The play "Chicago" was Maurine Dallas Watkins' retelling of two very public murder trials that occurred in Chicago in 1924, those of Beulah Sheriff-Annan and Belva Gaertner. Watkins covered these trials for the Chicago Tribune and wrote the character of Mary Sunshine as a self portrait. For Belva Gaertner (better known as Velma Kelly), she had a much less glitzy fate. She was acquitted and went on to have a few run-ins with the law, but ended up living a semi-normal life before dying of natural causes in California in 1965 at the age of eighty. Although in the case of Beulah Sheriff-Annan (a.k.a. Roxie Hart), it was more of a grisly end. It's true she was acquitted of murdering her lover, thanks to the skills of her highly paid attorney, who was bankrolled by her stunningly loyal husband. She repaid that debt by publicly divorcing him after her release. She married two more times before her death from tuberculosis four years later.

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