Belva gaertner biography books
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1924—Beulah Annan & Belva Gaertner
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Chicago Tribune reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins (July 27, 1896 – August 10, 1969) covered these two murder cases in order to provide a “woman’s angle.” She left the Tribune after only six months and made millions on a play she wrote based on these two cases.
One more thing. She also snuck into Bobby Frank’s funeral and interviewed Leopold and Loeb just hours before they confessed.
Beulah Annan
Date of Crime: April 3, 1924
Date of Verdict: May 24, 1924
Chicago Tribune April 4, 1924
Beulah May ytterligare, the 23 year old wife who shot “the other man” Thursday afternoon to the tune of her husband’s phonograph, was held to the grand jury yesterday afternoon by a coroner’s jury, which charged her with the murder of Harry Kalstedt. Assisting State’s Attorneys Bert Cronson, Roy Wood, and William McLaughlin are preparing to rush the case to an early rättegång, a
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He Had It Coming: Four Murderous Women and the Reporter Who Immortalized Their Stories
Beulah Annan confessed to shooting her lover during a rendezvous at her apartment, while her husband was at work. It was self-defense, she said, even though he’d been shot in the back. The body of Belva Gaertner’s boyfriend was found slumped in the driver’s seat of her bil outside her home; he had been shot with her revolver, and her clothes were covered in blood. When the police showed up, she claimed she had no idea what had happened — she had been so drunk she’d blacked out.
In back-to-back trials in Chicago in the spring of 1924, both women were acquitted of murder. “A jury isn’t blind,” a female inmate facing a murder trial of her own told Chicago Tribune reporter Maurine Watkins, “and a pretty woman’s never been convicted in Cook County.”
If the crimes of Beulah and Belva sound familiar, that’s because Watkins transfo
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Chicago
In 1924, the murder trials of Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner shocked the world, providing the real-life inspiration for Maurine Watkins’s unforgettable characters, Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly. Now, a century later, this reissue of Watkins’s play offers a fresh look at the origins of the story that has since become a household name.
From the silent film Chicago produced by Cecil B. DeMille in 1927 to the 1942 film Roxie Hart starring Ginger Rogers and the Broadway sensation created by Bob Fosse, Fred Ebb, and John Kander, this play has continuously evolved. It even inspired the 2002 Oscar-winning film Chicago starring Renée Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Richard Gere. But until recently, as editor Thomas H. Pauly writes in the book’s introduction, the real-life roots of the story were obscured.
While researching for a book on crime-as-entertainment during the 1920s, Pauly came across Maurine Watkins’s play, which was then out of print. After noticing similarit