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

by Harold Schechter

  Two days later, Friday, May 22, a grand jury returned indictments against Ray Lamphere, charging him with arson and the first-degree murders of Belle Gunness, her three children, and Andrew Helgelien.[12]

  Part Three

  THE STATE OF INDIANA

  V. RAY LAMPHERE

  27.

  GUNNESSVILLE

  In mid-May, at the height of the Gunness mania, when stories about the Female Bluebeard dominated the front pages of dailies throughout the Midwest, prominent La Porte shoelace manufacturer F. W. MacDonald made a business trip to Cincinnati and St. Louis. Upon his return, he sent a concerned letter to the editor of the La Porte Argus-Bulletin.

  Rather than their usual salutations—“Why hello, Mac, you’re looking well. How’s the missus?” and so on—the wholesalers he met had, to a man, greeted him with macabre jests: “Well, Mac, I see you haven’t been killed yet,” “Glad to see you, Mac, I thought all the men in La Porte were dead,” and the like. It was clear to MacDonald that the Gunness tragedy had terribly besmirched the reputation of La Porte. He was writing, therefore, to urge “our officials, both city and county,” to do whatever they could to dispel the dark shadow cast over their community by the Gunness case and “to make good the fair name of La Porte.”[1]

  MacDonald’s wish that the world would cease associating La Porte with its most infamous inhabitant would never come true. Long after the Gunness property had passed into the hands of other owners, tourists from throughout the country would flock to the site, searching the yard for the spots where Belle’s victims had once lain and tramping through the adjacent orchard, “ruining the apple trees . . . by breaking off branches” as souvenirs. Travelers to and from La Porte would elicit responses similar to the one experienced by a woman named Ford. On a train ride back to Memphis after a visit to La Porte in 1913, she handed her ticket to the porter, who took one look at her city of departure and gasped, “Gunnessville!”

  “He knew all about the Gunness case,” reported Mrs. Ford’s daughter, “and he was very disturbed about it.” And for the rest of the journey, he “kept his distance.”[2]

  There were some in La Porte who swore that Belle continued to haunt the area. In early July, Daniel Hutson was driving a wagonload of hay past the Gunness farm when—so he claimed—he “saw through the trees Mrs. Gunness and a strange man walking in the orchard.” His daughter, Eldora, reported a similar sighting. According to her story, she was out on McClung Road one day in July when she saw a buggy coming toward her, drawn by “a beautiful dappled gray horse I had seen tied up at Belle’s gate once that winter. Then the buggy came closer, and it was Belle!” That same day, two boys walking by the Pine Lake Cemetery spotted a heavily veiled woman stop to take a drink from a water pump. When she lifted her veil, they, too, recognized Belle.

  Another witness, identified in accounts only as “the town scavenger,” had a similar, chilling encounter. Driving by Belle’s farm one “rainy summer evening,” he saw a woman dressed in black alight from a buggy and go “fumbling around on the ground near the southeast corner of the house,” as though searching for something. As he stopped his team to “untangle the reins,” she returned to her rig, muttering, “That money ain’t here.” All at once, “the lightning flashed.” When he saw who it was, he went “cold and numb” and “drove on to town as fast as I could.”[3]

  In light of these and other accounts, one observer counseled that the best way to rid the community of Mrs. Gunness’s baleful presence was to pile all her remaining goods in a great heap and purge them in a “purifying” bonfire.[4] Instead, the town held an auction.

  Arranged by her executor, Wesley Fogle, the sale took place on Friday, May 29. Like the festive outings to the farm that had become known as “Gunness Sundays,” the event drew an enormous crowd—as many as five thousand people, according to some estimates. By the time the auction ended, every item had been snapped up, bidders paying as much as ten times the original cost for the privilege of owning one of the Female Bluebeard’s kitchen utensils or gardening tools. Belle’s border collie, Prince, and her children’s pony fetched the highest prices: $107 and $205, respectively. Both animals—along with two chickens, an old house cat and her kittens, and a few miscellaneous relics—were purchased by a huckster named W. W. Hans, who put them on display at Chicago’s Luna Park.[5]

  Belle’s border collie, Prince, and her children’s pony, sold at town auction.

  To the editor of one Indiana newspaper, the purchasers of Mrs. Gunness’s personal effects—“the memorials of a she-devil whose like has not been known”—were making themselves vulnerable to insidious forces. Citing the paranormal theory of psychometry—the belief that physical objects retain the residual life-energy of their former owners—the writer warned that Belle’s belongings possessed an “aura of evil” that might infect anyone who came into contact with them. Those foolish enough to have “spent the high dollar to obtain these blood-spattered goods” were behaving as recklessly as “a mother would be to buy rattlesnakes as playthings for her children.”[6]

  On the afternoon of Wednesday, June 17, under the supervision of undertaker Austin Cutler, the remains of the woman officially identified as Belle Gunness, along with the corpses of the three Gunness children, were loaded onto the Lake Shore train to Chicago. Arrived at Union Depot, the caskets were transferred into the mortuary wagon of a local undertaker, who proceeded directly to City Hall for the burial permits. At 10:00 a.m. the following morning, the four bodies were unceremoniously interred in the Forest Lake Cemetery. No service was conducted and no relatives were present, Belle’s sister, Mrs. Nellie Larson, refusing to attend.

  Readers of the La Porte Weekly Herald learned of the funeral in an article published on June 25. Its headline read: “Mrs. Gunness Dead At Last.”[7]

  Not everyone, however, shared that belief. Despite the coroner’s verdict and the interment at Forest Lake Cemetery, “at least seventy-five percent of the people in and about La Porte are convinced that the arch-murderess . . . is still alive and in hiding,” wrote journalist Arthur James Pegler.[8] Elsewhere in the country, sightings of the Female Bluebeard continued to be reported on a regular basis.

  In the last week of June, less than two weeks after the funeral, the New York Times reported that the Detroit police were holding “two young women [who] are said to have met Mrs. Gunness since her supposed body was found in the ruins of her home.” After receiving a telephone call from the sheriff of Hillsdale, Michigan, announcing that he had arrested Mrs. Gunness, Deputy Antiss and Police Chief Cochrane made an overnight trip to that city, only to find that the woman in custody was “a fortune teller of some nomadic tribe, weighing perhaps 150 pounds and without any resemblance to the murderess.” Later that summer, Belle was spotted in Birmingham, Alabama; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Portland, Maine; Passaic, New Jersey; and Galveston, Texas, where she was seen boarding the Hamburg-American liner Dania prior to its departure for Hamburg, Germany.

  Two men claimed to have seen Mrs. Gunness on trains passing through Texas. In late summer, a traveling salesman named George L. Robinson told police that, while riding the Katy Flyer to Denison, he was “standing at the water cooler, drawing a cup of water, when a woman in deep mourning approached and asked for a drink. In raising the cup to her mouth, she removed part of the veil, and I at once recognized her as Mrs. Gunness. When I spoke to her and called her by name, she suddenly turned and went back to her seat in a hurry, and after packing a few things that she carried, left the train at the next station.” A few months later, Henrik Fritz, former resident of La Porte, reported a similar experience aboard a train from Fort Worth to Denver. Passing through a Pullman car, he saw Belle “emerge from the lavatory.” Recognizing Fritz, she immediately “dropped a heavy veil over her face,” hurried back into the lavatory, and locked herself inside.[9]

 
Fritz’s reported sighting of the living Mrs. Gunness appeared in the press on October 9, 1908—one month to the day before Ray Lamphere was put on trial for her murder.

  28.

  THE MAYPOLE

  Interviewed in his cell on the eve of his trial, Ray stoutly maintained his innocence, as he had from the start. “They can twist and turn the evidence all they like, but if they prove that I set fire to the house, they will have to do it by false testimony,” he declared. “I have led a pretty loose life, maybe, and possibly I drank too much at times. But there are others who have done as bad as me who are walking the streets of La Porte today. I know nothing about the ‘house of crime,’ as they call it. Sure, I worked for Mrs. Gunness for a time, but I didn’t see her kill anybody, and I didn’t know she had killed anybody.”[1]

  Speaking to reporters, his aged mother, Hannah, proclaimed her unwavering faith in her boy. “With my own fingers I made all the clothes Ray wore until he was ten years of age,” she said in a tremulous voice as she dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “I sewed love into every stitch. He was my heart, my life, during his childhood. Every day that he has been in jail, my heart has ached for him. God knows—and I know—that he is not guilty! He has written this to me, and he has never told a lie to me in his life!”[2]

  In a somber column published in the La Porte Weekly Herald, editor Edward Molloy reminded his readers that the sole “reason for the trial” of Ray Lamphere was to “determine whether it was his hands that applied the torch to the house on the hill, or whether he is innocent of the atrocity that has been charged to him.” “It is not a show,” he stressed. “Its purpose is not to furnish entertainment either for spectators in the courtroom or readers of the daily press.”

  As it happened, the same page of the Herald carried a prominent advertisement for an actual show that was about to open at Hall’s Theater in La Porte: Father James Lawrence Vaughan’s “Grand Moral Play,” A Woman of the West, featuring, among other highlights, “the most reverential church scene ever written” and “a carload of scenic effects, including mountain stage coach and horses.”[3] The show would earn plaudits from local reviewers and draw appreciative audiences willing to pay anywhere from twenty-five cents to one dollar per ticket. Still, it would not prove nearly as popular as Ray Lamphere’s trial, which—despite editor Molloy’s admonition—would be the biggest show in town.

  The proceedings got under way on the morning of Monday, November 9, 1908. The onlookers crammed into the upper-floor courtroom were struck by the defendant’s “air of jaunty confidence” as he was led in by Deputy Sheriff Antiss shortly before 10:00 a.m. Apart from the jailhouse pallor he had acquired during his six-month incarceration, Ray seemed healthy and alert, and—in a new store-bought suit and necktie, clean collar, and freshly polished shoes—far better groomed than his neighbors had ever seen him. During the noon recess, he seemed positively carefree as he posed for the “flash light cameras” of the newspapermen from the various Chicago dailies.[4]

  His lawyer, Wirt Worden, was a figure of some renown in the community. Three years earlier he had been involved in a case that, while not nearly as sensational as the current one, generated a good deal of local attention. On that occasion, however, he was not the attorney but one of the defendants.

  In December 1904, two sisters, Mrs. Stella Lula and Mrs. Mary Sobinsky, residents of Michigan City, Indiana, were arrested for shoplifting furs from the Herman Zeese Dry Goods Store. At their trial in early 1905, their defense attorneys—Worden and his law partner, La Porte mayor Lemuel Darrow—produced a witness, Mrs. Rose Duck, who identified herself as a salesclerk at a Chicago department store and testified that she had sold the furs to the two women the previous March. Both defendants were acquitted.

  A subsequent investigation, however, revealed that Mrs. Duck, whose real name was Boyce, was a phony witness who had been paid twenty-five dollars by the defense team to lie on the stand. In March 1905, a committee appointed by Judge John C. Richter of La Porte submitted a two-page report concluding that Darrow and Worden—along with a third attorney involved in the case, John E. Talbot of South Bend—had “conspired, confederated, and connived in procuring [Mrs. Duck] to commit the crime of perjury.”[5] At their trial in January 1906, Darrow and Talbot were found guilty of unprofessional conduct and permanently disbarred from the practice of law in Indiana. Worden, however, was acquitted.[6]

  Presiding at Ray’s trial was the same Judge Richter who had ordered the investigation into the conduct of Worden and his associates that led to the disbarment proceedings. Now, after overruling the defense’s motion that the indictment be quashed, he directed that all witnesses be excluded from the courtroom during jury selection, as requested by the state.[7]

  It would take four days to empanel the jury. One hundred and fifteen talesmen would be questioned: solid citizens, mostly farmers and merchants, ranging in age from thirty-one to seventy-two.[8] Each was asked the same set of questions: Had they read of the case? Did they know Mrs. Gunness? Had they formed any opinion as to whether she was dead or alive? Were they acquainted with Ray Lamphere? Had they arrived at any fixed belief about his guilt or innocence? Could they be impartial?

  Unsurprisingly, the majority were rejected after admitting that, having followed the case closely in the local papers, they had reached firm conclusions both about Ray’s involvement and Mrs. Gunness’s ultimate fate.

  With little of substance to report during this protracted and tedious process, Harry Burr Darling, editor of the Argus-Bulletin, found various colorful ways to keep his readers diverted. A writer much given to strained, often bizarrely incongruous metaphors, he outdid himself on November 10 with a front-page piece in which he compared the coming task of the Lamphere jury to “a May day celebration”:

  In the spotlight is the May pole, and, stretching from its top are twelve long ribbons, each juror holding a ribbon. The entire case of the prosecution hangs on conclusive proof that the Gunness woman is dead. Otherwise, the May pole falls in a crash and the state’s argument is broken and shattered. If, on the taking of evidence, the jurors are persuaded as to the death of the woman, the May pole stands, but to convict Ray Lamphere, the state must play the right music. The jurors will refuse to budge from their positions and the ceremony will be over unless, on each of the ribbons, the state stamps in indelible letters the name of “Ray Lamphere.” Circumstantial evidence must be so woven about this prisoner . . . as to dissipate the last shred of reasonable doubt. In that event, mystery unraveled, Belle Gunness dead and Ray Lamphere unseparably [sic] connected with her death and the deaths of her children, the jurymen might well turn in ribbons, blackened by human murder. Unless this spider web of circumstantial evidence is spun around the prisoner, the ribbons will be handed back as they were received, white and spotless.[9]

  The seventh juror had just been selected on Tuesday the tenth when, shortly before the afternoon adjournment, “Lamphere’s thin cheeks paled, he uttered a weak cry as if in pain, and his head fell on the table in front of him. He tried to rise, and blood gushed from his nose and his mouth.”

  Deputy Sheriff Leroy Marr immediately hurried to Lamphere’s side, helped him to his feet, and half led, half carried him into the cooler air of the corridor. While the courtroom buzzed with consternation, Sheriff Smutzer rushed out into the hallway after Lamphere and the deputy. He returned a few minutes and announced that “Lamphere had suffered only a slight hemorrhage and would shortly be able to return.”

  Though Chicago papers speculated that Lamphere’s collapse might jeopardize the entire trial, he returned to the courtroom the following morning, seemingly no worse for wear. Interviewed by reporters, however, the physician who attended the inmates at the La Porte jail struck an ominous note, expressing his “fear that [Lamphere] is afflicted with incipient tuberculosis.”[10]

  It was not a report on
Ray’s physical condition but a piece on his supposed psychological makeup that dominated Wednesday’s coverage by the Chicago Daily Journal. Headlined “Hate-Cowardice: Predominating Elements in Ray Lamphere Told by Character Expert,” the article featured a full-face portrait of Ray with a dozen arrows pointing to various facial and cranial features. According to the author, J. M. Fitzgerald, M.D.—identified as “Phrenologist and Expert in Character Study”—Ray was “exactly the sort that [Mrs. Gunness] would pick from all her acquaintances for her assistant, her Man Friday—weak mentally and morally and yet as stealthy as a cat, with less sense of gratitude than many members of the feline species”:

  The first impression that one gets from his picture is that here is a mixture of the human and the tiger cat. The head is low in the frontal brain and especially pinched in the upper temples and forehead at the seat of ideality, or refinement of mind, benevolence or sympathy, veneration or respect for law, human divine, causality or logical reason, and power to comprehend consequences innately . . .

  He has none of the initiative [Mrs. Gunness] possessed in abundance for wholesale murder, but a person of his type would readily consent in carrying out the after work and doing away with the individual if he were crippled or maimed into helplessness.

  He is naturally a coward but would be revengeful and full of deadly hate for anyone who he believed had sufficient influence to jeopardize his liberty and who failed to give him money for the purpose of gratifying his animal nature, which possesses him body and soul. His whole head and face indicate the dissolute man of perverted appetites. The eyes are catlike, watchful, cunning, and cruel . . . The nose is well suited to the feral, catlike eyes; it further bears out the impression of stealth and low ideals.