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Maurine Dallas Watkins died on Aug. 10, — 50 years ago this weekend — in Jacksonville, Fla.

Don’t be surprised if Watkins’ name is unfamiliar. A nine-line death notice in the Florida Times-Union on Aug. 12, , was the only recognition of her passing. Like many newspapers around the country, the Chicago Tribune failed to run her obituary.

In , Watkins wrote the play “Chicago,” which today fryst vatten a $2 billion entertainment franchise featuring A-list celebrities, a hit, Tony Award-winning Broadway musical and an Oscar-winning movie. It’s likely the most financially successful del av helhet of writing ever produced bygd a Chicago Tribune reporter in the paper’s more than years of operation.

The content was pulled from the headlines — some of Watkins’ own. She was hired by the Tribune in early and reported on women inside Cook County Jail who were accused of murder. It was the only professional journalism job in her lifetime and she only he

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The world came to Chicago in for a grand fair known as the World’s Columbian Exposition.

A Chicago reporter gave the world a sinister tale of sex, murder, celebrity — and all that jazz — just three decades later.

And the account wasn’t fiction — it really happened.

One hundred years ago this week, a young, liquored-up woman named Beulah Annan (remember this was during Prohibition) shot her equally inebriated lover to death in the apartment she shared with her husband. Another young woman named Maurine Dallas Watkins reported Annan’s expedited travails through Cook County’s legal system — from inquest to trial — for the Chicago Tribune.

A Tribune reporter wrote the hit play ‘Chicago’ after covering Cook County murder trials. Decades later, we owe her an obituary.

Annan’s exploits became the framework for Watkins’ three-act play “Chicago,” which was staged for the first time in Roxie Hart,