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

by Harold Schechter

  The next day she was back in the store, once again giving vent to her worries over Lamphere. “She told me that she feared he would some day set fire to her home and buildings,” Miss Schultz would say afterward, “and that he would murder her and her children.”[11]

  10.

  MONDAY, APRIL 27, 1908

  Joseph Maxson, Ray Lamphere’s replacement, would later testify that Belle had kept her daughters home from school that day. Their teacher at the Quaker school, however—Miss Carrie Garwood—told a different story. As Miss Garwood recounted:

  On the morning of April 27, I noticed that the two little girls of Miss Gunness came into the schoolroom crying. Their cheeks were swollen from weeping, and they seemed in great distress.

  I called Myrtle to me and asked if she was in trouble. She replied that she and her sister had been given a terrible beating by their mother that morning. It was the first time I had ever seen the children behaving so, and I was surprised. I pursued the questioning and Myrtle told me that she and her sister had started in play toward the cellar of the Gunness house. Mrs. Gunness rushed after them before they reached the bottom of the stairway and dragging them back had given them both a terrible beating.

  “You keep out of there,” she told the oldest girl. “Don’t you poke your faces where they are not wanted.”

  I asked the children if they had been forbidden to go down into the cellar and they said they had, but they had forgotten the injunction.[1]

  Later that day, Belle hitched up her buggy and drove into town. Her first stop was the office of her lawyer, Melvin E. Leliter. Tearfully she informed him that she was living in fear of Ray Lamphere, who was threatening to “burn the house down over my ears.”

  Leliter advised that the simplest way to deal with Lamphere was to “fill him full of buckshot” the next time he showed up at her farm uninvited. Dismissing the suggestion, Belle told the lawyer that she wished to make out her last will and testament. She “wanted to leave everything in good shape in case something happened.”

  Leliter proceeded to write out the document according to Belle’s instructions. She left all “her property both real and personal to her three children, Myrtle Adolphine Sorenson, Lucy Bergliat Sorenson, and Phillip Alexander Gunness, providing that in the case of the death of any of said children without issue before her death, the survivor is to inherit the whole of the property, and provided also, that in the case of the death of all three of said children without issue, the whole of the property should go to the Norwegian Children’s Home of Chicago.”[2]

  Once her will was completed and signed, Belle took it to the State Bank, where she placed it in a safe-deposit box and made a cash deposit of $730.[3]

  Her next errand was at a store where she purchased candy, cake, and a toy train, telling the clerk, Marie Farnheim, that she was “going to give the children a little treat.”

  “Is it a birthday party?” asked Miss Farnheim.

  “No,” said Belle. “I am just going to give them a little surprise.”[4]

  Belle’s trip to town that afternoon ended at John Minich’s general store, where, as clerk George Wase recalled, she purchased “a large quantity of groceries.” She bought something else, too—two gallons of kerosene in a five-gallon can that she borrowed from the proprietor, explaining that she had searched for her own oil can before leaving home but had been unable to find it.

  She had been in the store about fifteen minutes when Ray Lamphere entered and asked for a five-cent plug of chewing tobacco. According to Wase, “No words passed between Lamphere and Mrs. Gunness . . . not even a nod of recognition.” Lamphere just stood by the counter and glared at her while she finished up her shopping. He then followed her outside and watched as she untied her horse from the hitching post and drove off in her buggy.[5]

  Belle arrived home at around 5:30 p.m. Joe Maxson helped her with her purchases, carrying the oil can into the house and stowing it in the entry under the back stairs.

  An hour later, he and the family sat down to a supper of “bread and butter, dried beef, salmon, beefsteak, and potatoes. Everyone showed a fine appetite,” Maxson said later. “We all had a couple of helpings of beefsteak and lots of cookies and jam.”

  When the meal was done and the dishes cleared from the table, the five of them—Maxson, Belle, Lucy, Myrtle, and Phillip—repaired to the parlor and “played all kinds of games, the main one being ‘Little Red Riding Hood and the Fox.’” According to Maxson’s recollections, Mrs. Gunness “loved to play this game and almost cried if the bad fox chanced to catch Red Riding Hood.”

  By 8:30 Maxson was having trouble staying awake. Bidding the others good night, he headed for the stairway. “The last I saw of Mrs. Gunness,” he recalled, “she was sitting on the floor with her daughters and son, playing with the toy engine and passenger coaches” she had bought earlier that day for the children.[6]

  Part Two

  THE MURDER FARM

  11.

  CONFLAGRATION

  Mrs. Gunness was already up and cooking breakfast: that was Maxson’s first thought as he surfaced from his sleep. From the smell of it, though, the hotcakes were burning. Suddenly, he was fully awake, choking and coughing. His room was filled with smoke.

  Leaping from his bed in his long johns, he threw open the window and stuck his head outside. The house was ablaze. He yanked on his boots and started kicking and pounding the door that separated his room from the main part of the house where Mrs. Gunness and her children slept. He tried yelling “Fire!” but the smoke was so dense that he could hardly breathe.

  Pulling on his overalls, he grabbed a small satchel and a handful of belongings, then raced down the rear stairs and made for the carriage shed about fifty feet away, where he left his stuff before running back to the burning house. He tried reaching his room again but got only as far as the second-floor landing before the flames drove him back outside.

  After trying to kick in the front door, he grabbed an ax from the toolshed and chopped out a panel. All at once, there was a great crackling sound overhead. Looking up, he saw the flaming roof collapse into the bedroom where, just a few minutes earlier, he had lain sound asleep.[1]

  Not far away, Mrs. Ella Clifford arose as usual at around 4:00 a.m. to prepare breakfast for her husband, Michael, who went off to work before daybreak. Looking out the kitchen window, she saw her neighbor’s house ablaze. She called to her teenage son, William, rousing him from sleep. Within minutes, he was on his bicycle and pedaling furiously to the Gunness place “in order to wake the people, if there was any chance,” as he later testified.

  He arrived just as Joe Maxson was taking his ax to the front door. Running to his side, the teenager peered through the broken-in panel. All he could see was fire.[2]

  By then, Mrs. Clifford had alerted both her husband, Michael, and her brother-in-law, William Humphrey. They arrived at the Gunness place to find Joe Maxson standing helplessly by the front door, ax in hand.

  “Where do they sleep?” said Humphrey, yelling to be heard over the roar of the flames.

  Maxson pointed to the two upstairs windows on the west side of the house. Searching around, Humphrey found some bricks and flung one at each of the windows. The glass shattered, flames spurted out, but no one responded from inside.

  “Is there a ladder around here?” Humphrey shouted to Maxson, who immediately made for the woodshed.

  He returned a moment later, dragging a ladder. With Michael Clifford and his son supporting it on either side, Humphrey scaled the rungs and peered through one broken window. There was an empty bed in one corner of the room—“no bodies, just a mattress on the bed, no body or sheets,” Humphrey said afterward. Fire was coming through the floor.

  Hurrying down, he and the Cliffords moved the ladder to the second window. Aga
in Humphrey climbed to the top, peered inside the other room, and saw nothing but an empty bed. He “thought of going into the room,” he testified, “but as the flames were coming through the floor, I was afraid to risk going in.”[3]

  Humphrey sent Michael Clifford to alert Daniel Hutson, who lived with his family a short distance away. Roused from bed by Clifford’s insistent pounding—“I thought someone was going to break the door in,” he commented afterward—Hutson, still dressed in his nightshirt, groggily asked what was wrong.

  “Are you going to let your neighbors all burn up while you sleep?” cried Clifford, jabbing a finger toward the Gunness place. Looking in that direction, Hutson “saw a constant blaze from every window. Everything was alight with fire.”

  As Clifford hurried back to the burning house, Hutson threw on his clothes—“I didn’t even stop to tie my shoes,” he related—and “went over there as fast as I could, half dressed. I got over there and everything was alight with fire. The only place that I saw that wasn’t burning was the southwest corner—the wind blowed right hard against that. The east side was ready to drop, and the whole thing was a solid blaze.”

  Hutson saw at once that there was nothing he and the others could do. “You better notify Sheriff Smutzer,” he said to Maxson, who immediately ran to the barn and led out one of the four stabled horses.

  “The horse was afraid,” Hutson remembered, “but, between the three of us, we got him hitched to the buggy, and Mr. Maxson started for La Porte, the horse going at a good jump.”[4]

  The courthouse clock read five o’clock when Joe Maxson reached the jail. Manning the desk was Deputy Sheriff William Antiss, who—after hearing Maxson’s story—accompanied him to Sheriff Smutzer’s house a few blocks away.

  Despite the six-shooter he wore cowboy style on his hip, there was something almost dandyish about Albert F. Smutzer. His best-known newspaper photograph shows a round-faced fellow with a large, neatly trimmed mustache and an incongruously snazzy outfit: knitted turtleneck sweater beneath a nicely tailored wool jacket, with a peaked leather cap riding jauntily on his head. He liked to travel in style, too. In stark contrast to his neighbors’ horse-drawn modes of transportation, he tooled around town in a snappy red Ford runabout.[5]

  With Antiss in the passenger seat, Smutzer drove his automobile out to the Gunness place, while Maxson followed in the buggy. By the time they arrived at the home, only parts of three walls were still standing. “There was nothing to do but watch until the flames died down,” one chronicler records. Smutzer summoned the members of the volunteer fire company, who “went to work throwing water by the pailful over the glowing embers and pulling down the tottering fragments of brick wall.”[6]

  By then, at least fifty spectators had gathered at the scene—a number that would soon grow into the hundreds. Among them was Harry Burr Darling, editor of the Argus-Bulletin, one of La Porte’s two dailies. That afternoon, his newspaper carried the first of what would quickly become a nationwide deluge of sensationalistic, page-one stories that would not subside for months.

  “The house of mystery has become a house of horror,” his article began in fine melodramatic style:

  Several years ago this house was associated with a mystery. Today it is a funeral pyre. The tragedy of the husband and father, whose mysterious taking out of the world proved a mystery on which little light was ever thrown, was followed this morning by a holocaust in which the wife and children were tortured to death by flames . . . The fire raged for an hour until nothing remained but three brick walls, which stand as grim evidence of the devastating work of the holocaust.[7]

  Though the blaze had burned itself out by daybreak, the heat from the smoldering ruins kept Smutzer and the others at a distance. Setting up a bucket brigade to carry water from nearby Clear Lake, volunteers doused the rubble until it was cool enough to approach. By the cellar door, the men “perceived signs of a blaze so concentrated that it must have been man-made”—the work of an arsonist (or “incendiary,” in the terminology of the time). Among the crowd of rubberneckers, a rumor spread that Mrs. Gunness herself, suffering from a “weakened mentality” over her recent troubles, had started the fire—that, as Darling reported, her “despondency . . . caused her to plan and execute the harrowing tragedy.”[8]

  Sheriff Smutzer and others, however, who knew the details of her ugly feud with Ray Lamphere, believed otherwise. As Darling informed his readers, the officers were firmly convinced that the “former hired hand . . . had set fire to the house through a motive of revenge.” Smutzer immediately assigned his two deputies to track down the suspect. At the time the Argus-Bulletin went to press that afternoon, however, Ray Lamphere’s whereabouts remained unknown. “No trace has been found of the man upon whom suspicion rests,” Darling wrote. “He has disappeared.”

  In the meantime, another hunt was about to commence. Arming themselves with picks and shovels, a dozen men, Smutzer among them, made ready to dig through the ruins of the fire-ravaged house in search of any sign of its missing residents: “evidence,” wrote Darling, “of the four lives which were snuffed out.”[9]

  12.

  DISCOVERY

  About two miles away from the Gunness farm, beside the tracks of the Lake Shore Railroad, stood the Interlaken School, a progressive institution founded by one of La Porte’s most eminent citizens, Dr. Edward A. Rumely. Opened in September 1907 with an enrollment of thirteen male students between the ages of nine and eighteen, its purpose—as Dr. Rumely explained to an interviewer—was to produce young men “of initiative, courage, and self-reliance—men who will dare to do great things, who will not bow before precedent, and who will have the power to become fit leaders of men in this great industrial Republic.”[1]

  Among the first students to attend the school was Carter Hugh Manny, who, fulfilling Dr. Rumely’s ambitions, would go on to have a distinguished career as a businessman, civic leader, and supporter of the arts. At around four o’clock on the morning of April 28, 1908—so he recalls in an unpublished memoir—Manny, then just a few months shy of his seventeenth birthday, was awakened by a schoolmate, “Tubby” Washburne, who occupied a room with a window that faced north: the “exact direction” of the Gunness place. Washburne had “come to tell me that there was a big farm fire a couple of miles away.” A few moments later, Dr. Rumely himself made the rounds of the bedrooms, telling “us to stay up and watch if we wished but please not to leave the school grounds.”

  While Rumely went off to use the school telephone to see what he could learn, Manny accompanied Washburne to his room, where they pulled up chairs before the big open window and watched the conflagration. “The fire was obviously a fair-sized farmhouse,” Manny observed, “because it burned for nearly two hours. Had it been a barn, the fire would have consumed it rather quickly.”

  When daylight came, Rumely informed the boys that the fire had consumed the home of the widow Gunness. “It was the first time we had ever heard the name,” Manny reports. There would be no classes that morning, Rumely announced. After breakfast, the boys were free to visit the farm “but should be back by noon.”

  “Thus,” Manny writes,

  after breakfast we all trotted down the tracks and when we reached the site were surprised to see all the things that had developed. There were uniformed men from the sheriff’s office, including himself, and a couple of policemen from La Porte. Firefighters were there from volunteer groups, aided by a water tank wagon from La Porte’s equipment. One shed building had been set aside for newspapermen and already there were a half dozen or so of these from Michigan City, La Porte and South Bend. Others would soon arrive from Chicago, Indianapolis and other places, for already word had gone out over the railroad telegraph keys telling of the fire and indicating that it was not an ordinary farm fire.

  All that remained of “what was once a beautif
ul country home” were three “ghastly and blackened walls.” As Manny watched, a corps of firemen under the direction of Chief Thomas Whorwell, using ladders, ropes, and hooks, tore down the walls, so that searchers could work in the ruins without worrying about falling bricks. By the time they were done, nothing was left but the cellar—“a sort of open well,” as Manny described it.[2] With Smutzer leading the way, the searchers began digging through the cellar, while firemen did their best to cool off the still-smoldering debris with bucketfuls of water.

  Following a brief midmorning respite, when he went back home for breakfast, William Humphrey returned to the Gunness place and joined in the digging. “The work was conducted under great difficulties,” one observer recorded, “for the ruins were a hotbed of coals, from which smoke and steam constantly poured.” After hours of labor, however, the men had brought to light nothing but “pieces of bedding, bedsteads, an old pistol, and articles of that kind.” By midafternoon, after excavating nearly the entire cellar, they were “becoming mystified, for they began to think that the bodies were not in the ruins.”[3]