Love Letters Flood Peggy Beal, as She Awaits Trial for Slaying False Lover

Kansas City, Missouri, 1922
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Love Letters Flood Peggy Beal, as She Awaits Trial for Slaying False Lover

Kansas City, Mo., Sept. 18.—Three hundred men have written Peggy Beal, slayer of Frank Warren Anderson, "the perfect lover," asking her to marry them. Among the suitors for the hand of the fair slayer are ministers. Also many men who claim to have great riches.

Peggy Beal, who shot and killed Anderson, scion of an old Philadelphia family, in a hotel room in Kansas City, June 3, has just left the hospital where she recovered from wounds inflicted upon herself after shooting Anderson.

She is charged with murder and will face a jury in Kansas City in the near future. She herself is the moving spirit back of plans for early trial.

"I want to stand before the work vindicated," she said. "I want other women to know what I suffered. I want them to know that I killed Frank Anderson to save other women from his clutches."

Minister Proposes.

Meantime the proposals of marriage come flooding in. In one of them, a man calling himself a Detroit minister, says in part:

"I am sure you are not all bad. No woman could have written the wonderful love thoughts that you have written and be bad at heart. I would like to make you my wife and lift you up from the depths of despair.

"As a minister, it is my duty to offer you a haven in my heart and home."

Peggy Deal, before revealing the letter, clipped the writer's name from it. She said she would not give out the names of any of those who have written love letters to her. A man describing himself as a Galveston, Tex., sea captain wrote that he was sure he could make her forget the drear days that have followed the killing of Anderson.

"If you will marry me, I will see that you forget the past," he wrote. "I am not so terribly handsome or so terribly good, but I would be willing to give every hour in the day to trying to make you happy.

"If you will say the word, I will get a year's leave from my work and will come to Kansas City at once."

From a Widower.

From San Diego another man writes:

"First I must confess I am a widower, but in that confession I ought to make myself more desirable to you, for I have learned how to put up with the whims of women.

"I have read that you trusted Frank Anderson and then learned he had 50 other sweethearts.

"I want to say that I never have paid court to more than one woman at a time. You could count on me being loyal and true to you."

Peggy has not answered the letters -- at least not many of them.

One of the letters, she says, is from a former convict.

"I have had my troubles and you have had yours," he writes from near San Quentin, Cal.

"I have $90 I made doing fancy work while in prison. I'd like to send you that to come out here and we would see if we couldn't be happier together.

"Please answer at once whether you would marry a former convict if he is trying to do right now."

Love letters do not thrill Peggy Beal as they once did, she says. It was when Frank Anderson, just out of the army, wrote such strong protestations of love that she received her greatest thrill.

"The Perfect Lover," the young woman styled Anderson, when she spoke of him to other women.

She exhibited letters, from which the following is an excerpt:

"Dearest Peg: I have just finished reading one of the most wonderful books. 'Thuvia -- Maid of Mars.' Honestly, sweetheart, I never knew I was such a big cry baby. I read it with a handkerchief in the left hand and I had to use it constantly to clear my visage. If you have not read it, by all means get a copy."

Apparently Peggy got a copy for after Anderson had come to Kansas City to join her, he was found dead and she near death from bullet wounds inflicted by her in a hotel room. By her side lay a copy of the book. "Thuvia -- Maid of Mars." It was open at an illustration of Thuvia, character of the novel of her victim, a dagger in her hand.

List of Women.

A list of names of women, a list printed carefully with a pencil by Anderson, was found in the room. It was the list that brought death to Anderson, according to the story police say Peggy told them. She chided him about failing to keep a promise to marry her, she is alleged to have said, and he showed her the fist.

"Peg, I'm a devil -- I love no woman," he said.

A bullet from Peg's pistol was her answer.

After the shooting, when Peggy Beal was recovering at a hospital, she said:

"I killed him to save other women from the fate of the 50."

For weeks the young woman lay between life and death. Physicians had given up hope when from Terre Haute, Ind., her former home, came this telegram.

"Tell mamma I love her and I want her to get well."

It was from Louis Beal, 13 years old, who lives with his brother, Stepehen, 16, and their father in Terre Haute. The children have lived with their father since their parents were divorced several years ago.

It was the child's telegram that caused Mrs. Beal to have a determination to recover and to seek vindication by an early trial.

--The Helena Independent, Helena, Montana, September 19, 1922, page 3.



Peggy Beal Acquitted

SAYS SHE'LL MAKE GOOD WHEN FREED MURDER CHARGE

Peggy Beal Faces Life With Renewed Determination When Acquitted of Slaying Lover

(By The Associated Press)

KANSAS CITY, Mo., Oct. 24—Marie L. (Peggy) Beal faced life with renewed determination today, freed after a brief trial for the charge of having murdered her lover Frank Warren Anderson, who she said boasted he bad broken the hearts of fifty other women.

Leaping to her feet as the verdict was read last night, Mrs. Beal thanked the jury and asserted:

"Now I am going to stay right here in Kansas City and make good. I'm going to send for my little boys in Terre Haute and make a good home for them."

The court ordeal was comparatively brief, there were few witnesses and the testimony was adduced speedily. She took the witness stand, pallid and nervous and the story of the shooting was drawn from her by the attorneys.

From the first meeting in Dayton Ohio. Mrs. Beal, a young divorcee related in chronological order, incidents of their association which terminated in her fatally shooting Anderson and seriously wounding herself in a room which they occupied in a local hotel June 3. He lured her there, she said, with a promise of marriage. She had been reading a passage in a romantic novel in which a woman killed her lover. She shot Anderson as be lay upon the bed and turned the revolver upon herself, sending a bullet into her breast.

"I met Anderson in a restaurant in Dayton, 0.," she testified. "He asked me to marry him before he left Dayton and I told him I would give him my answer in June."

Twice she visited him in Kansas City. They moved to the hotel where the tragedy occurred. She asked him to marry her, she said. "I was nearly stunned when he told me he could find no grounds for divorce," she said. "I asked him what I was going to do," she told the court, "and he said 'do as you please.' "

She asked him why he had sought her love and he answered, she declared, "because I am a devil." She said that she could not recall shooting him but remembered shooting herself.

--The Olean Evening Herald, Olean, New York, Oct. 24, 1922, page 1.