If you’re familiar with the acclaimed Broadway musical, “Chicago,” you might know that the storyline was based upon a real-life murder allegedly committed by a woman named Beulah May Annan. I thought I’d tell her story or what details we know that have been documented and add a bit more flavor spiced from my imagination.

Beulah May Sheriff was born in a small Kentucky town a few weeks after Halloween in 1899. At the age when most girls are yearning to go on a date with a high school football star, Beulah married newspaper linotype operator, Perry Stephens. She dumped him quite quickly for car mechanic, Albert “Al” Annan and the two lovebirds moved to Chicago where Al dropped to one knee and took Beulah’s hand on March 29, 1920.

While Al found work at a local garage, Beulah found Harry Kalstadt while she was washing her clothes at her apartment building laundry mat. The two came together just like their washing machine tubs that rotated on a horizontal axis and began a torrid four-year affair.

Now, there was no common sense when it came to where Beulah and Harry hooked up for their liaisons. While hubby was at work changing spark plugs, she and her lover were revving up their motors in the married couple’s bedroom.

One afternoon, things got stupid after they got steamy. Harry and Beulah drank a bottle of wine and then Beulah began to slug some gin. Oh, should I mention that one or the other had placed a loaded gun on top of the bed sheet? Here’s what may have happened next.

“No, I’m not leaving my husband,” she said. “I love him.”

“Well, then,” said Harry with a slur of his words. “I’m leaving you and I will disgrace your name all over Chicago!”

“You will not get that chance!” Beulah shouted as Harry put on his coat and hat. He turned around to find Beulah reaching for the gun. He pounced on the bed and for a moment, they struggled to seize the weapon. She finally wrestled it free from his grip and Harry fled for the door.

Beulah shot him in the back. He fell to the floor, but with blood gushing through his coat, she saw that he was still breathing. Beulah laughed and spun a fox trot dance record on the Victrola. As she hummed to the music, she poured herself a tall glass of gin and watched Harry die.

Once the gin after the wine had left her woozy and doozy, she did what no married woman would do after she had just killed her lover in the same room where she sleeps with her husband. She called Al.

“Oh Al, honey? Is this you I’m talking to? Oh, good. I just shot and killed some guy in our bedroom. Why did I shoot him? Because he was trying to make love to me and I didn’t think you would appreciate that.”

Beulah was arrested and put on trial for murder. Prosecutors claimed she shot Harry in a jealous rage because he threatened to leave her.

“That’s not true,” she said in her self-defense. “I thought he was going to rape me and I thought I was pregnant too.”

Add her husband’s dumb loyalty to his wife. He found out that the affair was happening on the same bed he slept with Beulah; nevertheless, he withdrew all of the money he had in the bank to hire the best of lawyers Chicago could offer in order to defend her.

Beulah’s trial ended in her acquittal on May 25, 1924. One day later she said these exact words to the Chicago press.

“I’ve left my husband. He’s too slow.”

Two years after she claimed he had deserted her, their divorce rewarded Beulah with whatever assets he had left.

Beulah was not finished with her manly relationships. In 1927, she married a boxer named Edward Harlib. She divorced him three months later claiming mental cruelty and was awarded $5,000 ($84,000 in today’s money). She then moved onto a fourth man named Able Marcus. What happened to them is unknown, but conjecture is that Able was able to escape Beulah’s claws before she could tear out his heart and steal his wallet.

In 1928, Beulah had some trouble breathing and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She entered the Chicago Fresh Air Sanitorium where she changed her name to avoid publicity by the city’s press.

Beulah Annan died on March 10, 1928, nearly four years after her acquittal. She was 28 years old.

Five men. Three divorces. One murder - all occurring within a span of eight years. A nurse working in the sanitarium said she heard Beulah’s last words before she died, still claiming her innocence in the killing of Harry Kalstadt.

“I didn’t murder Harry,” she said. “The bottle of gin did.”

The apartment building where the murder took place still stands in Chicago. Residents who have rented the one-bedroom suite where Beulah and Harry had their affair have terminated their leases after living there for one year.

A woman who had lived in Beulah’s apartment told the Chicago Tribune, “I was awakened one night last March to the sound of someone falling at the end of my bed. I heard a man’s voice whisper, “Help me!”

“I turned on the light and there was a pool of what looked like dried blood on the floor. There was something else that was very strange. Something was left on my bed stand that certainly was not mine.

“It was an empty bottle of gin!”

Happy Halloween everyone!

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com