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

by Harold Schechter

  Though assuring him that he remained her “dearest, faithfullest, and only friend in the whole world,” she ended with a thinly veiled ultimatum. “Make up your mind as soon as possible as to what you really intend to do . . . In your next letter let me have the great happiness to hear that you are soon on your way here as then I will be the happiest and will know that I have found the best friend in the world.”

  Helgelien’s reply, like all his other correspondence, no longer exists. From Belle’s last surviving letter to him, however, it seems clear that he took her message to heart, assuring her that her long wait would soon be over.

  “Dear one, make all haste, I beg of you,” she wrote on December 2. “I am so anxious about you, my only and very best friend in all things. I wait every day to hear that you are coming, and be sure to arrange all matters so that you will not have to go back any more.”

  Another month would pass before he made good on his promise. In early January 1908, Andrew Helgelien finally came to La Porte.

  8.

  THE RIVAL

  Having happily settled into the role of Belle Gunness’s paramour, carpenter, and farmhand, Ray Lamphere received a cruel jolt on the morning of Friday, January 3, 1908, when a burly stranger in a shaggy fur coat that hung down below his knees arrived at the farm. Later that day, Belle informed Ray that she was turning over his bedroom to her guest. Ray, she said, could “go sleep in the barn.”[1]

  At daybreak the next morning, Ray returned to the house and, following his usual morning routine, started building a fire in the parlor stove to warm up the room before breakfast. He was just finishing when the new man came downstairs. The two struck up a conversation that was interrupted when Belle appeared and angrily motioned Ray aside. “She gave me the dickens,” Ray would testify, “and told me to leave him alone.”

  With the arrival of the big Norwegian farmer from South Dakota, it seemed to Ray that his whole relationship with Belle had changed overnight. “We got along all right before that and she used to come to my room at night,” he said later. “But after he came, she had no use for me.”[2]

  Frank J. Pitner, a cashier at the First National Bank of La Porte, was at his usual place behind the teller’s cage on Monday morning, January 6, when Belle Gunness came in with a broad-shouldered man wearing a gray fur coat that reached to his shins. Introducing himself as Mr. Helgelien, he presented three certificates of deposit from the First National Bank of Aberdeen, South Dakota, and announced that he wished to redeem them for their full value. When Pitner explained that he would have to send them to the issuing bank for collection, Mrs. Gunness asked how long that would take.

  “Four or five days,” Pitner estimated.

  Though Helgelien accepted the delay without complaint, Mrs. Gunness couldn’t conceal her annoyance. “She argued and urged,” writes one historian, “but no cash was forthcoming, and at last they went away moneyless.”[3]

  A draft for the full amount arrived at the La Porte bank on January 11, but three more days elapsed before Mrs. Gunness and Helgelien showed up again. When Pitner lightly remarked that they seemed in less of a hurry for the money now, he was told that Helgelien had been sick for the past few days.

  Given the amount—$2,839 (nearly $75,000 in today’s dollars)—Pitner suggested that he write a cashier’s check. Helgelien seemed willing, but Mrs. Gunness insisted that he take the entire sum in cash. As Pitner counted out the money—half in gold coins, half in currency—he asked Helgelien what he meant to do with it all.

  “Mind your own business!” Mrs. Gunness snapped, then took her companion by the arm and led him from the bank.[4]

  Later that same day—Tuesday, January 14—Belle sent Ray Lamphere off on an errand. She had arranged a horse trade with a cousin of hers, she explained. John Moe was his name. Lamphere was to meet him in Michigan City, where the transaction would take place. If, for some reason, Moe failed to show up that evening, Lamphere was to spend the night there and await her cousin’s arrival the next morning.

  At around 5:00 that evening, Lamphere set out for Michigan City, about twelve miles away from La Porte. He brought along a friend for company, a brewery-wagon driver named John Rye. There was no sign of Moe at the livery barn where the swap was supposed to take place, so Lamphere and his pal killed a few hours, first at an oyster house, then at a five-cent vaudeville show.

  At around 8:00, after checking again at the livery barn, Lamphere, in defiance of his employer’s express orders, told Rye that he was heading back to La Porte. They caught the 8:15 interurban car, pulling into La Porte about an hour later.

  Saying that he wanted “to see what the old lady was up to,” Lamphere promised to meet Rye later at Smith’s saloon, then strode off in the dark toward the Gunness farm. Rye waited at the bar for an hour but Lamphere never showed up.[5]

  As for Andrew Helgelien, no one ever saw him alive again.

  9.

  ENDGAME

  In preparing for his trip to La Porte, Helgelien had ignored some of the suggestions so lovingly proffered by his dearest best friend in the whole wide world. He had not, for example, withdrawn all his cash from the local bank and brought it with him sewn inside his underwear. In other regards, however, he had gone along with her proposals. Evidently, he agreed with her that it was best to tell no one about their relationship—that his plan to start a new life with Belle should remain a delicious secret between the two of them. As a result, before setting off for Indiana on January 2, he had said nothing to his brother, Asle, about his destination—only that “he would be back home in a week surely.”[1]

  When ten days passed with no sign of his brother, Asle grew concerned. Thinking that Andrew might have gone to see a family friend named Minnie Kohn in Minneapolis, Asle sent her a letter. She confirmed that Andrew had paid her a visit but said that he had stayed only “about one hour.”[2] “I am surprised to hear that Andrew is not home,” she wrote.

  John Hulth, the farmhand Andrew had hired to look after his livestock, had also begun to wonder about his employer’s absence. Looking around Andrew’s cabin for a clue to his whereabouts, he came upon dozens of letters, which he promptly turned over to Asle. All were signed “Bella Gunness.”[3]

  Precisely what happened between Belle and Ray Lamphere on February 3, 1908, is unclear. Some newspaper accounts claim that she fired him; others that he quit following a dispute over some unpaid wages.[4] It is certain, however, that a bitter break occurred between them on that date. So abrupt was Ray’s departure from the farm that he left his clothes and carpenter’s tools behind. Less than a week later, she hired a replacement, Joseph Maxson, who took up residence in the second-floor bedroom reserved for Belle’s hired hands.

  In the meantime, Lamphere had consulted a local attorney, who counseled him to return to the farm, demand his money and belongings, and, if refused, inform Mrs. Gunness that he was prepared to file a replevin suit, an action to recover unlawfully taken personal property. Lamphere did as advised. Far from being cowed by his threat, however, Belle not only drove him from her property but immediately wrote several letters to the county sheriff, Albert Smutzer, complaining that she was being harassed by her former handyman. The following month, after spotting Lamphere skulking around her farm, she had him arrested for trespassing. Tried on March 13 before Justice of the Peace S. E. Grover, Lamphere, with no legal representation, pleaded guilty and was fined one dollar plus costs.[5]

  In mid-March, after writing to the La Porte postmaster and confirming that Mrs. Gunness was a resident of the city, Asle Helgelien sent Belle a letter. She responded on March 27. “You wish to know where your brother keeps himself,” she wrote. “Well this is just what I would like to know but it almost seems impossible for me to give a definite answer.” According to her highly dubious account, Andrew had left home to search for another of his bro
thers, a professional gambler who had absconded from Aberdeen in January. After failing to find him in Minneapolis, Andrew had briefly stopped off in La Porte before continuing on his quest. “He was going to make a thorough search for him in Chicago and N[ew] York,” she wrote. “He always thought he, the Bro., had gone to Norway and he would go after him.”

  Belle claimed that, after arriving in Chicago, Andrew sent her a letter “saying that he was to look for his brother the next day & he said I shouldn’t write until I again heard from him. Since then I have neither heard or seen anything of him.

  “Now this is all I can say to you about the matter,” she said in closing. “I have waited every day to hear something of him.”[6]

  On March 28, one day after writing her letter to Asle Helgelien, Belle filed an affidavit alleging that Ray Lamphere was insane.

  According to the document—a printed questionnaire on which her responses were recorded by hand—she noticed “the first signs of insanity” in Lamphere in December 1907 when “he told me things that I knew were not true and unreasonable.” Asked if he had “shown any extraordinary propensities of feeling or conduct,” she replied with an emphatic “Yes. He comes to my house every night, at all times of night, and looks in the windows, commits misdemeanors.” Though he had already been found guilty and fined for this harassing behavior, he “continues same,” generally while “intoxicated.” Presented with a checklist of behavioral traits that best described Lamphere, Belle indicated that he was “silent, melancholy, restless, seclusive, dull, profane, filthy, intemperate, sleepless, and criminal.”

  Appended to Belle’s affidavit was a statement from Ray’s physician, Dr. Bo Bowell, who testified that he had “prescribed for Lamphere at different times during past five years. Have never treated him for any mental disturbance. I do not consider him insane.”

  The three-member insanity commission appointed to examine Lamphere and rule on Belle’s allegation came to the same conclusion. “We find patient quiet, clean, and neat,” they wrote. “He is slightly nervous. His memory is good for recent and remote events. Speech is intelligent and coherent. Ray Lamphere is not insane.”[7]

  Thwarted in her effort to have Lamphere declared insane, Belle had him arrested again for trespassing in early April. His trial was set for the fifteenth. Shortly before it took place, Asle Helgelien wrote to her again, asking to see the letter she had referred to in their previous exchange, the one ostensibly sent to her by Andrew from Chicago.

  Belle replied that she was unable to do so, because the letter had been stolen by “a man named Lamphere, who worked for me for a while . . . This Lamphere began to find so many wrong things to talk about until at last they arrested him, and they had three doctors examine him and see if he was sane. They found him not crazy enough to put in a hospital. But perfectly sane he is not. He is now out under bonds and is going to have a trial next week . . . but one thing I am sure of is that in one way or another he has taken the letter from Andrew he had sent me. Others have told me that Lamphere was jealous of Andrew and for that reason troubled me this way.”

  To represent him at his second trial, Lamphere retained the services of local attorney Wirt Worden, who requested a change of venue to the nearby town of Stillwell. The proceedings took place as scheduled on Wednesday, April 15, Justice Robert C. Kincaid presiding.

  During his cross-examination of Belle, Worden, seeking to undercut her credibility, launched into an increasingly combative interrogation of her past.

  “Peter Gunness, your husband, died very suddenly, didn’t he?” he inquired.

  Instantly, the state’s attorney, Ralph N. Smith, was on his feet. “Objection!”

  “He carried considerable life insurance, didn’t he?”

  “Objection!”

  “You collected that life insurance, didn’t you?”

  Smith, growing angrier by the moment, told the witness “that she did not need to reply.”

  “Mrs. Gunness,” said Worden, “how did that sausage grinder and crock of hot brine come to drop on Mr. Gunness’ head, anyway?”

  Springing to his feet, Smith, his face flushed with indignation, “protested in strong language against the practice of browbeating a witness and insulting a defenseless woman.”

  Undeterred, Worden proceeded to question Belle about the sudden death of her first husband, Mads Sorenson—“how he happened to die, whether he had any life insurance, and whether she got the life insurance.” Smith’s heated objection to each of these questions was sustained by Justice Kincaid. When Worden then pressed Belle about the suspicious circumstances of Mads’s death—“Wasn’t there some talk about taking up his body to see if he had been poisoned?”—Smith gave full vent to his outrage. “I object to these questions!” he cried. “They have nothing to do with this case. I demand that they be stopped.” Then, turning to the witness stand, he said: “Mrs. Gunness, you would be justified in waylaying this man on his way home!”

  Justice Kincaid concurred. “I think these questions have gone a little too far,” he told Worden.

  Worden, seemingly chastened, indicated that he was ready to dismiss the witness. As Belle was getting to her feet, however, he said: “Oh, just a moment. When will your daughter, Jennie Olson, return, Mrs. Gunness?”

  This question brought a sharp response from Justice Kincaid, who rebuked Worden “for wasting the court’s time by asking such questions.”

  By the time she left the stand, Belle, who had been perfectly composed at the start of Worden’s interrogation, was visibly agitated. To Kincaid, there was nothing surprising about her reaction: it was that of “any decent woman resenting such insinuations.” Soon enough, he would arrive at a very different conclusion: that Worden’s pointed questions had been deeply unsettling to Mrs. Gunness, reinforcing her fear—already aroused by Asle Helgelien’s inquiries into his brother’s whereabouts—that her crimes were catching up with her.[8]

  Lamphere was found guilty and ordered to pay a fine of five dollars plus costs—a total of $19.01, which was covered by his current employer, a farmer named John Wheatbrook. But Belle wasn’t done with her former farmhand and lover. Less than a week later, she had him arrested again for trespassing.[9]

  He was lodged in the county jail when Belle received another anxious letter from Asle Helgelien. In Belle’s reply, dated April 24, she expressed her “wonder . . . “as to where Andrew keeps himself.” Promising to “tell you all I know,” she repeated her earlier story, adding a few minor details. “I cannot remember the accurate date he left La Porte, but it was either the 15th or 16th of January,” she began.

  My little daughter . . . took him to the street car station. He went by way of Michigan City as he had a desire to see that little town about 12 miles from LaP[orte]. He didn’t stay there more than a day and he left here at one o’clock in the afternoon.

  Two or three days afterwards I had a letter from him from Chicago saying that he had hunted for his brother, but did not find him . . . If he couldn’t find him, he would go to New York and find out if he had gone to Norway. If such was the case I think he would go to Norway too. As I said before he told me not to answer his letter until I had one from him telling where he would stop for a little while so he could get an answer. This is all I can tell, and I haven’t his letter. I got the letter in the morning and read it and laid it in a china closet in the kitchen and went to milk & when I came back the letter was gone. That Lamphere was here and he had probably taken it . . .

  I don’t understand what keeps [Andrew] away so long unless as you say he has gotten into some trouble and does not want any of us to know about it. I for my part thought it was strange I didn’t hear from him but I was pretty sure Lamphere had taken his letter but I don’t see why he hasn’t written to you.

  Responding to Asle’s proposal tha
t he come to La Porte and initiate a search for his brother, Belle assured that she would be happy to assist him in any way she could, though “I don’t know what we could do to find him.”

  The day after Belle composed this letter, Ray Lamphere was brought once more to trial. On the witness stand, both Belle and her eleven-year-old daughter, Myrtle, claimed that Lamphere “was back to his prowling.” Just a few days earlier, they had “spotted him by the pig pen, and hurried out to chase him away. They were within fifteen feet of him when he coolly cut the wire fence, pulled out the fence post, and carried it away.”[10]

  This time, however, Ray’s defense lawyer Wirt Worden was able to call a pair of witnesses—“two substantial citizens of the county”—who swore that, on the day his client was allegedly vandalizing her property, “Lamphere was at the home of . . . John Wheatbrook, about six miles out of town, and could not possibly been at the home of Mrs. Gunness.” Lamphere was acquitted, leaving Belle to foot the bill for the costs.

  Miss Bertha Schultz—a clerk in the Chicago Leader dry goods store on Main Street “who frequently waited on Mrs. Gunness”—later reported that, during the last week in April, Belle had come in looking very distressed. When Miss Schultz asked what was the matter, Belle recounted her troubles with Lamphere, describing “the things which . . . he did to harass her” and declaring that he “acted as if he knew something about her and that he was bold and annoyed her repeatedly.”