The Girls of Murder City by Douglas Perry Read Free Book Online Page A

reporter Ishbel Ross. Editors demanded “complete reliability” on breaking news, Ross noted. “They can’t depend on the variable feminine mechanism.”
    Women on newspaper staffs who wanted to knock down such notions rarely got the opportunity. Despite the dramatic rise in “gun girls” and women bandits in Chicago, some of the city’s newspapers still wouldn’t send girl reporters out on nighttime assignments. “I would rather see my daughter starve than that she should ever have heard or seen what the women on my staff have been compelled to hear and see,” exclaimed one editor. Other outfits—like the Hearst papers—employed only sob sisters, who were allowed out after dark but whose charge was to write heartbreaking stories of personal tragedy, no matter what the circumstances.
    The Tribune, at least, wanted a true “feminine perspective” on women criminals. It sought strong, unsentimental women who could write crime stories “with a high moral tone.” To no one’s surprise, the paper had had limited success so far. One of its first hires was a young woman not long out of the University of Chicago. On her first assignment, Fanny Butcher interviewed a woman whose son had attempted to kill her. The fledgling reporter was so shaken by the events the woman described that she barely made it back to the local room without collapsing. Next, Butcher spent a week in the morals court, watching as men and women were arraigned on prostitution and related charges. She had to listen, she said, “to the intimate details of sexual intercourse, abnormal as well as normal, of amounts paid and demanded as refund by dissatisfied customers, of friskings during lovemaking, and of young girls hounded by procurers. I went home every night and promptly lost whatever dinner I had been able to get down (I weighed ninety-eight pounds when it was over).” Butcher wasn’t able to take it, just as the Tribune ’s managing editor, Teddy Beck, had foreseen. He sent her to women’s features to save her from having to write any more “tales of depravity.”
    Maurine was certainly aware of the widespread doubts about her gender’s ability to cut it under pressure, but she didn’t have time to worry about perceptions. Knowing that a replate would be necessary for a final street edition, she began to write as soon as she had the bare-bones facts. She was so rushed that she didn’t even get all of those facts right. She called Belva by her popular nickname, her old stage name, and misspelled her first husband’s surname. She called the dead man Robert, instead of Walter. She misnamed the café where Belva and Walter had sat drinking. Nevertheless, she had a feel for the story. She knew it was leading somewhere good. She wrote:
    Mrs. Belle Brown Overbeck Gaertner, a handsome divorcee of numerous experiences with divorce publicity, was arrested at an early hour this morning after the police had found the dead body of Robert Law, an automobile salesman, in her automobile.
    Law had been shot through the head. His body was found slumped down at the steering wheel of Mrs. Gaertner’s Nash sedan, a short distance from the entrance to Mrs. Gaertner’s home, 4809 Forrestville avenue. On the floor of the automobile was found an automatic pistol from which three shots had been fired, and a bottle of gin. . . .
    From the license number of the automobile Mrs. Gaertner’s name and address were found. The police went to her apartment at 4809 Forrestville avenue and found Mrs. Gaertner hysterically pacing the floor. She readily admitted she had been with Law, but steadfastly denied she knew anything of the manner of his death. . . . She finally admitted the gun was hers, saying she always carried it, because of her fear of robbers. When pressed concerning the actual shooting, she answered all queries with:
    “I don’t know, I was drunk.”
    Maurine, probably nervous about how her first big story would be received by the copyreaders, reined in