7. Bombardment: The Prosecution Opens
“Following the first shot of the prosecution, fired at the close of yesterday afternoon’s session by State’s Attorney Smith,” wrote Harry N. Darling, “the attack of the state began this morning in a bombardment from the witness stand. Before the defense shows its hand the state will have produced fifty witnesses.”
Ray Lamphere entered the courtroom on that unlucky morning, Friday, November 13, paler and more ghostlike than ever. Every head turned as he entered, and a buzz followed him to his place. Some of the heads wore Merry Widow hats, and some of the voices in the buzz were soprano. The women of La Porte had decided not to miss the show.
The ladies watched with bright eyes as Worden took his place beside his client. The defense lawyer looked over his notes. It was not yet time for the defense to speak, but Worden already had his case well in mind. He had to, for his strategy was to reinterpret the evidence of the prosecution in the light of his own theories of the case. Every time he rose to cross-examine, it would be his purpose to convert prosecution witnesses into witnesses for the defense.
The prosecution would be trying to prove that the burned body was the body of Belle Gunness, that she had died by fire, and that it was Ray Lamphere that, out for revenge, had set the fire. The burden of proof was on the state. It had to prove each of these propositions beyond a reasonable doubt.
The defense was not obliged to prove anything. Worden’s plan was to scatter as many reasonable doubts as he could. He was not obliged to prove who the dead woman was if she wasn’t Mrs. Gunness, or how she died if not by fire, or who burned the house if Ray didn’t.
Nevertheless, Worden had up his sleeve several alternate theories of the case with which to divert the jury. They were all plausible, and one of them he sincerely believed to be the truth. As opportunity arose, he would emphasize one or another of them in cross-examination. Worden had a theory to fit any assortment of facts.
Suppose the, dead body was Mrs. Gunness, and she died by fire. That didn’t make Lamphere guilty. Maybe somebody else set the fire. C. C. Fish said Mrs. Gunness had an undercover accomplice. Maybe that accomplice fell out with Belle and fired the house.
Suppose the dead body was Belle, but she was dead before somebody burned her. Lamphere was the one man of all others who could not have got at her. Maybe the mysterious accomplice, seeing discovery looming, killed the woman before he set the fire.
Did Belle herself, driven to desperation by approaching exposure, murder the children, apply the torch, and kill herself?
Or did the cunning murderess, only one jump ahead of discovery, plant a substitute corpse, kill the children, fire the house, and vanish with her ill-gotten gains?
The other theories were useful doubts. The last one was what Worden believed. He had strong reason for believing it. He had it from Ray Lamphere.
Right after the fire, Ray told Worden that Belle Gunness had fled. He knew, because he helped her. He had driven her away that night in a rig hired by Nigger Liz. He didn’t know there was anybody left in the house. He cried when Worden told him the children had burned up.
As to why Belle Gunness had fled, Ray was cautious. He barely hinted at certain murderous activities. The most he would ever admit to his lawyer, even after the hog-lot discoveries, was that when he sneaked back from Michigan City to eavesdrop, he heard Helgelien groaning in agony and begging Mrs. Gunness to send for a doctor. He had helped, he said, to bury a box that might have contained the pieces of Andrew; but since Andrew was not boxed, there was evasion in that.
There was a mark on Belle’s body, said Ray, by which she could be certainly identified. She had a long scar on the thigh. There were no scars on the burned body. That proved she had got away.
Where was she hiding?
According to Ray, only one man knew. That man, Ray told Worden, met the surrey seven miles from La Porte in an automobile, to take Mrs. Gunness on the next leg of her journey. Ray named the man: former Sheriff Albert Smutzer. Rumor had been busy naming him ever since.
Smutzer would testify for the state. If Worden could break him in cross-examination, the case would be won. But he was not a man to be broken easily. Worden had to be ready with alternate doubts. He poised his pencil as Martin R. Sutherland, assistant prosecutor, rose to question the first witness for the state.
To Sutherland fell the first task in the state’s orderly case, proving the corpus delicti, or that Belle Gunness was dead.
The first witness for the state was Coroner Charles F. Mack. Snowy-haired, snowy-bearded, the old gentleman looked like a prophet about to preach as he held up his hand and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Impressed, the jury and the crowd prepared for revelations. Wirt Worden looked for loopholes. Sutherland began asking questions in his mild voice:
Q. You may state your name to the jury.
A. Charles F. Mack.
Q. What office do you now hold?
A. Coroner of the county.
Q. Did you view the remains after the Gunness fire?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Were you at the Gunness place?
A. Yes, sir, in the afternoon.
Q. What did you see in the cellar?
A. Four bodies.
Q. Describe these bodies.
A. As they lay there—ah—there was a body of a woman and three children. They were lying under a mass of debris on the cellar floor. The bodies were badly burned. There was a hole in the forehead of one of the children. The head of the adult body was missing, and also the right leg was burned below the knee. The left foot was missing and one arm was off. I disremember as to whether or not the hand was attached to the arm.
Worden made a note, and then another, and another. A blow to the forehead, dismemberment, found under the debris—it all looked like-deliberate murder, rather than death by fire. Sutherland continued his mild questioning:
Q. Were there rings on the hands, Dr. Mack?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Can you identify the rings?
A. No, sir.
Q. Did you take charge of the bodies, Doctor?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. What disposition did you make of them?
A. I had them taken to Cutler’s morgue.
Q. Did you have charge of them after this?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. What examination did you make of them, Dr. Mack?
A. I viewed them. I did not make a minute examination.
Q. Did you make a record, Doctor?
A. I made the ordinary record. I did not pay any more attention to the bodies than in an ordinary case.
Q. Do you have this record to refresh your memory?
A. No, sir.
Q. Will you make a search for it in order to refresh your memory?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Did you appoint autopsists, Dr. Mack?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Whom did you appoint?
A. Dr. Meyer, Dr. Gray, Dr. Wilcox, and Dr. Long.
Q. Did you or they see any bones other than those with the body?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. What were those bones, Doctor?
A. One a vertebra, one a part of a lower jaw.
Q. What disposition did you make of these?
A. I gave them to the Sheriff and took his receipt.
Q. How were these prepared, Dr. Mack?
A. Placed in a jar and sealed with this ring.
Q. Are these the bones?
Mr. Sutherland produced a sealed jar. Dr. Mack thought it was the same one. The assistant prosecutor opened the jar. With impassive face he produced some grisly relics. The coroner named them over as Sutherland showed them—a seventh vertebra, a heelbone, a jawbone, a piece of cloth pried out of one of the clenched hands. Women who had known the Gunness family shuddered, and wondered which hand had contracted on the bedclothes in a tortured death spasm. But Dr. Mack could not positively state which hand it was.
Next, proceeding
methodically, the assistant prosecutor produced a paper bearing the coroner’s bold, distinctive handwriting.
“It is my verdict in this case,” said Dr. Mack.
“May it please Your Honor,” said Mr. Sutherland, “we wish to introduce this verdict in evidence.”
Worden was on his feet at once. “We object! Did the defendant appear at this inquest? Did he make any admissions to Dr. Mack? No? Then the inquest report is not evidence against him!”
Heavy books were opened and authorities were cited. Judge Richter ruled that the inquest report could be admitted. It was first blood to the prosecution. Mr. Sutherland sat down with a smile. The smile would be wiped off after lunch, when after a period of digestion Judge Richter was to come into court and reverse himself, ruling finally that the inquest report must be excluded from the evidence.
Meanwhile, however, undaunted by the setback, Worden rose to cross-examine. Where should he attack first? He glanced at his notes, and saw more than one vulnerable point. The old man had been full of uncertainties, unwilling to identify the rings, unable to remember without his notes. Worden attacked him briskly.
“You stated, Dr. Mack,” he began, “that you are a physician and coroner?”
Dr. Mack was sure of that; but at the very next question Worden was able to show that this coroner had perhaps been rather casual in the discharge of his duties.
Q. You were not present, Doctor, when the bodies were discovered?
A. No, sir.
Q. You do not know the condition of the bodies when found?
A. Not of my own knowledge.
Worden smiled. That put him ahead, because he had been there to see the bodies found. He flicked a glance at the jury to see if the point had registered, and then attacked another vulnerable point, the identification of the body.
Q. Now, Dr. Mack, did you weigh the body of the adult person?
A. I did not.
Q. Why did you not?
A. It was not my custom to weigh bodies in inquests.
Q. Did you know, Doctor, that there was a question as to the identity of the body?
A. No, I did not.
The jury and the public gaped. Dr. Mack himself had questioned it for a stubborn three weeks, and plenty of people were still questioning it. The witness seemed to be answering at random, hoping only to escape from his relentless inquisitor. But there was no escape.
Worden glanced at his notes and took another tack. Could he twist Dr. Mack’s evidence to suggest that these four people died otherwise than by fire?
Q. Now, Dr. Mack, you observed a hole in the skull of a child?
A. Yes, sir.
Did the child die by a favorite Gunness weapon, a hammer? Worden pressed the question, but demonstrated only that Dr. Mack had not examined the hole, did not remember its shape, and could not say which forehead it was in. Worden dropped the point and went on.
According to Dr. Mack’s testimony (which Worden knew to be accurate in that respect), the body of the woman had been found headless and in a pretty fragmentary state. Mrs. Gunness habitually disjointed her victims for disposal. Was the adult body in fact such a cadaver in process of dismemberment when the murderess suddenly decided to plant it, fire the house, and run away?
Q. Now, Dr. Mack, about the adult—could you state whether the arms were disjointed or not?
A. No, sir.
The defense lawyer tried another word in his next question, and succeeded better:
Q. Do you know whether the foot was disconnected or not?
A. I think so.
Q. Could you tell from appearance whether the leg had been cut off or burned off, Doctor?
A. No, sir.
Q. Could you tell whether the head had been burned off, or charred after it had been severed?
A. I could not.
Q. Did you examine the upper terminus of the spine, Doctor?
A. No, sir, not with any care.
Worden himself had seen the hideous and suggestive state of the spine. In burning, the flesh had shrunk back from the upper vertebrae, leaving the spine protruding as the sawed-through bone protrudes from a half ham after a housewife has cooked it. Had that neck, too, been sawed through? Nothing on the subject could be elicited from Dr. Mack; but later on two other prosecution witnesses, the ex-Sheriff and the undertaker, put the state of the spine on record.
The coroner was flagging. Many in the crowd had known the old man’s benevolent kindness, and pitied him as he wearied under the ordeal; but with Ray Lamphere’s life at stake, Worden had no mercy.
A telling item of prosecution evidence was one of the bits of charred bone on the table. The state offered it as a fragment of the missing head found among the ashes. Dr. Mack had already identified it as a scrap of lower jaw. Worden attacked to shake that identification, and soon shook every bit of anatomical certainty out of the coroner’s brain.
Q. Are you positive that this bone which I show you is a cervical vertebra?
A. I am not.
Q. Well, Doctor, are you positive that this bone I present is a jawbone?
A. It is.
Q. Is it the bone of a human being?
A. I do not know.
Q. Would you state, Dr. Mack, from present observation, that this bone is from the upper or lower maxillary?
The coroner had been bedeviled to the end of his patience.
A. I could not positively state that it is a bone at all!
It was an utter rout. Worden let him go. A sigh of relief rippled through the crowd as the old man walked slowly from the witness chair and departed, leaning more heavily than usual on his gold-headed cane. The first medical testimony for the prosecution had been turned into a triumph for the defense.
There were four more doctors to come. Mr. Sutherland called Dr. Franklin T. Wilcox. Dr. Wilcox bustled to the stand, a genial, robust person with a solid bay window and a little mustache neatly trimmed. He had performed an autopsy on the body thought to be Myrtle’s.
Dr. Wilcox was followed on the stand by big, burly Dr. H. H. Long. Dr. Long had autopsied the body of the younger girl.
Between them, the two doctors depicted the incinerated state of the little bodies, and described the condition of the viscera, each stomach empty, each heart full of blood. In each forehead was a hole, although the brain beneath was neither injured nor burned away, nor was the hair destroyed.
In cross-examination, Worden emphasized those frontal holes. Were they made by a hammer in the murderess’ hand before the fire was set?
In cross-examining Dr. Long, the defense lawyer raised another point useful to his client:
Q. On the body of this child, Lucy, Dr. Long, did you observe any ecchymotic spots?
A. No, sir, none.
Q. Such spots invariably appear when death is due to suffocation, do they not, Doctor?
A. Yes, sir, that is correct.
Again Worden had elicited testimony valuable to the defense from a prosecution witness. He sat down with a smile for his client.
Ray was looking shrunken, and his sallow face was tinged with a sick green. The multiplication of horrors was telling on him. He must have longed for this unlucky day, Friday the thirteenth, to come to a close. He must have felt the mounting horror of the crowded courtroom audience focusing itself on him as the author of it. But the prosecution plowed on. Dr. J. L. Gray was called to the stand.
In Dr. Gray the defense caught a Tartar. The witness was a precise, chill Vermonter. His glasses had cold steel rims, his air was remote, his diction was crisp and positive. He would be a tough opponent. Worden took careful notes as Mr. Sutherland began to question Dr. Gray.
Q. Were you called in by the coroner of the county, Dr. Gray, to perform an autopsy?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Please describe the body, Doctor.
A. It was the body of an adult female. The head was missing and the upper vertebrae were missing down to the seventh cervical. The left arm was burned to the upper third. The right arm wa
s disconnected at the shoulder. The right leg was burned off to the knee. The left leg was burned off at the ankle, and most of the flesh to the knee. The breast was burned, exposing the contents of the body. An adult right arm was with the body with the fingers tightly clutched. In this hand was a piece of cloth.
Worden, noting that clenched hand, consulted a big medical tome before him and nodded to himself as Sutherland continued:
Q. What were your findings internally, Dr. Gray?
A. On making an incision, the cardial sac appeared normal. The heart was dilated, and all four cavities filled with blood clots. The stomach was empty. The lungs were normal, except cooked. The back of the legs was worse burned than the front.
Mr. Sutherland picked up a charred bit of bone and handed it to the witness.
Q. I will ask you, Doctor, to look at that bone and state from appearance what it is.
A. You ought to have an anatomist.
Nevertheless, Dr. Gray named over the bones again, a heelbone, an adult jawbone. That done, Mr. Sutherland consulted his papers and began to elicit the evidence he needed to identify this body as that of Mrs. Gunness.
With great confidence, the physician estimated that the body, now greatly shrunk by fire, would have stood five feet, four and a half inches in life, and weighed about two hundred pounds. The breasts were fat and large, and the abdomen carried about two inches of fat.
It sounded like a smaller version of Belle Gunness.
Mr. Sutherland went on to emphasize the similarities between Belle Gunness and the body found in the fire, attacking by inference the defense implication that the body might have been a cadaver that Mrs. Gunness, in the practice of her deadly profession, happened to have had on hand.
Q. Now, Dr. Gray, could you tell if any of the organs were decomposed?
A. They were not decomposed.
Q. Could you determine the cause of death?
A. No. No scars or evidence of violence were apparent.
Q. What, in your opinion, was the cause of death?
A. In my opinion, death was due to asphyxia.
Q. Caused by what, Doctor?
A. By fire.
On still another point the positive Dr. Gray proved useful to the prosecution. On the table among the bones were three heavy gold rings. The prosecution wanted to establish that these were Belle Gunness’ rings. Drs. Mack and Long had declined to recognize them at all. Dr. Wilcox had seen them on the dead woman’s hands, but knew no more about them. A blurry enlargement from the Koch photograph had been produced, but gave no certainty. Now Dr. Gray gave a precise account of these rings:
The Truth about Belle Gunness Page 9