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

by Harold Schechter

  Dear Bess, in old La Porte,

  For that mysterious “Gunness case”

  Is going through the court.

  They found a jury for the case,

  Most fit in every way:

  For what they thought about it all

  They really could not say.

  We don’t know whether she’s alive,

  Or whether she is dead,

  Or whether, when she went away,

  She took along her head.

  But this we know—she left her teeth:

  They’re mostly made of gold,

  And every time we go to court

  We hear the story told.

  One preacher scolds us dreadfully

  Who go. Perhaps he’s right.

  But where a preacher goes ’twould seem

  That women surely might.

  And so I’ll go again and see

  What curious things they do,

  To find out whether teeth will burn

  And come out good as new.

  And then, when I get home, Dear Bess,

  I’ll write it all to you.[5]

  Despite the mockery and disdain he incurred, Reverend Garrard refused to back down. In a follow-up talk at his church, he insisted that he had “the greatest respect” for the “real women of the city,” who were of the “highest caliber.” His previous remarks had been addressed strictly to “a certain class of women” who were drawn to the trial “by morbid curiosity”—the type who “delight in the weird and sensational” and were “flocking like sheep” to the courtroom purely “out of a desire for entertainment.”

  Replying directly to the writer who had claimed her prerogative “to learn the ways of justice” by attending the trial, Garrard presented himself as a defender of female rights, even while asserting a thoroughly hidebound view of the proper role of women. “I certainly would not keep down the liberty of women,” he declared, “but liberty does not mean license. I repeat my belief and say God made man and woman. He made man the stronger and set him over a particular field. He gave woman a peculiar nature and set her in the home to be the presiding spirit there. Her powers are represented by gentleness, sympathy, purity, devotion to principle, and love.” The same unnatural impulses that drove certain women to sensational trials like those of Mrs. Gunness and Harry Thaw—killer of famed architect Stanford White—were responsible, he claimed, for the “multitudinous divorce proceedings” that were destroying the moral fabric of the nation.[6]

  Garrard’s hectoring appeared to have a discernible effect. On the afternoon of Saturday, November 22—one day after his original harangue was reprinted in the papers—more women than ever showed up at the trial. As the special correspondent for the Chicago Daily Journal noted, “This was attributed in large part to Rev. M. H. Garrard’s attack on those who previously were spectators in the courtroom.”[7]

  36.

  PARADE

  To bolster its central arguments—that Mrs. Gunness was alive, that she had faked her own death, and that Lamphere was not her accomplice—the defense brought on a parade of witnesses over the next two days of the trial.

  Belle’s neighbor, Daniel Hutson, repeated his widely publicized story of having seen her and a “strange man” walking in her orchard on July 9, an account corroborated by his two young daughters, Evalina and Eldora.

  “I was on the road, returning from town with a hayrick, and I saw two people at the Gunness place,” said Hutson. “Even from that distance I could recognize her plainly. I knew her shape and I knew her lumbering walk. I never saw a woman walk like that. I started up my horses to try to get up the hill to the orchard before she could get away, but she saw me first and she and the man ran to their buggy, clambered in, and raced straight to the main road. I was within twenty feet of her and could plainly see her face.”

  Under cross-examination, Hutson was compelled to admit that the woman had been wearing a “wide-rimmed hat” with a double veil, one white, one black, “that came down to her chin.” How he could “plainly see her face” under those circumstances was an interesting question. Hutson stubbornly insisted, however, that he “knew Mrs. Gunness well enough that he could not be mistaken”.[1]

  The testimony of another of Belle’s neighbors, John Anderson, was offered to advance the theory that the headless body found in the ruins was that of a different heavyset woman, lured to the farm to be slain by and substituted for the murderess.

  On the Saturday evening before the fire, Anderson recalled, he was tending to his flower garden, when Mrs. Gunness drove by in her buggy and stopped to chat with him. Seated beside her was “a strange woman.” She was “a large woman,” said Anderson, if “not quite so large as Mrs. Gunness.”

  “Did you ever see her again?” asked Worden.

  Anderson gave an emphatic shake of his head. “Never,” he said.

  To support his contention that Belle had a partner in her murder business—someone other than Lamphere—Worden summoned Fred Rittman, described in the papers as a “surprise witness.” A former farmhand of Belle’s, previously unheard of in all the months since the fire, Rittman told of a strange afternoon, when—so Worden wanted the jury to believe—Belle’s coconspirator had driven a victim to the “death homestead,” where he would be drugged, killed, and planted in a freshly dug grave.

  Two years earlier, said Rittman, he was plowing in the cornfield, when “Mrs. Gunness hitched up her favorite horse and said she was going to drive to town. Before departing, she told me to inform any visitors that she would return shortly and to make themselves right at home.

  “Shortly after,” Rittman continued, “a big, green automobile whizzed up the driveway and a couple of men, one elderly and the other medium but not so heavyset, got out. I exchanged greetings and asked what they wanted. They said they must see Belle Gunness at once. I explained that she was not at home but asked them to step inside and take things easy.

  “I went back to my plowing and had been working about an hour when Mrs. Gunness came back. She put up her rig and came at once to me. ‘I want you dig a hole for me,’ she said.

  “‘What kind of a hole?’ I asked.

  “‘Just a hole for a brick foundation,’ she said. ‘The masons will be here tomorrow.’ She showed me where to dig, and put stakes to mark the corners. ‘Dig it five-and-a-half feet deep,’ she said.

  “It did not occur to me at the time,” said Rittman, “that it was about the size of a grave.”

  Rittman went on to relate that, before quitting for the day, he had gone up to the house to get paid and found Belle and the two men seated in the kitchen with several bottles of wine on the table. He himself had been offered half a glass, which left him feeling so “queerly” that he was certain the wine had been “doped.”[2]

  The testimony of Mrs. Louise Gackle—a young skirt factory worker who lived on Park Avenue, the direct road from La Porte to the Gunness farm—was meant to persuade the jury that Belle had escaped the burning house in the company of an accomplice after setting it ablaze.

  In the early morning hours of April 28, said Mrs. Gackle, she awoke to drink a glass of medicine, having been unwell for the past few days. She saw by the clock on her bedside table that it was three in the morning. Just then, she noticed a “red glow, as of a fire and went to the window. I saw that it was coming from the Gunness farm.” As she looked outside, a red automobile with a canvas top came speeding down the road from that direction. Later that morning, as other witnesses attested, “the same auto, or one of the same description, was seen going through the town of Hobart and also through Valparaiso.”[3]

  Joe Maxson was recalled to the stand to offer testimony that, if believed by the jury, would deal a serious blow to the pros
ecution. The handyman stated that, on the morning of May 19, he was standing beside Louis Schultz when the miner suddenly cried out, “I found the teeth!” According to Maxson, however—whose account was corroborated by his brother-in-law, Isaiah Alderfer—the miner did not remove the bridgework from the ashes he was sluicing but from his vest pocket. He “then stowed the teeth in his pocket again. It was near noon when Smutzer appeared. The sluice man pulled out the teeth and gave it to him.”

  The person best qualified to rebut this testimony was, of course, Schultz himself. But “Old Klondike” was nowhere to be found.[4]

  A few other witnesses were called on Monday: Dr. Bo Bowell, who testified that, in his professional opinion, “the crown work exhibited could not have gone through the fire of April 28”; W. H. Ludwig, a former crematory attendant, who declared that “two or three hours were necessary to consume a human body in a heat of three thousand degrees intensity” and that the “skull was the last to burn”; County Commissioner William P. Miller, who told of finding “a flat stone in the Gunness basement.” He “lifted it and saw a hole that looked as if a human skull had been concealed there. The skull was gone.”[5]

  The defense had one last, critically important witness to call: Dr. Walter S. Haines of Rush Medical College. When, just before lunch recess on Monday, Worden announced that Haines would not able to travel to La Porte until the following day, Judge Richter declared a recess until Tuesday afternoon, when the jury would hear the final testimony of the trial.

  37.

  THE CHEMIST

  Though he lived to be seventy-two—a ripe old age at a time when the life expectancy for an American male was forty-nine—Walter Stanley Haines was a semi-invalid for much of his adulthood, being afflicted with a debilitating respiratory condition. Despite this handicap, he managed to lead a remarkably active life. Born in 1850—the son of John C. Haines, twice elected mayor of Chicago during Walter’s boyhood—he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before training as a physician at the Chicago Medical College. In 1874, he joined the faculty of Rush Medical College as a professor of chemistry and remained there for fifty years, a revered figure to generations of graduates.[1]

  By 1884, Haines was a figure of such renown that he became an early celebrity pitchman, touting the virtues of a popular brand of baking powder in newspaper ads. “I have recently examined a package of Royal Baking Powder and have found it entirely free from adulteration and injurious substances of all kinds,” read one such testimonial (an endorsement that speaks volumes about the concerns of consumers in the days before the creation of the FDA).[2] Ten years later, Haines was still promoting the baking powder in a newspaper ad that read: “‘I find the Royal Baking Powder superior to all others in every respect. It is the purest and strongest.’—Walter S. Haines, M.D. Consulting Chemist, Chicago Board of Health.”[3]

  Owing to his expertise as a toxicologist, Haines became a leading figure in the still-nascent field of forensic science. Along with a pair of eminent collaborators, he edited the two-volume Text-Book of Legal Medicine and Toxicology, a pioneering work covering such subjects as “Gunshot Wounds,” “Mental Perversions of the Sexual Instincts,” and—in one chapter singled out for particular praise by reviewers in professional journals—“The Destruction and Attempted Destruction of the Human Body by Fire and Chemicals.”[4]

  From left: Adolph Luetgert, who murdered his wife and dissolved her corpse; Thomas Neill Cream, hanged for serial poisoning; Dr. Bennett Clark Hyde, accused of poisoning Thomas H. Swope with strychnine.

  In the course of his long and distinguished career, he was involved in a string of sensational murder cases, testifying at the trials of Adolph Luetgert (the Chicago sausage maker charged with murdering his wife and dissolving her corpse in one of the vats used to make his product), Thomas Neill Cream (the serial poisoner whose last words on the gallows were “I am Jack the—!”), and Dr. Bennett Clark Hyde, accused of dispatching millionaire Thomas H. Swope with strychnine.[5]

  There was no secret about the testimony Haines was expected to offer when he took the stand on Tuesday. Days before he arrived in La Porte from Washington, D.C.—where he had been engaged in official business related to his work on the revision committee of the United States Pharmacopeia—newspapers were reporting that he would “tell of finding poison in the bodies taken from the ruins.”[6]

  After listening to the distinguished toxicologist, the jury would naturally conclude that Belle, fearing imminent discovery, had killed her children and committed suicide, and Ray would be acquitted of murder. Or so Worden and his cocounsel hoped.

  On the stand, which he occupied for just over thirty minutes, Haines explained that, on May 27, he had received several sealed jars from Coroner Mack, one containing the stomachs of Belle and two of her children. Cracking open the jar, he discovered that the organs were so badly decomposed that they “had run together, so that the material was like thick mud. A few fibers from the original wall were observable. The only possible analysis was by using the mass together.” He blended the fetid sludge “to obtain uniformity and removed one-third of it for examination.[7]

  “I found an abundance of arsenic and a quantity of strychnine,” said Haines. “There was enough strychnine to have caused the death of three persons.”

  Apart from one qualifying observation—that “it was impossible to tell whether the poison was in one, two, or all of the stomachs”—Haines’s testimony was everything that Worden could have hoped for.

  Then came the cross-examination.

  Asked if he could state with certainty “that the three persons whose stomachs he analyzed had died of strychnine poisoning,” Haines replied that he could not. “The poison found in the stomach after death,” he explained, “is not usually the poison which has caused death, for that has been absorbed and has gone to the remote arteries of the body.” Indeed, Haines added, “owing to the condition of the viscera submitted to him,” he “could not possibly determine the cause of death at all.”[8]

  Noting that, for ten days, “the bodies lay at the morgue and were viewed by several hundred persons,” Smith wondered “if the strychnine may have been injected into the stomachs” during that time.

  Yes, Haines conceded, “The poison might just as easily have been introduced after death.”[9]

  Haines was followed to the stand by La Porte undertaker Austin Cutler, called by the state as a rebuttal witness. In the view of the correspondent for the Chicago Examiner, Cutler’s testimony added “a touch of farce comedy to the proceedings.” To Ray Lamphere’s defense team, however, there was nothing amusing about it.

  No sooner had the mortician been sworn in than Prosecutor Smith asked if he had treated the remains with any poisonous substances.

  “Why, yes, I put poison on those bodies. I thought it was strange you never asked me before,” Cutler said. “I scattered about two gallons of formaldehyde embalming fluid and fifteen pounds of arsenic preserving powder over them while they were in my place.”

  Smith allowed himself a small smile. “Was this before the autopsy, when the stomachs were put in the jar for chemical exaggeration?”

  “Why, of course it was,” Cutler answered, as if astonished at being asked such a question.

  “Tell me, Mr. Cutler,” said Smith. “Why have you waited until now to make this fact known?”

  “No one ever asked me,” Cutler exclaimed. “That’s why I didn’t tell about the arsenic. When the bodies of the woman and the three children were brought to me the morning after the fire, nobody said anything to me about anything being wrong. All they told me was to get the bodies ready for shipment to Chicago, as they were to be buried there. Anyone knows that in my business we have to embalm bodies for shipment. The railroad will not receive them otherwise. I could not embalm in the ordinary way because the bodies were
burned so badly, so I just scattered a lot of arsenic over them.”

  Though Cutler’s testimony clearly helped the state in one regard—by offering an alternate explanation for the arsenic found in the corpses—it failed to account for the presence of the lethal dose of strychnine. Worden immediately put Dr. Haines back on the stand and asked if “strychnine [was] used in embalming fluids or preservatives.”

  “Strychnine has no antiseptic or preservative qualities,” answered the chemist.

  Haines’s reply undid some of the damage done by Cutler. Overall, however, he turned out to be such a disappointing witness that, in its daily coverage of the trial, the Detroit Free Press reported his testimony under the headline “Defense Expert Aids Prosecution.” Haines’s failure to definitely state “that the four persons whose bodies were found in the ruins came to their end by poisoning rather than suffocation and burning” was more than a setback for the defense. It was, wrote the paper, “a death blow.”[10]

  38.

  CLOSING ARGUMENTS

  On Wednesday, November 25, in honor of the impending holiday, the Argus-Bulletin devoted the middle of its front page to a piece titled “Why We Are Thankful” by the Reverend John B. Donaldson, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church. After paying tribute to the New England Puritans, “those stern and stalwart souls” who “established Thanksgiving Day,” and to Abraham Lincoln, who proclaimed it a national holiday, Donaldson offered thanks for America’s “civic, commercial, and political” institutions, its upstanding elected officials, and its “just and sensible” citizenry. Looking closer to home, he gave thanks for the continuing “betterment of La Porte”—for “the influence of her schools and her public spirit,” for “her growing factories and widening markets,” for “the lanes that will be boulevarded and the macadam highways that will gridiron the county,” for “the shrubs that will beautify her waste places” and for “a water plant that will furnish good drinking water before the wells shall produce a pestilence.”