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

by Harold Schechter

  In his efforts to locate his missing brother, Asle Helgelien had communicated not only with Belle Gunness but with La Porte police chief Clinton Cochrane, who confirmed that a man matching Andrew’s description had been seen in the city. After learning that Andrew had arranged to have his savings wired to the First National Bank of La Porte, Asle also sent a query, along with a photograph of his brother, to Frank J. Pitner, the clerk who had handled the transaction. Pitner promptly wrote back to say that “Andrew was without doubt” the man who had come to the bank with Belle Gunness to cash in his certificates of deposit.

  On May 1—the same day that Mrs. Larson, her two children, and Mrs. Olander all arrived in La Porte—Asle received an envelope from Pitner. Inside was the front page of the La Porte Daily Herald of April 28, reporting on the fiery destruction of the Gunness house and the death of its occupants.[8]

  The following day, Asle Helgelien was on his way to La Porte.

  15.

  HORROR

  He arrived late Sunday, May 3, and stayed overnight at the Hotel Teegarden.

  Early the next day, he made his way to the office of the La Porte Herald, purchased back issues of all the daily papers from the date of the fire on, and spent the next hour or so poring over them. He then proceeded to the sheriff’s office and introduced himself to Al Smutzer, who listened to his tale, then drove him out to the Gunness farm.

  By then only two men were still engaged in digging through the rubble: Belle’s hired hand, Joe Maxson, and her neighbor, Daniel Hutson. Hoping to find some clue to his brother’s fate, Asle joined in the work, while Maxson and Hutson kept an eye out for Mrs. Gunness’s still-missing head.

  The cellar yielded nothing but charred household debris. That night, Asle accepted the hospitality of Belle’s neighbors, the Swan Nicholson family, who were happy to open their home to a fellow Norwegian. When he returned to the Gunness farm early the next day, Maxson and Hutson were already at work, shoveling through the ruins of the cellar.

  Joe Maxson, Belle’s hired hand, in the ruins of the Gunness home.

  Asle spent some time hiking around the property, searching for anything suspicious. Seeing the big lake nearby, he returned to the two diggers and—as he later testified—“asked some questions, whether there were any holes in the ice on the lake in the winter, how deep the water was.” If his brother had met with foul play, Fishtrap Lake would have been a handy place to dispose of the body. But as far as Maxson and Hutson recalled, the lake had been a solid sheet of ice all winter.[1]

  It seemed to Asle that there was no point in hanging around the Gunness place any longer. He would have to look elsewhere for some trace of Andrew. “I told the boys goodbye,” he recalled afterward, “and I started down to the road.” He hadn’t gone far, however, when he stopped and swiveled on his heels. “I was not satisfied,” he would explain, “and I went back to the cellar and asked Maxson whether he knew of any hole or dirt having been dug up there about the place in spring.”

  As a matter of fact, Maxson did. Sometime back in March—he couldn’t remember the exact date—he had helped Mrs. Gunness load up a wheelbarrow with “old cans, shoes, and other rubbish,” then hauled it to a pit that had been dug in a fenced-off portion of the barnyard used as a hog lot, about fifty feet south of the house. At his employer’s direction, he had then dumped in the refuse and filled in the hole.

  Asle asked Maxson to show him the spot, and the three men, shovels in hand, headed for the yard and began to dig.

  It wasn’t long before their nostrils were assaulted with “an awful bad smell. Mr. Maxson told me that Mrs. Gunness had put a lot of tomato cans and fish cans there. Maybe it was they made it stink,” Asle would say. But the fetor that arose from the pit smelled nothing like rotting tomatoes and fish.

  Their shovels struck the source of the stench about four feet down: “something hard, covered with a gunny sack.” There was a tear in the fabric. Through it they could see a human neck. In the dirt beside the sack lay a man’s severed arm.

  Within minutes, Maxson was at the reins of Mrs. Gunness’s buggy and racing to town. Looking around the yard, Asle found an old coat and a few gunnysacks and laid them over the grisly find. Then he and Hutson picked up their shovels and carefully cleared away more of the dirt from the fetid grave.

  They had just finished when Sheriff Smutzer drove up. Beside him was Coroner Charles S. Mack, an imposing, white-bearded fellow, garbed in a rumpled three-piece suit with a wing-collared shirt, black bow tie, and fob chain strung across his vest. Under Mack’s watchful eye, Smutzer and the others soon brought the rotted body parts to the surface.

  Coroner Mack would later depose that it was impossible to provide a “particular and minute description” of the corpse, “owing to the fact that . . . the head was separate from the torso, as was each arm from the shoulder down, and each leg from about three inches above the knee down; and to the further fact that putrefaction had set in.”[2] The face, moreover—or what remained of it—was, in the words of one chronicler, “a thing of horror”: sunken holes for eyes, a leering gash for a mouth, a zigzag crack running from the top of the skull to the forehead.[3]

  Certain deductions could be drawn from the putrid remains despite their appalling condition. It seemed clear, for example, that the victim “had fought for his life. Across his left wrist, as if he had lifted it to ward off a slashing blow, were two deep cuts laying it open to the bone. Another savage blow had chopped off the first joints of every finger of his right hand. In a death grip the mutilated hand held a tuft of short brown curly hair torn from the head of his murderer.”[4]

  The ghastly face—though resembling a Halloween horror mask more than anything human—also retained enough of its features to make an identification possible. “I recognize it by the form of the face—across the eye—the forehead—across the cheeks,” Asle Helgelien would later testify. “When you have been with your brother every day for fifteen years, you know him.”[5]

  Asle’s long search for his brother Andrew had come to an end in a trash pit in Belle Gunness’s barnyard.

  A drizzling rain had begun to fall. As Coroner Mack squatted on his haunches for a nearer look at the unearthed remains, Sheriff Smutzer asked Joe Maxson if he knew of any other “soft spots” on the property—places where holes had been dug, then loosely covered over with dirt. Maxson pointed to a spot a short distance away.

  By then, a small crowd of curiosity seekers had gathered at the farm. As they pressed their faces to the wire mesh fence, Maxson, Hutson, and Smutzer began to dig. Three feet down, beneath a pile of rubbish, they uncovered a jumble of putrefied body parts: naked torsos wrapped in burlap, heads, arms, and legs scattered around.

  The buggy shed was turned into a makeshift morgue for the hideous trove. There were four victims in all: two men, one woman, one female adolescent, each divided into six pieces. As with Andrew Helgelien’s corpse, few firm conclusions could be drawn from the dismembered and badly decomposed relics. The difficulty faced by medical investigators can be seen in the deposition of Dr. Franklin T. Wilcox of La Porte, brought in by Coroner Mack to conduct the autopsy on the adult female:

  With the exception of the uterus, none of the viscera could be recognized. The right arm was severed by a chopping instrument an inch below the head of the humerus. Both arms were detached from the body. The two femora were cut off through the lower third. There were found four arms and four forearms with hands with the body, but it is impossible to say which, if any, belong to this body. There were found two skulls and two lower maxillary bones with this body, but it is impossible to say which, if any, belong to this body. There were also two sets of fibula but they could not be positively identified as belonging to this body. From the examination it is impossible to determine the cause of death.[6]

  Though in equally app
alling condition, the remains of the younger female did retain one distinguishing feature: a matted tress of long blond hair sprouting from the fleshless skull. From this unmistakable evidence, witnesses who knew her in life were able to positively identify the butchered young woman.

  Jennie Olson had not been sent away to a seminary in California two years earlier. She had not gotten married and was not on her honeymoon journey. Chopped into a half-dozen pieces, she had been dumped into a corpse-filled hole and covered with rubbish in her foster mother’s hog pen. And—as newspapers around the nation would soon report—the date on which her butchered remains were brought to light, May 5, 1908, would have been her eighteenth birthday.[7]

  16.

  MURDERESS

  There had, of course, been notorious murders in Indiana before. Perhaps the most sensational was the 1895 case of Reverend William E. Hinshaw. A much-admired figure in the village of Belleville, Hinshaw was accused of killing his wife, Thirza—who had discovered his affair with a pretty young parishioner—then inflicting nearly twenty flesh wounds on himself with pistol and razor and claiming that he had sustained the injuries while grappling heroically with a pair of intruders who had snuck into his bedroom at night and murdered his wife. His trial in September of that year (which climaxed with his conviction) became a courtroom sensation, the “one absorbing topic of public interest” for its two-month duration.[1]

  For all the titillated fascination it generated, however, the “Belleville Tragedy,” as it became known, remained a local story, little known beyond the Hoosier state. By contrast, the Gunness case would be front-page news throughout the country, and even overseas.[2] “Big-time newspapermen from all over converged on La Porte,” writes one historian of the crime. “Seven Chicago papers had a total of twenty-two reporters on the ground. Others arrived from New York, St. Louis, Detroit. There were thirty-five in all. They set up headquarters at the Hotel Teegarden . . . In ten days they would put out an estimated million words of sensational copy.”[3]

  Overnight, Belle Gunness—formerly lauded in the press for her “heroic, but futile effort . . . to save her offspring”—was transformed into a demon. In its earliest report on the gruesome discoveries of May 5, the Chicago American, within the space of a few paragraphs, branded her as both “the most fiendish murderer of the age” and “the most fiendish murderess in history.” The same paper was also the first to raise a possibility that would haunt the case forever. Given her diabolical cunning, it now seemed conceivable that the headless body found in the ruins of the cellar was not Belle Gunness at all but another of her victims, whose decapitated corpse had been substituted for the “arch-murderess.”

  Mrs. Gunness, the paper declared, was “now thought to be still alive.”[4]

  Ray Lamphere was reading his Bible and chewing meditatively on a wad of tobacco when Sheriff Smutzer returned from the Gunness farm and informed him of the day’s horrific developments.

  “My God,” gasped Lamphere.

  “Five bodies. I knew that woman was bad but nothing like this.”

  Led from his cell, he was brought before a group of reporters, who peppered him with questions about the unearthed corpses. He insisted he knew “nothing about it,” though he admitted that he had harbored some suspicions.

  “There were things I noticed,” he said. “I guess they were more serious than I thought.”

  Asked to elaborate, he told of the time, immediately after Helgelien’s arrival, that Mrs. Gunness instructed him to go to town and buy a container of Rough on Rats, a popular pesticide compounded of 10 percent soot and 90 percent arsenic. “Another time she wanted chloroform,” Lamphere said.

  “Anything else?” one of the reporters pressed.

  “Well, about a year ago,” said Ray, “there was a man with a black mustache who came to the farm, and Mrs. Gunness told me he was a friend of Jennie’s. He had a big trunk with him. A long while after he went away, the trunk was still at the house. It used to stand upstairs. It still had the man’s clothes in it, which seemed to me kind of funny.”

  Speaking of Jennie, did Lamphere think the dead girl dug up that afternoon might be her? someone asked.

  Lamphere nodded gravely. “It must be Jennie,” he said. “I never believed she was in California. I never heard of any letters coming from her.”

  Before being taken back to his cell, Lamphere was asked again about Andrew Helgelien.

  “Look here,” he answered. “I don’t know anything about that, and I don’t know anything about the fire, except what I told a long time ago. She used to tell me not to talk to Helgelien. One time, she found us together in the sitting room when she came in. She was angry and told me to get out and never speak to him again. I told her I’d speak to him if I felt like it. Well, a few days later, I came home from town and Helgelien was gone. I asked about him and she said, ‘I told you you’d never talk to him again.’

  “I didn’t know what she meant,” Lamphere said as Smutzer took him by the arm and led him away. “But now I understand.”[5]

  That same day, a letter arrived at the La Porte post office addressed to Mrs. Gunness. Like all her mail since the fire, it was handed over to Wesley Fogle, a local “implement dealer,” appointed by Belle as her executor.

  The letter was from a Waupaca, Wisconsin, man named Carl Peterson, writing to say that he was “sorry he could not meet Mrs. Gunness’ requirements as to his financial condition” but assuring her that he was “respectable and worthy in every way.” Tracked down by reporters, Peterson explained that he had initially contacted Belle after seeing her ad in the Skandinaven. In her response, which he had received just the previous week, she had described her farm in glowing terms and explained that she was looking for a man to share it with. She was perfectly willing to consider Peterson as a partner, as long as was “able to put up $1000 cash.” If not, there was no point in pursuing the matter.

  As papers throughout the country would report, Peterson had good cause to “congratulate himself on his narrow escape.” As recently as the week before the fire, Belle Gunness was still trolling for victims.[6]

  17.

  THE GRAVEYARD

  The road leading to the Gunness place was so choked with buggies, buckboards, and bicycles on the morning of Wednesday, May 6, that Sheriff Smutzer had trouble maneuvering his own vehicle through the traffic as he drove up to the farm. A massive crowd of men, women, and children—whose number that day would eventually swell to the thousands—was pressed against the wire mesh fence surrounding the hog lot, eager for a glimpse of the latest horrors.[1]

  They didn’t have long to wait. Smutzer, Joe Maxson, and a few other men recruited for the grim task began digging in the northeast corner of the lot, about five feet from the spot where the four decayed corpses had been found the day before. Almost immediately, their spades struck a patch of loose soil that gave off a nauseous smell. About three feet down, they turned up the butchered bones of another victim. Rotting burlap—the remnants of the sack in which the torso had been stuffed—clung to the rib cage, pelvis, and spine. The skull—which bore a three-inch gash, “as if made by some cutting instrument”—lay nearby, along with the sawed-off leg bones. The stink of the corpse was made even worse by the grave in which it lay, the body parts having been dumped into an abandoned privy vault.[2]

  Unidentified “skull of victim” exhumed from Belle’s farm.

  The ghoulish work did not deter Smutzer and his team from taking a break for their lunch. They resumed their digging about thirty minutes later. Just a few feet from the excavated latrine, their shovels uncovered more than a dozen pairs of men’s shoes. Under the shoes lay a heap of human bones.

  “One of the men dug into the pile and his spade brought out parts of the legs of two bodies,” one Chicago newspaper reported:

  A second spadeful of dirt a
nd bones revealed the fact that three bodies were hidden in the hole. All of the bodies were wrapped in gunny sacks. Quicklime had been placed in the sacks, but it had been poorly applied to the bodies. Many pieces of flesh clung to the bones where the lime had not eaten.

  As the leg bones were drawn out, the marks on them revealed for the first time the horrible insane anger with which the woman worked over her victims. About the joints she had hacked them with an ax. The bones had been crushed on the ends, as though they had been . . . struck with hammers after they were dismembered. Two of the skulls were near each other; they had been buried face up. Quicklime had been scattered over the faces and stuffed in the ears. In one of the heads, a sufficient quantity had not been placed and the brain remained intact . . . The lower parts of the bodies were decomposed, and it was impossible to tell whether they were men or women.[3]

  The noisome relics were placed in tin pails and transferred to the buggy shed serving as a temporary morgue, from which, as one reporter observed, “there proceeded a stench that daunts even the most resolute curiosity seeker.”[4]

  Added to the five bodies dug up the previous day, the latest discoveries brought the total of butchered corpses buried in Mrs. Gunness’s hog lot to nine. Across the country, from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle, newspapers trumpeted the latest ghastly findings, branding Belle with a variety of lurid nicknames: “a modern Lady Macbeth who poured blood into her coffers and turned it into gold,” the “La Porte Ghoul,” the “Indiana Ogress,” the “Human Vampire,” the “Female Bluebeard,” the “High-Priestess of Murder,” the “Mistress of the Castle of Death,” the “Queen of Crime,” and “Hell’s Princess.” In the view of the Pittsburgh Press, “The murders in the Rue Morgue pale into insignificance when compared to this case,” while a writer for the Chicago Evening American opined that if Poe were to “come back to life, he might write a new and more thrilling story of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ Mrs. Belle Gunness, the grim widow of La Porte, Indiana, with her castle of death and her yard filled with graves, would afford him material for a new ‘weird tale’ more thrilling than any he conceived.”[5]