There was one problem: the body presumed to be Belle's was missing its head. Even without the head, it was obvious that this corpse was much smaller and lighter than the hefty widow. Then Asa Helgelein showed up in town, suspecting foul play in his brother's disappearance and asking permission to dig around the farm.
On May 5, the first body was uncovered. It was brother Andrew, with fatal doses of arsenic and strychnine in his stomach. Quickly, the digging crew uncovered more bodies, including that of Jennie Olson. All in all, at least thirteen bodies were dug up, but the final estimate was higher than that, perhaps forty, because of the numerous bone fragments found in the pigpen. Belle had been feeding her suitors' bodies to the pigs.
Ray Lamphere was found guilty only of arson, because it was impossible to prove whether or not the headless corpse was Belle. He was sent to prison for two to twenty years and died there of tuberculosis two years later, still insisting that Belle was alive somewhere.
He wasn't the only person who believed she was alive. Sightings of Belle became as common as UFO sightings would be seventy years later. In fact, a woman fitting her description was connected to a 1931 murder in California, where Belle was believed to have fled after the fire.
THE FRANKIE SILVER STORY
Frankie Silver was the first woman to be hung in the state of North Carolina. She killed her husband, Charlie Silver, on December 22, 1831.
Frankie, born Frances Stewart, had been a young girl of about seventeen years old when she married Charlie Silver, who was probably all of eighteen. It was a hard life that they lived, and within a year, Frankie had given birth to a baby girl. Her life was miserable. The Silvers lived in an isolated area, miles from the nearest town, and Charlie had a habit of leaving his young wife alone for days at a time while he was off drinking and chasing women. To add to Frankie's misery, when Charlie came home drunk, he was abusive. Everyone knew that Charlie beat Frankie. They may not have approved, but wife beating was an accepted practice in those days. There was the unwritten, but accepted law that was called “rule of thumb,” which said that a man shouldn't beat his wife with a stick that was wider than his thumb. Charlie, it was said, broke the rule.
On December 23, 1831, Frankie came to the house where Charlie's family lived to tell them that Charlie hadn't been home for days. Their cabin was cold, she'd burned up all the firewood, and she was taking the baby and going home to her folks. She didn't care if Charlie never came home again. Charlie's family searched the woods and river for him, thinking maybe he'd fallen through the ice or been attacked by an animal.
Finally, Charlie's father hiked forty miles across the mountains to Tennessee, where there lived a slave who, folks said, could “conjure.” The slave was gone, but his master used the conjure ball, a ball on a string that moved like a pendulum, over a map that Charlie's father had drawn. It stopped right over the crude sketch of Charlie's cabin. That's where to look for Charlie, said the man.
Meanwhile, a neighbor, Jack Collis, explored the abandoned cabin. He noticed that there was an extraordinary amount of ash in the fireplace; Frankie's last fire seemed to have consumed a huge amount of wood and burned very hot and very long. The ashes were suspiciously greasy. Poking around in the fireplace, Collis discovered bits of human bone. Neighbors pried up the floorboards and found a puddle of blood “large as a hog's liver.” Next, the family and friends searched around outside the house and found grisly parts of Charlie—parts that wouldn't burn—hidden all over. In a recently dug hole filled with ashes was the iron heel of one of his hunting shoes. A hollow tree stump concealed his liver and heart. Charlie's family buried the body parts as quickly as they found them. When they found more parts, instead of opening the grave, they dug a new grave. As a result, Charlie Silver has three graves.
On January 10, 1832, Frankie was arrested for the murder of her husband. But there was a problem: Frankie stood four feet, ten inches high, and Charlie was big, weighing twice as much as she. How could she have dragged his body to the fireplace and chopped it up herself? She had to have had help. Her mother and her brother were arrested, only to be released for lack of evidence. Frankie was brought to trial alone, and within two days she was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. The prosecution—and the legend—accused her of hacking up Charlie and burning his pieces out of jealousy for his affairs with other women. Frankie never got to tell her side of the story because she was not allowed to testify.
LIZZIE BORDEN'S FORTY WHACKS
In August 1892, spinster Lizzie Borden was thirty-two years old, and her sister Emma was forty. The Borden family, including the girls' father, Andrew, and their stepmother, Abby, lived in a dark, cramped wooden house in a shabby neighborhood in Fall River, Massachusetts. The only running water came from the kitchen sink, and the only toilet was located in the cellar. They didn't even own a horse and buggy.
Andrew Borden was, ironically, a retired undertaker and very rich. But he also was a miser. He had married plain, heavyset Abby because he needed a wife and unpaid housekeeper. Emma and Lizzie refused to call her Mother.
Lizzie experienced some severe trauma in her childhood. For example, she loved animals and kept a coop of pigeons in the family's barn. When small boys started breaking into the barn, presumably to get at the pigeons, Andrew Borden's solution was to chop the heads off all the birds. Lizzie later recalled asking her father, “Where are their heads?”
Perhaps her father's cruelty to her pigeons fueled Lizzie's own inherent cruelty, or perhaps the trauma of the pigeon experience merely hardened Lizzie's heart, for not long after, Lizzie chopped off the head of her stepmother's cat. The cat had pushed open the door to Lizzie's bedroom, where Lizzie had been entertaining guests. Lizzie carried the cat downstairs, put its little head on the chopping block, and chopped it off. For days Abby wondered where her cat had gone. Finally Lizzie told her, “You go downstairs, and you'll find your cat.”
On the morning of August 4, 1892, while Andrew was out checking on one of his businesses and Emma was away visiting friends, Lizzie told the Borden's maid, Bridget, that her stepmother had gone off to see a sick friend. Later in the morning, Andrew returned home, carrying a small parcel wrapped in paper. It contained a broken lock that he had picked off the floor of one of his properties. Bridget opened the door for him, and as she stood at the entrance, letting him in, she heard a sound that was very unusual in the Borden house. Lizzie Borden was standing at the top of the stairs, laughing out loud.
Like a solicitous daughter, Lizzie helped her father relax on the dark horsehair sofa, so that he could nap. She pulled off his shoes and folded his coat under his head for a pillow. She then told Bridget about a sale of goods at the local shop, perhaps to get her out of the house. Bridget said she'd go later and climbed the stairs to her little attic room to lie down for a while. She was roused shortly after 11 A.M. by Lizzie's shout, “Come down! Father's dead!”
Bridget and Lizzie quickly called for doctors and friends galore, and by 11:45, there was a crowd gathered outside the house. The doctor, after examining Andrew Borden's gory remains, asked for a sheet to cover the body.
Lizzie answered, “Better get two.”
And where was Mrs. Borden? First Lizzie repeated the story that her stepmother had gone to see a sick friend. Then she added that she might have heard Abby come in and that maybe she was upstairs. Bridget and another woman climbed the stairs to find Abby, with her head crushed in, lying in a pool of congealed blood on the floor of the upstairs guest bedroom. During the funeral, the police searched Lizzie's closet for a bloodstained dress, to no avail. The following week, she was arrested for the murder of her father and stepmother.
Although there was great evidence that could prove Lizzie was the murderer, she was acquitted. The jury saw her as too much of a lady to have committed such a gruesome crime. After the trial, Lizzie and Emma, now rich, bought themselves a fourteen-room mansion in a neighborhood called the Hill, where the rest of the gentry lived. Though it was never prove
d, the rest of the gentry living up on the Hill had to wonder, did Lizzie Borden kill her father by hitting him with an axe ten times and her stepmother nineteen? And could she have hit them hard enough to crush Abby Borden's skull, slice Andrew's eye in half, sever his nose, and render his face into an unrecognizable pulp? They never bothered to find out. They didn't care to socialize with Lizzie Borden—not one bit.
“Lacking ladylike poison, Lizzie (Borden) did what every over-civilized, understated Wasp is entirely capable of doing once we finally admit we're mad as hell and aren't going to take it any more: She went from Anglo to Saxon in a trice.” —FLORENCE KING
ONE MORE REASON TO FEAR CLOWNS
John Wayne Gacy was an overweight, unattractive man with a passion for raping and murdering young males. Like so many other serial killers, Gacy had delusions, or at least dreams of grandeur. He wanted to be a local icon, so he joined local political groups, threw parties, and dressed as a clown named Pogo to entertain the local kids. His efforts were well received, and he was popular with children and parents alike, until authorities found the bodies of scores of neighborhood boys buried in his basement. In 1980, a jury convicted Mr. Gacy of murdering thirty-three young men, and he was executed fourteen years later.
“Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend.” —AGATHA CHRISTIE
NO WILLY WONKA
Jeffrey Dahmer was known to be a calm, articulate man working in a chocolate factory in Milwaukee. In reality, he was a murdering, cannibalistic sociopath. In 1989 he was arrested for molesting children, and in 1991 he was arrested for the murder of thirteen men and sentenced to 957 years in prison.
A MURDERING MADAME
Patty Cannon was a large woman, said to be equal to a man when it came down to a fight. In the early 1800s she was known for kidnapping free black people and selling them as slaves. When Cannon was in her sixties, one of her tenants discovered a grave by accident when his plow horse sank into a hollow. He unearthed a blue chest, which he opened to find not a secret stash of cash but the corpse of a slave trader Cannon had killed years before for a large sum he had been carrying. The tenant went to the authorities, who, after many years of turning a blind eye to Cannon's depraved dealings, were forced to arrest her. The investigation of Cannon's property led to the discovery of several other bodies, some of which were children. Cannon's victims never received justice; rather than stand trial, Cannon poisoned herself in 1829 while in prison.
“MURDER IS TERRIBLY EXHAUSTING.” —ALBERT CAMUS
PEOPLE EATER PACKER
Alfred Packer was the first man ever to be convicted for cannibalism under Colorado state law. In 1874 Packer and five other miners split from their party to seek silver in the San Juan Mountains. Sixty-five days later, Alfred Packer strolled back into town—alone. He also brandished a large cash roll as well as a gun that had belonged to one of the other miners. Packer was quickly jailed, only to escape. It didn't take long to locate the bodies of his former companions and confirm that Packer had killed and eaten the five miners. It took nine years to catch him, and another three to convict and sentence him to forty years in prison. Today he is gone but not forgotten: the University of Colorado at Boulder sports a memorial grill named after him, and one of the grill's most popular entrées is called the Packerburger.
FLORIDA'S FEMALE SERIAL KILLER
Aileen Wuornos had a textbook serial-killer child-hood. Her father died in prison, and her fifteen-year-old mother abandoned her to her grandparents when she was an infant. Wuornos had a baby herself at the age of fourteen; when her grandmother passed away and her hard-drinking grandfather started beating her and her brother, she left home, taking to the road and supporting herself as a prostitute. Wuornos collected arrests for crimes such as driving drunk, assault, and passing bad checks, and she was known under a variety of different aliases.
Her rough-and-tumble life was briefly brightened when she met Tyria Moore, a hotel maid, at a gay bar in Daytona, Florida. The couple moved in together, and Wuornos supported them by turning tricks. Things started to fall apart in the late 1980s, when Moore's alcohol addiction got the best of her and Wuornos met Richard Mallory, a trash-talking ex-con man who picked her up off the highway. According to Wuornos, she was sitting in Mallory's car listening to him rant about women and rape and killing, and she “snapped,” pulling out the .22-caliber gun she kept in her purse and shooting him three times. His body was found, decomposing, days later off the side of the highway.
After that incident, the bodies of several more men began cropping up around the same area. Meanwhile, Wuornos started bringing home extravagant trinkets, and Moore pretended not to wonder why her partner could suddenly pay the rent again.
The jig was finally up in June 1990, when Wuornos and Moore were found driving the car of a man who went missing days earlier. Florida police chased the women for several days and finally apprehended Wuornos in a bar. She was convicted of six counts of murder and sentenced to die, which she did, by lethal injection, in 2002.
“The consequences of our crimes long survive their commission, and, like the ghosts of the murdered, forever haunt the steps of the malefactor.” —SIR WALTER SCOTT
DOCTOR DEATH
Not all doctors put their patients' health at the top of their list of priorities. Dr. Harold Shipman was one such physician—a British general practitioner who is said to have killed up to 250 of his patients in the 1990s. A friendly, well-liked doctor, Shipman had an easy way with his patients and had been practicing for many years. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until a colleague, asked to cosign many of his cremation orders, noticed that his patients were dying in droves. She alerted the police, who, after some initial bungling, focused in on the death of Kathleen Grundy, an older woman who was found dead at her home in 1998. According to her will, Grundy had left all of her money—the sizable sum of more than 350,000 pounds—to Shipman, ignoring her children and grandchildren entirely. Police exhumed Grundy's body and found traces of diamorphine, or heroin, in her system. According to her family and friends, Grundy had never used a drug in her life.
Police seized Shipman's medical records and honed in on fifteen similar cases for investigation. A pattern emerged—Shipman would administer a lethal dose of heroin, sign the death certificate, and then alter the medical records to indicate the patient was in poor health. In some cases, he would manipulate his victims into leaving him money. The doctor was brought to trial and sentenced to fifteen consecutive life sentences for the fifteen murders, though it was estimated that he took part in as many as 250 deaths.
BLACK WIDOWS
“Black widow” is the slang term for women who use poison to kill their victims. People have used this silent but deadly method of murder for hundreds of years, but one of the better known black widows from modern times was Nannie Hazel Doss, also known as “the Giggling Grandma” for her sweetly nervous disposition. Over the course of thirty-four years, Doss killed eleven of her family members—including four husbands and two children—using arsenic.
5. COINCIDENCE OR SYNCHRONICITY?
ODD THINGS HAPPENING TO ORDINARY FOLKS
“COINCIDENCE IS GOD'S WAY OF REMAINING ANONYMOUS.” —ALBERT EINSTEIN
SOLE SURVIVORS
On December 5, 1664, the first event in the greatest series of coincidences in history occurred. On this date, a ship in the Menai Strait, off north Wales, sank with eighty-one passengers on board. There was one survivor—a man named Hugh Williams. On the same date in 1785, a ship sank in the Menai Strait with sixty passengers aboard. There was one survivor—a man named Hugh Williams. On the very same date in 1860 in exactly the same area, a ship sank with twenty-five passengers on board. There was one survivor—a man named Hugh Williams.
OUIJA MAGIC
A wealthy Connecticut woman named Helen Dow Peck believed messages she received from Ouija boards.
One day in 1919, the board spelled out that she should leave her entire estate to a man named John Gale Forbes. That
she did—the only problem was that she didn't know anybody by that name. In fact, after she died in 1956, her lawyer did a search throughout the world and discovered that, despite what the all-knowing spirits had said, there was nobody with that name.
BROTHERLY FATE
In Bermuda, in 1975 and 1976, two brothers were killed in strikingly similar accidents. The first was riding a moped when he was struck and killed by a taxi. One year later, the man's brother, riding the same moped, was struck by the same taxi driver who had killed the first man, and the taxi was carrying the same passenger.
TWIN SHIPWRECKS
In 1922 the Lyman Stewart was wrecked off the coast of Lands End, San Francisco's rockiest and most treacherous section of coast. In 1937, the Frank Buck was wrecked on the exact same rock where the Lyman Stewart had gone down. The odd thing? Both ships were built as twin ships, side by side in the shipyard of their origin.
You can still see the ruins of the shipwrecks. If you visit Lands End, now part of the Golden Gate National Park Conservancy, take the stairs that lead from the Merrie Way parking lot and head onto the Coastal Trail between the Vista Point and the Palace of the Legion of Honor. At low tide you can often spot the Lyman Stewart's steam engine and the Frank Buck's stern post and steam engine sticking up out of the waters off the shore.
The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts and Strange Stories Page 8
