Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

by Harold Schechter

  Less than a year after she and Mads bought the place, a fire broke out in the store. At the time, no one was present except Bella and her foster daughter, Jennie, then a three-year-old toddler. “The first known of the fire,” reported the Chicago Tribune, “was when Mrs. Sorenson, with her child, came running out onto the sidewalk, crying ‘Fire!’ at the top of her voice.”[16] By the time the blaze was extinguished, the interior of the store had been completely destroyed. Though Bella claimed that “a small kerosene lamp had exploded,” insurance investigators, sifting through the debris, could find “no trace . . . of glass fragments or other evidence of a broken lamp.” Despite suspicions of arson, the insurance company ultimately paid up. Soon afterward, the Sorensons divested themselves of the store, selling it to the brother of its original owner.[17]

  Having recouped their investment, Bella and Mads moved out to the “blue-collar fringe of the well-to-do suburb” of Austin, where they purchased a three-story, bay-windowed house on Alma Street.[18] Over the next two years—between 1896 and 1898—they became the parents of four more children: Caroline, Myrtle, Axel, and Lucy.[19] Whether these were babies born in rapid succession to Bella (then in her late thirties) or, as seems more probable, orphaned or unwanted infants that she took in (perhaps, according to later accounts, “for a monetary consideration”)—remains, even today, a matter of dispute.[20] One fact is certain. Soon after their births, two of them died: Caroline at five months old, Axel at three months. At a time when the US infant mortality rate was shockingly high—approximately one hundred deaths per one thousand live births—no suspicions were aroused by the sudden passing of the little ones, whose causes of death were given, respectively, as enterocolitis (acute inflammation of the bowels) and hydrocephalus (commonly called “water in the brain”).[21]

  Mads, who had found work with the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad, was bringing home wages of twelve dollars a week, when a seemingly golden opportunity came his way.

  On the evening of Friday, October 1, 1897, the Sorensons were visited at home by a gentleman named Angus Ralston, who presented himself as the agent and chief engineer for an enterprise known as the Yukon Mining & Trading Company. Ralston explained that Yukon Mining was “a corporation of great financial resources that had been incorporated with a capital stock of $3,500,000, owned mines in New Mexico, and had great and extensive interests in Alaska and the Klondike regions.” The company was presently hiring miners willing to endure the rigors of a yearlong stretch in the Alaskan wilderness for the chance to strike it rich. At Bella’s urging, Mads quickly signed on, entering into a formal agreement with the company that was signed, sealed, and witnessed on October 27.

  According to its terms, Mads agreed to “go to Alaska in the employ of [the company] and prospect for gold, locate same, and do any other kind of work that the manager in charge of the expedition requires done, for one year, beginning April 1, 1898.” In return, he would not only be paid “the same wages as other men in the camps where the mines are located” but also receive “one-fourth interest on all mines located by him,” along with twenty-eight hundred shares of stock in the corporation. Since the Sorenson family would be without their breadwinner for a full year, the company also agreed “to pay Bella Sorenson, his wife, thirty-five dollars each month while he is in their employ and to charge same to his account for salary.”[22]

  Bella—who, as her sister observed, cared little for Mads as a person—was happy to send him off for a year to prospect for gold. Blinded by the promise of dazzling wealth, she and Mads also agreed to invest a considerable sum of their own money to cover his “supplies for one year.” On the same day that Mads entered into his agreement with the company, he and Bella signed over a joint promissory note for seven hundred dollars (equivalent to over twenty thousand today), putting up the deed to their Alma Street property as collateral security.

  What happened next is detailed in a lawsuit Bella and Mads subsequently launched against the Yukon Mining & Trading Company. “In compliance with said contract,” reads the document, Mads “made all preparations and at great sacrifice and expense to himself to go to Alaska, and presented himself to said corporation on or about the first day of April, 1898, and informed the officers of said corporation that he was then ready to fulfill his contract and would hold himself in readiness to go to Alaska.” When two months passed with no word from any representative of the company, he and Bella, their suspicions aroused, contacted a lawyer who “demanded the right to examine the books of said corporation.” His investigation confirmed the Sorensons’ worst fears.

  Far from the booming gold-mining operation it purported to be, the Yukon Mining & Trading Company had “absolutely no financial resources.” According to the bill in chancery filed by Bella and Mads in June 1898,

  said corporation had not and has not any interest of any value in any mines in New Mexico, Alaska, or elsewhere. [It is] absolutely without means, and it has given away large blocks of stock, to wit: five hundred and twenty-five thousand shares. [Its] officers and promoters are men without means and men who are not financially responsible. [It] was formed for the sole purpose of defrauding innocent investors, and never at any time intended to fulfill its contract . . . [It] is now entirely defunct, insolvent, and abeyant [with] no assets or means to pay its legitimate debts or to continue in business.

  Like others whose greed gets the better of their judgment, Bella and Mads had fallen victim to a scam. Their promissory note, along with the accompanying trust deed on their property, had been sold to a real estate salesman and mortgage broker named Emanuel Hogenson for five hundred dollars.[23] When that note came due in two years, the Sorensons would be required to pay him seven hundred dollars plus interest or risk losing their home.

  Though the Sorensons ultimately prevailed in their lawsuit, preventing Hogenson from cashing in on their note, their get-rich-quick dream had come to a mortifying end.[24] Mads returned to his earlier job as night watchman at the Mandel Brothers department store, while Bella seemed destined to spend the rest of her days as the wife of a low-earning workingman. But as events would soon prove, she had other plans.

  On the evening of Tuesday, April 10, 1900, a fire, reportedly caused by a “defective heating apparatus,” broke out in the Sorensons’ Alma Street home. Though firefighters arrived in time to save the building, Bella and Mads suffered the loss of roughly $650 worth of “household goods.” Fortunately, as the Chicago Tribune reported, “all the property destroyed was insured,” and the couple received another hefty settlement.[25]

  For Bella, there was still more to come.

  At the time of the fire, Mads belonged to a mutual benefits association that provided him with a $2,000 life insurance policy, set to expire on Monday, July 30, 1900. He had decided to let that policy lapse and take out a new one for $3,000 that would become operative on the same day.

  That very Monday afternoon, Dr. J. C. Miller, a young physician who had once boarded with the Sorensons, received an urgent summons from Bella. Hurrying to the Alma Street address, he found Mads, fully clothed, lying dead atop his bed. By then, another doctor—Charles E. Jones, the Sorensons’ family physician—had arrived. Questioning Bella, they learned that her husband, who was suffering from a bad cold, had come home from work that morning complaining of a “fearful headache.” She had given him a dose of quinine powder, then gone down to the kitchen to prepare dinner for the children. When she went back upstairs a short while later to check on her husband, she had found him dead.

  Thinking, as he later explained, that “the druggist had made a mistake and [given] her morphine instead of quinine,” Miller asked to see the paper in which the powder had been wrapped. Bella replied that she had thrown it away. With no other evidence to go on beyond the symptoms as Bella described them, the two doctors concluded that Mads had died of a cerebral hemorrhage.[26]

 
For Bella—the sole beneficiary of her husband’s two life insurance policies—the timing of his sudden death could not have been more fortuitous. “Had Sorenson died a day earlier,” one newspaper later explained, “his wife would have been able to collect only on the first policy for $2,000, or if a day later, only on the second for $3,000. Dying as he did, she collected on both the old and new policies, a total of $5,000.” Translated into today’s dollars, the widow Sorenson was richer by $150,000.[27]

  Three days later, on the morning of Thursday, August 2, 1900, Mads Ditlev Anton Sorenson was laid to rest beside his two infant children at the Forest Home Cemetery. Among those attending the funeral was Bella’s estranged sister, Nellie. Exactly what transpired between them is unknown, though—according to Nellie’s testimony—she was gripped at one point with a dark premonition.

  “While I was there,” she would later recount, “a terrible feeling came over me. I felt just like something was going to happen.” The sensation hit her with such force that she grew dizzy and “could not stand up.” Another eight years would pass before she understood the meaning of the dread that seized her that day.[28]

  3.

  THE GRINDER

  Situated on McClung Road on the outskirts of La Porte, the property known locally as “Mattie Altic’s Place” had a checkered history. The original owner of the land was John C. Walker, one of La Porte’s founding fathers, who, in 1846, erected an imposing house for his daughter, Harriet, and her husband, John W. Holcomb. Nearly twenty years later, in 1864, the Holcombs—whose Southern sympathies made them pariahs in a county that sent more than twenty-five hundred men to fight for the Union cause—left La Porte for good.[1]

  Not long after they absconded, the house was reportedly sold to one B. R. Car, a local coal and lumber merchant whose son, G. Hile Car, became the leader of an outlaw band that “terrorized that section of Indiana.” When things got too hot for the gang, the younger Car headed west to Denver, where he was eventually shot to death during an attempted bank holdup. Soon after his son’s body was shipped back home, the elder Car sold the place and disappeared from La Porte, leaving behind a bundle of unpaid debts.[2] In the following years, the house passed through the hands of several more reputedly ill-fated owners, including two brothers who “died so suddenly that the coroner was called in to investigate,” a farmer who hanged himself in an upstairs bedroom, and, in 1892, the individual who would briefly hold the title of “the most notorious woman in northern Indiana,” Mattie Altic.[3]

  A transplanted big-city madam, the flamboyant Mattie—a statuesque woman in the Gibson Girl mold who sported a hat with an enormous ostrich plume when she went shopping downtown—transformed the place into the region’s classiest whorehouse, complete with a marble-topped bar in the front “entertaining room,” a fancy carriage house, and a flashy, fringe-topped surrey used to pick up her clients when they arrived by train from Chicago. When she died suddenly a few years later, the cause was officially given as heart disease, though stories persisted that she had either taken her own life after being jilted by a lover or been poisoned by her sister, a rival brothel keeper named Eva Ruppert, who ran a competing “resort” (as the newspapers euphemistically described it) in South Bend.[4]

  Despite its “sordid reputation,” the Altic place had no trouble attracting buyers.[5] In the eight years after it ceased to operate as a bordello, it would have a succession of owners before being purchased by the woman whose infamy would so vastly surpass that of its earlier proprietress that, by comparison, Mattie Altic would seem as respectable as a midwestern schoolmarm.

  Exactly how Bella Sorenson learned that the Altic place was for sale is unclear. Following the death of her husband, she paid a visit to a relative on a farm in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, and the idea of resettling on a farmstead of her own seems to have taken hold of her then. Back in Chicago—according to certain historians of the case—she placed a classified advertisement in the Tribune, seeking a suitable property. The ad caught the eye of the then-current owner of the Altic place, who contacted Bella. An agreement was struck, and in November 1901, after selling her Alma Street property, Bella Sorenson and her three children, Jennie, Myrtle, and Lucy, moved to La Porte.

  Belle Gunness with her foster daughter, Jennie Olson, and daughter Lucy.

  The people of her new community would know her by a different name. Though she continued to sign herself “Bella” in her private correspondence, she adopted the plainer, more typically American “Belle” in her dealings with her neighbors. And within a few months of her arrival in La Porte, her last name was no longer Sorenson.

  During their first decade of marriage, Belle and Mads had briefly taken in a boarder named Peter Gunness. Surviving photographs of Peter confirm one writer’s description of him as a “fine-looking blond Viking of a man with clear blue eyes and a pointed yellow beard and mustache.”[6] An emigrant from Oslo who arrived in this country in 1885, he joined his brother, Gust, in Minneapolis before moving to Chicago in 1893—the year of the great World’s Fair—where he rented a room from the Sorensons while working in the stockyards. After a brief visit back to Norway, he returned to Minneapolis, where, in June 1895, he married a young woman named Jennie Sophia Simpson. They lived in a house on Hennepin Street while Peter worked as “an order man for a grocery house.” Their first child, a girl they christened Swanhild, was born in 1897. Four years later, Jennie Gunness died while giving birth to their second child, another girl.[7]

  Peter Gunness, Belle’s second husband, a “fine-looking blond Viking of a man.”

  During her visit to her cousin in Minnesota following Mads’s death, the widow Sorenson made it her business to take a trip to Minneapolis and become reacquainted with her handsome—and suddenly available—former boarder. The years had not been kind to Belle. Hardly a beauty to begin with, she had aged into a coarse and mannish figure, described, in the particularly harsh words of one of her contemporaries, as a “fat, heavy-featured woman with a big head covered with a mop of mud-colored hair, small eyes, huge hands and arms, and a gross body supported by feet grotesquely small.”[8] That she had so little trouble attracting men, even one as handsome as Peter Gunness, says much about the seductive appeal of her forty-eight-acre Indiana farmstead. On April 1, 1902, the physically incongruous couple were married in the First Baptist Church of La Porte, the Reverend George C. Moor officiating.

  Five days after the nuptials, Peter’s seven-month-old daughter died. “Edema of the lungs” was given as the official cause of death. Her body was shipped to Chicago, where it was interred in the Forest Home Cemetery beside the remains of the two other infants who had died in Belle’s care.[9]

  Eight months later, at around 3:00 a.m. on Tuesday, December 16, Swan Nicholson and his family—the Gunnesses’ nearest neighbors—were startled awake by a sharp banging on the front door, as though someone were striking it with an iron rod. Hurrying downstairs in their bedclothes, they found Belle’s foster daughter, Jennie, standing on their porch, a stove poker clutched in one hand.

  “Mamma wants you to come up,” said the twelve-year-old girl. “Papa’s burned himself.”

  When they arrived at the Gunness farmhouse a few minutes later, Swan and his young son Albert found Belle seated in the kitchen, so overwrought that she could barely speak coherently. Her husband, dressed in his long white nightshirt, was sprawled facedown in the parlor—“laying on his nose and blood on the floor,” as Nicholson later testified. Squatting by the body, Nicholson “took hold of his arms to feel the pulse and tried to talk to him. But he wouldn’t give me no answer.”

  Ordered to go fetch a physician, young Albert ran all the way into town and roused Dr. Bo Bowell, then serving as the county coroner. While the doctor got dressed, Albert hurried over to the barn where Bowell stabled his rig. Then the two quickly drove to the Gunness place.

 
Striding into the parlor, Bowell got to his knees and made a close examination of the body, while the others—Swan, Albert, Jennie, and a sobbing Belle—stood around in a circle. Bowell could tell at once that Gunness had been dead for some time. The body was already growing rigid. The back of his head bore an ugly wound, thickly caked with blood, and his nose was broken and bent to one side. Bowell’s immediate impression was that the man had been murdered.

  Belle, whose “condition bordered on hysteria,” was led back into the kitchen and seated in a chair. Bowell did his best to find out what had happened, though the story he managed to extract from the inconsolable woman raised more questions than it answered. From what he could gather, her husband had gone into the kitchen to get his shoes, which he kept near the stove to stay warm. As he stooped to retrieve them, a meat grinder had tumbled from a shelf above his head, striking the back of his skull and overturning a bowl of hot brine that scalded his neck. Despite his injuries, he’d assured her that he was all right and had lain down to rest. A few hours later, she’d discovered him dead on the parlor floor.

  Though Bowell found this story highly suspect, he decided to reserve judgment until a postmortem could be performed the next day. Young Albert Nicholson, however, harbored no such doubts. As he and his father headed back home, he “remarked that he thought Mr. Gunness had been murdered. His father cautioned him not to say anything of the sort, or there might be trouble for Mrs. Gunness.”[10]