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

by Harold Schechter

  4.

  THE FARM WIDOW

  A few months after Belle’s second husband was consigned to his grave, another child was added to her household, a boy she named Phillip. Mysterious circumstances attended the infant’s arrival. The midwife who came to assist with the delivery was bewildered to find that the baby had already “been born, bathed, and dressed.”

  Later that morning, after being notified by young Jennie Gunness that her mother had “gotten a little baby boy,” a neighbor named Catherine Lapham went over to lend a hand. Much to her amazement, Belle was at the cistern out back, washing clothes.

  “You shouldn’t be up!” exclaimed Mrs. Lapham.

  “Ah,” said Belle, “in the old country they never go to bed after they get a baby.”

  Iconic photo of Belle Gunness with her children, Lucy, Myrtle, and Phillip.

  Another farmwife, Mrs. Louisa Diesslin, was similarly astonished when she visited the following day and found Belle “in the yard chasing pigs and running around.” When Mrs. Diesslin expressed her shock—“How can you do that, a new mother?”—Belle, once again, shrugged off her neighbor’s concerns.

  Besides the seemingly miraculous recuperative powers of the forty-three-year-old new mother, there was something else that struck each of these women as strange. As one of them put it, the baby “looked too old to be a newborn.” Rumors quickly spread that the widow Gunness hadn’t given birth at all. The boy, neighbors speculated, must have been adopted.

  In later years, other, far more sinister theories about the child’s origins would circulate among the people of La Porte.[1]

  Among those least persuaded by the official verdict on Peter Gunness’s death was his brother, Gust. Suspecting that foul play was involved not only in his brother’s case but in the sudden death of seven-month-old Jennie Gunness—the infant who had died less than a week after Peter’s marriage to Belle—he had reason to be concerned about the well-being of his surviving niece, five-year-old Swanhild, who remained in her stepmother’s care. He also knew that, prior to the marriage, Peter had taken out a $2,500 life insurance policy, naming Swanhild as the beneficiary. Gust wanted to make sure that the payout ended up where it belonged.

  In the early months of 1903—the exact date is uncertain—Gust traveled to La Porte from his home in Minneapolis. He was reassured to find that, though occasionally lonely for her family members back in Minneapolis, Swanhild appeared to be doing well. He was less satisfied when he inquired about the $2,500 she was owed. Before her late husband’s unfortunate demise—so Belle explained—Peter “had turned the insurance policy over to a mining company for the purchase of stock, and if the stock ever amounted to anything, Swanhild would be a rich girl.” When Gust asked to see the stock certificates, however, Belle could not produce them. Instead, she made him a proposition: that he “stay with her and manage the farm.” Given the doubts he harbored about the manner of his brother’s death, it is hardly surprising that he declined the offer. Belle reacted with a baleful look. “I didn’t like her eyes,” Gust would say later. He stayed at the farm for several days with a growing sense of unease. One morning, less than a week after his arrival, Belle awoke to find that Gust was gone—and that he had taken Swanhild with him.[2]

  The friendly relations Belle enjoyed with her neighbors when she first came to La Porte were not fated to last. “No one was a friend of hers,” Louisa Diesslin’s daughter, Dora, later recalled. “You didn’t want to have nothing to do with her. All the neighbors, not just us.”

  Belle’s break with the Diesslins was provoked by a conflict over some stray cows. As Dora explained, Belle’s two heifer calves kept wandering onto the Diesslins’ property to graze in their fields. Infuriated by this gross “violation of small-town codes,” Dora’s father warned Belle that, unless she kept her cattle fenced in, he would demand payment for the use of his pasture. The next time he found the calves on his property, he made good on his threat, locking the cows in his barnyard and refusing to return them until Belle paid him a dollar. Shortly afterward, she retaliated. Spotting some of Diesslin’s cows grazing along the road, she drove them into her yard. When William hurried over to retrieve them, she demanded a dollar for their return.

  “But you run them in here off the road!” Diesslin shouted.

  Belle coolly insisted that the cows were “trespassing” and repeated her demand.

  When the outraged Diesslin reached for the gate to free his cows, Belle turned to her foster daughter, Jennie. “Go in and get the revolver,” Belle ordered. Moments later, the girl ran back out with the gun.

  “Don’t touch that gate,” said Belle, leveling the weapon at Diesslin.

  “And so he had to pay her a dollar!” Dora recounted. “That’s the kind of neighbor she was!”[3]

  A similar clash over livestock led to her rupture with the Nicholson family, until then her closest friends in the community. As Albert Nicholson told the story, a bunch of Belle’s pigs kept roaming onto his family’s farm and getting “into the corn.” Tired of driving them home, his father, Swan, finally shooed them into his own pigpen, then hitched up his buggy and headed into town to lodge a complaint with the constable. Belle was forced to pay a fine to retrieve them: eleven dollars, “a dollar a head for damages.”

  The following Monday, Albert’s mother was in town when she ran into Belle. Though Swan Nicholson’s testimony at the coroner’s inquest over Peter Gunness’s death had been instrumental in keeping Belle from being indicted for murder, he had now—in the warped view of the “money-mad” woman—committed an ultimate offense. Her broad face reddening with fury, Belle turned on Swan’s wife and spat: “That’s all Mr. Nicholson has been trying to do all these years is get my money. Well, now he has got it. I don’t want nothing more to do with any of you!”

  From that time forward, the Nicholsons and Belle Gunness never spoke or set foot on each other’s farmsteads again.[4]

  With Peter gone, Belle assumed the work that would normally have been performed by a man. She did her own planting and harvesting, pitched her own hay, milked her own cows. Wearing a sealskin cap, a man’s leather coat, and a pair of her husband’s old shoes, she would join the men at farm auctions, “tramping around in the mud . . . looking at farm machinery, while the rest of the women stayed up near the stove.” At livestock sales, she would buy a two-hundred-pound hog, then lift it up and toss it into her wagon as easily as if it were a sack of laundry. When the time came to butcher the animal, she handled the business herself—“shot it, bled it, scalded it, gutted it, and saved the head for head cheese.”[5]

  Like other local farmers, she earned extra money by selling some of her produce in town. One La Porte native, Mabel Carpenter, would always recall the day in her childhood when Belle Gunness drove up to her house in a ramshackle buckboard, hopped off the seat, then lifted “up this great big basket of potatoes, [put] it on her shoulders . . . and marched right into the house.”[6]

  An inventory of Belle’s farm property would eventually include “sows, a boar, stoats, heifers, calves, a bull, chickens, horses, a foal, a Shetland pony . . . wagons, a cultivator, planter, harrow, binder, plow, harnesses and saddles, saws, ladders, wheelbarrows, buggy, pony cart, bales of wire, and all sorts of buckets and rope.”[7] Even for a woman of Belle’s exceptional strength and abilities, such a substantial operation was more than she could manage on her own. By the winter of 1904, she was in pressing need of a man—and not just to help out with the farmwork.

  In February of that year, thirty-year-old Olaf Lindboe—a Norwegian immigrant who had arrived in Chicago three years earlier—came upon a “help wanted” ad in the Norwegian-language newspaper Skandinaven. The job was for a laborer on a farm in La Porte, Indiana. Packing his worldly belongings—including his life savings of $600—he headed for Indiana, where he was promptly hire
d by the proprietress of the farm, the widow Gunness.

  Within a short time of his arrival, neighbors began to notice that he and Mrs. Gunness seemed to enjoy an unusually close relationship—so much so that, as one newspaper reported, it was “generally accepted that he was her fiancé.”[8] Lindboe himself did nothing to dispel that notion. Writing to his father back in Norway just two months after coming to work for Mrs. Gunness, he rhapsodized about the “exquisite location” of the farm and “mentioned that he might be getting married soon.” To the other immigrants he befriended, including Swan Nicholson, he was even more direct. As Nicholson later testified, Mrs. Gunness was “very kind to [Olaf]—so kind that he became imbued with the notion of marrying her. Olaf began to look upon himself as master of the farm.”[9]

  Not long after Lindboe posted the letter to his father, one of Belle’s neighbors, Chris Christofferson, received word from Mrs. Gunness that “she needed help [because] her hired hand, Olaf, had left in the middle of a major job.” Belle was in the field plowing corn when he arrived. When Christofferson asked about Olaf’s disappearance, she explained that he had gone to St. Louis to see the World’s Fair “and that he was going to buy some land” there. Swan Nicholson heard a different story: that his friend Olaf had gone “home to see the new king of Norway crowned.” And when Olaf’s father, after receiving no communication from his son for many months, wrote to ask about his whereabouts, Belle sent a letter saying that, from what she understood, he “went west and took up a homestead someplace.”[10]

  In truth, he was still on her farm. Four years would pass, however, before Olaf Lindboe—or what remained of him—was seen again.

  During the second week of April 1905, just months after Lindboe’s disappearance, neighbor Chris Christofferson was at the Gunness place when a stranger arrived from town. Introducing himself to Christofferson as Henry Gurholt, he explained that he had “come there to work for Mrs. Gunness.” He had a heavy trunk with him, and Christofferson helped him carry it up to the room recently vacated by Lindboe. Gurholt was very pleased with the accommodations and conveyed his appreciation to his new employer.

  “Oh yes,” said Mrs. Gunness, “I always like to have it neat and nice for a person who works for me.”

  Everything about his new situation was to Gurholt’s liking. In a letter to his mother written a week after his arrival, he described the farm as “one of the nicest places in the neighborhood,” with a handsome, thirteen-room brick house surrounded by “a grove of nice green trees.” “I am being treated almost the same as one of the family,” he declared.[11]

  Chris Christofferson saw Gurholt repeatedly over the following weeks, often in Mrs. Gunness’s company. One day in August 1905, during harvesttime, Belle appeared at the Christofferson home and asked if he could help her stack oats. Gurholt, she explained, had suddenly quit.

  “Did he leave you at such a time, when he had just cut the oats?” Christofferson exclaimed.

  “He said he was sick and couldn’t do the work,” answered Belle. He had gone to Chicago, she said, taking only “a satchel with some clothes.” His trunk and the bulk of his garments, including a heavy fur coat, he had left behind.

  That winter, as he later testified, Christofferson saw Mrs. Gunness wearing “the fur coat which Gurholt had left.” Puzzled as to why a man would move to Chicago without his coat, Christofferson asked Belle “if Gurholt didn’t want it”—if “he hadn’t written to her for it.”

  No, Belle replied, she “had not heard a word from him.”[12]

  5.

  THE MISSING

  In the late summer of 1905—shortly after Henry Gurholt disappeared—a classified advertisement began appearing in Norwegian-language newspapers throughout the Midwest, including the Minneapolis Tidende, the Decorah-Posten in Iowa, and the Skandinaven. Translated into English, it read:

  WANTED—A woman who owns a beautifully located and valuable farm in first class condition, wants a good and reliable man as partner in same. Some little cash is required and will be furnished first class security.[1]

  Interested parties were invited to write to “B. G.” care of the newspaper.

  Precisely how many replies this ad elicited is unknown, though D. J. Hunter, the postman who delivered mail to Belle Gunness’s farm, later reported that she typically received “from one to four” letters every morning, and sometimes as many as “eight or ten letters a day.”[2] Among the first to respond was a middle-aged Norwegian immigrant named George Berry, who left his home in Tuscola, Illinois, with $1,500 in cash—roughly $40,000 in today’s money—after informing acquaintances that he was moving to La Porte “for a job and possibly marriage.”[3] A few weeks later, a subscriber to the Decorah-Posten, Christian Hilkven of Dover, Wisconsin, sold his farm for $2,000 and bid farewell to his friends after arranging to have the paper forwarded to his new address in La Porte.[4]

  Informing his boss that he was going “to marry a rich widow,” Emil Tell, a Swedish bachelor from Osage, Kansas, quit his job at the Howard-Massey Furniture Company and traveled to La Porte “with $2,000 in his pocket.”[5] Fifty-year-old widower Ole Budsberg of Iola, Wisconsin, sold his farm to his grown sons and—explaining that “he was going to La Porte to get married”—set out for Indiana with $1,000 in cash.[6] In December 1905, John Moe, a forty-year-old bachelor from Elbow Lake, Minnesota, and a Skandinaven subscriber, visited his local bank to cash $1,000 in checks, explaining to the teller that “he was going to La Porte, Indiana, where he would use the money.”[7]

  And there were more. Many more.

  According to the subsequent testimony of Emil Greening—“a square-cut, commonsensical, happy” nineteen-year-old hired as a farmhand—“Mrs. Gunness received men visitors all the time. A different man came nearly every week to stay at the house. She introduced them as cousins from Kansas, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Chicago. Most of the men that came brought trunks with them. Mrs. Gunness kept the cousins with her all the time in the parlor and her bedroom. She was always careful to make the children stay away from her cousins.”

  None of these men stayed around very long, though neither Greening nor anyone else ever witnessed their departure. Strangely, every one of them left his trunk behind. Eventually, Greening recalled, “there were about fifteen trunks, and one room was packed full of all kinds of men’s clothing. Mrs. Gunness said that the cousins had left their clothes, and she wasn’t certain that they’d be back for them.”[8]

  In the summer of 1906—during one of the intervals between visits from her many male “cousins”—Belle hired a local man, a Polish immigrant named William Brogiski, to dig a couple of holes in the muck of her fenced-off hog pen. She was very exact about their dimensions: six feet long, three feet wide, and four feet deep.

  “They are to be rubbish pits,” Belle explained.

  The following week, Brogiski had occasion to return to the farm. The holes, he noticed, still lay empty. As he later testified, he “never saw what went into the bottom of these pits, nor when they were filled.”

  Several years would pass before Brogiski, along with the rest of a horror-struck world, discovered their true purpose.[9]

  By the fall of 1906 Belle’s foster daughter, Jennie, had blossomed into a strikingly pretty sixteen-year-old. A photographic portrait taken around that time shows a fresh-faced, full-lipped young woman with thick blond hair, mild eyes, and flawless skin: the very picture of a fetching, milk-fed farm girl. Unsurprisingly, she had attracted several male admirers.

  Jennie Olson, Belle’s foster daughter, “a strikingly pretty sixteen-year-old.”

  One of these was Emil Greening, Belle’s young farmhand. Over the course of his lengthy employment at the farm, he and Jennie had become confidants. “She told me a good deal about herself when we were alone,” Greening would later explain. Sometime in the w
inter of 1906, she informed him that her mother had decided to send her to college in California and had arranged for one of the professors to come to La Porte and escort her to the school.

  Shortly before Christmas, Greening heard that the professor had arrived. Early the next morning, he was sent on an errand. When he returned, he asked to see Jennie so that he could bid her goodbye. He was nonplussed by Belle’s response.

  “Mrs. Gunness told me that Jennie had left that same morning,” Greening said. “But no one saw her leave. And no one about the place ever saw the professor.”[10]

  John Weidner, a young carriage shop worker who was paying court to Jennie, had a similar experience. During a visit to her home about ten days before Christmas, Jennie told him that she was going off to Los Angeles to attend college. Her mother had made all the arrangements. Weidner was crestfallen. Jennie herself did not seem especially happy about leaving and made him promise that he would return the following Sunday to say goodbye.

  When Sunday came, Weidner hired a buggy and went out to the farm. “It was snowing. Blowing,” Weidner later recalled. “When I got there, I rapped on the door and asked for Jennie. Mrs. Gunness said, ‘Why, Jennie has gone to Los Angeles.’ I said, ‘Is that so? How funny. She asked me to come see her before she went.’ Mrs. Gunness said, ‘Yes, she went Wednesday.’”

  Over the course of the next half year, Weidner sent several letters to Jennie in California but received no reply. Encountering Mrs. Gunness in town one day in October 1907, he told her of his failed efforts to communicate with her daughter.