The Truth about Belle Gunness

by Lillian de la Torre

  In the buzz, tall tales were taking shape. The mighty Belle, the Hog Butcher of Indiana, was beginning to be Paul Bunyan’s only rival. She could lift a calf, tote trunks full of bodies, move a piano single-handed. People began to think they had seen her perform these feats.

  Wiseacres from Chicago were setting themselves up as experts on crime in general and Mrs. Gunness in particular. Some were recalling Hoch, the Butcher of the Chicago Stockyards, an ugly little miscreant who made a business of marrying, mulcting, and murdering a succession of simple-minded mail-order brides. Was he an accomplice in this La Porte mail-order murder mill? Or—since the law put an end to Hoch and his activities early in 1906, just about the time when Mrs. Gunness turned from hired men to suitors by mail—did Hoch’s well-publicized exploits give her the idea?

  Other visitors from Chicago had facts, fables, and theories to relate about Belle’s career before she left the big city for La Porte. There was a good deal of gabble about her conducting a baby farm where she freely abolished her little charges. The only actual evidence that Mrs. Gunness boarded children as well as adopting them, however, was offered by a nursling who survived.

  Whether or not Mrs. Gunness went in for wholesale child murder, everybody was now completely convinced that she had murdered her husbands, and the stories that came out confirmed that belief.

  It was Dr. J. B. Miller of Chicago that most vividly recalled the day in 1900 when Mads Sorenson died. Dr. Miller was a young medico who had formerly lodged with Mrs. Gunness. When one summer day at midmorning Mads suddenly died, Dr. Miller was summoned in haste.

  He took one look at the body, arched upon head and heels with one hand fixed in a death grip on the bed rail, and he said to himself: Strychnine!

  When he told the widow there must be an autopsy, she burst out wailing. Another doctor was summoned.

  “It’s all right, you can sign the certificate,” said Dr. C. E. Jones. “I was treating Mr. Sorenson for an enlarged heart.”

  It wasn’t strictly legal, but the young doctor didn’t want to get too technical. Both doctors signed.

  A week later, Dr. Miller learned a remarkable fact. Mads Sorenson had died on the one day when two insurance policies, overlapping, made his death worth twice as much as it would have been worth on any other day. Belle had wept her way out of an autopsy with the two insuring fraternal orders, too.

  A while later Mads’s brother Oscar arrived from the East. Belle could weep all she liked, there must be an autopsy. Mads was dug up, and two doctors opened him.

  The death certificate read “enlargement of the heart.” The heart was enlarged. The autopsy went no further.

  Now, after the hog-lot finds, Dr. Miller was wishing that he had been more aggressive about his first diagnosis of strychnine, instead of letting Belle get by to kill again.

  Once rid of Mads, Belle looked for another husband. She hit on a Wisconsin man named Frederickson, who was willing to sell his real estate for cash, increase his life insurance, and marry her. Her plans were spoiled by the man’s housekeeper, an old Norwegian lady named Gunness. Belle paid Mrs. Gunness back for that. She turned around and married Mrs. Gunness’ newly widowed son Peter. Belle had had her eye on Peter Gunness ever since he had boarded at her house in Chicago in the year of the World’s Fair.

  Peter Gunness came to LaPorte with his baby, Jennie. He walked through the marriage ceremony with Belle, the minister thought afterward, like a man in a trance. That was on April 1, 1902.

  Five days later the baby was mysteriously dead.

  That baby was smothered, said Dr. H. H. Martin to himself.

  But Belle gave him such a baleful glare that he hastily signed the death certificate and got away from there at once.

  Now he wished he hadn’t.

  Eight months later Peter Gunness fell victim to the sausage-grinder. Half La Porte thought then that he was murdered, and all La Porte thought so now.

  Albert, Swan Nicholson’s older boy, was the first to think so, because he was the first to see the body.

  The Nicholsons were summoned in the small hours of the morning. They found Mrs. Gunness in the kitchen, wringing her hands and crying. The floor was covered with drying brine. Peter Gunness lay on his face on the dining-room floor, dressed in his long white nightshirt. His bleeding nose was bent sideways under him.

  “Albert, hitch up and go for the doctor!”

  The stable door was locked. Mrs. Gunness went through Peter’s pockets, but the key was not to be found. The stouthearted boy ran all the way to town in the cold hours before dawn.

  He rode back with Dr. Bo Bowell, then coroner. It was getting light as the coroner walked into the house, knelt down, and felt the body all over. Nobody said a word. He got up from his knees, looked into the people’s faces, brushed his hands once with a sharp swish, and said:

  “Here has been a murder.”

  Mrs. Gunness said not a single word.

  This time she could not escape an inquest; but she escaped a murder verdict. She told her story well. Anybody who chose could read it among the courthouse records, as Dr. Bowell’s clerk took it down:

  Monday afternoon, well, I was trying to finish up the butchering business. He was in town, and got things to make sausage in and helped me along the best he could. Monday night after I put the children to bed he ground some meat for me. The first I did so far as I remember, I made sausage, and he was in here writing, and I was out in the kitchen doing some work, and I washed up everything and finished up for the next day, and he was looking at the papers. Then we were sitting here looking at them, I think it was after eleven o’clock, if I am not mistaken, it must have been around that time, I can tell by the work we had done. We was sitting here, and I said to him:

  “I guess it is pretty near time to go to bed.”

  He thought so too, and he picked up his pipe and went out into the kitchen. He always used to lock the doors before we go upstairs to sleep, and I heard him make some kind of a little noise out there, and he always put his shoes back of the stove to warm, and I guess he must have been back to get hold of a pair of shoes to go out with, because he had a pair of slippers on. All at once I heard a terrible noise and I dropped my paper and went and when I came out there he was raising up from the floor and putting both hands on his head. I had a big bowl with some brine on the back of the stove and I was going to put it on some head cheese I left there, and the bowl was full and hot, and I thought I couldn’t use it until tomorrow morning, I might as well leave it there until morning. It was on the back part of the stove. I had washed the meat-grinder and wiped it off and put it on the shelf of the stove to dry, so that it would not get rusty, I generally put my iron things up there to dry. At first I didn’t notice anything but the water.

  “O, Mamma,” he says, “I burned me so terrible.”

  I was so scared I didn’t know what to do, all his clothes were wet. I said:

  “You had better take the clothes off.”

  He said: “My head burns terribly.”

  And so I heard baking soda and water was good to put on so it would not get blistered, and I put that on, I bathed a towel in it and put it over his neck. I rubbed him with vaseline and liniment.

  No, I didn’t notice anything with the nose at all. I saw the cut in the head, and I asked him two or three times where he had been with his head, but he didn’t tell me. I guess we sat in the kitchen a while. We were rubbing, and he said he was afraid he was going to lose some of his hair on account of that burning, and he was complaining terribly, and I thought, Such a pain that girl must have had and she didn’t complain as much as he did at all. [This remark referred to Jennie, who had been badly burned in one of Belle’s profitable fires.]

  He didn’t tell me how the brine came to tip over on him, he did not give me any satisfaction on that at all. I said:

  “How did you happen to do that?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” he said, “I must have got against it some way.”

 
It was quite a while we sat there. We were sitting here, and he was beginning to get a little better and I said:

  “Don’t you think you had better lay down, I think if you lay down maybe that burning will go away.”

  And he said: “Probably I will.”

  And I said: “You had better not go upstairs to bed, but lay on the lounge and I will fix that up, for it is warmer.”

  He thought so, and I went and fixed the lounge for him and took off his clothes and put on his night shirt, and I told him:

  “I think I go up and lay down with the girls, and if there is anything you want call me down.”

  So I went up and I went to sleep, I was tired, and all at once I heard him calling. He was over by the door calling “Mamma!” so fast as he could, and so the children waked up and I was trying to think and said they should keep quiet, that I had to go to Papa, that Papa was burned. I tried to put my clothes on, because it was cold. I went down the steps and when I came down he was walking around the room and saying:

  “Oh, Mamma, Mamma, my head! I don’t know what is the matter with my head. My head, my head! It is like something going on in my head!”

  “Papa,” I said, “what are you talking about? Let me see what it is, I suppose you have rubbed off the skin.”

  “Oh, my head, my head!”

  “Well, if you think it is best, I had better send for the doctor,” I said, and I went upstairs and got the girl up and she went over to Nicholson’s.

  When I came down from upstairs I found him on the floor and he was holding his head, and said: “Oh, Mamma, Mamma, I guess I am going to die!”

  When Nicholson come to the door I was rubbing his head, and I opened the door, I think, and they come in, and he then thought he was gone, but I did not think he was gone before the doctor came, I think he was only unconscious. I tried to feel his pulse but my hands did not have any feeling in them any more.

  The coroner had some questions to ask.

  Q. How do you think he got that hurt on his head?

  A. I don’t know, Doctor. I picked up the meat-grinder from the floor and I think that must have tumbled on him one way or another. No, I never think he had a quarrel with anybody. He seemed to get along very nicely with all as far as I know.

  Q. Did you think it was possible that somebody may have come in while he was out there and you not hear him?

  A. No, if anybody had come in I must have heard them one way or another, that’s what I think, but I didn’t see it.

  Q. Have you suspected or have you been afraid that somebody might have come in here and killed him, hit him with the sausage-grinder?

  A. I have never been afraid at all.

  Q. You have always lived happily together, you and him?

  A. As far as I know.

  Jennie’s story dovetailed satisfactorily. When her mother wakened her, she said positively, she could hear the panicky voice of the dying man downstairs: “Mamma, Mamma! Oh, my head, my head!” When she came down, Gunness was lying silent, on his back. Mrs. Gunness was darting about in a panic.

  “She was by him and around and getting everything she could and fixing them and everything—guess she was so scared I thought she was going to fall down—when anything happens she feels so scared and she does all she can.”

  The coroner asked Jennie about Sorenson, and Jennie told. She finished, “… and they said he took hold of the bedclothes, gave a scream, and died.”

  “Yennie!” The brittle blue eyes were blazing. “That’s none of the coroner’s business!”

  The stenographer formed an uneasy impression that Jennie was in for a good beating.

  Swan Nicholson told the same story that Belle had told, as far as he knew it. Then the coroner put it to him bluntly:

  Q. Do you think it is possible that she might have killed him?

  A. No, I never thought so, no, sir. They be like a couple of children, and the same as the day they were married.

  The verdict was accidental death. Mrs. Gunness pestered the coroner half distracted until she got it in writing.

  Mrs. Gunness was cool at the funeral. She gave the Laphams a start when she walked into the cold parlor, where the coffin lay, with a big butcher knife in her hand.

  “To trim the fringe on the rug,” she explained calmly.

  During the preaching she sat moaning with her fingers before her eyes. Albert Nicholson could see, however, that she was peeking alertly between them to check the effect she was making. That made him certain of her guilt.

  Even little Myrtle had known it. Only a week before the fire she had whispered in the ear of a small schoolmate, “My mamma killed my papa. She hit him with a meat cleaver and he died. Don’t tell a soul.”

  Her chum had faithfully obeyed her admonition to secrecy until Myrtle was ashes.

  Gunness and Sorenson never had a chance. Jennie was almost saved. It was Jennie’s father, Anton Olson, who came to town and told her story to the coroner.

  When Jennie was a baby, Mrs. Olson died, and Belle took the baby to care for. Later, when things looked a little better for the Olsons, the father asked her to return his little girl. Belle put him off. Pressed, she refused flatly, and dared Olson to go to court.

  At last, Belle consented to let Jennie visit her family in Chicago. Jennie was willing to stay with her folks, but after a while Belle came to Chicago to see her. After that Jennie pined for the farm. Finally Olson sent her back. He never saw her again.

  Jennie was happy at the farm, and happier when Emil came. She told Emil she had $1,800 of her own. Belle was taking care of it, and must return it when Jennie turned eighteen. That day never came.

  Jennie never knew her danger. She trusted her foster mother till the day she died. If she had breathed a word, Emil could have saved her; but she never did. If, as people now believed, Belle killed her for fear she knew something and would talk, it was ironic. It cost that strange woman something to kill the girl she had fostered from a baby and fought to keep. Belle shed real tears on the faked letters with which she fooled Emil. Emil thinks now that she really missed Jennie and was grieving for her death. It was a tragic waste. It is extremely doubtful that Jenny had any suspicions. Belle need not have killed her at all.

  Had Belle crowded her luck until it ran out and she died in flames?

  Or instead, harassed by suspicions about Sorenson and Gunness and Jennie, peppered with questions by relatives of her victims, fearing Asle’s impending arrival, quick as ever with match, strychnine, or ax, had she covered her tracks and taken her flight?

  Was Ray Lamphere, waiting in the county jail, guilty of her murder, or the innocent victim of her plot?

  “If anybody wants Mrs. Gunness,” said Ralph N. Smith dryly, “I can produce her in five minutes. She lies on a slab in Cutler’s morgue.”

  That was the prosecutor’s view. On the basis of it Mr. Smith firmly intended to get Ray Lamphere indicted for murder when the grand jury convened, on Monday, May 11.

  The Sheriff agreed with the prosecutor. The Sheriff was a prominent Republican politician, so all the Republicans agreed with the Sheriff. This included the La Porte Herald, which aligned itself solidly on the side of common sense and Ray Lamphere’s guilt.

  Of course, this put the La Porte Argus on the other side. If not by politics, the Argus editor would have chosen that side by instinct. Harry N. Darling was a lovable old tub-thumper with a sensational line of purple prose that he happily devoted to the absconding Belle Gunness and the wrongfully accused Ray Lamphere.

  Wirt Worden was retained to defend Ray. Mayor Lemuel Darrow was his partner, and both had an interest in the Argus. This alignment produced a curious split among the limbs of the law. The Sheriff’s staff would not search for Belle. They devoted themselves to developing the evidence against Ray. The Pinkertons were called in to help.

  The city police would not work against Ray. They wanted Belle found. To help defend Ray and find Belle, the Clark detective agency sent down one C. C. Fish, an ex-cop fr
om Chicago who had been unfrocked after the Haymarket riots.

  The public, like the law, was divided in a recurring argument. Was Belle Gunness alive or dead?

  “Dead,” said her nephew John. “She weighed over two hundred pounds, and she never walked a step if she could help it. And she didn’t ride away—all her horses were in.”

  “Alive,” said rumor. “She rode away in a rig Nigger Liz hired at the livery barn.”

  “That’s a lie,” said Liz.

  “That’s not true,” said the livery barn.

  “She’s dead,” said those exponents of common sense, the bankers. “She left seven hundred and twenty dollars in the bank.”

  “A blind,” said the press. “What’s seven hundred and twenty dollars to a murderess who has amassed thirty thousand from her victims?”

  “She never had more than two thousand,” said the clerk at the bank. “She worried about it. She kept drawing it out to hoard in her sock, and then changing her mind and depositing it again. I figure she did that twelve or fifteen times.”

  “Fifteen times two thousand is thirty thousand,” Belle’s accusers replied. “How can you be sure it was the same two thousand?”

  “She’s alive,” insisted a local doctor, H. H. Long, who had examined the body. “Mrs. Gunness was a big coarse woman. The burned body has fine bones and manicured fingernails. Who ever saw Mrs. Gunness with manicured nails?”

  Thus the argument raged. Some people thought that Prince, Belle’s faithful collie dog, could tell them if the corpse was that of his mistress; but he was never asked to view the remains. Nephew John Larson, who wanted the question settled and forgotten, bethought himself and remembered that his aunt had an eight-inch scar across her chest, the result of an old accident; but this test was never applied either. The identity of the burned body remained a matter of debate, and the coroner still would not find that Mrs. Gunness was dead.

  In, this impasse, a dentist came forward.

  “If you can find Mrs. Gunness’ false teeth,” said Dr. Ira P. Norton, “I can identify them. Last fall I made her a set of six porcelain teeth backed with gold. If Mrs. Gunness died in the fire, those teeth are still in the ashes.”