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

by Harold Schechter

  Only one area—the southeast corner—remained unexplored. William Humphrey was shoveling through the charred wreckage there at around 3:45 p.m., when, as he later put it, his shovel “hit something soft.”

  He called to Sheriff Smutzer, who was working nearby, “and we commenced to dig carefully.” Other men quickly gathered around them. A moment later, Humphrey paused and said, “Here they are.”[4]

  La Porteans learned of this grisly development just a few hours after it happened, Harry Burr Darling having managed to insert a two-sentence bulletin into his page-one story before his paper went to press. “The bodies of the mother and her children were found . . . piled up together,” he announced, “indicating that the mother had evidently made an effort to escape from the house with the children clinging to her.”[5]

  The following day, a far more extensive account dominated the front page. According to Darling, the condition of little Phillip Gunness—“the youngest of the trio of little innocents [and] the least burned of the four” bodies—told a heart-rending story of his mother’s “heroic, but futile effort . . . to save her offspring”:

  The mother, aroused from her sleep by the crackling of the flames and the fumes of suffocating smoke, true to the maternal instinct, had thrown a quilt about the child, evidently with the idea of protecting its little body from the cold after they had gained the open. The quilt served to protect in a measure the body of the child.

  Catering to his readers’ appetite for morbid titillation, Darling did not stint on the ghastly details in picturing the remains of the boy, “whose face was black, with a hole in the forehead evidently from a falling brick. Its limbs below the knees had been burned away. The child’s mouth was open, silent testimony to the agony of death.”

  His description of Phillip’s two sisters was an equally shameless blend of mawkish sentimentality and rank sensationalism: “The little girls who the night previous had breathed a tender prayer, lisping the words, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep,’ were but a semblance of human beings who a few hours previous lived in the smile of their Master.”

  Hideous as these “blackened and dismembered” bodies were, however, it was Mrs. Gunness who “presented the most ghastly appearance.” Her body was “an unrecognizable mass, with the bones protruding through the naked flesh.” Rendering her remains even more appalling was the absence of her head. Evidently—so Darling surmised—the corpse had been decapitated “by the ruthless and torturing flames.” The “diggers in the ruins have yet to find the skull,” he reported, “for this would be all that remained of the missing head.”

  The four corpses were carefully removed from the debris and placed on boards, where they remained until the town undertaker, Austin Cutler, arrived in his hack wagon. The bodies were then loaded on board and driven to the funeral home morgue.[6]

  Only one member of the doomed family had escaped the “holocaust,” noted Harry Burr Darling: Mrs. Gunness’s stepdaughter, Jennie. Even at that moment, the young woman was “on her way from California to this city. She is expected to arrive here in a day or two, and it is thought that she will be able to throw some light on the mystery.”[7]

  13.

  ARREST

  Though initial reports claimed that he had “disappeared,” Ray Lamphere had, in fact, gone off to work at John Wheatbrook’s farm that morning. He was still there when Deputies Leroy Marr and William Antiss drove out in the late afternoon. About a mile from the farm, the road grew so muddy that Marr got out and walked the rest of the way. Just as he reached the front gate, Lamphere—who must have watching through a window—opened the front door of the house.

  “Ray,” said Marr, “get on your coat and come to town with me.”

  If Marr had any doubts that the wiry little handyman had some involvement in the tragedy, they were dispelled by the first words out of Ray’s mouth: “Did those three children and the woman get out of the building?”

  Asked how he knew about the fire, he told Marr that, after rising at three that morning, he’d set out on the six-mile hike to John Wheatbrook’s farm. As he passed near the Gunness farm, he’d seen “smoke coming out of the windows and around the roof.”

  “Why didn’t you yell?” asked Marr.

  “I didn’t think it was any of my business,” said Ray.[1]

  Brought to the county jail, Ray was subjected to the first of what would be a string of third-degree grillings—“sweatings,” as they were commonly called at the time. The interrogation was conducted by Sheriff Smutzer, Deputies Antiss and Marr, and State’s Attorney Ralph N. Smith, who had hurried to the jailhouse when he heard of Lamphere’s arrest.

  Though Ray stuck to the essentials of his original story, he offered a different explanation for his failure to sound the alarm. “I was afraid I’d be blamed for starting the fire,” he said. He also provided a detail he had omitted from his initial account, one that he begged his interrogators not to make public: he had spent the night of the fire in bed with Elizabeth Smith.[2]

  The pervasive, everyday racism of American culture in the early decades of the twentieth century—an era of “Mammy” songs, “pickaninny” jokes, and blackface vaudevillians—requires no documentation. It might also be noted that, within twenty years of the Gunness fire, Indiana would be home to the largest branch of the Ku Klux Klan in the nation, with a membership of 250,000—roughly one-quarter of the native-born white male population of the state.[3] It is not surprising, then, that, in referring to Elizabeth Smith, the local newspapers routinely used the name by which she was known among her neighbors: “Nigger Liz.”

  The daughter of Virginia slaves who migrated to Indiana after the Civil War, Smith was said to have been a beauty in her youth—“the handsomest black girl in Indiana.” According to local rumor, she had won the hearts of “many of the young men of the time, not all of whom had black faces.” One of her reputed lovers was “a brilliant La Porte lawyer” with whom she bore an illegitimate, half-white daughter. A half century later, stories were still being told of the sensational climax of that affair, “when the man gave her a note for $600 to educate their child and then became converted at a revival, in which he arose and confessed his misdeeds. For thus publicly drawing attention to their affair, the negro girl horsewhipped the lawyer on the public square before a great crowd, the man finally breaking away and finding refuge in a nearby drug store.”[4]

  By the time of Ray Lamphere’s arrest, no vestige of her former loveliness remained. With her bony frame, wrinkled face, tattered black shawl, and “musty, old Mother Hubbard dress,” Smith—now in her seventies—cut a scarecrowish figure. Among neighborhood children, her ramshackle, refuse-crammed hovel was believed to be the habitation of a witch. Long into adulthood, many remembered “running past her place as youngsters, filled with terror.”[5]

  Her advanced age and physical deficiencies appeared to make no difference to Ray Lamphere, a man evidently blessed with highly flexible standards of female beauty. Cast out by his nearly 300-pound lover, Belle Gunness, he had found comfort in the bed of the spindle-shanked Elizabeth Smith.

  Visiting the jail on the morning following Ray’s arrest, Smith spoke to a local reporter, confirming Lamphere’s alibi while discreetly omitting the more scandalous detail that the latter had confessed to officials the evening before.

  “That man Lamphere came to my house Monday night and asked for a room,” she explained.

  “He said he was sick and had no money. ‘If I ever get any money, I’ll pay you,’ he told me, and then he sat down a while. He fell asleep in the chair and slept about half an hour. Then he woke up and said, ‘Are you going to let me have the room?’ I told him I thought so, and he went over to Smith’s saloon and got something to eat. I had my clock set for 4:30 and he turned it back to 3:30. I heard the alarm go off and went in to
wake him up. He was snoring like a good fellow and I told him it was after 4 o’clock. He said, ‘My God, I ought to be over to Wheatbrook’s by this time’ and started out. I didn’t see him after he left my house until this morning. I can sure say, though, that he was at my house at 4 o’clock that morning.”[6]

  Smith’s corroboration of Ray’s whereabouts at the time of the fire did nothing to dispel the universal belief in his guilt. Newspapers throughout the Midwest did not hesitate to brand him a “maniac,” a homicidal “firebug” whose “mad infatuation” with Mrs. Gunness had driven him to set her house ablaze when she “failed to reciprocate his passion.” Rumors spread that Lamphere would fall victim to lynch law. “The feeling in La Porte is running high, and mob violence is feared at any moment,” reported the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “Police in large numbers are guarding the jail, and Lamphere has collapsed. The whole city is excited.”[7]

  At the inquest that evening, conducted by Coroner Charles Mack, five witnesses testified: Joe Maxson, Michael and William Clifford, William Humphrey, and Daniel Hutson. Attending the proceedings were State’s Attorney Smith; Sheriff Smutzer; Deputies Antiss and Marr; clerk J. Roy Morrison, who transcribed the evidence; and a handful of newspapermen.

  Between them, the five witnesses offered a vivid account of the events of that fateful morning. Maxson, asked about the evening before the tragedy, stated that by the time he went to bed, the fire in the woodstove had died out, and that the kerosene lamps in the house were never left burning during the night. “His evidence was important in bearing out the . . . the belief that an incendiary started the fire,” one reporter noted.[8]

  It was Daniel Hutson, however, who offered what the newspapermen deemed the most dramatic testimony of the inquest. Asked by Sheriff Smutzer about the discovery of the four bodies in the cellar, Hutson—who had been one of the men who had helped lift the corpses from the rubble—declared that “the whole head of Mrs. Gunness was gone from the neck back.” Looking at what remained of her after she was placed on a board, he “could see her heart from where her head should be. I could look right on from her shoulders to the heart.” At least, that’s what he thought he was seeing. “She was burned so,” Hutson said, “that I cannot say what it was.”[9]

  Repeated “sweatings” of Lamphere having failed to produce a confession, Sheriff Smutzer resorted to another time-honored technique for trying to break down a suspect. Early Thursday morning, Ray was taken from his cell in handcuffs, escorted to Smutzer’s jaunty little automobile, and told he was going for a ride. Unbeknownst to him, his destination was the morgue in the Cutler funeral home, where—as Harry Burr Darling would report in his typically overwrought way—“he was to look upon all that was mortal of the woman he had hounded in life and the three little innocents who, but a few days ago, played about the home which was even then fated to become their funeral pyre.”

  Confronted with the hideously charred remains of Belle and her children, Lamphere trembled and paled. “My God,” he gasped.

  “Now, Lamphere,” said Smutzer, “there is some of your work. What do you think of it?”

  “Isn’t that awful,” stammered Ray, who seemed on the brink of collapse.

  Deeply shaken, he was hustled back out to Smutzer’s car and driven directly to court for his arraignment. Before Justice Grover, State’s Attorney Smith read aloud the affidavit, charging

  that on the 28th day of April, 1908, one Ray Lamphere did then and there unlawfully and feloniously kill and murder one Belle Gunness in the perpetration of arson and did then and there feloniously, willfully, and maliciously set fire to the house of the said Belle Gunness . . . and by reason and means of said burning by said Ray Lamphere, as aforesaid, said Belle Gunness was then and there mortally burned, and then and there died, contrary to the form of the statute in such case made and provided and against the peace and dignity of the state of Indiana.

  After pleading not guilty, Ray was ordered held without bond. He was then returned to his cell to await the action of the circuit court grand jury, scheduled to meet Monday, May 11.[10]

  In the meantime, a score of men continued to dig through the rubble in search of the dead woman’s missing skull. “Where Is the Head of Belle Gunness?” ran a headline in the Chicago Tribune. According to Dr. Lucius Gray and other La Porte physicians, “no heat could have been severe enough to have wholly cremated the woman’s skull.” Failure to find it in the ruins of the cellar would therefore lend credence to a theory that many had come to believe in recent days: that Ray Lamphere wasn’t merely an arsonist but a fiendish killer who had “stolen into [Mrs. Gunness’] room in the dark, decapitated her, and then set fire to the house to cover the evidence of his crime.”[11]

  14.

  SIBLINGS

  Stories about the missing head continued to swirl. According to one, Mrs. Gunness had been murdered and decapitated for the gold in her teeth. Sheriff Smutzer, however, scoffed at this theory, arguing that no one would perpetrate such an atrocity for “several hundred dollars’ worth” of gold fillings—and besides, “it would have been rather cumbersome for anybody to carry off a head.”[1]

  The postmortem examination of Mrs. Gunness confirmed his opinion. A team of physicians, led by Dr. J. Lucius Gray, concluded that “the head of Mrs. Gunness was not cut from the body before death. All agree[d] that it was burned off . . . They found no evidence of violence . . . nothing to indicate that death had been caused by anything other than suffocation and fire.”[2]

  The head was not the only missing part of the body. Though cast in cool, clinical terms, the final autopsy report vividly conveyed the sheer ghastliness of the woman’s remains: “Left arm burned off to the upper third of humerus. Right arm burned off at the shoulder. Right leg burned off at the knee. Left foot burned off at ankle . . . All muscular tissue was thoroughly burned and charred.” The entire right side of the torso, from chest to abdomen, had been burned away, leaving the internal organs completely exposed. The lungs, intestines, liver, and pancreas all “appeared normal,” the report noted, “except cooked.”[3]

  On Friday, May 1, the alleged perpetrator of the atrocity was reported to be “seeking the consolation of religion.” Summoning Dr. Edwin A. Schell, pastor of the La Porte Methodist Church, to his cell, Ray Lamphere requested and received a copy of the Bible. On the front page of the following day’s Argus-Bulletin, editor Harry Burr Darling interpreted the prisoner’s sudden interest in scripture as a sign that he might be on the brink of confessing—that, as Burr put it in his typically turgid way, Lamphere “wanted to read the sacred word hoping that he might find therein some message of the Master which would cause a penitent heart to unfold a tale.”[4]

  Among the passengers who arrived by train from Chicago that same Friday morning was a stout, white-haired matron with wire-framed granny glasses who looked to be in her seventies, though her actual age was fifty-four. This was Mrs. Nellie Larson. Eight years had passed since she had last seen her younger sister, then known as Bella Sorenson. It had come as a dreadful shock to her when, while reading Wednesday’s newspaper, she found herself looking at a photograph of her estranged sibling and learned of the inferno in which Bella and her three children had died.

  Her dismay was compounded when a subsequent article reported that, according to the provisions of the will Bella had made one day before the fire, her entire estate, estimated to be worth $15,000, would go to the Norwegian Children’s Home of Chicago. Accompanied by her adult children, John R. Larson and Mrs. Edward Howard, Nellie had hastened to La Porte.[5]

  Alighting from the train, the trio proceeded directly to the Cutler morgue. Unable to bring herself to view the awful remains, Mrs. Larson consigned that solemn duty to her son. Afterward, the three conferred with undertaker Cutler about arrangements to transport the bodies to Chicago, where, in accordance with Belle’s final wishes, they wo
uld be laid to rest in the Forest Home Cemetery.

  Their next stop was the office of Belle’s attorney, Melvin Leliter. There, Mrs. Larson and her children made it known that they intended to contest Belle’s will and, as the closest living relatives of the deceased, claim their share of the estate.[6]

  Another interested party who had read of the tragedy in the papers arrived by train that morning: Jennie Olson’s older sister, Mrs. George Olander of 2818 South Park Avenue, Chicago. Though separated since childhood, when Jennie was given over to Belle’s care, the sisters had kept up a regular correspondence. Mrs. Olander, however, had not heard from the younger woman in two years, when Jennie wrote to say that she was being sent to a Norwegian seminary in California. Mrs. Olander had made efforts to discover the exact name and location of the school but without success.

  Like Nellie Larson, Mrs. Olander had hurried to La Porte after reading accounts of the tragedy in the Chicago papers. Stories had begun to circulate that Jennie had gotten married in California and was on her wedding tour. “She is now supposed to be on her way to this city with her husband,” the Argus-Bulletin reported, “and is doubtful in ignorance of the tragic fate of the woman who guided her steps in childhood.” Mrs. Olander was worried, however, that Jennie might have reached home the day before the fire and met the same awful death as her foster mother and siblings.

  There was something else troubling Mrs. Olander. She, too, had read the newspaper stories about Mrs. Gunness’s will. She could not understand why Belle had bequeathed everything to Myrtle, Lucy, and Phillip—or, in the event of their deaths, to the orphanage in Chicago—and left nothing at all to Jennie.[7]