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

by Harold Schechter

  During his long incarceration in the La Porte county jail while awaiting the start of his trial, Ray had been visited regularly by another man of the cloth: the Reverend Edwin A. Schell, until recently pastor of La Porte’s First Methodist Church. A native of Deer Creek, Indiana, and graduate of Northwestern University, the forty-eight-year-old Schell, after a distinguished career as a minister, church administrator, and writer for popular magazines, had been appointed president of Iowa Wesleyan University just weeks before the Gunness fire.[7] On the day of Ray’s arrest, he was one of the first people to come speak to the prisoner. Afterward, interviewed by reporters, Schell had vouched for Ray’s essentially harmless character.

  “He is not a vicious man,” said Schell, “just a farmer’s son who had picked up a little knowledge of the carpenter’s trade and, of course, cannot be expected to rate high mentally. But there is little in his past life to believe that he would be guilty of the crime of firing a house containing four people. He is a toper, and his relations to women are open to criticism. But he is not a bad man.”[8]

  In the following weeks, Schell became Ray’s closest confidant, engaging him in emotional conversations that sometimes lasted several hours. Badgered by reporters following one of these talks, Schell refused to repeat what Ray had told him, insisting that “Lamphere’s communications to me are wholly privileged.”[9]

  On several subsequent occasions, however, Schell could not resist dishing out tantalizing bits of supposedly confidential information, stating unequivocally that “the Gunness children were chloroformed” before the fire and “the woman’s body found in the ruins was not that of Mrs. Gunness,” who was “still alive.” Asked about Ray’s involvement in the Gunness atrocities, Schell startled his listeners by replying that he “was sure that [Lamphere] was innocent of all but the Helgelien murder. But of the latter he was very jealous.” When one reporter asked if Schell was saying that Ray had confessed to the Helgelien murder, Schell clammed up, solemnly declaring “it would not be right” to answer that question, since the facts divulged by Ray were “as inviolably sacred as the secrets of the confessional should be.”[10]

  Having hinted so strongly for so long that he was in possession of Ray’s darkest secrets, Schell came under renewed pressure to disclose them once Ray was in the ground. As before, he was firm in his refusal. “It is the minister’s duty to hear confession and to plead with the criminal to make restitution or urge him to make his statements to the courts,” he told reporters on January 10. “If I should reveal this confidence, the ministry would be discredited and would lose some of their power to do good by hearing confessions. I expect to be criticized whether I decide to reveal the statement or not. The ministry and churchmen will criticize me if I reveal, and others of the public will criticize me if I do not.”

  All in all, Schell said with a sigh, he had come to wish that Ray had never confided in him at all. “I would give $500 if I had not heard the story told me by Lamphere.”[11]

  On Thursday, January 13, 1910—three days after Schell made this statement—the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch carried a startling banner headline: “Confession Clears the Gunness Mystery. Details of Lamphere’s Dying Statement Given to the Post-Dispatch.”

  According to the copyrighted story (which made no mention of the supposedly exclusive confession published by the paper eight months earlier), days before his death, “when he believed eternity was near,” Ray Lamphere “had unburdened his soul by a confession which clears the Gunness mystery, the crime classic of a generation.” The confession—“hitherto supposed to have been made only to the Rev. E. A. Schell”—was given “to a man of unassailable character and truthfulness, whose standing in the community is such that his word is accepted without question.” This unimpeachable source—who, for “good reasons” of his own, insisted on anonymity—had been tracked down by “a staff correspondent for the Post-Dispatch in a quest extending over six states.

  “The Post-Dispatch staff correspondent fully verified the fact that this man had such an interview with Ray Lamphere as he asserts he had, under conditions as he describes them,” the article continued. The confession, dictated by Ray, “had been put into writing at the time it was given.” Unfortunately, “only one copy” was made. That copy, “which was left with Lamphere,” had evidently disappeared. Nevertheless, “though the Post-Dispatch has not been able to find the written record of the confession, it has come into possession of its essential details from such a source that there can be no question of its authenticity . . . There is no reason to doubt that the statements now made public for the first time are substantially as they fell from the lips of Ray Lamphere.”[12]

  In contrast to the ostensible confession that had appeared the previous May, which offered little in the way of new information, the present one was packed with dramatic revelations. Not long after Ray went to work for Belle—so the story went—a Norwegian man had arrived at the farm in response to one of her matrimonial ads. “This man went to sleep one night and never awoke. In the dark hour before dawn, Mrs. Gunness awakened Lamphere and ordered him to carry something in a gunnysack to the farmyard where a hole had been dug as an ostensible receptacle for rubbish. The gunnysack and the something in it were tumbled into the hole and a hummock of earth was shoveled on top of it.”

  Within a month, “another man came to the farm,” bringing “all his money from Wisconsin or Minnesota.” A “few nights later, there was another burying job for Lamphere.” By the time Ray helped dispose of a third corpse-filled gunnysack, he had become a willing accomplice, remunerated for his services with enough money “to spend in drinking and gambling in the saloons of La Porte.” Each time Belle expected a new arrival, she would send Ray into town to purchase chloroform, which she used to kill her victims in their sleep. On those occasions when “the chloroform did not of itself kill them,” she would “sever their heads with a keen-edged ax.

  “Then Andrew Helgelien came,” the confession continued. Ordered to move out of the house, Ray waited until Helgelien and Mrs. Gunness were out driving one day, then snuck back in and

  bored a hole through the floor of the sitting room in such a position that it would not be discovered but would enable him to both hear and see what went on in the room. When Mrs. Gunness sent him to Michigan City on a fictitious errand and told him to stay all night, he suspected that Helgelien’s time had come.

  He returned in the evening against her orders and crept into the cellar. Something Mrs. Gunness had given Helgelien had made him sick. He was groaning in great distress. “For God’s sake, call for a doctor,” Lamphere heard him say, but Mrs. Gunness told him that he would soon be better. Presently he succumbed to the effect of the poison and dropped from his chair to the floor. Lamphere, staring through the hole in the floor, saw Mrs. Gunness strike the blow that ended Helgelien’s life. He went away then and it was not until the next night that the woman called on him to help her bury a body sewed in a gunnysack.

  When Lamphere demanded “a larger share of the profits,” the two quarreled bitterly and “Mrs. Gunness ordered him off the farm.” Repairing to his favorite watering hole, Lamphere began downing whiskeys and brooding over the money he felt entitled to. “He believed there was not less than $1500 hidden about the house . . . The more he drank, the more convinced he became that Mrs. Gunness had not given him a fair deal.”

  In the early hours of the morning of April 28, an inebriated Lamphere, equipped with “some of the chloroform that had been bought with Mrs. Gunness’ money” and accompanied by a female companion, “crept up through the cedars toward the silent house on the hilltop . . . It was something that Lamphere, sober, would not have undertaken. But Lamphere, drunk, had enough bravado to essay it.”

  The Gunness dog, which would have set up a racket at the intrusion of a stranger, was “silenced with a word” from the familiar
ex-farmhand. Sneaking into the bedrooms of Mrs. Gunness and her children, Lamphere—who had learned the technique from his former employer—chloroformed them all. Then he and his companion ransacked the house by candlelight. Much to their disappointment, they found less than seventy dollars. By then, dawn was beginning to break. Abandoning the search, they hurried away. As Lamphere headed toward the farm “where he was to work that day, he looked back and saw smoke and flames bursting from the house on the hill.”

  Ray insisted that he “did not intentionally start the fire.” He “did not desire the death of the Gunness children. He was not such a monster that he could wish to burn sleeping children in their beds. He did not even intend to kill Mrs. Gunness.” Apparently, he had unwittingly left a burning candle behind, which sparked the conflagration.

  Foremost among the facts supposedly established by the confession was “that Mrs. Gunness is dead”:

  The adult body found in the smoking ruins of the Gunness farmhouse was the body of Mrs. Belle Gunness. She was under the influence of chloroform when the smoke crept up through the crevices and smothered her. She died with the head of her little boy pillowed on her breast. He, too, was chloroformed and died without waking. Neither of them knew aught of it when the two little girls, Myrtle and Lucy, not so thoroughly chloroformed as the woman and boy, awoke to their peril and ran into their mother’s room and threw themselves on the woman, beseeching help. They perished there with the woman and the boy, mercifully suffocated by the smoke before the flames came licking at the tender flesh.

  There was another, perhaps even more startling revelation. When Ray snuck into the Gunness farmhouse that night, he had found a fifth person asleep in one of the bedrooms—Jennie Olsen! Mrs. Gunness had in fact “sent Jennie away to school in California for a time, but she had returned, and Mrs. Gunness, for reasons of her own, had kept her concealed in the house. Lamphere found her when he went there that night and chloroformed her, and she died as she lay in her bed. With her slender body, the flames did their work so well that the searchers raking the hot debris the next day found only the other four bodies.”

  As for the girl exhumed from the Gunness graveyard and widely assumed to be Jennie, her identity “added another mystery to the case.”[13]

  Ray’s purported confession made headlines in newspapers across the country, from the Los Angeles Herald to the New York Times. In La Porte, reaction was uniformly dismissive. “No one here believes the tale,” reported the correspondent for the Cincinnati Enquirer. Both Wirt Worden and Ralph N. Smith scoffed at every supposed revelation, deriding the entire account as “a story of the cock-and-bull variety.”[14]

  Pressed to reveal the source of the confession, the editor of the Post-Dispatch stood by his refusal to disclose the person’s name, defending his decision on the basis of long-standing journalistic practice. “In newspaper offices,” he wrote, “it is well known that valuable information is often obtained under an inviolable pledge of confidence, and that such a pledge is never broken unless the newspaper is released by the person to whom it is made . . . the name of the man who received the confession from Lamphere will never be made known by the Post-Dispatch unless permission is given by this man, which seems highly improbable.” He did, however, drop a very strong hint as to the identity of his anonymous source, declaring that “the Rev. Mr. Schell could verify the confession, if he would consent to break his silence.”[15]

  Besieged by reporters at his home in Burlington, Iowa, on Friday, January 14, Schell “reiterated that he had not divulged any such confession to any person.”[16] The following day, however, he succumbed to the pressure. Summoning a reporter from the Chicago Tribune to his office at Iowa Wesleyan University, the pastor finally broke his long silence, dictating a statement that appeared on the front page of the next day’s edition under the headline “Dr. Schell Bares Lamphere Secret.”

  “In view of the conflicting reports which continue to keep alive interest in the Gunness case,” Schell began, “and the interrogations which must continually arise in the minds of sorrowing friends and recognizing that the principal facts already are made public, I have concluded to relieve myself of further responsibility by communicating to the public through the Chicago Tribune the details of my three conversations with the late Ray Lamphere in the jail at La Porte, the statements he made to me, and the circumstances under which they were made.”

  Schell recalled first hearing about the fire at the Gunness house “on the next to the last Monday morning” of April 1908 and described his sorrow at learning of the death of the three children, “who had been attending my Sunday school, a bright, winsome lad 5 years old and two girls, perhaps 7 and 9. I had seen the children driving around in a pony cart the previous fall and several times noticed the boy in the infant class. At the suggestion of J. P. Rupel, the Sunday school superintendent, we arranged a brief memorial service for the Sunday school the following Sunday morning.”

  A few days later, Ray Lamphere was arrested. That Friday, “at the suggestion of Prosecuting Attorney Smith and understanding it was Lamphere’s wish, I called at the jail to counsel with him and perhaps to receive his confession.”

  Lamphere, said Schell, “was agitated in the extreme. Beads of perspiration were on his brow, his hands twitched, and his nervousness was plainly noticeable . . . He said that he supposed they would hang him, but that he was innocent of murder.”

  During that first conversation, Lamphere “denied that he set the house on fire and related to me how he had slept at the house of a negress until 3 a.m. that morning, then had started for the home of a relative in the country, and in passing by the Gunness home had seen that it was burning, but being angry at Mrs. Gunness and no longer working for her, he hurried past. He then said he reached his relative’s place in the country, some four miles further, at about 4 o’clock.”

  After leaving Lamphere, Schell made some inquiries, then returned to the jail “early after dinner the same day . . . and told him I had learned that he had not reached his relative until after 6 o’clock that morning.” Confronted with this inconsistency, Ray now “said that on thinking it over, he remembered that he went back to bed after waking up at 3 a.m. and that the negress got his breakfast about 4 o’clock a.m. and that he did not start as early as he thought, as he remembered the Lake Erie train went by just as he crossed the track north of the lake. He also said that instead of going directly by the house, as he had said in the morning, he had taken the road farther east and on the other side of the lake and only saw the house at a distance.”

  Gently chiding Lamphere for prevaricating, Schell “advised him that if he wanted my sympathy, prayers, and help to remain silent or tell the exact truth. I promised not to tell the prosecuting attorney.” The two men then engaged in “general conversation about Mrs. Gunness.” Finally, “after some two hours,” Lamphere opened up about the events of that fateful night.

  He “had been intimate with Mrs. Gunness from June 1907,” Ray explained. “Three times at her request,” he had purchased chloroform and once he “dug a hole in the hog lot for her and helped her put in the body of someone who she said had died suddenly about the house, and she thought the easiest way was to cover him up and say nothing about it.”

  Ray insisted that he had “no suspicions of Mrs. Gunness having murdered anyone until one night when he returned suddenly from Michigan City and, having bored some holes through a wall, saw her administer some chloroform to a man and hit him in the back of the head with a hatchet. Fearing her after that, he had quit working for her and returned to the house only occasionally to get his wages still due.”

  When Schell responded that he was not fully convinced by the story—“that it was contradictory in too many particulars”—Ray admitted that he “had taken money from Mrs. Gunness several times, making her ‘shell out’ or he would tell on her. Once she gave him $50. At
another time $15, and again $5. He would then go to saloons and when he was sober he would find the money all gone.” On the Saturday night before the fire, he had come to her house and, reminding her that he had witnessed the Helgelien murder, demanded more hush money. “She refused to give him more than $1, and he told her that he would get even with her.”

  At Schell’s prodding, Ray then went on to detail the events of the night of the conflagration:

  On Sunday night, after he and the negress had been drinking about 11 o’clock, the two went together to the Gunness house, letting themselves in by a key which he had and going quietly so as not to disturb another hired man who was in the house. With some of the chloroform which he had purchased for Mrs. Gunness before Helgelien disappeared and part of which he had kept in another bottle, the two gave Mrs. Gunness some chloroform, holding it under her nose until she became quiet. The little boy was in bed with her. They then gave some to the two girls who were in another room. He could not explain how all were together when found. He did not know, he was pretty drunk, but that was the way he remembered it.

  He and the negress then searched for the large sum of money which they were sure was hidden in the house, but found only a small amount. He did not set the house on fire, though he was not certain that the negress did not do it, for she was as drunk as he was. He stoutly protested that he had not arranged a candle so that it would burn down and later set fire to the place, and that he had nothing in his mind more than to get enough money to have a “big time” with. He and the negress left the house together, and at a certain point in the road, she went home and he went running away, greatly afraid because he saw the house burning.