The Truth about Belle Gunness

by Lillian de la Torre

  Finally, Wirt Worden tossed into the grab bag Mrs. Gunness’ will; but before he did so, Bessie Folant was called to the stand. As the girl took the stand and directed her luminous brown gaze on the examining lawyer, both attorney and witness must have remembered vividly the day when they, too, sat in the rain, side by side, on the ruined wall of the burned Gunness place, watching narrowly to see what the diggers would find. What exactly the diggers did find was the crux of the dispute in this courtroom.

  Worden, however, did not mean to involve his favorite secretary in that dispute. She was there only to identify Mrs. Gunness’ signature. Worden questioned her formally:

  Q. What is your occupation, Miss Folant?

  A. I am stenographer for Darrow and Worden.

  Q. Did you know Mrs. Gunness?

  A. Yes, sir. She came to the office a year ago last June.

  Q. What did she come for?

  A. She wanted to complain to Mayor Darrow about the neighbors.

  Q. What was said on this occasion?

  A. I asked her her name. I couldn’t understand it the way she said it, so I asked her to write it in a little book.

  Q. Is this the book?

  A. Yes, it is.

  The signature, book and all, was placed in evidence. Haying proved the signature, the defense finally produced Mrs. Gunness’ will and had it read out. Was that will, made the day before the fire, proof that Mrs. Gunness was thinking of suicide?

  By lunchtime on Monday, what with calling innocent bystanders and amateur experts, borrowing state’s witnesses and summoning the prosecutor himself, the defense had managed to parade thirty witnesses. It had scattered doubts like bird shot. But Ray’s fate still hung in the balance. The Argus exclaimed:

  The psychological moment has come! The defense must turn the tables now or never. On the tables, in the parlance of the gambling room, rests a flush of hearts, and it is held in the hands of the prosecution. The best the defense has so far been able to do is draw four of a color. They must upset the tables, or make good on the only one draw left—and Haines is the card.

  The poison expert from Chicago was still in Chicago, and could not be expected to reach La Porte for another twenty-four hours. It was exasperating to Worden to let the jury cool off for a whole day, but there was no help for it. He had to ask for a recess while they waited for the witness who was the last forlorn hope of the defense.

  While they waited, the papers and the public had to make what grist they could. The best they had to work on was the presence of Mr. Randolph Churchill, a fascinating English writer who had come among them to study Belle and the temperance question, and a couple of crank letters in Mayor Darrow’s hands. The letters purported to be from Belle and her accomplice, and proclaimed the innocence of Lamphere:

  Mrs. Gunness is alive and well. I got a letter from her no more than five days ago, and she hoped Lamphere would get hung or a life sentence, but I could not think of him, an innocent man, being so treated!

  Crank letters written by screwballs weren’t evidence, but they provided something to talk about until the trial was resumed. Hardheaded observers, ignoring such stuff, were saying that the defense had failed to shake the strong case established by the prosecution. Would the last witness do what the first thirty witnesses had not been able to achieve?

  At last, on Tuesday, November 24, at one-thirty P.M., Dr. Walter Haines, professor of toxicology, came to the stand. A teeming crowd jammed into the courtroom to hear the star witness. Five hundred people were crowded into the courtroom where barely two hundred could sit. The overflow jammed the stairs and clustered on the lawn.

  As. Dr. Haines ascended the stand, the defendant looked at him without hope. Even his closest friends had given up any thought of an acquittal.

  Wirt Worden had not given up. His steady look of confidence was unimpaired as he played his last card for the defense.

  Dr. Haines said he had received three jars containing matter to be tested. One jar contained one stomach, which was Andrew Helgelien’s. Worden asked him:

  “When you made a chemical examination of this stomach, what did you find?”

  “Object!” said Prosecutor Smith promptly. “Irrelevant, incompetent, and immaterial!”

  “I contend that it is admissible,” countered Worden, “on the ground of similarity between the Helgelien case and the case before us.”

  “I will admit the evidence,” ruled Judge Richter.

  Worden asked the witness again: “What did you find?”

  “I found arsenic and strychnine in the Helgelien stomach.”

  No wonder Andrew came out of the earth so well preserved. As many a poisoner has learned to his sorrow, arsenic is an excellent preservative. Undertakers know this well, a fact of which the prosecution intended to take advantage later.

  Dr. Haines stated that he found one and a half grains of strychnine in the stomach, and that one-third grain would be enough to cause death.

  Then Worden raised the question of the stomachs in the others jar. What had the doctor found in them?

  “The examination revealed an abundance of arsenic and a quantity of strychnine,” Dr. Haines replied. “There was almost two grains of strychnine in the whole mass, enough to have caused the death of three persons. But as to whether it did cause the death of three persons, I am unable to state.”

  The three persons in question were the adult and the two younger children, Lucy and Philip. Myrtle’s stomach had been too charred to test. When the worthy coroner saved freight by bundling the other three stomachs into one jar, he made it impossible to tell whether the woman only, or the children only, or all of them, had died by poison. By the holes in the little foreheads, the children might have died by the hammer; but there was now no way of making sure.

  Dr. Haines went on to point out that it was a waste of arsenic to administer it with strychnine, since the strychnine would kill before the arsenic got to work. Violent convulsions would start very quickly, sometimes so violent as to throw the victim out of bed. Death would ensue in a very short time. Usually in cases of strychnine poisoning there would be intense rigidity, the heart would be empty and contracted, and the feet would be arched.

  Before turning over his expert for cross-examination, Worden got ahead of the cross-examiner. Smith had tipped his hand last Friday when he asked about embalming fluids. Worden got his question in first:

  “Dr. Haines, is strychnine ever used in embalming?”

  “No, sir. There are no antiseptic preservative properties in strychnine.”

  R. N. Smith rose to cross-examine. It was his turn to sow doubts. He ignored embalming fluids, but he suggested other ways by which strychnine might have got itself into the stomachs in question. Was it taken in medicine? Was it sneaked into the remains by some curiosity-seeker? However unlikely these suggestions were, the expert, of course, could not conscientiously say a flat no to either possibility.

  The hearts of the three out of the four fire victims had been not empty, but clotted with blood. Did this mean that they could not have been the victims of strychnine?

  No, said the expert; there is nothing determinative about the condition of the heart. The only distinctive appearance is that intense rigidity.

  When the poison expert stood down, the defense rested.

  Had Wirt Worden filled his bobtail flush?

  11. The Trumpet Call: The Trial Ends

  The artillery of the heavens this morning sounded the trumpet call of the approaching conflict. On this day, the 25th of November, is being fought the real battle for the life of Ray Lamphere.

  Four days were required to decide upon a jury, a board of reviewers. Ten days more were consumed in the taking of evidence. During these days, each side built its fleet. The prosecution constructed a powerful, first-class battleship. The defense adopted different tactics, relying on a multitude of small craft, such as torpedo boats and submarines, to do the damage, and so harass the maneuvers of the enemy as to render it incapable of i
nfliction of serious damage.

  This morning the two fleets got together in the presence of His Honor Judge Richter, whose rulings have been eminently fair and impartial, the jury, and a courtroom crowded with spectators. As of yet, the armor of the big warship has proved of sufficient thickness to resist the fire of innumerable theories from the opposing flotilla.

  —La Porte Argus

  On Wednesday, November 25, to the ominous roll of unseasonable thunder, Ray Lamphere once more entered the courtroom. He was hardened by this time. He would no longer change color or flinch or start forward in anger, no matter what they said about him. Only his burning eyes, fixed on the speaker, would show the strain he felt as the lawyers fought for his life.

  Beside him, the imaginative could again see the menacing figure of the vanished murderess, placed there by the defense to stand trial in Ray’s place for the very same crimes with which he was charged—murder and arson.

  The jury listened in grave quiet as Martin R. Sutherland, for the prosecution, rose to demand Ray’s death. His height and breadth, his commanding nose made him impressive. His mild voice was the voice of common sense as he began:

  “I apprehend, gentlemen of the jury, that you join with us in being glad that this case is nearing its end. I want to thank you for your careful attention. Our government is made up of three parts, the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. You elect a sheriff to serve the writs of this court, to ferret out and detect every criminal and every crime that occurs in his county. You have elected a prosecuting attorney to arrange the facts of crime and present them to you for final determination.

  “The defense has sought to belittle the Sheriff in his zeal in doing his duties. I presume that they would have you believe that a law should be enacted reading something like this:

  “‘Be it enacted that the Sheriff shall be confined to his office when a crime has been committed and only seen by his family and that when he seeks to find a criminal he must give ten days’ notice and be followed by a brass band.’

  “I am not attempting to be humorous, but to set forth and by exaggeration to show the attitude of the defense.

  “First let us consider the corpus delicti. It has been contended that the adult body was not the body of Mrs. Gunness. Now, we do not ask you to use your imagination, but just good common sense.

  “On the morning of April twenty-eighth the house was destroyed. In the debris there were found four bodies. Ordinary common sense would lead us to believe that those were the bodies of those who inhabited that dwelling.”

  To prove that the body was Belle’s, the speaker adduced her watch, her rings, and her teeth, all found in the ashes—“not false teeth easily removed, but bridgework fastened to the natural teeth of Mrs. Gunness. Yet the defense has asked you to let your imagination run with Mr. Hutson, who testified that he recognized Mrs. Gunness even with two veils over her face. It is very probable, isn’t it, that Belle Gunness would come to La Porte, hire a livery wagon, and drive out to the scene of her murders! Gentlemen of the jury, your common sense teaches you better. And by using that same common sense you will realize that we have established the corpus delicti beyond a reasonable doubt.

  “Now consider the motive. Testimony we have introduced shows that Lamphere, the easygoing Lamphere, the hard-drinking Lamphere, the fellow-about-town, had an easy berth out with Mrs. Gunness. Testimony further shows that Andrew Helgelien replanted Lamphere in Belle Gunness’ affections. This aroused jealousy in the suspicious Lamphere, who did not want to trade his Gunness berth for a bed at the home of Nigger Liz.

  “On the night of January fourteenth Helgelien disappeared, never to be seen alive again. Lamphere did notstay at Michigan City, as Mrs. Gunness had instructed him. The scene that he saw that night was such as to satisfy his desire of getting Helgelien out of the way. A compact was probably made over the body of Helgelien. What that was we have no positive evidence, but we have a right to infer that she agreed to pay him money. From receipts it was evident that there was no money due him for labor, yet his whole cry was that she owed him money and he would get even with her.

  “We find on the day before” the fire Mrs. Gunness was tracked by Lamphere. Mrs. Gunness, weeping, entered Minich’s store and bought some groceries. Lamphere, as an excuse for entrance, bought a five-cent plug of tobacco. Lamphere followed Mrs. Gunness out of the store, glaring at Mrs. Gunness.

  “What is the evidence now to show that Lamphere committed the crime of the morning of April twenty-eighth? We find Lamphere skulking and hiding before the fire started; then again after the fire started. We find Lamphere flatly contradicting himself in the stories he told to Jury Bailiff Marr and Deputy Sheriff Anstiss. First he told one thing and then he told another to the several officers. Finally, he practically made a confession of arson to Sheriff Anstiss.

  “It is enough!

  “Now as to the defense. If you are able to tell what it is, you can do better than the prosecution.

  “They would attempt to prove by one witness that she was alive, and by the next witness that she was dead. By one witness they try to show that the teeth were clipped off and left in the fire, by another witness they try to show that they were not her teeth. The fallacy of the statement that she was lying on the bottom of the cellar floor is apparent when it is noted that her back was burned off so that the spinal cord was exposed, and the breast was not burned to any extent.

  “The expert testified that he found poison in the mass of the stomachs and Mr. Cutler testified that … poisonous fluids … were used on the bodies.

  “From all the facts, we ask you to sum up the whole matter and use your good common sense!”

  Mr. Sutherland sat down. Ellsworth Weir, associate defense attorney, rose to reply. Tall, slender, well turned out, Weir was of the old school of forensic oratory. His high-pitched voice would vibrate with emotion, his long arms would wave in theatrical gestures; at the proper moment tears would stream unchecked down his thin cheeks. Having less to work with than the prosecution, the seasoned courtroom performer was to spice his arguments with raillery and sweeten them with sentiment, smothering Sutherland’s searchlight logic in a haze of emotion. He began with a laugh:

  “I want to say to you that you have seen the greatest legal somersault of the present century! The gentleman who preceded me charged us with trying to lead you into realms of imagination. Yet the gentleman himself used no facts to substantiate the statements of Lamphere’s movements on the night of the fire.

  “This is a case of great importance, since it involves the life or liberty of a human being. We do not propose that this case shall degenerate into sarcasm or personalities. I want no compromise, no begging of the questions.

  “That a crime was committed we all agree, and as good citizens we feel that if the criminal can be apprehended he should be convicted. If Ray Lamphere is guilty, he should be hanged by the neck until he is dead.

  “But I do not believe Ray Lamphere is guilty of the crime which is charged against him. Ray Lamphere may be ever so bad, but he did not commit this crime, and as he did not, he should be freed by you gentlemen.

  “The first burden to be proved is what is called in law corpus delicti. Let us see if that has been done. Mr. Sutherland said that the fact that the back of the adult was burned through proved that the bodies could not have lain on the floor, as someone testified. But Mr. Sutherland has not taken into account the fact of the presence of kerosene oil. On the day before the fire Mrs. Gunness had bought two gallons of coal oil. This can was placed in the frame portion of the house. On the next day after the fire the can was found in the cellar near the bodies under the brick part. No one had access to the house but Mrs. Gunness and Maxson.

  “As reasonable men you must believe someone had a hand in these crimes which she had committed. A confederate might have had a purpose in getting rid of this woman. Whatever theory you take, it is merely a guess, and you cannot guess this defendant into the penitentiary or hang him b
y guessing!

  “There has not been a scintilla of evidence outside of Dr. Norton that there was a portion of the head left. Yet Dr. Norton not only identified the jawbone as that of a human being, but the sex and age as well. Six or seven other physicians could not tell what it was. I do not charge Dr. Norton with falsifying, but rather as being ignorant.

  “Now as to the teeth. Mr. Schultz was employed. Where is he now? Why do they not bring him here? The most important witness not here! The teeth were shown to witnesses in the morning about eight o’clock and they were not shown to Smutzer until about eleven o’clock. I believe that Dr. Norton is mistaken. The plan was given to Smutzer two weeks before they were found and they could have been made and substituted.

  “As Mr. Worden stated in the opening statement, it does not make a bit of difference whether Mrs. Gunness is alive or dead. The children were not identified as those of Mrs. Gunness. Not a bit of evidence was produced to show that they were her children.

  “Then there is the poison that Mr. Sutherland brushes away with a wave of his hand. Granted that the undertaker used a pure arsenic powder, yet the eminent Dr. Haines said there was strychnine sufficient to have killed three people.

  “There isn’t a crime committed without a motive. There must have been a reason for Lamphere setting fire to the house if he did. Mr. Sutherland took a flight into the realms of fancy which he charges us with using. He pictures the scene when Lamphere sees Mrs. Gunness killing Helgelien. And then because they are partners in crime they want to kill each other.…

  “So far as Ray Lamphere is concerned, there is no evidence that he did anything except occasionally to drink, and many good men drink. No evidence is shown against Lamphere other than those charges which Mrs. Gunness brought against him.…

  “For Lamphere to have committed the crime of murder, it would have been necessary for him to have gone into the house, administered the poison, and then carried them to the cellar and set fire to the building. But Lamphere could not gain admission to that house. It was locked up tight.”