Tender Murderers Read online

  Copyright © 2003 by Trina Robbins

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact: Conari Press, an imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC, P.O. Box 612, York Beach, ME 03910-0612.

  The portrait of Kate Bender is used by permission from the Collections of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

  Cover Illustration: Leslie Cabarga

  Cover Design: Leslie Cabarga and Suzanne Albertson

  Book Design: Suzanne Albertson

  Author Photo: Steve Leialoha

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Robbins, Trina.

  Tender murderers : women who kill / Trina Robbins;

  foreword by Max Allan Collins.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-57324-821-5 (pbk.)

  1. Women murderers. 2. Women murderers–Biography. I. Title.

  HV6517.R63 2003

  364.15'23'0922–dc21 2002012254

  Printed in the Canada.

  03 04 05 06 TC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Frontispiece

  In 1975, artist Becky Wilson drew Carrie Nation, Squeaky Fromme, Bonnie Parker, Lizzie Borden, and an unidentified victim, for the underground comic book, Wimmen's Comix. In this book you'll find all the women mentioned, except for Carrie Nation, who never killed anything bigger than a whiskey bottle.

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  Tender Murderer

  Foreword by Max Allan Collins

  Introduction

  One They Did It for Love

  Beulah May Annan and Belva Gaertner

  Gin and Guns

  Winnie Ruth Judd

  “Count the Heads!”

  Jean Harris

  Integrity Jean and the Diet Doctor

  Aileen Wuornos

  “I Would Kill Again”

  Two They Did It for Money

  Belle Gunness

  Indiana Ogress

  Kate Bender

  The Family That Slays Together

  Ruth Snyder

  Dubious Distinctions

  Dorothea Puente

  Arsenic and Old Lace Redux

  Three Bandit Queens and Gun Molls

  Belle Starr

  The Petticoat Terror of the Plains

  Bonnie Parker

  “Tell Them I Don't Smoke Cigars”

  Lai Choi San

  The Pirate Queen of Macau

  Phoolan Devi

  India's Bandit Queen

  Four Fabled Femmes Fatales

  Charlotte Corday

  The Woman Who Isn't in the Painting

  Frankie Silver

  “Die with It in Ye, Frankie!”

  Grace Marks

  The Canadian Conundrum

  Lizzie Borden

  Forty Whacks

  Five Shoots Like a Girl: Women Who Missed

  Lolita Lebron

  “I Came Here to Die”

  Valerie Solanas

  “I Am a Flower Child”

  Squeaky Fromme

  “It Didn't Go Off”

  Amy Fisher

  The Long Island Lolita

  Acknowledgments

  Recommended Reading

  Permissions

  About the Author

  Foreword

  Over the past several decades, I've earned a certain reputation as a writer of “true-crime fiction,” a contradictory term if there ever was one. That reputation grew out of a number of novels (and short stories and even comics) I've written that combine the traditional hardboiled crime story–what they're calling “noir” these days–with the real people and events who originally inspired the '30s/'40s/'50s “tough-guy” writers like Dashiell Hammett, Craig Rice, Raymond Chandler, Leigh Brackett and Mickey Spillane. (Two of those tough-guy writers are women, by the way–and Mickey isn't one of them.)

  The great noir movies and books that have become so accepted in the great American pop-cultural landscape have their own roots in tabloid reality. My distinction, I guess, is that I tend to use the real crimes right down to the real people's names and including details of the events worthy of a nonfiction account. But James M. Cain's Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity were derived from the Snyder/Gray murder case; Joseph Lewis's Gun Crazy, arguably the greatest of all B-movies, drew from the Bonnie Parker/Clyde Barrow crime spree (long before the Arthur Penn film); and the Bob Posse musical Chicago had its roots dyed in the Beulah May Annan and Belva Gaertner cases.

  And then there's William March's classic horror yarn, The Bad Seed, from which blossomed both Broadway and Hollywood productions. March's novel mentions various cases–some real, some imagined—of famous murderers who happened to be female; the ghosts of Lizzie Borden and Belle Gunness loom large inThe Bad Seed's backstory. March's murderous little girl, Rhoda Penmarck, remains one of the most famous female villains of American literature. My own films, the unofficialBad Seed sequels Mommy and Mommy's Day–both starring the original Rhoda, the wonderful Patty McCormack–further explore the depths of evil that can hide behind the brittle mask of a beautiful woman's face.

  There are those who decry the abundance of black widows and other distaff murderers in noir as evidence of rampant sexism. James M. Cain and Mickey Spillane are perhaps the male authors most commonly criticized for their supposed dark chauvinism. But anyone reading with eyes and mind open will note how remarkable these authors' women are. Cain's murderesses are routinely smarter, more cunning, and better motivated than his thinking-with-the-little-head males. Mike Hammer's secretary, Velda, is as strong and as brave as Mike and even smarter (some would say that's no stretch), and the handful of black widows in Spillane are also strong, well-motivated women.

  Is it fair to say that in a culture that relegates women to second place, one option open to a strong woman is to choose a path of crime and even evil? Some of the lethal ladies you ar e about to meet might be dismissed as weak, but few really qualify for that dismissal. They may be sociopaths, but the women who kill for love and money in these pages are for the most part anything but weak. Sometimes, perversely so, they are admirable.

  I have been fascinated with America's female version of Sweeney Todd–Kate Bender–for many years. If you are not familiar with her story, prepare to be spellbound by one of the gr eat waking nightmares; but I would advise sitting with your back close to the wall, and without any snacks in front of you. And who doesn't love Lizzie Borden? Other than her father and mother, I mean.

  I take no shame and even a little pride (Kate Bender's inclusion is partly my doing) in reading Trina Robbins's terrific book and knowing that I am a small part of it. There are few things more entertaining than sitting down with a book like this–compact but complete renderings of famous and infamous crimes, titillation and education, going hand in hand!

  And now to Trina. First, know that I would love this book even if I didn't already love Trina. Like many of the women you're about to meet, Trina is sweet and deadly. Few genuinely nice people have more spine than this tough-as-nails sweetheart. She used to be a cartoonist (she retired undefeated, a while back) and she is the sort of female artist who could pose for her own pinup-worthy “pretty girls.” I am going to be frank here: Trina is a feminist, and Trina is a babe. I love the fact that she sees nothing at all contradictory about that. Neither do I.

  In another time, though–in days even more repressive than these–who knows how Trina's inner strengths might have revealed themselves? Via a bullet, or a sash weight? I can almost see her cutting up a body and stuffing it efficiently into a trunk. All I know at this po
int is that this is a writer who has skills and weapons I envy: she will lead you through these harrowing pages with precision and yet wry good humor. Trina is the kind of writer who alternates very objective renderings of fact with wonderful outbursts of subjective editorial truth.

  I've known Trina for a long time, and I can promise you this: it never takes long to find out what she thinks. And her opinions are doozies, just like the women in this fascinating book. I only hope there is a second volume. There are plenty of crazy dangerous ladies out there, and Trina is just the crazy dangerous lady to tell their stories.

  —MAXALLAN COLLINS

  Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.

  The honest thief, the tender murderer...

  —ROBERT BROWNING, from

  Bishop Blougram's Apology

  Introduction

  As early as 1855, when he wrote these words, the poet Robert Browning echoed a universal fascination with those who willingly cross over the moral line painted by civilization. And of those who knowingly commit the act that separates them from the rest of human society–the taking of another life–woman, “the tender murderer,” is the most unusual, and the most fascinating. Despite the fact that we who may have a hard time crushing cockroaches know that murder is the ultimate transgression, we're mesmerized by those rare women, real and fictional, who step where we would never dare, and never wish to.

  Killing is something that men do, right? Women stay in their lace-curtained houses, have babies, tend to the vegetable plot out front, and raise their families, don't they? Not always. True, statistics show that 85 percent of all homicides are committed by men, but that leaves 15 percent for the ladies.

  What kind of woman takes that step over the edge? What brings her to that point? According to Jean Harris, education has a lot to do with it, with uneducated children more in danger of winding up in prison. Indeed, of the women in this book, Phoolan Devi and Frankie Silver were both illiterate, while Bonnie Parker, Valerie Solanas, and Aileen Wuornos all quit school early to either marry or have a baby. Yet look what happened to overeducated Jean Harris!

  Women kill for various reasons. In some cases, love drives them to such a state of desper ation that they seem to lose their inborn moral sense. In other cases, it's money, and many women who kill for money are serial killers. Whereas male serial killers act out of twisted sexual urges and usually combine murder with rape and torture, the less than 3 percent of serial killers who are women, like Kate Bender, Belle Gunness, and Dorothea Puente, are more practical. They kill less violently–often with poison–take their victims' money, and neatly bury the bodies in their gardens. Of course, the victims are just as dead.

  Many people, when they learned about the book I was writing, brought up the subject of battered women who kill in selfdefense. A 1992 study showed that 90 percent of the women in prison for murder had killed the men who abused them. But with the exception of Frankie Silver and Aileen Wuornos, both of whom may have killed in self-defense, I've chosen not to include battered women in this book. Why? Because we know why they did it!

  In her book, The Second Sex, Simone deBeauvoir wrote, “Superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.” Aha! And when “that which kills” is “that which brings forth”? The result is the runaway popularity of Thelma and Louise, a movie that had millions of women weeping because the film's fictional killer heroines had to die for their crime in the end. The result is songs, plays, films, ballets, operas, and even comic books–many bearing little or no resemblance to their subjects–written about real-life and would-be murderesses the likes of Charlotte Corday, Lizzie Borden, Valerie Solanas, Aileen Wuornos, Bonnie Parker, Frankie Silver, and Squeaky Fromme. Whether we're repulsed or sympathetic, we're intrigued by women who kill.

  Tender Murderers explores the question of women who kill with a rogue's gallery of twenty fascinating but damned women, from the lyrics of old folk ballads to the pages of yesterday's newspapers. Each of these women, in their time, committed what was then considered the crime of the century, or her trial was the trial of the century. Some of them are ridiculous, some pathetic, some dashing, romantic, and tragic, but they were all notorious. And all of them paid the price for their crimes.

  One

  They Did It for Love

  Beulah May Annan and Belva Gaertner

  Gin and Guns

  Beulah May Annan could not have known, when she phoned the police on that afternoon of April 3, 1924, that she would inspire a Broadway play, three movies, and a hit Bob Fosse musical, or that in them her character would be played by the likes of Ginger Rogers and Gwen Verdon. All she could think of at the time was that her lover, Harry Kolstedt, lay slumped against her wall, dying from her gunshot wound, as she told Sgt. John O'Grady at Chicago's Wabash Avenue station, “I've just shot a man!” The startled cop could hear music playing in the background on the other end: it was a jazzy little pop tune called “Hula Lou” (“Who had more sweeties than a dog has fleas”).

  By the time the cops arrived at Beulah May's apartment they found two men. One was the now very dead Kolstedt, and the other was hubby Albert Annan, who'd arrived after the phone call and tried to take the rap by swearing it was he who shot the guy. Beulah wouldn't allow this and went willingly to the police station. Kolstedt “tried to make love to me,” she insisted, and she had killed him to protect her honor.

  Then she started changing her story. First she admitted that, well yes, she and Harry had been “fooling around” for two months. He came over that afternoon to end their affair, and after sharing what was variously reported as two quarts of moonshine liquor or a half-gallon of wine, she'd shot him rather than give him up. But wait, wait, that's not the way it happened! Actually, she “was the one who was going to quit him.” He got mad and—no, no, what really happened was that she had learned about his time in prison. She called him a “jailbird,” and he got mad. There was a gun on the bed. He went for it, and she went for it. It was self-defense. And anyway, she was drunk. And anyway, “I fainted.”

  And all the time this was happening—pick your story—she kept rewinding the phonograph, playing “Hula Lou” over and over.

  This is a good time to mention that Beulah May was absolutely gorgeous. A farmer's daughter from Kentucky who'd married and had a baby at sixteen, she had dumped hubby number one and their kid for the fast lane in fabled Prohibition-era Chicago. She was a twenty-three-year-old jazz baby, a sizzling flapper with big blue eyes, bobbed red hair, and the cutest li'l ole southern accent, and she deserved the title she earned: Chicago's Prettiest Woman Killer. While in jail, she acquired admirers—jaildoor Johnnies, who sent her steak dinners and flowers. The newspapers dutifully reported each outfit she wore during her trial: “A simple fawn colored suit with dark brown fur piece that framed the flowerlike face,” “slim and straight in her new brown satin crepe frock, with furpiece thrown over one arm,” “navy twill tied at the side with a childlike moiré bow—with a new necklace of crystal and jet.”

  Most of these articles were written by a young journalist for the Chicago Tribune, Maurine Watkins. The twenty-eight-year-old Watkins, no slouch in the looks department herself, had just gotten her big break while covering the story of another murderess, a thirtyish divorcee named Belva Gaertner. Like Beulah May, Belva shot her man because he was doing her wrong–leaving her, that is—about a month before Beulah May dispatched Harry Kolstedt. And like her red-haired flapper sister on Chicago's Murderess's Row, her defense was that she was drunk and couldn't remember a thing. “Gin and guns–either one is bad enough,” she said, “but together they get you in a dickns of a mess, don't they.”

  It was Beulah versus Belva, competing for headlines and selling papers. Chicago's newspaper readers were having the time of their lives, and Maurine Watkins was racking up bylines. News photographers posed the two murderesses together for the front page. Belva, a one-time cabaret dancer, was a bit too over-the-hill for the Pr
ettiest Killer title, so Watkins dubbed her The Most Stylish of Murderess's Row, and outdid herself describing her outfits: “A blue twill suit bound with black braid, and white lacy frill down the front; patent leather slippers with shimmering French heels, chiffon gun metal hose. And the hat—ah, that hat! helmet shaped, with a silver buckle and cockade of ribbon, with one streamer tied jauntily–coquetishly–bewitchingly–under her chin.”

  The Assistant State's Attorney queried a prospective juror, “Would you let a stylish hat make you find her ‘not guilty’?”

  Belva's lawyer wisely postponed her trial until after Beulah's. If Beulah got off, so would Belva. And Beulah played her trump card: she was pregnant! “Beulah Annan Awaits Stork, Murder Trial,” ran Watkins's headline.

  Beulah May had yet another tale for the jury: When a drunken Harry Kolstedt came to her door, she begged him to leave, and “I told him I was going to have a baby.” She threatened to send him back to prison if he wouldn't leave her alone, and they both went for the gun. Beulah got the gun, and Kolstedt turned to get his hat and coat, but “didn't get that far.”

  And why didn't he get that far?

  “Darned good reason,” testified Beulah May. “I shot him.”

  On May 25, 1924, a jury of handsome young bachelors found Beulah May not guilty. Less than a month later, Belva Gaertner was also found not guilty. Beulah divorced Albert, the faithful husband who'd stood by her during her trial, and married an ex-prizefighter named Edward Harlib. That lasted about a year, until Beulah discovered that he was already married.

  As for Maurine Watkins, she went on to study at the Yale School of Drama, and wrote a play based on the story of Beulah May Annan: Chicago. On the stage, Beulah May was given the classier name Roxie Hart, and Belva was re-christened Velma. The play, a satiric comment on media circuses and trials of the century, opened on Broadway in 1926 and was an instant hit, playing for a respectable 172 performances. Chicago was turned into a silent movie in 1928, and filmed again in 1942 as Roxie Hart, with Ginger Rogers in the title role. Finally it was adapted into the classic Bob Fosse musical, opening on Broadway in 1975. The most recent incarnation of Beulah's story is the 2002 movie, an adaptation of Bob Fosse's musical starring Renee Zellweiger as Roxy and Catherine Zeta-Jones as Velma, a.k.a. Belva.