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Several middle-aged men of means responded to
Gunness' ads. One of these was John Moe, who arrived from Elbow
Lake, Minnesota. He had brought more than $1,000 with him to pay
off her mortgage, or so he told neighbors, whom Gunness introduced
him to as her cousin. He disappeared from her farm within a week
of his arrival. Next came George Anderson from Tarkio, Missouri
who, like Peter Gunness and John Moe, was an immigrant from
Norway.
During dinner with Anderson, she raised the
issue of her mortgage. Anderson agreed that he would pay this off
if they decided to wed. Late that night, Anderson awoke to see her
standing over him, holding a guttering candle in her hand and with
a strange, sinister expression on her face. Without uttering a
word, she ran from the room. Anderson fled from the house, soon
taking a train to Missouri.
The suitors kept coming, but none, except for
Anderson, ever left the Gunness farm. By this time, she had begun
ordering huge trunks to be delivered to her home. Hack driver
Clyde Sturgis delivered many such trunks to her from La Porte and
later remarked how the heavyset woman would lift these enormous
trunks "like boxes of marshmallows", tossing them onto her wide
shoulders and carrying them into the house. She kept the shutters
of her house closed day and night; farmers traveling past the
dwelling at night saw her digging in the hog pen.
Ole B. Budsberg, an elderly widower from Iola,
Wisconsin, appeared next. He was last seen alive at the La Porte
Savings Bank on April 6, 1907, when he mortgaged his Wisconsin
land there, signing over a deed and obtaining several thousand
dollars in cash. Ole B. Budsberg's sons, Oscar and Mathew
Budsberg, had no idea that their father had gone off to visit
Gunness. When they finally discovered his destination, they wrote
to her; she promptly responded, saying she had never seen their
father.
Several other middle-aged men appeared and
disappeared in brief visits to the Gunness farm throughout 1907.
Then, in December 1907, Andrew Helgelien, a bachelor farmer from
Aberdeen, South Dakota, wrote to her and was warmly received. The
pair exchanged many letters, until a letter that overwhelmed
Helgelien, written in Gunness' own careful handwriting and dated
January 13, 1908. This letter was later found at the Helgelien
farm. It read:
In response to her letter, Helgelien flew to
her side in January 1908. He had with him a check for $2,900, his
savings, which he had drawn from his local bank. A few days after
Helgelien arrived, he and Gunness appeared at the Savings Bank in
La Porte and deposited the check. Helgelien vanished a few days
later, but Gunness appeared at the Savings Bank to make a $500
deposit and another deposit of $700 in the State Bank. At this
time, she started to have problems with Ray Lamphere.
In March 1908, Gunness sent several letters to
a farmer and horse dealer in Topeka, Kansas named Lon Townsend,
inviting him to visit her; he decided to put off the visit until
spring, and thus did not see her before a fire at her farm.
Gunness was also in correspondence with a man from Arkansas and
sent him a letter dated May 4, 1908. He would have visited her,
but did not because of the fire at her farm. Gunness allegedly
promised marriage to a suitor Bert Albert, which did not go
through because of his lack of wealth.
Turning Point
The hired hand Ray Lamphere was deeply in love
with Gunness; he performed any chore for her, no matter how
gruesome. He became jealous of the many men who arrived to court
his employer and began making scenes. She fired him on February 3,
1908. Shortly after dispensing with Lamphere, she presented
herself at the La Porte courthouse. She declared that her former
employee was not in his right mind and was a menace to the public.
She somehow convinced local authorities to hold a sanity hearing.
Lamphere was pronounced sane and released. Gunness was back a few
days later to complain to the sheriff that Lamphere had visited
her farm and argued with her. She contended that he posed a threat
to her family and had Lamphere arrested for trespassing.
Lamphere returned again and again to see her,
but she drove him away. Lamphere made thinly disguised threats; on
one occasion, he confided to farmer William Slater, "Helgelien
won't bother me no more. We fixed him for keeps." Helgelien had
long since disappeared from the precincts of La Porte, or so it
was believed. However, his brother, Asle Helgelien, was disturbed
when Andrew failed to return home and he wrote to Belle in
Indiana, asking her about his sibling's whereabouts. Gunness wrote
back, telling Asle Helgelien that his brother was not at her farm
and probably went to Norway to visit relatives. Asle Helgelien
wrote back saying that he did not believe his brother would do
that; moreover, he believed that his brother was still in the La
Porte area, the last place he was seen or heard from. Gunness
brazened it out; she told him that if he wanted to come and look
for his brother, she would help conduct a search, but she
cautioned him that searching for missing persons was an expensive
proposition. If she were to be involved in such a manhunt, she
stated, Asle Helgelien should be prepared to pay her for her
efforts. Asle Helgelien did come to La Porte, but not until May.
Lamphere represented an unresolved danger to
her; now Asle Helgelien was making inquiries that could very well
send her to the gallows. She told a lawyer in La Porte, M.E.
Leliter, that she feared for her life and that of her children.
Ray Lamphere, she said, had threatened to kill her and burn her
house down. She wanted to make out a will, in case Lamphere went
through with his threats. Leliter complied and drew up her will.
She left her entire estate to her children and then departed
Leliter's offices. She went to one of the La Porte banks holding
the mortgage for her property and paid this off. She did not go to
the police to tell them about Lamphere's allegedly
life-threatening conduct. The reason for this, most later
concluded, was that there had been no threats; she was merely
setting the stage for her own arson.
Lamphere suspected of arson and murder
Joe Maxson, who had been hired to replace
Lamphere in February 1908, awoke in the early hours of April 28,
1908, smelling smoke in his room, which was on the second floor of
the Gunness house. He opened the hall door to a sheet of flames.
Maxson screamed Gunness' name and those of her children but got no
response. He slammed the door and then, in his underwear, leapt
from the second-story window of his room, barely surviving the
fire that was closing in about him. He raced to town to get help,
but by the time the old-fashioned hook and ladder arrived at the
farm at early dawn the farmhouse was a gutted heap of smoking
ruins. Four bodies were found inside the house. One of the bodies
was that of a woman who could not immediately be identified as
Gunness, since she had no head. The head was never found. The
bodies of her children were found still in their beds. County
Sheriff Smutzer had somehow heard about Lamphere’s alleged
threats; he took one look at the carnage and quickly sought out
the ex-handyman. Leliter came forward to recount his tale about
Gunness' will and how she feared Lamphere would kill her and her
family and burn her house down.
Lamphere did not help his cause much. At the
moment Sheriff Smutzer confronted him and before a word was
uttered by the lawman, Lamphere exclaimed, "Did Widow Gunness and
the kids get out all right?" He was then told about the fire, but
he denied having anything to do with it, claiming that he was not
near the farm when the blaze occurred. A youth, John Solyem, was
brought forward. He said that he had been watching the Gunness
place and that he saw Lamphere running down the road from the
Gunness house just before the structure erupted in flames.
Lamphere snorted to the boy: "You wouldn't look me in the eye and
say that!"
"Yes, I will", replied Solyem. "You found me
hiding behind the bushes and you told me you'd kill me if I didn't
get out of there." Lamphere was arrested and charged with murder
and arson. Then scores of investigators, sheriff's deputies,
coroner's men and many volunteers began to search the ruins for
evidence.
The body of the headless woman was of deep
concern to La Porte residents. C. Christofferson, a neighboring
farmer, took one look at the charred remains of this body and said
that it was not the remains of Belle Gunness. So did another
farmer, L. Nicholson, and so did Mrs. Austin Cutler, an old friend
of Gunness. More of Gunness' old friends, Mrs. May Olander and Mr.
Sigward Olsen, arrived from Chicago. They examined the remains of
the headless woman and said it was not Gunness.
Doctors then measured the remains, and, making
allowances for the missing neck and head, stated the corpse was
that of a woman who stood five feet three inches tall and weighed
no more than 150 pounds. Friends and neighbors, as well as the La
Porte clothiers who made her dresses and other garments, swore
that Gunness was taller than 5'8" and weighed between 180 and 200
pounds. Detailed measurements of the body were compared with those
on file with several La Porte stores where she purchased her
apparel.
When the two sets of measurements were
compared, the authorities concluded that the headless woman could
not possibly have been Belle Gunness, even when the ravages of the
fire on the body were taken into account. (The flesh was badly
burned but intact). Moreover, Dr. J. Meyers examined the internal
organs of the dead woman. He sent stomach contents of the victims
to a pathologist in Chicago, who reported months later that the
organs contained lethal doses of strychnine.
Morbid Discovery
Gunness' dentist, Dr. Ira P. Norton, said that
if the teeth/dental work of the headless corpse had been located
he could definitely ascertain if it was she. Thus Louis "Klondike"
Schultz, a former miner, was hired to build a sluice and begin
sifting the debris (as more bodies were unearthed, the sluice was
used to isolate human remains on a larger scale). On May 19, 1908,
a piece of bridgework was found consisting of two human canine
teeth, their roots still attached, porcelain teeth and gold crown
work in between. Norton identified them as work done for Gunness.
As a result, Coroner Charles Mack officially concluded that the
adult female body discovered in the ruins was Belle Gunness.
Asle Helgelien arrived in La Porte and told
Sheriff Smutzer that he believed his brother had met with foul
play at Gunness' hands. Then, Joe Maxson came forward with
information that could not be ignored: He told the Sheriff that
Gunness had ordered him to bring loads of dirt by wheelbarrow to a
large area surrounded by a high wire fence where the hogs were
fed. Maxson said that there were many deep depressions in the
ground that had been covered by dirt. These filled-in holes,
Gunness had told Maxson, contained rubbish. She wanted the ground
made level, so he filled in the depressions.
Smutzer took a dozen men back to the farm and
began to dig. On May 3, 1908, the diggers unearthed the body of
Jennie Olson (vanished December 1906). Then they found the small
bodies of two unidentified children. Subsequently the body of
Andrew Helgelien was unearthed (his overcoat was found to be worn
by Lamphere). As days progressed and the gruesome work continued,
one body after another was discovered in Gunness' hog pen:
Ole B. Budsberg of Iola, Wisconsin, (vanished
May 1907);
Thomas Lindboe, who had left Chicago and had
gone to work as a hired man for Gunness three years earlier;
Henry Gurholdt of Scandinavia, Wisconsin, who
had gone to wed her a year earlier, taking $1,500 to her; a
watch corresponding to one belonging to Gurholdt was found with
a body;
Olaf Svenherud, from Chicago;
John Moe of Elbow Lake, Minnesota; his watch
was found in Lamphere's possession;
Olaf Lindbloom, age 35 from Wisconsin.
Reports of other possible victims began to come
in:
William Mingay, a coachman of New York City,
who had left that city on April 1, 1904;
Herman Konitzer of Chicago who disappeared in
January 1906;
Charles Edman of New Carlisle, Indiana;
George Berry of Tuscola, Illinois;
Christie Hilkven of Dovre, Barron County,
Wisconsin, who sold his farm and came to La Porte in 1906;
Chares Neiburg, a 28-year-old Scandinavian
immigrant who lived in Philadelphia, told friends that he was
going to visit Gunness in June 1906 and never came back — he had
been working for a saloon keeper and took $500 with him;
John H. McJunkin of Coraopolis (near
Pittsburgh) left his wife in December 1906 after corresponding
with a La Porte woman;
Olaf Jensen, a Norwegian immigrant of
Carroll, Indiana, wrote his relatives in 1906 he was going to
marry a wealthy widow at La Porte;
Henry Bizge of La Porte who disappeared June
1906 and his hired man named Edward Canary of Pink Lake Ill who
also vanished 1906;
Bert Chase of Mishawaka, Indiana sold his
butcher shop and told friends of a wealthy widow and that he was
going to look her up; his brother received a telegram supposedly
from Aberdeen, South Dakota claiming Bert had been killed in a
train wreck; his brother investigated and found the telegram was
fictitious;
Tonnes Peterson Lien of Rushford, Minnesota,
is alleged to have disappeared April 2, 1907;
A gold ring marked "S.B. May 28, 1907" was
found in the ruins;
A hired man named George Bradley of Tuscola,
Illinois, is alleged to have gone to La Porte to meet a widow
and three children in October 1907;
T.J. Tiefland of Minneapolis is alleged to
have come to see Gunness in 1907;
Frank Riedinger a farmer of Waukesha,
Wisconsin, came to Indiana in 1907 to marry and never returned;
Emil Tell, a Swede from Kansas City,
Missouri, is alleged to have gone in 1907 to La Porte;
Lee Porter of Bartonville, Oklahoma separated
from his wife and told his brother he was going to marry a
wealthy widow at La Porte;
John E. Hunter left Duquesne, Pennsylvania,
on November 25, 1907 after telling his daughters he was going to
marry a wealthy widow in Northern Indiana.
Two other Pennsylvanians — George Williams of
Wapawallopen and Ludwig Stoll of Mount Yeager — also left their
homes to marry in the West.
Abraham Phillips, a railway man of
Burlington, West Virginia, left in the winter of 1907 to go to
Northern Indiana and marry a rich widow — a railway watch was
found in the debris of the house.
Benjamin Carling of Chicago, Illinois, was
last seen by his wife in 1907 after telling her that he was
going to La Porte to secure an investment with a rich widow; he
had with him $1,000 from an insurance company and borrowed money
from several investors as well; in June 1908 his widow was able
to identify his remains from La Porte's Pauper's cemetery by the
contour of his skull and three missing teeth;
Aug. Gunderson of Green Lake, Wisconsin;
Ole Oleson of Battle Creek, Michigan;
Lindner Nikkelsen of Huron, South Dakota;
Andrew Anderson of Lawrence, Kansas;
Johann Sorensen of St. Joseph, Missouri;
A possible victim was a man named Hinkley;
Reported unnamed victims were:
a daughter of Mrs. H. Whitzer of Toledo,
Ohio, who had attended Indiana University near La Porte in 1902;
an unknown man and woman are alleged to have
disappeared in September 1906, the same night Jennie Olson went
missing. Gunness claimed they were a Los Angeles "professor" and
his wife who had taken Jennie to California;
a brother of Miss Jennie Graham of Waukesha,
Wisconsin, who had left her to marry a rich widow in La Porte
but vanished;
a hired man from Ohio age 50 name unknown is
alleged to have disappeared and Gunness became the "heir" to his
horse and buggy;
an unnamed man from Montana told people at a
resort he was going to sell Gunness his horse and buggy, which
were found with several other horses and buggies at the farm.
Most of the remains found on the property could
not be identified. Because of the crude recovery methods, the
exact number of individuals unearthed on the Gunness farm is
unknown, but is believed to be approximately twelve. On May 19,
1908 remains of approximately seven unknown victims were buried in
two coffins in unmarked graves in the pauper's section of
LaPorte's Pine Lake Cemetery. Andrew Helgelien and Jennie Olson
are buried in La Porte's Patton Cemetery, near Peter Gunness.
The
trial of Ray Lamphere
Ray Lamphere was arrested on May 22, 1908 and
tried for murder and arson. He denied the charges of arson and
murder that were filed against him. His defense hinged on the
assertion that the body was not Gunness'.
Lamphere's lawyer, Wirt Worden, developed
evidence that contradicted Norton's identification of the teeth
and bridgework. A local jeweler testified that though the gold in
the bridgework had emerged from the fire almost undamaged, the
fierce heat of the conflagration had melted the gold plating on
several watches and items of gold jewelry. Local doctors
replicated the conditions of the fire by attaching a similar piece
of dental bridgework to a human jawbone and placing it in a
blacksmith’s forge. The real teeth crumbled and disintegrated; the
porcelain teeth came out pocked and pitted, with the gold parts
rather melted (both the artificial elements were damaged to a
greater degree than those in the bridgework offered as evidence of
Gunness' identity). The hired hand Joe Maxson and another man also
testified that they’d seen "Klondike" Schultz take the bridgework
out of his pocket and plant it just before it was "discovered".
Lamphere was found guilty of arson, but acquitted of murder. On
November 26, 1908, he was sentenced to 20 years in the State
Prison (in Michigan City). He died of tuberculosis on December 30,
1909.
On January 14, 1910, the Rev. E. A. Schell came
forward with a confession that Lamphere was said to have made to
him while the clergyman was comforting the dying man. In it,
Lamphere revealed Gunness' crimes and swore that she was still
alive. Lamphere had stated to the Reverend Schell and to a fellow
convict, Harry Meyers, shortly before his death, that he had not
murdered anyone, but that he had helped Gunness bury many of her
victims. When a victim arrived, she made him comfortable, charming
him and cooking a large meal. She then drugged his coffee and when
the man was in a stupor, she split his head with a meat chopper.
Sometimes she would simply wait for the suitor to go to bed and
then enter the bedroom by candlelight and chloroform her sleeping
victim. A powerful woman, Gunness would then carry the body to the
basement, place it on a table, and dissect it. She then bundled
the remains and buried these in the hog pen and the grounds about
the house. Belle had become an expert at dissection, thanks to
instruction she had received from her second husband, the butcher
Peter Gunness. To save time, she sometimes poisoned her victims'
coffee with strychnine. She also varied her disposal methods,
sometimes dumping the corpse into the hog-scalding vat and
covering the remains with quicklime. Lamphere even stated that if
Belle was overly tired after murdering one of her victims, she
merely chopped up the remains and, in the middle of the night,
stepped into her hog pen and fed the remains to the hogs.
The handyman also cleared up the mysterious
question of the headless female corpse found in the smoking ruins
of Gunness' home. Gunness had lured this woman from Chicago on the
pretense of hiring her as a housekeeper only days before she
decided to make her permanent escape from La Porte. Gunness,
according to Lamphere, had drugged the woman, then bashed in her
head and decapitated the body, taking the head, which had weights
tied to it, to a swamp where she threw it into deep water. Then
she chloroformed her children, smothered them to death, and
dragged their small bodies, along with the headless corpse, to the
basement.
She dressed the female corpse in her old
clothing, and removed her false teeth, placing these beside the
headless corpse to assure it being identified as Belle Gunness.
She then torched the house and fled. Lamphere had helped her, he
admitted, but she had not left by the road where he waited for her
after the fire had been set. She had betrayed her one-time partner
in crime in the end by cutting across open fields and then
disappearing into the woods. Some accounts suggest that Lamphere
admitted that he took her to Stillwell (a town about nine miles
from La Porte) and saw her off on a train to Chicago.
Lamphere said that Gunness was a rich woman,
that she had murdered 42 men by his count, perhaps more, and had
taken amounts from them ranging from $1,000 to $32,000. She had
allegedly accumulated more than $250,000 through her murder
schemes over the years—a huge fortune for those days (about $6.3
million in 2008 dollars). She had a small amount remaining in one
of her savings accounts, but local banks later admitted that she
had indeed withdrawn most of her funds shortly before the fire.
The fact that Gunness withdrew most of her money suggested that
she was planning to evade the law.
Aftermath and Belle's fate
Gunness was, for several decades, allegedly
seen or sighted in cities and towns throughout the United States.
Friends, acquaintances, and amateur detectives apparently spotted
her on the streets of Chicago, San Francisco, New York, and Los
Angeles. As late as 1931, Gunness was reported alive and living in
a Mississippi town, where she supposedly owned a great deal of
property and lived the life of a doyenne. Smutzer, for more than
20 years, received an average of two reports a month. She became
part of American criminal folklore, a female Bluebeard.
The bodies of Gunness' three children were
found in the home's wreckage, but the headless adult female corpse
found with them was never positively identified. Gunness' true
fate is unknown; La Porte residents were divided between believing
that she was killed by Lamphere and that she had faked her own
death. In 1931, a woman known as "Esther Carlson" was arrested in
Los Angeles for poisoning August Lindstrom for money. Two people
who had known Gunness claimed to recognize her from photographs,
but the identification was never proved. Carlson died while
awaiting trial.
Burial, exhumation and DNA analysis
The body believed to be that of Belle Gunness
was buried next to her first husband at Forest Home Cemetery in
Forest Park, Illinois.
On November 5, 2007, with the permission of
descendants of Belle's sister, the headless body was exhumed from
Gunness' grave in Forest Home Cemetery by a team of forensic
anthropologists and graduate students from the University of
Indianapolis in an effort to learn her true identity. It was
initially hoped that a sealed envelope flap on a letter found at
the victim's farm would contain enough DNA to be compared to that
of the body. Unfortunately, there was not enough DNA there, so
efforts continue to find a reliable source for comparison
purposes, including the disinterment of additional bodies and
contact with known living relatives.