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

by Harold Schechter

  The first to take the witness chair that morning was Florence Flynn, who had not finished her testimony when court was adjourned on Saturday afternoon. At one point during Worden’s cross-examination, juror Jared Drollinger interrupted to ask Flynn if she knew how much Belle weighed. Two years earlier, Flynn replied, Belle, following a visit to her doctor, had revealed that she was tipping the scales at 280 pounds—sixty more than Dr. Gray’s estimate. The answer reinforced the doubts of those who believed that Belle hadn’t died in the flames, since the notion that a body that size could shrink to a mere seventy-three pounds seemed flatly incredible to anyone who had ever roasted a hunk of beef.[4]

  For the most part, the morning produced little in the way of compelling interest. Mrs. Ray Turner, who had been retained by State’s Attorney Smith to translate Belle’s letters to Andrew Helgelien, explained “that the grammatical construction of the letters was extremely faulty and evidently the work of an ignorant person. The letters were all one long sentence without capitalization.” Belle’s attorney, Melvin Leliter, testified “that there was some contention between Mrs. Gunness and Lamphere as to wages,” though under cross examination, he admitted that “he knew of the controversy between the two parties only by hearsay.” Insurance agent D. H. McGill put the value of Mrs. Gunness’s house at between three and four thousand dollars, and surveyor Clyde Martin displayed a map showing the shortest route between the Gunness property and John Wheatbrook’s farm.[5]

  The proceedings, largely perfunctory up to that point, took a dramatic turn when the next witness was called: Asle Helgelien.

  The “stringy and shabby” Norwegian began with an abbreviated account of his brother’s life in America, omitting Andrew’s ten-year stretch in the Stillwater penitentiary.[6] The rest of his testimony—which ran through the noon recess, then picked up again after lunch and occupied the remainder of the day—concerned his efforts to locate his missing brother. He recounted his discovery of Belle’s correspondence with Andrew, which began in 1906 and continued until Andrew “left his home to meet his fate in the ‘House of Death.’” He then described his own letters to Belle, inquiring about his brother’s whereabouts.

  Three of her replies were read aloud to the jury: those of March 27 and April 24, in which she claimed that Andrew had gone off in search of his gambler-brother “in Chicago or New York, or possibly . . . Norway,” and a third, dated April 11, in which she cunningly cast suspicion on a man “who worked for me for a while” named Lamphere, whom she characterized as a mentally unstable drunkard who was “jealous of Andrew.”[7]

  Following the introduction of these letters as evidence, Asle was asked about his visit to La Porte after receiving the newspaper clippings on the fire sent to him by bank clerk Frank Pitner. He proceeded to relate the tale of his search of the farm—already the stuff of local legend—culminating in the awful discovery of his brother’s body “in a three-foot grave” and the disclosure, to a dumbstruck world, of the Gunness horrors.[8]

  In an interview with Harry Burr Darling conducted that evening, Asle insisted that the full extent of those horrors had yet to be uncovered. “I know there are more bodies on the place,” he declared. “I have learned of another soft spot which has never been explored. If the people here would let me, I am convinced I could find further trace of the woman’s crimes.”[9]

  In Asle’s telling, his brother—the burly ex-con who had once robbed and torched a village post office and was reportedly involved in a horse-rustling case[10]—was a sensitive, poetic soul, who pined for the faraway beauties of Norway.

  “Andrew Helgelien was something of a mystic,” said Asle. “He lived too much in his imagination for a farmer in Dakota. He could not forget the fjords and mountains of his native land. Anything that brought a touch of home with it moved him to melancholy.”

  It was Andrew’s homesick yearnings that made him susceptible to the wiles of Mrs. Gunness. “She was a clever woman,” said Asle. “She wrote of the things he loved. She discussed Norwegian places and Norwegian ways. When she told him she loved him, he believed it, because the poor fellow was in that mood where he would have renounced richness in America for a crust at home. I did not know these things until long after, when her letters to him came into my possession, and the ogress began writing to me.

  “She held him spellbound,” he went on, then let out a ragged breath. “So he went to his death.”[11]

  Asle did not remain in La Porte for the rest of the trial. Before returning home to South Dakota, he ordered a tombstone for his brother’s grave in the Patton cemetery. The chiseled inscription read:

  “Andrew Helgelien, 1859–1908, the last victim of the Gunness horror, remains found by his brother, Asle K. Helgelien, May 5, 1908. Rest in peace.”[12]

  33.

  THE PROSECUTION STRIKES

  In Washington Irving’s classic story “Rip Van Winkle,” the feckless title character stumbles upon the ghostly crew of Henry Hudson, who gather every twenty years in a hollow of the Catskill Mountains to drink beer and play at ninepins, “the sound of their balls” reverberating “like distant peals of thunder.”[1] Perhaps it was Harry Burr Darling’s attendance at Monday evening’s theatrical performance that inspired his typically muddled metaphor in the next day’s edition of the Argus-Bulletin:

  The progress of the Lamphere trial suggests a thunderstorm. The elements got to work a week ago, and a steady downpour of rain, punctuated by a few peals of thunder, some loud, some almost inaudible, together with a correspondingly small number of flashes of lightning, has been in order ever since.

  Prosecutor Smith is now playing the part of the great Jupiter who rolls the balls down the bowling alleys of the heavens. He started off with a rush Thursday afternoon, and in his opening statement scored a clean “strike.” Since then, several “spares” have been recorded to his credit, but withal it will be necessary to land several more “strikes” to anywhere near approach a 300 score.

  There’ll be another sharp peal of thunder at any moment.[2]

  Darling was right about one thing. Tuesday’s proceedings did produce another peal—not of thunder, however, but of laughter. The day got off to a delayed start. As soon as the doors opened that morning, a jostling crowd surged inside, filling the seats, jamming the aisles, arraying themselves along the walls. It was a frigid day, however, and, even packed with scores of people, the courtroom was so teeth-chatteringly cold that Judge Richter ordered a postponement until the building’s custodian could shovel enough coal into the furnace to generate “a proper degree of heat.”

  When the trial finally resumed at 10:00 a.m., Smith, seeking to elicit incriminating testimony against the defendant, began summoning a string of Ray’s acquaintances. John Rye, Ray’s companion on his aborted trip to Michigan City the night Andrew Helgelien vanished, testified that “Lamphere had said he ‘would get even with the old woman sometime.’” He was followed to the stand by Bessie Wallace—variously described as “Lamphere’s sweetheart,” “a woman of the underworld,” and “a whore”[3]—who likewise testified that, during a conversation with Ray, he had said something “about Mrs. Gunness owing him money and how he would get the money or make it unpleasant for her and get even with her.”[4]

  It was another friend of Ray’s, William Slater, who set the courtroom roaring with laughter. Under questioning by Smith, Slater detailed Ray’s increasingly bitter conflict with Belle after Andrew Helgelien appeared on the scene. Soon after leaving her employ, Ray had told Slater that he had overheard “Mrs. Gunness and Helgelien talking about giving him poison” and that “Helgelien had suggested that they try it on Lamphere’s dog.” What made this perfidy particularly galling to Ray was the fact “that the woman had promised to marry him.”

  “What do you know about Lamphere’s relations with Mrs. Gunness?” asked Smith.

  Sl
ater shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “He said she used to come to his room at night.”

  “Did Lamphere tell you that he slept with Mrs. Gunness?” Smith asked.

  “No,” said Slater. “He said she slept with him.”

  The remark produced such an explosion of hilarity that Judge Richter, after banging his gavel repeatedly, threatened to clear the courtroom if any such outburst happened again.[5]

  The titillating testimony about Belle’s sexual habits continued with state witness Peter Colson, Ray’s predecessor in the role of handyman-lover. Under cross-examination by Wirt Worden, Colson described “how he fell under Mrs. Gunness’ spell and how she made love to him with sweet words and caresses.” Even while “obsessed with love of the woman,” however, he was “possessed with fear of her.

  “She made me love her,” said Colson, “and she scared me at the same time. I was suspicious of her on account of the way her husband, Peter Gunness, died.”

  As the spectators listened in riveted silence, Colson explained that, eventually, her sexual demands became so insistent that he had to flee. “She made such love to me that I finally had to run away from the place. For six months I slept in a haymow on a farm a half mile away.

  “I loved Mrs. Gunness in spite of myself,” Colson concluded. “I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it. She attracted me and repelled me at the same time.”[6]

  Belle’s final handyman, Joe Maxson—who began his testimony at the tail end of Tuesday and resumed it Wednesday morning—had no salacious tidbits to offer, though he did provide a dramatic account of his actions on the night of the fire. Under direct examination, he described his final meal with Belle and the children, their after-dinner game of Red Riding Hood and the Fox, his going off to bed and being “awakened about four o’clock by a room-full of smoke.” He told of his efforts to “kick and beat down the door” separating his room from the main part of the house, until—“almost overcome by the dense smoke”—he grabbed a few belongings and “dashed madly downstairs.”

  After depositing his stuff in the carriage shed, he grabbed an ax and tried, unsuccessfully, to chop through the front door. At this point in Maxson’s recital, State’s Attorney Smith introduced the ax as evidence. It was, observed one reporter, “big enough and strong enough for an Oregon lumberman,” and the possibility that it might be the very weapon with which the ogress had dismembered her victims sent a ripple of excitement through the courtroom.[7]

  For the most part, Maxson’s testimony was unrelievedly grim, but he did provide one inadvertent moment of levity. It happened during his cross-examination, when Wirt Worden’s cocounsel, Ellsworth Weir, asked about the items Maxson had rescued from his room and deposited in the carriage shed.

  “Didn’t you take a few novels, pick them up and put them in your pocket?” said Weir.

  “No, sir!” cried Maxson, clearly incensed at the suggestion that he might engage in an activity as effete as reading fiction. “I want you to understand here and now that I do not read novels, no kind of novels!” The sheer depth of his indignation produced scattered chuckles among the spectators.

  Though Maxson’s eyewitness account of the fire had been exhaustively covered in the press and was familiar to anyone who read the newspapers, he now added one previously undisclosed detail. At the end of his dinner with the Gunness family on that fateful night, Belle had handed Joe an orange that he had promptly “made away with.” Though it “tasted sort of queer,” he kept on eating it.

  “I never thought much about it until after the fire,” he continued, “and then I told my sister that I thought something might have been placed in the orange. I remember that I struck the bed like a log that night and went to sleep barely a moment after my head touched the pillow. If there were any noises the next morning when the fire broke out, I didn’t hear them because I was in such a sound sleep. I don’t usually sleep so soundly. I did not awake, as I said before, until the room was full of smoke, and then I was so dazed that it took me a while to realize that the place was on fire.”[8]

  Maxson’s revelation about the ostensibly drugged orange inspired yet another of Harry Burr Darling’s dizzying rhetorical flights, published that evening under the heading “A Gunness Lemon”:

  Beware of this kind of fruit. It is dangerous, and the man or woman who offers it to you has evil intentions. Just because the lemon has the exterior appearance of an orange, don’t be deceived. You may think it is a nice, sweet juicy Florida orange. Perhaps at one time it was. But the “Gunness” system has converted it into a “lemon” of the worst variety. It contains some kind of dope, which, as soon as you have eaten it, will put you to sleep.

  This is the warning sounded today in the testimony of Joe Maxson. This witness, it is believed, revealed Mrs. Gunness’ favorite method of murder. She first secured control of her victims by throwing them into a sound sleep via the doped orange route. Then she could do the dirty work in any manner she chose, whichever was the most convenient, a sausage cutter or a sharp knife. If “she” had been a “he,” it is probable that a poisoned cigar, rather than a doped orange, would have been used.[9]

  On Wednesday afternoon, the state called one of its most important witnesses, a man who had never wavered in his belief that Belle Gunness was dead and that Ray Lamphere set the fire that killed her: Sheriff Albert Smutzer. “Dapper in polka-dotted bow tie, his curly brown hair parted with a double flourish,” he took the witness stand “with affable self-confidence, a smile on his pleasant, rosy face.”[10] As the prosecution hoped, his testimony—which closed out the day and resumed on Thursday morning—made for damning evidence against the defendant.

  Smith began by asking Smutzer what he knew about the bad blood between Ray and Belle.

  “About the middle of February,” said Smutzer, “Mrs. Gunness wrote a letter to me and complained that Lamphere was annoying her in all sorts of ways, sticking his face in the windows at night, prowling around the house, and so on.”

  “What reply did you make to Mrs. Gunness?” Smith asked.

  “I wrote her that if he kept it up to have him arrested.”

  “What did Mrs. Gunness reply?”

  “She wrote me another letter saying that she was afraid Lamphere would do her some harm and that he was still bothering her.”

  “What steps did you take, Mr. Smutzer, in consequence of this second letter?”

  Smutzer explained that he had immediately telephoned Ray’s favorite watering hole, Smith’s saloon, and told the proprietor “to send Lamphere around to me.” When Lamphere showed up at the jail about an hour later, Smutzer “told him to keep away from Mrs. Gunness’ house or I’d have to arrest him.” When Ray protested that he had only gone there to fetch the tools he’d left behind when he was fired, Smutzer advised him to “send the constable for them.”

  And how, asked Smith, did Ray react to that advice?

  “He shuffled away a few steps,” Smutzer recalled, “and then turned to me with a queer look in his eyes and said, ‘If I tell what I know of that woman, I can make it mighty hot for her.’”

  According to Smutzer, Ray had informed him that Belle was presently consorting with “a man named Helgelien who owned a gambling house in Aberdeen, South Dakota. A man was killed there and ten thousand dollars was stolen. This man Helgelien fled with the money, and she has him there in that house.” Smutzer had investigated this charge by writing to Aberdeen but dropped the matter after receiving a reply assuring him that “Helgelien was a well-to-do farmer living near Mansfield, that he was of good repute, and not wanted for any crime whatever.”

  Returning to the subject of Ray’s conflict with Belle, Smith asked the sheriff what he knew “of Lamphere being arrested at the insistence of Mrs. Gunness.” Smutzer’s answer provoked an angry reaction from Wirt Worden.

 
; “When Mrs. Gunness and her hired man, Joseph Maxson, came to me to have Lamphere arrested,” Smutzer said, “Maxson brought with him a bar of iron a foot and a half long which he said Lamphere had left on the place while prowling around the night before. I thought then, and I still think, that Lamphere intended to kill Mrs. Gunness with that bar of—”

  Worden, face flushed, was on his feet at once. “Objection!” he cried. “This witness must be warned! He is trying to get matter into the record that he knows will be ruled out. He knows he must not offer his conclusions but only the facts! He knows that conclusions are for the jury!”

  The objection was sustained but, as in all such cases, the witness’s words could not be unheard. When, after a largely fruitless cross-examination, a smiling Smutzer left the stand, observers agreed that his testimony had delivered exactly what the prosecution was aiming for, that it had been—as Harry Burr Darling would say—a “clean strike” for the state.

  Smutzer was followed to the stand by Leroy Marr, the deputy who had driven out to John Wheatbrook’s farm to take Ray into custody. Even before he announced why he was there, said Marr, Ray had asked if Belle and her three children had made it out of the burning house. When Marr asked how he knew about the fire, Ray replied that he had been walking “along by the house” and saw “smoke coming out of the windows and around the roof.” Asked why he “didn’t yell,” he could only offer the lame excuse that he “didn’t think it was any of my business.”