Prologue
Thursday, April 24, 1924
The most beautiful women in the city were murderers.
The radio said so. The newspapers, when they arrived, would surely say worse. Beulah Annan peered through the bars of cell 657 in the women's quarters of the Cook County Jail. She liked being called beautiful for the entire city to hear. She'd greedily consumed every word said and written about her, cut out and saved the best pictures. She took pride in the coverage.
But that was when she was the undisputed "prettiest murderess" in all of Cook County. Now everything had changed. She knew that today, for almost the first time since her arrest almost three weeks ago, there wouldn't be a picture of her in any of the newspapers. There was a new girl gunner on the scene, a gorgeous Polish girl named Wanda Stopa.
Depressed, Beulah chanced getting undressed. It was the middle of the day, but the stiff prison uniform made her skin itch, and the reporters weren't going to come for interviews now. They were all out chasing the new girl. Beulah sat on her bunk and listened. The cellblock was quiet, stagnant. On a normal day, the rest of the inmates would have gone to the recreation room after lunch to sing hymns. Beulah never joined them; she preferred to retreat to a solitary spot with the jail radio, which she'd claimed as her own. She listened to fox-trots. She liked to do as she pleased.
It was Belva Gaertner, "the most stylish" woman on the block, who had begun the daily hymn-singing ritual. That was back in March, the day after she staggered into jail, dead-eyed and elephant-tongued, too drunk -- or so she claimed -- to remember shooting her boyfriend in the head. None of the girls could fathom that stumblebum Belva now. On the bloody night of her arrival, it had taken the society divorcée only a few hours of sleep to regain her composure. The next day, she sat sidesaddle against the cell wall, one leg slung imperiously over the other, heavy-lidded eyes offering a strange, exuberant glint. Reporters crowded in on her, eager to hear what she had to say. This was the woman who, at her divorce trial four years before, had publicly admitted to using a horsewhip on her wealthy elderly husband during lovemaking. Had she hoped to make herself a widow before he could divorce her? Now you had to wonder.
"I'm feeling very well," Belva told the reporters. "Naturally I should prefer to receive you all in my own apartment; jails are such horrid places. But" -- she looked around and emitted a small laugh -- "one must make the best of such things."
And so one did. Belva's rehabilitation began right there, and it continued unabated to this day. Faith would see her through this ordeal, she told any reporter who passed by her cell. This terrible, unfortunate experience made her appreciate all the more the life she once had with her wonderful ex-husband -- solid, reliable William Gaertner, the millionaire scientist and businessman who had provided her with lawyers and was determined to marry her again, despite her newly proven skill with a revolver. He believed Belva had changed.
Excerpted from The Girls Of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers who Inspired Chicago by Douglas Press. Copyright 2010 by Douglas Press. Excerpted by permission of Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA).
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