Part One
Peggy Beal changed history with her Sheik Love defense. Here’s how it happened.
Guests at the Midwest Hotel, called the front desk and reported that they had heard two gun shots. The hotel management called the police. Police Officers entered a prominent Kansas City hotel, The Midwest, and found the body of Warren Anderson, dead, shot in the back of the head. Lying beside him, bleeding from her right side where she shot herself, punctured her lung, and set her silken underwear on fire from the burning of the gun powder, was Peggy Beal. Only 10 hours before this Peggy had been talking to a neighbor in the hotel describing Warren as the “Perfect Lover” and showing the woman a stack of love letters from him.
Peggy was an army nurse when she met Warren, an aviator from New Jersey. They met in Dayton, OH, she as a nurse and he as an aviator stationed at a base close to Dayton. Both of them shared an interest in Esperanto, a language that was invented by a Polish ophthalmologist in 1887 an attempt to develop one international language to foster world peace and international understanding, the language is still somewhat alive. In 1999 William Auld won a Pulitzer Prize in literature for a book that he wrote in Esperanto.
Elizabeth Beal, Peggy’s former husband’s new wife spoke to reporters. She had been married to Steven since 1919, a year after his divorce from Peggy was final. Elizabeth was helping Steven raise two sons, that were 16 and 13 from Steven’s marriage to Peggy. Peggy did not want to share any of her personal information to the press. When asked about her sons she told them, “As to the baby, please, please, please leave the baby out of this. I am alone now in this affair. I have no fear of the future, let me face it alone.”
Elizabeth told the reporters that Steven married Peggy when she was 16 and they were married for 14 years. They lived in the Hungarian sector of Dayton, OH. Peggy’s maiden name was Marie Letenyer. Her parents were divorced when Peggy was 8 and Peggy’s father raised her. Her father was from Vienna, Austria and spoke nine different languages. He worked as both an interpreter and a teacher.
At the time of the murder both her parents were dead. Also, Peggy had a sister/half-sister living in Cleveland. Peggy fell in love with a doctor in Cleveland and they became engaged. She caught the flu, and her doctor fiancé took care of her. Unfortunately, he caught the flu and died on the day they were to be married. Peggy was admitted to Stillwater Sanitarium for treatment of mental illness, probably depression. She was there from January 19, 1921 through April 28,1921 when she was pronounced cured. Peggy went back to the sanitarium as a nurse’s aide on May 1, 1921 and stayed there until November 1, 1921.
After World War I, Warren worked as a Floor Manager in a department store in Kansas City. Peggy was still a nurse in Springfield, IL. They were living together in a prominent hotel in Kansas City as Mr. and Mrs. Anderson. Peggy and Warren had been living together as husband and wife for 10 days at two different hotels. Anderson introduced her to his friends and coworkers as his wife.
In critical condition, Peggy was rushed to the hospital. They found a note on the dresser from her. “My name is Peggy Beal. I am 29 years of age. I live in Springfield, IL. I came to Kansas City with the intention of marrying Warren Warren Anderson. When I arrived, I met him, and we went to a hotel together. He told me he was married and not divorced yet. Therefore, he could not marry me. There is nothing more to tell. I shot him because he brought me here and could not marry me. Signed, Peggy Beal”
Doctors believe that Peggy will recover from her self-inflicted gunshot wound. When the nurse told her she was going to survive she whispered, “I want to die. I’m not sorry I shot him. He deserved it. I did right to shoot him. I should have killed him before I did.”
Warren’s body was waiting at a mortuary waiting for transportation back to Collingswood, NJ. Women came to visit him to see the body of who Peggy describes as “The Perfect Lover.” The police received a phone call from an unnamed woman who had called the hotel where Warren and Peggy were staying and asked for Mr. or Mrs. Anderson.
The hotel receptionist told her what had happened, and the woman called the police to verify. Police also allowed her to see the body. She stood staring at it for a long time and said, “How could she? What devils women are!”
Letters were found between Warren and his father, in the letters it was apparent that Warren, the supposed war hero, as an army aviator never went overseas. The most exciting thing that he did during World War I was campaigning in Liberty Bond drives. In one of the letters Warren also told his mother that he was writing Romance Short Stories. One of the stories supposedly semi-autobiographical, had the facts a little skewed.
It was about a war hero aviator who fell in love with a girl that didn’t want anything to do with him because of his family’s wealth. She fled to the South Seas and the aviator followed her, they made up and became rulers of one the islands and created a kingdom of romance, tropical beauty and undying love. A little cloying! Give me a bodice ripper over this any day!
Warren told Peggy that they would take their honeymoon in the South Seas. He then told her that he had to postpone his wedding to Peggy because his divorce was not yet final. It was the second time that he had postponed the wedding. That is one of the examples Peggy Beal used to describe Sheik Love.
“My faith survived that, I ought to have known then. But I didn’t. I believed him. I thought he cared for me. And then he told me there were 50 others and showed me their names written in a diary and the cities where they lived. And my name was the last of all of them. Will there be more? I asked him. ‘I don’t know, maybe there will. Maybe I’ll go back to some of these. I can’t tell.’ Then I killed him. I ought to have done it before. All I’m sorry is that I didn’t kill myself too. There is nothing more for me.”
Warren had been married twice the first time to a woman named Ruth and the second to Opal, who’s nickname was Babe or B.
Oddly enough Warren really was still married to Opal Anderson who was staying with her stepbrother in Indianapolis, trying to recover from tuberculosis. Opal had been married before and was a war widow. She married Warren in November 1918. Their marriage was happy until Opal caught Warren with other women. One of the letters found in Warren’s trunk was a letter from his father, warning him that B was trying to track him down and had threatened to kill him. She had phoned Warren’s father to tell him this. This may have been the motivation for dropping the divorce, or it could have been as Peggy Beal described it Sheik Love.
