Felonious Flappers: Bad Girls of the Art Deco Era

retro
0 1.2k

Prohibition literally fueled crime during the 1920s.  Flappers flaunted the law by drinking in speakeasies and wearing garters equipped with a handy flask filled with bootleg hootch – or a gun! The good times wouldn’t last forever, the giddy drinking and partying that characterized the 1920s came to a screeching halt in October of 1929 with the stock market crash. 

Former beauty pageant winner Hazel Belford Glab was handy with a gun, and she wasn’t afraid to use one to further her agenda.  When her husband threatened to divorce her, Hazel hatched a plan to cash in before Mr. Glab could bail out.

During the Deco Era when a wife wasn’t taking deadly aim at her husband, it’s probably because she’d focused instead on the “other woman”.

When neighborhood gossip hinted at a love affair between Clara Phillips’ husband and an attractive young widow, Clara became a woman with a mission, to remove the woman she thought was a rival for her husband’s love by any means necessary.

The Depression of the 1930s resulted in the perpetration of darker crimes. Women became involved in bandit gangs, and they were active participants in kidnappings, bank robberies, and murders.

During the early 1930s Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were on the run from the law in the Midwest.  In Los Angeles, Burmah and Thomas White were also on the run. The nineteen year old bride and her twenty-eight year old groom spent their honeymoon on a deadly crime spree.

While some women blatantly committed crimes on the streets of Los Angeles, other women went quietly about their evil business in the comfort of their own homes.

You’ve heard of someone keeping a skeleton in their closet – Walburga “Dolly” Oesterreich kept her murderous secret in the attic of her home, and when it was finally revealed it was so unbelievable that it made headlines.

Curvy killers have always been a part of the fabric of Los Angeles, and whether you empathize with them, or find them repellent, you are certain to be fascinated by Felonious Flappers!