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

by Harold Schechter

  After hearing Ray’s statement, Schell went home and transcribed it from memory on two sheets of paper, which he showed to Ray the following day. Urged to share it with Prosecuting Attorney Smith “and save the county the cost of the trial and his sisters the expense of defending him,” Ray “agreed to sign it and give it to the prosecuting attorney.” Schell then met with Smith and “told him that Lamphere was going to confess.” That, according to the pastor, was the end of his involvement with Lamphere.

  “I still feel that the communication was privileged,” Schell told the Tribune reporter, “that I owed it to his sisters to refuse to make it public until now, and that the church whose minister I was at La Porte had a right to expect silence from me, and that failure on my part to keep the confidence a secret might deter others needing the encouragement of a Christian preacher from opening his heart to some man of God.”[17]

  The Chicago Tribune’s claim that it had scored a journalistic coup with Schell’s statement was greeted with scorn by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which asserted that the Tribune’s ostensible “scoop” merely corroborated what the Post-Dispatch had already published two days earlier. Far from redounding to the Tribune’s credit, “the publication of the confession . . . emphasizes the Post-Dispatch’s motto, ‘First in Everything.’”[18]

  Freed from its pledge of confidentiality, the Post-Dispatch now confirmed what many had suspected all along: that its anonymous source was the Reverend Schell. In a front-page story on Saturday, January 15, F. A. Behymer, the reporter who had gotten the confession from Schell, gave a full account of the episode—a “fascinating story of newspaper resource and enterprise” that had led to “this notable achievement in newsgathering.”

  Behymer—who went to work for the paper as an eighteen-year-old and would remain on the staff for the next sixty-four years until his retirement in 1952[19]—traveled to Schell’s Iowa home on Sunday, January 9, where he learned from the pastor’s wife that her husband “had gone to Adair, 200 miles up the state, to dedicate a church. Mrs. Schell said that her husband had spoken the last word about Lamphere’s confession and it would be useless to see him.”

  Undeterred, Behymer proceeded to Adair, where he found the pastor “at a home at which he was being entertained.” “Following a planned line of attack,” Behymer then engaged Schell in a discussion of the crime. Sensing that the pastor “thought the world ought to know the truth” but felt constrained by his pledge of confidentiality, Behymer proceeded by indirection. Instead of asking straightforward questions, he put forth theoretical propositions about what might have occurred. Schell responded in kind, filling in details “not as one giving information but as one suggesting theoretical explanations.

  “Both of us were playing parts,” Behymer explained. “I was seeking facts by asking for theories, and Dr. Schell was imparting information under the guise of hypothesis. But it was a harmless masquerade, because neither was deceiving the other but only playing at it.”

  Given their little charade, it was unclear to Behymer “how much of the information had been given involuntarily and how much intentionally.” But “it did not matter. I had the Lamphere confession, and Dr. Schell knew I had it, and said so, but he asked me not to reveal the source of my information. I promised and kept the promise until Dr. Schell, by revealing the source of the information himself, released me from the obligation.”[20]

  Questioned by reporters following the publication of Schell’s statement, Wirt Worden responded with a snort. “I went to see Lamphere in jail immediately upon hearing that he had been talking with Dr. Schell,” Worden explained. “I asked him if he had confessed. Lamphere was holding the Bible given to him by Dr. Schell, and standing there with his hand on the book, he laughed and said he would never tell the clergyman anything he wouldn’t tell me. He then repeated what he had told the preacher. It was the same story he clung to all through the case, absolutely denying that he had killed Mrs. Gunness or set her house on fire. Lamphere insisted that was all he told the pastor.”[21]

  A local physician, interviewed by the La Porte Argus-Bulletin, was equally dismissive. Schell’s story, he said, “was the most ridiculous thing I ever saw in print. No matter how deep might have been their sleep, it’s impossible that Lamphere and the negress could have chloroformed Mrs. Gunness and her three children without awakening them. And if Mrs. Gunness had been awakened, there would have been screaming, and Maxson would have heard it.”[22]

  Prosecuting Attorney Smith was of a different opinion. “I know it’s authentic,” he said about Schell’s statement. “There are remarks in the story which Schell made to me after his talks with Lamphere, quoted exactly.”

  Even so, there was one element of the confession that Smith questioned. “Schell told me to arrest a certain negress,” Smith told reporters. “He didn’t tell me why, but now I know. In my opinion, however, Lamphere lied to Schell when he told that this colored person went to the Gunness house with Lamphere and assisted him in the murder of the woman and her children. I think this person helped plan the thing, but she was too wise a girl to go to the house with Lamphere and assist in the execution.” [23]

  41.

  THE SKULL

  The “negress” referred to in Schell’s statement was, of course, Elizabeth Smith—“Nigger Liz,” as her neighbors had no compunctions about calling her. Immediately following the publication of Ray’s reported confession on Saturday, January 15, 1910, she was arrested at home on the order of Judge Richter and subjected to a four-hour “sweating” at the county jail. She admitted that Ray had spent part of the night of April 27 at her home but fiercely denied that she had accompanied him to the Gunness house or had anything to do with the fire. She was then released on a five-hundred-dollar bond.

  She was expected to give grand jury testimony the following Thursday, January 22, but failed to appear. She was “sick at home,” the newspapers reported, “and her physicians say she may not be able to undergo an inquisition for weeks. Worry over her position in the affair and the action of the authorities has made her seriously ill.”[1]

  She was still “prostrated” on February 4 and unable to appear before the grand jury that had been called to examine her. One month later, on Saturday, March 5, State’s Attorney Smith announced that, owing to the lack of “tangible evidence on which to hold her for trial, the decision had been reached to drop the case against Elizabeth Smith for alleged complicity in the crimes committed at the Gunness farm.”[2]

  That same day, Wirt Worden had his own announcement to make, telling reporters that “there would be sensational developments shortly in connection with the Gunness case,” ones that confirmed his long-held belief “that she is alive.”

  The big news promised by Worden broke the following day: Belle Gunness had been located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, identified by a local police officer, Louis Richmond. “This woman has by her peculiar actions caused at least three others to suspect that she is Mrs. Gunness,” declared Richmond, who immediately wrote to Sheriff Antiss in La Porte, urging him “to send a deputy to the Michigan city to arrest the woman.”[3]

  This announcement was greeted with widespread and well-justified skepticism. Just two months earlier, in January, papers throughout the Midwest had trumpeted the news that Belle had been arrested in Willmar, Minnesota, where she was working under an alias as housekeeper for a farmer named Gus Kirby. In mid-February, word came from Washington State that the “archmurderess” had been “found on a ranch, sixteen miles from Bellingham by United States Marshal Andrew Williams.”[4]

  As in both those previous instances, the Michigan story proved to be false, the woman in question having been identified as Belle for no better reason than that she “was a Norwegian and had inserted advertisements in Norwegian newspapers seeking a husband.”[5] Despite these repeated mirages, sightings of “La Porte’s Lucret
ia Borgia” would continue unabated. Before the year was out, she would be reported as living in Moscow, Idaho; Greenville, Illinois; Palouse, Washington; and Galcon, Oklahoma, where she was ostensibly cohabiting “with a man who is the possessor of a fur coat, two revolvers, two rifles, and two shotguns.”[6]

  Each of these supposed discoveries was scrupulously investigated by La Porte authorities at the behest of State’s Attorney Smith. Though Smith remained convinced that Belle was dead, he insisted on running down every lead, intent on proving “that every clue brought up by those who cling to the belief that Mrs. Gunness is alive is without foundation.”[7]

  Wirt Worden—one of those who clung most tenaciously to that belief—got a seemingly significant boost in December 1912, when a prisoner named Harry Myers, doing time in the Michigan City penitentiary, came forward with a startling story.

  A convicted burglar and horse thief, Myers had been put to work in the prison and, while nursing the dying Ray Lamphere, had obtained—so he claimed—a “deathbed statement” from Ray. According to Myers, Ray insisted that Belle Gunness was alive. The headless adult body found in the ruins was that of a Chicago woman brought to the Gunness farm as a housekeeper and poisoned a few days later. She was then decapitated “to make identification almost impossible.” Her head—wrapped in a piece of carpet and placed inside a wooden box containing “three other heads, two of them that looked as if they had been dead some time”—was given to Lamphere, who “buried it in a field of rye.” Belle had killed her three children, also with poison, to “keep them from talking” about all the male visitors who had vanished so mysteriously.

  On the night of the conflagration, Ray had driven Belle “in a two-seated rig drawn by a pony to a point nine miles from La Porte, where another man whom he did not know met her and drove her to Chicago.” She was carrying “two large valises and a small basket. In the basket was a box made of tin containing a large pile of paper money, the smallest denomination being $100 bills.” After he “delivered Mrs. Gunness to the other man,” Ray “returned to the Gunness farm and set fire to the house in which were the bodies of the Chicago woman and three children.” For his work, he received $500.[8]

  Myers’s widely publicized revelation brought a new flood of reported sightings. Within two weeks, “at least twenty Mrs. Gunnesses [had] been seen in different parts of the country and reported to police.”[9] Most of these tips were so patently implausible that La Porte authorities paid no attention to them. One, however—a telegram from police in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, claiming that the notorious fugitive was living in a small mining village ten miles away—was taken seriously enough that the La Porte police chief, William Meinke, was dispatched to Lethbridge to confirm her identity. The woman in question, according to information conveyed by a Norwegian miner named Foreland, “weighed about the same as Mrs. Gunness and is of the same age. She has three trunks, kept securely locked in her basement, that correspond to those which were told about by witnesses at the time the murders were discovered.” Foreland also claimed that he was “in possession of a letter written to the woman which commenced with the words ‘Dear Belle.’”

  Meinke’s trip up north, however, proved to be in vain. He returned to La Porte on January 27, 1913, and announced that “the woman is not Mrs. Gunness.”[10]

  Shortly before five p.m. on Friday, March 17, 1916, Elizabeth Smith—“the only person in the world who might have lifted the veil of mystery from the Gunness case”[11]—died at the home of a friend. No one, including herself, knew her exact age, though, as she told the doctor who attended her in her final illness, she suspected it was “pretty near eighty.” A few days earlier, while lying on her cot beside the stove in the only habitable room of her tumbledown shack on Pulaski Street, an errant spark set the mattress on fire. Neighbors, hearing her screams, rushed to her aid and, after swiftly extinguished the fire, carried her to her friend’s home. Though the burns she suffered weren’t life-threatening, the shock of the experience, combined with her frail physical condition, proved too much for the “aged negress.”[12]

  Knowing that her end was near, Smith asked to see Wirt Worden. Over the years, she had promised him repeatedly that, when she knew she was dying, she “would tell him everything she knew of Belle Gunness and the murder farm.” As luck would have it, however, Worden was in Louisiana on a business matter. By the time he got back to La Porte, Elizabeth Smith was in the ground.[13]

  In announcing her death, newspapers recounted the salient facts of her life: her childhood spent with her widowed mother, an ex-slave known as “Granny” Olmstead, who lived to be 104 and claimed to have known George Washington; her marriage to a Union army cook who died early, leaving her with a federal pension of $24 a month; her own shrewdness as a businesswoman that allowed her to acquire six houses and a savings account of several thousand dollars. And, of course, her youthful reputation as a “colored beauty” who had “dazzled many a white man.”[14]

  In the latter years of her life, Smith, like many old people, had become what we now call a compulsive hoarder. A newspaperman, visiting her shack sometime after her death, was shocked at its condition. “There are tons and tons of rubbish in the old shack,” he reported. “The front door was piled high with rubbish of all kinds, all absolutely valueless. The floor was covered several feet deep with papers, broken lamps, chairs, benches, tin cans, bits of window screen, rags, and filth and dirt of every kind and description. Rubbish was piled high around the little stove in one room, where she was finally compelled to live because all the others were so full of rubbish. Her coal ashes were dumped on the floor by the stove.”[15]

  The shack being beyond salvation, plans were made to tear it down and sell the lumber, studs, and sheathing. A man named Andrew Harness was retained to clean the place out and demolish it. Eventually, he would sell nearly a thousand pounds of rags and scrap metal to local junk dealers and cart twenty wagonloads of refuse to the town dump.

  On Friday, May 5, while rummaging about in the knee-deep debris of Smith’s shack, Harness turned up a human skull—a “musty, cob-webby” relic, missing its lower jaw and with “only a few rotted roots to mark the upper set of teeth.”[16] Newspapers throughout the country immediately announced a possible solution to the Gunness mystery. Should the skull prove to be Belle’s, its discovery would confirm one widely held theory: “that Ray Lamphere and Elizabeth Smith, his black paramour, murdered Mrs. Gunness and her children, dragged the bodies to the cellar and then severed the head of Mrs. Gunness from the body so that it might not be identified and suspicion fall upon her for the deed.” Alternatively, wrote the Chicago Tribune, “if experts can prove that the skull found in the shack of ‘Nigger Liz’ fits that of the torso found, then it may be established that Mrs. Gunness escaped the fire.”[17]

  The excitement provoked by Harness’s find, however, was exceedingly short-lived. Within twenty-four hours, doctors examining the skull declared that it was at least forty years old, while neighbors of Smith’s affirmed that it had been in her possession “long before she knew there was such a woman as Belle Gunness.” Smith, it seemed, was what the newspapers quickly labeled a “voodoo doctor” who “used the skull to conjure with.”

  “My mother, she’s dead now,” said one of Smith’s acquaintances, “but she often told me about how she’d see Nigger Liz sitting up at night with the light shining through the holes in the skull and Nigger Liz she’d sit and read to it out of the Bible.” Others testified that it was Smith’s “custom to write the names of those persons upon whom she wished to work a malicious charm upon the skull and go through her mysterious ceremonies over the pencil marks.” There were, in fact, a number of names inscribed in pencil on the cranium of the skull, one of which—“Phil Bungers”—appeared to refer to a long-retired La Porte police officer, Phil Bongerz, “whom [Smith] hated most fiercely.”[18]

  Unconst
rained by anything as banal as verifiable fact, the Chicago Tribune proclaimed that Smith—“a known ‘voodooist,’ a worker of charms and incantations—was a friend of Mrs. Gunness and often visited her”:

  Papers dug from the dirt in her shack lead to the belief that she may have been engaged in the same practices as Mrs. Gunness, or may even have been the latter’s mentor in crime. There are letters containing proposals of marriage from men she evidently got into communication with through marriage newspapers. There are recipes for weird charms and love philters, and papers on hypnotism and clairvoyance. Then there is the question of how she obtained enough money to acquire almost a whole block of La Porte property, as well as a comfortable bank account. Was the money obtained in the same way as Mrs. Gunness’, or did she share in the latter’s wealth for some part she played in helping fill the graves on the “death farm”?[19]

  The source of the skull would never be determined, though one individual came forward with a colorful, if highly dubious, explanation. His name was C. F. Russell. A Barnumesque character who ran a “traveling show” that toured the army outposts of the western frontier, Russell claimed that, twenty-five years earlier, Elizabeth Smith had been suffering from “a tumor in the abdomen” and had consulted “an old dark mammy,” who provided her with a surefire cure: a magical incantation to be recited while rubbing the skull of a murderer: