Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

by Harold Schechter

  Even as they pursued their new lives in America, the members of Chicago’s Norwegian community found frequent occasions to honor their ethnic heritage. They celebrated Norway’s Independence Day each May 17, threw a massive outdoor party on the millennium of Norway’s unification under the Viking king Harald Fairhair, and turned out by the thousands in July 1875 for an open-air gala to commemorate the sailing of the sloop Restauration, the so-called Norwegian Mayflower that carried the first boatload of immigrants from the coastal town of Stavanger to the United States fifty years earlier. One of the highlights of Chicago’s great World Columbian Exposition of 1893 was the arrival of the dragon-prowed longship Viking, which—in emulation of Leif Eriksson’s epochal voyage—had been sailed across the Atlantic by an intrepid crew under the command of Captain Magnus Andersen: a feat that stirred “elated feelings of pride in the hearts of Norwegians throughout the United States.”[11]

  By the time of the World’s Fair, Chicago’s Norwegian population (which would eventually grow to be the “the third-largest . . . in the world, after Oslo and Bergen”) numbered slightly over twenty thousand. The wealthiest among them—doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and bankers—had turned the neighborhood of Wicker Park into such a tightly knit ethnic enclave that, among themselves, they referred to it as Hommansbyen, after a fashionable residential district of Oslo.[12] Their less affluent countrymen—the merchants, shop owners, skilled laborers, and craftsmen—congregated in the neighborhoods of Humboldt Park and Logan Square.[13] As had been the case since the earliest days of their arrival, serious crime was strikingly rare in their community. Official reports issued by the Chicago Department of Police show that, between 1880 and 1890, Norwegians accounted for a mere 1 percent of arrests in the city, generally for infractions no worse than drunk and disorderly conduct. This “enviable record,” as one historian writes, was shining proof of one of the most admirable traits of Chicago’s Norwegian population: their “deference to law and order.”[14]

  Among the more than twenty-five thousand Norwegians who came to these shores in 1881—the start of a great wave of migration from Norway that would not subside until the decade’s end—was a twenty-two-year-old woman from Selbu on the country’s west coast, not far from the city of Trondheim. Her most famous photograph shows a stout, grim-faced matron fixing the camera with a baleful glare—although to be fair, that picture was taken years later, when she had settled into a hard-bitten middle age. Even in her twenties, however—as an earlier photo attests—she was a notably unlovely young woman, with a large head, small eyes, short nose, and a wide, fat-lipped mouth that, when set in a frown, bore resemblance to a frog’s. She was christened Brynhild Paulsdatter—Brynhild daughter-of-Paul—to which was added, in accordance with custom, the name of the farm on which her family lived and worked, making her full Norwegian name Brynhild Paulsdatter Størset.

  Unsurprisingly, very little is known about her earliest years. Apart from a few official documents laboriously dug up by later historians—confirmation records, census reports, and the like—reliable facts about her background are virtually nonexistent. Born on November 11, 1859, she grew up in Inngbya, one of several tiny hamlets within the district of Selbu. Her sharecropper father, Paul Pedersen Størset, a native of the area and one of its poorer members, leased an acre or so of the Størset farm, where he raised a few cows, sheep, and goats and grew just enough crops—barley, oats, and potatoes—to keep his wife, Berit, and their seven children from starving.[15] During the winter months, he supplemented his meager income by working as a stonemason. Even so, his situation was sometimes so dire that, on at least one occasion, he was compelled to apply for public welfare, receiving ten kroners of poor relief from town coffers.[16]

  Like other peasant children, Brynhild was expected to perform a variety of chores from an early age: milking, churning, drawing water, watching over the cattle to ensure that they did not wander off or, even worse, fall prey to the malicious hill-spirits who shrink cows to the size of mice and drive them away to a mysterious subterranean realm.[17] Because her family could not afford hardwood for its hearth fire, she was also sent out daily to collect Snurkvist, the tiny, dried-up twigs of the spruce tree normally used for kindling—a task that earned her the demeaning nickname Snurkvistpåla (roughly translated as “Paul’s twig-daughter”) among her less charitable neighbors.[18]

  In June 1874, at the age of fourteen, she was confirmed at the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Her religious instructor, Pastor Agaton Hansteen, evaluated her as “good in religious knowledge and diligence,” a ranking that “only one half of the girls obtained.” That same year, she was hired out as a dairymaid to a neighbor named Rødde, who would later describe her as a “diligent human being that in all ways behaved well.”[19]

  After a full day of toiling the fields, she would often sit by the firelight, knitting mittens, caps, and other woolen goods adorned with the traditional “star rose” pattern for which Selbu was renowned. Diversion was provided by the family storyteller, who would regale the household with magical tales of clever country lads who win the hands of haughty princesses, giant trolls with an unquenchable hunger for human flesh and blood, and the sirenlike creatures known as Hulder: sinister females with hollowed-out backs and long cows’ tails who lure mortal men to their doom.[20]

  Not all of Brynhild’s neighbors shared her pastor’s and employer’s high opinions of her. “Here in Selbu,” the local newspaper, Selbyggen, editorialized, “she is remembered by many [as] a very bad human being, capricious and extremely malicious. She had unpretty habits, always in the mood for dirty tricks, talked little and was a liar already as a child . . . As a grownup she was still little respected and was a scum of society.”[21]

  Stories would also circulate that, at seventeen, she was impregnated by the son of a wealthy landowner who, having no intention of marrying her, lured her to a lonely spot and beat her so severely that she miscarried. According to this account, her assailant died soon afterward of an intestinal ailment whose symptoms were suspiciously like those of arsenic poisoning.[22]

  There are good reasons, however, to doubt the truth of this anecdote, for which no documentation exists. Her neighbors’ exceptionally harsh judgments of her character are likewise open to question, since they were offered many years after her departure from Norway and were almost certainly colored by subsequent events. By the time the Selbyggen editorial appeared, the young dairymaid from Selbu had metamorphosed into a creature as evil as any mythical Hulder: “a woman,” as one historian puts it, “whose malevolence seemed to match that of the unseen beings peopling Norwegian folk tradition.”[23]

  2.

  COMING TO AMERICA

  The Norwegian emigrants who made the exodus to the New World in the latter decades of the nineteenth century left copious accounts of their arduous journey. It began for many of them, as it did for Brynhild Paulsdatter Størset, with a voyage from Trondheim to the English port city of Hull aboard the steamship Tasso. During the four-day crossing of the North Sea, the bulk of the travelers remained belowdecks in steerage, huddling in groups or stretched out, fully clothed, on the narrow wooden shelves that served as bunks. Even in good weather, the ship tended to roll about on the waves, and—as various letters and journal entries attest—seasickness was so common that even passengers accustomed to sailing were often made ill by the pervasive stench of vomit.

  For those who could hold down their food, three daily meals were offered. Though promotional brochures described the menu in glowing terms, the testimony of one passenger tells a very different story:

  For breakfast there was always sweet tea without milk and dry hard biscuits, and the same for supper. There was butter, but it was so rancid that we could not digest it. For dinner, soup with meat, but there was no taste to the soup and the meat was as salty as herring. One day we had salted fish with a dash of soup,
but it was inedible for most of us, and we just ended up dumping our portions into the sea.

  The privies, located on the upper deck, were particularly vile: “small, cramped, dark spaces without water,” as one observer wrote, “those for men and women being close together, the entrance in no way protected from the weather. Altogether more evil-smelling unsatisfactory places it is difficult to imagine.”[1]

  Upon their arrival at Hull, the emigrants were herded to various dockside lodging houses and given a simple meal of soup, coffee, and bread and butter while their baggage was being unloaded. They were then hurried to the station of the North Eastern Railway Company for the train ride to Liverpool, where they would board a steamer to America.

  For the vast bulk of emigrants who traveled in steerage, the transatlantic crossing had improved considerably by the late 1800s. Advertisements for the new steamers touted the between-decks living area as “high, light, and spacey” with “different compartments for families, for unmarried males, and for unmarried females,” and with a crew “specially employed” to maintain “order and cleanliness.” The food was “fresh and rich, made of first class supplies,” and “served to the passengers by stewards.” The reality proved somewhat different. The meals were often barely palatable (one traveler recalled an offering of pork that “from its appearance had made the trip across the Atlantic before”), the toilet facilities were execrable, the decks—despite the supposed attentions of the special cleaning crew—were a vile mess from the constant, wholesale seasickness. Even so, the sheer reduction in travel time made the trip a far more tolerable experience than it had been in the past. Whereas the sailing vessels of an earlier era—brigs, schooners, sloops, barks, clippers—might take up to sixty-five days to make the voyage, modern passenger ships like the Thingvalla, Hekla, and Geiser could complete the journey in as little as ten.[2]

  Most of the steamers docked in Quebec, New York, or Boston. From there, the new arrivals from Norway would make their way by boat, rail, and wagon to their final destinations: Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, the Dakotas, Washington State. Most settled in small farm communities, though others chose ethnic enclaves in cities like Minneapolis and Seattle. And in the case of Brynhild Paulsdatter Størset, Chicago.

  Several years earlier, Brynhild’s older sister, Olina—her senior by ten years—had moved to the United States and settled in Chicago, where she met and married a man named John R. Larson. It was Nellie, as she now called herself, who had invited Brynhild to come live with her and her husband, and who had paid her sister’s passage to the New World. Shortly after arriving in Chicago and moving in with the Larsons, Brynhild, like Nellie and countless other immigrants, adopted a new American name: Bella Peterson.[3]

  At the time Bella embarked on her new life, most unmarried Scandinavian women seeking employment in Chicago chose domestic occupations over factory work. According to one eminent historian, “In 1880, about three quarters of Norwegian-born women working outside the home became servants, housekeepers, or laundresses.”[4] Bella Peterson did likewise, taking in laundry, doing piecework sewing, and cleaning homes for meager wages that she handed over to the Larsons for her upkeep.

  This type of labor was nothing new to the former farm maid, who had spent her hardscrabble girlhood performing precisely such menial tasks. But she hadn’t come to America to slave her life away in drudge work. There were riches to be had here, and—as any stroll through the commercial heart of Gilded Age Chicago made tantalizingly clear—a world of glittering merchandise for sale. In his classic novel Sister Carrie, set in the late 1880s, Theodore Dreiser offers a portrait of another provincial young woman, newly arrived in Chicago, whose most covetous longings are aroused as she wanders for the first time through one of the city’s great “palaces of consumption,” a downtown department store:

  Carrie passed along the busy aisles, much affected by the remarkable display of trinkets, dress goods, stationery, and jewelry. Each separate counter was a show place of dazzling interest and attraction. She could not help feeling the claim of each trinket and valuable upon her personally, and yet she did not stop. There was nothing there which she could not have used—nothing which she did not long to own. The dainty slippers and stockings, the delicately frilled skirts and petticoats, the laces, hair ribbons, hair-combs, purses, all touched her with individual desire, and she felt keenly the fact that not any of these things were in the range of her purchase.[5]

  The material desires aflame in Carrie Meeber’s breast burned even more fiercely in Bella Peterson’s. The deprivations of her youth had left her with a lust for wealth. “My sister was insane on the subject of money,” Nellie Larson would later remark. “She would do anything to get it.”[6] As for marriage, Bella made no secret of what she wanted in a mate. “She never seemed to care for a man for his own self, only for the money or luxury he was able to give her,” Nellie observed. Years afterward, Bella would say of her first husband—the father of her children and, by all accounts, a kind and loving man—that she had stayed with him only because he provided her with “a nice house.”[7]

  His name was Mads Ditlev Anton Sorenson. The only extant photograph of him shows a powerfully built, bullnecked fellow with strong Nordic features, a handlebar mustache of the kind fashionable in those days, and a high balding dome. Five years older than Bella, he was one of the eight hundred employees of the Mandel Brothers department store on State and Madison streets, where he worked as the night watchman.[8]

  They were married in March 1884 at the Evangelical Lutheran Bethania Church on Grand Avenue and Carpenter Street. Officiating at the ceremony was the Reverend John Z. Torgersen, a venerable figure among his fellow Norwegians who, at the time of his death in 1905, would be eulogized as “Cupid’s Noted Aid,” having performed over fifteen thousand weddings in the course of his thirty-six-year ministry, more than any other clergyman in the country.[9] In her wedding photograph, the twenty-four-year-old Bella poses proudly in a formal black dress, “perhaps taffeta or silk moire, with lace ruffles and a triple strand of pearls around her neck,” her left hand crossed over her right so as to display her “double wedding bands.”[10]

  Only known photo of Mads Ditlev Anton Sorenson, Belle’s first husband.

  The historical record of the Sorensons’ life is a virtual blank for the first decade of their marriage. Still, it is possible to draw some inferences from the few documented facts.

  By most accounts, Bella seemed possessed of powerfully maternal impulses. “She had great love for children,” her sister Nellie recalled. “Almost every Norwegian Sunday school child in Chicago knew her for her kindness.” She appeared especially touched by the plight of the orphaned or abandoned. Attending “the children’s picnics at Humboldt Park, she would get out on the platform and offer to take care of children” who needed a home.[11]

  Indeed, it was her eagerness to raise a child that led to a bitter break with her sister. Unable to conceive during the early years of her marriage, Bella directed much of her maternal feeling toward her four-year-old niece, Olga, the youngest of Nellie’s five children. “She was an awfully cute little girl,” Nellie later explained, “and my sister demanded to have her to rear.” Though Olga was permitted to stay with her aunt for an extended visit of six weeks, Nellie, quite understandably, “refused to let [Mrs. Sorenson] adopt my little daughter, and from that day, my sister would hardly speak to me.”[12]

  In 1891, Bella Sorenson realized her dream of taking in a child, an infant girl named Jennie. Living close to the Sorensons at the time was a couple named Olson, who became close friends with Bella and Mads. As Anton Olson, the child’s father, later explained: “When Jennie was eight months old her mother was dying. [Mrs. Sorenson] begged the dying woman to bequeath the child to her. My wife put the baby in Bella’s arms and called on her to swear that she would guard the little one as her own, rear and
care for her. Bella swore that she would regard the pledge as sacred. My wife died soon afterward . . . After Bella took the child, I saw her frequently. She brought Jennie to me often and kept her well dressed. The child was happy.”[13]

  Years later, after he had remarried, Olson tried to regain custody of his daughter. Bella fought him in court and won.[14]

  Though Mads never brought home more than fifteen dollars in weekly wages (equivalent to roughly $450 today), he and Bella somehow managed to acquire enough money by 1894 to purchase a small candy store at Grand Avenue and Edward Street. Occupying the street-level floor of a two-story wood frame building, the store (as a newspaper photograph makes clear) sold tobacco and cigars, newspapers and magazines, stationery, and some grocery staples, along with the popular confections of the time.[15] Despite its location in a busy commercial district, however, the shop failed to prosper, and Bella watched with growing consternation as her cherished money drained away.