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

by Harold Schechter

  Marr then added a detail that, in a courtroom full of white-only faces, cast Ray’s already dubious character in an even more unsavory light. After being taken to jail, Ray had been interviewed by State’s Attorney Smith. In the course of their conversation, said Marr, Ray admitted that “he had slept with Nigger Liz” but begged Smith not “to put that in any statement.”[11]

  The testimony of Marr’s colleague Deputy William Antiss—the next witness to take the stand—was particularly damaging to the defense. According to Antiss, Ray not only admitted that “he saw [Mrs. Gunness] killing Helgelien” but stated that, were it not for his concern over hurting his mother, he “would plead guilty to arson.” As the correspondent for the Chicago Examiner put it, Antiss’s “version of what Lamphere said amounted almost to a confession on the part of the prisoner.”

  Following a brief cross by Wirt Worden, the witness was dismissed. The town clock was just striking 10:00 a.m. as he stepped from the stand. At that point, having “fired its biggest guns” with the testimony of the lawmen, the state abruptly rested its case.[12]

  34.

  SCATTERSHOT

  Believing that the prosecution’s case wouldn’t conclude until the end of the day, Wirt Worden was caught off guard by Smith’s announcement and requested a recess until Monday morning. When Judge Richter denied the request, Worden had no choice but to proceed with his opening statement.

  Though delivered extemporaneously, his address, according to the rapturous account of Harry Burr Darling, was a model of lawyerly eloquence. “He spoke slowly and with the utmost deliberation,” Darling reported, “and each word fell clearly on the ears of the entire courtroom. Several of the jurymen edged over to the front of their seats as if drawn toward the speaker like a needle attracted to a magnet. When he was finished, there was a profound quiet. Women sunk back in their chairs, and a peculiar light played over their faces. The spectators realized that Worden had made assertions in such a masterly manner that, if he proved able to back them up with witnesses, Ray Lamphere’s neck was saved from the noose.”[1]

  Step by step, in his strong, sonorous voice, Worden set out the main points of his argument, all leading to a conclusion that would exonerate his client: that Mrs. Gunness had plotted the fire, substituted a female body for her own, and was still alive.

  “Mrs. Gunness was not burned in the fire of April 28,” Worden began. “We will show by evidence that the body of the adult female found in the ruins could not have been that of Mrs. Gunness. We will produce as a witness, John Ball, a local undertaker, who knew Mrs. Gunness very well. He will testify that the adult female body could not have been that of Mrs. Gunness.

  “We will produce a witness who saw her with a middle-aged man, driving past her old home in a top buggy on the afternoon of July 9,” Worden continued. “The two daughters of this witness also saw Mrs. Gunness that day.

  “We will show that Mrs. Gunness had a motive for setting fire to her house. We will show that the crisis in her life came on April 27, that she was in constant dread that Asle Helgelien, brother of one of her victims, Andrew Helgelien, might arrive in La Porte any minute and begin an inquiry which would reveal the fate of his brother, buried in the Gunness cemetery.

  “Our evidence will show that on the afternoon before the fire, Mrs. Gunness went to Minch’s grocery store and bought an unusual quantity of kerosene, more than she was in the habit of buying.

  “We will prove by testimony that on the afternoon of April 27, Mrs. Gunness had a conversation in front of the First National Bank building with a certain man in which she said, ‘It must be done tonight, and you must do it.’ That night, the house burned to the ground and the bodies of the three Gunness children were found in the ruins.

  “Our evidence will further show that on the Saturday preceding the fire, she was seen driving out to her house with another woman, slightly smaller than herself, who has never been seen since, unless it was her body that was found in the ruins of the fire.

  “We will show that the teeth found in the ruins could not have withstood the terrific heat of the fire without crumbling to pieces. Consequently, the teeth found in the ruins must either have been thrown there, or else the fire could not have been as hot as it is generally supposed to have been. This being the case, the skull of the female could not have been burned away. We will further show that the bridgework made by Dr. Norton for Belle Gunness could have been removed from the mouth in various ways.

  “We will show by the testimony of local physicians that the three children came to their end by strychnia poisoning rather than burning. We will show that the bodies showed all the symptoms of strychnia poisoning rather than those of suffocation. We shall show from testimony already introduced that it would have been impossible for Ray Lamphere to have gone there and administered poison.

  “Did Mrs. Gunness poison the children, place the adult body with them, remove her bridgework and leave it behind, and escape? If this be true, Lamphere cannot be guilty.

  “On the strength of all this evidence,” Worden concluded, “we will show that Ray Lamphere is an innocent man and the object of untrue accusations.”[2]

  “The defense pressed the trigger of its revolver this morning,” enthused Darling, “and the report will echo through Judge Richter’s courtroom long after the Lamphere trial has passed into history.” If Worden opened with a bang, however, he followed with a misfire. His first witness was John H. Ball, a pioneering figure in La Porte, renowned as the “first white boy born in the county.”[3] After years spent as a bricklayer, cattle drover, miner, and US cavalryman, Ball had opened La Porte’s first funeral home, selling the business to Austin Cutler upon retirement. Following the fire at the Gunness farm, the seventy-four-year-old Ball had been called in by Cutler to assist in the removal of the four bodies from the ruins.

  In his opening statement, Worden had promised the jury that he would summon Ball as a leading witness to testify “that the adult female body could not have been that of Mrs. Gunness.” When, however, Worden posed the key question to Ball—“From your knowledge of dead bodies and your acquaintance with Mrs. Gunness, was that the body of Mrs. Gunness?”—Smith objected on the grounds that it “called for a conclusion”: that the question improperly asked Ball, a lay witness, to offer a legal opinion. The objection was sustained and Ball excused.[4]

  Worden fared somewhat better after the lunch break. Calling the first of several dental experts—Dr. George Wasser, a prominent Cleveland dentist and graduate of Western Reserve University—Worden asked if, in his professional opinion, “the crownwork found in the ruins of the fire could have passed through the heat which destroyed the skull bones.”

  “I do not think so,” said Wasser.

  “In your opinion,” Worden continued, displaying a fragment of tooth, “was this piece of tooth ever covered by the crown in the other set of teeth?”

  “If it did cover this tooth,” Wasser replied, “it was an awful misfit.”[5]

  Another dental witness, W. S. Fischer, agreed “that the teeth could not possibly have gone through the fire that destroyed the skull,” as “the porcelain was free of cracks such an intense heat would have caused.” Shown a pair of excising forceps, Fischer also explained “how they could be used in snipping live teeth from a person’s head.”[6]

  Worden closed out the day with a hodgepodge of witnesses. Mrs. George Wright, a neighbor of Belle’s, testified that she had seen the blaze through her bathroom window just as her mantel clock was “striking the hour of three”—twenty-five minutes before Ray Lamphere, according to his claim, left Liz Smith’s house.[7] Undertaker William C. Weir told of visiting the farm on the day of the fire and “seeing a five-gallon can in the cellar. The can was empty and the solder melted away.” Joe Maxson, recalled to the stand, verified Weir’s statement, testifying “that on the evening
before the fire, he placed the oil can in the hallway at the end of the stairway in the frame part of the house. After the fire it was in the cellar.”[8]

  In a move that seemed to promise a dramatic revelation but ended up amounting to nothing, Worden called his opponent, State’s Attorney Smith, to the stand, to question him about a mysterious trunk he had surreptitiously hauled away from the Gunness carriage shed the previous spring. When the trunk was brought into the courtroom and opened, however, it “revealed neckties, books, and letters, none of which had any relation to the case.”[9]

  Reporting on Friday’s developments, most newspapermen agreed that, following Worden’s strong opening statement, the defense had gotten off to a scattershot start—that “no groundwork was laid for its theory that Mrs. Gunness is alive, or, if dead, that she was poisoned and not burned to death in the fire.”[10] Locally, however, the biggest story of the day had nothing to do with the lawyers, the witnesses, or the defendant.

  It had to do with the spectators.

  35.

  CESSPOOL

  Throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, newspapermen covering highly publicized murder trials rarely failed to comment, generally in tongue-clucking tones, on the large number of women who flocked to these proceedings and often made up the majority of spectators. That ordinary housewives and mothers should evince such eager interest in gruesome and salacious crimes seemed a shocking violation of every prevailing belief about the so-called gentler sex.

  The situation was no different at the Lamphere trial. Owing to the scandalous nature of the anticipated testimony, efforts had been made to limit attendance to men. Apart from the opening day, however, when no ladies were permitted inside, the womenfolk of La Porte showed up at the trial in droves. “Women elbowed into the courtroom by the hundreds and occupied all the seats inside the rail that were not used by members of the bar,” noted one Chicago reporter on the trial’s third day; while the correspondent for the Indianapolis News, writing a few days later, estimated that “the number of women present has run as high as 400, many of them handsomely gowned and occupying front seats.”[1]

  This flagrant display of prurient fascination among the community’s female population provoked the predictable outcry. Its source was the Reverend M. H. Garrard, who had recently assumed the pulpit of the First Christian Church. On Thursday evening, November 19, Garrard veered off the subject of his midweek sermon—“Beginning of Family and Business Life”—to deliver a fiery harangue against the eager horde of women trial-goers.

  “I have been thoroughly disgusted with the way women have flocked into the courtroom in large numbers and at all hours both morning and afternoon, to have poured into their ears all the filth connected with the trial now in progress in our city,” he began, deliberately avoiding so much as a mention of the foul name that had brought such infamy to La Porte. “It seems these women have camped out near the cesspool and mean to stay there until it is drained of its rot. It is bad enough to see many men there, but when I see the women sitting right up in front, as near to the filth as it is possible for them to get, I presume they are there out of fear that one of the rotten words or scenes might be missed if they were further back.

  “When I see this thing, I am at a loss as to how to adequately describe it,” continued Garrard, his voice ringing with indignation. “It is a strange thing that women, under no compulsion whatever, are found in large numbers in every notorious trial everywhere, and the more dirty the trial, the more women will usually be found in attendance. What are we to say of such women? Of their modesty? Of their refinement? It is mild to say they are not of the genteel type.”

  Curious about the type of people who would be drawn to such “dirty, rotten stuff,” Garrard, as he explained, had visited the courtroom “one afternoon and also one morning” and was appalled at what he saw. “One young woman was comfortably located near where all could be heard and seen, and gave evidence of her very great pleasure in being so fortunately situated. She was artistically squishing a big piece of gum,” he said with full-throated contempt, “her cheeks bulging out on both sides with the fat cud, and her head bobbing like a cow’s.

  “Well,” he concluded, “many other things could be said, but I have more pleasant things to say. I hope that all decent women will keep away and frown on those who do go. Let modest, refined, well-bred ladies keep away from the very appearance of evil.”[2]

  Printed in its entirety in Friday’s local newspapers, Garrard’s diatribe set off an uproar. Both Harry Burr Darling and Edward Molloy, editor of the Herald, were inundated with letters defending the targets of the pastor’s attack. Typical was the letter from a writer identified in headlines only as a “Well-known La Porte Lady,” who charged Garrard with “desecrat[ing] his pulpit and his own profession by casting slurs” upon the women of La Porte.

  Having “attended the Lamphere trial several times” herself, the writer affirmed that she had “seen the very nicest and most refined ladies of town there.” Moreover, she had “heard nothing said by anyone in the court proceedings which contained one-tenth part as many obscene words and low phrases as” Garrard had claimed.

  Striking a self-assertive note, very much in keeping with feminist sentiments of the time, the writer insisted on a woman’s right to be educated in the workings of the legal system. “This is not an age when women are kept underfoot and in ignorance. A mere desire to see justice done and to learn the ways of justice should not be construed as a gratification of evil tastes.” Stating that Garrard had done nothing but “bring ridicule upon his own head” with his intemperate remarks, she reminded him that “from a minister of the gospel, we naturally expect ‘Charity for all and malice toward none.’” She ended with a swipe at Garrard’s newcomer status, declaring that, as a newcomer to town—“a distinct outsider”—it was not his place to denounce the “genteel” trial-going women, whose “characters are far above reproach.”[3]

  Women weren’t the only ones offended by Garrard’s sermon. “Husband Takes Exception Also,” declared a headline in the Weekly Herald. Reprinted below is an outraged letter sent to the paper by an unidentified gentleman of the city. Echoing the author of the earlier letter, the writer maintained that, as a recent arrival in La Porte, Reverend Garrard had little right to make such a sweeping condemnation. “The brother has not been a resident of this beautiful city long enough to be qualified . . . to dictate the tastes and desires of the ladies of this community.” He then launched into a lengthy lecture of his own, part blistering attack on the minister, part gallant defense of his wife, part ringing tribute to American womanhood:

  My wife attended the Gunness trial, as did large numbers of other women, and now up bobs the Rev. M. H. Garrard and says that she and all the others are virtually not modest, refined, or genteel; in short, not respectable ladies. He would lead people to believe that the gentler sex of La Porte are a carnal-minded lot who like to revel in what he calls filth and rot . . . Talk about arrogance, presumption, and the old criticaster’s trick of “curving a contumelious lip”—all that is a mild sort of stupidity compared with this. Since when was this man commissioned to sit in judgment on the question of our women’s modesty, refinement, and gentility? . . .

  I glory in the American girl’s stability and spunk. We all should be proud that her noble attributes of mind and soul do not break like blown glass before the various little naughtinesses of everyday life. If so sensitive and fragile as that, they would have shattered long ago. And I submit to any knowing man or woman whether the “racy” and unseemly words unavoidably spoken at the Gunness trial were really more vulgar, rotten, and suggestive than those that oft come from preachers’ lips when discussing dancing, the white slave traffic, and kindred delicate topics . . .

  I consider that woman’s curiosity, her desire to see and hear and learn, is as legitimate a part of her life
as of a man’s, and that if her refinement and modesty are of a genuine and sensible quality, they will withstand all necessary indelicacies of the rough world all about her . . . Mr. Garrard will come in contact with just as good a moral element attending the trial as he will meet anywhere, church not excepted. My wife went to that trial a good woman, and she came from there a good woman still. True virtue can be trusted anywhere. I am not afraid to trust my wife . . . Mr. Garrard is not qualified or commissioned to sit in judgment over her.

  Decrying the minister’s lecture as “scurrilous,” “ungentlemanly,” and “unspeakably offensive,” the writer concluded by referring to Garrard’s sneering description of the young, gum-chewing woman seated up front. “I think,” he wrote, giving full vent to his anger, “that the young lady . . . was engaged in a much better business than the immoderate Mr. Garrard spitting out unholy and gratuitous insults on the character of our women, thereby dragging the pulpit down to a level with the scandalmongering street.”[4]

  Not everyone offended by Garrard’s finger-wagging sermon responded with an angry letter. One local writer, Mollie Long, was moved to compose a humorous poem. This bit of light verse, published in the Weekly Herald, took the form of a letter from the author to her friend Bessie Short of Chicago:

  We’re having lively times, just now,