The Truth about Belle Gunness

by Lillian de la Torre

  “I don’t want to be an exhibit in this case!” ejaculated Smith, rolling his eyes over the skulls and bones on the table in mock dismay.

  After this bit of comic relief, Worden produced a pair of excising forceps, and Dr. Fischer explained how they could be used in snipping live teeth from a person’s head. He admitted that the teeth did not look as if they had been removed by force.

  The medical man whom Worden called was Dr. Bo Bowell. It was he that, as coroner, had investigated Peter Gunness’ death in 1902, but he was not asked about that. He was asked to look at the much-disputed scrap of bone. He said it was a jawbone. Was it human? He could not positively say.

  In between experts, Worden kept the pot boiling with neighbors, amateur detectives, and theorists. There was a lot of evidence about what time the fire broke out; but since Ray had no solid alibi earlier than six A.M., it all added up to nothing but a smoke screen.

  At the shank of Friday afternoon, the defense had the impudence to call the prosecuting attorney to the stand and burn him up for another smoke screen.

  Outside of court the opposing attorneys, Smith and Worden, were close friends. Worden detailed his associate, Ellsworth Weir, to apply the torch to Smith. The prosecution, it would be suggested, had treated the defendant with monstrous unfairness in building up the case against him. The topic of examination, the Argus reported gleefully, was that famous night ride that Mr. Smith and Mr, Marr made in a closed hack to impound a trunk from the locked buggy shed the previous spring. “The first set-back,” said the Argus, “came at the discovery that the keys to the ‘bone-house’ had been forgotten. But this did not discourage the night riders. Their courage had been screwed to a sticking point, and maybe ‘never again’ they would dare to ride. The watchman of the ruins was summoned in a hasty consultation. The door must be opened—that was all there was to it. The watchman removed the staple, and the door swung off its hinges.”

  Mr. Weir prodded the prosecutor gleefully:

  Q. What did you do?

  A. Nothing. I gladly allowed others to do the heavy work.

  Q. (pretending to misunderstand) What’s that, you left the dirty work to others?

  A. The heavy work.

  Q. What was done with the trunk?

  A. It was placed on the hack and removed from the premises.

  Q. Where was it taken, Mr. Smith?

  A. To my office.

  Q. Where is it now?

  A. It is still there.

  The hackman and the watchman went over the same story. Mr. Smith had told them to keep mum. They did not know who owned the trunk or what was in it.

  By this time the whole courtroom, right up to the Judge himself, was burning with curiosity. The Judge ordered the bailiffs to produce the trunk in court on Saturday morning.

  The first thing Saturday morning, the trunk was duly hauled into court. Ray Lamphere looked at it without interest. He knew all about it. It was his trunk. Amid general suspense the mystery box was opened. It contained a few dirty shirts and rumpled neckties, books and old papers, none of them having any possible connection with the case. The whole trunk rumpus was just one of Wirt Worden’s red herrings. The trunk was removed amid general disappointment.

  It was a dull morning in court. Joe Maxson was called once more, to testify again that he put the kerosene under the stairs, and that nobody could get into the main house that night because Mrs. Gunness had locked all the doors. Joe was followed by a witness who saw the same kerosene can, empty and unexploded, inside the cellar. Somebody must have carried it down and emptied it out before the fire started.

  Evidence was then offered by a jeweler about a gold watch that the fierce heat of the fire had melted shut. Worden passed the congealed watch case to the jury. Then the defense attorney began to question the witness about a certain scientific experiment:

  Q. Did you make tests as to the comparative heat at which porcelain and gold would melt?

  A. Yes, sir. I took a soup bone, removed the marrow, and put into the cavity a twenty-two-carat-gold crown, platinum, and porcelain teeth with meat wrapped around. I put these into a stove with a wood fire and let it burn for an hour and a half.

  “Object!” rapped out Mr. Smith with an ill-concealed grin. “This witness has not been qualified as an expert.”.

  Anybody could see from his amateurish experiment that he wasn’t one. The jeweler was not allowed to finish his experiment.

  Whether by instinct or because of the weekly baking chores or because their hearts had been converted to higher things, the women of La Porte were conspicuous by their absence from the Saturday-morning session. At the Thursday-night prayer meeting, the indignant minister had delivered a scathing blast against trial-going for women. The women, he cried, had camped out by the cesspool that was the Gunness trial for fear of missing one of the rotten words or scenes that were being described. He took particular exception to the young lady whom he had noticed “fortunately situated down front. She was artistically squashing a big piece of gum, her cheeks bulging out on both sides with a fat cud, and her head bobbing like a cow’s.”

  When the women began staying away, the minister must have felt rewarded for his eloquence.

  On Saturday afternoon, however, the women came back in droves. They seemed to sense something in the air, and they were right, for Wirt Worden that afternoon gave them one sensation coming quick on the heels of another.

  The first startling testimony was given by Fred Rickman, who had done odd jobs for Mrs. Gunness two years ago. Worden questioned him:

  Q. Do you remember an automobile coming to the Gunness place?

  A. Yes, I do. I was plowing corn near the house on that particular day. After dinner Mrs. Gunness hitched up to go to town. She came to me and said, “I must go to town, and two men are coming here while I am gone. You are to show them the key under the door mat and let them into the house.”

  Shortly after, two strange men rode into the farmyard in a green automobile. I showed them the key, and they made themselves at home, while I went back to my plowing in the field back of the barn.

  I had been working about an hour when Mrs. Gunness came back. She put up her rig and came at once to me. “I want you to dig a hole for me,” she said.

  “What kind of a hole?” I asked.

  “Just a hole for a brick foundation,” she said. “The masons will be here tomorrow.” She showed me where to dig, and put stakes to mark the corners. “Dig it five and a half feet deep,” she said. I obeyed to the letter. It did not occur to me at the time that it was about the size of a grave.

  Q. Where was it you dug, Mr. Rickman?

  A. Under the wagon shed. As soon as I started digging, Mrs. Gunness hurried to the house. When I finished, I went to the front door for my money. It was open, which was unusual. She generally kept all the doors fastened tight. Inside I could see the three of them drinking wine. There were several bottles on the table. One of the men came to the door and paid me. He brought a bottle and poured me a drink. I drank it, and liked it, and started for home in my buggy. I distinctly remember passing a farmer on the road, but after that I remember nothing until four o’clock the next afternoon. I was not drunk. I had nothing else to drink that day. I think now the wine must have been doped.

  Worden called Rickman to tell this quaint story in order to show that if Mrs. Gunness had an accomplice, it wasn’t Ray. Listeners with imagination could perceive the whole story:

  Accomplice locates victim, brings him down in green automobile. Mrs. Gunness, notified in advance, hurries to town to replenish supply of dope, or wine, or both. Returning, she orders victim’s grave dug beforehand, and hastens to house to process him. With accomplice she plies victim with drink, filling his glass from doped bottle, theirs from another bottle. Rickman interrupts. Mastermind accomplice pays him off and gives him a drink from the drugged bottle, either by mistake or just to keep his hand in.

  Listeners with less imagination might suppose that Rickman got drunk o
n his own hook and dreamed the rest of it.

  The one thing that must have occurred to everybody in the courtroom was that Sheriff Smutzer ought to have dug under the new concrete foundation of the buggy shed.

  Sensational as Rickman’s story was, it paled into insignificance when the next witness came to the stand. Mr. Hutson had held everybody spellbound with his vivid narrative of the fire when he had appeared as a prosecution witness. Now he had an even more astounding story to tell, and he told it with dramatic gusto as Worden started him off:

  Q. You say, Mr. Hutson, that you knew Mrs. Gunness. How well did you know her?

  A. I worked for Mrs. Gunness for about four weeks last spring. During that time I saw her four or five times a day.

  Q. Have you seen Mrs. Gunness since the fire?

  A. Yes, sir!

  Q. Where?

  A. On the road near the hog pen.

  Q. What date did you see her?

  A. On the ninth day of July. I was coming from town with a hay rack, and I saw through the trees Mrs. Gunness and a man walking in the orchard. Even at that distance I could recognize her plainly. I knew her size, I knew her shape, and I knew her lumbering walk. I never saw another woman who walked like her. She had on a light skirt, black waist, a wide trimmed hat with a black veil that came down to the chin and a white veil over that. There was a man with her. He weighed about a hundred and sixty-five pounds. He had a gray mustache and gray hair.

  Q. Describe the rig, please, Mr. Hutson.

  A. The buggy had a yellow running gear and black top. The horse was a gray one with dapples on its hips as big as a half dollar.

  Q. What did you do?

  A. I started up my horses to try to get up the hill to the orchard before she could get away, but when I got within two wagon lengths of the buggy, they ran to it, clambered in, and raced straight for the main road. I tried to follow them, but they got ahead “of me, and I did not like to follow them any more. There was a good chance of getting a chunk of lead!

  The courtroom shuddered. Under Mr. Hutson’s spell, the crowd would hardly have been surprised if the Viking figure in the two veils had suddenly pushed open the door and walked in, to laugh in their startled faces or accuse Ray Lamphere to his teeth. Ray’s haunted eyes almost seemed to see her there.

  In vain did Prosecutor Smith, cross-examining, try to restore common sense:

  Q. Doesn’t John Welker, the cabman, have a buggy with a yellow running gear, and a gray horse also?

  A. I don’t know.

  Q. If you couldn’t see her face, how did you know it was Mrs. Gunness?

  A. I couldn’t see her features under the veils, but I knew her by her build and her walk.

  There was a sentimental murmur as the next witness was tenderly led to the witness chair. She looked very young and small in it. She was Evaline Hutson, eleven years old, a pretty, appealing child with dainty features and beautiful trusting eyes. She spoke right up to corroborate her father’s story:

  “I saw Mrs. Gunness, in hay time, near our woods. She was in a buggy with a man. She had on two veils. The black one was over her face. When she saw me, she turned her face away from me.”

  The next witness, even smaller and more appealing, was Evaline’s younger sister, Eldora. She too spoke up in her small childish voice:

  “I was playing by the big gate by the road. I saw Mrs. Gunness go by with a man. I did not know the man.”

  Worden’s reasonable doubt of Mrs. Gunness’ death was somehow transmuted, as the afternoon grew dark, into unreasonable fear. The effect was all that the defense could wish; but Wirt Worden still had two more shocks to deliver.

  In the atmosphere the Hutsons had created, belief was ready that the ogress of the hog lot was alive somewhere, gloating, as the toils threatened to enmesh her victim, the defendant.

  Then whose headless body had turned up in the fire?

  To answer that, as well as it could ever be answered, Worden called a neighbor of Belle’s to the stand. He said his name was John Anderson, and he lived on the McClung Road near the Gunness place. Worden asked him:

  Q. Mr. Anderson, did you see Mrs. Gunness shortly before the fire?

  A. Yes, I did, on the Saturday evening before the fire. She was driving by in her buggy, and she stopped and asked how the flowers were getting along.

  Q. Was anybody with her?

  A. There was a strange woman with her.

  Q. Describe her, please, Mr. Anderson.

  A. She was a large woman, not quite so large as Mrs. Gunness.

  Q. Did you ever see her again?

  A. Never. After the fire I told the Sheriff about her.

  Where else did this fat girl disappear to, if not into the fire? And what became of her head?

  The last witness of Saturday was William P. Miller, county commissioner. He suggested an answer to that question:

  “I was at the Gunness place when the bodies were taken from the fire. I observed the adult body. There was no head on the body. I made investigation around the place, and discovered fresh digging. I looked in the vault of the privy, and saw a large stone. I spoke to Mr. Smutzer about it. The second time I looked, the rock was about half sunk. At a third time, the rock was out of sight.”

  Was it a rock? Or was it the missing head? That was the kind of question that Wirt Worden liked to leave in people’s heads as the second week of the Lamphere trial ended.

  Ray Lamphere was guided out of the darkened courtroom like a man in a trance. Others besides Ray walked out into the windy November night with horror stiffening their spines. If the wind moaned in dry branches, the timid stopped their ears. If dead leaves ran with light footsteps on the pavement behind them, only the hardiest dared to turn their heads. Who knew when or how the ogress would show herself?

  Worden had scared the impressionable. He was too hardheaded to feel fear himself. He packed up his papers with the satisfying feeling of a job well done.

  The jurors, stretching and yawning and scratching their heads, were shepherded out by a bailiff. In their third-floor-dormitory at the top of the courthouse, where twelve cots were set up in a row, they repelled gloom and ghosts over a good supper sent in by the Hotel Teegarden.

  On Sunday they would go in a body to church before dining, and then in a body they would aid digestion with a country walk. They would not walk in the direction of the Gunness place. The attorneys could not agree on that procedure. Books and tobacco and more food would have to while away the time till court convened again on Monday morning.

  Early on the morning of Monday, November 23, before courttime, Wirt Worden was visited by Mr. Lingard, the cattle buyer whom C. C. Fish had located as the witness to Belle’s instructions that something had to be done “tonight.”

  “I want to look at Ray Lamphere,” he said.

  “Come along with me,” said Worden. “You can see him as he goes into court.”

  Soon Ray appeared.

  “That’s the man!” cried Lingard.

  “What man?”

  “That’s the man I saw on the street corner with Mrs. Gunness, on the afternoon before the fire—the man with the basket of mushrooms—the man to whom she said, ‘It’s got to be done tonight, and you will have to do it!’”

  Worden felt as if somebody—probably C. C. Fish—had hit him a blow in the solar plexus. A fine defense witness this man had turned out to be! He was much too close to home with that accurate detail of Ray’s basket of mushrooms. Worden wished he had not taken Fish’s word for him. There was nothing to do but drop him in a hurry. Suppose it was proved that Mrs. Gunness plotted the fire; how could that help the defense if the plot was hatched with the defendant?

  Rain was lashing the windows and darkening the courtroom as Worden, much against his inclination, opened his third day of stalling. His star witness, Dr. Haines, the poison expert, was unavoidably absent. Worden chose fill the time of waiting by raising more questions and scattering more doubts.

  A neighbor said she saw
an automobile near the farm early on the morning of the fire. Was Mrs. Gunness escaping in it?

  One of the diggers said he had seen the woman’s skull, with its long light braid, found at the farm on May 22. Was it the dead woman’s head?

  Joe Maxson, called again, told of the finding of the teeth, and his brother-in-law Isaiah Alderfer corroborated his account. It was about nine o’clock, they said, when the sluice man pulled the teeth out of his vest pocket, both sets, remarking, “We have got what we wanted!” Then he stowed them in his pocket again. It was near noon when Smutzer appeared. The sluice man pulled out the teeth and gave them to him.

  That was not the way Smutzer had told it. Was Smutzer lying?

  A crematory attendant testified that in all cremations he had seen, the small bones went first, and the skull was the last thing to burn. To Mr. Tag, the levelheaded bailiff, that just about settled it; that skull never was in the fire.

  Were the bodies, when found in the ashes, resting amid the ruins of a bed? Smutzer had said they were. The impeaching witness had finally testified that he had once heard Smutzer admit the contrary. Worden called three Gunness neighbors who had seen the bodies found, and they all said there were no bedsprings under them. One good lady was especially positive when Worden asked her:

  Q. Were you present when the bodies were removed from the Gunness ruins?

  A. Yes, sir, I was sitting right there on top of the wall. I saw them digging. The remains of the piano were on top of the debris above the bodies.

  Q. What was under the bodies?

  A. I couldn’t see anything but a little ashes under the bodies. When that had been shoveled away I could see the floor as plain as I see the floor of this courtroom.

  Cross-examined, the witness estimated that the layer of ashes underneath might have been six inches deep.

  Had the ex-Sheriff lied when he said the bodies had been found surrounded by the ruins of a complete bed? Had they been placed, rather, on a kerosene-soaked mattress on the basement floor, before somebody kindled the fire?