Ugly Prey: An Innocent Woman and the Death Sentence That Scandalized Jazz Age Chicago [Hardcover]

Ugly Preytells the riveting story of poor Italian immigrant Sabella Nitti, the first woman ever sentenced to hang in Chicago, in 1923, for the alleged murder of her husband. Journalist Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi leads readers through the case, showing how, with no evidence and no witnesses, Nitti was the target of an obsessed deputy sheriff and the victim of a faulty legal system. She was also—to the men who convicted her and reporters fixated on her—ugly. Forthatunforgiveable crime, the media painted her as a hideous, dirty, and unpredictable immigrant, almost an animal. Featuring two other fascinating women—the ambitious and ruthless journalist who helped demonize Sabella through her reports and the brilliant, beautiful, 23-year-old lawyer who helped humanize her with a jailhouse makeover—Ugly Preyis not just a page-turning courtroom drama but also a thought-provoking look at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and class within the American justice system.

“Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi’s riveting and creepy tale of violence, betrayal, and injustice is an uncomfortable yet all-too-familiar story of anxious Americans’ willingness to believe that illiterate, poor immigrants can be guilty of a crime because of who they were, not what they did.” —Kate Clifford Larson, author ofThe Assassin’s Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln

“An elegantly researched and beautifully written example of investigative journalism. Sabella Nitti’s story is a cracking-good mystery. It’s a monument to Jazz-era misogyny, true crime, women’s rights, immigrant prejudice, and the brutal inequities in the system of jurisprudence in 1920s Chicago.”
—Jeffrey Gusfield, author ofDeadly Valentines: The Story of Capone’s Henchman “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn and Louise Rolfe, His Blonde Alibi