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

by Harold Schechter

  As Mrs. Herron climbed into a taxi for the short ride to her sister’s apartment, the Times reporter called out: “Won’t you say something about your experience?”

  “Oh, what can I say?” she replied in a tremulous voice. “It is too awful.”[2]

  It came as no surprise to Deputy Sheriff Antiss that the Syracuse police had nabbed the wrong woman. Like others in La Porte, he remained firmly convinced that Belle Gunness was dead—slain by her sometime accomplice, Ray Lamphere. Reinforced by a trio of Pinkerton detectives brought in to aid the investigation, the La Porte sheriff’s department had, according to Antiss, already gathered enough evidence “to hang Lamphere on a charge of murder.”[3] Every restless night that Ray passed behind bars was reported in the press as indisputable proof of his guilt-stricken conscience. With its standard shameless disregard for verifiable fact, the Chicago American portrayed him as a “raving maniac,” driven to madness by Mrs. Gunness’s vengeful specter, come to haunt him in his cell: “‘She’s pointing her finger at me,’ Lamphere cries out at night. ‘She is saying, “I’ll get you yet! I’ll get you yet!” I can’t get away from her!’”[4]

  Rebutting Antiss’s claim, Ray’s attorney, Wirt Worden, issued a statement asserting his client’s innocence. Having represented Ray in the various suits brought against him by Mrs. Gunness, Worden proclaimed that, though undeniably “a man of mediocre mentality,” Lamphere was “without criminal proclivities.

  “There are two reasonable theories as to the cause and origin of the fire,” he continued:

  One is that Mrs. Gunness—thinking that Lamphere may have discovered things that would incriminate her, and knowing further that Asle Helgelien was coming to make an investigation—sought to cover up all evidence of her crimes and escape with her own life, if possible, and that she, in carrying this out, murdered the three children, placed them on the cellar floor with the adult corpse found, and fired the building and escaped. The other theory is that Mrs. Gunness, foreseeing the culminating of events upon the arrival of Helgelien, decided to end her own life and at the same time cover up all evidence of prior crimes and to do so, killed her own children, fired the house, and committed suicide.

  “In either event,” Worden concluded, “Lamphere, as I firmly believe, is innocent of any crime. He is simply a victim of circumstance.”[5]

  Proponents of Worden’s first theory—that the headless woman found in the cellar was a decoy planted by Belle—were bolstered in their belief by the many reported sightings of the murderess. Police in Elkhart, Indiana, were on the lookout for a woman weighing about two hundred pounds “and of distinctly masculine appearance” who had aroused the suspicion of a bookstore clerk named Stillman when he noticed that she spoke in a Scandinavian accent and “had a number of gold teeth . . . that matched the description of the La Porte arch-fiend.”[6] George G. Spurunewski, a druggist in East St. Louis, contacted the police to report “that a woman answering the description of Mrs. Belle Gunness” had recently taken up residence in his city.[7]

  Sheriff R. S. Williams of Delta County, Colorado, convinced that Mrs. Gunness had settled nearby, telegraphed the authorities in La Porte, asking “if any reward was being offered for her capture, so that he might proceed with her arrest.”[8] Another telegram to the La Porte police, this one from a resident in Willmar, Minnesota, claimed that Mrs. Gunness was currently working as a housekeeper for a local farmer and urged them to “come and get her.”[9] Samuel Harvey of Kansas City, Missouri, wrote directly to Mayor Darrow, saying “he had met Mrs. Gunness in Ogden, Utah on May 4, six days after she was supposedly burned to death.”[10] She was also seen in Grand Rapids, Michigan; Palouse, Washington; Hot Springs, Arkansas; Cincinnati, Ohio; Joliet, Illinois; Alberta, Canada; and “traveling through the wilds of the state of Chiapas, Mexico, dressed in man’s attire.”[11]

  Closer to home, a self-declared “seer” named Jesse Dickenson appeared at Sheriff Smutzer’s office on Saturday, May 9, announcing that Belle Gunness was still in La Porte County and that he had the power to locate her. “All I require,” he said, “is something that has been in the possession of Ray Lamphere, and by the aid of this, I will be able to tell the exact location of her hiding place and the mystery will be solved.”[12]

  Another person claiming spiritualistic powers, Mrs. A. James of South Milwaukee, announced that, by studying the signs of the zodiac, she had discovered that Mrs. Gunness was presently living “either in Michigan City, Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, or Terre Haute . . . She will be found in a livery barn in one of these cities dressed as a man and doing man’s work.”[13]

  Sightings of Belle became such a common occurrence that the press began treating them as a joke. One Indiana newspaper advised all “large-sized women [to] stay at home so that they are not mistaken for Mrs. Gunness and held by the authorities.” Another wryly observed that Belle had “been seen in so many different places at almost the same time” that she seemed “to have solved the problem of rapid transit.”[14]

  Sheriff Smutzer, still convinced that Belle was dead, had come up with a novel way to prove it, “an original departure from the methods usually employed in the work of solving murder mysteries,” as one Chicago paper wrote. Late Saturday, May 9, he announced that he had retained the services of a veteran miner named Louis Schultz, who had spent nearly twenty years among the gulches of California and Colorado prospecting for gold. On Monday, Schultz would set up his sluice on the Gunness property and begin sifting the ashes in the cellar in a search for Belle’s gold-capped teeth.

  “I will take my time,” said Schultz, “and go over every particle of the wreckage. If the teeth are there, I will find them. And if it was Mrs. Gunness who perished in the flames, the teeth are there.”

  Belle’s dentist, Dr. Ira P. Norton, agreed with Schultz. “Mrs. Gunness had some dental work done by me a year ago. She made two visits and paid me $40 for my work,” he told reporters. “The four incisors in her lower jaw were missing. I put gold crowns on the two lower bicuspids and bridged in four porcelain teeth between them. The four porcelain teeth were reinforced by a back of eighteen-karat gold. If it was Mrs. Gunness whose body was found in the ruins, her teeth are intact among the debris. The fire was not hot enough to melt the gold or incinerate the porcelain.”[15]

  Smutzer’s announcement came at the end of a long and fruitless day of digging. For the first time since he and his helpers began their grim excavations, Belle’s “garden of death” yielded no new bodies. When the search was abandoned at nightfall, the crowds that had gathered at the farm since early morning couldn’t hide their surprise. By then, Belle had assumed such monstrous dimensions in the public imagination that it was generally assumed “she had sown every square yard of her 30-acre farm with the bodies of her victims.”[16]

  No digging was planned for the next day, partly in honor of the Sabbath but mostly because of the immense hordes that were expected to descend on the farm. Guards would be posted in the cellar and on the ruins of the farmhouse, but otherwise “spectators [would] be allowed to roam at will.”

  To cash in on the Gunness-related frenzy, the Lake Erie and Western Railroad had arranged for special excursion trains to bring visitors from Indianapolis and Chicago. Every hotel room in La Porte and nearby Michigan City had been booked and extra cots set up in the hallways. Restaurants were doing a booming business. “Generally speaking,” one local newspaper observed, “the town presents the appearance of a fair or big convention.”

  Livery companies were hiring additional drivers to ferry sightseers to and from the Gunness place. They would have countless round-trips to make. According to one estimate, at least ten thousand people—“the equivalent of three-fourths of the population of La Porte”—were expected to flock to the “murder farm” on Sunday to gratify their morbid curiosity.[17]

  24.

  CARNIV
AL

  The predictions published in the Saturday papers were wrong. Ten thousand people did not descend on the Gunness farm on Sunday, May 10. According to the most reliable estimates, the number was closer to sixteen thousand, and possibly as high as twenty.

  The first excursion train reached La Porte just after five o’clock in the morning. Others, packed to overflowing, arrived regularly throughout the day, disgorging passengers by the hundreds. Local hackmen were waiting at the station, ready to take the new arrivals out to the farm. The standard fare was ten cents for the one-mile ride. Once there, the passengers were informed that the return trip would cost them a quarter.[1]

  By midmorning, the McClung macadam road was jammed with every variety of vehicle—carryalls, buggies, broughams, buckboards, wagonettes, and more—along with an army of pedestrians. An estimated fifty automobiles brought smartly dressed visitors from Chicago, Michigan City, South Bend, Elkhart, Goshen, Niles, Mishawaka, and other midwestern cities. Young men on bicycles, new mothers pushing baby carriages, and old-timers hobbling along on crutches “vied with each other for a place on the road, while motorcycles shot through the crowds at frequent intervals.” Given the congestion, it seemed a miracle that only a single accident occurred, when an automobile spooked the horse pulling the buggy of Benjamin Zanelar and his wife, and Mrs. Zanelar was thrown from the rig and broke an arm.[2]

  A festive atmosphere reigned at the farm. Newspaper commentators compared the scene to a “county fair,” a “playground,” and a “Sunday amusement park.”[3] Vendors, calling their wares through megaphones, peddled peanuts, popcorn, and lemonade. Beside one of the graves, where the moldering remains of two of Belle’s victims had been unearthed, a portly fellow manned a makeshift refreshment stand, dispensing “pink ice cream and cake.”[4]

  A crew of young men, hired for the occasion by a local printer, roamed the grounds, hawking picture postcards at ten cents apiece or three for a quarter. The photos of Andrew Helgelien’s dismembered body sold out within minutes, though the ones showing the skulls of Belle’s other victims were also popular. Other subjects included portraits of Belle and her children, panoramic views of the farmstead, and images of shovel-wielding diggers standing knee-deep in the graves. Many visitors brought Kodaks and took their own photos, posing their families before the ruins of Belle’s farmhouse or at the edges of the pits in the excavated hog lot.[5]

  Several enterprising youngsters went around offering human skeletal fragments allegedly dug from the “death garden,” though the people who snapped up these supposed relics would eventually learn that they had purchased the bone shards of pigs. Other eager souvenir hunters came away with whatever treasures they could get their hands on: chunks of brick from the incinerated house, charred pieces of stovepipe, bent nails, burnt shoe buttons, even twigs from the orchard. Joe Zahner, member of the South Bend baseball club, “secured an old coffee pot and a disreputable looking shoe.”[6]

  Ignoring the guards posted at the site, scavengers climbed into the ruins of the cellar and emerged with whole bagfuls of debris. Other men hopped into the open graves and groveled in the dirt for ghoulish keepsakes. One handsome young woman was seen “with the skirt of her beautiful dress lifted up in which she carried about part of the carcass of a dead dog, supposed to have been killed by Mrs. Gunness while she was experimenting with poisons to use on her victims.”[7]

  The earliest arrivals to the farm made straight for the buggy shed, where the reeking remains of the exhumed corpses were lain out on wooden planks. Sheriff Smutzer, standing guard outside, lined the visitors up in single file and allowed them into the makeshift morgue a few at a time. By nine o’clock, however, the crowd pressing for admission became so large and unmanageable that Smutzer was compelled to padlock the door. Sending up cries of frustration, several women “clawed at the little red carriage house . . . They stuck their fingers in the cracks and wrenched in an attempt to pry them apart far enough to see inside,” while “men boosted each other to the window at the end of the structure and gazed until others pushed them from their places to make room for other gawkers.”[8]

  It was a perfect day for a picnic, and many of the families who arrived in the morning brought along lunch baskets. At noontime, they spread tablecloths on the lawn beneath the fir trees in the front yard or on the grass of the apple orchard and settled down for their meals. Laughing children darted among the crowds or trooped alongside a local character, “Uncle Ben,” who roamed the property with a forked willow divining rod that could—so he claimed—detect the graves of undiscovered victims. “Thirty-seven in all,” he solemnly announced to reporters at the conclusion of his search.[9]

  The holiday scene at the Gunness farm was not only front-page news across the Midwest but the subject of widespread moralizing. For two weeks, papers had been gleefully exploiting the tragedy. Suddenly, their editorial pages rang with indignation at the unseemly behavior of the crowds who had defiled the Sabbath by turning the murder farm into a carnival ground. The normal Sunday atmosphere of “quietude and religious observance” had been supplanted by “noisy merry-making and wild frolic”—“ribald rioting and coarse and disgusting and almost insane frivolity.” Such was the air of festivity that “one would have thought the Gunness farm contained a circus rather than a murder morgue.” To one outraged commentator, the mad “scramble of 15,000 people” to the site of such “appalling and atrocious” crimes was a sad commentary on the moral state of supposedly civilized man—“galling, incontrovertible proof that the race is still but a little removed from a stage of actual savagery.”[10]

  Stung by these attacks, the editor of the La Porte Weekly Herald defended his community, arguing that the hordes of morbid sightseers at the Gunness farm deserved no special censure, “for the same would doubtless have been true of [people from] any other section of the state or the country.” The ghoulish spectacle was merely “a magnified reflection of what transpires almost every day in every community. Our police courts are always crowded with people eager to brush against crime. The morgue is the center of attraction . . . Relics of a murder or of a terrible accident entailing the loss of life are eagerly collected and given a conspicuous place in many homes.”

  How to account for this “unhealthy appetite for the horrible”? Perhaps, the writer suggested, there was some strange comfort to be derived from the awareness of another’s suffering. “One would think there was enough unavoidable tragedy in everyone’s existence to keep him from seeking the hideous and unsightly,” he mused. “And yet it may be the fact that each has his cross to bear that leads him to come in contact with the world’s wretchedness as a sort of palliative to his own.”[11]

  Whatever the case, the public’s fascination with every grisly detail of the Gunness case would continue unabated, as would the efforts of various hucksters to profit from it. The following Sunday would bring ten thousand sightseers to the farm. A few days later, an editorial in the La Porte Weekly noted with outrage that two theaters in South Bend were presenting a magic lantern show consisting of “twenty-two views of the Gunness farm. Next,” the writer continued with bitter sarcasm, “they will probably be showing moving pictures of Mrs. Gunness murdering her victims.”[12]

  His comment proved prescient. Not long afterward, theaters throughout the Midwest began showing a moving picture produced by the Edison Company, titled Mrs. Gunness, the Female Bluebeard.[13]

  25.

  “THE MRS. GUNNESS MYSTERY”

  The public couldn’t get enough of the Gunness case. In La Porte, the printing presses worked overtime to meet the demand for the two local papers. The daily run of the Herald rose by as much as eight hundred copies, many readers “buying three and four extra copies” of every issue, one for themselves, the others “to send away to friends.”[1]

  In Chicago, the appetite for every juicy tidbit about the case was fed by the yellow paper
s, which—when no actual news was available—cheerfully dished out wild rumor, lurid gossip, and even rank fabrication. According to one Chicago daily, Mrs. Gunness was a grave robber who “stole a body from Pine Lake cemetery near her home and substituted it for her own in the burning house.”[2] Another reported that she was a hypnotist who “was possessed of some remarkable power to compel unwilling victims to do what she commanded.”[3] In a syndicated piece headlined “The Horrors of That Night,” a writer named Robert Ash depicted the “multi-murderess” as a guilt-haunted wreck, tormented nightly by “the ghosts of her victims”:

  For months following the death of her victims, the archfiend suffered the torments of the condemned . . . The woman’s dreams were troubled. Specters of Helgelien, of Jennie Olson, of ten crumbling skeletons haunted her . . . Darkness was filled with horror for the woman. In nightly delirium the wraiths of the victims of the “death farm” passed in review before her.[4]

  Citing sources in Norway, one widely circulated story claimed that Belle’s father, “Peter Paulson,” was “a traveling conjurer and magician” who performed at fairs throughout the country. Along with “her three sisters and brothers,” Belle also “took part in the show,” performing in front of the tent as “a rope dancer . . . in short skirts” to entice male customers inside.[5]

  One of Belle’s most diabolical letters to Andrew Helgelien was reprinted in newspapers across the country. “No woman in the world is happier than I am,” it read in part. “I know that you are now to come to me and be my own . . . When I hear your name mentioned, it is beautiful music to my ears. My heart beats with wild rapture for you! My Andrew, I love you. Come prepared to stay forever.” Only many years later would researchers determine that this sinister missive was a fake, concocted by one or more of the out-of-town newspapermen holed up at the Hotel Teegarden.[6]