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

by Harold Schechter

  Summing up his highly scientific and unbiased study, Fitzgerald concluded that Lamphere’s “phrenology and physiognomy indicate a low-grade animal type of man of weak mental and moral faculties, whose animal propensities early in life instinctively crowded out of his mind any good training or fine example his mother might have tried to inculcate . . . He has, these many years, been antisocial in the higher sense, and the more human parts of his brain have become atrophied from lack of normal function.”[11]

  That same day, Wednesday, November 11—twenty-four hours after publishing his hopelessly muddled “May day” piece—Harry Burr Darling ran an eye-catching story headlined “Sensational Find of Bones,” resurrecting a controversy that had been seemingly laid to rest several months before.

  In the last week of May, State’s Attorney Smith had received a letter from one Julius Truelson, an inmate in the Vernon, Texas, city jail. A small-time swindler who had been going under the name Jonathan G. Thaw—supposedly a cousin of the notorious Pittsburgh millionaire Harry K. Thaw, slayer of celebrity architect Stanford White—the twenty-two-year-old Truelson claimed that he had been an accomplice of Belle Gunness in several of her murders.

  According to his literate and compellingly detailed letter, he and Belle had become acquainted in January 1903, when, after answering one of her ads, he “met her in Chicago and was offered employment by her.” She told him that “she practiced an illegal form of surgery”—by which she meant abortions—“and occasionally had bodies to dispose of, and that she would pay him well for helping her.”

  Four and a half years later, in June 1907, now married to a young woman named Mae Frances O’Reilly of Rochester, New York, Truelson, having tired of his wife, took her to the Gunness farm “to have her put out of the way.” He and Ray Lamphere then buried her body, along with that of another victim, “near the railroad tracks in the rear of the farm.” In the following months, he “assisted [Lamphere] in disposing of six other bodies at the Gunness farm.”

  One evening in March 1908, fearing that Asle Helgelien’s inquiries into his brother’s fate were about to expose her crimes, Belle asked Truelson “to burn down the place and flee with her to Frisco.” Truelson “cautioned her not to panic and thereby draw suspicion on herself.” In town that night, he and Ray discussed the matter and “decided that we had to put her out of the way before she did away with both of us, so we tossed a coin to see which of us was to do the job. Lamphere lost and it was decided that he was to enter at night and knock Belle and her kids in the head and then set fire to the place to cover her crimes and ours. I left that night and went to Chicago.” Eventually, he made his way to Texas, where he was arrested for passing forged checks. He was writing now because his “guilty conscience . . . haunted him most every night.”[12]

  In contrast to the countless crank letters sent to La Porte officials since the start of the Gunness affair, Truelson’s missive sounded so persuasive that Sheriff Smutzer was immediately dispatched to Texas. Arrived in Vernon on May 21, Smutzer conducted a lengthy interview with the prisoner, who ultimately swore to and signed a nineteen-page confession.

  No sooner had he been led back to his cell, however, than Truelson recanted everything he had said, explaining that the whole thing was a lie designed “to get him out of the hands of the Texas authorities.” A subsequent investigation into his background revealed that he was locked up in the Elmira Reformatory during the entire time Belle was engaged in her crimes; that his ex-wife, Mae Frances O’Reilly, was very much alive; and that he was “addicted to drugs which sometimes aid the imaginative faculties.” Interviewed at the family home, a three-story private residence at 34 West Forty-Seventh Street in Manhattan, Truelson’s brother, Harry, flatly declared that his brother was “insane. He was struck by a trolley car at Twenty-Third Street and Broadway five years ago, and he has not been right since.”[13]

  Despite Truelson’s retraction and the other hard evidence that he had concocted the confession, some people continued to believe that there must be some truth to it. It was “so minute in detail,” they insisted, so full of “things that could only be known by a person actually familiar with them,” that it could not have been a complete fabrication.[14]

  Among these individuals were Belle’s neighbor Daniel Hutson and Deputy Sheriff Marr. In the days before the start of Ray’s trial, the two men went out to the Gunness farm and, as Harry Darling reported, “made excavations in the place described in Truelson’s confession, where he said bodies of victims had been buried.” Though they found no bodies, they did dig up some bones, which Marr “believe[d] were human.”

  The discovery occasioned Darling’s sensational headline of Nov-ember 11. The accompanying story, however, ended on a distinctly anticlimactic note: “This development is likely to have little bearing on the case on trial, except as giving some slight degree of credence to the confession of Truelson.”[15]

  Finally, on the afternoon of Thursday the twelfth, after the rejection of one hundred and three candidates, a jury was seated: twelve men, the youngest thirty-four, the oldest sixty-five, nine of them farmers, the others a carpenter, dry goods clerk, and a salesman. They would be sequestered for the course of the trial—not, however, in a local hotel, as was usually the case, but in the courthouse itself, where twelve cots had been set up in the jury room. They would be allowed a brief daily walk outside for some fresh air and exercise, but, to ensure that they engaged in no inappropriate interactions with the public, they would be “given close surveillance . . . by Sheriff Smutzer and his deputies.”[16]

  29.

  SMITH

  At 4:30 p.m., with time still remaining before court adjourned for the day, State’s Attorney Ralph N. Smith rose to make his opening statement. He would hold the jury spellbound for the forty-minute duration of his speech. One listener, Harry Burr Darling, extolled the lawyer for his unpretentious style. “Prosecutor Smith does not indulge in flowery metaphors,” he wrote admiringly. “He spoke in the plainest English and straight from the shoulder. During the entire time the dropping of a pin would have attracted attention.”

  Darling’s own preferred style, of course, was the diametrical opposite of the unembellished English he commended in Smith. His fondness for florid and overblown language was evinced yet again in his description of the defendant’s reactions to the prosecutor’s statement. “A remarkable change came over the prisoner during the address of Smith,” wrote Darling. “He was not the same Lamphere of the jury examination, listless and apparently unconcerned. The color of his face resembled a fresh tombstone, and his eyes shone out from sunken sockets like two pieces of burning charcoal would blaze from a sheet of snow.”[1]

  Thanking the jurymen for their “patience in the long and somewhat tedious examination” process, Smith explained that, owing to the “widespread notoriety” of the case, selecting the twelve most qualified men for the task was “a matter . . . of great importance.” He stressed that—however aggressive he and his cocounsel, Martin Sutherland, might appear in their prosecution of the defendant—they were not out for anyone’s blood. They were not agents of vengeance but servants of the law. “We have no animosity to satisfy,” he asserted. “We have no axes to grind, no spleen to vent. We are not persecuting anybody. If we sometimes get zealous, it is because of our anxiety to fulfill our duty . . . A dark cloud has fallen upon our county. A dastardly series of crimes have been committed in La Porte County and we are here to do our duty.”

  He acknowledged that there would be very “little direct evidence” in the case. The guilt or innocence of the defendant would be determined almost entirely on circumstantial evidence. Of course, there was nothing unusual about that. Dark, premeditated deeds like arson were typically carried out in secrecy. As Smith put it, “People, when they set out to commit a crime, such as the burning of a dwelling, do not set out to do it with a brass band.”
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br />   Having dispensed with these preliminaries, Smith got to the heart of the matter. “We charge Ray Lamphere with setting fire to the home of Belle Gunness on April 28 while she was in it,” he declared, “and we expect to prove that she was burned to death there with her three children—Myrtle Sorenson, Lucy Sorenson, and Phillip Gunness. We expect to prove that when the ruins were cleared away, the charred bodies found in the ashes were those of Belle Gunness and the children.

  “Our position is that it does not matter whether Lamphere intended to set fire to Belle Gunness when he set fire to her house. When we prove he did set the fire, remember the statute which says he is guilty of murder in the perpetration of arson where lives were lost, whether he intended to take a life or not. The state is not required to show that he went out there with the intention to kill Belle Gunness in the fire.”

  Before continuing to lay out the case against Ray, Smith paused to say a word about the woman who had brought such unwanted notoriety to La Porte. It was not his purpose, said Smith, either “to defend the character of Belle Gunness” or “to drag it down.” From the “dismembered bodies of nine persons [that] were found on her premises,” however, it appeared that she “engaged in the wholesale slaughter of humanity.”

  Returning to the issue at hand, Smith turned to the question of motive. “By his own admission,” he charged, “the prisoner was a witness to the murder of Andrew K. Helgelien, a profit-sharer in the blood money, and because he did not receive what he considered a fair share of this blood money, he applied the torch to Mrs. Gunness’s home.”

  At this dramatic accusation, Ray “half started from his chair, as if to shout a denial,” only to be pulled back down by the restraining hand of his attorney.[2]

  “We shall show by evidence,” Smith went on, “that in January of this year a man by the name of Helgelien was induced by means of matrimonial advertisements and letters to come from South Dakota to the Gunness farm, bringing his worldly wealth with him. We shall prove that on the night of January 14, Belle Gunness sent Ray Lamphere to Michigan City on a wild goose chase on the pretext of leaving some horses there for someone who was to call for them. Lamphere was to stay in Michigan City. This was the night Helgelien disappeared.

  “Instead of staying at Michigan City as he was instructed to do,” continued Smith, “Lamphere came back on the streetcar and got off near the powerhouse, and the evidence will show that he made the remark to a man on the car that he was ‘going over there to see what the old woman was doing.’ We will prove that Lamphere bobbed up like Johnny on the spot and assisted Mrs. Gunness in the dastardly work of disposing of Helgelien’s body.

  “Helgelien had three thousand dollars on his person, and evidence will be introduced to show that Lamphere got part of the money. It was over money matters that Lamphere and Mrs. Gunness fell out.”

  Smith briefly sketched the growing animosity between the pair. “Mrs. Gunness had Lamphere arrested for trespass. Altogether she had him arrested three times. She served notice on him to keep away from her place.” For his part, Lamphere had been overheard to make insinuating threats against his former employer. “We can prove,” asserted Smith, “that Lamphere said, ‘I can get the old woman down on her knees anytime I want to. I know something about her that would send her to the penitentiary.’”

  Matters came to a head, recounted Smith, on April 27. After coming into town that afternoon with his current employer, John Wheatbrook, Lamphere had gone to spend the night at the home of Lizzie Smith—“Nigger Liz,” as Smith, like everyone else in town, had no qualms about calling her. Lamphere had set his alarm clock for three in the morning and started out from Smith’s home about twenty minutes after three.

  “The fire occurred about four o’clock,” Smith continued. “Instead of going by a direct route through the city park to the farm of his cousin to get a broad ax, we will show he took the Gunness road. By his own statement we will show he was on the spot at the time of the fire. When asked why he did not wake up the people when he saw the house burning he replied, ‘I didn’t think it was any of my business.’

  “We will prove he ran along the foot of the hills afterwards, past the cemetery to get on another road and wound up at his cousin’s farm at five thirty.”

  Lamphere’s movements that morning clearly pointed to his guilt. So did his reaction when taken into custody. “At seven o’clock that evening when the deputy sheriff went to the Wheatbrook farm to arrest Lamphere, he said, ‘Ray, get on your coat and come along to town.’ Ray’s answer showed he had the fire in mind. He said, ‘Did those folks burn up in that fire?’ ‘What fire?’ asked the sheriff. ‘Why, that house,’ answered Ray. The foremost thing on Lamphere’s mind was the burning of that house.”

  Of course, Smith conceded, to convict Lamphere of murder, the state was obligated “to prove the corpus delicti, or that Mrs. Gunness is dead.” Undoubtedly, the defense would seek to convince the jury of the opposite. Indeed, Worden had already let it be known that he planned to issue a subpoena for Belle, summoning her to appear as a witness for the defense.[3]

  Declaring that he certainly did “not want to convict a man for the murder of anybody who isn’t dead,” Smith proceeded to outline the evidence he would offer to prove that Mrs. Gunness “died and was burned in the fire.

  “On the day before the fire,” he related, “Mrs. Gunness went to attorney Leliter in La Porte and drew up her will and at Mr. Leliter’s suggestion rented a safety deposit box in the bank and into that box she put the will and her private papers and some $700 in money. After that she went to Minich’s grocery store for her week’s supply of groceries and she also got toys and games for her children, spending some eight or ten dollars.

  “That night,” he continued, “Joe Maxson ate supper with them. About nine thirty he went up to bed and at that time the mother and children were at the table in the home playing games and nothing unusual had happened. The children played with the toys and games around the fireside.

  “About four in the morning Maxson was awakened. He was occupying the upper story of the frame part of the house. Mrs. Gunness occupied the southeast corner room with the little boy. It was the custom of the children to occupy the northwest corner room. Maxson heard them retire. He was awakened by smoke in his room. There was a gale blowing that night from the northwest. He rushed to the window and the whole interior of the brick house was on fire. Maxson beat on the door of the family apartments without success and escaped from the house.

  “The fire had evidently been started in the outside cellarway. Others came on the scene. They climbed to the room occupied by the children, but there was no one in the room. Our contention will be that Mrs. Gunness became suffocated and died, that the children were awakened by the smoke and ran over to their mother’s room, into the thickest of the fire, and were suffocated.

  “The house was completely burned. Not a bit of wood was left. The bodies were burned in the hot debris for twelve hours. Two hundred pails of water were necessary to cool the hot bricks so the bodies could be got at. All four were found together. That of Mrs. Gunness was lying on the back with the body of the boy clasped in her left arm.”

  That the charred female corpse was that of Mrs. Gunness would be shown by hard evidence. “We shall prove by the coroner’s inquest,” said Smith, “that the coroner found on the hand a ring or rings belonging to Mrs. Gunness. We shall prove by a reputable dentist here in La Porte that he did crown and bridgework for Mrs. Gunness. We will produce those teeth, and also her upper teeth. I think you will agree when the evidence is all in that the old woman is dead.”

  Of course, it was natural to feel that Mrs. Gunness “got what was coming to her.” That sentiment, however, must have no bearing on the jury’s decision. “I want to impress upon your mind,” Smith stressed, “that the principal—the salient—points in the case are
these: Did Ray Lamphere burn this house? Did he feloniously and willfully do this? Did Belle Gunness and her three children meet death because of this act?

  “If we prove beyond a reasonable doubt an affirmative answer to these questions, and I believe we can,” concluded Smith, “we shall expect a verdict accordingly.”[4]

  30.

  CORPUS DELICTI

  After their first night in what the La Porte Weekly Herald described as their “comfortable quarters”—a small deliberation room crammed with a dozen cots—the jurors were taken for a walk by Bailiff Carl Matz, then escorted to breakfast at the Hotel Teegarden, where they were “permitted to peruse the morning papers, from which all references to the trial had been removed.” Having caught up on the other news of the day—the self-inflicted wound of an amateur magician named Don V. Smythe, who “accidentally shot himself in the hand with a blank cartridge while giving a sleight-of-hand performance in Noblesville”; the deplorable “lack of appreciation” shown by Miss Cora Harness, who failed to reward ticket agent Henry Benford after he found the “much-prized” gold watch she had lost during a shopping expedition; and the plans of the International Egg Carrier & Paper Co. to open a factory in La Porte—the jurors were led back to the courthouse for the first day of testimony.[1]