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

by Harold Schechter

  “Had I gone down there, I am firmly convinced the woman would have murdered me,” Harriet asserted. “I know the only reason she consented to Jennie inviting me down there was with the hope of killing us both. The thought of it—chopping my head open and sawing my arms off—has made me sick.”[16]

  A young man named Melvin Kanaga garnered a fair amount of publicity for himself with a story that, for all its wild improbability, was widely reported as fact. According to Kanaga, a resident of Elkhart, Indiana, he and his friend Delbert Landers had been riding the train home from work the previous August when a “strange woman” entered the car and seated herself beside them.

  “She began talking to Delbert in a friendly way and relating how lonesome it was out there,” Kanaga recounted. “Then she pretended as though she liked him very much. She told him she was single and had a nice farm just a short distance from La Porte. Finally in a roundabout way she suggested that Delbert pay her a visit, as she was wealthy and would be more than pleased to show him a good time. Then she asked him to come and make his home with her, that they could live peacefully and well contented. He spoke to her of me, at which she turned to me and told me she would be glad to have me come also.”

  The woman disembarked at La Porte, and Kanaga had never given her a second thought until the news broke of the Gunness death farm. “Had Kanaga complied with the requests of the woman, who no doubt was none other than Mrs. Gunness,” the papers reported, “it is probable that he would have been lured into the clutches to suffer the same penalty as did many other victims. No doubt her intentions were to get him to her home, induce him to get an insurance policy, and take his life.”[17]

  That Belle lusted after Harriet Danielson’s blood or made seductive advances to Melvin Kanaga and his friend was exceedingly unlikely. Other individuals, however, had legitimate reasons for believing that—as the newspapers put it—they had “escaped the clutches of the fiend.” Besides Carl Peterson—the thirty-six-year-old Waupaca, Wisconsin, man rejected by Belle because he lacked $1,000—there was Alonzo “Lon” Townsend of Topeka, Kansas, a well-to-do farmer who had arranged to visit her home in early May but was delayed by late “spring rains which prevented him from putting in his crops as soon as he had desired.” By the time he was ready to make the trip, the Gunness home was ashes.

  “Had she gone on with her career of crime a few days longer, Townsend would probably have perished by her hand,” the Argus-Bulletin observed. “As it is now, he is so pleased over his escape from his prospective bride that he left Topeka on an early morning train for Kansas City so that he could best celebrate his fortunate escape.”[18]

  If Townsend had been spared by a fortuitous spell of bad weather, another bachelor farmer, Olaf W. Catchousen of Opheim, Illinois, attributed his salvation to a family emergency. After an increasingly ardent exchange of letters with Belle not long before the fire, Catchousen had, in accordance with her wishes, withdrawn $2,000 from his bank and made plans to move to La Porte. Just before his scheduled departure, however, he “received a message to hurry to the home of his parents in Bishop, Illinois, and there he went. Had the message not come, the Opheim man would have been one of the victims of the human slaughterhouse.”[19]

  George Anderson—a thirty-nine-year-old Missourian who had responded to one of Belle’s ads in 1906—had an especially close call. Satisfied with his financial qualifications, she had instructed him to convert his property into cash and join her in La Porte, where they would be married. On the night of his arrival, he repaired to his bedroom on the second floor of the farmhouse and quickly fell asleep.

  Sometime around midnight, stirred from his slumbers by a dream “that something uncanny was hovering over him,” he opened his eyes “to find Mrs. Gunness standing over his bed. She spoke and then ran out of the room. Greatly frightened, he did not close his eyes after that, and at daylight left the place.” In light of the recent horrific revelations, Anderson had no doubt that, as one newspaper put it, “Murder was in the heart of Mrs. Gunness when she entered the death chamber that night and Anderson would have paid the penalty of her lust had he been asleep. But Providence watched over him and he escaped decapitation, dismemberment, and burial in her private cemetery.”

  Anderson was certain of something else, too. “I am convinced the woman is still alive,” he told reporters, “and that she set fire to the farmhouse herself.”[20]

  Sightings of Belle continued to be reported in Chicago. She was spotted riding on streetcars, hurrying along the streets, eating in restaurants. May Wagner, a waitress at Buchbinder’s café on Van Buren Street, told police that, at around nine o’clock on the morning of May 8, a woman precisely matching Mrs. Gunness’s description entered “with a man, the couple having alighted from the Rock Island train a few minutes earlier. The man ordered two steaks and Miss Wagner, who took the order, handed them a newspaper containing the latest details of the La Porte tragedy with a portrait of Mrs. Gunness on the open page. The man, said the waitress, took one look at the paper, threw it on the floor, and then he and the woman left hurriedly before they’d taken more than a bite of steak and a sip of coffee. She wanted to know if there was anything wrong with the food and the man told her no, he wasn’t feeling well.” About an hour later, the same couple was seen eating a hurried breakfast at Heibel’s restaurant on West Jackson Boulevard and Halstead Street, their furtive manner attracting the notice of the proprietor.[21]

  As far as the Chicago Tribune was concerned, these and other eyewitness accounts left little doubt that the archmurderess was at large in the city. “Fleeing from place to place, haunted by her conscience and in constant dread that she will be seized by the hands of the law, Belle Gunness is . . . being sought by scores of detectives,” the paper informed its readers.[22] It was one of the Tribune’s competitors, however—the Chicago Inter Ocean—that made the most dramatic claim about the issue. Its correspondent in La Porte had somehow wangled his way into the embalming room of the Austin Cutler funeral home, where the charred remains removed from the cellar of the incinerated farmhouse had been brought.

  Before the mutilated trunk of the dead woman was sewn into its burial shroud, Cutler weighed and tape-measured it in the reporter’s presence. Allowing for its missing head and feet, the undertaker calculated that, in life, the dead woman was five feet two inches in height and weighed around 130 pounds. By contrast, Mrs. Gunness, according to her neighbors, stood five feet seven inches tall and weighed around 280 pounds.

  There was only one conclusion to be drawn from this “astounding revelation,” the paper proclaimed. Mrs. Belle Gunness—“the siren who lured a score of men to their death”—was, “beyond a reasonable doubt,” alive.[23]

  21.

  THE MIND OF MRS. GUNNESS

  The members of the governing board of the Norwegian Lutheran Children’s Home, West Irving Boulevard and Fifty-Eighth Avenue in Chicago, were faced with a quandary. They were in the midst of a drive to raise $25,000 for a new building in Norwood Park and had just been named the beneficiary of a large, wholly unexpected gift. Unfortunately, it had been left to their institution by one of the most infamous killers in the annals of American crime, who had evidently acquired much, if not all, of it from her many victims. The Reverend C. E. Solberg, president of the board, was in Minnesota on church-related business when the terms of Belle’s will were made public, and immediately arranged to return to Chicago to confer with his colleagues. Even before he arrived, however, Miss Caroline Williams, superintendent of the Children’s Home, announced that the orphanage had no intention of accepting Belle Gunness’s “blood money.”[1]

  Since the precise number of Belle’s victims would never be known, it is impossible to say exactly how much money she realized from her butcheries. One widely syndicated article, headlined “Small Fortune for Indiana Murderess,” added together the insurance payouts fro
m the deaths of her two husbands with “the amounts she is believed to have received from the inmates of her charnel house” and arrived at the figure of $46,900—the equivalent, in today’s dollars, of over $1,200,000.[2]

  Though the “money-mad” Mrs. Gunness clearly killed for financial gain, greed alone could not account for the sheer savagery of her crimes, the evident gusto with which she slaughtered her victims like farm animals. Various specialists in the human mind were promptly called upon to offer their analyses of Belle’s bizarre mentality. In the view of one prominent alienist, she was “a woman of dual personality: a kind and indulgent mother at certain times and at others a demon without fear of God of man or of the law.” Another diagnosed her as a “victim of an uncontrollable passion for taking lives, a mania for murdering.”[3]

  Dr. Hugo Munsterberg, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of the book On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime, saw in Belle a total absence of empathy, characteristic of the criminal type soon to be known as a psychopath. “The scientific investigator, in seeking an explanation for Mrs. Gunness’ unnatural crimes, would say that she was emotionally dead,” Munsterberg wrote.

  When once the emotions, that make most women so sensitive to any cruelty, are deadened, then the path is opened for carrying crime to any extent. When the emotions are dead, a woman is not affected by any of the natural feminine feelings of horror, fright at the sight of blood, or pity that ordinarily influence a normal person. Because her emotions were dead, she could carve a body to pieces, gather up all the piteous dismembered parts, throw them into a gunny sack, carry them out on her back in a moonlit night, dig a grave in the yard, and throw the troublesome bundle into the hole without a tremor.[4]

  Basing his analysis on a newspaper photograph of Belle’s face, Dr. J. M. Fitzgerald, an “Expert in Character Study,” judged her to be a “woman of selfish and domineering will,” “masculine resolution and power of mind,” and “an instinct for killing, as shown in the base of her brain, which is remarkably expanded.” To Dr. S. V. Rehart of Washington, D.C., the same photograph served as “a practical illustration of the truth of Phrenology. It shows a . . . practical, matter-of-fact intellect combined with ingenuity or Constructiveness, large Destructiveness, Secretiveness and Acquisitiveness, with a large development of the social nature and a small development of the moral and religious qualities. With her power to plan and devise, combined with her social nature to entrap her victims, and her executive nature to carry out her plans without moral restraint or sympathy, we have just the kind of character to commit the crimes with which she has been charged.”[5]

  A very different conclusion was reached by Dr. Charles Jones of Austin, Belle’s family physician back when she was Mrs. Mads Sorensen. Though not an alienist by training, Jones claimed to be “a conscientious student of the psychology of crime.” In his view, Belle was a religious fanatic, whose atrocities were motivated by the “same spirit as prompted tortures and burning at the stake in the name of religion in the middle ages.

  “In my psychological studies,” Jones explained, “I have observed that religion is not restraining in a moral see. Religion is not the same as ethics. Religion in its fanatic state may be a passion devoid of morality that will take any means to an end.”

  Already “unhinged by religious eccentricities,” Belle was launched on her unparalleled career of crime after murdering Mads and collecting on his insurance. “The sudden wealth that came to her,” Jones opined, “may have had an irresistible suggestion of the ease with which money might be obtained. In the incident of her husband’s death, her temptation to commit the alleged atrocities may have had its birth.”[6]

  The most illustrious figure to weigh in on the issue of Belle’s mental state was Cesare Lombroso, nowadays dismissed as a crackpot but, in his own time, the world’s foremost criminologist. In his enormously influential book, L’Uomo deliquente (Criminal Man), Lombroso argued that violent criminals were not merely barbaric in their behavior but were literal atavisms: savage, apelike beings born by some hereditary glitch into the modern world. With their jutting brows, big jaws, thick necks, and other supposedly telltale features, violent criminals were evolutionary throwbacks: specimens of humanity in its most degenerate state.[7]

  In a piece on the Gunness case widely reprinted in American newspapers, Lombroso argued that the La Porte murderess was a prime example of what he called the “born woman criminal.” Such beings, he noted “generally commit fewer crimes than men, but when they are criminal, they are considerably more so than men. It is not enough for a woman to murder an enemy; she wants to make him suffer, and she enjoys his death.”

  Like others of her breed, “who always mix eroticism with crime,” Mrs. Gunness “must have used the attraction of sensuality to obtain her victims . . . Her exaggerated and perverse sexual instincts manifested themselves in murdering the beings who should have been most dear to her, and she found in this a strange satisfaction.” In the slaying of her children, Lombroso saw another element common to such criminals: in these unnatural females, “the maternal instinct, which is conspicuous in the normal woman, is not only suppressed but reversed, as it becomes in them a pleasure to torture their own offspring.”

  The explanation for such behavior offered by the great criminologist was breathtaking in its combination of rank misogyny, pseudoscientific blather, and fundamental incoherence:

  Woman has many traits in common with a child. Like it, she is vindictive and jealous, only in ordinary cases these defects are naturally neutralized by piety, by maternity, by less ardor in the passions, by weakness, and by undeveloped intelligence. But if there is diseased excitement of the psychic centers which intensifies the bad qualities and seeks a vent in evil, if pity and maternity are absent, if strong passions are also present, the desires derived from an intense eroticism, a sufficiently developed muscular force and a superior intelligence for doing evil and carrying it out are present, the born criminal appears and the woman will be more terrible than any male criminal.[8]

  Far more persuasive were the insights offered by an unnamed specialist cited in a widely circulated article by noted journalist Arthur James Pegler. Placing her in the proper criminological category, this person saw Mrs. Gunness as “a maniac of the much-dreaded type that includes the White Chapel murderer.” It is “not money” that drives such killers “but the constantly growing appetite for blood, to cut deep and watch the blood flow, to dabble the hands in it, to revel in the odor of it.” One “distinguishing features of these criminals is their invariable use of the same methods in every case. Mrs. Gunness decapitated every one of her victims. In every case she severed the limbs. Always there was the maximum of mutilation.”[9]

  In comparing Belle to Jack the Ripper as a murderer driven by bloodlust and employing a signature MO, this anonymous expert accurately identified her as the type of homicidal maniac for which no name had yet been coined: what a later age would call a serial killer.

  22.

  JOHANN AND KATE

  During the postmortem on Andrew Helgelien, his stomach, liver, and kidneys were removed, hermetically sealed in a jar, and sent to Dr. Walter S. Gaines of the Rush Medical College at the University of Chicago. Gaines would ultimately report that he had found nearly one and a half grains of strychnine in the stomach—“a quantity sufficient several times over to have produced death”—along with a “considerable amount” of arsenic.[1] It was, of course, impossible to say precisely how Belle dispatched her victims. Gaines’s findings, however—combined with the condition of the various skeletal remains—suggested one plausible scenario.

  After consuming a last, home-cooked, poison-laced meal, Belle’s victim would soon be in the throes of an agonizing death. Wielding a hatchet or cleaver, she would put him out of his misery with several bone-splintering blows to the skull. She would then drag the bo
dy into her cellar abattoir for butchering. Once the head and limbs were removed from the trunk, she would package the separate parts in gunnysacks, haul them into her hog lot, dump them in a hole, and add quicklime to facilitate decomposition.

  How many victims suffered this fate is another unanswerable question. Under the category of “Most Prolific Murderers,” however, the first twelve editions of the Guinness Book of World Records estimated the total at twenty-eight—“the greatest number of murders ever ascribed to a modern murderess.”[2]

  Just two years before the Gunness horrors came to light, the country was riveted by the case of a serial killer every bit as diabolical as Belle. His birth name was Johann Schmidt, but he would assume many others in the course of his malevolent career: Albert Huschberg, Count Otto von Kein, Dr. L. G. Hart, Martin Dotz, Jacob Duss, Henry F. Hartman, Heinrich Valtzand, and at least a dozen more, including the one by which the world would come to know him: Johann Hoch.[3]

  A native of Germany, he came to America in 1887 at the age of twenty-five, abandoning a wife and three children. In 1895, under the name Huff, he bigamously married a well-off widow named Martha Steinbucher. Four months later, she fell ill with a devastating intestinal ailment. As she writhed in agony, she told her physician that she had been poisoned but—attributing the remark to delirium—he paid her no heed. She died the next day. Immediately afterward, her husband sold her property for $4,000 and disappeared.