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

by Harold Schechter

In the weeks leading up to the trial, the state had issued subpoenas for forty witnesses. All had been found except one: the gold miner Louis Schultz, who had produced the dental bridge declared to be that of Belle Gunness. Evidently, the old prospector, possessed of the perennial optimism of his breed, had decamped for the west in pursuit of the big strike that had so far eluded him.[2]

  To establish the corpus delicti—proof that Mrs. Gunness had in fact been murdered—the prosecution began by calling the coroner, Dr. Charles S. Mack. A graduate of Harvard and the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he received his M.D. in 1882, Mack had gone on to teach at the medical school of the University of Michigan before entering into private practice, first in Chicago and then in La Porte. He had held the office of coroner for the past two years.[3] “Snowy-haired [and] snowy-bearded,” the fifty-one-year-old physician was described by one chronicler as resembling an Old Testament “prophet”[4]—an apt analogy since he had recently been ordained as a Swedenborgian minister and announced his intention to resign from his medical practice and take up a new life as a pastor in Toledo, Ohio. Indeed, just a few days before, a farewell banquet had been held for him at the Methodist church, where his fellow members of the La Porte Physicians Club “presented him with a beautiful gold-headed cane,” symbolic of the upright manner in which Mack had “ever walked . . . as a physician, as a citizen, and as a man.”[5]

  From the point of view of any audience members anticipating high drama, Mack’s testimony got the proceedings off to a disappointing start. Questioned by Smith’s associate, Martin Sutherland, the coroner stated that he had first seen the “body of a woman and three children” on the afternoon of the fire. They “were badly burned. One of the children had a hole in the forehead. The head of the adult body was missing, and also the right leg was burned below the knee. The left foot was missing and one arm was off. I disremember as to whether or not the hand was attached to the arm.”

  Asked what “disposition” he had made of the bodies, Mack replied that they had been “taken to Cutler’s morgue,” where he had called in four “autopsists”—Drs. Gray, Wilcox, Long, and Meyer—to conduct the postmortem. As for himself, he “did not make a minute examination of the bodies. I did not pay any more attention to the bodies than in any ordinary case.”

  It quickly became clear to Sutherland that Mack would be unable to provide much useful testimony concerning the corpus delicti without consulting the notes he had made on the day of the fire. Mack, however, had failed to bring the notes with him. “Realizing the futility of obtaining an accurate description of the bodies unless the mind of the witness were refreshed by [the] notes,” wrote Harry Darling, a somewhat exasperated Sutherland abandoned that line of questioning.[6]

  A pair of sealed jars sat on the prosecution table. Retrieving the larger of the two, Sutherland undid the lid and removed the contents—a few badly charred bones recovered from the cellar along with the bodies. He then showed them, one at a time, to the witness, who identified them as a heel bone, a left jawbone, and—insofar as he was able to judge—a “seventh vertebrae.” The second jar contained something that Mack was able to identify only as “animal tissue.” It was difficult to see what advantage the prosecution had achieved by exhibiting these “ghastly relics,” though—to judge from the excited stir among the spectators—it was a high point for courtroom sensation seekers.

  Worden’s cross-examination, which began a few moments later, proved such an “utter rout” that an audible “sigh of relief rippled through the crowd” when Dr. Mack—a beloved figure in the community—was finally permitted to step from the witness chair.[7] Under the defense attorney’s relentless grilling, the coroner was compelled to admit that he was “not present when the bodies were discovered”; that he did “not know the condition of the bodies when found”; that he could not “state whether the arms [of the adult] were disjointed or not”; that he did not “weigh the body of the adult person”; that he did not “know there was a question as to the identity of that body”; that he “could not say whether any of the vertebrae were missing”; that he had no idea “how many cervical vertebrae there are in a human person”; that he did not examine “the upper terminus of the spine” with “any care”; that he could not “tell from its appearance whether the leg had been cut off or burned off,” or “whether the head had been burned off or charred after it had been severed”; that he had not “examine[d] the hole in the skull of the child,” could “not undertake to say” what “caused the hole,” and had not checked to see if “there were holes in any heads of the other children.”

  By the time Worden got around to questioning Mack about the three charred bones, the coroner was so worn down that his testimony lapsed into self-contradiction.

  “Are you positive,” asked Worden, holding up one of the fragments, “that this bone I show you is a cervical vertebra?”

  “I am not,” said Mack.

  “Well, Doctor, are you positive that this bone I present is a jawbone?”

  “It is.”

  “Is it the bone of a human being?” Worden pressed.

  Mack let out a sigh. “I do not know.”

  “Would you state, Dr. Mack, from present observation, that this bone is from the upper or lower maxillary?”

  Just a moment before, Mack asserted that he was “positive” the bone was a jawbone. Now, “bedeviled to the end of his patience,” he snapped, “I could not positively state that it is a bone at all.”

  With that, the coroner’s ordeal came to an end. “The first medical testimony for the prosecution,” as one historian put it, “had been turned into a triumph for the defense.”[8]

  The state fared somewhat better in the afternoon session. The first witnesses called to the stand were Drs. Harry H. Long, Franklin T. Wilcox, and J. Lucian Gray—three of the “autopsists” called in by Mack. While the examination of Long and Wilcox, who had conducted the postmortems on the two Gunness girls, was somewhat perfunctory, Dr. Gray’s testimony, as one reporter noted, proved to be “of material value to the state.”[9] The former coroner of La Porte County and onetime coroner’s physician in Cook County, Gray, under questioning by Sutherland, estimated that, before shrinking in the fire, the body of the adult woman would have stood “five feet, 4.44 inches” and weighed “about two hundred pounds.” The “tissue of the abdomen [was] fatty, about two inches thick” and the breasts were “fat and large”—traits that corresponded to Belle’s physique. Moreover, while acknowledging that he could not definitively state the cause of death, it was his opinion that “death was due to asphyxia”—a crucial point for the state, which was seeking to prove that Belle had been killed in the fire set by the defendant. In part, said Gray, his opinion was based on the condition of the “tightly clutched” fingers of the corpse’s right hand. “Muscles are contracted that way in all cases of suffocation,” he explained.[10]

  Under Worden’s aggressive cross-examination, however, Gray conceded that the clenching of the corpse’s right hand could have been “a postmortem spasmodic contraction” caused by strychnine poisoning. He also admitted that he could not tell whether the body’s left arm and right leg “had been cut off or burned off.” His explanation of how he had computed the probable weight of the woman also raised eyebrows, particularly among the housewives in the audience. Including the arm, the charred remains weighed seventy-three pounds, explained Gray. “By comparing [it] with other meats which had been cooked, I estimated that it had shrunk about two-thirds.” By this logic—as one crime historian points out—a nine-pound standing rib roast, when cooked, would end up as “a stingy three pounds on the dinner table.”[11]

  Observers agreed that, by the time he was done, Worden had “scored an impressive list of reasonable doubts” by suggesting that the dead woman had not died of suffocation but “been killed with strychnine and partial
ly dismembered, and that Dr. Gray’s identification of the seventy-three-pound remains as Mrs. Gunness was close to wishful thinking.”[12] As for the other witnesses, wrote Harry Burr Darling, “it is the general opinion that [they] failed utterly to establish the state’s contention as to Mrs. Gunness’ death . . . Dr. Mack’s testimony in particular is considered practically worthless in the way of identification of the adult body.

  “Today,” proclaimed Darling, “was decidedly Lamphere’s day.”[13]

  31.

  THE DENTIST

  For the sake of the jurors—who would otherwise be forced to spend two idle days largely confined to their makeshift quarters—all the principals involved in the trial “deemed [it] advisable to hold court on Saturday.”[1] The morning began with an unforeseen setback by the state. Following the completion of Dr. Gray’s cross-examination and a brief reappearance by Coroner Mack—who testified that, besides the four bodies retrieved from the rubble, ten decomposed corpses were “removed from the place”—the prosecution called its next witness, Dr. Johann H. William Meyer.

  A native of Buer, Germany, who emigrated to the United States at seventeen and still spoke with a pronounced accent, Meyer had begun his working life as a salesman for the Wile & Fox dry goods firm in La Porte before entering Rush Medical College in Chicago. Following his graduation in 1876, he interned at the Cook County Hospital, then returned to La Porte, where—apart from a year’s study in Heidelberg and Vienna—he had practiced ever since, specializing in diseases of the ear and eye. In addition to his large private practice, he served on the faculty of the Practical School of Watchmaking in La Porte, where he lectured on the anatomy and diseases of the eye to aspiring opticians, and held the post of local physician for the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railroad.[2]

  Despite his high standing in the community, Meyer would find himself in serious legal trouble just a few years after Lamphere’s trial, when he was charged with murder for performing an abortion on a local farmer’s wife, Florence Greening, that resulted in her death. Mrs. Greening’s husband, William, who turned state’s evidence in return for immunity, was the primary witness against him at his ten-day trial in February 1913. After fifteen hours of deliberation, however, the jury would acquit him.[3]

  At the autopsies of the four corpses recovered from the fire, Meyer had performed the postmortem on four-year-old Phillip Gunness. Asked now about the condition of the little boy’s body, he provided a description that—though delivered in a dry, clinical tone—was ghastly enough to induce shudders in the listeners.

  “The body was severely burned,” said Meyer. “The legs were burned off at the knees entirely. The forehead was burned away, exposing the brain. The back was badly burned, the spinal cord was exposed.”

  “How much of the limbs was burned off?” asked Sutherland.

  “Nearly to the knees.”

  “Were the arms burned off?”

  “One of the arms was missing,” said Meyer. “The lungs were partially preserved by cooking. The heart was contracted, containing no particle of blood. All the organs were well cooked.”

  Sutherland paused for a moment, as though to let the jurors fully take in the hideous picture. Clearly, the person responsible for inflicting such horrors on a four-year-old child deserved no mercy. Unfortunately for the prosecution, its own witness was about to raise serious doubts as to the identity of that person.

  “Could you form any fixed idea as to the cause of death?” asked Sutherland.

  Meyer replied that he could not.

  “What is your professional opinion, Doctor?” asked Sutherland.

  “Contraction of the heart, like some case of poisoning,” said Meyer. “From the examination of the stomach, I would say that the contraction was probably due to strychnine.”

  Any suggestion, of course, that Belle and her children had not been killed by arson undermined the state’s argument against Lamphere. “Here,” as one writer says, “was a prosecution witness in effect testifying for the defense.”[4] Sutherland, clearly caught off guard by Meyer’s response, quickly brought his examination to an end.

  Meyer helped the defense again when Worden took over a moment later. Asked if there had been any ecchymotic spots on the little boy’s body—small discolorations caused by ruptured blood vessels, a common sign of suffocation—Meyer replied with an emphatic “No, sir, none.” He also confirmed that “there was a hole in the boy’s forehead,” reinforcing the notion that the children had died at Belle’s hands before the conflagration.[5]

  Worden faced a much tougher challenge when Belle’s dentist, Dr. Ira P. Norton, took the stand. Like Dr. Meyer, the forty-year-old Norton had gotten his degree from Rush Medical College, financing his education with a job as an engineer on the Chicago elevated railroad.[6] A few years before the trial, he had won wide recognition in professional circles for his invention of a patented dental forceps equipped with a detachable lancet.[7]

  Though the previous direct examinations had been handled by the assistant prosecutor, it was Frank N. Smith who now approached the witness chair—a sign of Norton’s importance to the state. The dentist began by offering a detailed description of the work he’d done for Belle.

  “I extracted three lower teeth,” he explained. “Upon two cuspids I put two gold crowns and swung between these certain dummies in bridgework. It was an unusual construction. There was 18k-gold solder used to reinforce this. Afterwards, I drilled through one of the dummy teeth and placed two platinum pins, riveted in the end. I hung this bridge upon the two natural teeth remaining in Mrs. Gunness’s jaw.”

  “Now, Doctor,” said Smith, “did the sheriff bring to your office some teeth?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When was that?”

  “May 19, 1908.”

  “I now hand you some teeth. Are these the teeth the sheriff gave you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you ever see these teeth before?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “I constructed them.”

  “For whom?”

  “Mrs. Belle Gunness.”

  It was a dramatic moment—the positive identification of the bridgework found in the ruins—and Smith underscored it with a pregnant pause. After offering the teeth in evidence as State’s Exhibit Number 16, he then set about to demolish the theory that Belle had deliberately planted the bridgework in the ruins as a decoy.

  He began by eliciting a key bit of testimony from Norton: that “portions of the roots” of two of Belle’s “natural teeth” were still “contained in the crowns of the bridgework.”

  “Now, Doctor,” Smith asked, “how could these teeth be removed?”

  “Only by splitting the gold crowns.”

  “Could they have been pulled?”

  “No, sir,” declared Norton. “Not even a dentist could have pulled the natural teeth from Mrs. Gunness’ jaw with the crowns still attached, as these are.” There was no question in his mind that the teeth had been “severed from the mouth of Mrs. Gunness by burning.”[8]

  When Worden’s turn came a few minutes later, he sought to instill doubt in the jurors’ minds by suggesting that—since neither the gold crowns nor the remaining roots could have possibly survived the inferno—the bridgework was a fake.

  Wouldn’t a fire “intense enough to destroy a skull” also “destroy a tooth?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” said Norton.

  “Why?”

  “Because of being protected by the gold crown.”

  “Wouldn’t the dental gold melt before a skull would burn?” Worden pressed.

  “It would not,” said Norton.

  Far from helping his cause, it was clear to Worden that, as Harry Burr Darling obs
erved, his “cross-examination was only serving to strengthen the direct testimony.”[9] He brought his questioning to a hasty close.

  The final witness of the day was a neighbor of Belle’s, Mrs. Florence Flynn, who offered a particularly ghoulish bit of testimony. Confirming that she been present at the farm when the four bodies were found, she was asked if she had seen them.

  “Yes, sir,” she replied. “I could recognize them as they were taken out. There was a sort of bed and mattress under them. The little boy lay upon the woman’s body as if he had been wrapped in her arms.”

  “Well, were the arms about him?” asked Prosecutor Smith.

  “It did not seem to me,” said Mrs. Flynn, “that there were any arms.”

  On that grim note, the first week of Ray Lamphere’s trial came to an end.

  32.

  ASLE

  If the Weekly Herald could be believed, Ray’s initial optimism had been completely wiped away by Dr. Norton’s testimony. According to the paper, he was “particularly gloomy and downcast” throughout Sunday and spent much of his time poring over his Bible, “a thing he has not done to any extent since last spring.” He seemed so deeply troubled that his jailers “believed he might break down and confess” at any moment.[1]

  Whether Ray was really as despondent as reported is impossible to say. If so, he made a rapid recovery. By the next morning, he “seemed greatly refreshed and entered the courtroom with a smile on his face and a nod of recognition to several friends whom he noticed among the spectators.”[2]

  One of the spectators that morning was a visiting celebrity, Thomas Jefferson—not, of course, the long-deceased president but the son of one of nineteenth-century America’s most beloved actors, Joe Jefferson, who had starred in a wildly popular stage production of Rip Van Winkle for over forty years. Following his death, his son had taken over the role and was scheduled to perform it that night at Hall’s Theater. In a gesture much welcomed by the jurors, W. J. Hall, business manager of the theater, had invited them, along with Judge Richter, to be his guests at the show, an offer they had gratefully accepted.[3]