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

by Harold Schechter

  Given a variety of factors—the proximity of La Porte to Chicago, Belle’s former residence in that city, and the shameless sensationalism of its yellow press—it was hardly surprising that the Chicago papers had a field day with the story. The Wednesday edition of William Randolph Hearst’s Examiner made an especially startling claim. “Belle Gunness a Member of Band of Chicago Thugs,” the headline blared. “Police Seeking Her Here.”[6]

  According to Assistant Police Chief Herman F. Schuettler, Chicago was home to “a gang of murderers organized for the purpose of collecting insurance on their victims.” Mrs. Gunness, he asserted, was “a member of this gang of murderers . . . who received the bodies of the victims done to death in Chicago and disposed of them in her La Porte home.” Schuettler’s theory was largely based on the testimony of several local liverymen, who revealed that, in 1906 and 1907, they had delivered at least nine heavy trunks to the Gunness farm. It was the belief of the Chicago police, the newspaper declared, “that this and the other trunks contained human bodies.”

  One of these liverymen, Claude Sturgis, offered a dramatic account of his own experience in the fall of 1907. After carting a large, “tightly corded” trunk up on the porch of the Gunness farmhouse and rolling it into the front parlor, he had begun to remove the ropes. At that instant, Mrs. Gunness had “rushed madly at him and asked what he was doing. ‘I always untie the trunks for the ladies,’ Sturgis replied. In a fit of rage, she grabbed him by the arm and, pushing him out the front door, told him to mind his own business.”

  Receiving a tip that “two mysterious trunks” were currently awaiting shipment to the Gunness farm, Captain O’Brien of the Chicago City Detective Bureau, immediately instituted a search of all railroad baggage rooms and local express companies. According to the informant who contacted the police, the trunks “contain[ed] the corpses of murder victims.”[7]

  Picking up on this story, newspapers throughout the country declared that Mrs. Gunness was part of what was variously described as a “crime bureau,” “criminal conspiracy,” “murder syndicate,” and “man-killing trust.” Her role was that of “fence” or “clearinghouse” for this sinister organization, which used her farm as a graveyard for its victims.

  Stories began to circulate of a “secret death chamber” in Belle’s “house of horrors” that had served a ghastly function in this diabolical racket. “There was a room of the Gunness home that was used exclusively by the woman,” one paper reported. “No one was allowed to enter there, not even her children. The door was a heavy oaken affair and the windows were tightly shaded. It was in this room the bodies were stored after they were shipped from Chicago. The woman piled them in there until they were old enough, so there was no danger of their bleeding. Then she hacked them to pieces.”[8]

  Dr. J. H. William Meyer—former member of the Cook County Hospital staff and president of the Alumni Association of Rush Medical College—

  suggested a somewhat different possibility. After taking part in the postmortem examinations of several of the unearthed corpses, including the one identified as Andrew Helgelien, Meyer declared to reporters that “the decapitation and severance of limbs from the bodies was done by an anatomical expert . . . someone familiar with the dissecting room.”

  The “disarticulation of the ball and socket joints of the shoulder,” Meyer explained, was especially telling. “This cannot be done by an amateur with an ordinary instrument,” he insisted. “Every one of these operations was clean cut. It was done by a strong hand with nothing less sharp than a surgeon’s knife.”[9] The clear implication was that the victims had been dismembered in Chicago by a killer with medical expertise, then shipped in pieces to La Porte.[10] With the memory of Dr. H. H. Holmes still fresh in their minds—the infamous serial killer who had purportedly dispatched and dissected an indeterminate number of victims in the dungeon of his so-called horror castle—Chicagoans could easily believe in the existence of a medical monster involved in a murder-for-profit scheme.[11]

  The notion that Belle had accomplices in Chicago also lent credence to the widespread conviction that she was still alive, particularly after an unnamed witness came forward to say that he had spotted a “cloaked figure” boarding the Chicago train from La Porte on the morning of April 28, the day of the fire at the Gunness farmhouse. Based on this intelligence, Schuettler speculated that Belle “had been met in Chicago by a confederate and was now hiding” while awaiting a chance to “escape to Norway.”

  A massive search was launched for the archmurderess.

  “Every depot in Chicago is being watched by the police,” the Examiner reported. “The post office is under the eye of the police. So are numerous other places at which it might be supposed that the woman would appear. Express warehouses and baggage rooms are being winnowed for traces of trunks to or from the woman. A dragnet is out that encompasses the city.”[12]

  While police conducted their manhunt for the supposed fugitive, reporters tracked down Dr. J. C. Miller, who had been called to the bedside of the stricken Mads Sorenson eight years earlier. Recent developments had compelled Dr. Miller to reevaluate his original diagnosis.

  “When I arrived at Sorenson’s home,” Miller told the newsmen, “he was clutching the bedpost and was in great agony. He died within half an hour. Sorenson was apparently in the best of health before he died. At the time, I believed that his death was probably due to hemorrhage of the brain. As I think of it now, however, I can see that the symptoms may have been those of strychnine poisoning.”[13]

  Convinced that Belle’s connection to “an organized gang of trunk murderers” dated back to her days in Chicago, Assistant Chief Schuettler ordered an immediate investigation into the records of all missing persons who had disappeared from the Austin area at the time she lived there. Meeting with reporters late Wednesday, he also announced that, at sunrise the following day, his men would “begin to spade up the backyard” of the home she and Mads had shared on Alma Street.

  “We confidently expect to find bodies in this yard,” Schuettler told the newspapermen.

  Moreover, he had reason to believe that not all those bodies were those of adults. In addition to her other monstrous activities, Belle Gunness, according to Schuettler, was in the business of “baby farming.”[14]

  In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, mothers of unwanted infants—typically unwed women, prostitutes, or destitute females already overburdened with children—would consign the luckless newborns to paid caregivers who, for a flat or monthly fee, would agree to provide a home for the babies or find them suitable families for adoption. While some of these so-called baby farmers treated their charges with warm maternal care, a sizable number proved to be utterly callous females who sought to maximize their profits by supplying the children with the barest of necessities.

  When a social worker named Arthur Alden Guild conducted an investigation into Chicago’s baby farms for the Juvenile Protection Agency, he found hundreds of diseased, malnourished children living in appalling conditions.[15] So high was the mortality rate among these unregulated operations that, to many observers, they were little more than death traps. Some of the women involved in this sordid business, moreover, were guilty of far worse than criminal neglect. Perhaps the most notorious was the British baby farmer Amelia Dyer, believed to have murdered several hundred infants in her care.[16]

  Chicago authorities were now firmly convinced that Mrs. Gunness had engaged in the same gruesome business—“taking in babies for a sum of money until they could be conveniently put out of the way.” While they did not believe she had matched Amelia Dyer’s record, they thought it likely that—as Lieutenant Matthew Zimmer of the Austin police station told reporters—“she may have murdered children by the score.” Indeed, said Zimmer, it was her “success in hiding her crimes with the bodies of children [that] may have encouraged her
to continue her crimes along bigger lines.”

  The awful career of the La Porte ghoul, Zimmer speculated, had “begun by murdering babies.”[17]

  In La Porte, authorities waved off the theories of the Chicago police. Informed of Schuettler’s belief that the bodies dug up on Mrs. Gunness’s farm had been shipped there by her cohorts in a Chicago crimes syndicate, La Porte mayor Lemuel Darrow was emphatic in his response.

  “There is only one solution to the mystery,” he declared to reporters. “Mrs. Gunness enticed all these people here for the purpose of getting their money and then murdered them.

  “She carried on a correspondence with countrymen of hers when she knew they were single men or widowers with money,” Darrow continued, “and after making offers of marriage or other inducements, such as having a suitable farm for sale, she would request a visit. After she got her men to the farm, she would entertain them so hospitably that their visits were prolonged. When the time was opportune, she would administer some kind of poison, probably arsenic or chloroform, and when death resulted, take her time in dismembering them and burying the remains in the yard.

  “I believe she has been carrying on this extraordinary means of securing for several years,” said Darrow as the newspapermen scribbled his words in their notepads. “I believe further investigation will reveal more bodies of the woman’s inhuman traffic.”

  Asked by one of the reporters how many more bodies he expected to find, Darrow replied without hesitation. “I would not be surprised,” he said, “to have the list of victims reach a score of men, women and children.”[18]

  18.

  BUDSBERG

  A drenching rain on Thursday, May 7, put the digging on hold. With the grim work suspended, Sheriff Smutzer traveled to Chicago early that morning to confer with his counterparts.

  He was still away when a messenger arrived at the jail to inform Deputy Antiss that a pair of men had broken into the locked buggy shed on the Gunness farm, where the exhumed piles of rotted flesh and bone lay on wooden planks.

  Hurrying out to the farm, Antiss was met by Joe Maxson, who told him that, while walking in the yard, he had spotted the two men climbing out of the shed’s rear window.

  “One was a tall man with dark hair and other was heavyset, not quite so tall,” said Maxson. “It was raining heavily, and I could not see much of their faces because their hats were pulled down low and their coat collars were up. I told them that the sheriff’s orders forbade anybody entering the shed, and one of them said, ‘Mind your own affairs. We’re doctors and have a right to go in.’”

  Maxson immediately sent one of the neighbor boys into town to notify Antiss. By then, however, the two men had already gotten away, hightailing it through the woods to a rig they had left nearby. Rumors quickly spread through town that “accomplices of Mrs. Gunness had smashed the lock of the shed and broken in to destroy evidence against her . . . They stole several bottles said to contain poison and attempted to mix up the bones of the skeletons to prevent identification.”[1]

  The truth turned out to be more mundane: The two men, later identified as residents of Michigan City, had snuck in through the window of the temporary morgue for no more sinister reason than to satisfy their morbid curiosity with a close-up look at the charnel remains of Mrs. Gunness’s victims.[2]

  At around 1:30 that afternoon, before Smutzer’s return, two young men arrived by train from Iola, Wisconsin, in the company of an older acquaintance, a hardware dealer named Edwin Chapin. They were met at the depot by James Buck, president of the La Porte Savings Bank, who escorted them to the courthouse, where Deputy Antiss took charge of them. The two young men were brothers Mathias and Oscar Budsberg, ages twenty-seven and twenty-nine, respectively: “simple, ingenuous young farmers,” as one newspaper patronizingly reported, “slow of thought and utterance.”[3] They were there on a somber mission: to view a human skull thought to be that of their father, Ole Budsberg.

  Fourteen months earlier, Budsberg—a fifty-one-year old widower and subscriber to both the Skandinaven and the Decorah-Posten—informed his sons that he was taking a trip to La Porte, Indiana, to see about managing a farm there. To his brother, Budsberg told a different story: that he was going there to marry a wealthy widow.

  He left Iola in the third week of March 1907, returning a week later to settle his affairs before moving permanently to his new home. He sold his farm to Mathias for $1,000. On April 5, with the cash from the sale plus a mortgage note for an additional $1,000 secured by some land that he owned, he departed by train, promising his sons that he would write as soon as he was settled.

  The following day—as a cashier named J. W. Crumpacker later testified—Budsberg appeared at the First National Bank of La Porte in the company of Belle Gunness and requested that his mortgage note be sent to the Farmers State Bank in Iola for collection. He was back with Mrs. Gunness on April 16 to pick up the money. “That was the last time I saw him alive,” Crumpacker would say.[4]

  By late April, having received no word from their father, Mathias was sufficiently concerned to send him a letter at the Gunness farm. It was eventually returned as undeliverable by the Dead Letter Office in Washington, D.C. In the meantime, the mortgage note having come due, J. C. Swenson, a cashier at the Farmers State Bank in Iola, sent a letter of inquiry to cashier Crumpacker, asking as to whether he “had seen anything of Mr. Budsberg lately.” Crumpacker passed along the letter to his employer, bank president Buck, who took it upon himself to drive out to the Gunness farm and see if Budsberg was there. At his knock, Mrs. Gunness came to the door but did not invite him inside. To his question about Budsberg, she replied that she did not know where he was. During a visit to Chicago, she explained, he had been robbed of “most of his money.” When he got back to La Porte, he decided that “he would go out west and try to make up what he had been robbed of before any of his relatives should learn of it.” A few days later—she could not remember the date—she had taken him to the train depot where he set out on a trip to Oregon. That was the last she had seen of him.[5]

  Buck had Crumpacker notify the bank officers in Iola. Several months later, following the conflagration at the Gunness farm and the discovery of the first bodies in the hog lot, Crumpacker sent newspaper clippings to cashier Swenson, who notified the Budsberg brothers. Fearing the worst, Mathias and Oscar had set out at once for La Porte.[6]

  At around 2:00 p.m., Deputy Antiss drove the Budsberg brothers out to the Gunness farm. Despite the inclement weather, twenty or so men—drawn by the fast-spreading stories of the supposedly sinister break-in that had taken place earlier in the day—were gathered outside the buggy shed. Antiss led his two charges into the foul-smelling outbuilding, the other men crowding in eagerly behind them.

  By the glow of an oil lamp, Mat and Oscar peered at the row of planks holding the rank remains dug out of the barnyard. Atop one mass of decayed bones and skin sat the skull they had come to view, and they bent to take a closer look.

  Though the head retained few recognizable features, there was no mistaking its distinctive facial hair: “a tangled red waterfall mustache,” as one historian describes it, “curling into the fleshless mouth.”[7] After a moment, the brothers straightened up, exchanged a grim look, then pushed their way out of the shed and into the open air.

  Withdrawing a ways, they engaged in a brief, whispered conversation before returning to the shed. By then, Antiss had emerged and stood waiting for them.

  “It’s him,” said Mat. “I’m sure of it.”

  “It’s what we feared,” said Oscar.[8]

  The Budsberg boys had found their father.

  In a front-page story datelined May 7, the New York Times summed up for its readers the four main theories surrounding the Gunness case, “a series of crimes which have startled the whole country”:
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  Theory No. 1—That Mrs. Gunness, fearing exposure of her long murderous career, killed her three children and herself, setting fire to the house to conceal the crimes.

  Theory No. 2—That Mrs. Gunness, fearing exposure, fled after killing her children, putting the headless body of another woman in the house to mislead authorities.

  Theory No. 3—That Ray Lamphere, her farmhand, did the killing from a double motive of revenge and jealousy.

  Theory No. 4—That the quadruple crime was committed by a murderous gang with headquarters in Chicago who feared exposure by Mrs. Gunness of a long series of murders for insurance, she being used as their “clearinghouse” for corpses.[9]

  Even as this edition of the paper was going to press, however, authorities in Chicago were discounting the last of these theories. Just one day after making his confident pronouncements about Mrs. Gunness’s involvement with a “crime syndicate,” Assistant Chief Schuettler did a complete about-face on the issue. His reversal was prompted partly by a talk with Sheriff Smutzer, who gave no credence to the notion that the rotted remains exhumed from Belle’s barnyard had been shipped there from Chicago. Investigators had also determined that the information about the two “mysterious trunks” supposedly awaiting delivery to the “death farm” was a false lead, if not an outright hoax.