The Truth about Belle Gunness

by Lillian de la Torre

  Within two weeks Smutzer turned around and went back to Texas, bound for the Pecos Valley with another band of home-seekers. “Between selling automobiles and Texas land,” said the Herald admiringly, “ex-Sheriff Smutzer is a very busy man, but he is a hustler and is sure to make a ‘go’ of it.”

  Sheriff Anstiss was kept very busy by people who still persisted in thinking that they had located Belle. Finally he took to offering five hundred dollars to anyone who would produce her in La Porte. This put a stop to wild-goose chases by the constabulary.

  All this while Ray Lamphere lay in the Michigan City pen, getting whiter and thinner and saying nothing. There would be no appeal, because there was no money; and besides, before an appeal could be heard his minimum two years would be up. He was working in the shirt department and had nothing to complain of, if only he didn’t feel so tired and sick all the time.

  In April the faithful C. C. Fish went to see him, and was shocked at his appearance. “He’s got the prison pallor right, and he’s sick, or I’m no judge of when people are sick.”

  The prison doctor denied that Ray had consumption; but he had, and it was galloping. Soon they had to put him in the hospital.

  In the hospital Ray found a friend, a forlorn little trusty named Harry Myers, who became his nurse. As his life ebbed, Ray began to whisper confidences in Harry’s ear.

  One day as Harry was tending him, Ray glanced out of the window. A buxom woman was walking by.

  “She’s about the size of Belle, my old girl,” said Ray dreamily.

  “Belle?”

  “Belle Gunness. People think she’s dead—but she isn’t. She had a large scar on her left thigh. There was no scar on that body that burned. That shows it wasn’t her.”

  Myers knew little, if anything, about the Gunness case. The newspapers reached the prisoners pruned of crime news. He listened while Ray told how intimate he had been with the mighty Belle.

  A while later the patient in the bed next to Lamphere’s was reading the remains of a clipped newspaper when he came across an item that the censors had missed. It said that Belle Gunness had been found.

  Ray seized the paper in agitation. As soon as he read the item he burst out laughing.

  “That must be a mistake,” he said.

  “How do you know it’s a mistake?” Harry asked him.

  “The report comes from a long way off,” replied Ray, “and I know where Belle is. She’s not very far from La Porte!”

  Ray showed Harry letters and cards that had come to him in the mail, giving him word of his mistress under her code name of “Big Six.” He didn’t let Harry read them.

  One evening shortly afterward the two men were together in the only privacy the jail afforded—the bathroom—when Ray said:

  “I’ll tell you something if you’ll promise never to repeat it while I am alive.”

  Harry promised, and Ray began to spin the saga of his murderous mistress. He was proud of her deeds of darkness, and of his part in them. He seems to have painted his part much darker than it could possibly have been.

  By this time his failing lungs prevented Ray from talking for very long at a time. The story was whispered out bit by bit. In sum, here is what Ray told Harry:

  Belle Gunness, said Ray, met her first husband when they were working in a factory together (a fact he must have learned from Belle herself) and she was a former tightrope walker (a fiction that he must have picked up in reading The Mrs. Gunness Mystery). She poisoned Sorenson, Ray confided to Harry, and killed Gunness with a hammer covered with a piece of rubber hose, and because she was afraid that Jennie knew it she finally killed Jennie.

  A few weeks after Ray went to work for Belle, he said, she put out one of her matrimonial ads. Soon replies were pouring in, and suitors were appearing—and disappearing.

  Once Ray was sent to Michigan City to fetch an applicant. The man was at the farm two or three days, and then Belle abolished him.

  “The man was given something to drink,” said Ray rather vaguely, “either in milk, coffee, or something, and what he drank set him sick, and he had to lay down, and while the man was in the stupor she knocked him in the head. It looked as if she had used the hammer.”

  Ray buried the victim in the rye field. Belle habitually murdered and dissected without assistance, so Ray told Harry. It was Ray’s part to do the “planting.” He buried the heads and bodies separately, he said, on different parts of the farm. He conveyed a hazy notion that this procedure was “to prevent identification.” None of the remains in his time was thrown into the water, as far as he knew.

  Ray told Harry some thrilling or grimly humorous (and probably fictitious) anecdotes of his perils and tribulations while doing Belle’s “planting” by night. Once, he said, he had to dispose of a victim under the very nose of his successor. Once he was confronted with three corpses at once. Once Belle tried cremation, with such noisome results that Ray, working outside, had to rush in and warn her it smelled like a soap factory.

  Another time they decided that there were too many “soft spots” at home, and the current corpse would have to be buried elsewhere. They selected a nearby farm whose old bachelor owner had been feuding with Belle. Ray went over to spy out the ground, and he and the unsuspecting farmer spent a pleasant afternoon tinkering with the talking machine. That night he took the headless remains over in a one-horse rig. The gruesome jest almost had a sorry ending when Ray alighted and the skittish horse bolted, corpse and all.

  Only one suitor escaped. Belle had given the man chloral in his coffee, but he was an unusually hardheaded fellow. When she went in that night to finish him off with the hammer, he sat up in bed. Belle ran out. When she returned he was gone. This worried them. After that she used strychnine with the chloral. One such murder alone, said Ray, netted $23,000 or $33,000; and there were forty-two murders. (Ray got that figure, too, from The Mrs. Gunness Mystery.)

  With the money, Ray said, Belle paid off debts and spent lavishly in Chicago. Once she came to his room at night with a long tin box stuffed with big bills. She peeled off five hundred-dollar bills and told him to buy a fine team of matched blacks that she had been coveting. Better not, said Ray; people might wonder. She dropped the idea.

  They felt quite safe from the law, however, as the local sheriff was in Belle’s pay. Ray told Harry how once he had surprised her paying the fellow off. She complained that she had also had to buy him the snappy car he drove.

  Finally Ray and Belle quarreled. He flung off the place after accusing her of plotting to murder him because he knew too much.

  In spite of precautions, people were beginning to wonder. Inquiries were being made after missing men. The children were getting suspicious. Belle decided it was time to make a getaway. She met Ray in La Porte and promised him five hundred dollars if he would come and help. He consented.

  She gave him his instructions. He was to take her to a certain place a few miles distant from La Porte, where Al Smutzer would meet her in a two-seated rig and drive her to Chicago. From there she would go back to Norway.

  Then Ray was to return and fire the house.

  Belle hired the substitute corpse, according to Ray, on impulse. She found her sitting on a stairway of a building on State Street in Chicago. Belle walked past, studying her, made a snap decision, turned back, and spoke to the woman. She offered a good job at big wages. The unhappy derelict accepted.

  “Her hair was dark,” said Ray, describing her to Harry. “It was a fine head of hair, and long. She had no false teeth—she had very pretty teeth. She did not have a nose like Mrs. Gunness’. She was as tall, but not as heavy. She was dark-complected and dark-eyed.”

  Belle brought her down to La Porte (apparently on the Saturday, which agrees with Anderson’s evidence), and on the third day (Monday) she did away with her. (On Sunday, Jerold Siegel says, he saw such a woman at the farm. She was walking on the high ground near the hog lot with Mrs. Gunness while young Jerry, then fourteen, was digging muskra
t runs in the swamp below.)

  When Lamphere arrived at the farm on Monday night, his first chore was to bury the woman’s head, which had been separated so that the body might be taken for that of the blonde, blue-eyed Belle. He constructed a box and put the head in it, wrapped in a rug. With it he boxed, so he told Harry, three other heads, two of which looked as if they had been dead for some time. Ray buried the box in the rye field.

  A hired rig was used for the escape. Ray and Nigger Liz drove to the farm at the appointed time. Ray waited outside. Liz went in, and emerged again with some bundles. A little later Belle came out disguised as a man in a Prince Albert outfit. She carried two satchels and a basket. In the basket was the long tin box stuffed with big bills and stolen diamonds.

  Ray drove her away. Nine miles out, at the appointed rendezvous, he turned her over to Smutzer. Then he returned, as instructed, and fired the house.

  “Later,” Ray told Harry, “Mrs. Gunness sent back her false teeth, and these teeth were placed among the ashes of the burned house and later discovered by the authorities.”

  Harry, not knowing anything about the case, did not inquire how she managed to pull them out, real teeth and all, in one piece.

  That was the yarn that Ray spun for Harry. As the days passed and his strength ebbed, he clung more and more to his only friend and confidant. One day he scrawled a note to Nigger Liz, bidding her give Harry one hundred dollars on his release. Harry kept the note carefully.

  Five days before he died, Ray whispered to Harry that he would reward him for all his care. There was a box of diamonds and watches buried on Belle’s place. Ray told Harry how to find it. At the same time he told where the other box was buried, the box which contained the missing head.

  With Ray’s consent, Harry sent a message to Worden. He said nothing about the box of valuables; that was to be his. But he revealed Ray’s story.

  Worden was not surprised. Allowing for Ray’s trick of exaggerating and boasting, it checked with what Worden had already been told.

  Would it check further?

  At dead of night Worden took diggers out to the rye field. They dug the spot where Harry told them to dig. They found nothing. They sent over for better instructions. The dying Lamphere tried to give them.

  For five nights they dug. They never found the head.

  There were no further directions forthcoming. On Friday, December 30, 1909, holding Harry’s hand, Ray Lamphere died.

  With his last breath he insisted that Belle was alive, near him, and waiting for him. She was in Chicago, disguised as a man. Harry thought he said that he had seen her there after the fire, which he certainly hadn’t, since he had been in jail continuously; but perhaps as Ray’s life flickered, it consoled him to believe that he had seen her again.

  A year later, when Harry’s time was up, he received a letter. It was signed “Charley Hunter,” and it said that “Six has moved,” and offered Harry a job, kind not specified. Since Ray’s story had as yet had no publicity, “Hunter” was no crank, but somebody in the know.

  Harry did not dicker with the offer. He went down to La Porte, paroled to Worden and Weir. In La Porte, “Charley Hunter” contacted Harry again. His name was not Hunter. He was a relative, they say, of the accused accomplice. Myers would have no truck with him.

  If Myers ever found the box of valuables that was to be his reward, he did not brag about it. After a time he disappeared from La Porte. Did Belle Gunness and her accomplice do him in? Or did he find the buried treasure box and fade away voluntarily? Or did he simply drift aimlessly on?

  When Ray died, there was one final burst of newspaper activity. The press didn’t know about Harry, but it did know about Ray’s confession to a clergyman right after the fire. Scrounging for copy, reporters got after the clergyman. The reverend wouldn’t talk. By guess and by rumor, a newsman who had covered the case trumped up a bogus confession, and that fetched the clergyman. He revealed what Lamphere had told him four days after the fire.

  Lamphere had told the secret to Worden, but he wasn’t going to set the clergyman on Belle’s track. He said she was dead in the fire, and the fire was an accident.

  “Mrs. Gunness had been giving me money,” said Ray, “ever since I sneaked back from Michigan City to spy on her, and saw her chloroform that man and then hit him with an ax. On the Saturday night before the fire I slept at the farm, and she wouldn’t give me more than a dollar, so I swore I’d get even. On Monday night I got Nigger Liz, and we went out to rob the place.”

  The pair of them, he said, chloroformed the family in their beds, rummaged for money, and ran away. The house caught fire by accident, he didn’t know how.

  There was little truth to this tale. When he told it, Ray didn’t know that it was strychnine, not chloroform, that finished the victims, or that the family had not burned in separate beds, but all in one heap. When the latter fact was pointed out to him, he said he was pretty drunk at the time.

  The one result of the clergyman’s belated revelations was that Nigger Liz was hauled in again. She was furious. She made a sweeping denial. Bitterly criticizing the heating arrangements at the jail, she bailed herself out with more unlikely wealth from her side-seam pocket. Somehow the grand jury never got around to indicting her.

  But Nigger Liz knew something.

  “Mr. Worden,” she would say, “when I know I’m going to die, I’ll send for you and tell you all I know.”

  She died in 1916. Ironically, she died by fire. When they pulled her out of the blazing rubbish pile that was her home, she was far gone.

  She lived long enough to send for Worden. The lawyer was on a hunting trip. Until he came, she would not talk; and before he came, she died.

  They combed the knee-deep rubbish for clues. In some places the stuff was three feet high, too tightly packed to burn. Liz had made beaten paths through it in order to pick her way from one room to another. They hauled out 980 pounds of rags, and fifteen or twenty wagonloads of rubbish went to the dump. Among the debris they made some interesting finds.

  They found a picture of Ray Lamphere, and a letter from him. It said nothing important. They found negotiable papers. They found recipes for voodoo charms and philters, and printed works on hypnotism, “absent treatment,” and clairvoyance. They found piles of marriage proposals by mail, answers to lonely-hearts ads. Had Nigger Liz taught Belle the business?

  They found no clue to Belle’s whereabouts.

  Hidden between two mattresses, however, they found a musty skull. Doctors said they could not tell whether it was ten years old or fifty. The lower jaw was missing, and only a few rotted roots marked the upper set of teeth. People who had known Belle said emphatically that it could not be her skull.

  Scratched on the skull, they say, were the initials of a law officer whom Liz abhorred. The old voodoo woman had been using it to hex her enemies.

  But where did the skull come from in the first place?

  “If only,” said Wirt Worden, “I had not been away when Liz died, the whole mystery would have been solved by now.”

  The years went on. The Rumely Company never did any experimental plowing, after all. That was a pity. Who knows what they might have found?

  Instead, they sold the farm to a stouthearted fellow named John Nepsha, and Nepsha built a nice brick bungalow almost exactly on the spot where the Gunness murder mansion once stood. After a while he sold it, but he kept a strip of land along the rise that was once crowned by Belle’s hog lot. There Mrs. Nepsha has just put up a pretty little cottage for herself. When the foundation was dug, nothing was found but stones.

  Today the farm acres are lush and peaceful. In the bungalow live people who don’t know anything about Belle Gunness and don’t want to. They don’t want curiosity-seekers prowling about the place, they aren’t afraid of ghosts, and they don’t care if there are still dead men under the sod. They just want to be let alone.

  The meadows are neglected now. The orchard trees are old. The once bare hog
lot is a tangle of long grass and weeds and black-cap canes. A section of Belle’s Kokomo link fence is still fastened to a tall hickory-nut tree, the nails grown deep into the bark. Nature has taken over.

  As the years went on, excited people still thought, now and then, that they had caught Belle Gunness. Sometimes a policeman would be sent on another wild-goose chase, but Wirt Worden never went to see. Until he heard that they had caught a woman with a long scar on her thigh, there was no reason for him to budge.

  In 1931 there was a great flurry in California over a rawboned old Norwegian woman who was caught playing Belle’s old tricks with arsenic. After she died, two transplanted La Porteans looked at the wasted body and said she was certainly Belle Gunness; but Worden would not make the trip.

  One by one the leading actors in the drama played out their scenes and passed from the stage.

  Ex-Sheriff Smutzer refused to take Ray’s dying accusation seriously. “It’s Ray’s word against mine,” he would remark with a shrug. He kept visiting Texas, and on one of his trips he neglected to come back. For thirty years he was out of touch with La Porte. Then he came back, sick and broke. He refused to discuss the Gunness case. Not long afterward he died.

  In spite of his narrow escape, Joe Maxson had no feeling against widows. He married a nice one, and had a little family. He died suddenly when some planks he was loading on a wagon tipped over on him and crushed his skull.

  Wirt Worden married his secretary, Bessie Folant, and lived happily until he died in 1943. He died firmly convinced that Belle Gunness got away.

  Bessie Folant Worden still lives under the maples on Michigan Avenue, with Wirt’s picture smiling at her elbow. To her gentle kindness and inside knowledge of the case this book owes a great deal.

  There are many in La Porte who still remember Belle Gunness. They are levelheaded people, and leave the legends to sensational writers. When checked against old records shelved for forty years, their memories prove astoundingly full and accurate. They are uniformly kind and helpful to people asking questions.