Most of all, he was thankful to the Lord for having lifted a terrible curse from his beloved community. “We praise God for the conflagration of the scarlet house whose visitors’ feet took hold on the earthly hell.” With heartfelt gratitude, he foresaw “the approaching day when our scandals shall cease to heat the wires of two continents”—when the Gunness case was a thing of the past, and La Porte was restored to its former blessed obscurity.[1]
Occupying the front page along with the Reverend Donaldson’s essay was Harry Burr Darling’s daily report on the trial. With the testimony finished and final arguments about to begin, he summed up the situation with one of his usual overwrought metaphors:
On this day, the 25th of November, is being fought the real battle for the life of Ray Lamphere. Four days were required to decide upon a jury, a board of reviewers. Ten days more were consumed in the taking of evidence. During these ten days each side built its fleet. The prosecution constructed a powerful, first-class battleship. The defense adopted different tactics, relying on a multitude of small craft, such as torpedo boats and submarines, to do the damage, and so harass the maneuvers of the enemy as to render it incapable of infliction of serious damage.
“As of yet,” concluded Darling, “the armor of the big warship has proved of sufficient thickness to resist the fire of innumerable theories from the opposing flotilla.”[2]
Martin Sutherland, Prosecutor Smith’s cocounsel, was the first to address the jury that day. Appealing to the jurors’ “good common sense,” he began by mocking the defense’s contention that the female body found in the ashes was not Belle’s. Joe Maxson’s testimony proved that, besides the hired hand himself, Belle and her three children were the only ones in the house on the night of the fire. The next morning, “there were found four bodies in the debris. Ordinary common sense would lead us to believe that those were the bodies who inhabited that dwelling.”
As for the teeth, they “were not false teeth, easily removed, but bridgework fastened to the natural teeth of Mrs. Gunness. Yet the defense has asked you to run with the imagination of Mr. Hutson, who testified that he recognized Mrs. Gunness even with two veils over her face,” said Sutherland with an audible sneer. “It’s very probable, isn’t it, that Belle Gunness would come to La Porte, hire a livery wagon, and drive out to the scene of her murders! Gentlemen of the jury, your common sense teaches you better. And by using that same common sense, you will realize that we have established the corpus delicti beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Turning next to the question of motive, Sutherland, his voice still laced with sarcasm, described the seemingly genial defendant as a man driven to exact murderous vengeance on his former lover, both for betraying him with Helgelien and for reneging on a promise of hush money after he witnessed the murder of the North Dakotan.
“Testimony we have introduced,” said Sutherland, “shows that Lamphere, the easy-going Lamphere, the hard-drinking Lamphere, the fellow-about-town, had an easy berth out with Mrs. Gunness. Testimony further shows that Andrew Helgelien supplanted Lamphere in Mrs. Gunness’s affections. This caused jealousy in the suspicious Lamphere, who did not want to trade his cozy berth with Mrs. Gunness for a hard bed offered by Liz Smith.
“On the night of January 14th Helgelien disappeared, never to be seen alive again,” continued Sutherland. “Lamphere did not stay at Michigan City, as Mrs. Gunness had instructed him. The scene that he saw that night was such as to satisfy his desire of getting Helgelien out of the way. A compact was probably made over the body of Helgelien. What that was we have no positive evidence, but we have a right to infer that she agreed to pay him money. From receipts it was evident that there was no money due him for labor, yet his whole cry was that she owed him money and he would get even with her. The woman did not abide by this compact, did not pay Lamphere enough of the blood money, and the morning of April 28, Lamphere applied the torch to her house, sending her and her children to an awful death in a fiery furnace.”
Lamphere’s behavior immediately prior to the conflagration left no doubt about his guilt, argued Sutherland. “We find on the day before the fire, Mrs. Gunness was tracked by Lamphere,” Sutherland stated. “Mrs. Gunness, weeping, entered Minich’s store and bought some groceries. Lamphere, as an excuse for entrance, bought a five-cent plug of tobacco. Lamphere followed Mrs. Gunness out of the store, glaring at Mrs. Gunness.
“What is the evidence now to show that Lamphere committed the crime on the morning of April 28? We find Lamphere skulking and hiding before the fire started, then again after the fire started. We find Lamphere flatly contradicting himself in the stories he told to Deputy Sheriff Marr and Deputy Sheriff Antiss. First he told one thing and then he told another to the various officers. Finally, he practically made a confession of arson to Deputy Antiss.
“It is enough!” cried Sutherland, raising his voice for the first time.
Sutherland concluded with a dig at his opponents. “Now as to the defense,” he said with a dismissive shrug, “if you are able to tell what it is, you can do better than the prosecution. They would attempt to prove by one witness that she was alive, and by the next witness that she was dead. By one witness they attempt to show that the teeth were clipped off and left in the fire, by another witness they attempt to show that they were not her teeth. The expert testified that he found poison in the mass of the stomachs, and Mr. Cutler testified that poisonous fluids were used in the bodies.
“From all these facts,” concluded Sutherland, returning to his starting point, “we ask you to sum up the whole matter and use your good common sense.”[3]
Next up was Wirt Worden’s cocounsel, Ellsworth Weir. Son of a prominent local politician who had served both as a two-term state senator and mayor of La Porte, Weir was lucky to be there at all. Several years earlier, while representing a pretty young Cleveland woman, Mrs. Louise Brill, in a divorce suit, he had been shot at point-blank range by her estranged husband, Joseph—an “immensely rich” mine owner who accused the attorney of being “unduly intimate” with his wife and “stealing her affections.” Newspapers throughout the Midwest reported that the wound was “probably fatal.” Under the ministrations of a La Porte physician, however, Weir eventually made a full recovery.[4]
Now, attacking Sutherland for allowing a case of such vital importance to “degenerate into sarcasm,” Weir angrily accused his opponent of “the greatest legal somersault of the present century!” For all his talk about common sense, Sutherland himself had taken “a flight into the realms of fancy,” spinning a purely imaginary tale about Lamphere’s involvement in Andrew Helgelien’s murder. “He pictures the scene when Lamphere sees Mrs. Gunness killing Helgelien,” Weir said derisively. “And then because they are partners in crime, they want to kill each other!”
It was possible, Weir conceded, that Mrs. Gunness had a confederate who assisted in her crimes, and who eventually had “a purpose in getting rid of” her. But the theory that Lamphere was her accomplice was “merely a guess, and you cannot guess this defendant into the penitentiary, or hang him by guessing!”
Turning to the issue of the teeth, Weir demanded to know why the prosecution had not produced the miner Louis Schultz. “Where is he now? Why do they not bring him here? The most important witness!” He also wondered why Dr. Norton had “made a diagram of the teeth” and provided it to Sheriff Smutzer “two weeks before the teeth were found.” In that amount of time, Weir suggested darkly, a fake set “could have been made and substituted.”
And what about the poison “that Mr. Sutherland brushes away with a wave of his hand? Granted that the undertaker used a pure arsenic powder,” said Weir, “yet the eminent Dr. Haines testified that there was strychnine sufficient to have killed three people. For Lamphere to have committed the crime of murder, it would have been necessary for him to have gone into the house, administer the poiso
n, and then carried Mrs. Gunness and her three children into the cellar and set fire to the building. But Lamphere could not have gained admission to that house. It was locked up tight!”
As Weir drew near the end of his remarks, his voice grew hoarse with emotion. “That a crime was committed we all agree,” he said, “and as good citizens we feel that if the criminal can be apprehended, he should be convicted. But I do not believe that Ray Lamphere is guilty of the crime which is charged against him. So far as Ray Lamphere is concerned, there is no evidence that he did anything except occasionally to drink, and many men drink. Ray Lamphere may be ever so bad, but he did not commit this crime, and as he did not, he should be freed by you gentlemen.”
By the time Weir reached his closing words, tears were coursing down his cheeks. “Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. You of the jury go home tomorrow, your task completed, to the hearts of your families. This man, if you condemn him, will have nothing before him! Think! Think long and hard before you seal the doom of a human life!”[5]
Worden, who spoke next, delivered what was by all accounts a moving appeal on behalf of his client. “Before a body of his peers, a man could have pled for his own life with no greater force,” wrote one observer. “He fought for the prisoner as though the prisoner was his own brother.” His powerful speech inspired a particularly head-scratching tribute from Harry Burr Darling, who praised the defense lawyer for leaving “no table unturned to make the jury ‘fireproof’ against the blazing bonfires in the face of Prosecutor Smith.”[6]
Worden began by reminding the jurors of the concept of reasonable doubt. “This case against Ray Lamphere is entirely built up of circumstantial evidence,” he stressed. “Therefore you must be satisfied that there is no other reasonable explanation of the evidence than the one presented in the indictment that Lamphere is guilty. Otherwise he is entitled to be acquitted.”
Every point the prosecution had made, Worden argued, was open to doubt, beginning with its claim that Mrs. Gunness had died in the fire. “I firmly believe she is alive,” Worden asserted. “She had abundant motive for the commission of this crime, in the coming of Asle Helgelien to find out about his brother. She made preparation for the fire. Even in her will she made provision for the disposal of her property in the event of the death of all her children. I am honest in saying that I believe the statement of D. M. Hutson and the two little girls.
“What of the four bodies?” he continued. “I believe it impossible for four bodies to fall from the second story, and still to be found together, laid out in regular rows. The remains of the piano were found on top of the bodies. If we are to believe the state, those bodies falling from the second floor beat the piano to the basement!”
By way of planting even more doubt in the minds of the jurors, Worden proffered a startling new suggestion: that Joe Maxson was somehow complicit in Mrs. Gunness’s sinister scheme. “I am of the opinion that Joe Maxson knows more than he has been willing to tell. I believe he had his clothes on all night. There was no yelling, no cry of fire, no calling of the neighbors.”
In regard to the teeth, Worden dismissed Dr. Norton’s testimony as “prejudiced.” “I say to you that these teeth never went through the fire!” he exclaimed. Everything connected to them, “from the manner in which they were found” to “the condition in which they are now,” suggested that they were part of a diabolical plot to convince the world that Mrs. Gunness had perished in the flames.
Worden went on to dispute “the testimony of John Rye, who said Lamphere went back to the Gunness home on January 14” and “read aloud a statement by Lamphere that denied this.”
His final words were delivered with “a ringing intensity of feeling”: “They say that Lamphere made damaging admissions. Suppose you agree that Lamphere lied to Antiss. Would you hang him for lying? Then we must all prepare for death! But I believe if you act as your conscience dictates and according to the law and the evidence, there will be no question about your verdict!”[7]
State’s Attorney Smith was the last to speak. In contrast to the impassioned tones of the defense attorneys, he began in an easy, conversational style, eschewing histrionics—at least for the moment.
“I’m not here to make a political speech,” he told the jurors. “I want to talk to you a little bit about this case. I am going to show you beyond a reasonable doubt that Lamphere set fire to the house and burned up those people.”
Like his cocounsel, Smith dismissed the defense arguments as hopelessly confused. “I cannot conceive on what theory the defense is trying this case,” he said. “One moment they say Belle Gunness is alive and the next that she is dead.” Addressing Worden’s charge that the evidence against Lamphere was “entirely circumstantial,” he repeated the line he had used in his opening statement. “Of course the evidence is circumstantial!” he exclaimed. “When men start out to burn houses or commit crimes, they do not give notice, nor go around with a brass band.”
Smith responded to another of Worden’s accusations by leveling one of his own. “Where is Louis Schultz?, they ask. Well, we ask: Where is Nigger Liz? Why don’t they establish an alibi by her? What was the defendant doing during the one hour and forty-five minutes which, according to his own statement, was consumed in going a mile and a quarter? If the time that has been stated is not correct, why don’t they bring in Nigger Liz? She knows. Why don’t they bring her in?
“Where is there any evidence that Dr. Norton told anything but the absolute truth about the teeth?” Smith continued. “When the defense’s own dental experts testified, they stated that the teeth had been made for and had been worn in the same mouth, and further that they had been through the fire.”
Like Sutherland, he scoffed at Daniel Hutson’s claim that Belle was easily recognizable despite the two veils hanging down to her chin. Next, he briefly recapped his reasons for believing that Lamphere was complicit in Andrew Helgelien’s murder.
Then, in a moment made even more dramatic by the sudden shift in tone, he swiveled away from the jury box, jabbed a finger at Lamphere, and thundered: “What did you tell John Rye you would get even with the old woman for? Why did you tell Deputy Sheriff Antiss that you would plead guilty of arson were it not for the sake of your poor old mother? Why were you running around the Gunness place at night, and then pleading guilty to being out there, and paying fines for trespass?”
As Ray struggled, with limited success, to appear unshaken by this onslaught, Smith turned back to the jurors. Though the state had devoted much of its time to proving that Mrs. Gunness was murdered, Smith made it clear that he cared little about the woman. She was, after all, “rottener than hell.” No, his “feelings were for the three innocent children, slain by a man who hides behind towers and sneaks about and sets a fire with such consequences!”
His final words, which rang with righteous indignation, could hardly fail to stir the blood of his listeners, most of whom were parents themselves. “I say to you that if you don’t believe Lamphere is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, then don’t bring in a verdict of guilty. I do not ask you to vindicate that bad woman, but I have a right to plead in the name of God on behalf of those three innocent children!”[8]
In his instructions to the jury, Judge Richter defined “reasonable doubt,” stressed that the defendant’s failure to testify should “raise no presumption of any kind against him,” and explained that circumstantial evidence was “to be regarded as quite as conclusive in its convincing power as direct and positive evidence.” He then told the jurors that, under the law, they could bring in one of several verdicts:
Guilty of murder in the first degree—Death
Guilty of murder in the first degree—Life sentence
Guilty of murder in the second degree—Life sentence
Guilty of manslaughter—Two to twenty-one years
Guilty of arson—Two to twenty-one years
Not guilty
It took Richter fifteen minutes to read his instructions. At 5:30 p.m., Thanksgiving Eve, the jurors filed out of the courtroom to begin their deliberations.[9]
39.
VERDICT
After five hours of heated debate and four divided ballots, it was clear that the jurors were not about to reach a quick decision. At 10:45 p.m., they knocked off for the night, resuming their deliberations after breakfast on Thanksgiving Day.
Twice that day they requested additional information from Judge Richter. Twice they were told that the court could do nothing more than reread the instructions to them. Both times, the twelve men filed back into the courtroom, took their seats in the jury box, and listened intently while Judge Richter read through his instructions in their entirety.
By then, rumors had spread that jury was deadlocked. As the twelve men continued their deliberations into the afternoon, the rest of the participants dispersed for their holiday meals, and the lights of the emptied courtroom were extinguished.
Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men Page 23
