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

by Harold Schechter

  As dusk came on, a group of newspapermen—milling about on the street, awaiting a decision—saw the courtroom windows suddenly light up from within. Words spread rapidly that a verdict was about to be returned, and people came swarming. The room was nearly filled when it became clear that the crowd had responded to a false alarm: Deputy Sheriff Antiss, entertaining some out-of-town friends curious to see the site of the notorious trial, had brought them up to the courtroom and turned on the lights.

  Finally, at approximately 7:00 p.m.—fifteen minutes after returning from supper and twenty-six hours after beginning their deliberations—the jurors sent word to Bailiff Matz that they had come to a decision on their nineteenth ballot. After notifying Judge Richter and the attorneys by telephone, Matz switched on the courtroom lights. By the time Richter and the lawyers arrived, the room was packed, every seat occupied, people standing in the aisle and lining the walls. A few minutes later, Lamphere was brought over from the jail by Deputy Sheriff Antiss, who seated himself directly behind the prisoner to ensure that Ray did not make any “undue movements” upon hearing the verdict.[1]

  At 7:20, the jurors filed inside and took their seats in the jury box and the court was called to order.

  “Gentlemen of the jury, have you reached an agreement?” asked the judge.

  Rising to his feet, foreman Henry Mills confirmed that they had, but said that he “wished to make a statement before the verdict was read.” Judge Richter replied that he was “not at liberty to hear any statement until the verdict was received and read.”

  A tense few moments of silence ensued as Foreman Mills passed the white slip of paper to Bailiff Matz, who handed it to Judge Richter. After entering the verdict upon the docket, Richter cleared his voice and read:

  “We find the defendant guilty of arson.”

  The crowd, having been warned that no demonstration would be tolerated, heard the verdict in silence. Ray appeared to flush, then grow pale, and those watching him closely noticed a “slight tremor of his hands.” Otherwise, he showed no reaction. His attorneys, however—who “seemed to take the blow harder than the prisoner himself”—started forward, as though about to offer an angry protest, before “check[ing] themselves.”[2]

  Having read the verdict, Judge Richter asked Foreman Mills if he still cared to make his statement, but Mills declined the offer, saying that “it would do no good now.” After receiving the thanks of the judge and Prosecutor Smith for their “careful and conscientious consideration of the case,” the twelve men were discharged and Lamphere was ordered to stand.

  “Do you have any reasons to state why sentence should not be pronounced upon you?” asked Judge Richter.

  Ray—his face haggard, his eyes downcast, his hands held before him “as if his wrists were still shackled”—slowly replied, “I have nothing to say at this time.”

  With that, Judge Richter sentenced him to the state prison in Michigan City for an indeterminate term of two to twenty-one years, fined him $5,000, and disenfranchised him for five years. The court then instructed the deputy sheriff to escort him back to the county jail.[3]

  With a fair degree of hyperbole—and a certain civic pride in his city’s newfound notoriety—Edward Molloy of the La Porte Weekly Herald declared that Ray’s conviction “brought to a close one of the most famous murder trials in the history of the world”:

  In every city, every town and every hamlet and even at the cross roads, in fact places, no matter how remote, to which the telegraph, the mails and the newspapers had access, the people were watching the trial. They had followed the case from its beginning. They had devoured every line printed by the newspapers and they had formed theories on the various features of the case. The newspapers and the news associations were wild to get all the news that was to be had. Within two minutes after Judge Richter read the verdict, it was flashed by wire to all points of the compass. The cables carried the news to Europe and to other foreign lands.[4]

  Interviewed in his cell that night by Molloy, Ray seemed reconciled to his fate.

  “It could have been worse,” he said. “I don’t have any particular complaint. The evidence was pretty strong against me, so I’m willing to take my medicine. Sure, I was hoping for an acquittal, but my conscience is clear, and that helps some.”

  Hoping to settle some of the controversial questions raised during the trial, Molloy asked Ray why he “didn’t arouse the people when you saw the fire that morning if you didn’t set it.”

  “Well,” said Ray, “I suppose if I’d realized what was going to happen and knew what I know now, I guess I would’ve done so. I got scared and did things I shouldn’t have done, and that made it look bad.”

  “Do you believe Mrs. Gunness is dead or alive?” Molloy asked.

  “Oh, she’s dead, all right,” said Ray. “That was her body and the children they found in the fire.”

  “Tell me this, Ray,” said Molloy. “What did you really see that night you returned from Michigan City, the night Helgelien disappeared?”

  Ray was emphatic. “I didn’t see anything,” he said.

  Molloy tried pressing him for more details on the matter, but at that point Ray clammed up, explaining that his attorney, Wirt Worden, “had told him not to make any admissions.”

  “But what does it matter, now that you’ve been convicted?” said Molloy. “They can’t try you again.”

  Ray only shook his head and repeated that he was following his lawyer’s instructions.

  Once Molloy was gone, Ray asked Sheriff Smutzer for a sheet of paper, a pen, and some ink, and composed a letter to his mother.

  “Dear Mother,” he began. “I will try and write you a few lines to let you know how I am”:

  I just got back from the courthouse where I went to get my sentence. I was somewhat disappointed, although the circumstances were against me, but Ma, I am not guilty and before God I am no criminal, even if I am in the eyes of the people. Don’t worry about me, Ma, for it might have been worse. I have thought many times since I have been here in jail that it is a wonder I did not find a resting place in her private burying ground, so Ma, do not worry for I am among the living with a clear conscience, and know I never did any very great wrong to anybody. Now Ma, I know you are almost heartbroken, but try and console yourself in the fact that I am innocent. Of course it is hard for me but not half as hard as it would be if I were guilty.

  “Now Ma, cheer up,” he concluded. “Don’t worry about me, and I will see you sometime. Goodbye from your son, Ray.”[5]

  With the trial behind him, Ray, relieved of the tension of uncertainty, slept soundly Thursday night. The letter had not yet been mailed the following morning when Ray was brought into Sheriff Smutzer’s office. Moments later, his mother and his sister, Mrs. Pearl Steele, entered, the pair having traveled by train from South Bend to bid him goodbye.

  Sheriff Smutzer made his office available for the sad occasion. Supported by her daughter, the seventy-year-old woman burst into tears as she embraced her boy.

  “Ray, I know you are innocent,” she said between sobs. “Your mother still believes in you.”

  Ray’s eyes moistened, but otherwise he kept control of his emotions.

  Moments later, knowing that “she might not live to see her wayward son again,” the elderly woman was led from the office in a state of near collapse.[6]

  Lamphere might have accepted his fate with equanimity, but the same could not be said of Wirt Worden, who gave free vent to his outrage. Speaking to reporters at the jail that morning, he denounced the verdict as “ridiculous.

  “There were absolutely no grounds and no evidence to support,” he said bitterly. “We’re going to make a motion for a new trial on Monday. If that’s denied, we’ll take the appeal to the supreme court.”r />
  No one doubted Worden’s sincerity, though an appeal seemed unlikely. To begin with, there was the expense—$500 for a transcript alone. Moreover, it would take at least two years for the case to reach the state supreme court, and by that time, as the Herald noted, “the minimum term of Lamphere’s sentence would have expired and it would be better to work for his release on parole.” Even if the decision were reversed on appeal and the state declined to retry the case, Ray could hardly count on walking away a free man, since Smith had made it clear that he was prepared to bring charges against Lamphere for the murder of Andrew Helgelien. The consensus among observers was that, once their emotions had cooled, Ray’s lawyers would “realize that their client, by mere chance, had escaped a more severe punishment, and that . . . the best thing for [Lamphere] to do is to accept the verdict as gracefully as possible.”[7]

  The jury’s decision, it emerged, had been a compromise between ten men who favored a verdict of murder in the second degree with a penalty of life imprisonment and two stubborn holdouts, one who argued for a verdict of arson, one who wanted to acquit.[8] Among editorial writers in newspapers throughout the Midwest, the consensus was that the decision made little legal or logical sense. In the words of one typical commentator, “The result of the trial was peculiar”:

  According to the judgment of the jury, Lamphere was guilty of arson but was acquitted of the charge of murdering Mrs. Gunness and her children, who were incinerated in the conflagration. It imposes a severe strain upon the imagination to conceive how it would be possible for the defendant to be adjudged guilty of arson without being convicted of murder also . . . Under the circumstances, the return of a verdict of arson is a travesty of justice [and] cannot be viewed as being anything other than almost absurdly inconsistent.[9]

  Apart from his die-hard defenders, virtually everyone seemed to feel that the jury had let Lamphere off easy. One wisecracking writer for the Chicago Daily News remarked that, had Mrs. Gunness been on trial instead of Lamphere, the jury would probably have found her guilty of nothing worse than operating an unlicensed graveyard.[10]

  There was one editorialist who felt differently. He agreed that Lamphere should have been found guilty of murder. But, at least when it came to the “ogress,” that was no reason for the jury to impose a harsh sentence. “If Lamphere took the life of Belle Gunness,” the writer opined, “he should have been presented with a gold medal.”[11]

  Early Friday afternoon, Ray was taken by interurban streetcar to Michigan City. Along with Sheriff Smutzer, he was accompanied by several newspapermen. He chatted easily with them, repeatedly remarking that he was “going to prison with a clear conscience.” When one of the reporters asked what he meant by that, Ray replied, “I didn’t do any more than hundreds of other people would’ve done in my place”—a comment that, to the ears of his listeners, “sounded very near to a confession.”

  On the whole, he seemed relaxed, even surprisingly cheerful, at one point whistling “Wait ’Til the Sun Shines, Nellie” while gazing out the window. A car was waiting at the Michigan City streetcar stop to drive him the rest of the way. “I’m lucky to be here,” he mused aloud as the prison came into view. “Mighty lucky. Why, I might’ve been chopped up and put in a hole in old woman Gunness’ chicken yard.”[12]

  With Smutzer still at his side, he was escorted to the chief clerk’s window, where his name was entered in the register and he was assigned his convict number: 4,140. He was then taken to the receiving room for a bath, photographed and measured in the Bertillon room, and issued his suit of prison gray.

  Before being led off to his cell, he shook hands with Sheriff Smutzer, “thanked him for the excellent treatment he had received in the county jail during the six months he had been confined there and asked him to say a good word for him when his application should come before the parole board in a couple of years.”

  Even before he spent his first night behind the walls of that grim fortress, Ray, as the papers reported, was “looking forward to the end of his minimum sentence, when he would be eligible for parole.”[13]

  CONCLUSION

  a mystery never to be fully resolved

  40.

  CONFESSIONS

  In their ongoing battle for newsstand supremacy, William Randolph Hearst and his yellow-press rival, Joseph Pulitzer, packed their Sunday magazine supplements with the most sensationally attention-grabbing—and often wholly fabricated—stories. One favorite recurrent feature was the “confession” of a notorious murderer, presented as a major newspaper exclusive, though, more often than not, it was a shameless hoax concocted by some anonymous staff writer. Occasionally, the criminal in question was paid to certify to the authenticity of the piece, though often it was written and disseminated without the consent—or even the knowledge—of the prisoner who had supposedly provided it.

  Typical of these brazen frauds was the two-page spread published with much fanfare in the May 9, 1909, Sunday Magazine of Pulitzer’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch under the headline “Confession of Ray Lamphere.” From the moment of his arrest, the story read, Lamphere—“the Sphinx of the Gunness case”—had maintained a steadfast silence. “Through the tense times following the discovery of the bodies at the Gunness farm he refrained from making any statement. He withstood hours of midnight sweating.” Recently, however, he had been “seen by a staff correspondent from the Sunday Post-Dispatch,” to whom—for reasons unexplained by the paper—Ray had decided to “unbosom” himself.

  Despite the lurid illustration accompanying the piece—a black-and-white drawing of Ray sneaking down into a creepy cellar hung with drying cuts of meat that might be either ham or human flesh—the “confession” is little more than a dull rehash of familiar facts, spiced up with a few fabricated “revelations.” In addition to claiming that Belle had offered “to marry me if I would get my life insured,” the narrator describes the night when he had unexpectedly returned from Michigan City with John Rye, then proceeded by himself to the Gunness farm:

  I went around to the side of the house where the cellar steps were and went into the cellar. Mrs. Gunness and Helgelien were in the sitting room above. I could hear their voices, and now and then I could catch a word, but I could not tell what they were talking about. Sounds that I heard made me think that Helgelien was sick or drunk.

  I did not realize it then, but I have no doubt now that the woman had given him poison in beer and that it was beginning to take effect. She always kept bottled beer in the house and it would have been easy for her to put poison in a glass of beer. I stayed there between half an hour and an hour. All the time I could hear Helgelien making sounds as if he was sick . . . [The next morning] Helgelien was not there. Mrs. Gunness said he had gone home. I did not suspect then that she had killed him.

  “For the first time,” the newspaper trumpeted, it had obtained “direct testimony” proving that Mrs. Gunness “killed her victims by poison”—an impressive journalistic coup, had the heralded confession been authentic.[1]

  Ray would never finish his two-year minimum sentence. The hemorrhage he suffered on the second day of the trial turned out to be, as his physician had recognized, the sign of incipient tuberculosis. By October 1909—less than a year after his conviction—it was clear that he was dying.

  Hoping to win Ray’s release, his brother-in-law, H. L. Finley of La Porte, traveled to Indianapolis for a meeting with Governor Thomas R. Marshall and was informed by Marshall’s secretary, Mark Thistlewaite, that the state parole board would not meet until early December.

  “Lamphere will come home in a box before then,” was Finley’s grim reply.

  He then appealed to the governor for an immediate pardon. Taking the matter under advisement, Marshall contacted both Warden James D. Reid of the Indiana State Prison and William Antiss, now sheriff of La Porte. Reid believed that no
good purpose would be served by freeing Lamphere, “since in prison he had the best of care and was more comfortable than he would be at home.” Antiss felt that Lamphere was not deserving of a pardon, “for he had not told all he knew about the Gunness case.”[2] He advised that Lamphere remain in prison until he “unseal[ed] his lips.”

  According to newspaper reports, authorities, among them State’s Attorney Ralph Smith, were “convinced that [Lamphere] will make a confession clearing every detail of the Gunness death farm mystery when he realizes the end is at hand.”[3]

  Their confident prediction proved to be wishful thinking. On Thursday afternoon, December 30, Ray began to fail so rapidly that, though his sister, Mrs. Finley, was immediately notified by telephone, he was dead by the time she arrived a few hours later. He was thirty-eight years old.

  “Died with Gunness Mystery Unsolved,” the Indianapolis News reported on Friday:

  Whatever knowledge Lamphere had of the night when the Gunness house was burned to the ground went with him to the grave, for he made no statement before his death that would throw any light on the Gunness case. Those who expected that he would confess before he died were disappointed, as were also those who expected that in his dying moments he would prove his innocence.[4]

  That Ray had been acquitted of the murder charges brought against him and died without admitting to any guilt did not prevent a number of newspapers from identifying him in their obituary notices as “Ray Lamphere, the slayer of Mrs. Belle Gunness and her children.”[5]

  Ray’s wake was held at his sister’s home on Sunday, January 2, 1910. Along with Mrs. Finley and her husband, attendees included Ray’s brother and elderly mother. Afterward, his body was transported to Rossville Cemetery for interment. Officiating at the funeral was the Reverend C. R. Parker of the First Baptist Church, who chose as his theme a verse from Genesis 18, dealing with God’s righteous destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.[6]