The Truth about Belle Gunness

by Lillian de la Torre

  Prosecutor Smith is now playing the part of the great Jupiter who rolls the balls down the bowling alleys of the heavens. He started off with a rush Thursday afternoon, and in his opening statement scored a clean “strike.” Since then several “spares” have been recorded to his credit, but withal it will be necessary to land several more “strikes” to anywhere near approach a 300 score.

  There’ll be another sharp peal of thunder any minute.

  On Tuesday morning, November 17, lawyers and audience, Judge and jury, bailiffs and defendant came back to a death-cold courtroom. Ray Lamphere’s teeth began to chatter. Even the Judge’s broad frame draped in broadcloth began to shiver. He told the bailiff to hire an extra stoker and load the furnace better, and everybody went away to a warmer place until the stoking had produced its effect. When finally they had all come back again, Prosecutor Smith began to launch a quick new succession of thunderbolts.

  Last week the prosecution had brought five medical men into court to prove that Belle Gunness had died in the fire. This week Mr. Smith was proving, by adducing motive, means, and opportunity, that Ray Lamphere killed her.

  The victim herself, in her letters to Asle Helgelien, had already been called into court to testify that Lamphere was crazy and dangerous. Now Prosecutor Smith began to call Lamphere’s friends to the stand.

  Ray’s friends were a motley crew—farmers, hired men, bartenders, a hackie, a brewery-wagon driver, a whore. One by one, avoiding Ray’s eyes, they told on him. Ray sat sullen, with downcast gaze. Wirt Worden, looking slightly contemptuous, let them pass without much cross-examination. Once he tried to get Ray’s cousin to put on the record the precarious health of Ray’s grieving mother; but the prosecution objected, and the Judge stopped him.

  When the whore flounced to the stand in a rustle of petticoats, a pretty woman made no prettier by rats in her pompadour and paint on her face, Worden merely asked her where she had been living and what she did there, and she soon bounced down again with her red cheeks redder, while scandalized matrons sniffed. A bank clerk and a justice of the peace, called next, barely restored the odor of respectability.

  Among them, these state’s witnesses painted a vivid picture of Ray’s goings-on during the last months before the fire. Between December and April, Smith would contend, Mrs. Gunness paramour turned against her. Watching the woman jealously, Ray Lamphere came to share with her some guilty knowledge that both terrified him and gave him a hold over her. When she paid him off, he bragged about it. When she fought back in the courts, he threatened to get even with her.

  Did he get even with her by burning her up in her house? That was the question before the jury.

  Ray’s friend William Slater knew a lot of Ray’s secrets, for Ray liked to brag to him. The prosecutor questioned him like any old gossip:

  Q. Did you hear the defendant talk about Mrs. Gunness?

  A. Yes, sir. He came to work for me sometime in February. We slept together, and he would talk about her.

  Q. What did he say, Mr. Slater?

  A. He said she had promised to marry him, that he had two witnesses in the barn who heard her promise.

  Q. What do you know about Lamphere’s relations with Belle Gunness?

  A. What?

  Q. Did he tell you that he slept with Mrs. Gunness?

  A. No.

  The prosecutor stared. He knew that Ray had been sleeping with Belle, and bragging about it, and the newspapers had been playing it up. Was this witness turning hostile?

  Q. He didn’t say he slept with her?

  A. No. He said she slept with him.

  The courtroom exploded into mirth. Judge Richter had to hammer loudly for order. The witness felt he had to explain the distinction: “He said she often came to his door in the evening, knocked softly, and stayed in his room until daybreak.”

  It was time to hustle the nubile virgins out of the courtroom before they heard more, and worse. The mammas did well to remove their daughters, because soon Peter Colson was on the stand. Peter had been Belle’s farm hand, and her lover, in 1903. He was called to the stand to report some of Ray’s talk; but when cross-examined by Wirt Worden, he somehow started talking about Belle Gunness instead. A slow, sincere Norwegian, he wrinkled his forehead and tried to make himself and the world understand how Mrs. Gunness seduced him in spite of himself.

  “She said for us to go West and get a farm and raise cattle and ship to Chicago. She wanted me to marry her. Then there was a sort of love affair.

  “I loved Mrs. Gunness in spite of myself. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it. She caressed and purred like a cat, and then I couldn’t resist her. She was soft and gentle in her ways. I never saw such a woman.”

  Ray Lamphere’s haunted eyes burned on the witness, with who knows what memories behind them. Men and women alike listened avidly. In the front row a gum-chewing girl froze with her mouth open. A visiting clergyman looked at the eager women among the spectators, and scowled. Colson went on staring bewildered into the past:

  “All the time that I was giving in to her, there was something about her that seemed to be pulling me away. She, made me love her, and she scared me at the same time. I was suspicious of what she was after.

  “Then one day she called me down, and that ended me on it. One of the horses was lame, and I took a piece of old shirt to tie up the foot, and when she saw it she called me down pretty sharp. I told her I would buy a couple of shirts if she would not say anything.

  “I kept doing the chores, but I stayed in town. She talked better, and I asked her for my money. She was angry. She asked me what I would do with the money if I got it. She said I should stay a while. I said I would if she would pay me my money on the spot. She fumbled and fussed around and delayed things until it was very late. Then she asked me to go upstairs to bed. She said I should have a good rest, because my nerves seemed to be all unstrung. She said I would feel better in the morning. I was afraid to stay there. I went and slept at a neighbor’s.

  “Another thing that turned me against her, she treated Jennie Olson very badly, and I didn’t like that. One time Jennie was trying to carry a heavy pail of water. I wanted to carry it for her, but she begged me not to. She said if she didn’t carry it herself Mrs. Gunness would tear her to pieces.”

  Had Ray Lamphere felt the same kind of misgivings and the same half-hypnotic fascination? The crowd stared from Ray to Peter and back again as the testimony proceeded.

  The story was carried forward to the coming of Andrew Helgelien, when the prosecution put the bank cashier, Frank J. Pitner, on the stand. He told how Mrs. Gunness appeared at the bank on January 6 with a big man wearing a gray fur coat that hung below his knees. She introduced her companion as Mr. Helgelien.

  Mr. Helgelien wanted to draw his money, all of it, out of a South Dakota bank. He was willing to wait till the money came, but Mrs. Gunness was in a hurry. She argued and urged, but no cash was forthcoming, and at last they went away moneyless.

  On January 11, the South Dakota bank paid up. It was January 14, however, before the pair came in to collect.

  “Well, Mr. Helgelien,” said the cashier banteringly, “you don’t seem in as great a hurry for your money now as you were a week ago.”

  “I been sick,” said Helgelien.

  “Ja,” said Mrs. Gunness, “I been taking care of him.”

  Everybody who heard about this interchange wondered whether Belle had been taking care of him by poisoning his meals. In point of fact, however, this was highly unlikely. Until Andrew had collected his cash, he had not served his purpose.

  The bank cashier was unwilling to hand out any cash. So soon after the panic of 1907, cash was hard to get. He wanted to credit the money to its owner instead.

  “Well, that will be all right,” said Helgelien. “I don’t need all that money right away.”

  “Draw it in cash!” said Mrs. Gunness at his elbow, and Helgelien good-naturedly consented.

  “What are you going to do wi
th all that money?” asked Mr. Pitner.

  “None of your business!” snapped Belle.

  Pitner produced the cash. It was Andrew’s death warrant. He went away with Belle. That was the last Mr. Pitner saw of him. Later, however, he saw the gray fur coat. Lamphere was wearing it.

  Later still there were inquiries from South Dakota. Mr. Pitner questioned Mrs. Gunness, and she said Helgelien had left by streetcar to go down East, and he might go to Norway. She showed him the scrap of Andrew’s letter.

  What had really become of Andrew Helgelien? The prosecution contended that Ray Lamphere knew, because he had had a hand in it. John Rye, the brewery-wagon driver, was called to tell the story of the night of January 14.

  “He was going to make some kind of a horse deal in Michigan City. I went with him. We left La Porte in the snow, driving a cutter with a fast horse, and got there about six-thirty. We put up the horse at the livery barn, and came back on the eight-o’clock car on the interurban. At the powerhouse switch Lamphere got off, saying, ‘I am going to get off and go over and see what the old woman is doing.’

  “He agreed to meet me later in the evening at Charlie Smith’s saloon, but he didn’t come. I didn’t see him again till the next forenoon. He said he got a brace and bit and bored a hole up through the floor to hear what they were saying.”

  Babbling to William Slater in the dark, Ray had told a lurid version of what they were saying. They were discussing a plan to give Ray poison, and wondering how much would do the business.

  “He’s got a dog,” said Helgelien. “Why don’t you try it on his dog?”

  It was highly unlikely that Mrs. Gunness ever breathed a word about poison to her prospective victim. Wirt Worden, however, knew that Ray had been apprehensive that she might poison him, and when his dog disappeared, Ray became convinced that she had been trying a dose on the poor creature. He told a friend that if he died suddenly, there must surely be an autopsy to look for poison. The friend’s advice was to stay away from Mrs. Gunness; but that Ray was unable to do. After a week the dog came back, which made Ray feel better, because he was much attached to the shaggy old bitch; but he couldn’t leave Mrs. Gunness alone.

  What had Ray really seen and heard that night? Was it the murder of Helgelien? Did he thereupon come forward to assist in packaging the body? The state would say so; but no evidence to that effect was produced.

  Whatever Lamphere saw that night, he thought it gave him a hold on the woman. He muttered darkly in saloons that there was money coming to him from Mrs. Gunness, and she had better pay him or else.

  “I know something about the old woman, and she has to come my way,” Lamphere told Slater. He added vaingloriously: “The big Swede that was at the farm, I drew a gun on him and made him leave. He left his clothes. Mrs. Gunness begged me to give him time to get his clothes, but I chased him away. His clothes are still there.…”

  “Pete,” muttered Ray darkly to Colson one day in the Maple City Saloon, “what do you think of that woman?”

  Colson laughed in his face.

  “I think,” he said, “that she is too damn sharp for you! You’ll never get ahead of her.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Lamphere, cursing. “She’ll pay me the money she owes me, or I’ll make her get down on her knees to me. That man that was there in winter from the West, I drove him away, and she got down on me for that. And I know something else about her—” Lamphere broke off.

  “What do you know?”

  Lamphere clamped his mouth shut on his glass.

  For all his talk about money, Worden never saw any in Ray’s possession. He did have John Moo’s silver watch. He went into the saloon one day and pawned it for two dollars. Later on, said the bartender, he got hold of two dollars somewhere and came back and redeemed the watch.

  “How are you getting along with your sweetheart out at the farm?” asked the bartender.

  “She is having me pinched all the time, and damned if I ain’t getting tired of it! If she don’t leave me alone, I’ll send her over the road to the penitentiary that quick!” snarled Lamphere with a snap of his fingers.

  Belle Gunness was a dangerous woman to blackmail. Her counterstroke in taking Ray to court was bold to the point of foolhardiness, but she got away with it.

  Justice S. E. Grover took the stand and gave an account of this extraordinary litigation. The Justice was a big, jolly man who seemed about to burst into a Homeric quake of laughter; but the tale he had to tell was no longer so very funny as it had seemed when Worden had laughed himself home from Stillwell.

  On March 12, the record ran, Ray Lamphere was hauled up for trespass, admitted his guilt, and paid a one-dollar fine. On March 24, again accused of trespass, he appeared with his lawyer and denied the charge. Worden got the case put off, and finally got it transferred to Stillwell court. Later the Stillwell justice would add his impression of the complainant. Mrs. Gunness had a broad smile on her face the whole time she was giving evidence, like somebody putting over something. She put it over, for at Stillwell Ray was fined again.

  Mrs. Gunness’ trickiest move was to question Ray’s sanity. If he was found insane, then it didn’t matter what he accused her of. In December, 1907, she complained, he betrayed insanity by saying things that she knew to be both false and unreasonable. What things he said exactly she did not state, but it was easy now to see that they must have been things about vanished husbands and vanishing suitors.

  “He comes to my house,” the complaint went on, “every night at all times of night, commits misdemeanors; was fined for the same but continues it. He gets intoxicated.”

  They gave her a printed list of adjectives, and she checked off that the man who had been her lover was “silent, quiet, melancholy, seclusive, dull, profane, filthy, intemperate, sleepless, criminal.”

  Three doctors examined Ray, and dissented:

  “We find patient quiet, clean, and neat. He is slightly nervous. His memory is good for recent and remote events. Speech is intelligent and coherent. Ray Lamphere is not insane.”

  Defeated in this attempt, Mrs. Gunness had tried a new legal dodge. She went into court saying that she had cause to fear that Ray Lamphere would injure her property and herself, and asking that he be put under bonds to keep the peace. This proceeding took place on Saturday, April 25, just two days before the fire.

  Belle Gunness and her daughter Myrtle told Justice Grover that Ray was back at his prowling. On Sunday night they spotted him by the pig pen, and hurried out to chase him away. They were within fifteen feet of him when he coolly cut the wire fence, pulled out the fence post, and carried it away. On Tuesday night there he was again, standing by the hog lot in the dark. Mrs. Gunness wanted him kept away from the hog lot. Everybody in court, now, could see why.

  In spite of Belle and Myrtle, Wirt Worden produced an alibi, and Ray got off.

  Now, however, that court action told heavily against Worden’s client.

  Mrs. Gunness had said on oath that she feared Lamphere would harm her. Somebody had harmed her. It must be Lamphere, mustn’t it? Again Belle Gunness had been called into court to testify against the defendant.

  Worden was too canny to cross-examine either justice about what had gone on in court. He chose to cross-question a bystander instead, Ray’s friend John Wheatbrook. The result was a rather remarkable example of shrewd cross-examination.

  Q. Did you pay a fine for Lamphere, Mr. Wheatbrook?

  A. Yes, sir. I paid his fine of $19.10 at a trial at Stillwell justice court.

  Q. Do you remember my asking Mrs. Gunness, in the trial at Stillwell, if it was not a fact that her first husband was killed by poisoning?

  “Object!” shouted Mr. Smith. “It is quite immaterial what my friend Mr. Worden asked Mrs. Gunness at Stillwell.”

  “It is material,” insisted Worden. “My idea in asking is that we are attempting to show Mrs. Gunness’ frame of mind, and that these questions affected her, convincing her that the attorney knew of h
er former experiences and thus furnishing a motive for flight or suicide.”

  “The witness may answer,” ruled Judge Richter.

  The witness answered, “Yes, sir,” and Worden went on with the questioning:

  Q. Do you remember that I asked whether Mrs. Gunness collected insurance on Sorenson?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. And do you remember, Mr. Wheatbrook, that I asked whether the life of Peter Gunness was insured?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. Do you remember that I asked if the sausage-grinder that killed Peter Gunness was not held in the hand of Mrs. Gunness?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. Do you remember that I asked whether Jennie Olson was ever coming back again?

  A. Yes, sir.

  By this curious inverted process, Wirt Worden was able to testify for his client without taking the stand. Mrs. Gunness had not answered any of these questions, since her attorney, Mr. Smith, had instructed her not to; but the answers did not matter. It was the series of questions, the defense would contend, that frightened her. Added to inquiries from the Lindboe family, from Jennie’s people, and from Asle Helgelien, and capped by Asle’s announced intention of coming himself on May 1, it was enough, in Worden’s view, to drive her to a sudden escape, either by flight or by suicide.

  One way or another, the prosecution witnesses showed, things came to a head on Monday, April 27. On that afternoon, said Wheatbrook, he had been going into town with a load of wood. Ray Lamphere, who had been picking mushrooms, decided to ride along and sell them in town. There the two men went their separate ways, and Wheatbrook did not see Lamphere again until after the fire.

  Other people saw Lamphere drifting around town that Monday afternoon. He peddled the mushrooms at the saloon and then drank up the proceeds. Later a grocer’s clerk saw him.

  The grocer was waiting on Mrs. Gunness. She wanted a large quantity of groceries, some candy, and some kerosene. She had forgotten to bring the can, so the proprietor rummaged around and found one. She had him put in two gallons.