8. The Great Jupiter: The Prosecution Continues
On Monday, November 16, Ray Lamphere walked into court to face the second week of his trial for murdering his mistress by arson. A day’s respite had done him good. He entered smiling and confident. By this time he was used to the buzz of whispered comment and the pitying feminine glances that followed him to his place. He nodded affably to friends in the crowd.
The courtroom was jammed to the doors. Standees crowded the aisles and were pressed in thick along the walls. Such a thing had never been known before; but as long as there was an inch of room, said the authorities, no one would be barred from the trial. Jacob Tag, bailiff, was detailed to keep order in the crowd. Intent only on listening, they gave him no trouble.
Smith and Sutherland, for the state, and Worden and Weir, for the defense, entered separately and took their places. Reporters from all over poised their pencils. Mrs. Frances Flynn returned to the stand.
Unfolding his lanky length from the prosecution table, Ralph N. Smith put a few brief questions, reminding the jury that Mrs. Flynn recognized the rings, knew Mrs. Gunness well, and thought the body was hers.
When he sat down, Worden arose with a complete change of battle plan in mind. He had used the medical witnesses to suggest doubts about the body’s identity. He would use Mrs. Gunness’ neighbor to turn sympathy against Mrs. Gunness. Through her he chose to bring into the courtroom a pitiful little ghost, a shy small wraith with spun-gold hair and trusting blue eyes—Jennie Olson, who after two years in the ground came back in mute accusation against the woman who mothered her, and fought to keep her, and destroyed her.
Many in the courtroom remembered Jennie vividly. More than one of the boys she had known could still hear the tinkle of her ladylike little tunes on the old Gunness piano. Her schoolteachers recalled how gently she had mothered the smaller children. Neighbors remembered seeing her driving the cows, barefoot in the lush summer meadows, or sitting in the shade, deep in a book. Wirt Worden called her before them now as he asked quietly:
Q. Now, Mrs. Flynn, you say you visited the farm frequently until Jennie left. Did you know that Jennie was going away?
A. Yes, sir. Mrs. Gunness told me so. I visited Mrs. Gunness the night before Jennie was to go. She showed me the elaborate wardrobe she had prepared for Jennie. There was a beautiful new cloak that came from Chicago. Mrs. Gunness said she paid fifty dollars for it. There were silk waists and skirts. Mrs. Gunness was sewing on one then in order to have it ready for next day. I never saw Jennie again.
A wave of renewed pity for the doomed girl swept the courtroom. Worden was satisfied to leave it at that.
Jared Drollinger, a grizzled juror from a farm out Wills way, was on pins and needles. Overnight a particular point had been revolving in his head, and this friend of Mrs. Gunness’ was the very person to settle it for him. He was on his feet with his long beard bristling almost before Worden had finished with Mrs. Flynn.
“Mr. Drollinger?”
“Your Honor, I would like to ask Mrs. Flynn how she knows about Mrs. Gunness’ weight.”
“She was weighed two years ago,” replied Mrs. Flynn.
“What exactly did she weigh?”
“Two hundred and eighty pounds.”
Mr. Drollinger gave the prosecution table a sharp look as he sat down. “How’s that for shrinkage?” it seemed to say. Not all the jury had joined Mr. Smith’s team.
The next witness was a tantalizer. She was Mrs. Ray Turner, a bright young Norwegian girl. Mr. Smith handed her a packet of letters.
Q. Mrs. Turner, will you identify these letters?
A. They are letters which I translated from Norwegian into English.
Q. By whom are they signed?
A. Bella Gunness.
Q. To whom are they addressed?
A. Asle Helgelien.
A ripple of interest ran through the courtroom. What had the 280-pound charmer written to her victim’s brother? Ray Lamphere eyed the little bundle of envelopes uneasily. What had the woman said? Had she mentioned him? Eager curiosity focused on the papers in Mrs. Turner’s hand as everybody got ready to hear them read out.
The prosecution chose to keep everyone on tenterhooks. Mrs. Turner stood down. She was followed on the stand by a smattering of purely formal evidence. The letters lay on the table whetting curiosity. It was nearly noon before the bailiff called:
“Asle Helgelien!”
Necks craned for a look at the determined brother who had come all the way from South Dakota to La Porte to find what the Sheriff wouldn’t look for. Asle was still stringy and shabby, he still had his singing Norwegian accent, but there was a new dignity in his bearing.
It was part of Prosecutor Smith’s case that Ray was an accomplice in the murder of Andrew Helgelien, and that it was over Andrew’s money that he and his mistress fell out. He began to elicit from Asle the story of Andrew. Amid intense sympathy focused upon the witness, Smith commenced:
Q. Did you have a brother, Mr. Helgelien?
A. Ja, Andrew K. Helgelien.
Q. Where did your brother live?
A. Rock County, Minnesota, and in 1880 he went to South Dakota. In 1883 he went to Wisconsin to work in a pinery until 1893.
Everybody in court knew this was a polite fiction. Andrew had not been in Wisconsin; he had been in jail. He did ten years in the federal penitentiary at Stillwater, Minnesota, after having had the bad judgment to rob a post office. The federal jail record had been used to check the identity of the body Asle found in the hog lot. No wonder Asle had been quick to worry when his wayward younger brother disappeared again. Mr. Smith led him forward:
Q. And then, Mr. Helgelien?
A. Then he returned to South Dakota, where he lived on the farm next to mine until January first of this year. Then he left home. He arranged for my hired man to take care of his stock, and said that he would be home in a week surely. He and I were on good, friendly terms. When I heard nothing from him in nine or ten days, I began to worry about him. The hired man found letters in his house, written by Mrs. Gunness, urging him to come to La Porte and marry her. The first of these letters was dated 1906, and she wrote every week right up until my brother left. When I had read these letters, I became very uneasy.
Q. Did you then write a letter to Mrs. Gunness?
A. I asked the hired man to write to her.
Q. Did she reply?
A. She replied immediately.
Q. Is this the letter she sent you, Mr. Helgelien?
Every eye fixed on the envelope, and every ear sharpened to hear the letter read out. But the prosecutor was still holding back his climax. Asle Helgelien identified the letter. The prosecutor put it back on the table unopened as he asked:
Q. Did you reply to this letter from Mrs. Gunness?
A. Yes, I was still suspicious, and I wanted to draw her out. She replied to my letter, and later she wrote a third time.
Q. Are these the letters you received from Mrs. Gunness, Mr. Helgelien?
A. Yes.
The prosecutor laid down the letters. The crowd sighed with disappointment as the court rose for the luncheon recess. As Ray Lamphere left the courtroom, his burning eyes over his shoulder lingered on the little packet of envelopes. What story would the letters tell?
Dead silence fell on the packed courtroom when finally Prosecutor Smith drew the first letter from its envelope:
La Porte, March 27, 1908
Mr. Asle K. Helgelien:
I have your recent letter in which you wish to know where your brother Andrew keeps himself. Well that is just what I would like to know.
He came here about the middle of January. When he left here he said he wanted to find his brother who kept a gambling room in Aberdeen. He thought he was in Chicago or New York or possibly had gone to Norway. He wanted to spend some time at the farm with us when he returned. When he was in Chicago, he said, he would be there so short a time that I needn’t write. I have neither seen nor heard fro
m him since then. I saw a man who said he had gone back to South Dakota. I will close now with friendly greeting.
BELLA GUNNESS
Thus wrote Mrs. Gunness to Andrew’s brother, about the time of the spring thaw, sitting at her dining table within sight of the fresh hole into which she had just put the pieces of Andrew.
Soon she wrote again, according to Mrs. Turner’s translation:
La Porte, Ind., April 11, 1908
Mr. A. K. Helgelien:
Your letter I have received some days ago, but haven’t been able to answer in regard to your brother Andrew. I have tried every which way to find some trace of him. The man who told me he is in South Dakota is named Lamphere, who worked for me for a while. He said he had heard it from some one he knew in Mansfield. I knew right away it was a lie.
This sounded like another of Belle’s plausible lies. Probably only two people in the courtroom knew that it happened to be the truth that Mrs. Gunness was using for her dishonest purposes. The two were Ray Lamphere and Wirt Worden.
Soon after Andrew disappeared, Ray had thought up a muddleheaded scheme of cloudy purpose. He cooked up a letter saying that Andrew was back home again, and then got it mailed by a friend in Mansfield. The look of superior contempt that Mrs. Gunness gave him at sight of the letter, Ray had told Wirt Worden, convinced him all the more that something had gone very wrong with Andrew. The letter itself was at the time of the trial actually in Worden’s possession. Its existence helped to convince Worden that his client had had no positive knowledge of Andrew’s fate; but it wasn’t legal evidence, and there was no use in protruding it in a court of law.
The prosecutor’s sharp voice was reading on:
But this Lamphere began to find so many wrong things to talk about until at last they took and arrested him and they had three doctors to examine him and see if he was all right. They found him not quite crazy enough to put in a hospital. But perfectly sane he is not. He is now out under bonds and is going to have a trial next week. Therefore, there is no foundation to the stories Lamphere told. Others have told me that Lamphere was jealous of Andrew and for that reason troubled me this way.
Had “crazy Lamphere” murdered his rival? At home in South Dakota, Asle Helgelien must have asked himself this question. Now, as he sat in the witness chair, with his sad, quiet eyes fixed on the defendant, Asle must have been still asking himself whether the jealous hired man had not helped with his brother’s murder. That thought was in every mind as the letter continued:
The reason he was looking for his brother, Andrew told me, was that both of them left Aberdeen the same day, and there was some trouble with a man they had found dead there. He said that he had not talked to his brother about it, but had heard it from others and when his brother left home Andrew probably thought this was the reason and that is why he wanted to know if his brother went to Norway alone. Now this is what Andrew told me, and I believe it to be the truth.
It was a lie. Andrew had told Mrs. Gunness no such thing—but Ray had. Ray thought it up to get Andrew in trouble with the police, and the police had already checked it and found out it was untrue, as evidence was soon to prove. Ray shifted uneasily in his place at the defense table as he heard his own invention come back thus used by Mrs. Gunness to deceive her correspondent. The letter went on:
Andrew did not say anything to me in regard to the farm or creatures, but I think it would be best for you to sell the farm and creatures as soon as you can and come here in May.
When Andrew comes up there again, which he will no doubt some time, be sure and do not tell him that I told you this or do net tell it to others either. He probably will not like it.
I must now do the best I can here and so we must hope that all will come out all right. I think it is only this half-crazed Lamphere who has started it all, but there is hardly anything to do about it.
Andrew was not very well when he was up here. He had caught a bad cold up there and on his way, so he had quite a cold, but I do not think it anything to talk about. He is otherwise well and strong and I hope nothing has happened to him.
Well, I have done the best I could and given you all the enlightenment I can and if you wish again to write I will gladly answer your respectable letter.
Heartiest regards;
BELLA GUNNESS
If Andrew had not been done away with by “half-crazed Lamphere,” had he fled to Norway because of a murder mix-up? Had his cold gone into pneumonia and carried him off on his journey? Mrs. Gunness had managed to raise many possibilities. She had even made a bold bid for Asle, enriched with the proceeds of Andrew’s possessions.
“This letter,” said Asle on the witness stand, “made me more anxious about my brother than before. I hurried to reply, and received a letter back dated April twenty-four, 1908.”
Mr. Smith proceeded to read out that third and last letter, written by the murderess four days before the fire that brought all her plotting to an end:
Mr. A. K. Helgelien:
Your welcome letter I have received, for which I thank you. It is a wonder to me, as well as for you, as to where Andrew keeps himself. I cannot remember the accurate date he left La Porte, but it was either January 15 or 16. My little daughter, fourteen years old, took him to the street car station.
Two or three days afterwards I had a letter from him in Chicago, saying that he had hunted for his brother, but didn’t find him, and that the next day he would look around the “Board of Trade” and see how it was, also to get some track of his brother. If he could not find him, be would go to New York and find out if he had gone to Norway. If such was the case, I think he would go to Norway too.
This is all that I can tell, and I haven’t his letter. I got the letter in the morning and read it and laid it in the china closet in the kitchen and went to milk and when I came back the letter was gone.
That Lamphere was here and he has probably taken it, but part of the letter was found in the barn door one evening when he was around. I send it to you. I recognize Andrew’s writing and I think you do top. I have had it in my pocketbook so long that it is about worn out. We found it the first of this month, and Lamphere he did not know anything about Andrew’s trouble, but he has lately found so much to trouble us with. He has begun all over again. He is in jail just now.
You spoke of sending me money with which to discover what has become of Andrew. If I thought this would be of any use, still I could not go and do the inquiring, so it would be useless for you to send any.
I assure you I will do all I can if you will take a trip down here to see what you can do in this case. I will be glad to see you. I don’t know what we could do to find him, and I don’t understand what keeps him away so long unless, as you say, he has gotten into some trouble and does not want any of us to know about it.
It was that fear, of course, that weighed on the heart of the former bank robber’s brother as heavily as the thought of murder. To dispel that fear as well as all others, he had to go to La Porte. Worden understood that Mrs. Gunness had been told to expect Asle about May 1.
In this last letter Mrs. Gunness enclosed that scrap of Andrew’s handwriting, referring to it as if she had been treasuring it for love of the writer.
I must now close for this time. Be very careful with this part of the letter I am sending you and send it back to me in your next letter, if you please. Heartiest regards from us all,
BELLA GUNNESS
Now the prosecutor picked up from the table the dog-eared little scrap of paper that Mrs. Gunness had sent to Asle Helgelien. No wonder it was about worn out. No wonder Mrs. Gunness could only send a selected scrap without date or signature, with an elaborate lie to account for its fragmentary state. Andrew Helgelien must have written it in the spring of 1907; by the spring of 1908 he was under the mud in the hog lot.
The sympathetic attention in the courtroom sharpened. The little scrap of a love letter brought the big bluff Norwegian into the courtroom to speak out in his own voice.
It was this kindly, simple man whom the ruthless mistress of the hog lot had plundered and killed. The crowd listened in silent sympathy as Asle went on to tell how he had come to La Porte, and dug with his own hands, and found and recognized that dreadfully altered head. When you have loved your brother, and been with him every day for fifteen years, in spite of death and dissolution, you know him.
Asle had known of the finding of the other bodies, “and I believe,” he added as people gasped, “that there are still fifty more dead men buried on the place!”
The loudest gasp and the richest rustle came from a showy group of ladies and gentlemen seated together in a flutter of ostrich plumes and glittering pompadours. A lacy handkerchief touched the corner of a mascara-dark eye; a long white hand went theatrically to a broad white brow as the actors and actresses from Hall’s Theatre reacted appropriately to this real-life drama they had come to observe.
They were to open that night in Rip van Winkle. The round-faced young-old fellow was Thomas Jefferson, the star. Turn about was fair play. Manager Hall had already invited the jury to be his guests at the show that evening, and with the Judge’s blessing the jury had accepted.
Harry N. Darling, the Argus editor, having press passes, went along too.
The play and the trial got rather mixed up in his mind, and Rip’s eternal game of bowls making thunder in the Catskills turned up rather confusedly in Mr. Darling’s next editorial comment on the trial:
The progress of the Lamphere trial suggests a thunder storm. The elements got to work a week ago, and a steady downpour of rain, punctuated by a few peals of thunder, some loud, some almost inaudible, together with a correspondingly small number of flashes of lightning, has been in order ever since.
The Truth about Belle Gunness Page 11