The Truth about Belle Gunness

by Lillian de la Torre

  When Koch, the photographer, saw the dead wagon pulling out of Austin Cutler’s mortuary, he grabbed his camera, jumped on his bicycle, and followed. It led him to Belle Gunness’ hog lot.

  In the near corner of the fence a raw hole gaped in the dead earth. At the far corner, forty feet farther off, stood the Sheriff in his roughneck sweater. With him was the coroner, Dr. Charles Mack, impressive with his snowy beard and his professional black broadcloth overcoat. They were directing further digging operations. Pressed against the wire fence, a curious crowd looked on. A drizzling rain was falling.

  Andrew Helgelien was aboveground, a thing of horror. He had been put into the earth in pieces. Somebody had taken him apart very neatly and efficiently. With knife and saw the legs had been smoothly and cleanly cut off halfway up the thigh, as a butcher begins to slice a veal for cutlets. The arms had been removed with equal neatness, the joints being separated as if by a surgeon. Bits of the knitted undershirt were still on the severed left arm. The once white cloth was stained with earth but not with blood. How had the murderer sliced and sawed and shed no blood? Had the victim been bled like meat at the slaughterhouse?

  The hideous head was off. It had been removed by sawing through the sixth or seventh vertebra. The trunk was nude, and so perfectly preserved inside that experts were astonished. The parts were neatly packaged in burlap sacks.

  “There’s one of my grain sacks!” cried the dealer with whom Mrs. Gunness had traded.

  Andrew Helgelien had fought for his life. Across his left wrist, as if he had lifted it to ward off a slashing blow, were two deep cuts laying it open to the bone. Another savage blow had chopped off the first joints of every finger of his right hand. In a death grip the mutilated hand held a tuft of short brown curly hair torn from the head of his murderer.

  It seemed as if Andrew had come back with revenge in his dead and mangled hand. But somehow that tuft of hair never told its story. It was not Belle’s hair. Soon they had to admit it was not Ray’s hair, either. Whose was it? The law never established the answer.

  There was a little knot of starers watching the excavation proceedings in the fence corner. Koch wondered why the Sheriff had chosen that particular spot to dig, and what he expected to find. What he was finding was a mess of rubbish—dead leaves, tin cans, crockery fragments, a toy stove, a broken lamp, the bones of a cow.

  Underneath the rubbish, about four feet down, was a litter of human bones. They lifted them out and set up a temporary morgue in the buggy shed under the apple blossoms. When they had them sorted out, they found they had the bare bones of four people.

  The body on top lay on the remains of an excelsior-filled mattress. It needed only a glance at the long blonde hair to know that the long-departed Jennie had come home. That day, May 5, was her eighteenth birthday.

  Of the other three bodies, one was a man with a tangled red waterfall mustache curling into the fleshless mouth. There was another man, and the fourth body was that of a woman. They had all been taken apart and packaged like Andrew.

  Five bodies! It was enough for one day. The diggers and starers went home shocked and nauseated. Soberly Mr. Hutson told his little daughters what had become of their playmate Jennie. There was a rope around the pitiful bones, he said, when he came upon them in the earth, and a dishpan covered the head with the long blonde hair.

  It fell to the young electrician, Emil Greening’s rival, to identify the gruesome remains of the pretty little girl he had loved. He arranged the loosened teeth in order on the coroner’s desk, and looked at them dry-eyed.

  “That’s Jennie,” he said calmly.

  “Five bodies!” gasped Ray Lamphere. “Five bodies! That woman! I knew she was bad, but this is awful!”

  He chewed tobacco nervously as reporters, watching him all the time, imparted the hideous details.

  “I always suspected that she killed Helgelien,” he said, “and now I am sure of it. As for the others, I don’t know anything beyond what I suspect. Things that I know look different to me now, and it may be that things I noticed were more serious than I thought they were.”

  “What, for instance?”

  “Well, once she wanted me to buy some Rough on Rats, and another time she wanted chloroform. I wouldn’t get them for her,” he added hastily.

  “What other ‘things’ did you notice?” pressed the reporters.

  “Well, about a year ago there was a man with a black mustache who came to the farm, and Mrs. Gunness told me he was a friend of Jennie’s. I think she said he was her sweetheart. He had a big trunk with him, and a long while after he went away the trunk was at the house, and used to stand upstairs. I saw some clothes in it that the man used to wear.”

  “What about Andrew Helgelien?”

  “That’s enough,” said the Sheriff.

  “Look here,” said Lamphere over his shoulder as he was moved off, “I don’t know anything about that, and I don’t know anything about the fire, except what I told a long time ago. She used to tell me not to talk to Helgelien, and one time when she found us together in the sitting room she drove me out of the house. She said she wanted to get some money out of him, and I shouldn’t spoil the game. We got along all right before that, but after Helgelien came she had no use for me. The big revolver they found was one she used to carry all the time, and I was afraid of her.”

  News of the discoveries in the hog lot spread like wildfire.

  In La Porte, the shock was dizzying. Mrs. Lapham cried for a week. She had been fond of Belle, and she couldn’t reconcile herself to the awfulness of the crimes hidden from sight in the hog lot. The Siegels thought of Belle’s kindness when they were burned out, and found the news of the Gunness charnel house almost incredible.

  Emil Greening’s mother began to think Emil had had a narrow escape. She told reporters:

  “Emil told me that he woke up one night and found Mrs. Gunness trying the lock on his door. It was thundering and lightning, and Emil was afraid that somebody was trying to rob the house. He got out of bed and opened the door. Mrs. Gunness was walking up and down. Emil said, ‘Good Heavens, Mrs. Gunness, why don’t you go to bed?’ She told him that it was noisy and that she was restless and thought she would come around and see that he was all right before she went back to bed.”

  Since Emil had nothing but youth and vigor, it is probable that Mrs. Gunness had other things than murder on her mind that night; but Emil was protected by a double charm, his locked door and his absorption in Jennie.

  Way out West, Emil had completely forgotten that incident; but he was remembering other odd episodes. On one occasion, Belle had sent him twelve miles over the road to Michigan City to fetch a horse. There was no horse there. Was it at this time that one of her visitors passed from the scene?

  The horse, Belle said, was coming from her cousin Mr. Moo. Emil remembered Mr. Moo. He arrived at the farm just before Christmas, 1906, about the time Jennie went. Emil last saw Mr. Moo getting into the buggy with his bag; but still …

  All of La Porte was agog wondering about Mr. Moo, and about all the other vanishing suitors and absconding farm hands. The bank remembered Mr. Moo. On the day after Christmas, with Belle at his elbow, he had drawn $1,100 in cash. The press dubbed Mr. Moo “the Christmas papa.” Where was Mr. Moo now?

  Where, added the savings bank, was Ole Budsberg? A pleasant-faced, solid old fellow, Mr. Budsberg had drawn $1,800 on April 6, 1907. He was escorted by Mrs. Gunness. Mr. Budsberg had not been seen since. His sons had written to ask what had become of him, and the bank cashier called on Mrs. Gunness to inquire. Mrs. Gunness kept him outside, and parleyed sharply through the window. She said Ole Budsberg had gone to Oregon.

  “Do they think I made away with him too?” she snapped angrily.

  Now people were thinking just that; and they were thinking the same about the vanishing farm hands.

  “Where is Olaf Lindboe?” asked Swan Nicholson. “He was fresh from Norway, about thirty years old, and a fine-looking young
fellow. She was very kind to him—so kind that he got the notion of marrying her. Olaf began to look on himself as the master of the farm, but after a little while I could see that Mrs. Gunness was tired of him.”

  “The last time I saw Olaf,” added another Norwegian neighbor, Chris Christofferson, “was in the spring of 1904. He was moving the old privy off its hole. Next time I visited the farm, there was Mrs. Gunness on a riding plow, finishing the plowing. She complained that Olaf had left her in the lurch and gone off to St. Louis to see the fair.”

  “Where is Henry Gurholt?” added Chris. “I was calling at the farm when Gurholt arrived, in the spring of 1905. I helped him carry his trunk upstairs. He was pleased that Mrs. Gunness gave him such a nice room. ‘Oh, ja,’ she said, ‘I always like to have it neat and nice for a person who works for me.’ Then suddenly in August she came and asked me to help stack oats, because Henry had left her flat in the middle of oat-cutting to go off with a horse trader. He left his fur coat behind. I have often seen her wearing it.

  “The next farm hand disappeared suddenly, too,” concluded Chris, “so suddenly that he left his horse and buggy behind him. What became of all these men?”

  “There was a young boy at the farm last summer,” put in Emil Palm, the meat dealer. “Mrs. Gunness came to the store with him several times. Suddenly he stopped coming. One time I asked her what had become of the boy, and she looked up at a piece of meat and remarked what a lovely cut it would make!”

  MRS. GUNNESS HAD PRIVATE

  GRAVE YARD AND FURNISHED

  HER OWN VICTIMS THEREFOR!

  From coast to coast the press seized upon the macabre exploits of Mrs. Gunness with glee, and big-time newspapermen from all over converged on La Porte.

  They arrived in a hurry, ill provided with hastily snatched baggage. Ralph Waldo Emerson (not the essayist) came from Boston with a canvas carryall containing one Prince Albert coat and a soiled stick-up collar. Arthur James Pegler of the Chicago American did some famous reporting on forty-two handkerchiefs and a box of pills. Seven Chicago papers had a total of twenty-two crack reporters on the ground. Others arrived from New York, St. Louis, Detroit. There were thirty-five in all.

  This unruly crowd set up headquarters at the Hotel Teegarden and proceeded to turn night into day, pulling elaborate spoofs and real scoops on one another and eternally jockeying for position at the wires. In ten days they put out an estimated million words of sensational copy. When not at the wires, they haunted the hog lot to see what horrifying find would be turned up next.

  Genial Sheriff Smutzer was the man of the hour. Reporters pressed about him as he plied a shovel with a will, like any common laborer, or pitchforked a find of bones into proper anatomical order on the ground. The competent official was equipped to cope with bones, they noted, having in the past plied the allied trades of the butcher and the undertaker.

  As digging progressed, Smutzer was finding more bones to cope with. The diggers would probe the earth of the hog lot with a long rod. If the earth was loose and smelled bad, they dug.

  On May 6 they found three more soft spots bunched up close to Jennie’s grave in the back corner of the hog lot.

  From the first hole they took the skeleton of a man with strong young teeth and blond hair. A three-inch gash in the skull spoke of the ax blow that killed him. By the stench, they concluded that he had been tumbled into an old privy vault. Olaf Lindboe had come back.

  The second soft spot was against the back fence. In it, mixed with rubbish, lay the bones of three dead men and the skulls of two of them. The skulls wore short dark hair, and one face was bearded. The clean-shaven face was probably Henry Gurholt’s.

  All the bodies had been dissected and packaged the same way.

  All day Thursday, while the rain fell in torrents, they dug in vain. On Friday they opened up another of Belle’s middens. It contained a woman’s shoes, a purse frame, a right-side truss, a rotted box, and the bones of a youth. He had his first wisdom tooth just appearing, and not another tooth in his upper jaw.

  “I digged that hole,” said Brogiski, the Polish handyman. “I digged it for trash last summer.”

  Emil Palm’s missing boy seemed to have been found.

  “I digged that hole, too,” said Brogiski, pointing at the hole in the fence corner, from which they had taken Jennie and three other bodies. “I digged that one last year, when first I come to work for the summer.”

  Then where had Belle stored the pieces of Jennie while she waited for the thaw? Sensation-mongers got up a story about a secret soundproof butchery vault; but there was no such thing on the farm. Other people remembered Belle’s odd habit of keeping her milk cans in the kitchen instead of in the cold cellar. Jennie—and who else?—must have been in the cold cellar.

  Such speculations set the public agog. For a while they swapped theories. Had the ten bodies perhaps been shipped in from Chicago? Was the private graveyard a hiding place for limbs scattered in railroad wrecks? Or for a doctor’s failures?

  It was soon made plain, however, that at least half of them had arrived on their own two feet and been processed at the farm.

  On Thursday, two young Wisconsin farmers named Budsberg arrived in La Porte. They were taken out to the buggy-shed morgue. In the musty half dark they looked at the skull with the tawny waterfall mustache, and they looked at each other, and they nodded. They had found their father.

  Ole Budsberg, they said, read the ads in the Norwegian paper. In March, 1907, he took a trip down to La Porte to look things over. He liked it fine. He came back home to Iola, Wisconsin, sold everything for cash, bought some seed potatoes, and went back to La Porte. That was the last they heard from him. A little later a letter came for Mr. Budsberg from Mrs. Gunness, saying that she hoped he was not offended because she refused him, and trusting he would get well settled out West. The rest was silence.

  Subsequently three oilier Norwegians came to town, the brothers of Olaf Lindboe, Henry Gurholt, and John Moo. They could not be entirely sure about the disarticulated bones, but they were sure of what had happened to their brothers.

  Moo’s brother looked at the watch that Belle had given to Ray and said, “Now I know that my brother is dead! That is certainly his watch—the leather chain that my brother always wore is still on it. That woman murdered him!”

  She murdered him just after Jennie went, at Christmastime, 1906. That must have been his body that Belle buried in the first hole Brogiski dug, along with Budsberg, Jennie, and the unknown woman.

  Lindboe and Gurholt told how after their brothers disappeared they wrote to Mrs. Gunness, and she put them off with plausible replies. Martin Gurholt had even started inquiries in person. He asked his friend Ole Budsberg to inquire about Henry when he went to La Porte. Belle put a stop to that when she put Ole next to Henry in the hog lot.

  The rest of the ten bodies were never certainly identified, but in the end people had no doubt whatever that Belle had killed them.

  Had Ray Lamphere helped her? Folk looked at the prisoner with a new accusation in their eyes. Ralph N. Smith was more determined than ever to bring Ray to trial—as soon as the coroner would declare that Belle Gunness was dead.

  The trouble was that with the revelations of the last few days, general suspicion about the headless body had become a universal burning certainty:

  Belle Gunness was not dead.

  Pressed by the relatives of her victims, warned of Asle’s impending arrival, she had planted a body, taken her plunder, fired the house, and skipped.

  Popular clamor arose:

  Ray Lamphere is innocent!

  Find Belle Gunness!

  4. The Evidence in the Ashes

  Sunday, May 10, dawned bright and fair—a perfect day for a Sunday outing. From Chicago, from South Bend, from Indianapolis the picnickers poured forth. Fifteen thousand of them had such curious taste that they thought the ideal place for their airing would be the Gunness farm.

  The trains were packed. The railroad
s put on specials, and when they ran out of passenger coaches they herded the sight-seers onto freight cars. All day long the McClung Road was packed solid with surreys, Stanhopes, cracky wagons, gasoline buggies, bicycles, baby carriages, and pedestrians. Once in that surging stream, they say, you couldn’t have turned back if you’d wanted to. Nobody wanted to.

  Along the road booths offered sandwiches and lemonade. Hawkers peddled pictures of the vanished Belle. A bull-voiced barker proclaimed the attractions of the nearby baseball park. In town, bars defied the law to succor the thirsty. A spirit of carnival prevailed.

  At the farm, the Sheriff and his deputies were outnumbered thousands to three. There was nothing to do but lock the buggy shed, post a guard over the ruins, and let the fun-makers ramble. Few unpleasant incidents marred the mirth. There was a runaway now and then, when some skittish farm horse met that unfamiliar monster, the gasoline buggy. A few of the unwary had their pockets picked. But in the main, Gunness Sunday was a huge success.

  Under the flowering orchard trees family groups rocked the baby and ate their picnic lunches. Souvenir hunters stripped the trees and picked up the rubbish on the ground. Rubbernecks wrenched at the doors of the carriage house and boosted each other up for peeks through the dusty window. Several times the obliging Sheriff unlocked the door and let the curious file past.

  Dusky old Uncle Ben from the backwoods paraded back and forth with his forked divining rod, dowsing for bodies.

  “Thirty-seven more on the place,” he announced solemnly.

  The mob did not doubt it. There was a great deal of talk about more bodies. One neighbor had sunk a box in the lake for Mrs. Gunness, another was sure there were bodies in the frog pond. Still another remembered that for no reason Belle had had the barn moved six feet, and had had a concrete foundation put under the shed. The Hutsons had found a rubbish-filled hole in the woods—had there been a body under the rubbish? There were still suspicious spongy depressions around the farm, at the edge of the orchard and all over. The mob was gratified to learn that the Sheriff, agreeing, intended to resume digging shortly.