Jailhouse Makeovers In 1924, two beautiful defendants accused of murder captured the attention of Chicagoans—and the sympathy of jurors. D O U G L A S P E R RY EDITOR’S NOTE: Chicago’s reputation as the stomping grounds of Al Capone and his associates during the Roaring
Twenties is legendary, but there is more to the city’s crime past than Scarface and his henchmen. During this era of increasing visibility for women, new attention focused on their activities in the courtroom as defendants, lawyers, and journalists. So riveting were the stories of two glamorous defendants that they inspired reporter Maurine Watkins to write the play Chicago. In addition, attorney Helen Ciersi learned that the more attractive a woman looked, the more likely she was to win an acquittal. Douglas Perry explores this latter aspect in this excerpt from his book The Girls of Murder City.
T
he Evening Post announced that April 21, the day after Easter, was “ladies day” in the Criminal Courts Building. The reason: Beulah Annan, Belva Gaertner, and Sabella Nitti were making an appearance before Judge William Lindsay. The courts building, two blocks north of the Chicago River, wasn’t anything special. It sulked at the corner of Dearborn and Austin like an emptied fireplug, square and uninspired, with the exception of an understated arched entrance at street level. But the three women didn’t get to come through that lovely entrance like everyone else; they walked across the “bridge of sighs”— an enclosed span facetiously named after the canal crossing in Venice that Byron made famous in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. This bridge connected the courthouse to the jail behind it, allowing for the safe, stressfree transport of prisoners to court. Judge Lindsay’s courtroom was usually sparsely populated with defendants’ family members, but this Monday morning found it packed with reporters and other observers, filling up the benches and spilling out into the marble-floored hall. There hadn’t been this kind of crowd since Kitty Malm’s trial in February. Surrounded by deputies, Beulah and Belva swept into the courtroom like exiled royals being returned to power. They knew what to expect. They’d read every line of copy about themselves and seemed to have internalized the coverage. The real reality—the hard jail beds, the daily chores, the skittering vermin, the threat of execution—had been replaced by the newspapers’ reality: the romance of their struggle. They now believed, like the newspapers, in innocent womanhood. They believed that modern life degraded values and that bootlegging was evil. 24 | Chicago History | Fall 2012
Above: Poster for the 1927 movie Chicago, based on Maurine Watkins’s play. Right: Kitty Malm and her daughter, Tootsie. Described as the “hardest woman to ever walk into a courtroom,” Malm’s murder conviction signaled a change in how all-male juries treated female defendants.