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

by Harold Schechter

  “I no longer believe that Mrs. Gunness was the agent of a gang of murderers or that she ran a baby farm,” he told reporters:

  It appears certain that she herself killed the suitors whose bodies were found in the farmyard graves. That she could have lured and killed more than a dozen men in this way is entirely plausible. I believe she answered letters from men of her own nationality and invited them to her farm. There she showed them the abundant fields. The prospect was pleasing. So much accomplished, the rest was not so difficult as might be supposed. A little chloral in a glass of beer or coffee brings quick death. So does a well directed blow with a hammer or hatchet. There is no reason why she, a strong woman, could not have buried them as well. Her farm is far from the nearest neighbor.

  At the same time, Schuettler clung to his conviction that the archmurderess was still alive. “I cannot believe that she is dead. She was too expert a criminal to be caught that way. She may well be in Chicago.”[10]

  His opinion seemed to be confirmed by an acquaintance of Belle’s who notified the police that he had seen her board “a North Clark streetcar at Summerdale Avenue” just one day earlier, Wednesday the sixth.[11] Several other witnesses claimed to have encountered her in the vicinity of Wabash Avenue district south of the Loop within the past week. One of these was a pharmacist named Al Levi, proprietor of a drugstore in the Commercial Hotel Building on Wabash Avenue and Harrison Street. After coming upon a photograph of Belle in the Chicago Tribune, Levi contacted the newspaper, claiming to recognize her as “the same woman who attempted to buy morphine from him within four or five days after the Gunness house of horror had been burned.”

  “I am certain it is her,” insisted Levi, who would not be the last to assert that he had come face-to-face with the living Belle Gunness. “The features—the nose, the mouth, the eyes—are the same.”[12]

  Persuaded now that Belle’s atrocities had been confined to her remote farm in La Porte, Schuettler called off plans to search for other missing persons in the yard of her former residence in Austin. His decision did not prevent a group of enterprising reporters from showing up with shovels on Alma Street. Before they could begin to dig, however, they were confronted by the current owners, brothers John and Daniel Nellis, a pair of burly plumbers from Wisconsin, who had purchased the premises in November 1907 and who threatened to “get an injunction restraining any excavating here. We bought this property,” said Daniel, “and all this sensational talk is injuring it.”[13]

  Schuettler’s belief that Belle had staged her own death and made her way to Chicago was shared by La Porte’s mayor, Lemuel Darrow, and his police chief, Clinton Cochrane. Sheriff Smutzer and Prosecutor Smith, on the other hand, were adamant that she had perished in the fire. Of course, as newspapers were quick to point out, Smutzer and Smith had good reason to insist on that point. To admit that she was still alive would—as the Chicago Tribune put it—“destroy the case they are building against Ray Lamphere.”

  On that same afternoon, Thursday, May 7, Smith appeared before a flock of reporters to make a dramatic announcement. So far as the state was concerned, the case against Lamphere was “complete.” Mrs. Gunness’s former handyman and lover would be indicted and tried not only for arson but for murder.

  “I am satisfied we have collected testimony of such a character that Lamphere’s responsibility for the deaths in the house will be established beyond all reasonable doubt,” Smith declared. “We will produce witnesses to prove that Lamphere was seen around the Gunness house before the fire broke out and that he was seen running away later. We shall also prove that he set fire to the place in revenge for action taken against him by the woman after they had fallen out, and that this disagreement was due to a quarrel over the murder of Helgelien in which Lamphere was implicated, according to our evidence.”[14]

  Asked by one newspaperman if, as was widely reported, police had resorted to the third degree—“sweating”—to extract information from Lamphere, Smith bristled. “We don’t sweat people here,” he said. “La Porte is a civilized town. We’re not like Chicago and New York.”[15]

  He concluded that he would “endeavor to have the case called for trial at the next term of court.” Lamphere, Smith predicted, “will be on trial within three weeks.”[16]

  19.

  THE WEB

  Reporting on State Attorney Smith’s announcement, Friday’s Chicago Tribune ran a story headlined “Weave Web Around Lamphere.” A web of a very different kind appeared prominently in the same issue: a front-page editorial cartoon depicting a swarm of insect-winged men, satchels in hand, flying into the clutches of a fat, female spider. Blazoned across the spider’s back were the words “Matrimonial Bureau.”[1]

  According to one informed estimate, Chicago in the first decade of the twentieth century was home to no fewer than 125 matrimonial (or “affinity”) agencies, the vast bulk of them fly-by-night operations designed to milk as much cash as possible from desperately lonely men and women. Typical was the scam conducted by a woman named E. L. Glinn, who snared victims by running phony newspaper advertisements ostensibly placed by prosperous businessmen and well-to-do widows in search of congenial mates. The dupes who responded to these come-ons were required to mail Miss Glinn a five-dollar “initiation fee” in her matchmaking club, in return for which they would receive more detailed information about the (nonexistent) marriage seekers, along with a list of other possible (and equally fictitious) candidates. Before she was arrested, tried, and convicted of mail fraud, Glinn managed to rope in more than six hundred suckers of both sexes, none of whom, it seems needless to say, ended up with a husband or wife.[2]

  Decrying Glinn and her ilk as “a menace to the American people” who “debased the ideal of love and marriage” by reducing it to a matter of “tawdry commercialism,” Chicago authorities went after the worst of the offenders.[3] One larger-than-life character, Detective Sergeant Clifton R. Wooldridge—the self-styled “American Sherlock Holmes” responsible for twenty thousand arrests during his two-decade career—waged relentless war on these con artists, regarding their chicanery as “one of the most insidious forms of crime,” a “volcano belching forth fraud, swindling, bigamy, [and] desertion.” In his bestselling memoir, Twenty Years a Detective in the Wickedest City in the World, Wooldridge proudly proclaims that he had put more than one hundred of these “get-rich-quick schemers” out of business, seizing and destroying “40 wagon loads” of their meretricious circulars and advertisements.[4]

  The battle against Chicago’s “love brokers” turned into an all-out crusade in the wake of the Gunness revelations. Conveniently ignoring the fact that Belle had never availed herself of a matrimonial agency, the district attorney’s office issued immediate instructions “that every manager of an affinity bureau in the Chicago district be placed under immediate arrest.”

  “The revelations in La Porte have been such,” Assistant D. A. Seward S. Shirer told reporters, “that we believe different alleged ‘matcher-up’ bureaus have sent men and women to murder establishments like the one run by Mrs. Gunness. This was probably done to rob them of the few cents they may have had in their pockets. These poor persons are an unintellectual set and could be murdered and put out of the way without much danger of exposure.” While conceding that not all matrimonial agencies were in the business of “wholesale murder,” he insisted that there was “no telling how far each manager will go in his efforts to wring a few pennies out of the poor persons who answer their alluring advertisements.”[5]

  Detective Wooldridge’s memoir echoed these sentiments. Switching from a geological metaphor—the “belching” volcano—to a botanical one, he described the matrimonial bureau as a “plant of hell” whose most hideous “blossom” was the Gunness murder farm.

  “This wholesale murderess,” Wooldridge proclaimed in defiance of the facts, “lured her victims to th
eir fate through advertisements in a ‘matrimonial paper’ or through a matrimonial agency . . . Through the aid of these fraudulent agencies, [this woman] murdered more people than any other human being who ever lived.” Accompanying this passage was an illustration of a scythe-wielding Belle standing in her yard at night. All about her were graves sprouting skull-flowered plants. “The Death Harvester,” read the caption.

  “This, then, is the crowning work of the matrimonial agency,” Wooldridge concluded. “This horrid burying ground of dismembered bodies, this ghastly charnel pit on an Indiana hillside. By their fruits shall ye know them. In the dread Gunness Farm behold the ripened fruit of the matrimonial agency!”[6]

  20.

  THE CORPSE HARVEST

  On Friday morning, May 8, the flooding rain that had fallen for the past thirty-six hours subsided to an intermittent drizzle. At daylight, a great caravan of buggies, hacks, wagons, and assorted conveyances began making its way toward the “horror farm.” By 8:00 a.m., more than a thousand men, women, and

  children—“farmers, merchants, clerks, residents of adjacent towns and villages”—had shown up to watch the grave-hunting resume.[1]

  Locating a “soft spot” not far from the pits they had excavated on Wednesday, Sheriff Smutzer, Joe Maxson, and Daniel Hutson bent to their task. The saturated soil came up easily under their spades. Just a half hour after digging began, Hutson struck something solid: a rotting wooden box, which disintegrated into splinters as he poked it with the blade of his tool.

  “As the fragments fell aside,” one observer wrote, “they revealed a mass of lime from which ragged pieces of gunny sack were lifted. In the bottom of the hole a tangled heap of bones was exposed, to some of which masses of jelly-like flesh still clung.” There was also a skull with some strands of dark hair sticking to it.[2]

  The bones were brought to the surface and examined by Coroner Mack. Like all of Belle’s victims, this one had been carved up prior to disposal—the legs neatly sawed off two inches above the knee joints, the arms severed near the shoulders. From the size of the bones and the dimension of the skull, Mack concluded that the remains were those of an adult male, despite the incongruous fact that two pairs of women’s shoes had been tossed into the pit with the body.

  As word of the find spread through the crowd, hundreds made a mad dash for the freshly opened grave. One newspaperman witnessed a scene that captured the frenzy of the moment. An “old man with a long gray beard” had just arrived at the farm, pulling two toddlers, evidently his grandchildren, in a little wooden wagon. As he approached the hog lot, “the little wagon toppled over, and the two children were thrown to the muddy ground. It was at this moment that the cry was raised, ‘another body has been found,’ and the old man ran to the excavation, leaving the children crying on the ground.”[3]

  The mystery of the women’s shoes was solved a few minutes later. Continuing to dig in the same hole, Hutson soon turned up another mass of bones. Because there was only one skull in the grave, Smutzer initially theorized that all the remains belonged to a single victim. Coroner Mack quickly disabused him of that notion. “If all those bones belonged to one person,” Mack declared, “you’d have a monstrosity—someone ten or twelve feet high.”[4] To Mack’s practiced eye, it was clear that this second skeleton was that of a woman.

  Placed in separate tin buckets, the two butchered skeletons—the tenth and eleventh to be dug out of the “death garden”—were transferred to the improvised morgue to join the other fetid remnants of Belle Gunness’s victims.

  As a result of the nationwide coverage of the case, police officials in La Porte were flooded with inquiries from people who feared that their long-missing loved ones had ended up in the muck of Belle Gunness’s hog lot. From Mrs. J. M. Canary of Pine Lakes, Indiana, came a letter about her nineteen-year-old son, Edward. A somewhat troubled, “not intellectually bright” youth who had “once burned an empty cottage for the pleasure of seeing it being destroyed,” Edward had disappeared abruptly from his job as a local farmhand in July 1906 and had not been seen since.[5]

  William Stern, a Philadelphia saloonkeeper, wrote to ask about his twenty-eight-year-old employee, Charles Neiburg. A recent immigrant from Sweden, Neiburg—whose “one ambition was to marry a woman of wealth” and who “spent all his free time answering matrimonial advertisements”—had vanished in June 1906, telling his boss that he was going to Indiana to marry a “widow with a large farm.” He had left his bicycle and a trunkful of clothing behind, saying that he would send for them once he was married. But Stern had never heard from him.[6]

  Another letter came from Mr. G. R. Burk of Tuscola, Illinois, asking about his former worker George Bradley. The previous October, the forty-year-old Bradley had announced that he intended to marry “a widow who owned a nice farm near La Porte.” Selling “about $1,500 worth of property,” he had departed for Indiana, “leaving his clothing with Mr. Burk and saying that he would come back for it, but he never returned.”[7]

  The wife of Benjamin Carling, an agent for the Prudential Life Insurance Company in Chicago, sent a pleading letter about her husband, who had left home for La Porte a year before, “telling her that he had secured a splendid investment through a rich widow. He was enthusiastic over the plan, having borrowed several thousand dollars from Chicago men whom he had interested in the scheme. At the same time, he had in his possession $1,000 belonging to an insurance company.” That was the last anyone had seen of him.[8]

  Mrs. Kulers of McKeesport, Pennsylvania, contacted Sheriff Smutzer about her missing father, John E. Hunter of Duquesne, who “left his home in November, 1907, for Northern Indiana to marry a wealthy widow, as he informed his family. He took with him a large sum of money, telling his daughters he did not know when he would return.”[9]

  Gustav Thuns, a resident of Washington, Pennsylvania, likewise told his family and friends that he had been “in communication with “a wealthy widow in La Porte.” According to a letter sent by his former employer, Pat Schimmack, the last anyone had seen of Thuns was when he “started for the Indiana town last summer with $1,000.”[10]

  And there were letters and telegrams concerning dozens of vanished men. Herman Konitzer of Chicago; Auguste Gunderson of Green Lake, Wisconsin; Lindner Nikkelson of Huron, South Dakota; Andrew Anderson of Lawrence, Kansas; E. F. Plato of Youngstown, Ohio; I. T. Striver of North Bend, Nebraska; Bert Chase of Mishawaka, Indiana; Emil Tell of Kansas City, Missouri; George Williams of Wapawallopen, Pennsylvania. And more.[11]

  The physical descriptions that generally accompanied these inquiries were, for the most part, utterly useless. Given the condition of the exhumed bodies—piles of hacked, rotting skeletons with an occasional fleshless skull—it was impossible to put names to most of them. Circumstantial evidence, however, left little doubt as to some of their identities.

  From the testimony of various witnesses, authorities concluded that Belle’s hired hands Olaf Lindboe and Henry Gurholt—who had both disappeared under highly suspicious circumstances—were two of her earliest victims.[12] Another man named Olaf—Olaf Jensen—had written to relatives in Norway that he was leaving his home in Carroll, Indiana, to marry “a rich widow who owned a farm in La Porte.” Jensen had been seen on the Gunness place, helping Belle with some chores. He disappeared shortly after cashing a large check at the First National Bank of La Porte. When neighbors asked of his whereabouts, Belle “claimed that he had gone west because he ‘didn’t like La Porte.’”[13]

  Arthur Peglow, an assistant cashier at the First National Bank, was able to identify another victim who had been lured into Belle’s clutches. This was forty-year-old bachelor John Moe, resident of Elbow Lake, Minnesota, and subscriber to the Skandinaven, who arrived in La Porte after informing relatives that he was “moving to a town in Indiana, not far from Chicago.” In December 1906, Moe had come into the bank t
o cash two checks totaling $1,000. He was never seen again. Peglow clearly “remembered Moe when he was shown a photograph.”[14]

  In early 1906, fifty-five-year-old Christian Hilkven of Dover, Wisconsin, had abruptly departed after selling his farm for $2,000 in cash. His fate was established by Johannes B. Wist, editor of the Norwegian-language newspaper the Decorah-Posten. After reading of the Gunness atrocities, Wist notified authorities that, in the spring of 1906, he had received a letter from Hilkven—a longtime subscriber—asking that future issues be mailed to him in La Porte. The La Porte postmaster confirmed “that Hilkven’s mail was delivered to Mrs. Gunness’s farm.”[15]

  As is typically the case when a community discovers that a homicidal monster has been living in its midst, people immediately came forward with breathless tales of narrow escapes. Some of these were clearly the products of overheated imaginations. Eighteen-year-old Harriet Danielson of Austin, for example, one of Jennie Olson’s former playmates, reported that, the previous September, she had been invited to spend a week with her childhood friend at La Porte. “She told me what a beautiful home they had down there, and what a delightful time we could have together,” Harriet explained. “She said her mother urged me to come. It was just an accident that I did not go. A friend of mine did not want me to, there was some pretext or reason I could not go at the time. I wrote Jennie saying I could not visit her at that time. I got no reply.