Huff’s second murder victim was Caroline Hoch of Wheeling, West Virginia, who was hit with a violent illness shortly after their wedding. On a visit to the stricken woman, her minister surprised Huff in the act of giving his wife some white powder—presumably medicine. The next day, Caroline was dead. Huff immediately sold the house, claimed his wife’s $900 insurance policy, then faked his own suicide and disappeared.
Now calling himself Johann Hoch, the killer made his way to Chicago. Along the way, he preyed on an indeterminate number of women, murdering some, merely fleecing and abandoning others. For a while, he worked in the Chicago stockyards, an occupation that would ultimately earn him his homicidal nickname, the “Stockyard Bluebeard.”
In December 1904, Hoch placed a matrimonial ad in a German newspaper and, soon afterward, received a reply from a forty-six-year-old widow, Marie Walcker, who owned a small candy store. They were married a short time later. A week after the wedding, Marie was stricken with excruciating abdominal pains, a violent thirst, and a tingling in her extremities that felt, she said, like ants crawling over her flesh—all classic symptoms of arsenic poisoning. Her physician, however, diagnosed the problem as nephritis. She died two weeks later. No sooner had Marie exhaled her last, agonized breath than Hoch proposed to her sister, Julia, who had come to tend her dying sibling. Three days later, Hoch and Julia were married. Hoch soon disappeared with all of Julia’s money.
While notifying the police, Julia learned that Hoch was already under suspicion for swindle and murder. Caroline Hoch’s body had previously been exhumed, but examiners were unable to determine if there was poison in her stomach because Hoch had taken the precaution of eviscerating the corpse and dumping the organs into the Ohio River. Authorities had better luck with the body of Marie Walcker. A postmortem turned up lethal traces of arsenic in her viscera.
Police immediately distributed the fugitive’s photograph. Hoch—who had fled to New York City—was arrested when his landlady recognized his picture in the papers. When police arrested him, they found a fountain pen in his possession. Instead of ink, the reservoir contained fifty-eight grains of a powdered substance that turned out to be arsenic. He was convicted of the murder of Marie Walcker and hanged on February 23, 1906. The number of his victims is unknown, though his most trustworthy chronicler estimates that Hoch “married between forty-three and fifty women, about a third of whom he murdered.”[4]
As soon as the enormity of Belle’s crimes became clear, stories comparing her to Johann Hoch began to appear in the papers. The strangest of these was a widely syndicated article headlined “If Their Paths Had Crossed,” a piece of alternate history inspired by the speculations of Charles Peters, deputy chief sheriff of Chicago.
“It would have been interesting from a criminological point of view to watch a contest between Mrs. Gunness and Hoch,” Peters mused to reporters. “Suppose that Hoch had seen one of her advertisements, answered it, and a meeting had been arranged. She would have been after Hoch’s money, and he would have been after hers. Then would have come the contest, each plotting, scheming with all of his or her cleverness to get the better of the other. It would have beaten any drama of villainy ever produced on the stage.”[5]
Elaborating on Peters’s macabre what-if? scenario, the article described in lurid detail the imaginary encounter of the male and female Bluebeards. Replying to Mrs. Gunness’s ad, Hoch “would have grinned in ghoulish glee” as he pictured the “rich farm” soon to come into his possession. Belle would have read Hoch’s response with a “cruel smile” upon her face, then “glanced out of the back window into that graveyard of mutilated victims and figured out where she could bury one more.”
At their first meeting, each would have sized the other up and decided, “This one will be easy.” On the following day, Belle “would have carelessly held his hand or patted his cheek as she showed him over the acres. He would have returned the caress, believing that his appearance and winning mannerisms had already made an impression.” Soon they would be discussing finances: “Hoch would have told the widow he had thousands of dollars with him to be put into the common fund. She would have smiled and answered that her farm would belong to him when they were married. Possibly, right there, they would have set the date for the wedding.”
Once they had completed their nuptials and taken a brief honeymoon tour, the couple would have returned to the farm, where “the curtain on the last act would have been raised,” and their “fiendish plotting” would reach its “tragical” climax.
As for the winner of this grim contest between the two matrimonial monsters, the writer could only speculate.
“Which would have outwitted the other? Who would have found the first opening to strike, either with poison at a meal, an ax in the darkness of night, or a dagger while in a loving embrace? Which of them would now be under the ground, the victim of the other’s treachery, and which enjoying the money of the other?”[6]
If Belle’s crimes resembled those of Johann Hoch, they also called up memories of another notorious case, that of the “Bloody Benders” of Kansas.
The Bender family consisted of the sixty-year-old patriarch, John, a hulking, heavily bearded man (generally referred to simply as “Old Man Bender” in historical accounts); his wife, known only as “Ma,” a stout, homely female in her fifties with “a tallow-white” face and a temperament every bit as surly as her husband’s; John Jr., a slender young man in his midtwenties, with a pleasant face, a trim mustache, and a way of breaking into sudden, nervous giggles that led some people to regard him as a simpleton; and a daughter named Kate, a young woman in her early twenties who, by default, was considered the brains of the operation. Though Kate has gone down in legend as a red-haired temptress, she appears to have been a ruddy-faced, mannish-looking female who held séances under the name “Professor Miss Kate Bender” and claimed to be a faith healer.
Sometime around 1870, the Bender family arrived in Labette County, Kansas, and built a home along a stretch of road a few miles south of the railway town of Cherryvale. The dwelling was little more than a one-room log box, sixteen by twenty feet in size. The interior was divided in half by canvas curtain. One side served as the family’s living quarters. The other was turned into a rudimentary inn, where wayfarers could enjoy a home-cooked meal and a straw mattress on the floor for those who wished to bed down for the night.
No one knows how many guests the Benders entertained during the two years they ran their ghastly roadhouse, but at least nine of them were never seen alive again. Their dreadful fate was uncovered in the spring of 1873, following the mysterious disappearance of a prominent local physician named William York, last seen traveling by buggy along the Osage Trail. A search party led by the doctor’s brother, Colonel A. M. York, traced his movements to the Bender homestead. Questioned by Colonel York, John Jr. confirmed that the doctor had, in fact, spent a night at the inn but insisted that he had departed in good health the following morning. Claiming that he himself had recently escaped an ambush by highwaymen, John suggested that the doctor might have fallen victim to the gang—a theory Colonel York found highly implausible. After questioning Kate—who offered to use her clairvoyant gifts to find the missing man—the colonel and his men took their leave. It was clear, however, that their suspicions had been deeply aroused.
Some weeks later, a neighbor of the Benders rode over to the inn and was surprised to discover that the place was deserted. From the mess strewn around inside—dirty dishes, an old clock, a German Bible, some hammers, a meat saw, a long-bladed knife, and the canvas partition, which lay bundled in a corner—it seemed clear that the Benders had abandoned their home in a hurry.
When word of this development reached Colonel York, he lost no time in assembling a group of men and making straight for the inn. According to some chroniclers, it was York who discovered the trapdoor in the flo
or of what had been the Benders’ kitchen area. The moment it was lifted, a dreadful odor assaulted his nostrils. Closer inspection revealed the source of the terrible stench: a pool of dried blood, caked on the stone floor.
Prying up the entire cabin with stout poles, the men managed to move it clear of its foundation. With the cellar exposed, they used sledgehammers to shatter the stone floor but found nothing beneath. By the light of the late afternoon sun, however, one of the men spotted something suspicious in the soil of the nearby apple orchard: a strange, rectangular depression, like a slightly sunken grave. He called out to the others, who grabbed shovels and spades and began digging. In less than a minute, they had unearthed the remains of a partly clothed man lying facedown in the dirt. The base of his skull was completely bashed in. When the men turned the body over, they saw that the throat had been slashed from ear to ear. Despite its badly decomposed state, Colonel York had no trouble identifying the corpse as his missing brother, William.
By then darkness had fallen. Early the next morning, the men returned to the spot and, using metal rods to probe the soil, conducted a thorough search of the orchard. By the time they were done, they had unearthed eight more bodies, all but one of them adult males, subsequently identified as travelers along the Osage Trail who had never reached their destinations. They were all known to have been carrying substantial amounts of cash and had all died in the identical manner, the base of their skulls crushed, their throats slit. The single exception was an eight-year-old girl, Mary Ann Loncher, found beside her father’s corpse with a silk scarf bound tightly around her neck. A postmortem exam determined that she had been strangled to the point of unconsciousness, then buried alive.
From the physical evidence—the size and shape of the men’s head wounds, the matching dimensions of the hammers found in the cabin, certain telltale stains on the canvas curtain—as well as from the testimony of several people who had survived stays at the inn, a picture emerged of the Benders’ diabolical MO. When a prosperous-looking traveler showed up, he would be ushered into the dining area and seated at the table with his back to the canvas divider. While Kate beguiled him with some dinnertime conversation, her father or brother would be lurking on the other side of the curtain, hammer at the ready. When the unsuspecting guest leaned his head back against the curtain, the hammer would come crashing down, shattering the back of his skull. The body would then be dragged to the rear of the cabin, where it would be robbed, stripped, and dumped through the trapdoor into the cellar. There, his throat would be slit for good measure. Later, the body would be taken out and buried in the orchard.
Three thousand dollars in reward money was offered for the apprehension of the fugitives. Despite a massive manhunt by lawmen, bounty hunters, and assorted vigilantes, however, the Benders eluded arrest. Rumors about their whereabouts would circulate for years: that John Jr. was working on a railroad gang in Texas, that Kate was running a brothel in San Francisco, that Pa Bender had committed suicide in Michigan, that the whole family had perished while attempting to cross into Mexico via hot-air balloon. But their fate remained a mystery.[7]
Following the ghastly discoveries on the Gunness farm, newspapers were quick to note the “remarkable parallelism” between Belle’s atrocities and the “notorious doings of the Bender family.” Indeed, so similar did the two cases appear in certain respects that wild rumors began to circulate about possible connections between Belle and the Benders. One widely printed article cited an anonymous correspondent who sent a letter to the editor of a Louisville, Kentucky, newspaper, claiming that Belle and Kate Bender were related by blood, “Kate’s father [being] a brother to Mrs. Gunness’ grandfather.”[8]
Another writer ventured an even more remarkable theory: that “Mrs. Gunness was . . . Kate Bender.” If such were the case, “she has outdone the ghastly achievements of her former life.” However appalling the Bender crimes, the tally of their victims had already been surpassed by the findings in Belle’s hog lot. Moreover, “the Benders had the support of one another—the terrible relief which comes to those who share a fatal secret.” By contrast, while “Mrs. Gunness may have had an accomplice in Lamphere or another,” it seemed equally likely “that many if not most of her crimes were committed by her alone.”
However dubious the notion that the vanished Kate Bender had reappeared three decades later under a new identity in La Porte, there was no doubt in the mind of the writer that she and Belle Gunness would forever be linked “in the history of crime.” Both had achieved “a terrible immortality, leaving names at which the world may well grow pale.” And their enormities revealed a sobering truth: that “the possibilities of the human heart seem infinite in evil as in good.”[9]
23.
DEAD OR ALIVE?
On Friday, May 8, E. R. Buell and A. J. Hunt, commercial travelers from Detroit, were seated beside each other in a Pullman car on the Atlantic Express, headed for Rochester, New York. At around seven o’clock in the evening, the train made a stop at Ashtabula, Ohio, where a woman boarded and took a seat across the aisle from the two men.
She was a large woman, perhaps five feet nine inches in height and weighing, from the looks of her, about two hundred pounds. She was dressed in widow’s weeds and wore a heavy black veil.
Buell would later tell reporters that there was something peculiar about her behavior—that “she seemed eager to avoid attention on the car.” Both men had recently been in Chicago and were keenly aware of the Gunness case and the conflicting opinions as to Belle’s fate. In fact, Buell was carrying a copy of one of the Chicago papers with a large photograph of the “Female Bluebeard” on its front page.
At some point during the trip, the woman lifted her veil. At the sight of her face, the two salesmen exchanged a look.
When they arrived in Rochester, Buell and his companion proceeded straight to the Powers Hotel, where they informed the house detective of their suspicions. The detective immediately telephoned the police lieutenant Henry R. McAlester, who in turn put in a call to Captain Thomas R. Quigley in Syracuse, where the train would be making its next stop. Quigley promptly dispatched two of his detectives, Carl Neiss and John Donovan, to meet the train when it arrived.
It was a few minutes before 1:00 a.m. when it pulled into the Syracuse depot. Accompanied by the stationmaster, the two detectives boarded the train and spoke to the Pullman car conductor, O. S. Britton. They described the woman in black who had gotten on at Ashtabula and asked if she was still on board. When Britton inquired if they were friends of the woman, Neiss and Donovan displayed their credentials and explained the reason they were there. Britton immediately led them to the lower berth where the woman lay sleeping.
She would later describe the “terrible sensation” that had come over her when she was awakened by “two men’s heads peering into [her] berth.” Her first thought was that “the train was being held up by robbers.” When they identified themselves and told her why they were there, she was “dumbfounded.” They ordered her to dress immediately. She was still making herself ready, however, when the train—already fifteen minutes past its scheduled departure time—chugged out of the station.
The officers rode with her all the way to Utica, where they led her onto the platform, loaded her into a hack, and drove her to police headquarters. By then, word of the detectives’ mission had spread throughout the train, generating intense excitement among the passengers, who felt that they had been present at a historical event: the capture of the country’s most notorious fugitive, the “Indiana Ogress,” Belle Gunness.[1]
That morning—Saturday, May 9—headlines around the country trumpeted the news. Even as the public was learning of Belle’s arrest, however, police in Upstate New York were admitting to an embarrassing blunder. The woman taken from the train, as she had no trouble proving, was Mrs. Cora Herron, widow of the recently deceased Frederick B. Herron
, former president of the Sethness Chemical Company of Chicago. She was on her way to New York City to visit her sister, Mrs. Etta V. Rockefeller of West Fortieth Street, wife of a streetcar conductor who claimed a distant kinship with the oil tycoon.
Having established her identity to the satisfaction of the Utica authorities, Mrs. Herron was taken back to Syracuse, where—after sending a telegram to her sister—she spent the remainder of the night in the matron’s quarters of police headquarters. Early the following morning, she was interviewed by Police Chief Condon, who offered his apologies and asked her to sign a release relieving his department of responsibility for the false arrest, a request she refused. She was then driven to the train station and given a ticket on the Empire Express to New York City.
Waiting to meet her at the Grand Central Station were her sister, Mrs. Rockefeller, and reporters from various papers, including the New York Times.
“This is a dreadful thing,” Mrs. Rockefeller angrily declared after she and Mrs. Herron had exchanged an emotional greeting, “and I shall encourage my sister to seek legal redress for the stigma that the stupid Syracuse detectives have placed on her.”
Asked how much she intended to sue for, an exhausted Mrs. Herron “named fifty thousand dollars as the sum she felt she was entitled to.”
Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men Page 14
