by Gordon Kerr
Nevertheless, they kept flooding to the farm, lonely, middle-aged and older men with sizeable wallets. But none of them ever left. A widower from Iola, Wisconsin, Ole B. Budsburg was seen at the La Porte Savings Bank on 6 April 1907. There, he signed over the deed to his land in Wisconsin and walked out with several thousand dollars in his wallet. When his sons found out where he had gone, they wrote to Belle, enquiring about his whereabouts. She wrote back saying she had never seen him.
Puzzlingly, Belle began to have large trunks delivered to the farm which she manhandled herself. The shutters of the house were shut all day and night, and at night Belle could be seen digging away in the pig-pen. Passers-by noticed that there was a lot of digging at the farm, some of it done by Lamphere.
The suitors kept arriving . . . and disappearing. Andrew Helgelien turned up after an amorous correspondence with the widow Gunness. He brought with him his total savings of $2,900. A few days later, Gunness began to visit the bank to make deposits, firstly of $500 and then $700.
But things were starting to go wrong. Ray Lamphere was in thrall to Belle, deeply in love with her. He would do anything for her and was insanely jealous of the men who came with the intention of marrying her. Things became fraught between them and she fired Lamphere. Then, possibly worried that he would go to the authorities and tell them what she had been up to, she made an appointment at the courthouse in La Porte. There, she declared that Lamphere was not right in the head and represented a danger to the public. They summoned Lamphere to a hearing but found him to be of sane mind. Unperturbed, Belle had him arrested a few days later for trespassing.
Lamphere began to threaten Belle with exposure, even confiding in one farmer that Helgelien would not be a problem; ‘We fixed him for keeps,’ he said.
They may have ‘fixed’ Helgelien, but his family were troubled by his disappearance and his brother, Asle, wrote to Belle. When she replied, saying that he had probably gone to Norway to visit family, Asle did not believe her. He said that he believed his brother was actually still in the La Porte area. She persuaded him that if he came to La Porte and instigated a manhunt, it could be expensive for him. He delayed his visit for some months.
Belle began to panic. There were now two people who could, conceivably, expose her and send her to the gallows. She took steps to neutralise one of them, informing a lawyer – not the police – that Lamphere had threatened to kill her and burn her house down. She told him she wanted to make a will and left everything to her children. She then went to the bank and paid off her mortgage, having withdrawn all her money.
A man called Maxon, who had replaced Lamphere at the farm, awoke on the morning of 28 April with the smell of smoke in his nostrils. The house was on fire. He screamed Belle’s and her children’s names, but there was no response. Flames blocking his escape down the stairs, he jumped from the window of his room which was on the second floor and ran to town to get help. But by the time they arrived at the farmhouse it was little more than a smouldering ruin. They searched the property and found four bodies in the cellar. One, that of a woman, was headless and so could not be positively identified as Belle, although it was presumed to be her. The bodies of her children were lying next to her.
Lamphere was, of course, suspected and was picked up immediately. Unfortunately for him, a witness was found who said that he had seen Lamphere running down the road from the farm just before the fire broke out. He was charged with murder and arson. Meanwhile, the sheriff and his deputies began a careful search of the ruins, looking for evidence.
Was it the body of Belle Gunness that was found? When the remains were measured, it strangely proved to be the corpse of a woman only five feet three inches tall, eight or nine inches shorter than Belle. Further complicating matters was the fact that she weighed just under eleven stones, some three stones lighter than Belle. Either being burnt to death is very slimming or this was not Belle Gunness. Her friends certainly did not think it was her. Several neighbouring farmers looked at the corpse and said it was not her. Some friends who arrived from Chicago said it could not be her. The La Porte clothiers who made her dresses and other garments categorically stated that it was not her.
Then the case was thrown wide open when the doctor examining the dead woman’s internal organs found that she had died of strychnine poisoning.
However, on 19 May, Louis ‘Klondyke’ Schultz, who had been detailed to sift through the debris to try to find some dental evidence from the headless corpse, that would link it to Belle, discovered two human teeth. They were identified as two porcelain teeth and a gold crown on some bridgework that had belonged to Belle. That was enough proof for the coroner and at a subsequent inquest it was declared that the body found in the ruins was, indeed, that of Belle Gunness.
Meanwhile, Asle Helgelien had arrived on the scene, insisting that a search be carried out for his brother. On 3 May the first of a series of grisly finds was made – the body of Belle’s daughter Jennie. Then, one after another, the bodies began to be pulled from the earth in the pig-pen – Ole B. Budsberg, Thomas Lindboe of Chicago, who had been one of Belle’s handymen, Henry Gurholdt of Scandinavia, Wisconsin, who had brought $1,500 to Belle with the intention of marrying her, Olaf Svenherud of Chicago, John Moo, Olaf Lindbloom from Iowa and many more whose remains could not be identified. More than 40 men and children were discovered buried in shallow graves around the farm.
Ray Lamphere admitted to arson, but denied the murder of Belle and her children. He was found guilty of arson, but acquitted on the charge of murder and was sent to jail for 20 years, dying in prison in 1909.
He made a deathbed confession, claiming that, although he helped Belle to bury a number of her victims, he had not taken part in their murders. He explained her method. She would welcome her guest with a hearty meal and a cup of drugged coffee. When the man had fallen asleep she would come up behind him and split his head with a meat cleaver. Or sometimes she would chloroform her victim when he was in bed asleep before carrying the body to the basement where she would dissect it. The remains were buried around the farm or sometimes they were fed to the pigs.
He also shed some light on the headless woman, explaining that she had been lured to the farm believing she was going to be Belle’s housekeeper. But Belle, of course, had other plans for her. She had drugged her, killed her and cut her head off, throwing it into a nearby swamp. Then she chloroformed her children, suffocated them and put them in the basement. She dressed the woman in her clothing, set fire to the house and fled, leaving her false teeth behind. Lamphere had been part of the plan, but she had evaded him after the fire and disappeared.
He said that by this time she was rich. He estimated she had murdered 42 men and each of them had brought with him at least $2,000. By the time she disappeared, he reckoned that she had saved around $250,000.
Belle Gunness became an American Lord Lucan. Sightings were reported for decades. She was seen in Chicago, San Francisco, New York. She was reported to be living in Mississippi as a wealthy landowner. Nothing was proved, however.
Interest grew in her case once again, in 1931, when a woman named Esther Carlson was arrested in Los Angeles for poisoning a suitor, August Lindstrom, for money. Some said she looked like Belle, but before they could confirm whether or not it was her, up to her old tricks, she died while awaiting trial.
In November 2007 the body of Belle Gunness was exhumed. Tests are being undertaken to prove once and for all whether it was her body that was found without a head in the basement in Indiana all those years ago.
Griselda Blanco, The Black Widow
‘If she owed you money, she’d kill ya. If you owed her money, she’d kill ya.’ So said a retired Miami homicide detective of the woman who is possibly the most notorious and ruthless female criminal of all time – Griselda Blanco. Blanco can be said to have been the world’s first female drug-trafficker and at the height of her success was estimated to be worth around half a billion dollars, money earned from the impor
tation of vast quantities of cocaine into the United States. She was a drug-trafficking visionary, being the first to realise the vast potential of using a drug-smuggling bridge from Colombia to Miami and then New York. Even amongst the drug-traffickers of Medellin, probably the most dangerous criminals who ever lived, she stood out, a psychopath who took pleasure in killing and who introduced her sons into the business of drug smuggling. Not for nothing was she known as the ‘Godmother of cocaine’, but she also enjoyed another nickname, the ‘Black Widow’, as her husbands and lovers had a nasty habit of turning up dead in the morning.
One policeman involved in her case said that she may have been the most prolific killer of all time, having had hits carried out regularly in New York, Miami and Colombia. Her ruthlessness showed in the methods that were used. One man, arriving at Miami International Airport, was stabbed by one of her hitmen 19 times with a bayonet as he came through Customs. He survived but, probably wisely, refused to press charges.
Griselda Blanco was born in 1943 into abject poverty in the area of Santa Marta, in northern Colombia, on the Magdalena estate which belonged to a man called Blanco. The estate is close to the Guajiro Peninsula, home of the Wayuu tribe, an ethnic group so fierce that the authorities found it almost impossible to police the area. Senor Blanco was, himself, half Wayuu.
Griselda’s mother worked as a servant on his estate and, as was often the case, she became pregnant by her boss. When the baby, Griselda, was born, Blanco gave her a few pesos, threw her off the estate, and they trudged off in the direction of the north Colombian seaport Cartagena. In the absence of work, Griselda’s mother took to begging in the streets, using the baby as a means of tugging at people’s heartstrings. Griselda’s life consisted of begging and being beaten by her mother for the slightest thing as the pair wandered through the towns and cities of the north of the country, living in the worst slums and barely finding the means to survive. Men came and went and children inevitably followed.
At the age of 13, Griselda, a street urchin, but an expert beggar, made the friendship of a gangster by the name of Carlos Trujillo. Trujillo made his money from forging the requisite documentation to help illegal immigrants obtain entry to the United States. He worked mainly in Queens in New York where there was a burgeoning Colombian community, flying back and forth between there and Medellin in Colombia. Griselda moved in with him and before long she had taken advantage of his skill with forged documentation and had relocated to Queens.
By her early 20s Griselda had been working for a number of years as a pickpocket and forger. She had learned from Trujillo the tricks of the trade and was now adept at creating visas, green cards and passports. They had three sons – Dixon, Uber and Osvaldo, all of whom were born in Medellin. Suddenly, however, Carlos was taken ill. He was admitted to hospital in Queens with cirrhosis of the liver and hepatitis, dying not long after and leaving Griselda to run the business and bring up her boys alone. Needless to say, she was up for it.
She flew immediately to Medellin, hardly taking any time to mourn the father of her children. She planned to run the forgery business herself, but was keen to add another activity to her portfolio – cocaine-trafficking. It was a trafficker from Medellin, Alberto Bravo, who introduced her to the world of narcotics smuggling. But he lived to regret helping her when, after he had said something that annoyed her, she stuck the barrel of a loaded pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. It was one of the first of her many murders.
It was now 1971 and she was running her own drug-trafficking network, buying the drugs from any number of different sources and using mainly female mules to carry them into the United States. They are said to have worn lingerie designed by Blanco that was on sale in a boutique she owned in Medellin. The versions the mules wore, of course, were tailored slightly differently. There were pockets sewn into them in which could be secreted two kilos of cocaine. Before long, her lucrative business was pulling in some $8 million a month.
She was flying backwards and forwards from Medellin to Miami, but finally set up home in Miami in 1978. There she assembled a crew of ruthless assassins known as ‘the Pistoleros’. To become a member was simple. You just had to kill someone and cut off a part of your victim’s body as proof.
In Queens, around this time, homicide detectives were bemused by a string of corpses that all had one thing in common. They were bloodless. This was the handiwork of one of Griselda Blanco’s Pistoleros, Roy Sepulveda, who became the father of her fourth son. He would render his victims senseless, hang them upside down, cut their throats and let the blood drain out of their bodies. It made sense – a body folds much better if it does not contain any blood. So, Sepulveda’s victims could easily be folded over and stuffed into boxes that were dumped on the street to be discovered by horrified passers-by.
One of Griselda’s most notorious actions was the Dade County Shopping Mall Massacre which was carried out on her orders in 1979. She had arranged to meet two drug suppliers to whom she owed a great deal of money at a liquor store. Of course she never had the slightest intention of paying the debt, sending instead two of her hitmen who arrived in a van advertising party supplies. Armed with automatic weapons the hitmen entered the store and shot dead their targets. But there were also two shop assistants present who had witnessed the murders. The hitmen pursued the two men through the shopping mall, spraying bullets in every direction and only succeeding in wounding the shop assistants. The police immediately identified Griselda Blanco as the number one suspect and a group was assembled called CENTAC, Central Tactical Unit. Its members were detectives from both New York and Miami and its sole objective was to nail Griselda Blanco.
By this time, however, the Black Widow had returned to Colombia where she owned vast tracts of land. They were aware that she still travelled back and forward between Colombia and Miami and became increasingly aware of the number of murders being committed by her Pistoleros in both Miami and New York.
In 1982, for instance, she ordered the death of one of her former enforcers, Chucho Castro, who had made the disastrous mistake of kicking one of her sons on the backside. Tragically, however, when her assassins pulled up alongside Castro’s vehicle and opened fire, they missed their target, hitting instead his two-year-old son Johnny twice in the head and killing him. As one of the hitmen said later, Blanco was angry at first that they had missed Castro, but when she heard that they had killed the son, she was delighted and declared that they were even now. The same year as the child was killed, she ordered the execution of Alfredo and Grizel Lorenzo in their south Miami house. They owed her money for a drug transaction and were killed while their children were watching television in an adjoining room. When her men returned, informing her that they had killed the couple but left their three children alive, she was furious.
In the early 1980s Griselda succumbed to her own product and became a heavy cocaine user, reportedly spending $7 million on her growing habit. She used a powerful, smokable version of the drug known as bazooka, and began to behave more and more erratically. She spent a fortune on Eva Peron’s diamonds and purchased a tea set once owned by the Queen. And now she was killing for fun, innocent strippers and topless dancers numbering amongst her victims. She once even shot a pregnant woman in the stomach. Her capacity for violence knew no limits. She ripped off her best friend for almost two million dollars and had her tortured and beaten before shooting her and having her thrown into a canal. She indulged in orgies – both lesbian and bisexual. She was known to cut the throat of her lovers after they had slept with her and she sported an emerald and gold-encrusted MAC-10 sub-machine gun.
She had a great many enemies, especially in Medellin where she had ripped off many of the people with whom she had done business. At one point, to put the numerous hitmen who pursued her off the scent, she had a coffin shipped back home, purportedly containing her remains.
As she got older and put on weight through her use of cocaine, she was reduced to forcing men to have sex with her at gu
npoint. One of her hitman, Jorge Ayala, known as Riverito, was understandably hesitant when she asked him to be her lover. ‘Everyone who fucks you winds up dead,’ he candidly said to her. She began to develop a painkiller and tranquilliser habit and passed control of the day-to-day running of the business to her sons, although she still supervised them. She moved to the town of Irvine in Orange County, California and she lived there like an ordinary housewife with her fourth and youngest son who enjoyed the bizarre name of Michael Corleone Sepulveda, named after the character in The Godfather, a film she adored.
DEA agent Bob Palumbo had been on Griselda’s case for years and he was the man who finally got to arrest her in February 1985. For months he had been trailing a team of Colombian hitmen who were pursuing her. When apprehended, they were found to be carrying a semi-automatic assault rifle equipped with a silencer and high-powered 9mm weapons. Shortly after that, she was arrested and extradited to Florida to face murder charges. Her former associate Riverito had connected her to 12 murders in Queens, 12 in Miami and everyone knew that there were also an unknown number in Colombia with which she would probably never be charged. Police estimates were higher, though. They thought that at least 40 murders had been committed by her or on her orders in the United States alone.