The Truth about Belle Gunness

by Lillian de la Torre

  Once, looking very sporty in his leather cap and turtle-neck jersey, Sheriff Smutzer brought a pack of foxhounds out to the farm. The hounds ranged about sniffing. They found six places interesting enough to prompt a good deal of whining and scratching. The places were marked for digging; but if they were dug, nothing turned up.

  Then one day the hogs rooted out some bones that looked like arm and leg bones; but by that time the authorities were tired of bones.

  What was the use? Suppose they did find more bodies; how would that advance the matter in hand—the case against Ray Lamphere? Money was short, Mrs. Gunness was gone, and the Sheriff’s office was being pestered every day with every kind of nonsensical demand.

  Nuts anonymous, nuts self-advertising peppered the Sheriff and the prosecutor relentlessly with every species of lunacy. Crank letters threatened and taunted: “Ha! Ha!! Ha!!! Wise Heads, You, Nit. From One Who Knows.” Persons in touch with the Infinite claimed to be in touch with Belle in the beyond, or offered to get in touch with her for a consideration. One seer offered to identify the unknown victims, if he could be provided with some bones. He received some from the butcher shop.

  The worst pests, to those who were getting ready to prosecute Ray Lamphere for murdering Belle Gunness, were the people who insisted on reporting that they had seen Mrs. Gunness, in the flesh, since the fire. With public opinion in that state, the prosecutor would have a tough time getting a conviction.

  MRS. GUNNESS VERY NUMEROUS, headlined the Herald. The vanishing ogress was turning up all over. She was “seen” in every one of the forty-eight states, Canada, and Mexico. She was “located” on an ocean liner, in an upper berth in Texas, in a Chicago streetcar. She was “arrested” on a New York train. The victim of that arrest was so insulted that she sued the railroad for $30,000.

  Excited people deluged Smutzer with letters on the subject, demanding $5,000 reward or enclosing “50¢ for your trouble,” as their natures dictated. A farmer in Illinois wrote that he had a suspect locked up in his granary. The exasperated authorities had thrown away his address before it occurred to them that somebody ought to go and let her out.

  Elsewhere the absconding murderess turned up “mysteriously veiled,” or with her teeth covered with chewing gum, or muffled in wraps and transported by stretcher, or publicly changing disguises by the railroad tracks. In July, trusting to two veils, a black one and a white one, she had the effrontery to show up by daylight at the scene of her crimes. The Hutson family reported the apparition.

  Sam Ball was a kind of self-appointed detective. He hunted Belle assiduously. At Rubber Bill’s sporting goods store, where the law hung out, they laughed at Sam’s activities.

  “Someday I’ll find her!” said Sam stoutly.

  One day he appeared with a photograph. It showed a figure dressed in man’s clothes; but the face was the face of Belle Gunness.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “I snapped it.”

  Elmore van Winkle, the photographer, standing by, suppressed a snicker. He knew very well who it was that had cooked up the picture for a joke, putting Belle’s face to a man’s body and throwing the whole out of focus to conceal the joint.

  The pool-hall boys had a lot of fun over that photograph. In that guise, they indicated, the missing murderess had been spirited out of town by none other than the Sheriff himself.

  “Say, Smutzer, where did you hide her?”

  “Hey, Al, want to make some dough? The Chicago Tribune will pay you ten thousand dollars for your confession about where you hid Old Lady Gunness.”

  The good-natured official only laughed off this nonsense. A smooth politician, Smutzer was rather enjoying the publicity that the case was bringing him.

  In July, Smutzer set out for Salt Lake City via Denver, Colorado, Lincoln, Nebraska, and possibly Vernon, Texas, where the bad-check artist still languished in jail.

  At Lincoln the Republican politico got into the limelight by donning a Democratic party badge and calling on William Jennings Bryan, perennial presidential candidate.

  “Have you found Mrs. Gunness yet?” inquired the Great Commoner.

  “She is buried in Chicago.”

  “You are probably right,” said the silver-tongued orator of the Platte.

  Smutzer came back covered with glory. At Lincoln he had saved a man’s life. As quick and resolute as he was good-natured, he jumped in and pulled a drowning man from flood waters while others were still staring.

  So famous a man could not be excluded from the Argus’ “Men of Affairs” cartoon series. When it appeared, it was a rather left-handed tribute. The cartoon depicted the popular Sheriff with his double bartender’s lick and polka-dotted bow tie, hustling a culprit into Cell 23. The accompanying doggerel insinuated pretty strongly that the Sheriff ought to be in that cell himself:

  Smutzer’s a fellow, take him all aroun’,

  As good as any you’ll find in town.

  Genial, always smiling, never means harm,

  He’s cut quite a figure at the Gunness farm.

  Looks a little foppy in his runabout.

  Twenty-three will get him if he don’t watch out.

  It was exasperating to Wirt Worden to see Smutzer spending time and money in an attempt to put Ray Lamphere in the death cell, while he refused to spend a day or a dollar looking for Belle Gunness. The defending lawyer was seriously convinced that Belle Gunness was alive somewhere, laughing at them all, and would have the last laugh unless they sought her in earnest. But there was not enough money in his pocket, or even in the county treasury, to follow up every lead. An influential county commissioner managed to get an official $4,000 reward posted for Belle’s capture, and a gentleman from Kansas started a private reward fund by forwarding $1 in cash. But what was the use of a reward of $4001 if the authorities would not move? Now and then Worden managed to needle them into action; but every false lead made them harder to needle.

  Some leads were very pointed, like the anonymous letter that came to Prosecutor Smith:

  The body of the woman found in the ruins is a cadaver murdered by Mrs. Gunness, who decapitated her and put her [Mrs. Gunness’] rings on her fingers. She had two persons to help her and one of them drove her to Valparaiso early in the night, where she boarded a Pennsylvania train for New York City. The other was Ray Lamphere, who fired her house early in the morning. They both got $1,000. Mrs. Gunness is now posing as a man.…

  Yours,

  TRAVELING MAN

  Who could the first accomplice be? A letter came, Worden announced, with a name in it; but it was a name too hot to publish. The Herald reported:

  The letter charges that a certain man, who is said to live not far from La Porte and who is declared to be quite well-known, was an accomplice of Mrs. Gunness. The name of this person is not disclosed, because it would not be right to drag him into the case if he is an innocent party. The matter is being fully investigated, but no steps will be taken to arrest him unless it is found that he really has information of value in his possession.

  Was it the same name as the one the pool-hall louts bandied about? Was it the name that had been heard in whispers even before the hog-lot discoveries made the case notorious? Were Ray’s partisans trying to scare somebody into making a break?

  If so, it didn’t work. The owner of the name was too well entrenched to scare easily. Safety lay in sitting tight. He sat tight.

  It was a long sit. Ray Lamphere sat it out in the county jail. He sat out the summer and he sat out the early fall. He sat out the wild search for Mrs. Gunness, and the serious building up of the case against himself for murdering her.

  While Ray sat, his disreputable old father got busy scouring for evidence on his son’s behalf. Ragged and battered, with tears in his rheumy eyes, he told the press: “Ray was always a good boy, and the only thing against him was that he occasionally drank too much. I don’t believe he set that house on fire, but I do know that that woman was looking for him, and if she had foun
d him he would have been in that burying ground too. She was driving around near my place the very day before the fire, inquiring where Ray was and saying she wanted him to come back to work for her.”

  Mr. Fogle, Belle’s man of business, confirmed this; Mrs. Gunness had run all over town that Sunday in a wild search for her former lover. But how could that help the defense of Ray Lamphere?

  Ray’s defender was busy trying another strange case. Wirt Worden was representing the son of the King of the Gypsies in a prosaic suit to recover the bride price that had been paid for an unsatisfactory Romany consort.

  While Ray sat, American politics went into high gear. Deputy Sheriff Anstiss, Prosecutor R. N. Smith, and Sheriff Al Smutzer all shelved the Gunness case in favor of electioneering. Smith was up for another term as prosecuting attorney, and Smutzer was boosting Taft for President and backing Anstiss to replace himself as sheriff. Ray’s friends worked hard to stop Anstiss; but they failed.

  At last, in November, Smith, Anstiss, and Taft had all got themselves elected, and Ray’s day in court was at hand. Ray polished his shoes, brushed his clothes, and sent out for a clean collar and a new necktie. The long wait was over.

  Book II: The Trial

  6. The Maypole: The Trial Begins

  As the Lamphere trial came closer, public excitement rose to fever heat. Everything about the approaching courtroom drama would be sensationally different.

  The defendant was a man of mystery. His secret knowledge of the bloody doings at the farm had hitherto remained locked in his breast. By what ties of lust and blood was Ray Lamphere linked to the woman he now stood accused of murdering? Would he speak out on the stand? Would he break and confess?

  Ray’s alleged victim was the most sinister multiple murderess in the annals of American crime. Her fate was cloaked in mystery.

  Unseen since the fatal night of April 27, Belle Gunness still walked La Porte like some bloodthirsty troll in Norwegian legend. Children stopped their bawling in terror at the mere threat: “Belle Gunness will get you!” Women locked their doors at twilight. Men who had seen the grinning head of Belle’s last victim lifted from the earth still started from sleep sweating, or lay awake staring at the darkness. Joe Maxson was a haunted man. His sister and brother-in-law had to move in and stay with him. Seventeen-year-old Frances Lapham, who had loved the children, still could not bear to smell or taste broiled meat. The horrors of the Gunness affair kept thickening over the town like a miasma.

  “I saw Mrs. Gunness at the farm in broad daylight,” averred Daniel Hutson. “It was about five o’clock on the afternoon of July ninth. I came driving by in a hay rack, and I saw her walking in the orchard with a man. There was a one-horse top buggy hitched in the farmyard. I whipped up my horse and turned into the lane. They saw me as I approached, ran to the buggy, scrambled in, and started off at a jump. I drove straight at the rig, intending to wreck it, but they whipped up, swung out around me, and pelted into the road and away.”

  “We saw her too,” said the Hutson daughters, Evaline and Eldora. They still say so.

  “We were out with the cows, straggled along the road,” says Eldora, “one of us at each end, out of sight of each other. I saw the horse coming, a beautiful dappled gray horse my sister and I had seen tied up at Belle’s gate once that winter. Then the buggy came closer, and it was Belle. Was I scared? No. It excited me, but I wasn’t disposed to be scared.”

  “We always thought she came back to get something she left behind,” says Evaline.

  Two boys came forward to say that they had seen Mrs. Gunness too, one summer day by the Pine Lake Cemetery. She was lifting two veils to take a drink at the pump.

  “What day was that?”

  “The Thursday after Independence Day.”

  That day, the calendar said, was July 9.

  “I saw Mrs. Gunness at the farm,” chimed in the town scavenger. “I saw her by the lightning flash, about eight o’clock on a rainy summer evening. She was wearing a black suit, and her companion was a broad-shouldered man with a derby hat and a mustache. They came along the road in a top buggy and turned in at the farm. It happened I had to stop my team to untangle the reins. It was a black night, and the rain was falling in buckets, but I saw their faces in repeated flashes of lightning. I’d know the man again anywhere. I think I saw him last week. I thought the woman was Mrs. Gunness, but I did not feel sure.

  “I watched them alight. The woman began fumbling around on the ground near the southeast corner of the house. I heard her speak. ‘That money ain’t here,’ she said. Though I could not be sure of the face, the voice, or the form, the strange resemblance of all three to the woman I knew as Mrs. Gunness makes me sure that is who it was.

  “I didn’t go near. I was afraid they would shoot me. I drove on to town as fast as I could. I was afraid, and my limbs were cold and numb.”

  Another popular legend centered around the scavenger. In April, the story ran, he was passing up the McClung Road on business. It was late at night, because they wouldn’t let him clean outhouses by day. As he neared the Gunness farm, a masked man appeared brandishing a pistol.

  “Do you value your life?” demanded a deep voice.

  The scavenger mumbled that he did.

  “Then turn back! You can’t go past the Gunness farm tonight!” At this the scavenger turned back in a hurry.

  Like many a Gunness legend, this one was too thick for sensible people to swallow. “That scavenger, he hasn’t got sense enough to come in out of the rain,” they scoffed.

  But every such legend added to the cumulative effect. Snoopers with as little sense as the scavenger kept prowling the abandoned farm, half hoping, half fearing that the ogress would show herself. Two of them got themselves treed by a bad-tempered bull. Luckily, it was an apple tree they took refuge in. They were stranded there for hours, but at least they had apples to eat. In the dead hours of night a search party finally rescued them. Mrs. Gunness had not appeared; but it was still the general belief that at any moment she might.

  The prosecutor would have to try Ray Lamphere in a very unfavorable climate of opinion.

  Finally, on November 9, 1908, the curtain went up on one of the most extraordinary courtroom dramas of the century.

  The setting was the handsome La Porte County courthouse, a square structure of blackish-red sandstone blocks, standing in the middle of a lawn shaded by maple trees. A low stone coping bounds it, polished by the pants of generations of philosophers who liked to sit under the trees and watch life go by.

  The square building has round-arched windows and a peaked belfry on top, housing neither bells nor bats.

  Inside, spacious halls of pink and white marble, wide stairs with wrought-iron railings, and a creaky open elevator cage in a metalwork shaft brought spectator and participant to the scene of the show.

  Ray Lamphere would be tried in the lofty courtroom on the upper floor, with its tall windows looking out through trees and over the roofs of La Porte. Even on that November day, the room sparkled with its carved golden oak, its gilded plaques and scrolls, its star-frosted glass panels, its rosy stained glass depicting over and over again the goddess Justice armed with scales, a sword, or a book.

  A carved golden oak railing divides the room in half. In one half, wooden theatre seats invite spectators. Today every seat is taken, every aisle and alcove is packed with standees, the crowd overflows to corridor and lawn. It is a womanless crowd; this trial is expected to be too foul and filthy for the gentler sex. The menfolk have ordered their ladies to stay away.

  On the other side of the railing, the stage is set. Carved golden oak chairs, upholstered in black leather, are ready for the actors in the drama. The biggest chair stands behind the Judge’s carved desk, on a dais three steps high. On a lower dais to the right is placed the solitary chair from which the witnesses will testify. On the same side, ranged in two rows, twelve chairs are ready in the jury box. Two long tables for defense and prosecution are ranged in the foreground
.

  The packed crowd stirs as the lawyers enter. These are the supporting cast. Two men take their places at the prosecution table. First enters the prosecutor, Ralph N. Smith, half-smiling, with his long jaw and heavy-lidded eyes, his tall lanky frame loose inside his ample garments. He is followed by his assistant, Martin R. Sutherland. Sutherland is older and heavier than Smith, ruddy and calm of face.

  There is another stir as the defense lawyer enters alone. Wirt Worden, short, blond, square, steady as a rock, would seem stolid but for his quick, perceptive eyes. Somehow it is his quiet strength that will dominate people’s memories of the Lamphere trial.

  “His Honor, Judge Richter!”

  Everyone is on his feet as an imposing big man in a Prince Albert outfit ascends the dais. Judge J. C. Richter is a non-onsense, fair-minded jurist with a cleft chin like a matinee idol’s and a bushy poll like William Jennings Bryan’s. At the moment the Judge is something of a hero. By his presence of mind and his powerful grip, he recently saved an unwary cyclist from falling under the wheels of an automobile.

  The Judge takes his place at his big desk, and Worden rises. In a quiet voice without much hope in it, he offers the formal motion to quash the indictment. Judge Richter’s heavy voice denies the motion. The trial must go on.

  In a moment a long murmur breaks out from the packed spectators. The star of this drama has appeared, the man on trial for his life, Ray Lamphere. He is led in by tall, saturnine Sheriff Anstiss. Beside the new sheriff, Ray looks small and thin in his ample new suit of store-bought clothes. He is all spruced up, his shoes are shined, he wears a clean collar and a new necktie, and he is affecting an air of jaunty confidence; but his deep-sunk eyes look haunted. He maintains a look of superior amusement as he stands to hear himself accused of murder, in that he did unlawfully and feloniously kill and murder Belle Gunness in the perpetration of arson by setting fire to the dwelling house of Belle Gunness to the value of $2,000 and thereby burned and destroyed said dwelling to the damage of Belle Gunness in the sum of $2,000, that before, at, and during said burning Belle Gunness was then and there in said dwelling, and by reason and means of said burning by said Ray Lamphere said Belle Gunness was then and there mortally burned and then and there died.