Curiously, the musical Chicago (which debuted as a stage production in 1975 and later adapted into a

Curiously, the musical Chicago (which debuted as a stage production in 1975 and later adapted into a film in 2002), was actually based on a real murder trial in the titular city… Albeit the show is filtered somewhat through several other fictionalised accounts of the case, such as a 1926 play of the same name which was itself made into a silent comedy-drama in 1927.In 1924, 24 year old bookkeeper Beulah Annan shot then man whom she had been having an affair with, Harry Kalstedt, in the back. Her accounts of what happened after this varied from telling to telling, but the most famous version is that they were drinking wine in her bedroom, as you do, but they got into a violent argument. Belulah said they both reached for the gun, and as she got to it first, she then shot him as he was putting his hat and coat on. She then reportedly watched him die slowly on her floor for the next several hours as she played the Hula Lou foxtrot record as she drank martinis. Once he was dead, she called her husband, Albert “Al” Annan, to tell him that she had killed a man who had tried to “make love to her“. The resulting murder trial was… a mess. The fact that the murderer was an attractive young woman and the “seedy details” of her affair and the crime itself were quickly seized by the tabloid press of the time, thrusting Beulah into the limelight as a kind of celebrity. Her husband Albert believed her tales that it was self-defence, even though her account of what happened and why changed multiple times over the course of the trial. But his hiring her the best lawyers he could afford with their savings worked, with Beluah managing to get off with an acquittal… Whereupon she promptly dumped him, telling the press immediately after she was confirmed to be a free woman: “I have left my husband, he is too slow“.Following the trial, Beluah costed on her infamy for a time, getting married twice more (once to a boxer, which ended in divorce due to his being abusive). Eventually, four years after the trial Beluah passed away from TB at Chicago Fresh Air Sanatorium, where she was staying under the name Beulah Stephens. It was 1928, and he was 28 years old.So yeah, kind of bizarre that this case has had multiple interpretations in multiple genres over the years, I wonder what it is about this case in particular that seemed to catch the attention of the audience to the degree that the interpretations of Beluah’s crime were all very successful in their ways. -- source link

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