The Truth about Belle Gunness

by Lillian de la Torre

  “Now, Lamphere, there is some of your work. What do you think of your work now?”

  Trembling, pale, the unfortunate young man gulped down a lump in his throat and gasped, “Oh, God! Isn’t that awful!”

  He said nothing further. They put him back in his cell in a state close to collapse.

  A little later a tall apparition, black as midnight, materialized at the jail, arriving soft-footed in dingy felt slippers, an old black polka-dotted Mother Hubbard dress bulging over layers of petticoats, an old black shawl hanging to her heels, a big black umbrella, a bony wrinkled black face, sharp black eyes darting wickedly. She was known as Nigger Liz.

  Nigger Liz Smith was a town character long familiar to the police. She lived alone in a jungle of broken furniture and old newspapers crammed into a little shack, where she reputedly practiced voodoo and black magic. She had a summary way with trespassers. If she did not hurl the first hard object under her hand, she was likely to discharge firearms over their heads.

  Elizabeth Smith had not always been lean and lank. In her youthful days there wasn’t a handsomer black girl in Indiana. High stepping and bold, she had borne a daughter to a prominent lawyer of La Porte. When he got religion at a revival meeting and confessed, she taught him not to confess on a lady by horse-whipping him in the public square, or, say others, by dangling him from an upper window by the heels until he promised to make it up to her.

  Ray Lamphere and Nigger Liz were allies. When Ray was in trouble with the law over trespass, it was she that bailed him out, for there was unexpected wealth in the skirt-seam pocket of the musty old Mother Hubbard. This time no amount of money would bail him out, but they let her in to comfort him.

  Nigger Liz meant to do more than comfort Ray. She meant to give him an alibi. The law noted it, and the press published it:

  That man Lamphere came to my house Monday night, and asked for a room. He said he was sick, and had no money. “If I ever get any money, I’ll pay you,” he told me, and then he sat down a while. Then he woke up and said, “Are you going to let me have a room?” I told him I thought so, and he went over to Smith’s saloon and got something to eat.

  I had my alarm clock set for 4:30. and he turned it back to 3:30. I heard the alarm go off and went in to wake him up. He was snoring like a good fellow and I told him it was after 4 o’clock. He said, “My God, I ought to be over to Wheatbrook’s by this time,” and started out.

  This vivid picture of a man stupefied with drink failed to impress the law. Ray was bound over for the grand jury. It was the theory of the authorities that Mrs. Gunness and the children had perished in a fire that Ray had kindled out of spite.

  The town was abuzz with many other theories and speculations, Thoughts went to the surviving member of the household, the adopted daughter attending college in California. Nobody had Jennie Olson Gunness’ address. The authorities in Los Angeles were asked to locate her, but they didn’t. Joe Maxson said Jennie would arrive any day; Belle had told him she was fixing up the best bedroom for her return. Mrs. Gunness had told Frances Lapham that Jennie was expected soon—on her honeymoon.

  “Poor little Jennie,” said Mrs. Lapham, “she’ll be heartbroken. We’ll bring her right up here to stay with us.”

  But Jennie did not come. Since she was not mentioned in Belle’s will, maybe it didn’t matter.

  Theories were flying about the fire and its victims. Some thought that perhaps Mrs. Gunness, driven insane by the persecutions of Lamphere, had killed the children, fired the house, and committed suicide.

  Other people, pointed out that the bodies had been found under the debris, lying together on the cellar floor. Perhaps robbers had slain them all and piled them neatly before firing the house.

  The woman’s body had no head. Physicians were inclined to think that no amount of heat could make a skull vanish so utterly. Perhaps the robbers had carried off the head for the gold in Belle’s teeth.

  On Wednesday night the coroner opened his inquest, but he was not ready to find that Mrs. Gunness was dead. Until they found the head, how did they know it was Mrs. Gunness?

  The grand jury was due to meet on May 11. It would be difficult to indict Ray for murdering Mrs. Gunness if the coroner would not say she was dead. Smutzer hired Maxson and Hutson, Belle’s farm hand and her neighbor, and set them to digging over the cold ashes. The head had to be found.

  On Friday, after two days of alternate sweating by the law and cooling in his cell, Ray Lamphere sent for a minister, and talked to him a long time. The minister came away looking wise.

  “Lamphere will confess,” he told Ralph N. Smith. “Better arrest Nigger Liz before she gets away.”

  Nigger Liz said indignantly that she knew nothing about anything. Lamphere did not confess. He lounged in his cell dully thumbing a Bible or sleeping away the time on his hard pallet.

  Jennie’s married sister came down from Chicago looking for news of her. There was no news, and the sister went away again. The La Porte Argus took a dark view:

  Where is Miss Olson? Is her body yet to be uncovered? There are persons who believed that the young woman who is reported to be on her wedding tour met an awful fate in this house of horror!

  The rival paper, the La Porte Herald, was bound to take the opposite view from the Argus:

  Attempts to find Jennie Olson Gunness are still being made, for until she is found there are many persons who will persist in believing that she lies dead somewhere on the Gunness farm—in fact there are people in town who believe that every person that has disappeared in Indiana during the past ten years is buried on the Gunness farm.…

  Jennie did not turn up in the ashes. Neither did Belle’s head. A pistol turned up, and an unreasonable number of men’s watches, and some charred pieces of skin and some bones. The bones, according to rumor, were pronounced by experts to be bones from a body four weeks dead.

  This was the state of things on Monday, May 4. In the cold ashes of the farmhouse Maxson and Hutson were still drearily delving. At the county jail Ray Lamphere sat waiting, his mismatched clothes rumpled and his chin stubbled with five days’ beard.

  Sheriff Al Smutzer was at his desk when a man appeared before him. The man was small, stringy, and shabby, and he spoke English slowly, with a singing Norwegian accent. He was rumply and cindery from travel, but there was a native dignity in his grave blue eyes and firm mouth that transcended travel stains.

  “I am Asle Helgelien,” he told Sheriff Smutzer. “I have come here from Mansfield, South Dakota, to look for my brother Andrew. This is Andrew.”

  Sheriff Smutzer looked at a cabinet photo of a broad, pleasant face crowned with straight sandy hair, the light eyes looking up and out at the world with an innocent expression.

  “Andrew left home on January second,” Asle went on. “He said he would return soon, in about a week. After ten days had passed without a word from him I began to worry about him.

  “I had heard that there was a rich widow in Indiana who wanted a Norwegian husband. She would advertise for one in the Norwegian paper. The hired men joked with one another about this. When my brother had been gone about two months, the hired man came to me one day with a bundle of love letters he had found. There were seventy in all. They came from La Porte and they were signed Bella Gunness. I read them carefully.”

  From the letters Asle had learned for the first time that his brother had been contemplating matrimony. In the summer of 1906 Andrew’s eye had been caught by a lonely-hearts ad in the Norwegian paper. He had replied, enclosing his picture, and the choice, in an unlucky day, fell upon him. Mrs. Gunness answered in a letter so modest, earthy, and warm that the bluff rancher was enchanted:

  Sept. 2, 1906

  Mr. Andrew K. Helgelien

  Dear Friend:

  Many thousand thanks for both your letter and photograph card. I have read the letter many times and studied the picture much also. I have now so much confidence and interest in our correspondence, especially when I know tha
t you are such an understanding and good Norwegian man. I long so to know you better, but I will try to wait with patience until you get ready up there. I think it will be best that you get everything ready before you come, so you will not have to go back, as it is so far and it probably will be so late in the fall. When you once get here I know I will not be alone again. How pleasant it will be to sit and talk Norwegian about everything. Don’t you think so, too?

  I would enjoy seeing all your beautiful horses, as I am much interested in horses and other critters. Could you not bring with you a pretty young driving horse? It would give us so much pleasure. I have only three horses, which is enough for us, but one could always use two more.

  In regard to your critters, you could take them with you to Chicago if you cannot sell them up there, and the same with the horses. If you will hire a railroad car you can take all of them that you want with you. I am quite sure you can get very good prices in Chicago. If you thought it would be too lonesome to stay there alone until you sold out, and have no other company, I could come to you and stay with you until you were through. I am well known around there, because we lived there for a while. Both of us could then look around a little.

  When you are all through and come here, then we must have some good cooking; but take everything with you and say goodbye to Dakota, so you can be here with us.

  Then you will see how happy we will be, but do not tell a word to anybody up there before you go, but only tell them after you have been here a while.

  You must pardon me for not writing before, but we have been so busy picking apples and pears to send to market. We are well paid for such, as we are so near Chicago.

  Yes, I will try and get all the fall work done, just so that when you get ready up there you will not have to return again, as it will be altogether too lonesome. I have now thrown away all the other answers I got and keep all yours in a secret place by themselves. I will show them all to you when you come here, as I prize them so highly; but I prize the writer more highly, and when I get to know you I will set the writer above all others, as such a man I have not found among the Norwegians in America.

  There is altogether too much cunning and humbug in this land. Honesty, sincerity, and righteousness last the longest. Where they are found on both sides, then everything will be all right.

  I have told you of everything as it really is, and this you will find when you come. You can be sure that you are heartily welcome. Well, I must close for this time and go and milk. Hope soon to hear from you.

  From your friend,

  BELLA GUNNESS

  Mrs. Gunness had proved herself a marathon letter-writer. Andrew Helgelien was in no tearing hurry to leave South Dakota. Lest he go off the boil, Belle wrote him a long letter every week. She kept it up for sixteen months.

  Her themes did not vary much. She wrote of her love for the critters, wishing she could see his little twin calves, and urging him to bring along his favorite black cat. She was solicitous for his welfare:

  But, my dear, you have been sick and all alone! You do not know how badly it makes me feel not to be with you. Make yourself a good hot punch and put on some good warm underclothes and keep good and warm all the time.

  Go and buy a big fur coat which is so nice and warm and you will get good use of it. Put good warm shoes and stockings on so you will not get cold on your feet. I will begin to knit you a good pair of stockings till you come, and later I will knit you several pair.

  She enclosed a four-leaf clover to bring him luck.

  As Christmas approached, Mrs. Gunness made the lonely rancher’s mouth water with promises of good Norwegian codfish, waffles, cream puddings, and many other goodies. “What pleasure would it be for me to prepare all these things for Christmas if I did not have a good friend to make them for?” She was much disappointed when he did not come.

  The wily widow painted flattering portraits of herself, and played on Andrew’s nostalgia for things Norwegian:

  I have passed through much in this life, but I have at any rate taken good care of my womanliness, which has been given to woman by God and therefore it is the best we own. I think that a man with a heart like yours could be trusted with all.

  Now, my dear, you must surely advise me just when you leave, and then I may have the permission to be the first one to welcome you to La Porte and I will be at the depot with my gray pony. I am a rather stout woman, and will have a nice buggy with a checked lap robe.

  I am a genuine Norwegian with brown Norwegian hair and blue eyes. You must remember that you will get a greeting that comes from the heart. But come alone; do not take anyone from up there with you before we have become a little acquainted.

  Even if my letters are a little simple and foolish, they are to you, and I do not pretend to be high-toned. I write just what I mean, as I am a genuine Norwegian woman who does not bother herself much about all these fine Americans.

  Over and over again, Andrew’s fiancée urged him to sell out everything and bring the cash to La Porte.

  Let things go cheaper if you get cash for them. Do not send any cash money through the bank. Banks cannot be trusted nowadays. Change all the cash you have into paper bills, largest denomination you can get, and sew them real good and fast on the inside of your underwear. Be careful and sew it real good, and be sure do not tell any one of it, not even to your nearest relative. Let this only be a secret between us two and no one else. Probably we will have many other secrets, do you not think so?

  Confident Andrew may have thought that his fiancée’s advice was a little simple and foolish. He did not follow any of it. He did not sell out, he did not draw his money out of the bank to sew in his underwear, he did not even plan to stay. He told his brother his trip would be short. The only admonition that seemed to him worth following was the advice to get a big fur coat that is so nice and warm. In it he left South Dakota on January 1, 1908, and he did not return.

  When Asle Helgelien had pondered the widow’s letters to his vanished brother, he told Sheriff Smutzer, he became very uneasy. He wrote to Mrs. Gunness, and was far from satisfied with her replies. Then he learned that Andrew had drawn all his money through a La Porte bank, and that Mrs. Gunness had been at his elbow when he did so. Day by day Asle became more convinced that there was something very wrong.

  “Finally, Mr. Smutzer, I received from the bank cashier newspaper clippings about the burning of the Gunness house. I came at once. I am convinced that my brother never left La Porte.”

  The Sheriff had reasons for thinking otherwise. He gave Asle a polite brush-off. To make up for it, he put Asle into his snappy red runabout and took him out to Swan Nicholson’s to stay. Swan Nicholson was a fellow Norwegian, and lived right opposite the Gunness farm.

  Asle could not rest. He walked up the hill to the Gunness farm. There were Hutson and Maxson, drearily turning over the rubble. Asle took a shovel and pitched in to help. As they dug they talked. Asle asked about Andrew.

  Both men had heard talk of “the big Swede.”

  “Mrs. Gunnes said,” Hutson told him, “that Ray Lamphere was jealous of the man from the West, and would like to get at him.”

  They had nothing more to contribute about Andrew. After a while Asle stopped digging and went back to the Nicholsons’, still in the dark.

  The next day something pulled him back again. He walked up the road on a raw gray spring morning.

  Asle walked all over the farm, thinking. In front of the shed at the back the apple trees were budding pink. The outbuildings swung in a half circle around the farmyard. Behind them the land dipped suddenly to a reedy swamp green with spring. The raw earth of a fenced enclosure at the top of the rise was softened by the bloom of peach and pear trees beyond. Chickens scratched in the damp ground.

  Asle came around by the razed kitchen, where the contorted kitchen stove and the pump on its charred pipe alone remained standing. In the basement among cinders Hutson and Maxson were still digging for the missing head of Mrs. Gunness
.

  Asle was casting about in his mind for the right question to ask. He could not rest until he knew. Across the road, Fishtrap Lake gleamed through pale-green budding leaves.

  “How deep is the lake?”

  “Not very deep.”

  “Last winter, when my brother went missing, were there any holes in the ice?”

  The two men shook their heads. Asle turned to go.

  He got as far as the road, and something stopped his feet. He was not satisfied. He went back to the ruins and asked one more question.

  “Mr. Maxson, was there any hole dug around here, or any dirt dug up, since January?”

  “Yes,” said Maxson. “The rubbish hole at the back. I filled it up in March.”

  “Did you dig the hole?”

  “No. Mrs. Gunness had it dug by somebody else to put trash in. She raked up the place, picking up old cans, old shoes and stuff, and putting them in the wheel barrow. I wheeled the loads back and dumped them in. Then I covered it up with dirt.”

  “Show me.”

  Maxson led the way to the back of the lot, where the peach trees were. In the fenced enclosure he pointed out a spot in the fence corner.

  “Dig!” said Asle.

  The three men took shovels and attacked the spongy naked ground. They had not been digging long before an unnatural smell began to assail their nostrils.

  “Fish cans,” said Maxson. “The old woman buried a lot of fish cans.”

  But it was not fish cans. In a little while the spades struck something covered over with some old oilcloth and a gunny sack. The stench was stronger. The diggers lifted off the covering, and saw a human arm.

  “Run for the Sheriff!” said Asle.

  When the Sheriff came, they lifted from the earth, livid and rotten, the remains of what had been a man. Asle looked at the pulpy sightless eyes and fixed mirthless grin of a face he knew.

  “That’s my brother!” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “When you have been with your brother every day for fifteen years,” said Asle, dry-eyed, “you know him.”