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

by Harold Schechter

  Authorities were unconvinced. “Mrs. Gunness dropped from sight in 1908,” Stahlman said, “and with Sheriff McDonald of La Porte and the authorities in Connecticut and Massachusetts we shall investigate those seventeen years she says she spent in the employ of the Cook family.”

  In La Porte—where, as newspapers reported, the populace had been whipped into a state of high excitement by the possibility that the ogress had finally been found[23]—Sheriff Tom McDonald expressed his doubts about the dying woman’s denials. “If Mrs. Carlson was not Mrs. Gunness, the case is the strangest one could imagine because so many details dovetail,” he declared. “The ages, the nationalities, and many of the racial features, the fact that each woman had three children, two girls and a boy, with ages corresponding and, from pictures, with similar features, these things are responsible for my strong feeling that Mrs. Carlson may be Mrs. Gunness.”[24]

  Besides sending Stahlman photographs and a detailed physical description of Belle, McDonald promptly contacted two men, former residents of La Porte, currently living in the Los Angeles area: John “Dennis” Daly, a seventy-year-old boilermaker, a neighbor of Belle’s between 1902 and 1908 “who had met and talked with her hundreds of times,” and John A. Yorkey, a onetime La Porte saloonkeeper who had often seen her around town. On Thursday, May 7, 1931, bearing introductory telegrams from Sheriff McDonald, Daly and Yorkey appeared in Stahlman’s office and were immediately taken to view Esther Carlson in the hope that they could settle the question of her true identity.

  By then, however, Esther Carlson was dead. She succumbed to her illness on Wednesday, May 6, a week after Anna Erickson went on trial for August Lindstrom’s murder.[25] Learning from doctors that Mrs. Carlson had only a few hours to live, Stahlman had rushed to her bedside, accompanied by Anna Erickson’s defense attorney, Joseph Marchetti. Hoping that, at the last, Carlson would clear up the mystery of August Lindstrom’s death, Stahlman bent close to the semiconscious woman’s ear and asked if she had poisoned Lindstrom. A barely audible sound—variously described as a mumble, sigh, and croak—escaped her lips. Stahlman thought it sounded like “Yes.”

  “You admit you gave him arsenic?” he asked. She answered with the same muffled sound.

  Satisfied that Carlson had made a deathbed confession, Stahlman stepped aside and Marchetti took his place.

  “Mrs. Carlson,” the lawyer asked, “you mean you did not kill Mr. Lindstrom, don’t you?”

  When she emitted the very same sound, Stahlman, letting out a sigh of his own, was forced to concede that the dying woman had no idea what she was being asked.

  A few hours later, as newspapers reported, “death sealed her lips forever.” Her body was removed to the county morgue to await transport to Hemet for burial.

  Driven to the morgue by Stahlman, Dennis Daly and John Yorkey each spent about forty minutes viewing the corpse. Afterward, speaking to reporters, Daly declared that he was positive that the dead woman was Belle Gunness. “I haven’t the slightest doubt about it,” he said. “She had a peculiar twist to her mouth that was very noticeable. Her eyes are the same color. Her hair, although faded by age, is the same general color and texture. The cheekbones are high, too. The height of the woman is the same. The last time I saw Mrs. Gunness she was rather heavy, but the tuberculosis could have worn the body down through the years.”[26]

  John Yorkey was equally emphatic in his identification. On Monday, May 11—the same day that Esther Carlson was laid to rest in Valley Cemetery beside her second husband, Charles—Yorkey sent a letter to Wirt Worden. “I am sorry I did not go and see her while alive,” he wrote, “but you can bet all you got that was Belle Gunness of the old murder farm.”[27]

  43.

  THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY

  Wirt Worden died of a heart attack in January 1943 at the age of sixty-nine. For the last eight years of his life, he had been a judge in the La Porte Circuit Court and had played a small part in the notorious case of D. C. Stephenson, former grand dragon of the Indiana branch of the Ku Klux Klan, whose conviction for the murder of a young woman, Madge Oberholtzer, dealt a death blow to the Klan’s growing political influence in the state. In recalling Worden’s accomplishments, however, newspaper obituaries gave greatest prominence to his role in the Gunness case and his successful defense of Ray Lamphere on the murder charge.[1]

  Worden never abandoned his belief that Belle had escaped, though whether he accepted John Yorkey’s confident assertion is unknown. In any event, another eighty years would pass before proof emerged that Yorkey was wrong. In 2014, Knut Erik Jensen, a native of Selbu, Norway—Belle’s birthplace—embarked on a research mission to settle the question of Esther Carlson’s true identity. After consulting census books, cemetery records, city directories, and various other documents, he definitively established that the story the dying Carlson told about her background was true in every detail. She was not Belle Gunness.[2]

  In my previous book, Man-Eater—about the nineteenth-century Colorado cannibal and convicted mass murderer Alfred Packer, whose guilt or innocence remains a matter of heated dispute—I referred to the innate human need for what psychologist Arie Kruglanski was the first to label “cognitive closure,” which he defined as “the individual’s need for a firm answer to a question and aversion to ambiguity.”[3] The sheer popularity of detective stories, a genre first brought to life in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” is testimony to the power of this basic psychological hunger, our deep-seated longing to arrive at—or be provided with—tidy solutions to vexing puzzles.

  In contrast, of course, to the seemingly impossible riddles neatly unraveled by the ratiocinative genius of a C. Auguste Dupin or a Sherlock Holmes or a Hercule Poirot, real life often presents us with criminal mysteries that stubbornly, even maddeningly, resist solution. Foremost among these is the identity of Jack the Ripper, and the regular appearance of books promising the long-sought revelation suggests just how difficult it is for us to tolerate the unknowable. Other cases shrouded in uncertainty that continue to elicit purported solutions include those of Lizzie Borden, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, and most recently, the JonBenét Ramsey murder.

  Though less well known nowadays than these others, the Gunness case continues to attract the fascinated attention of crime buffs. In 2008, for example, a pair of forensic anthropologists, after exhuming the remains from Chicago’s Forest Home Cemetery, employed DNA analysis in an attempt to determine if the headless body was that of Mrs. Gunness. The results were “inconclusive.”[4] When I embarked on this project, I fantasized that my own research might produce a solution of the century-old mystery. At one point, I believed I had stumbled on an exciting lead: a newspaper clipping revealing that Gunness had sometimes placed her matrimonial advertisements under the pseudonym “Belle Hinckley.”[5] Further digging led to the discovery that a woman by that name was residing in Wisconsin in 1915. I thought I might be on to something, but my excited hopes were quickly dashed when it turned out that there was absolutely no connection between the two Belles.

  My next hope was that, by the time I finished writing my book, I would arrive at some relatively firm conclusion about precisely what happened on the night of the Gunness fire. To my chagrin, I must now confess to failure even on that far more modest score. After several years of being deeply immersed in every detail of the Gunness case, I am unable to venture even an informed opinion on the matter.

  To be sure, Lamphere’s reported confession to the Reverend Schell strikes me as highly implausible. Beyond that, however, various possibilities seem equally credible to me: that Belle staged her own death and escaped, that she died in a fire deliberately set by Ray, or that she immolated herself and her children in a final act of suicidal desperation. An editorial published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer following the horrific discoveries on the murder farm has proved to be prescient: �
�The La Porte case may always remain one of the most puzzling things in the annals of crime.”[6] I trust that, at the very least, my reconstruction of the crime will allow readers to arrive at their own opinions about the mystery of Belle Gunness’s ultimate fate.

  Of course, there is a deeper mystery at work here. What kind of woman—what kind of person—could commit the kind of atrocities perpetrated by Belle Gunness? To be sure, other female psychopaths have killed at least as many victims. Just seven years before the Gunness horrors came to light, “Jolly” Jane Toppan, a respected and popular New England nurse, confessed to thirty-one murders, making her America’s most prolific serial murderer before John Wayne Gacy. Earlier women poisoners like Lydia Sherman and Sarah Jane Robinson—“American Borgias,” as they were called—subjected husbands, siblings, and their own children to slow, agonizing deaths by arsenic.

  What distinguished Belle from her homicidal predecessors, however—indeed what makes her a unique figure in the annals of female criminality, at least in our nation—is the butchery she performed on her victims, the desecration of their corpses, hacked to pieces and dumped in the muck of her hog lot. Reducing other people to subhuman status is the very essence of evil, and students of her crimes have struggled to account for its origins in Belle: the vicious assault she ostensibly suffered in adolescence that ignited her hatred of men; the pathological greed that transformed her into a “Bluebeard with a profit motive.”[7] These and other theories clearly cannot begin to explain evil on the scale of the Gunness horrors, confronting us with a mystery far more profound than the question of whether she survived the fire: what the Bible calls “the mystery of iniquity.”

  I leave the last words on the subject to the editor of the La Porte Weekly Herald, who wrote them on the day after the Lamphere verdict: “The mystery that hangs about the murderous operations of Mrs. Gunness is likely to never be fully dispelled . . . in conception and brutality of execution, the crimes of Mrs. Gunness are unparalleled. She is entitled to be known to future generations as the arch fiend of the twentieth century.”[8]

  NOTES

  PROLOGUE

  1. Charles Perrault, The Complete Fairy Tales in Verse and Prose (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002), p. 78.

  2. Francis Parkman, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1908), pp. 211–14.

  3. Jasper Packard, History of La Porte County, Indiana, and Its Townships, Towns and Cities (La Porte, IN: S. E. Taylor & Company, 1870), p. 36.

  4. Ibid., p. 37.

  5. Charles C. Chapman, History of La Porte County, Indiana; Together with Sketches of Its Cities, Villages, and Townships, Educational, Religious, Civil, Military, and Political History; Portraits of Prominent Persons and Biographies of Representative Citizens (Chicago: Chas. C. Chapman & Co., 1880), p. 616.

  6. Rev. E. D. Daniels, A Twentieth Century History and Biographical Record of La Porte County, Indiana (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1904), p. 126.

  7. Packard, pp. 443–58.

  8. Daniels, p. 132.

  9. Daniels, pp. 237, 239, 241, 242, 258, and 263.

  10. Capsule biographies of these and other prominent La Porteans can be found in a bound volume at the La Porte County Historical Society.

  11. Packard, pp. 47 and 72.

  12. Chapman, pp. 514–15.

  13. Packard, p. 73.

  14. Chapman, p. 517.

  15. Fort Wayne Daily News, December 1, 1902, pp. 1 and 2, and December 4, 1902, p. 1.

  16. Fort Wayne Daily News, December 18, 1902, p. 2.

  17. La Porte Weekly Herald, May 14, 1908, p. 2.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1. Donald L. Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 141.

  2. Theodore Dreiser, Newspaper Days (New York: Horace Liveright, 1922), p. 210.

  3. Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago, Volume III: The Rise of a Modern City, 1871–1893 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), p. 22.

  4. Harold M. Mayer and Richard C. Wade, Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 22.

  5. See Theodore C. Blegen, Norwegian Migration to America: The American Transition (Northfield, MN: The Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1940), p. 481, and Odd S. Lovoll, A Century of Urban Life: The Norwegians in Chicago before 1930 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 15 and 77.

  6. Lovoll, p. 65.

  7. A. T. Andreas, History of Chicago. From the Earliest Period to the Present Time. In Three Volumes. Volume II—From 1857 until the Fire of 1871 (Chicago: The A. T. Andreas Company, 1886), p. 444. As it happened, the coroner’s jury—though concluding that “some wicked boys” were “accessory to the death” of little Knud—found no definitive evidence that the victim had been “purposely drowned” for his refusal to steal. The death was ruled accidental, and the plan for a monument abandoned.

  8. See A. E. Strand, A History of the Norwegians of Illinois: A Concise Record of the Struggles and Achievements of the Early Settlers together with a Narrative of what is now being done by the Norwegian-Americans of Illinois in the Development of Their Adopted Country (Chicago: John Anderson Publishing Company, 1905), p. 217; Blegen, p. 434; and Lovoll, pp. 20–21, 54, and 93.

  9. Lovoll, p. 82; Strand, p. 245.

  10. Jean Skogerboe Hansen, “Skandinaven and the John Anderson Publishing Company,” Norwegian-American Studies, Vol. 28 (1979), pp. 35–68.

  11. Strand, p. 228 and 231–33; Lovoll, pp. 5, 130–31, 184, and 186.

  12. Strand, p. 180. At the time, Oslo was still known as Christiana.

  13. Irving Cutler, Chicago: Metropolis of the Mid-Continent (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), p. 74; Ann Durkin Keating, Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs: A Historical Guide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 174.

  14. Pierce, p. 31. To be more precise, the percentage of arrests for Norwegians was 1.09 in 1880 and 1.26 in 1890. By way of comparison, the percentages for Germans were 11.84 in 1880 and 11.07 in 1890; for the Irish, 17.62 in 1880 and 10.33 in 1890.

  15. According to genealogical records, Paul and Berit’s children were Marit Paulsdatter Størset, Peder Moen, Ole Paulsen, Olina Paulsdatter Størset (later Nellie Larson), Marit Leangvollen, Brynhild Paulsdatter Størset (the future Belle Gunness), and “one other,” name unknown. See http://www.geni.com/people/Belle-Gunness/6000000010140315276.

  16. Kjell Haarstad, letter to Janet Langlois, March 29, 1976, on file at the La Porte County Historical Society. See also Janet Langlois, Belle Gunness: The Lady Bluebeard (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 2–4.

  17. M. S. Emery, Norway Through the Stereoscope: A Journey Through the Land of the Vikings (New York: Underwood and Underwood, 1907), pp. 197–98.

  18. See Haarstad letter; Langlois, p. 2.

  19. See Haarstad letter.

  20. Langlois, p. 3; Emery, p. 97.

  21. See Haarstad letter. Quoted in Langlois, p. 2.

  22. See, for example, Sylvia Perrini, She Devils of the USA: Women Serial Killers (Goldmineguides.com, 2013), p. 58, and Ilene Ingbritson Wilson, Murder in My Family (Bloomington, IN: Trafford Publishing, 2004), p. 9.

  23. Langlois, p. 3.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. Highly detailed information on the transatlantic crossing is available on the website Norway-Heritage: Hands Across the Sea, www.norwayheritage.com.

  2. Ibid.; Odd S. Lovoll, “‘For People Who Are Not in a Hurry’: The Danish Thingvalla Line and the Transportation of Scandinavian Emigrants,” Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Fall 1993), pp. 48–67.

  3. All leg
al documents from this period show her name as Bella, including her marriage license to Mads Sorenson and the 1898 lawsuit she and Mads filed against the Yukon Mining & Trading Co. (see below, Note 23). Also see the article “Mrs. Gunness Changed Name,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 17, 1908, p. 5.

  4. Odd S. Lovoll, A Century of Urban Life: The Norwegians in Chicago before 1930 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 155.

  5. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (New York: Bantam Books, 1958), pp. 17–18.

  6. Chicago Examiner, May 7, 1908, p. 2.

  7. Chicago Tribune, May 7, 1908, p. 1.

  8. Most sources say Mads worked as a department store watchman (or detective). Others, however, describe him as a floor manager. See, for example, Indianapolis News, May 12, 1908, p. 8.

  9. Marriage License of Anthon [sic] Sorenson and Bella Peterson, Illinois Regional Archives Depository, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago. For unexplained reasons, the certificate shows Bella’s age as twenty-nine and Mads’s age as thirty-four. For the Rev. Torgersen’s obituary, see “Cupid’s Noted Aid Dead,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 12, 1905, p. 8.

  10. Langlois, p. 4.

  11. La Porte Argus-Bulletin, May 7, 1908, p. 1.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Chicago Daily Journal, May 8, 1908, p. 1.

  14. Langlois, p. 77.

  15. Chicago Examiner, May 6, 1908, p. 2.