The Girls of Murder City

April 12, 2010
This jaunty retrospective of two Jazz Age trials introduces us to the real-life originals of the killer ladies of the musical Chicago
—and to the society that adored them. Journalist Perry (The Sixteenth Minute: Life in the Aftermath of Fame
) revisits the 1924 cases of Belva Gaertner, a swanky divorcée, and Beulah Annan, a beautiful married woman, both accused of shooting their lovers to death. They were the most photogenic on Cook County jail’s “Murderess’ Row” of defendants in a spate of woman-on-man killings that inflamed the press and captivated a public grown bored with gangland murders. (Perry’s third heroine is skeptical female reporter Maurine Watkins, who bemoaned the inability of all-male Chicago juries to convict killers with pretty faces.) The author gives an entertaining, wised-up rundown of the cases and the surrounding media hoopla, which the defendants and their lawyers cannily manipulated. (Annan hired a fashion consultant for court appearances and falsely declared herself pregnant to win sympathy.) Beneath the sensationalism, Perry finds anxieties about changing sex roles as feisty flappers and aggressive career women barged into public consciousness; his savvy, flamboyant social history illuminates a dawning age of celebrity culture. Photos.

May 1, 2010
A chronicle of the wild spring and summer of 1924, when Chicago was afflicted with a seeming epidemic of female murderers.

The hit Broadway play Chicago has its roots in the night of March 12, 1924, when Belva Gaertner was arrested for drunkenly shooting her boyfriend Walter Law. The daily newspapers instantly seized on the story in part because Gaertner was the ex-wife of a well-known industrialist, but also because a female killer was an appealing target for Prohibition-era conservatism. The moralizing only intensified a month later, when Beulah Annan stood accused of shooting her lover—dancing to a jazz record while his body lay cold, some reported—and a young bohemian named Wanda Stopa was on the run from authorities for killing a man in jealous fury. Oregonian online features editor Perry (co-author: The Sixteenth Minute: Life in the Aftermath of Fame, 2005) provides consistently entertaining back stories on these women and others in the Cook County Jail, but more interesting is the author's exploration of the sexist attitudes that turned the women on"Murderess' Row" into odd celebrities. (One female inmate was likely saved from hanging simply by making herself look more attractive at a court appearance.) Perry also captures the hypercompetitive newspaper culture that fueled the alleged trend, following the cases through the eyes of Chicago Tribune reporter Maurine Watkins. Breaking through a sexist newsroom culture to deliver slyly satirical—if not entirely accurate—dispatches on the women's trials, Watkins occasionally pushed the bounds of journalistic integrity to argue that Gaertner and Annan were guilty. After both were acquitted and public interest moved elsewhere, she abandoned journalism to skewer scandal-sheet culture in her play Chicago. In a similar manner, Perry critiques the newspapers for being ruthlessly eager to play loose with facts and reduce the women to news fodder. But his prose sometimes echoes the papers' pulpy tone, reflecting his comment in the endnotes that the media tended to overdramatize events.

A lively history, though better at describing media sensationalism than the women who were caught up in its whirlwind.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from June 1, 2010
Maurine Watkins, a girl reporter with the Chicago Tribune in the 1920s, was the first to cover the sensational story of two Jazz Age women who killed their men with the insouciance they gave to filing their nails or rolling their stockings. Decades later, Bob Fosse made the pair of stylish killers internationally famous through his hit musical Chicago. In this account, journalist Perry illuminates both the murderesses who held court at Cook County Jail and the newspapers writers who showcased them. This is as much a book about journalism and social history as it is about crime. Perry re-creates the world of Front Page with vivid details from the era, including the workings of the Linotype machine, which allowed papers to expand from only a few pages in the late nineteenth century to several multipage editions a day. In Chicago, six papers engaged in vicious competition. At the center of the fray were the headling-grabbing stories, often concerning crimeand especially women committing murder, a phenomenon that increased 400 percent in 40 years. We follow shy Maurine Watkins, who left graduate school in classics at Radcliffe, as she is hired by the Tribune on a fluke and then goes on to get in-depth interviews and complete trial coverage of Beautiful Beulah Annan and Stylish Belva Gaertner, the models for Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly. This is a well-researched, fast-paced story behind the story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)