The Truth about Belle Gunness

by Lillian de la Torre

  At the magic word “gold,” an old Colorado prospector named Louis Schultz pricked up his ears. He was the man to find gold. If they would make him a Klondyke-style sluice box, he would pan the ashes for the gold in Belle’s teeth.

  On Monday, May 11, as the grand jury convened and Ray Lamphere waited, they put together the sluice box. Joe Maxson and his brother-in-law, Isaiah Alderfer, were assigned to dig and screen the debris. They hauled up a water wagon. The lean, walrus-mustached old miner took off his coat, loosened his vest, and hitched up his sleeve garters. A good-natured crowd cheered as the first shovelful of debris was baptized in a stream from the water wagon.

  Louis Schultz sluiced all week. All week, locked up in jail, Ray Lamphere sat and waited for the find that might cost him his life.

  The first find was a false alarm. It wasn’t a gold tooth—it was a piece of gilded picture frame.

  As the week went by, a number of odd things turned up. They found a sinister array of cutting instruments. They found charred pages from books on anatomy and hypnotism. They found some fragments of bone and skin.

  They found more men’s watches. The final count was twelve. But only eight dead men had turned up in the hog lot. Were there still more bodies hidden somewhere on the place?

  They found a plain gold ring, perhaps the one Belle bought before Christmas; a buckle, perhaps from Belle’s money belt; a lady’s watch initialed B. G.; and some keys. One of the keys fitted Belle’s safe-deposit box.

  On the shrinking dead hand down at the morgue, more rings came to light. Anstiss showed them to Ray Lamphere. Yes, said Ray calmly, they were Belle’s. Belle had had a long tray filled with all kinds of jewelry.

  All week, while the sluice man was sluicing, the grand jury was occupied with other matters. The teeth did not appear, and the coroner still would not say that Mrs. Gunness was dead.

  On Monday, May 18, the grand jury could wait no longer. They began hearing the witnesses against Lamphere. Nigger Liz said defiantly that she wouldn’t appear, but she did. In spite of urging, the coroner maintained his position of doubt. Louis Schultz was instructed to keep on sluicing. The gallery, bored, dwindled away. Ray Lamphere was not indicted.

  On Tuesday, in the nick of time, the teeth showed up, two sets, an upper and a lower.

  “Those are Mrs. Gunness’ teeth,” said Dr. Norton.

  Mr. Koch, the photographer, set the teeth up on pins and photographed them in a faceless grin. Then he put them in his window. Frances Lapham, pausing to look, recognized them with a shudder.

  When they took the teeth over to the jail, they got widely diverse reactions. The turnkey, who liked to clown around, tried them in his toothless gums. They didn’t fit.

  When Ray saw them, he gasped and turned green. In a frenzy of agitation he paced his cell, up and down.

  “What’s to prevent Mrs. Gunness from having removed her teeth and thrown them in the fire before she left?” a reporter asked Sheriff Smutzer.

  “Well, this doesn’t look much like it,” replied the Sheriff, pointing to the roots of a tooth still remaining in place in the gold cap. “Here is the real tooth the porcelain teeth were fastened to. Could anything be more conclusive?”

  The coroner had to admit it was conclusive. He found that Belle Gunness was dead by felonious homicide, perpetrator unknown.

  The grand jury quickly indicted Ray Lamphere, seven times over. On May 22 they charged him with simple arson, four murders by arson, murdering Andrew Helgelien, and being accessory while Belle Gunness murdered Andrew Helgelien.

  Now that Ray was safely indicted, the Sheriff felt that his big job had been accomplished. That same day he packed up and took himself out of town on business. A highly promising piece of evidence against Lamphere had turned up.

  A young man in Vernon, Texas, who called himself Jonathan G. Thaw, had announced that Ray Lamphere was guilty, and he, Thaw, knew it because he had been in on it. Smutzer set off for Texas to sift the story. Perhaps it was the evidence they needed to clinch the case against Ray Lamphere.

  5. Mrs. Gunness Very Numerous

  Sheriff Smutzer soon came back from Texas. His trip had not helped the case against Lamphere one bit. He had spent five days getting there, what with floods on the line, and when he got there he found he had gone on a wild-goose chase after a bogus witness.

  His quarry turned out to be a jailed bad-check artist whose name wasn’t Thaw. That was just a check-signing name, adopted to exploit the dubious fame of his alleged cousin Harry K. Thaw, now in Matteawan for murdering Stanford White, still wealthy, still mad, and still copy for the newspapers.

  Julius Truelson (to give him his right name) had got up an ingenious confession out of the newspapers, simply because he was tired of jail in Texas. He told a thrilling story about how he had joined with Ray in assisting Belle with her murder mill, and how finally, fearing they would become her next victims, he and Ray tossed up to see which one would murder her first. Ray won the assignment. By sheer ill luck, however, young Mr. Truelson confessed a bit too much when he confessed to helping to murder two missing people who subsequently turned up unmurdered. Furthermore, when he decided he preferred jail in Texas to the gallows in Indiana, it came out that he had a cast-iron alibi: He had been in jail at the time.

  Sheriff Smutzer was run ragged by such screwball antics. Publicity seekers were crawling out of the woodwork, wasting his time and distracting him from his prime purpose of convicting Ray Lamphere. The Sheriff was at the vortex of the Gunness tornado, which wound itself up and swept the country in a dizzy cyclone of sensation. The press and the public went wild over Gunness.

  Everything about Belle was copy for the press. Cesare Lombroso, famous criminologist, diagnosed hysteria and epilepsy. Preachers said she was instigated by the devil. A know-it-all announced that she was a former tightrope walker and her father was a sword-swallower. Another wiseacre told the press that she was Kate Bender, Circe of the Kansas Trail.

  When even such copy as this was scarce, the exuberant newsmen at the Hotel Teegarden made up something. Since the authorities were holding back Belle’s genuine letters to Andrew Helgelien, they faked one. “My heart beats with wild rapture for you!” they made her exclaim. “Come, my Andrew, prepared to stay forever!” When they learned that the prosecutor had impounded a trunk of Ray’s, which might contain correspondence, they rushed to the press with another faked letter, to Ray this time, inviting him to move in, “and bring your sweetheart, if she has money enough.” Anybody could have seen that that letter was a fake, since Ray couldn’t read Norwegian and Belle couldn’t write in any other language.

  Another enterprising reporter proposed to have Elmore van Winkle photograph an old clothes-wringer that turned up at the farm so he could pass it off as the sausage-grinder that killed Gunness. He figured city readers wouldn’t know the difference.

  The name Gunness was a prime attraction in any guise. The Gunness farm was seen in pictures at the “nickel movements” through the enterprise of the Edison Company. A Chicago restaurant advertised “Gunness Stew,” and people ate it, too.

  On May 29 there was another Gunness carnival at the farm as they auctioned off Belle’s effects. Hackmen, refreshment vendors, and sellers of postcards reaped another harvest. Souvenir buyers bid up everything to many times its value. A shovel worth $.60 brought $2.10—who knows, it might have buried Andrew. Prince, the lonesome collie dog, brought $107 cash. A single entrepreneur bought the dog, the pony and cart, even the barn cat and her kittens. Then this backwoods Barnum hired Belle’s last farm hand, Joe Maxson, and C. C. Fish, Lamphere’s private eye, and set out to tour the sticks. The dumb creatures were put on display, Fish gave the spiel, and Joe answered questions. He was always sure to be asked: “Is Belle Gunness alive?” and he always answered loudly: “Yes!”

  Joe Maxson was now convinced that he did not escape from the fire through the mercy of Belle Gunness, for Belle had no mercy. He now believed that on the night of the fire she had rang
ed through the house, intending to kill everybody in it, and he had escaped only by a fluke. The press never got hold of his story of that strange night, and he was not asked to tell it in court, but he told it to his sister, Martha Maxson Alderfer.

  After dinner, he said, Belle handed him an orange for a treat. He slipped it in his pocket, saying, “I’ll eat it later.”

  “Eat it now,” said Belle. “It may be the last treat you get from me!”

  Joe thought she was joking. Upon her urging, he ate it then and there. Soon he was so sleepy he tumbled into bed.

  In the dead of night he woke with a start. Belle was standing at his bedside.

  “Is anybody sick?” was his first thought.

  “No,” said Belle hastily. “I just wanted to see if you were asleep.”

  Later Joe came to think that she had a hammer hidden in the fold of her skirt. At the time he merely became indignant at what he considered bad manners. Let Belle sleep with Ray and the rest—she wasn’t going to sleep with him in this abrupt fashion! As soon as Belle had beaten a hasty retreat, Joe got up and locked the door behind her.

  If she wants me, he said to himself, she can knock on my door!

  So Belle got no second chance at Joe, and he survived to assure inquiring yokels at the fair that in his opinion his former employer was alive and at large.

  In mid-July the yokels were able to slake their appetite for Gunness by investing a quarter in a paper-back novel entitled The Mrs. Gunness Mystery. No One could resist the lurid cover, on which Mrs. Gunness was revealed as a Gibson girl clad in filmy white, hovering with lethal intent over a mustachioed gentleman asleep in a stylish brass bed.

  Inside the paper covers was a mess of undigested newspaper clippings spiced up with red-hot imaginary episodes in thoroughly bad taste. The public ate it up. They couldn’t tell the fact from the fiction, and they didn’t care. They loved the sword-swallower’s daughter with her forty-two victims offering her their “mad old love,” and the culminating amours with “Andrew Helgelien, ruddy-cheeked giant, with hair like a dandelion gone to seed and the masterful manner of the Norsemen of old.” Readers enjoyed an agreeable shudder at the picture of Belle strolling with Ray over the unmarked graves in the hog lot and snuggling her “wanton auburn head on the man’s broad shoulder” as she cooed coquettishly: “You, of all the world, can bring me to my knees!”

  The man in question now sat in a cell at the county jail. He had sobered up, willy-nilly, and spent much time reading. It is not known what Ray’s range of reading was, but one thing is certain: He read The Mrs. Gunness Mystery with avid attention.

  There was a widespread burning interest in “the Gunness system” of matrimonial bait. The federal government turned a severe eye on courtship by mail, and the press published everything it could dig up on the subject. From the editor of Skandinaven, a Norwegian-language paper, newsmen extracted the text of Belle’s last ad. The indefatigable woman had opened a new campaign in March, 1908, announcing to the world:

  WANTED—A WOMAN WHO owns a beautifully located and valuable farm in first class condition, wants a good and reliable man as partner in the same. Some little cash is required for which will be furnished first-class security.

  This no-nonsense appeal was designed to fetch good solid farmers, and it fetched them. A Mr. Carl Peterson had been attracted. When the Gunness system became front-page news, he came forward with the come-on letter that Belle had written to him. It was dated April 14, 1908, just two weeks before the fire, and it told him crisply:

  There have been other answers to the same advertisement. As many as fifty have been received. I have picked out the most respectable, and I have decided that yours is such.

  My idea is to take a partner to whom I can trust everything and as we have no acquaintance ourselves I have decided that every applicant I have considered favorably must make a satisfactory deposit of cash or security. I think that is the best way for parties to keep away grafters who are always looking for such opportunities, as I have had experience with them, as I can prove.

  Now if you think that you are able some way to put up $1,000 cash, we can talk matters over personally. If you cannot, is it worth while to consider? I would not care for you as a hired man, as I am tired of that and need a little rest in my home and near my children. I will close for this time.

  With friendly regards,

  MRS. P. S. GUNNESS

  Mr. Peterson was lucky. He did not have $1,000.

  Still luckier, in his own opinion, was Mr. George Anderson of Tarkio, Missouri. He had answered an earlier ad, he told the press, liked the lady’s replies, and decided to go to La Porte and look things over.

  On the second day of his visit, Mrs. Gunness asked him point-blank how much money he had. He had only $300, but he had a big farm in Missouri. Belle told him to go home and sell it and come back with the cash.

  That night, in the small hours, Mr. Anderson woke with a start. Mrs. Gunness was bending over his bed. When he spoke, she ran out.

  Mr. Anderson took fright. On the instant he dressed and ran away. Perhaps because he felt he had made a fool of himself, he told nobody of his alarming adventure.

  Some people wondered if he should have been so very much alarmed. Ole Budsberg, they pointed out, had been perfectly safe at Belle’s—until he went home and sold out.

  Then what was Belle after? Did she bring her suitors love before she brought them death? Was that the charm she used to make grown men willingly give up to her every cent they had?

  Thinking of the hog lot, Mr. Anderson was still shuddering over his narrow escape. He recalled how Myrtle had looked at him as on a doomed man. “She would eye me with a pitiful look,” he recalled, “and when I glanced at her during a meal she would turn white as a sheet.”

  Frank Riedinger of Delafield, Wisconsin, also went to visit Mrs. Gunness. A letter came back, not in his handwriting, to say he had decided to “go West.” When the hog lot gave up its secrets, those he left behind too quickly lost hope and sold him out. Riedinger, who had in fact left La Porte in one piece, had to sue before he could convince them that he was alive and could claim his possessions.

  People all over the country were convinced that missing relatives had ended up in the hog lot. Sheriff Smutzer was pestered to death about it. When a wayward girl eloped, when a henpecked husband deserted his wife, the first thing the bereaved thought of was the Gunness farm. Inquiries poured in. Some were foolish. Others made sense. At least ten other Norwegian men, the inquiries showed, had taken their savings and gone off to La Porte, never to return. Were their bones still buried somewhere on the farm? If Smutzer kept notes on disappearing fellows that he really ought to dig for, they must have read something like this:

  George Berry left home in July, 1905, saying he was going “to work for Mrs. Gunness.” He had $1,500. Provisionally identified as the second body in Gurholt’s grave in the hog lot.

  Herman Konitzer took $5,000 and left home “to marry a wealthy widow in La Porte” in January, 1906. Posted one letter from La Porte.

  Christian Hinkley, Chetek, Wisconsin, in the spring of 1906 sold his farm for $2,000 and left. Changed his Decorah Posten subscription to La Porte. La Porte post office testified that Mrs. Gunness received mail as Mrs. Hinkley.

  Olaf Jensen, twenty-three, Norwegian, in May, 1906, wrote to his mother in Norway that he had reflected on a matrimonial ad in Skandinaven and decided to marry the lady, a widow from Norway who lived in La Porte. Went down for a visit, returned home to turn his belongings into cash, and went back to La Porte. Never seen since.

  Charles Neiburg, twenty-eight, left Philadelphia in June, 1906, saying that he was going to marry Mrs. Gunness. Took $500 in cash with him. Had a hobby of answering matrimonial ads.

  Abraham Phillips, Belington, West Virginia, told relatives he was leaving to marry a rich widow in Indiana. Had a big roll of bills, a diamond ring, a Railway Trainmen badge. Disappeared in February, 1907. A railroad watch turned up in the ashes
of the Gunness house.

  Tonnes Peter Lien saw an ad, sold his farm, and left Rushford, Minnesota, for La Porte to marry Mrs. Gunness His brother reported that he helped to sew $1,000 in bills in the sleeve of Tonnes Peter’s coat, and asked if a heavy silver watch initialed “P. L.” had been found. It had. Since Lien left home April 2, 1907, and all burials about that time were accounted for, his body had not been found.

  E. J. Thiefland of Minneapolis sought by a private detective. Described as a tall man with a sandy mustache. Saw an ad in a Minneapolis paper on August 8, 1906. Corresponded with Mrs. Gunness. On April 27, 1907, wrote to his sister saying he was going down to La Porte “to see if this lady is on the square.” Never heard of since.

  Emil Tell took $5,000 in May, 1907, and left Osage City, Kansas, to marry a rich widow in La Porte. Q. Was he the man with the pointed beard seen at the Gunness place in June, 1907?

  John E. Bunter of McKeesport, Pennsylvania, fifty-two, light gray hair, left saying he planned to marry a widow in Indiana. Went away on November 25, 1907. Q. Did he accompany Mrs. Gunness into Oberreich’s in December to buy a wedding ring?

  S. B. Smith missing. Ring initialed S. B. found in ruins.

  Paul Ames disappeared. Initials P. A. on ring found in ashes.…

  Sheriff Smutzer soon admitted there had to be more digging. By fits and starts more digging went on. In a disused privy vault they found a detached head of a woman with long blonde hair. They never found the woman’s body that went with it, and they never found out who the woman might be. They never found the man’s head that was missing from Gurholt’s grave.

  They dug up an old well, and a soft spot under a lilac bush, and the dirt floor of the cellar, and some more spots in the hog lot. On that seventy-acre farm they passed over the old vineyard by the tracks, the rye field, and the ground covered by the removed barn and the cemented floor of the shed.