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

by Harold Schechter

  Rub-a-dub-dub-dub

  Murderer’s skull to rub

  And fair or foul

  Or foul or fair

  You can have it

  As you care.

  As it happened, Russell himself was in possession of just such a skull. A former member of the Seventh Calvary under General George Armstrong Custer—or so he claimed—Russell had been “wounded in a fight with Sitting Bull’s men and discharged for disability.” As a result, he “was not with his regiment” at the Little Big Horn massacre. During one of his subsequent tours out west, he “visited the battlefield where my comrades had been wiped out” and discovered “the skull of a chief,” which he kept “as a souvenir.”

  Somehow, Smith learned that he was in possession of the skull and, figuring “that nobody was more of a murderer than the Indians who killed Custer and all those soldiers,” she sought out Russell and begged to borrow the skull. “I’d never heard of her,” Russell told his interviewer, “but she promised to return it, and so I gave her the skull.”

  When he went to retrieve it about a year later, however, she told him that it had been stolen. “I had no reason to believe she wasn’t telling the truth,” explained Russell, “so I let the relic go.”[20]

  Though some newspapers persisted in reporting that the skull might yet “provide a key to the famous Gunness case,” most agreed that Elizabeth Smith had “taken the secrets of the murder farm to the grave.” Wirt Worden expressed particular frustration. “I knew of Ray’s friendship with the old woman and tried my best to get her to talk,” he told one reporter. “If only I hadn’t been away when Liz died, the whole mystery would have been solved by now.”[21]

  42.

  MRS. CARLSON

  Throughout the years, anyone connected with the Gunness story was likely to find his name in the newspapers. In January 1915, Joe Maxson—the last of Belle’s handymen and survivor of the farmhouse fire—was arrested by La Porte police, charged with beating his wife and threatening to kill her and their children. Eight years later, on October 31, 1923, he died on the job at the Indiana Moulding Company, fatally struck on the head by a piece of falling lumber.[1]

  The following year, a nephew of Belle’s, twenty-six-year-old Adolph Gunness, was much in the news. An ex-soldier who had been gassed and shell-shocked in the Great War, Adolph was a patient at the Speedway Hospital for disabled veterans in Chicago, where he met and began a romance with a nurse named Anna Furness. They were married on July 20, 1923. Several months later, he absconded with $1,400 of her money and fled to Madison, Wisconsin, where, it turned out, he had another wife, the former Ella Mathewson, to whom he had been wed in 1920. Arrested and brought back to Chicago, he was convicted of bigamy and sentenced to one to five years in the Joliet penitentiary.[2]

  In late 1930, a Russian immigrant named John A. Nepsha, who had arrived in La Porte two years after the Gunness affair, purchased the former “murder farm” and began constructing a house where Belle’s home once stood. Nepsha, newspapers reported, “laughed at the superstitions which have kept the property vacant the last two decades. He thinks so little of such ghost stories that he plans to make a garden of the graveyard which yielded body after body of the woman’s victims.” Confirming, in the view of some La Porteans, that the place was accursed, Nepsha became embroiled in a bitter divorce proceeding a few years later and eventually “filed suit, asking Judge Russell W. Smith to partition between himself and his former wife seven tracts of land totaling sixty-four acres and including the Gunness farm.”[3]

  Sporadic sightings of Mrs. Gunness were reported over the next twenty years. The “Vamp Slayer” (as she was now dubbed in the press) was spotted in Colorado, Canada, Mississippi, New York. When, in 1928, Los Angeles detectives discovered that a string of missing boys had been molested and slain at a chicken ranch in the nearby community of Wineville, speculation ran high that Belle Gunness, recently reported as living in California, was somehow connected to the horrors.[4]

  The continuing failure of these supposedly promising leads did nothing to shake Wirt Worden’s conviction that Belle was still alive. He was totally convinced by the deathbed confession that Ray Lamphere had supposedly made to Harry Myers and that was published in its entirety for the first time in July 1930.[5] Worden never abandoned the hope that the multimurderess would someday be apprehended. And in the spring of 1931, that hope finally seemed to be fulfilled.

  On the night of February 9, 1931, Peter H. Lindstrom, a Chicago meat packer, received a telephone call informing him that his father, August, had died suddenly late that afternoon at his home in the Los Angeles suburb of Lomita. On the face of it, there seemed nothing suspicious about the elder Lindstrom’s death. A retired lumber dealer and former resident of Williams, Arizona, Lindstrom was eighty-two years old, a ripe age at any time and especially in a day when the life expectancy for a US male born in the mid-1800s was less than fifty. Still, the news came as a shock to Peter. Just one day earlier, he had received a letter from his father, who declared that he was “feeling fine” and “expected to live to be 100 years old.”[6]

  August’s body was transported to the Stone & Myers funeral home, where the deputy chief coroner signed the death certificate, ascribing the cause to heart failure. The remains were then shipped to Williams, Arizona, where they were interred on February 11.

  A few days after the funeral, Peter traveled to Los Angeles to look more closely into the circumstances of his father’s death and take care of the old man’s estate. His first stop was the home of Mrs. Esther Carlson, the sixty-two-year-old widow who had worked as August’s housekeeper for the past fifteen years.

  Mrs. Carlson’s late husband, Charles, had been close friends with August, their bond having been forged years earlier when Lindstrom was the superintendent of a logging camp near Williams and Carlson the proprietor of a local saloon. One day, after firing a gang of Mexican workers and replacing them with a bunch of his fellow Swedes, Lindstrom, according to newspaper accounts, was attacked by the Mexicans on the main street of Williams. Breaking free, he ran into Carlson’s saloon with the Mexicans at his heels. “Carlson, standing behind the bar, drew a revolver and killed three of the Mexicans.” From that point on, the two men had been “almost inseparable companions.” They were neighbors in Hemet, California, when Carlson died after a prolonged illness in 1925. Soon after, Lindstrom moved to Lomita, taking the widow Carlson with him as his housekeeper.

  Now, conferring with Mrs. Carlson, Peter Lindstrom learned that, on the afternoon of February 9, she had telephoned a local physician, Jesse A. Lancaster, and “informed him that Lindstrom was violently ill. Dr. Lancaster instructed her to come to his residence, where he gave her a powder for the patient. About a half hour later, she phoned again and stated Lindstrom was dying. Dr. Lancaster went to the home and found Lindstrom dead.”[7]

  The story struck Peter as odd. His suspicious were raised to an even higher pitch when he discovered something else: a week before his father’s death, Mrs. Carlson had arranged with the Lomita branch of the California Bank to make Lindstrom’s $2,000 account a joint account for herself and her employer. No sooner had August been buried than a close friend of hers, forty-two-year-old Mrs. Anna Erickson, appeared at the bank with a letter of authority from Mrs. Carlson and withdrew the entire sum.[8]

  Peter immediately shared his suspicions with his brother, Charles, a state highway official in Williams. On Wednesday, February 18, August’s body was exhumed and taken by train back to Los Angeles, arriving early Thursday. That same morning, Esther Carlson and Anna Erickson were brought in for questioning by Captain William Bright of the sheriff’s homicide detail. Afterward, the two women repaired to Mrs. Carlson’s place for coffee.[9]

  Early Friday, following the autopsy on August Lindstrom, the county chemist, R. A. Abernathy, reported to Deputy District Attor
ney George Stahlman that he had found two and a half grains of arsenic in Lindstrom’s stomach—“enough to kill forty men”—along with “a quantity of split-pea soup.”[10] Warrants for the arrest of Esther Carlson and Anna Erickson on a charge of suspicion of murder were immediately issued. By then, however, Erickson had been stricken with violent convulsions and rushed to General Hospital. When her stomach was pumped and the contents analyzed by Abernathy, the county chemist, he discovered that she had ingested “a strong dose of arsenic.” Doctors expressed little hope of her survival.

  It was shortly after midnight when Esther Carlson was taken into custody. Under questioning by Captain Bright and Deputy D. A. Stahlman, she remained tight-lipped about Lindstrom. As for Erickson, all she would say was: “She got me into this.”[11]

  Defying the dire predictions of her physicians, Anna Erickson not only survived but felt strong enough by Sunday, February 22, to point the finger of guilt at Mrs. Carlson. Speaking to Stahlman from her hospital bed, Erickson claimed that, about three weeks before August Lindstrom’s death, Carlson had told her that “she couldn’t stand him any longer and wished he was out of the way.” Lindstrom had also “been talking of giving up his home and going back to Williams, Arizona, to live with his son, Charles”—a move that would have left his longtime housekeeper without a job.[12]

  Two days later, on Tuesday the twenty-fourth, Stahlman took another written statement from Anna Erickson, who leveled even more incriminating charges against her former friend. As the deputy D.A. told reporters following this second bedside interview, Erickson claimed “that Mrs. Carlson had often remarked that she was sick of taking care of old men. She said that Mrs. Carlson had made this statement not only in referring to Lindstrom but to her husband, Charles Carlson, and another man, both of whom are reported to have died in Hemet in 1925 within a short time of each other.”[13]

  The other man, as newspapers soon revealed, was an eighty-year-old Swedish immigrant named Gustav Ahlzen. Soon after arriving in this country, Ahlzen fell ill and was taken into the home of the Carlsons, then living in Hemet, California. A doctor was summoned, who diagnosed the problem as heart disease and prescribed a then-common drug for the condition: strychnine tablets, to be taken one at a time as needed.

  A short time later, however, Ahlzen was found dead. “It was generally accepted that he had taken the entire box of tablets at once,” the Los Angeles Times reported, “either by accident or with suicidal intent.” Some months later, Charles Carlson died, reportedly of stomach cancer. Thanks to Anna Erickson’s latest accusations, however, Deputy D.A. Stahlman announced plans to travel to Hemet to look into the deaths of both men.[14]

  That same Tuesday, beginning at 11:00 a.m., an inquest was held into August Lindstrom’s death at the county morgue. Along with the dead man’s two sons, witnesses included county chemist Abernathy; undertaker Charles Myers; B. A. Peckham, the bank manager who had turned over the $2,000 to Anna Erickson at Esther Carlson’s written order; and Deputy Sheriff Harry Brewster, who testified that he had “found an empty strychnine bottle in a sewing bag belonging to Mrs. Carlson.”

  Carlson herself refused to testify, on the advice of her attorney. Erickson, who had just been discharged from the hospital, was there, too. After initially declining, she agreed to testify. Aided by another deputy sheriff, Hazel Brown, she tottered to the witness stand, where she “admitted that she had given Lindstrom a piece of apple pie on the morning of his death but declared that she had given another neighbor a piece of the same pie.”

  The coroner’s jury was unpersuaded by her professions of innocence. Though ruling that Lindstrom died from poison “administered with homicidal intent by a person or persons unknown to us,” they recommended that “Mrs. Esther Carlson and Mrs. Anna Erickson be held pending further action in this case.” That evening, immediately following the all-day inquest, Stahlman issued murder charges against the pair.[15]

  The next morning, shortly after their arraignment, Stahlman left for Hemet, where he discovered that Esther Carlson had purchased “a quantity of poison” from a local pharmacist in 1922. Inspecting the medical records of Gustav Ahlzen, he learned that—though the old man’s death was officially ascribed to natural causes—“the same symptoms as in arsenic poisoning were present before he died.” Stahlman was also told of unverified “reports indicating that strychnine poisoning may have caused Charles Carlson’s death.” Before returning home that night, the deputy D.A. announced to reporters that the “bodies of both men may be exhumed.”[16]

  On the first Monday of March, another pharmacist—L. L. Willis of Long Beach, who had been following the case in the newspapers—came forward to report that, a month earlier, Mrs. Carlson and her friend had attempted to purchase arsenic from him. “Suspicious of their motive,” he “declined to make the sale.” His disclosure prompted police to make another search of Carlson’s home, where they found a piece of stationery inscribed with a recipe for ant poison:

  3 cupfuls of sugar in jar

  2 cupfuls boiling water on sugar

  Add 2 teaspoonfuls of sodium of arsenite

  Put in little cans

  Deputy D.A. Stahlman immediately declared his intention “to show the formula to numerous druggists in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Redondo and other nearby towns in an effort to ascertain whether or not the women used it as a pretext for purchasing sodium of arsenite.”[17]

  That Friday, the preliminary hearing was held in Municipal Court. By then, Anna Erickson was fully recovered. It was Esther Carlson who appeared desperately weak and unsteady—the result, as newspaper readers were informed, of an advanced case of pulmonary tuberculosis.

  County chemist Abernathy was the first to take the stand, testifying that Lindstrom’s body was “saturated with arsenic.” Lindstrom’s son, Charles, described the suspicions that had led him to have his father’s body exhumed and returned to California for examination by the coroner. “Mrs. Carlson told me that my father came home ill one day, refused to eat lunch, was violently sick during the afternoon,” Charles told the jury. “She said that he refused to allow her to call a doctor. She finally did so about 7:00 p.m., when his condition grew much worse. But he was dead when the physician arrived.”

  The physician in question, Dr. Jesse A. Lancaster, told of giving Mrs. Carlson medicine for Lindstrom on the day of his death. He confirmed that, when he arrived at Lindstrom’s home shortly after 7:00 that evening, the old man was dead.

  “Several days afterwards,” he continued, “I was called to attend Mrs. Erickson, who was ill. I found her sick and vomiting and administered treatment, removing her to the hospital. A chemical test of the contents of her stomach showed arsenic. She told me she became ill after drinking part of a cup of coffee which Mrs. Carlson gave her.”

  At the close of the hearing, Judge H. Parker Wood ordered that both women be held for trial on charges of murder. Denying their lawyers’ request, he refused to release them on bail. Three weeks later, the defendants pleaded not guilty when brought before Superior Judge William C. Doran, who ordered them to go to trial on April 30 in Department Three of Superior Court.[18]

  Before that date arrived, however, something happened that propelled Esther Carlson—up until then a figure of strictly local notoriety—onto the front pages of newspapers around the country and touched off a controversy that would resonate for the next seventy years.

  Besides the recipe for ant poison, police had found something else of interest during their second search of Esther Carlson’s home: a battered trunk containing an old photograph of two little girls and a boy. Exactly how the photo came to be shown to Mrs. Mary Kruger of Huntington Park is unclear. What is certain is that Mrs. Kruger, a former resident of La Porte who claimed to have known the Gunness family well, positively identified the children as Belle’s son, Phillip, and her daughters, Myrtle and Lucy.[19]<
br />
  Informed of this startling fact, Deputy D.A. Stahlman and his boss, Buron Fitts, immediately let it be known that they were launching an investigation into the possibility that Esther Carlson was the notorious Mrs. Gunness. Throughout the nation, headlines trumpeted the dramatic development: “L.A. Woman May Be Famous Murderess,” “Slayer in Los Angeles May Be Belle Gunness,” “Mrs. Carlson Called ‘Murder Farm’ Woman.”[20] Newspapers ran side-by-side photographs of the two women: the famous formal portrait of the glowering, moon-faced “Female Bluebeard” and various shots of the scarecrowish Mrs. Carlson, who—allowing for the passage of years and the ravages of disease—might well have been an old, emaciated Belle. In the twenty-three years since the Gunness horrors came to light, sightings of the multimurderess had averaged one a month, according to the Los Angeles Times. “Of all those Gunness suspects,” the paper reported, “Mrs. Carlson appears to be ‘the hottest.’”[21]

  Confined to her bed in the prison ward of the County Hospital, Mrs. Carlson—whose condition had taken a marked turn for the worse—denied, with all the vigor she could muster, that she was Belle Gunness. Interviewed by Stahlman, she asserted that her maiden name was Johnson. Born in Sweden in 1867, she immigrated to America in 1892 at the age of twenty-five and for the next seventeen years worked as a housemaid for the Asa V. Cook family of Hartford, Connecticut. In 1907, she married a Hartford man, Charles Hanson. Just nine months later, her new husband drowned in the Agawam River near Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1909, she came to Los Angeles and soon afterward moved to Williams, Arizona, where, in 1911, she met and married Charles Carlson. Following his death in 1925, she moved back to Los Angeles. She insisted that she had never lived in Indiana, or indeed, ever set foot in the state.[22]