasping hands with each, making eye contact, exchanging smiles. The handshakes, the words, weren’t enough to express what she was feeling. She kissed a juror hard on the cheek, and then another, holding his face with both hands. She didn’t care what anyone thought about it.

Al followed along behind his wife, beaming and shaking jurors’ hands, blessing them for their forthright work. Reporters rushed into the hall, fighting for the phones again. Photographers took their final shots, the flashbulbs lighting up the room in sudden crackling bursts, and then ran out, well aware that their printing presses across the river were being started up. The remaining spectators, the amateurs, didn’t know what to do now that it was over. They wandered in confusion, in ecstasy, in anger. They watched as Beulah agreed to pose for a photograph with the jury. She grasped the jury foreman’s hand in a manly shake. The other jurors gathered around, leaning in and smiling. The photograph taken, Beulah broke away from the jurors. The court fans then stepped aside in deference, and Beulah and Al Annan left the courtroom, marching happily into the hallway, arm in arm. They swept out the doors and into the night.

The
Tribune
’s headline writers, working on deadline, kept it simple. “Jury Finds Beulah Annan Is ‘Not Guilty,’ ” the front page stated on Sunday morning. The subhead added, “Self-Defense Plea Gains Her Freedom; Thanks Each Member After Verdict.” Maurine, of course, took a harder-edged approach in the story.

Beulah Annan, whose pursuit of wine, men, and jazz music was interrupted by her glibness with the trigger finger, was given freedom last night by her “beauty-proof ” jury. . . .
Mr. Annan, who has stood by her from the very night he found [Harry Kalstedt] lying dead in his bedroom, was almost overcome with joy and gratitude.
“I knew my wife would come through all right!” he said, proudly.
That seemed to be the consensus of opinion.
“Another pretty woman gone free!” was the only comment made by Assistant State’s Attorney William F. McLaughlin, who prosecuted the case alone after the withdrawal of Roy C. Woods, who was called as a material witness.
BOOK: The Girls of Murder City
13.01Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Professor by Charlotte Brontë
Remember Me by Jennifer Foor
Starting Over by Dobson, Marissa
Carthage by Oates, Joyce Carol
Stalking Darkness by J.L. Oiler
Trilby by Diana Palmer