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  But rumors began to circulate around Tillie’s neighborhood. How had she known her husband was so close to death? People started whispering that she was psychic, that she could see death coming down the pipeline just in time to buy a cheap coffin. Of course, Tillie only knew that Kupezyk was “two inches” from death because she’d been poisoning him like clockwork. But to her credulous neighbors, the woman appeared omniscient.

  Rough on Rats

  One of the attendees at Kupezyk’s funeral was a gentle, hardworking, fifty-year-old widower named Joseph Klimek. Some called him an alcoholic, but he stridently denied those charges. Klimek didn’t really care about paying his respects to Kupezyk; he’d come to the funeral to set eyes on the newly single Tillie. His friends were nudging him in Tillie’s direction, and after years of bachelorhood, the idea of a wife was comforting to Klimek.

  After the service, Tillie didn’t stay to flirt. “She felt too bad to see people,” Klimek explained later. But after a few weeks of gentle pursuit, Tillie agreed to marry him. Klimek was overjoyed; his days of loneliness were over forever. “I married Tillie for a home,” he said. And what a cozy home it was! He appreciated her skill with the crochet hook, and he loved her cooking.

  Sure, Tillie had a past, but Klimek didn’t care about her former lovers. She was reformed. He was sure of it. “As soon as we were married, she burned up all the photographs of her husbands and her man friends,” he said. “And she tore up all her letters. She had my picture over the mantel; that was all.”

  Unbeknownst to the romantic Klimek, Tillie wasn’t so happy with her little slice of domestic bliss. She began complaining to her cousin, Nellie Koulik, who had a dead husband of her own under her belt. When Nellie suggested a divorce, Tillie responded, “No, I will get rid of him some other way.” Nellie knew exactly what she meant, and before Tillie left, Nellie slipped her a little tin of powder marked ROUGH ON RATS. It was a household poison made up of arsenic tinted black with coal, easy to purchase at any friendly neighborhood drugstore, and it had an eye-catching logo: a rat, dead on its back, overlaid with the slogan: DON’T DIE IN THE HOUSE. Nellie always kept some on hand. UNBEATABLE EXTERMINATOR, ran the text beneath the logo. THE OLD RELIABLE THAT NEVER FAILS.

  Tillie went home and began to whip up a series of wonderful, home-cooked meals for Klimek, each one seasoned with a healthy dash of Rough on Rats. Klimek ate and ate, growing sicker and sicker. His legs stiffened and his breath began to smell like garlic—two of the more innocuous signs of arsenic poisoning. Around that time, two of his pet dogs died suddenly.

  Klimek’s insurance money was practically glimmering on the horizon when his brother John ruined everything by getting suspicious. Despite Tillie’s loud objections that she could nurse Klimek herself, thank you very much, John insisted on bringing in his own doctor to take a look at his brother. The doctor immediately recognized the symptoms of arsenic poisoning and whisked Joseph away to the hospital, notifying the police in the process.

  On October 26, 1922, Tillie was arrested for the attempted murder of Joseph Klimek. The following day, her cousin Nellie was arrested for providing her with the arsenic. While Tillie was carted away in the squad car, she turned to the officer next to her. “The next one I want to cook a dinner for is you,” she said. “You made all my trouble.”

  Exhumations

  It soon became apparent that Joseph Klimek’s poisoning wasn’t an isolated incident. Anonymous letters begged the police to dig up the bodies of Tillie’s third husband, old Frank Kupezyk, and Nellie’s first. Lo and behold, their corpses were marbled with arsenic. Clearly, Tillie had enemies who had long suspected that her “psychic” qualities were rooted in murder. (“Don’t die in the house!”) Newspaper headlines began to take on a Frankensteinian quality: BODIES OF MATES OF PAIR ORDERED DUG UP; 3 MORE BODIES TO BE EXHUMED IN KLIMEK CASE; BODIES OF OTHER RELATIVES WILL BE EXHUMED.

  Meanwhile, Tillie was taken to the hospital to see her last living spouse. Did she feel bad for trying to murder him? She did not. As he plied her with furious questions, she replied, “I don’t know. Don’t bother me anymore.” When she overheard him asking a nurse for a glass of water, Tillie shouted at the nurse, “If he makes any trouble for you, take a two-by-four board and hit him over the head with it!” Still, she kissed him before she left, baffling onlookers.

  It soon became clear that Tillie had killed more than just her husbands. As the police were busily exhuming bodies, two of Tillie’s cousins showed up at the station and told them to dig deeper. They claimed that Tillie had killed four of their siblings, all of whom died after a creepy dinner party at Tillie’s place. Tillie had been in an argument with their mother, and took her rage out on the children by serving them poisoned food.

  A common thread was emerging among many of Tillie’s crimes: petty revenge. She killed Joseph Guskowski because she felt snubbed by his lack of engagement ring, and she grew so furious over minor slights and disagreements that it was dangerous to be around her when she was in a bad mood. Two of her neighbors came forward to tell the police that they fell deathly ill after Tillie fed them poisoned candy. One woman said it was because she and Tillie had gotten into an argument, and the other claimed that Tillie had spotted her talking to Klimek and hadn’t liked it.

  As Tillie and Nellie were formally charged with murder—Tillie for the murder of Frank Kupezyk and Nellie for the murder of her first husband—the exhumations took an even more disturbing turn. “Poison mystery trails” led detectives to three tiny graves: those of Nellie’s twin infants and granddaughter. Nellie had given birth to the twins while she was still married to her first husband, but he refused to acknowledge them as his. (At the time, Nellie was already embroiled in a tempestuous affair with the man who would become her second husband, Albert Koulik.) One of the twins died at eight months; the other died a month later. The third dead baby, the grandchild, was allegedly poisoned after Nellie’s daughter criticized Nellie for “her manner of living.” Just like her murderous cousin, Nellie had a quick trigger finger and a low tolerance for disagreement.

  The police could barely keep up with the accusations that were now pouring in. It was like a dam had broken in Tillie’s community, and people finally felt free to confess their deepest, darkest suspicions about their allegedly psychic neighbor and her child-killing cousin. Everyone was sure they were being poisoned. One of Nellie’s sons suspected that his mother had been slowly poisoning him. One of Nellie’s daughters suspected Tillie of poisoning her. Even Nellie’s sister, Cornelia, was brought into jail because her son-in-law was convinced she’d been giving him poisoned moonshine. Poison, poison everywhere, and not a drop to drink! The total alleged victim count hovered at twenty: twelve dead, seven alive but in poor health, and one missing (a mystery man known only as “Meyers,” suspected to be another husband or lover of Tillie’s). And that’s just counting humans. One neighbor claimed that their dog had died suddenly after Tillie “voiced objections” to its obnoxious barking.

  The community had gone poison mad—and to the police, the situation felt almost unstoppable. They began to talk of a witchy “poison belt” that stretched throughout Chicago’s Little Poland, with Tillie ruling over it as the “high priestess of the Bluebeard clique.” The cousins were now facing the gallows.

  “They Just Died Same as Other People”

  In jail, the accused women exhibited very different personalities. Nellie smiled more, spoke less English, and was prone to hysterics. She allowed photographers to take her picture, but not until she’d slicked back her hair. When asked about the case, she insisted that her accusing son had simply made a “joke” that the “big men” were taking too seriously. In contrast, Tillie was silent, controlled, and defiant, an “automaton of emotions.” The only time she showed any real feeling was when she burst out in her own defense: “I didn’t rob nobody! I didn’t shoot nobody; I didn’t poison nobody; I didn’t kill nobody. I didn’t! Everybody pick on me. Everybody make eyes at me like they go
ing to eat me. Why do they make eyes at me? I tell the truth. Anything I did I did to myself. Nobody else.”

  The prosecutor assigned to the case—William McLaughlin, assistant state’s attorney—was out for Tillie’s blood. McLaughlin had a knack for hyperbole and seemed determined to secure his own immortalization through this trial. He fed journalists the melodramatic quotes they wanted to hear, calling it “the most astounding wholesale poisoning plot ever uncovered” and “the most amazing death plot in recent criminal history.” He claimed that the cousins threw “poison parties” at which they fed arsenic-drenched entrees to large swathes of relatives. In fact, he was convinced that Little Poland was haunted by an entire network of female Bluebeards, and that Tillie and Nellie were simply the (crude, unattractive) tip of the iceberg. He wouldn’t be satisfied with a life sentence for Tillie, either. He wanted her to hang.

  Outside of the courtroom, several of Chicago’s feisty “girl reporters” were hot on the case, including the amazing Genevieve Forbes, who worked the crime beat in an era when women simply were not on the crime beat. Forbes scored a series of intimate interviews: she talked to Joseph Klimek in the hospital, she tracked down Tillie’s distraught parents, and, finally, she got an audience with Tillie herself.

  With her merciless journalist’s eye, Forbes recognized nuances in Tillie that no one else bothered to understand. She saw Tillie as a dangerous, vengeful woman who used poison as a means of assuaging her wounded pride and who held her secrets close to her chest. She tore into Tillie’s looks—“a fat, squat, Polish peasant woman, 45 years old but looking 55, with a lumpy figure, capacious hands and feet, and dull brown hair skinned back into a knot at the back of her head”—but grudgingly acknowledged her secretive intelligence. “Tillie Klimek is a spectator at her own drama,” she wrote.

  The court never gave Tillie that sort of credit, and the trial took a distasteful turn when the judge asked for a “psychopathic lab report” on the two accused women. According to the examining doctor, both women were “sub-normal mentally and sufferers from dementia praecox,” with intellects no higher than those of an eleven-year-old child. The judge took the whole thing a step further by bringing up one of the era’s pet subject: eugenics. He was irritated because one of Nellie’s sons had already been declared “of feeble mind” years before, and he was convinced that criminality ran in this family’s DNA. “If we had a fieldworker, a eugenics expert, to check up on the history of this whole family at the time one moron was discovered, then the police might have been warned to watch this woman,” he said. “When we find one case we can seek out and locate the nest.”

  Note that neither of these women spoke perfect English. If their examination had been conducted in English, it’s quite possible they would have simply been unable to complete it properly. It does seem like Nellie was significantly more naïve than her cousin, but Tillie was no fool, and the lab report especially underestimated her. “She has brains,” Forbes had noted, “and they are the yardsticks for her emotions.” But she wasn’t fluent, and she didn’t want to explain herself anyway, so the court insisted that her crimes were the result of a childlike intellect—or the sloppy, disagreeable work of a peasant.

  Since Chicago was so thoroughly out of control in the 1920s, it’s not surprising that Tillie’s trial turned into something of a circus. On numerous occasions, the judge was forced to yell, “This is not a theater!” Oh, but it was. The witnesses against Tillie included gossipy neighbors, three grave diggers, and a “lady undertaker,” and the audience was obsessed with them. One of the grave diggers scandalized the court with his tale of Tillie’s lover John, who often visited Tillie after Frank Kupezyk left for work. “Once I seen him kiss her,” said the grave digger. When the prosecutor asked what happened next, the grave digger replied, “Why then, Tillie put up some newspapers in front of the window, so I couldn’t see in.” Everybody cracked up at that—even Tillie.

  But by the end of the trial, nobody was laughing, and even Tillie’s impassive demeanor was starting to splinter. When the coroner’s chemist swore he’d found arsenic in the bodies of all three of her husbands, she finally began to exhibit signs of anxiety. Still, she gave her own solid defense, wearing the fateful black hat that she’d sewn next to Kupezyk’s deathbed. She insisted that Kupezyk died of alcohol poisoning and denied culpability in each one of her other husbands’ deaths. “I loved them; they loved me. They just died same as other people,” she said. “I not responsible for that. I could no [sic] help if they wanted to die.”

  McLaughlin was practically begging the jury for the death penalty. He was sick and tired of women getting away with murder. “Gentlemen, the death penalty has never been inflicted upon a woman in this state,” he cried. “This defendant is like a good many other women in this town. She thinks she can get away with it. There are a lot of women, gentlemen, who are awaiting your verdict in this case. I feel that the death penalty should be inflicted, and I mean it.”

  He was right: Tillie was exactly like “a good many other women in this town,” in that she was a husband killer. Four hundred percent, remember? But unlike many of the other women, who wept and flirted from the witness stand, Tillie did not, in fact, “get away with it.” She received a guilty verdict for the murder of Frank Kupezyk and was sentenced to life in prison—the harshest sentence ever given to a woman in Cook County at the time.

  No Beauty

  Nellie’s trial was something of a mess. Maybe the court never took her as seriously as Tillie, the ice queen, because despite the fact that her own kids testified against her, Nellie walked free. Once she was acquitted of the charge of giving Tillie poison, McLaughlin wearily dropped the other charge against her. Her first husband’s body was undeniably full of arsenic, but nobody felt like delving into this supposed “Bluebeard clique” any further now that its high priestess was in jail.

  Other murderesses were filing into the courthouse now, and they were much easier on the eyes. In two short years, “Stylish Belva” Gaertner and “Beautiful Beulah” Annan would be preening behind the bars of the same jail, posing for reporters in their slips and using every feminine wile in the book (including, but not limited to: tears, fashionable hats, and great tailoring) to walk free.

  This was the ugly truth behind the verdict: Tillie may never have been locked up for life if she had been more attractive. Yes, she was clearly guilty, but Chicago had dealt with guilty husband killers before, and the pretty ones consistently walked free. Twenty-eight women had been acquitted of murder in Cook County alone in recent years, and they were all good-looking. The latest woman to be released was Cora Orthwein, a “dashing, well dressed north side beauty.” Only four had been found guilty before Tillie came along: Hilda Axlund (“not a beauty”), Vera Trepannier (“more than middle aged”), Emma Simpson (“judged insane”), and Dora Waterman (“no beauty”).

  Of course, though Tillie was only technically on trial for the murder of Frank Kupezyk, it was pretty clear to most observers that she was a serial killer—and not just a serial killer, people thought, but the mastermind behind an entire “poison ring.” Even so, both the press and the courtroom loved the passionate violence of women who killed husbands and lovers, which is exactly what Tillie did. Orthwein, for example, shot her lover after a night of boozing and ferocious fighting. Who’s to say that if Tillie had been young and blushing, her story wouldn’t have been framed differently, despite its higher rate of violence? They might have portrayed her as a delicate husband seeker, continually offended by her coarse peasant lovers. A serial lover who just happened to kill.

  The courts and the press were well aware of their bias, but they also seemed to revel in it. There was something so sexy about a bad woman going free. Society’s moral outrage was reserved for women like Tillie, who didn’t look good doing evil things. A Tribune column called “A Line o’ Type or Two” published a vicious telegram mocking Chicago for the ugliness of its latest murderess: “Chicago’s bid for fame in boosting Tillie
Klimek will fall flat,” it ran. “Suggest you have eligibility classes as to beauty, social standing, and so forth before allowing any more murders.”

  After one especially ridiculous trial, where two gorgeous blonde sisters were acquitted of murder, the irritated prosecutor remarked that “blonde curls or dark eyes seem to have a faculty of making juries forget the most clinching evidence.” Genevieve Forbes put it the most bluntly: “Tillie Klimek went to the penitentiary because she had never gone to a beauty parlor.”

  The Devil Won’t Get Up

  One point that apparently never came up at the trial was the question of abuse. Most of the evidence pointed to money as Tillie’s motive, since she collected tidy little sums after each husband’s death. Because of this, perhaps the court didn’t feel the need to delve further into her psyche. But concurrent juries were extraordinarily sympathetic to any whiff of spousal abuse in these husband-killing cases, so one wonders why it wasn’t ever mentioned by Tillie’s defense. After all, both Tillie and her parents insisted that Klimek and Kupezyk were no-good alcoholics, and then there was that whole business of Tillie yelling in Kupezyk’s dead ear, “You devil, you won’t get up anymore.” Did she kill solely for money and revenge, or was she running from a devil or two?

  Money certainly wasn’t her only motivation, as there were plenty of times when Tillie killed with no hope of a life insurance payout. She held overblown grudges and used poison to silence anyone who irritated her, whether it was a neighbor who dared to flirt with her husband or a dog that wouldn’t stop barking. Genevieve Forbes, at least, certainly seemed to think Tillie was an enigma that hadn’t been solved yet. But the city at large was ready to move on to prettier criminals. For a while, they’d focused on Tillie’s crimes and her looks, but no one was terribly concerned with her demons. So they labeled her “squat” and “ugly” and locked her up for life.