Kitty Malm: The path to Cook County Jail
November 4, 1923
Otto Malm woke his girl with a quick shake. She snorted and rose up on elbows, bewildered, ready for anything.
“Come on, we’re going for a ride,” he said. He didn’t say where or what for, but she knew it wasn’t to get an ice cream cone. With barely a word, Katherine Malm stepped into a dress, pushed a flop of hair off her face and followed him into the night.
Eric Noren was waiting in the car. Eric always drove. Didn’t do anything else. He had a small face, and a small grin, and he lounged back on the crook of his spine whether he was idling at the curb or doing forty down an alley. Otto got in the front seat, Katy climbed into the back. Eric guided the old Ford away from the curb.
Nobody said anything. Katy wanted to ask where they were going. She always wanted to ask. She looked at Otto in the front passenger seat. His receding hair rolled back from his forehead like a Roman battle crest. In the intermittent street lamps, his face was cut into severe angles, his brows and cheekbones and nose casting shadows in every direction. He had that kind of profile. It didn’t matter which way you looked at him, you always got deep gorges and gullies. Katy liked her man’s face, though she couldn’t put her finger on why. It wasn’t handsome – no, you couldn’t say that. But it sure as heck wasn’t ugly, either. Maybe it wasn’t the face so much as the expression on it. He looked at her like he knew everything about her, every desire she’d ever had or ever would have. He hadn’t needed to utter a word to win her over.
***
Al Stemwedel was tired. Being a watchman wasn’t taxing. Being Al Stemwedel was taxing. His security service – Lincoln Protective – and his marriage weren’t easy to keep in the black, and so he found himself working all hours, or at least staying away from the house all hours. He was thirty-nine years old, and he was exhausted, so he’d relented and let Eddie Lehman come along on rounds. Lehman was eighteen; he had enough energy for the both of them. Who knew why the kid wanted to be there, circling the Delson Sweater factory on Lincoln Avenue at dawn with Al. Eddie had crapped out as a stenographer, but he was still just a kid – he had plenty of options to try out before he’d have to take on Al Stemwedel’s life.
As Stemwedel and Lehman turned off Barry Avenue to the alley behind the factory, chatting mindlessly, Katy was sitting against the wall outside the back entrance, chewing her fingernails. Nobody should have been able to see her hunched down in the corner, but she and Otto had left the house later than they should have. Instead of blackness surrounding her, the dark was beginning to be hollowed out by the rising sun. The watchman, accustomed to seeing nothing, still would have missed her, but the boy noticed a form at the last moment, registered the girl wincing as the car’s lamps rolled over her. A brunette, about his own age, maybe a little older. He insisted Stemwedel stop the automobile.
Lehman, eager to prove his usefulness, leaped from the machine and rushed over to the girl, who was now leaning inside the factory’s back door. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.
The girl turned toward the voice. The question would have been funny if she hadn’t been so rattled. Otto appeared in the doorway then, and the sound of the gun going off cut through the thin air like God Almighty taking roll. Katy instinctively clapped both hands to her ears. She screamed along with the explosions. Lehman staggered, teetering for a moment like a drunk pushing away from the bar. He seemed to float there, dancing, everybody happy. Then he tripped and stumbled through the gateway from the delivery enclosure to the back alley – the gateway that was supposed to shield Otto and Katy from view – and tried to run through the alley. He didn’t get far. He hit the ground and rolled like an errant football.
Katy, still screaming, began to run, too. She wasn’t sure where, couldn’t remember where Eric and the car were, what neighborhood she was in. Otto fired again. Stemwedel, having parked the car and followed after the kid, jumped for cover.
“Honey, you shot me!” Katy yelled.
Otto moved down the alley to her. “Quit kidding me,” he said. Katy put a hand to her head, felt it squish into a bloody mess. She tried to show him, displaying her hand like a child playing with finger paint, but he was charging forward, the blue steel out in front of him like a talisman. Katy screamed again and ran. Otto fired again. Al Stemwedel spun as the bullet stabbed into his arm. Dropping to his knees, the watchman squirmed desperately for another hiding place.
Stemwedel watched the man overtake the girl halfway down the alley, jerk her up onto the balls of her feet. Otto turned onto Barry, Katy holding on like something stuck to his shoe. At the corner of Southport, they rushed over to an idling car. “He shot me!” Katy wailed, then her legs gave out. Otto lifted her from the ground like a suitcase and pitched her headfirst into the back of the car. The machine’s wheels were already squealing and spitting gravel as he leapt in behind her and slammed the door.
Stemwedel, warming to the task now, gave chase on foot, shouldering through the back door of an adjacent building as if he might cut them off at the next intersection. When he made it to the street, he managed only to see the tantalizing bare ankle of the girl hanging over the running board just before the flivver disappeared from sight. He found his gun and fired it into the air, hoping someone – anyone – would hear it and ring the police.
***
Lehman was still alive when Detective Sergeant Paul Mielke got to him. Mielke wasn’t the first on the scene, but that was all right. Scratch marks were on the back door and tools were scattered along the ground. Blood peppered the alley like a spastic’s hopscotch pattern. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened here, even with patrolmen stamping all over the place.
As they prepared to lift the boy into a police car and drive him over to the Alexian Brothers Hospital, Mielke leaned over him. The kid was conscious, aware. Do you know who did it? Mielke asked. Did you get a good look at him? Lehman nodded. He opened his mouth. The Detective Sergeant leaned in closer.
“Get Bockelman,” he said.
***
Bockelman they knew. Walter Bockelman was twenty-eight years old and lived – or had until he abandoned his wife – at 1820 Sheffield Avenue. He was a squirrelly little low-life, a reformatory graduate and small-time criminal. Just the kind of guy you’d expect to plug a teenager with lead without a thought. Lehman had wheezed something about catching Bockelman a few nights before trying to break into a store and Bockelman threatening him.
As the police car raced Lehman to the hospital, another one set out for known Bockelman haunts. It didn’t take long. Bockelman liked playing craps, and since the coppers provided protection for most of the games in town, they knew the regulars.
Bockelman was hustled to Lehman’s bedside at the Alexian Brothers Hospital. Bingo. Positive identification. Just in time, too. Lehman wouldn’t make it through the night.
Over at the Sheffield station, they brought in Mrs. Margaret Leonbecher, who said she had looked down on the whole thing from her bedroom window. They put Bockelman into a lineup and asked the woman to pick out the man she’d seen. She looked long and hard at Bockelman, and at the policemen in their undershirts standing on each side of him. She said Bockelman sort of looked like the man who’d done the shooting. More or less. Next they brought in Stemwedel to make an I.D., a man supposedly trained to notice people. The watchman squinted and hemmed and hawed. He was still a little shaky from being shot, even if it was just a flesh wound. He said he wasn’t certain. “Maybe a little like him – from the shoulders down – but – but I can’t be sure,” he said.
Through all this, Bockelman had nothing to say, except for the chain-pull response of the oft-arrested: “My lawyer is Thomas D. Nash. Talk to him.” Except Nash wasn’t in a chatty mood. Maybe he’d represented Bockelman before and never got paid. The murder suspect was going to have to wait for another lawyer to come along.
There was a girl too, Stemwedel reminded everyone. The watchman was certain he could do better identifying the girl. She was a petite thing, Mrs. Leonbecher said, and very young – maybe twenty years old. She wore “a small toque, a plaid half-length coat and a dark crepe de chin dress with four pointed panels.” Mrs. Leonbecher wasn’t good with faces, but she did know what was in vogue. The police went out in search of the last girl to be seen with Bockelman – a squeaky little sometime prostitute named Ethel Beck.
When they brought her in, some hours later, the girl was wearing a ratty, faded silk dress and a fake fur coat. Her thin blond hair hung like spider webs before her eyes. She said hello to Stemwedel. He’d been a watchman for years in the neighborhood, and she’d known him since she was a little girl. They sat her down to await a lineup, with talk about the murder – from Stemwedel, newspaper reporters and officers – pulsing around her. The safety of a cell appealed to her. Horrible men waited outside police stations and the morals courts, drooling “like a pack of dogs after a bitch in heat” when a fallen woman would be let loose back into the night. It was better to be sent to the gallows than to have to fight off the lurkers at three o’clock in the morning.
Two officers took Beck into a room to be interviewed. It didn’t take long before she was ready to tell everything she knew. Her life story wasn’t much, and it wasn’t pretty, but that’s where she wanted to start. Things started going downhill as early as the fifth grade, she said, when a playground monitor at her school abused her. She had no one to protect her from such men. “My parents had died. My two brothers were put into a boarding house; they’re still there. My sister, Helen – she’s married now – was sent into a family, and the Juvenile people had given me to the Blyes – they live on 1941 South Sawyer Avenue.” She wasn’t “eatin’ regular,” the nineteen-year-old said. Her tale of woe soon veered into a confession, which brought in Assistant State’s Attorneys John Sbarbaro and Louis O’Connell. They gave her a sandwich and told her to keep talking.
When she was done, they walked her over to the county jail and sat her at a long table, across from Bockelman. She said hello. Bockelman looked at her but didn’t say a word. Sbarbaro read Beck’s statement, and before he was done Bockelman leapt to his feet, spitting with rage, pointing at the cowering girl. “I never met that party in my life,” he said. “I never met her! I have an alibi, and when I get my lawyer I’ll give a statement of where I was. But that girl, I never met her in my life.”
Beck couldn’t agree more. “I never met him before in my life,” she said, as glazed as a donut. Then she quietly began to weep. Bockelman marched about the room, a debate champion in the moment of triumph.
Beck, the weeping now turning to geysers, was quickly led from the room. Sbarbaro and O’Connell realized that putting her in there with Bockelman was a mistake. Prosecutors always wanted an easy time of it in court, and getting a participant in a crime to turn rat was a good way to make things easy. But this girl was jumpy and dim. The last time she was in the criminal justice system wasn’t even in the jail, they would soon learn. It was at Lawndale Hospital. A doctor put it succinctly: Beck was “a weakling and a high grade moron.” She was liable to say just about anything.
“Sure, it’s him,” Beck said when asked again, outside the room, if Bockelman was the man who shot up the Delson alley. “But I was afraid of him.”
That was good enough for the state’s attorneys, who wanted to move things along, whatever the girl’s state of mind. But the precinct captain, James Mooney, wasn’t done with her. He put her and Stemwedel in a squad car and drove them to the scene of the crime. He told her to show them what had occurred there. Beck got out of the machine on wobbly knees, strands of her blond, grimy hair stretched across her forehead like snail slime. She slowly walked the policeman and the watchman down the alley, inching around the bloodstains on the ground. She saw the back door sitting off its hinges where “Wallie” broke in, heard the screaming again, and the shots. She took Mooney through the crime step by step. The policeman was finally satisfied, happy even. It was rare to get a murder accomplice who was so cooperative, so eager to please.
***
At about six o’clock on the morning of November 4, shortly before the police put out the call for Walter Bockelman, Otto and Katherine Malm showed up at the North Side office of Dr. Henry Mal. They entered from the alley, banging on the back door of 435 West North Avenue until Dr. Mal opened it up. They didn’t know the doctor, but somehow they knew he would be in the office at this early hour. They might have been waiting, out of sight, until Mal showed up and let himself in. The doctor was alone, but he was not afraid. The man and woman standing before him were too pathetic to scare anyone. The man appeared exhausted, his eyes like pockmarks, mouth twitching just short of panic. The girl, a petite thing, maybe a teenager, was worse. She stood a step behind her man, whimpering, the skin on her face so thin and buttery she looked like she might melt into his sleeve. She also had blood matted through her hair on the left side, with black splotches caked here and there on her ear and neck until they disappeared into her clothing.
His wife was hurt, Otto Malm told the doctor. He asked him to treat and dress the wound. Dr. Mal led them inside and examined the girl’s wound. He asked how it happened.
I shot myself, she said, but the doctor’s expression must have made her doubt her memory. She said her husband had shot her. Katherine Malm, Katy to her mother and sisters, undoubtedly got another unsatisfied look, this time from her husband. The answers kept tumbling out of her mouth: an “outsider” shot her, she said. She’d received a blow from something heavy. Otto told her to shut up.
Dr. Mal accepted that he wasn’t going to get a straight answer. He sat back, calm and alert, unlike his guests. This type of wound should be treated at a hospital, he told them. That was where they should go. Augustana was just up the street.
No, Otto Malm said. He had to treat her here. Right now. There was no time to waste. Dr. Mal took another look at the shivering girl. He said he would treat her but he would have to notify the police. Otto didn’t let him get to the telephone. No one was calling the police. This time, for the first time, he was threatening Dr. Mal.
The best thing about Otto Malm – at least in his own mind – was his dead certainty. No man was ever so sure of his decisions … up until the moment everything fell apart. That was how it had been back when he shot Albert Jenson, the tailor, a decision that landed him in prison. He could take out his pipe right now, he knew, and threaten to blow a hole in the good doctor. He could stick the barrel in Mal’s gut so the doc could feel its warmth, so he’d know it had just been used. Otto stood before Dr. Henry Mal, the decision slipping its slot before finally clicking into place. He left his gun where it was, tucked away. “Come on,” Otto said to Katy, except he called her “Kitty.” She struggled to her feet, he grabbed hold of her, and they ran out the same way they came in.
Dr. Mal closed the door behind them and calmly called the police.
***
The next day, Walter Bockelman had a lawyer: William Scott Stewart. Someone at the station had his telephone number – one of the cops, no doubt. Stewart had done his bit as a prosecuter; he’d helped send Harvey Church away for murder. That case had gotten everyone’s picture in the paper. He didn’t know it, but Bockelman couldn’t have gotten any luckier. Thomas Nash was famous, thanks to his involvement with the Black Sox trial, but Stewart was a hard-nosed guy who would fight happily for anyone. Even for Walter Bockelman.
Stewart strode through the Cook County Jail on North Dearborn with his customary smile levered in place, slapping backs, asking after wives. Sure, he was a defense attorney now, but he still liked policemen, and they liked him. That, along with a few bucks spread around every month, came in handy in his line of work. The lawyer, lanky and always perfectly appointed, moved with confidence here, though it was heavy sledding today. Newspapermen were stacked everywhere, more than usual. Stewart didn’t like the look of them. All those boys with their hats cocked, practicing their smart-aleck jibes on one another. They should be behind bars themselves. They had no respect for anyone. No manners. They used foul language for laughs, even with a lady present. There was one here today, in fact, busily scribbling away in a notebook. She was a fine-looking woman, too – grim-faced, self-possessed, the stiff-upper-lip type. Stewart had seen her before, in the courthouse – Genevieve Forbes was her name. A Tribune hack. The lawyer walked on. The jail was no place for a woman.
Stewart hadn’t talked to Bockelman yet, but he knew what had transpired in the station the previous day and he couldn’t have been happy about it. So when Ethel Beck called out to him from behind bars he barely slowed his stride. “I remember that when I went back in the ‘bull pen’ to see Bockelman, Ethel Beck asked me what she should say when they took her before the judge,” Stewart would recall later. “I told her I did not represent her and could not advise her.” The damage was already done, after all. He couldn’t tell her to say she was just kidding about the confession.
Beck didn’t like Stewart giving her the brush off. Why did Walter Bockelman get a lawyer and not her? (Beck, despite being kept in jail for three months, never had a lawyer assigned to her. Charles Mishkin, advocate for public defender system, wrote of the mercenary defender process at that time that “Many of the attorneys who seek such assignment unfortunately are of the undesirable type who accept such cases only for the possible fee they can extract from the defendant or his relatives.” Beck was broke and had no relatives.) So while Stewart talked privately with Bockelman, Beck talked publicly with anyone who would listen, and soon found a reporter standing in front of her – the woman reporter. Beck said she had been walking home alone from a dance when Bockelman pulled up in a flivver and asked her to “go down the line for half an hour.” She said she went with him to the Delson factory and around the back. Beck had always loved to have an audience, and so she held nothing back in the telling of her story. “Just as we got there Ed Lehman came to the gate and asked us what we were doing,” she said. “And then I seen Al Stemwedel, the watchman, come in, and I hollered, ‘Don’t shoot,’ and Walter shot right at Al, and I seen the gun then. Then I run down the alley. I heard three more shots and I seen Walter run down the alley. Then he grabbed me by the hand.” Beck jumped up and mimed being yanked against her will. Bockelman tossed her in his car, she said, and took her through Lincoln Park, the machine tipping on two wheels at one point. He dropped her off at the corner of Sheffield and Fullerton, near the boarding house where she was staying. He was calm as could be, as if they’d just gone on a date and was feeling swell.
Reporters, like state’s attorneys, loved dumb bunnies who couldn’t keep their mouths shut. Life would be much harder without them. And Genevieve Forbes showed no more sympathy for the sad-eyed, crusty-nosed young woman than her male colleagues would have. Her editors surely noticed and approved. Their girl reporter would never be mistaken for a sentimental sob sister. The lede for her story, which would land on page one, might be a mouthful, but it was as hard as a hammer.
Ethel Beck, 19 year old waitress with six aliases, an unknown Greek husband and three service stripes in the Night court, the brazen and undernourished girl who never learned the ten commandments but has broken most of them, confessed yesterday to Capt. James Mooney and Acting Lieut. Hugh McCarthy that she accompanied Walter Bockelman early Sunday morning when he ended his attempt to ‘pull a job’ at the Delson Manufacturing company, 3051 Lincoln avenue, by sending a fatal bullet through young Ed Lehman.
No ambiguity there. Bockelman and Beck did it and should be sent away. Full stop. Forbes, being a woman, did end on a positive note, but it was the kind a good city editor could appreciate. Beck wasn’t just some simpering crook with bad taste in men. She had dreams. She knew she’d done wrong, and she wanted a different life. If only she had the opportunity, she would go into the restaurant business. “That’s what I really like, and if I get out of this mess, yes, man, I’d like to have a restaurant of my own,” she told the reporter.
And if she couldn’t own a restaurant, Forbes wrote, turning the screw like a pro, “Ethel would like to go into the movies, where they wear lovely clothes. But she despises the ‘sweet’ heroines.”
-- Douglas Perry
© Douglas Perry
Otto Malm woke his girl with a quick shake. She snorted and rose up on elbows, bewildered, ready for anything.
“Come on, we’re going for a ride,” he said. He didn’t say where or what for, but she knew it wasn’t to get an ice cream cone. With barely a word, Katherine Malm stepped into a dress, pushed a flop of hair off her face and followed him into the night.
Eric Noren was waiting in the car. Eric always drove. Didn’t do anything else. He had a small face, and a small grin, and he lounged back on the crook of his spine whether he was idling at the curb or doing forty down an alley. Otto got in the front seat, Katy climbed into the back. Eric guided the old Ford away from the curb.
Nobody said anything. Katy wanted to ask where they were going. She always wanted to ask. She looked at Otto in the front passenger seat. His receding hair rolled back from his forehead like a Roman battle crest. In the intermittent street lamps, his face was cut into severe angles, his brows and cheekbones and nose casting shadows in every direction. He had that kind of profile. It didn’t matter which way you looked at him, you always got deep gorges and gullies. Katy liked her man’s face, though she couldn’t put her finger on why. It wasn’t handsome – no, you couldn’t say that. But it sure as heck wasn’t ugly, either. Maybe it wasn’t the face so much as the expression on it. He looked at her like he knew everything about her, every desire she’d ever had or ever would have. He hadn’t needed to utter a word to win her over.
***
Al Stemwedel was tired. Being a watchman wasn’t taxing. Being Al Stemwedel was taxing. His security service – Lincoln Protective – and his marriage weren’t easy to keep in the black, and so he found himself working all hours, or at least staying away from the house all hours. He was thirty-nine years old, and he was exhausted, so he’d relented and let Eddie Lehman come along on rounds. Lehman was eighteen; he had enough energy for the both of them. Who knew why the kid wanted to be there, circling the Delson Sweater factory on Lincoln Avenue at dawn with Al. Eddie had crapped out as a stenographer, but he was still just a kid – he had plenty of options to try out before he’d have to take on Al Stemwedel’s life.
As Stemwedel and Lehman turned off Barry Avenue to the alley behind the factory, chatting mindlessly, Katy was sitting against the wall outside the back entrance, chewing her fingernails. Nobody should have been able to see her hunched down in the corner, but she and Otto had left the house later than they should have. Instead of blackness surrounding her, the dark was beginning to be hollowed out by the rising sun. The watchman, accustomed to seeing nothing, still would have missed her, but the boy noticed a form at the last moment, registered the girl wincing as the car’s lamps rolled over her. A brunette, about his own age, maybe a little older. He insisted Stemwedel stop the automobile.
Lehman, eager to prove his usefulness, leaped from the machine and rushed over to the girl, who was now leaning inside the factory’s back door. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.
The girl turned toward the voice. The question would have been funny if she hadn’t been so rattled. Otto appeared in the doorway then, and the sound of the gun going off cut through the thin air like God Almighty taking roll. Katy instinctively clapped both hands to her ears. She screamed along with the explosions. Lehman staggered, teetering for a moment like a drunk pushing away from the bar. He seemed to float there, dancing, everybody happy. Then he tripped and stumbled through the gateway from the delivery enclosure to the back alley – the gateway that was supposed to shield Otto and Katy from view – and tried to run through the alley. He didn’t get far. He hit the ground and rolled like an errant football.
Katy, still screaming, began to run, too. She wasn’t sure where, couldn’t remember where Eric and the car were, what neighborhood she was in. Otto fired again. Stemwedel, having parked the car and followed after the kid, jumped for cover.
“Honey, you shot me!” Katy yelled.
Otto moved down the alley to her. “Quit kidding me,” he said. Katy put a hand to her head, felt it squish into a bloody mess. She tried to show him, displaying her hand like a child playing with finger paint, but he was charging forward, the blue steel out in front of him like a talisman. Katy screamed again and ran. Otto fired again. Al Stemwedel spun as the bullet stabbed into his arm. Dropping to his knees, the watchman squirmed desperately for another hiding place.
Stemwedel watched the man overtake the girl halfway down the alley, jerk her up onto the balls of her feet. Otto turned onto Barry, Katy holding on like something stuck to his shoe. At the corner of Southport, they rushed over to an idling car. “He shot me!” Katy wailed, then her legs gave out. Otto lifted her from the ground like a suitcase and pitched her headfirst into the back of the car. The machine’s wheels were already squealing and spitting gravel as he leapt in behind her and slammed the door.
Stemwedel, warming to the task now, gave chase on foot, shouldering through the back door of an adjacent building as if he might cut them off at the next intersection. When he made it to the street, he managed only to see the tantalizing bare ankle of the girl hanging over the running board just before the flivver disappeared from sight. He found his gun and fired it into the air, hoping someone – anyone – would hear it and ring the police.
***
Lehman was still alive when Detective Sergeant Paul Mielke got to him. Mielke wasn’t the first on the scene, but that was all right. Scratch marks were on the back door and tools were scattered along the ground. Blood peppered the alley like a spastic’s hopscotch pattern. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened here, even with patrolmen stamping all over the place.
As they prepared to lift the boy into a police car and drive him over to the Alexian Brothers Hospital, Mielke leaned over him. The kid was conscious, aware. Do you know who did it? Mielke asked. Did you get a good look at him? Lehman nodded. He opened his mouth. The Detective Sergeant leaned in closer.
“Get Bockelman,” he said.
***
Bockelman they knew. Walter Bockelman was twenty-eight years old and lived – or had until he abandoned his wife – at 1820 Sheffield Avenue. He was a squirrelly little low-life, a reformatory graduate and small-time criminal. Just the kind of guy you’d expect to plug a teenager with lead without a thought. Lehman had wheezed something about catching Bockelman a few nights before trying to break into a store and Bockelman threatening him.
As the police car raced Lehman to the hospital, another one set out for known Bockelman haunts. It didn’t take long. Bockelman liked playing craps, and since the coppers provided protection for most of the games in town, they knew the regulars.
Bockelman was hustled to Lehman’s bedside at the Alexian Brothers Hospital. Bingo. Positive identification. Just in time, too. Lehman wouldn’t make it through the night.
Over at the Sheffield station, they brought in Mrs. Margaret Leonbecher, who said she had looked down on the whole thing from her bedroom window. They put Bockelman into a lineup and asked the woman to pick out the man she’d seen. She looked long and hard at Bockelman, and at the policemen in their undershirts standing on each side of him. She said Bockelman sort of looked like the man who’d done the shooting. More or less. Next they brought in Stemwedel to make an I.D., a man supposedly trained to notice people. The watchman squinted and hemmed and hawed. He was still a little shaky from being shot, even if it was just a flesh wound. He said he wasn’t certain. “Maybe a little like him – from the shoulders down – but – but I can’t be sure,” he said.
Through all this, Bockelman had nothing to say, except for the chain-pull response of the oft-arrested: “My lawyer is Thomas D. Nash. Talk to him.” Except Nash wasn’t in a chatty mood. Maybe he’d represented Bockelman before and never got paid. The murder suspect was going to have to wait for another lawyer to come along.
There was a girl too, Stemwedel reminded everyone. The watchman was certain he could do better identifying the girl. She was a petite thing, Mrs. Leonbecher said, and very young – maybe twenty years old. She wore “a small toque, a plaid half-length coat and a dark crepe de chin dress with four pointed panels.” Mrs. Leonbecher wasn’t good with faces, but she did know what was in vogue. The police went out in search of the last girl to be seen with Bockelman – a squeaky little sometime prostitute named Ethel Beck.
When they brought her in, some hours later, the girl was wearing a ratty, faded silk dress and a fake fur coat. Her thin blond hair hung like spider webs before her eyes. She said hello to Stemwedel. He’d been a watchman for years in the neighborhood, and she’d known him since she was a little girl. They sat her down to await a lineup, with talk about the murder – from Stemwedel, newspaper reporters and officers – pulsing around her. The safety of a cell appealed to her. Horrible men waited outside police stations and the morals courts, drooling “like a pack of dogs after a bitch in heat” when a fallen woman would be let loose back into the night. It was better to be sent to the gallows than to have to fight off the lurkers at three o’clock in the morning.
Two officers took Beck into a room to be interviewed. It didn’t take long before she was ready to tell everything she knew. Her life story wasn’t much, and it wasn’t pretty, but that’s where she wanted to start. Things started going downhill as early as the fifth grade, she said, when a playground monitor at her school abused her. She had no one to protect her from such men. “My parents had died. My two brothers were put into a boarding house; they’re still there. My sister, Helen – she’s married now – was sent into a family, and the Juvenile people had given me to the Blyes – they live on 1941 South Sawyer Avenue.” She wasn’t “eatin’ regular,” the nineteen-year-old said. Her tale of woe soon veered into a confession, which brought in Assistant State’s Attorneys John Sbarbaro and Louis O’Connell. They gave her a sandwich and told her to keep talking.
When she was done, they walked her over to the county jail and sat her at a long table, across from Bockelman. She said hello. Bockelman looked at her but didn’t say a word. Sbarbaro read Beck’s statement, and before he was done Bockelman leapt to his feet, spitting with rage, pointing at the cowering girl. “I never met that party in my life,” he said. “I never met her! I have an alibi, and when I get my lawyer I’ll give a statement of where I was. But that girl, I never met her in my life.”
Beck couldn’t agree more. “I never met him before in my life,” she said, as glazed as a donut. Then she quietly began to weep. Bockelman marched about the room, a debate champion in the moment of triumph.
Beck, the weeping now turning to geysers, was quickly led from the room. Sbarbaro and O’Connell realized that putting her in there with Bockelman was a mistake. Prosecutors always wanted an easy time of it in court, and getting a participant in a crime to turn rat was a good way to make things easy. But this girl was jumpy and dim. The last time she was in the criminal justice system wasn’t even in the jail, they would soon learn. It was at Lawndale Hospital. A doctor put it succinctly: Beck was “a weakling and a high grade moron.” She was liable to say just about anything.
“Sure, it’s him,” Beck said when asked again, outside the room, if Bockelman was the man who shot up the Delson alley. “But I was afraid of him.”
That was good enough for the state’s attorneys, who wanted to move things along, whatever the girl’s state of mind. But the precinct captain, James Mooney, wasn’t done with her. He put her and Stemwedel in a squad car and drove them to the scene of the crime. He told her to show them what had occurred there. Beck got out of the machine on wobbly knees, strands of her blond, grimy hair stretched across her forehead like snail slime. She slowly walked the policeman and the watchman down the alley, inching around the bloodstains on the ground. She saw the back door sitting off its hinges where “Wallie” broke in, heard the screaming again, and the shots. She took Mooney through the crime step by step. The policeman was finally satisfied, happy even. It was rare to get a murder accomplice who was so cooperative, so eager to please.
***
At about six o’clock on the morning of November 4, shortly before the police put out the call for Walter Bockelman, Otto and Katherine Malm showed up at the North Side office of Dr. Henry Mal. They entered from the alley, banging on the back door of 435 West North Avenue until Dr. Mal opened it up. They didn’t know the doctor, but somehow they knew he would be in the office at this early hour. They might have been waiting, out of sight, until Mal showed up and let himself in. The doctor was alone, but he was not afraid. The man and woman standing before him were too pathetic to scare anyone. The man appeared exhausted, his eyes like pockmarks, mouth twitching just short of panic. The girl, a petite thing, maybe a teenager, was worse. She stood a step behind her man, whimpering, the skin on her face so thin and buttery she looked like she might melt into his sleeve. She also had blood matted through her hair on the left side, with black splotches caked here and there on her ear and neck until they disappeared into her clothing.
His wife was hurt, Otto Malm told the doctor. He asked him to treat and dress the wound. Dr. Mal led them inside and examined the girl’s wound. He asked how it happened.
I shot myself, she said, but the doctor’s expression must have made her doubt her memory. She said her husband had shot her. Katherine Malm, Katy to her mother and sisters, undoubtedly got another unsatisfied look, this time from her husband. The answers kept tumbling out of her mouth: an “outsider” shot her, she said. She’d received a blow from something heavy. Otto told her to shut up.
Dr. Mal accepted that he wasn’t going to get a straight answer. He sat back, calm and alert, unlike his guests. This type of wound should be treated at a hospital, he told them. That was where they should go. Augustana was just up the street.
No, Otto Malm said. He had to treat her here. Right now. There was no time to waste. Dr. Mal took another look at the shivering girl. He said he would treat her but he would have to notify the police. Otto didn’t let him get to the telephone. No one was calling the police. This time, for the first time, he was threatening Dr. Mal.
The best thing about Otto Malm – at least in his own mind – was his dead certainty. No man was ever so sure of his decisions … up until the moment everything fell apart. That was how it had been back when he shot Albert Jenson, the tailor, a decision that landed him in prison. He could take out his pipe right now, he knew, and threaten to blow a hole in the good doctor. He could stick the barrel in Mal’s gut so the doc could feel its warmth, so he’d know it had just been used. Otto stood before Dr. Henry Mal, the decision slipping its slot before finally clicking into place. He left his gun where it was, tucked away. “Come on,” Otto said to Katy, except he called her “Kitty.” She struggled to her feet, he grabbed hold of her, and they ran out the same way they came in.
Dr. Mal closed the door behind them and calmly called the police.
***
The next day, Walter Bockelman had a lawyer: William Scott Stewart. Someone at the station had his telephone number – one of the cops, no doubt. Stewart had done his bit as a prosecuter; he’d helped send Harvey Church away for murder. That case had gotten everyone’s picture in the paper. He didn’t know it, but Bockelman couldn’t have gotten any luckier. Thomas Nash was famous, thanks to his involvement with the Black Sox trial, but Stewart was a hard-nosed guy who would fight happily for anyone. Even for Walter Bockelman.
Stewart strode through the Cook County Jail on North Dearborn with his customary smile levered in place, slapping backs, asking after wives. Sure, he was a defense attorney now, but he still liked policemen, and they liked him. That, along with a few bucks spread around every month, came in handy in his line of work. The lawyer, lanky and always perfectly appointed, moved with confidence here, though it was heavy sledding today. Newspapermen were stacked everywhere, more than usual. Stewart didn’t like the look of them. All those boys with their hats cocked, practicing their smart-aleck jibes on one another. They should be behind bars themselves. They had no respect for anyone. No manners. They used foul language for laughs, even with a lady present. There was one here today, in fact, busily scribbling away in a notebook. She was a fine-looking woman, too – grim-faced, self-possessed, the stiff-upper-lip type. Stewart had seen her before, in the courthouse – Genevieve Forbes was her name. A Tribune hack. The lawyer walked on. The jail was no place for a woman.
Stewart hadn’t talked to Bockelman yet, but he knew what had transpired in the station the previous day and he couldn’t have been happy about it. So when Ethel Beck called out to him from behind bars he barely slowed his stride. “I remember that when I went back in the ‘bull pen’ to see Bockelman, Ethel Beck asked me what she should say when they took her before the judge,” Stewart would recall later. “I told her I did not represent her and could not advise her.” The damage was already done, after all. He couldn’t tell her to say she was just kidding about the confession.
Beck didn’t like Stewart giving her the brush off. Why did Walter Bockelman get a lawyer and not her? (Beck, despite being kept in jail for three months, never had a lawyer assigned to her. Charles Mishkin, advocate for public defender system, wrote of the mercenary defender process at that time that “Many of the attorneys who seek such assignment unfortunately are of the undesirable type who accept such cases only for the possible fee they can extract from the defendant or his relatives.” Beck was broke and had no relatives.) So while Stewart talked privately with Bockelman, Beck talked publicly with anyone who would listen, and soon found a reporter standing in front of her – the woman reporter. Beck said she had been walking home alone from a dance when Bockelman pulled up in a flivver and asked her to “go down the line for half an hour.” She said she went with him to the Delson factory and around the back. Beck had always loved to have an audience, and so she held nothing back in the telling of her story. “Just as we got there Ed Lehman came to the gate and asked us what we were doing,” she said. “And then I seen Al Stemwedel, the watchman, come in, and I hollered, ‘Don’t shoot,’ and Walter shot right at Al, and I seen the gun then. Then I run down the alley. I heard three more shots and I seen Walter run down the alley. Then he grabbed me by the hand.” Beck jumped up and mimed being yanked against her will. Bockelman tossed her in his car, she said, and took her through Lincoln Park, the machine tipping on two wheels at one point. He dropped her off at the corner of Sheffield and Fullerton, near the boarding house where she was staying. He was calm as could be, as if they’d just gone on a date and was feeling swell.
Reporters, like state’s attorneys, loved dumb bunnies who couldn’t keep their mouths shut. Life would be much harder without them. And Genevieve Forbes showed no more sympathy for the sad-eyed, crusty-nosed young woman than her male colleagues would have. Her editors surely noticed and approved. Their girl reporter would never be mistaken for a sentimental sob sister. The lede for her story, which would land on page one, might be a mouthful, but it was as hard as a hammer.
Ethel Beck, 19 year old waitress with six aliases, an unknown Greek husband and three service stripes in the Night court, the brazen and undernourished girl who never learned the ten commandments but has broken most of them, confessed yesterday to Capt. James Mooney and Acting Lieut. Hugh McCarthy that she accompanied Walter Bockelman early Sunday morning when he ended his attempt to ‘pull a job’ at the Delson Manufacturing company, 3051 Lincoln avenue, by sending a fatal bullet through young Ed Lehman.
No ambiguity there. Bockelman and Beck did it and should be sent away. Full stop. Forbes, being a woman, did end on a positive note, but it was the kind a good city editor could appreciate. Beck wasn’t just some simpering crook with bad taste in men. She had dreams. She knew she’d done wrong, and she wanted a different life. If only she had the opportunity, she would go into the restaurant business. “That’s what I really like, and if I get out of this mess, yes, man, I’d like to have a restaurant of my own,” she told the reporter.
And if she couldn’t own a restaurant, Forbes wrote, turning the screw like a pro, “Ethel would like to go into the movies, where they wear lovely clothes. But she despises the ‘sweet’ heroines.”
-- Douglas Perry
© Douglas Perry