Kitty Malm” and should receive the same treatment from a jury. But the Tribune stated the situation bluntly: Katherine Malm was “the only really young woman who’s ever gone over the road”—that is, been convicted of murder. And the reason was that she “wasn’t—well—quite ‘refined.’ ” A respectable lady who shot her husband or boyfriend, on the other hand, a woman like Belva Gaertner, still didn’t scare men: She was a romantic figure, a representation of how much women in general, with their overflowing emotions, loved and needed their men. “My experience makes me know how unreasonable men can be and makes me give the woman every advantage of the doubt,” said one man interviewed about the rash of women shooting their men in Cook County.
It could all be explained through simple biology, newspaper readers were told in the aftermath of the conviction. Kitty Malm—and, needless to say, Sabella Nitti—was not like ordinary, decent women. You could tell simply by looking at her. A woman prone to crime and violence had a “broad nose and cheekbones, full chin and lips, contracted upper frontal skull development and prominent bulging development of the forehead just over the eyes and nose.” That was the conclusion of noted phrenologist Dr. James M. Fitzgerald. His description tended to fit ethnic women more than Anglo women, but the doctor was a little subtler than that in his analysis. Asked by newspapers to examine photographs of murderous women, Fitzgerald insisted that they “all have broad heads. You can put it down as a basic principle that the broad-headed animals eat the narrow-headed ones. . . . All these women are alike in having single-track minds, with imperfect comprehension of consequences. They are ‘show me’ people who have to experience to understand, and the jails are full of this type. Food and sexual interests make a strong appeal to them.”
So which was Belva Gaertner: a broad-headed animal or a narrow-headed one? Being a respectable lady, she planned on keeping a hat on in court, but she knew her life likely depended on her ability to shape the answer to that question, to make men—both jurors and reporters—see what she wanted them to see.
5
No Sweetheart in the World Is Worth Killing
Maurine’s desk sat on the east side of the local room, squeezed between the photo department and the file room. A battered typewriter, a castoff from another reporter, came with it. If she needed anything else, she could call out to a copyboy, though she didn’t like to raise her voice. Genevieve Forbes enjoyed a desk in a more central location, within easy sight of Robert Lee, who handed out the most important assignments. Forbes would thump in and out of the room without a glance toward her junior colleague.
Maurine could hardly have expected anything else from Forbes. Only a handful of girl reporters covered crime in Chicago, and none did so exclusively. This did not engender feelings of sisterhood or cliquishness among them. Being the best female police reporter in a newsroom carried very little cachet, which meant being second best might be cause for transfer to the fashions beat.
Besides, Forbes, thirty years old and unmarried, had some reason for jealousy. The paper’s star reporters, the men who always got the stories Forbes wanted, no longer walked straight through the center of the room. They meandered, weaving their way around to the far corner, where they paused to tie a shoe or laugh at a joke they’d just remembered. Maurine was “so lovely to look at that the men in the local room managed to have to walk by her desk, and of course stop for a cheery word,” observed Fanny Butcher, who worked in the adjacent Sunday room. Butcher amused herself day after day by watching men bump into each other as they looked for something to do near the new girl reporter. Maurine tried to ignore the hovering men, but that rarely discouraged them. If she were tapping away on her
It could all be explained through simple biology, newspaper readers were told in the aftermath of the conviction. Kitty Malm—and, needless to say, Sabella Nitti—was not like ordinary, decent women. You could tell simply by looking at her. A woman prone to crime and violence had a “broad nose and cheekbones, full chin and lips, contracted upper frontal skull development and prominent bulging development of the forehead just over the eyes and nose.” That was the conclusion of noted phrenologist Dr. James M. Fitzgerald. His description tended to fit ethnic women more than Anglo women, but the doctor was a little subtler than that in his analysis. Asked by newspapers to examine photographs of murderous women, Fitzgerald insisted that they “all have broad heads. You can put it down as a basic principle that the broad-headed animals eat the narrow-headed ones. . . . All these women are alike in having single-track minds, with imperfect comprehension of consequences. They are ‘show me’ people who have to experience to understand, and the jails are full of this type. Food and sexual interests make a strong appeal to them.”
So which was Belva Gaertner: a broad-headed animal or a narrow-headed one? Being a respectable lady, she planned on keeping a hat on in court, but she knew her life likely depended on her ability to shape the answer to that question, to make men—both jurors and reporters—see what she wanted them to see.
5
No Sweetheart in the World Is Worth Killing
Maurine’s desk sat on the east side of the local room, squeezed between the photo department and the file room. A battered typewriter, a castoff from another reporter, came with it. If she needed anything else, she could call out to a copyboy, though she didn’t like to raise her voice. Genevieve Forbes enjoyed a desk in a more central location, within easy sight of Robert Lee, who handed out the most important assignments. Forbes would thump in and out of the room without a glance toward her junior colleague.
Maurine could hardly have expected anything else from Forbes. Only a handful of girl reporters covered crime in Chicago, and none did so exclusively. This did not engender feelings of sisterhood or cliquishness among them. Being the best female police reporter in a newsroom carried very little cachet, which meant being second best might be cause for transfer to the fashions beat.
Besides, Forbes, thirty years old and unmarried, had some reason for jealousy. The paper’s star reporters, the men who always got the stories Forbes wanted, no longer walked straight through the center of the room. They meandered, weaving their way around to the far corner, where they paused to tie a shoe or laugh at a joke they’d just remembered. Maurine was “so lovely to look at that the men in the local room managed to have to walk by her desk, and of course stop for a cheery word,” observed Fanny Butcher, who worked in the adjacent Sunday room. Butcher amused herself day after day by watching men bump into each other as they looked for something to do near the new girl reporter. Maurine tried to ignore the hovering men, but that rarely discouraged them. If she were tapping away on her
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