Several Indiana communities seemed seized by a perverse envy. When rumors spread that “a new ‘death farm’ where Mrs. Belle Gunness buried many of her victims” had been discovered near Warsaw, “the citizens of that place were thrown into a fever excitement” and appeared crestfallen when the story proved false.[7] In Valparaiso, one newspaper reported that, before purchasing her farm in La Porte, “Mrs. Gunness wrote to one of our citizens inquiring about the price of a piece of land which he had for sale.” Evidently, she “intended to start her private graveyard near this city.” For unknown reasons, however, the “negotiations fell through. Thus,” the article somewhat wistfully concluded, “our city missed a chance to gain world-wide notoriety.”[8]
Jacob Rouch, a seventy-year-old resident of Warsaw, was said to have become so obsessed by the Gunness case that he “went temporarily insane . . . and while in that condition took his own life.”[9] Even weirder was a story in the New York Times, headlined “Dog Gunness Hurt Her Lawn.” According to the article, Mrs. Sarah D. Stubbert of Glen Ridge, New Jersey, had rented her “handsome home” to a Manhattanite named F. H. Sawyer. When she “returned to take possession of her home,” Mrs. Stubbert—who had “always taken pride in her lawn”—was “shocked to find the beautiful plot marred by Mr. Sawyer’s dog, Gyp, who had emulated Mrs. Gunness by burying bones in the lawn.” Mrs. Stubbert promptly brought a suit against Mr. Sawyer for $500 in damages wrought by his “canine Gunness.”[10]
The wildest tales of all appeared in a paperback “true crime” book hastily slapped together by some anonymous hack and published that summer by the Chicago firm of Thompson & Thomas. Priced at a quarter, this shameless cut-and-paste job—“a mess of undigested newspaper clippings spiced up with red-hot imaginary episodes,” as one historian describes it[11]—was titled The Mrs. Gunness Mystery! A Thrilling Tale of Love, Duplicity & Crime. On its lurid cover, Belle—depicted as a statuesque beauty in a filmy nightgown—hovers over the bed of a slumbering farmhand, a candle held aloft in one of her hands, a bottle of poison clutched in the other. The prurient quality of the image prevails throughout the book, which opens with a chapter on Belle’s ostensible childhood titled “The Sword Swallower’s Daughter.”
“It was a gala day in the gypsy camp near Trondheim, Norway,” the chapter begins, “when Peter, the giant sword swallower, won the hand in marriage of the svelte little Arabella, whose tiny pointed toes dancing upon a swinging rope high in the air had set the nation on fire with enthusiasm.” We learn how the “dashing and handsome” Peter swept the “pretty Arabella” off her feet by demonstrating his amazing skill at sword-swallowing, burying a long steel blade into the “human sheath” of his throat until only its “jeweled hilt” was visible between his teeth. “The brute horror of it fascinated the dancer. With the strange trait that characterizes her sex, Arabella found herself falling in love with this daring giant.”
Soon, Arabella was serving as Peter’s assistant in a new act he had invented called “The Decapitation,” in which he created the shockingly realistic illusion that he was beheading his lovely young wife:
The properties for the act were a great sword, a chopping block, a cheval mirror, and a head of wax fashioned to resemble the features of his pretty wife. Clad in the blood red tights and the black mask of the headsman, Peter would stand upon a platform beside the gruesome block, while the pretty Arabella laid her golden head upon its surface. Then, to the horror of the spectators, he would feel with his fingers for the white throat of the woman. A dazzling flash of the steel blade and down it came with a sickening crunch. A spurt of “property” blood and the head of the beauty dropped from the block into a basket before it. Before the crowd could recover from their thrill of horror, the woman would arise from behind the block, smile at them with her dazzling teeth to prove that a dummy and not her real head had been clipped off, and throw them a kiss.
One year after their marriage, a baby girl was born to the couple. “She was christened Arabella after her mother, but everybody called her Baby Bella.” Accompanying her parents on “their yearly round of the towns in Norway and Sweden,” the blue-eyed moppet was soon emulating them in her own games of make-believe. One day, “the big showman” and his wife came upon their little daughter seated at the rear of their gypsy tent, “prattling merrily to her one childish treasure,” a rag doll named Dollie. As the parents looked on in horror, Baby Bella reached for one of her father’s swords and, “with a gurgle of delight,” chopped off Dollie’s head.
So shocked were Peter and Arabella by this behavior that they “temporarily retired from show business” and opened a crockery shop in Christiana. Not long afterward, during a visit from her grandfather, the child saw the old man “meet a violent death when he tumbled from the top landing of the stairs, where she stood, to the floor below, and broke his neck.”
The worst, according to the book, was yet to come. Peter’s crockery venture having failed, he “was forced back into his old business of sword swallowing. One day, as he stood before a great crowd and thrust a razor edged blade into his vitals, he slipped and fell. The point of the knife was driven through his bowels. Baby Bella saw her father die in terrible agony.”
Though couched in characteristically overwrought language, the chapter concludes with a question that continues to dominate debates over the relative influence of nature and nurture in the creation of serial murderers. “Was it hereditary or was it childish association with horror that led this child to grow into an ogress, with the lust for letting human blood, the love of rending of bodies limb from limb, and the greed for human heads that caused her to slay and decapitate at least twenty-five children, women, and men whose names are known?”[12]
The heart of the book is a wildly sensationalistic account of Belle’s crimes, much of it plagiarized from the newspapers, the rest made up out of whole, highly colorful cloth. After dispatching her two husbands, Belle—variously referred to as “the sword swallower’s daughter,” “the sorceress,” “the siren,” “the ogress,” and “the bloodthirsty monster, Mrs. Hyde”—“set about devising a cunning murder machine, baiting her trap to satisfy the wild blood lust that hungers in her heart.” The first step was the construction of a “dungeon chamber” on her La Porte property. Soon after moving in, she hired a mason to build an ostensible “smoke house,” with soundproof walls, no windows, and a heavy oaken door. She then equipped her intended “murder room” with meat hooks and a vat—“appurtenances that might be used in cutting up and making sausage—or dismembering a human body.”
Next came the purchase of “the other accessories to this murder machine: some arsenic, a bottle of chloroform, a few keen edged scalpels and dissecting knives.” The final step was creating a “death garden”—a “little private murder cemetery” where she could “plant the bones of her victims.” At last, she was “prepared to enter the wholesale murder business.”[13]
Putting her diabolical plan in motion, she “sent myriads of letters into the world”—“love letters, palpitating with passion, seductive in their hints at the fortune any man might have in marriage.” It wasn’t long before the “moths flocked to her flame.”
In describing her atrocities, the nameless scribe pulls out all the salacious stops, rendering the scenes in the quasi-pornographic style of a Victorian penny dreadful. Typical is his depiction of the ostensible dual murder, on Christmas Eve, 1906, of Belle’s foster daughter, Jennie Olson, and the Minnesota bachelor John Moe:
Catlike, softly as a tigress stalking her prey, the sword swallower’s daughter sought the chamber of the virgin girl. Lithe fingers felt the soft white throat. A half smothered scream in a childish treble and all was over.
Now the tigress emerged and tiptoed to the room of Mr. Moe. From the belt beneath her nightgown she drew a tiny vial. No need for caution now. The man was drugged with wine.
Her eyes
were small steel points. Her nostrils quivered with the scent for blood. Her hands were talons. Her face was a horrid gargoyle. By candlelight, Mrs. Hyde sat in the crimson-papered guest chamber and reveled in the final struggles of her prey . . .
Down to the dungeon chamber she lugged the heavy bodies. Down on the chopping block she laid the lifeless forms. With the sure, quick work of the adept, she stripped them of clothing. She raised above her shoulders the keen blade of a huge meat axe. Quick, sure, clean as the work of the surgeon was Belle’s dismemberment. Conscienceless, trembling not, void of emotion, she separated limb from limb the slender form of the girl she had nursed from a babe.[14]
Once the bodies were planted in her “death garden,” the fictional Belle would sprinkle them with chloride of lime to destroy all traces of her monstrous handiwork. “Every day, the acid was eating away the evidence, devouring bones, hair, flesh, carrying on the labors that the widow, with fiendish ingenuity, had begun.”
Even as the acid did its work, “Belle’s thirst for blood and her itch for gold grew on apace.” Seating herself at her table, she composed one of her diabolical love letters, then—“smiling a vulture’s grin as her tongue tip wet the stamp”—mailed it off to her next unwitting victim.
Soon “there was another blood orgy: A bit of powder on a silver spoon, a groan, a rattling in the throat, the swift deft surgery that clipped bone from bone as the chef carves a capon for the table, the midnight burial in the little garden—and the lime did the rest.”[15]
Tallying Belle’s victims, the writer asserted that she was responsible for twenty-five “known murders” and suspected of as many as fifty. The depredations of America’s other notorious “multi-murderers” paled by comparison: “The Bender family, operating a murder ranch in Kansas, had but eight known victims. Dr. H. H. Holmes, of Murder Castle fame, killed not more than a score in all. Hoch, the arch bigamist, killed but ten.”
The numbers spoke for themselves. Belle Gunness, “The Sorceress of Murder Farm,” was, by a wide margin, “the most terrible criminal of the ages.”[16]
26.
PAY DIRT
The white-haired prospector Louis Schultz, known to his friends as “Old Klondike,” spent Monday, May 11, constructing his sluice box—a narrow wooden trough, about twelve feet in length and arranged at a downward angle on the ground. While he worked, Joe Maxson and a few other men began hauling shovelfuls of ashes from the cellar of the incinerated farmhouse and dumping them in a big pile beside the contraption. The next day, with a water wagon supplying the necessary stream, Schultz began the process of washing the debris in search of Belle’s gold teeth.[1]
In the weeks since the fire, diggers in the cellar had turned up three men’s watches. From its serial number, one had been traced to a store in Iola, Kansas, where, so the ledger showed, it had been purchased by Ole Budsberg. The other two timepieces were likewise presumed to be those of Belle’s victims. Now, as Schultz worked his sluice, other watches came to light—five more over the course of the next two weeks, making a total of eight.[2]
Skeletal remains from the Gunness farm, found by Maxson and his team.
As far as State’s Attorney Smith was concerned, these finds settled one of the biggest questions about Belle’s crimes. Contradicting theories that at least a dozen additional corpses would be discovered in her hog lot, Smith asserted his “confident belief” that “the graveyard of Mrs. Belle Gunness has surrendered its last victim. I base this belief,” he explained,
on the number of watches found in the debris. Eight watches have been recovered. It is the evidence of people who were employed by Mrs. Gunness and who, by the working of a seeming miracle, escaped her execution room, that this queen of crime possessed a mania for collecting watches. It is reasonable to believe that each one of her victims possessed a watch, and that she came into possession of a watch with the taking of the life of each new applicant for her matrimonial favors.[3]
Over the next few weeks, Sheriff Smutzer would do some desultory digging around the property. He would find a man’s skull in an abandoned privy vault, apparently the discarded head of one of the decapitated victims previously unearthed. Some hogs, rooting in the yard, turned up a couple of human bones. But as Smith had predicted, no more bodies would be found.[4]
On Saturday, May 16, the body of the first victim exhumed from the Gunness graveyard was returned to the earth.
Andrew Helgelien’s remains had been transferred to the Cutler mortuary, where they awaited official identification. On Friday night, May 15, Edward A. Evans, the Chicago police department’s specialist in Bertillon measurements—the standard system of forensic identification at the time, soon to be superseded by fingerprinting—examined the dismembered parts. Using Bertillon records obtained from Minnesota’s Stillwater Penitentiary—where Helgelien had done ten years for burglary and arson—Evans confirmed that the remains were those of the South Dakota farmer.
Placed in a casket that had been paid for by Asle Helgelien—who, before returning home, had left two hundred dollars for his brother’s funeral—the body was loaded into Cutler’s “dead wagon” and driven out to Patton Cemetery, where it was stored overnight in a vault. The following morning, at around ten o’clock, a brief service was conducted at the grave site by Reverend August Johnson, pastor of the Swedish Lutheran Church. As he reached the passage “For dust thou art, and unto dust shall thou return,” one of the participants—Charles H. Michael, proprietor of a local hotel—laid a bunch of lilacs on the casket. Then Andrew Helgelien—the first of Belle’s victims to be exhumed from her secret graveyard—was lowered to his final resting place.[5]
Apart from one rainy day when work was suspended, Louis Schultz would conduct his macabre prospecting for a week. Besides the watches, he would turn up several corroded knives, parts of a gilded picture frame, a plain gold ring, some keys, a belt buckle, a few bone fragments, and the remnants of a book on anatomy. The ashes, however, yielded no trace of the teeth.
Large crowds of spectators gathered at the farm each day to watch Schultz work. Among them was a trio of Pinkerton detectives, brought in at the suggestion of Sheriff Smutzer to help gather evidence against Ray Lamphere. Their presence did not sit well with Ray’s lawyer, Wirt Worden, who issued a caustic statement to the press. Alluding to the questionable tactics of which Pinkerton operatives were often accused, Worden flatly declared that “evidence is now being deliberately manufactured to make it fit the theory of the detectives.” There was no doubt in his mind, said Worden, “that the gold teeth of Mrs. Gunness, with special identification marks of the dentist, will be found.”[6]
Just before noon on Tuesday, May 19, Worden’s prediction was fulfilled when, moments after shoveling a large load of ashes into his sluice box, Schultz came up with a pair of dental bridges, an upper and lower.
“They’re found!” shouted Sheriff Smutzer, tossing his leather cap high in the air. Taking the bridges from the grinning miner, Smutzer hopped in his car, sped into town, and made directly for the office of Belle’s dentist, Ira Norton.
Dr. Norton had no difficulty identifying the prostheses. The upper bridge was the work of another dentist; Belle had been fitted with it in Chicago before moving to La Porte and was wearing it when Norton first examined her. The lower bridge was his own handiwork: four porcelain incisors backed with eighteen-karat gold and anchored to molars on either side of her jaw. There was, he told reporters, no mistaking the maker of the “dummy teeth,” which “bear my private style of workmanship. This lower bridge is positively the one I made for Mrs. Gunness.”[7]
“What’s to have prevented Mrs. Gunness from having removed the teeth and thrown them into the fire before she left?” asked one of the reporters.
Norton pointed to a charred fragment of molar still hooked to the lower bridge. “As you see,” he expla
ined, “a natural tooth still adheres to the bridgework. To do what you propose, Mrs. Gunness would have had to extract one of her own teeth.”[8]
Not everyone was convinced. Wasn’t Mrs. Gunness cunning enough to attach the bridgework to a tooth taken from one of her victims? And how was it possible that a conflagration hot enough to completely incinerate her skull would leave her false teeth so undamaged?
Norton’s pronouncement, however, was sufficiently authoritative to persuade most officials that, as the La Porte Argus-Bulletin put it, “Again, and finally, Mrs. Gunness is dead.”[9] Just a few days earlier, Coroner Charles Mack, who had still not issued his official report on the identity of the headless female corpse found in the ruins of the farmhouse, declared that he was likely to leave the verdict open. “Coroner Mack Not Yet Convinced That Body Is That of the Murderess,” read the headline in the Argus-Bulletin.[10] The discovery of the two sets of bridgework changed his mind. At 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday, May 20, Mack filed his report with the clerk of the court. “It is my verdict,” it concluded, “that the body . . . is that of Belle Gunness; that she came to death through felonious homicide and that the perpetrator thereof is to me unknown.”[11]
Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men Page 16