Beulah Annan gave her confession at the Hyde Park police station after shooting her lover, Harry Kalstedt, earlier that day, on April 3, 1924. A Chicago reporter gave the world a sinister tale of sex, murder, celebrity — and all that jazz — just three decades later.One hundred years ago this week, a young, liquored-up woman named Beulah Annan shot her equally inebriated lover to death in the apartment she shared with her husband.
The story would garner Watkins fame, fortune and a musical and film franchise that continues to delight audiences around the globe today.that eventually became the movie “Chicago” could, itself, be a movie. And it is all recorded in the Tribune’s expansive archive. You see, the actual women who inspired these steamy, savvy characters have their own tales to tell — and, quite often, they are not as headstrong and chic as depicted.
Through her job at a Chicago laundry, Annan met Harry Kalstedt. Walks together quickly progressed to day-drinking inside her apartment while her mechanic husband, Albert, was at work. A drunken disagreement led Annan to shoot Kalstedt with her husband’s revolver. She sat with the body for hours as her phonograph wailed the jazzy tune “Hula Lou” repeatedly. Ironically, the first phone call Annan made was to her husband: “I’ve shot a man, Albert. He tried to make love to me.
After babbling conflicting accounts before a grand jury about what transpired, Watkins interviewed Annan in her jail cell on “Murderess Row.”Beulah Annan talks with W.W. O’Brien, middle, and her attorney, Scott Stewart, left, during her trial for the murder of Harry Kalstedt in 1924. The claim moved her case to the front of the line.
“The verdict is in your hands and you must decide whether you will permit a woman to commit a crime and let her go because she is good-looking,” prosecutor William F. McLaughlin told the jury. “You must decide whether you want to let another pretty woman go out and say, ‘I got away with it!'”Less than two hours into deliberations, the all-male jury came to a not-guilty consensus on the third ballot.“I knew my wife would come through all right!” he said proudly.