The Truth about Belle Gunness

by Lillian de la Torre

  “After she had been in the store about fifteen minutes,” said the clerk, “Ray Lamphere walked in. He bought a five-cent plug of chewing tobacco. He stared constantly at Mrs. Gunness, but neither one said a word. In my opinion they were bitter enemies.”

  “Object!” cried Wirt Worden. “We object to this as a conclusion of the witness.”

  The grocery clerk was admonished to stick to the facts and keep his conclusions to himself. He went on:

  “Lamphere went out and stood on the sidewalk and watched Mrs. Gunness as she untied her horse and drove away. She had tears in her eyes.”

  Mrs. Gunness was never again seen on the streets of La Porte. Only one man saw her again before her fate was obscured in a blaze of flames—her hired man, Joe Maxson, the man who got out of the fire. Interest became intense when, late on Tuesday afternoon, the next prosecution witness was called:

  “Joseph Maxson!”

  9. Another Sharp Peal of Thunder: The Prosecution Rests

  As Mrs. Gunness’ last hired man came to the stand, Ellsworth Weir poised his pince-nez on his Grecian nose, adjusted his starched cuffs, and took a pencil from the pocket of his piqué-edged vest. Weir was reputed to be an ingenious and merciless cross-examiner, and he meant to be ready for Joe Maxson when the prosecutor had finished. Beside him, Ray Lamphere pulled at his mustache.

  Seated in the witness chair, small, sandy, worried-looking, Joe Maxson gave a nearsighted frown as the lanky prosecutor, Mr. Smith, began to question him:

  Q. Did you know Mrs. Belle Gunness?

  A. I worked for Mrs. Gunness.

  Q. When, Mr. Maxson?

  A. I went to work for Mrs. Gunness on February eighth, 1908. I worked for her until the fire.

  Q. Do you know Ray Lamphere?

  A. Yes, sir, I have known him for several years.

  Q. Did you see him at the Gunness farm, Mr. Maxson?

  A. I saw him around the place in March.

  Q. Did you see him on more than one occasion?

  A. Yes, I saw him again one evening later, standing in the evergreen tree near the house. He was in the branches about two feet from the ground, and he jumped down and ran. The same night I saw him running around the house. Mrs. Gunness had him arrested.

  Q. What happened at the farm the day before the fire?

  A. I worked grubbing around the place. Mrs. Gunness went to town. The children did not go to school that day.

  Q. Why not, Mr. Maxson?

  A. I don’t know.

  Had Mrs. Gunness, then, had foreknowledge that something was going to happen? That question crossed people’s minds briefly as the prosecutor continued:

  Q. When did Mrs. Gunness come back from town, Mr. Maxson?

  A. About five-thirty. She brought toys and food, and a large can half full of kerosene.

  Q. What was done with the kerosene?

  A. I took it from the buggy and put it in the entry under the back stairs.

  Q. At what time did you have supper?

  A. At about six-thirty.

  Q. What did it consist of, Mr. Maxson?

  A. Bread and butter, dried beef, salmon, beefsteak, and potatoes. Everybody showed a fine appetite, and we all had a couple of helpings of beefsteak and lots of cookies and jam. After supper we played games. The main one was “Little Red Riding Hood and the Fox.” Mrs. Gunness loved to play this game, and almost cried if the bad fox chanced to catch Red Riding Hood. At eight-thirty I became sleepy and went upstairs to bed in my room above the kitchen. The last I saw of Mrs. Gunness, she was sitting on the floor with the children, playing with the toy engines and passenger coaches.

  These words brought a different Mrs. Gunness into the courtroom. Here and there in the crowd parents of small children recalled, perhaps, how their own small fry had shared the Gunness toys, and met with affection and kindness from that strange, inexplicable woman. Had she really risen from the children’s games to kill them? Or had they perished, after all, clasped in her arms? The testimony went on:

  Q. What did you hear during the night, Mr. Maxson?

  A. Nothing.

  Q. When did you awaken?

  A. I was awakened by smoke, and looked out the window and saw all the brick part of the house in flames.

  Ellsworth Weir sat forward to listen intently. Joe’s look of worry deepened. Weir was to raise a new doubt on the part of the defense. Here was the man who had escaped from the fire with not only his life, but also his belongings. Did he know more about that fire than he ever told? Did he set it himself, perhaps by accident?

  There was little enough for Weir to go on. C. C. Fish, touring with Joe and the Gunness exhibit, had learned nothing damaging from Joe, in spite of a curiosity so persistent that Joe had taken alarm. Now Joe was to tell the story of the fire over again.

  Q. What did you do then, Mr. Maxson?

  A. I tried to break in the door to the main part of the house, but I couldn’t. I yelled, “Fire!” several times, and ran downstairs outside. Then I tried to go back in, but the roof had fallen into my room. I went to the front and tried to break in the door with an ax. The Clifford boy came first, and then William Humphrey came. The wind was blowing strong from the northwest. William Humphrey and I got a ladder and he went up to the second story. I came to town and notified the Sheriff and the coroner. The Fire Department came and pulled down the walls. I carried water to cool the ruins. I was still there when they found the bodies.

  Ellsworth Weir put up his pencil. The day’s session was ending. He would have the night to plan his attack.

  The Herald that night noted with sober satisfaction that the state was making excellent progress.

  “The picture of Belle Gunness, she of the dark blue eyes, strange and bewitching, painted yesterday by Peter Colson, hung over the witness stand this morning when Joseph Maxson was recalled,” reported the Argus on Wednesday.

  Ray Lamphere’s thin hands clutching the arms of his chair betrayed his nervousness as Mr. Weir advanced to cross-examine Mrs. Gunness’ last hired man. He started by trying to discover some unsuspected connection between the woman and the man; and Joe, with his innocent, worried look, defeated the smart lawyer from the start.

  Q. When did you first know Mrs. Gunness, Mr. Maxson?

  A. When I went out to her place in the middle of February to apply for the job of farm hand. She told me Ray Lamphere had worked for her, but he drank so much she had to discharge him. She said he was a hard-drinking man and a thorough nuisance.

  The defense lawyer switched the topic hastily:

  Q. Now, Mr. Maxson, when did you first realize the house was on fire?

  A. I was awakened about four o’clock in the morning by a roomful of smoke. My first thought was that Mrs. Gunness was getting breakfast. I thought the smoke was coming from the stove. I dressed, lit the lamp, and then looked at my watch. I saw it was too early for breakfast, and then I realized that the house was on fire.

  Q. What did you do?

  A. I tried to kick and beat down the door that opened from my room into the main portion of the building, but I couldn’t. I was almost overcome with the dense smoke. I snatched my things—

  Q. What things?

  A. My telescope bag, a pair of overalls, and a dirty towel from the closet shelf.

  Q. What did you do with them, Mr. Maxson?

  A. I put them by the carriage shed.

  Q. You ran fifty feet away to the carriage shed to deposit your belongings before you made any further attempt to break in the doors?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. Then what did you do?

  A. I tried to break in the front door, but I couldn’t. Finally I got out an ax to chop in the door panel.

  Q. Is this the ax?

  The cross-examiner, Mr. Weir, regarded the implement through his pince-nez as it was produced, and then looked at little Joe Maxson. The ax was a huge woodsman’s ax, big enough for some Paul Bunyan of a lumberman. It seemed a fitting weapon for the vanished Gunness woman to wield, b
ut Maxson was obliged to admit that on the night of the fire it took him twenty swings to pierce the front-door panel. Mr. Weir continued:

  Q. What did you see through the hole you chopped in the door, Mr. Maxson?

  A. Nothing. The smoke was blinding.

  Q. Then what did you do?

  A. I thought that a crime had been committed, so I came into town and notified the Sheriff and the coroner.

  Weir sheered away from the crime of arson. He shifted to his next topic of cross-examination, an orange that the Argus that evening chose to christen “a Gunness lemon.” Mrs. Gunness had handed it to Joe on the fatal evening.

  Q. Did you eat the orange, Mr. Maxson?

  A. Yes, I did. It tasted sort of queer, but I kept on eating it. I never thought much about it until after the fire, and then I told my sister that I thought something might have been placed in the orange. I remember that I struck the bed like a log that night and went to sleep barely a moment after my head had touched the pillow. If there were any noises the next morning when the fire broke out, I didn’t hear them because I was in such a sound sleep. I don’t usually sleep so soundly. I did not awake, as I said before, until the room was full of smoke, and then I was so dazed that it took me a while to realize that the place was on fire.

  Q. And in spite of your dazed condition, you managed to save your belongings?

  A. Yes.

  Q. What did you carry to safety?

  A. My telescope bag and some clothing.

  Q. Didn’t you take a few dime novels, pick them up and put them in your pocket?

  Joe was insulted. He shook his fist at his questioner and shouted loudly and angrily:

  A. No, sir! I want you to understand right here and now that I do not read novels—no kind of novels!

  Joe stood down in a huff. Weir gave the jury a look and sat down. William Humphrey was called.

  William Humphrey was the resolute young man who had taken command at the Gunness fire, fetching the ladder and looking in the windows. His evidence was important, and Prosecutor Smith questioned him carefully.

  Q. At what time did you reach the scene of the fire?

  A. At a few minutes after four in the morning.

  Q. What did you see, Mr. Humphrey?

  A. William Clifford and Joe Maxson were just breaking in the front door. I climbed up on a ladder and looked in the windows of the two rooms on the west side. I saw mattresses and bed clothing, but no people. I came down. I couldn’t get anywhere near the east side of the house because the fire there was burning too furiously. Soon the walls began to fall, and the roof caved in.

  Q. Were you present when the bodies were found?

  A. Yes, sir, it was my shovel that first struck one of them. I assisted in taking them out and placing them on the undertaker’s wagon.

  Mr. Weir cross-examined William Humphrey:

  Q. You say you looked in the windows during the fire, Mr. Humphrey. What exactly did you see?

  A. In the first room there was an iron bed with bare mattresses. In the second room there was an iron bed with mattress and some sort of a small bundle of bed clothing on it.

  Q. Was the room on fire?

  A. The fire was beginning to come through the floor.

  Mr. Weir smiled. He had elicited a telling point for the defense. According to the state’s contention, the four fire victims had been suffocated, clinging together in Mrs. Gunness’ bed on the second floor, and had fallen, bed and all, into the basement when the floor gave away. The defense theory was that the bodies were not in any bed when the fire started, but were already corpses, stacked together in the cellar. Now a state’s witness had testified that the beds were empty before the floor burned through.

  Mr. Weir was not going to let up on Joe Maxson. The more doubts the jury picked up about Maxson’s part in the fire, the better. Weir asked William Humphrey:

  Q. Did you see some things by the carriage shed, Mr. Humphrey?

  A. Yes, I did. There was a handbag. On top of it were two paper-covered books. They looked like dime novels.

  Daniel M. Hutson, Mrs. Gunness’ neighbor across the way, was now called to the stand. He was a little man with whiskers, “a talking man,” they called him in La Porte. Smith started off with him in a chatty tone: “I presume you knew Mrs. Gunness?”

  “I thought I did!” exclaimed Mr. Hutson darkly.

  Mr. Hutson made his description of the fire so vivid and interesting that it was like a Burton Holmes lecture, even though he had very little to contribute that was new. The wind was strong that morning, he said, and above the roaring of the flames he thought he heard cartridges exploding. He took a look-in through a window on the west side of the house, and thought he saw a trunk on fire. He helped find the bodies. They were lying with their heads to the west, with six to ten inches of ashes under them. He had burned the soles of his shoes wading in hot ashes.

  Mr. Weir did not attack the credit of this witness. Mr. Hutson was going to have something very important to say for the defense later. Weir elicited the opinion that the burned adult body that Mr. Hutson had helped dig out of the ruins might have weighed 165 pounds in life, and so could not be Mrs. Gunness, who tipped the groaning scales at 280 pounds.

  After lunch on Wednesday, Prosecutor Smith was ready to roll up his heavy artillery—the officials who had had charge of the investigation. The biggest gun was advanced first.

  “Albert F. Smutzer!”

  Smutzer advanced to ascend the witness stand with affable self-confidence, a smile on his pleasant, rosy face. He was dapper in polka-dotted bow tie, his curly brown hair parted with a double flourish, his bright brown eyes alert.

  The courtroom crowd sat up. Here was the man most closely identified with the investigation of the Gunness affair. As the sheriff in charge of the case, Smutzer had been from the first completely committed to the state theory that Mrs. Gunness was dead and that Ray had killed her.

  Many of the spectators grinned in expectation. They were Smutzer’s political cronies and fellow loungers at Rubber Bill’s. They expected good old Al to acquit himself handsomely.

  Others in the crowd stared at the personable official with narrowed eyes. They had heard the gossip about him. Was it true? Was this nice-looking fellow in cahoots with a murderess? It was hard to think so. What would he say from the witness stand? Every ear was alert as Prosecutor Smith began:

  Q. Mr. Smutzer, did you know Belle Gunness?

  A. Yes, sir. She visited my office several times.

  Q. Do you know Ray Lamphere?

  A. Yes, sir, I do.

  At the defense table Ray Lamphere lifted his eyes and looked at Al Smutzer, a dull look that seemed to hold neither fear nor hope nor hatred. Beside his client, Worden fixed an intent gaze on the rosy, confident face of the witness as Mr. Smith continued his questions:

  Q. Did you know that Lamphere quarreled with Mrs. Gunness?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. When did this quarrel come to your attention, Mr. Smutzer?

  A. Last February. It was on the fourteenth day of January, as we now know, that Andrew Helgelien was killed in the Gunness house. About the middle of February, Mrs. Gunness wrote a letter to me and complained that Lamphere was annoying her in all sorts of ways, sticking his face in the windows at night, prowling around the house, and so on.

  Q. What reply did you make to Mrs. Gunness?

  A. I thought little of the complaint at the time, for it looked like a case for a constable. So I wrote her that if he kept it up to have him arrested.

  Q. What did Mrs. Gunness reply?

  A. I received another letter from Mrs. Gunness in which she said that she was afraid Lamphere would do her some harm and that he was still bothering her.

  Q. Have you the letter?

  A. Unfortunately I tore up both of the letters.

  Q. What steps did you take, Mr. Smutzer, in consequence of this letter?

  A. I rang up Smith, the saloonkeeper, when I got the second letter and told him
to send Lamphere around to me. In an hour Lamphere came to the side door of the jail and asked for me. I told him to keep away from Mrs. Gunness’ house or I’d have to arrest him.

  “But my tools are there,” he said to me.

  “If you can’t get your tools without fighting with that woman, then send a constable for the tools,” I said to Lamphere.

  He shuffled away a few steps and then turned to me with a queer look in his eyes.

  “If I tell what I know of that woman I can make it mighty hot for her,” he said.

  “Why don’t you tell it?” I remarked.

  He stopped as if in deep thought. Then he said: “Mrs. Gunness is harboring in that house a man named Helgelien who owned a gambling house in Aberdeen, South Dakota. A man was killed there and ten thousand dollars was stolen. This man Helgelien fled with the money, and she has him there in that house.”

  Q. Did you act upon this information, Mr. Smutzer?

  A. I called up Captain O’Brien, of the Chicago police, and also interviewed the Mansfield police, but at neither place was there any record of a murder and ten-thousand-dollar theft in a gambling room. Then I wrote to Aberdeen and the answer that I got was that Helgelien was a well-to-do farmer living near Mansfield, that he was of good repute and not wanted for any crime whatever.

  Q. Go on, Mr. Smutzer.

  A. It was about the first of March that Lamphere came to me again. This was six weeks after the murder of Helgelien. “I promised you I would let you know if that man Helgelien left the Gunness farm,” he said. “Well, I just came to tell you that he went away this morning. I saw him taking the five-ten train, westbound, for Chicago. He had a satchel with him and evidently he is going away for good.”

  I believed what Lamphere told me, for the man looked truthful enough at the time. I asked him how he happened to know that Helgelien left, and he said he just happened to be at the station and saw him buying his ticket.

  In fact, it was this statement of Lamphere that misled me later when I was informed of the suspicions that Helgelien had met his death on the Gunness farm. When Frank Pitner, the banker, said to me the morning after the fire that he had not slept all night and that he believed Helgelien had been killed out there on that place, I told him he certainly was mistaken, for Lamphere had seen the man leaving town.