Say what you might about Belle Gunness, but she sure had a head for business. Once she discovered the money that could be made in insurance, there was just no stopping her.
Mrs. Gunness didn`t sell insurance; she collected it–first on one husband, and then on the next.
Finally, to cut down on troublesome paperwork involving insurance documents and the like, she switched to boyfriends bearing dowries.
Contemporary serial killer John Wayne Gacy was convicted of killing 33 persons. By some accounts as many as 42 suitors called to court Belle Gunness on her isolated farm outside La Porte, Ind., but only one ever lived to tell about it. Lucky for him, he was a light sleeper.
And no one was any the wiser until the predawn hours of April 28, 1908, when Belle`s cozy farmhouse burned to the ground, leaving the charred corpses of a woman and three children in the ashes.
Not long afterward 10 more bodies were dug up in her fenced-in chicken yard, and folks around La Porte were startled to discover that the poor widow Gunness had lived a secret life of ”Belle the Butcher,” a female Bluebeard. The original news story reporting the death of Belle Gunness was no big deal. It appeared on an inside page of The Chicago Tribune of April 29, 1908, next to an ad for Foreman Quality Clothes.
Under the headline, FOUR DIE IN FIRE; SUITOR IS IN TOILS, the brief article told how the wealthy widow and her three children had perished in an early morning blaze in their Indiana farm home.
”The blackened forms of the little ones were found huddled about that of the mother, as if they had sought her protection as the flames engulfed them,” the story read. ”Late this afternoon the bodies of Mrs. Gunness and her three children, Myrtle, aged 11; Lucy, aged 9; and Philip, aged 5, were removed from the smoldering ruins.”
The story went on to say that only the previous afternoon the middle-aged widow, apprehensive for her life, had brought valuable papers into town and placed them in a safety deposit vault.
Mrs. Gunness was quoted as telling her lawyer, M.E. Leliter, that she feared her ex-handyman, Ray Lamphere, who had become infatuated with her.
”I`m afraid he`s going to kill me and burn the house.”
Before the day was done Sheriff Albert Smutzer would arrest Lamphere for arson and murder.
A follow-up story on Thursday, April 30, beneath a photo of the loving Mrs. Gunness and the three tots, was a testimony to turn-of-the-century interrogation methods:
”Ray Lamphere, arrested last night in connection with the destruction of the country home of Mrs. Belle Gunness, a well-to-do widow, which resulted in her death and that of her three children, was today subjected to two sweatings by Prosecutor Smith and Sheriff Smutzer, but maintained that he did not set fire to the house.”
The story also disclosed that a will, executed by Mrs. Gunness just 12 hours before her death, left her estate to the three children or, in the event of their deaths, to the Norwegian Orphans` Home in Chicago.
But then the plot began to thicken. Coroner Charles Mack`s examination of the charred remains of the dead woman revealed that the body had no head!
”Where is the head of Mrs. Belle Gunness?” asked a news story of May 1. ”Today a score of men dug among the ruins in a vain search for the head. If it cannot be found, credence will be given to the theory that a murderer stole into her room in the dark, decapitated her and then set fire to the house so that the flames might cover up the evidence of his deed.”
It was the digging for Belle`s missing head that unearthed the real horror, a grisly tale that shocked the nation.
In the first day of rooting around ”soft spots” in the farm widow`s chicken yard, the sheriff`s men uncovered five more bodies, some of them dismembered and the parts in sewn-up gunny sacks.
Asle Helgelein, who had come all the way from Mansfield, S.D., to search for his missing brother, Andrew, showed up at the widow`s farm just as the first sack was being opened. Looking at the hacked-up body he exclaimed,
”That`s Andy!”
He told the sheriff that his brother had left his home in Aberdeen after drawing $3,000 out of the bank–a tidy sum in those days. His pockets full of cash, Andrew, described as a big, handsome man, hopped a train for La Porte in response to matrimonial advertisement the widow had placed in a Scandinavian- language newspaper.
When Asle Helgelein heard nothing more from his brother, he wrote to Mrs. Gunness.
”He has returned to Norway,” she advised him by return mail.
The discovery that Andrew Helgelein had not gone back to Norway was only the first shock. By sundown four more bodies had been unearthed.
One of them was identified as that of Jennie Olson, Mrs. Gunness` 15-year-old adopted daughter, who had not been seen in two years. When asked about her daughter, Belle explained that Jennie had been sent away to a Lutheran school in Los Angeles, where opportunities for a bright young girl were so much greater than in rural Indiana.
There were also the body of a tall man with a black mustache and those of two children.
On the following day four more bodies were exhumed, and several days later, another, for a total of 10, not counting the four found earlier in the fire ruins.
One of the chicken-yard bodies turned out to be that of John Moo of Elbow Lake, Minn. He had gone to La Porte two years earlier with $1,000 cash to pay off the mortgage on Mrs. Gunness` farm as a wedding gift.
The mortgage was paid, but there were no nuptials.
”He went back home,” Belle explained. ”The romance just didn`t work out.”
And then there was Ole Budsberg, the father of several grown sons, who left his home in Iola, Wis., in April of 1907 with a $3,000 bank draft to marry the Indiana widow.
When his sons failed to hear from him, they wrote to the La Porte Savings Bank asking for information. A bank cashier wrote back that Mrs. Gunness told him Budsberg had gone to Oregon to buy a farm.
The crafty widow followed up the banker`s report by writing a letter to Ole in care of his Iola home, asking what had become of him and asserting that she was still willing to become his bride if he would have her.
Ole ”bought the farm” all right, but not in Oregon. His body was among those dug up in Belle`s chicken yard.
Coroner Mack sent the stomachs of the fire victims, along with that of Andrew Helgelein, to Chicago, where their contents were examined by Dr. Walter S. Haines of Rush Medical College.
Dr. Haines reported back: ”Helgelein`s stomach contained arsenic in abundance and a considerable quantity of strychnine.”
The bodies of the woman and children found in the fire ruins also contained ”an abundance of arsenic and a considerable amount of strychnine.” The other bodies exhumed in the farmyard had been reduced to skeletons, and little more could be learned from their bones.
The gruesome discoveries, however, got folks to wondering about the deaths of Mrs. Gunness` two legal husbands, both of which occurred under suspicious circumstances, come to think of it.
The first, Max Sorenson, was insured for $8,500–a good-sized bundle 80 years ago. The second, Peter Gunness, had a $3,500 policy on his life.
The question now, as incredulous workers continued to dig up Belle`s barnyard, became: Was it really Belle`s body that was burned in the fire, or that of yet another murder victim?
Before the answer could be determined, folks got to know quite a bit about Belle Gunness.
For some time she had been considered a local celebrity around La Porte after the story got out that in her childhood she had performed as a tightrope walker with a circus in Norway, where her father was a sword swallower and contortionist.
The fact of the matter was, Brynhilde Poulsdatter, as she was born on Nov. 11, 1859, was the daughter of dirt-poor Norwegian tenant farmers Peter and Arabella Poulson of the village of Selbu, where she worked as a cattle girl. She called herself Bella, after her mother.
She left Norway at the age of 8, and came to Chicago to live with her married sister, Nellie Larson, in the 900 block of North Francisco Avenue. Nellie and her husband had paid Bella`s passage over.
Bella Americanized her name to Belle, and in 1883 married Max ”Mads”
Sorenson, a Chicago department-store detective. They settled in the Austin neighborhood on the West Side, and in 1894 they opened a small candy store on West Grand Avenue.
Belle and Mads had four children, but only two, Myrtle and Lucy, survived. The couple also adopted Jennie Olson in infancy after her father, Antone Olson, decided the Sorensons could give her a far better life than he could provide.
Lucy and Myrtle subsequently perished in the burning farmhouse, and Jennie ended up in the chicken yard.
Fire consumed the confectionary in 1898, and Belle, who had personally insured the store, collected the insurance. That appears to have been the initial business transaction, so to speak, in which Belle discovered a promising new source of income.
Belle herself sounded the alarm when the shop burst into flames, and ran from the building with her children. Jennie was slightly burned in the fire, which Belle told authorities broke out when a kerosene lamp exploded.
At the time little significance was attached to the fact that no glass from the lamp was found.
The Sorensens then moved to a home at 620 Alma St. (now Latrobe Avenue), in the Austin neighborhood. It, too, was the scene of a suspicious fire for which Belle was paid insurance.
Mads died there one evening two years later after complaining of sickness. His death was attributed to ”convulsions,” but the talk later was that he actually died of strychnine poisoning ”in his apple pipe”
(windpipe). There was also some suspicion surrounding the deaths of their first two children.
Belle, meanwhile, collected $8,500 on Mads` life and $5,000 for the sale of the house, and departed for Indiana.
There, on Nov. 9, 1901, according to local records, she purchased a two-story brick home on McClung Road, a mile or so northwest of La Porte.
It was a sturdy structure, built in 1857 by H.B. Holcomb, head of one of five families that founded La Porte in 1832.
Belle and Peter Gunness, also known as Gunnerson, were married in La Porte the following spring–April 1, 1902.
Their honeymoon was cut short seven days later, however, by the unfortunate
death of Jennie Gunness, Peter`s 7-month-old daughter by a previous marriage. And by December of that year Peter himself was dead.
The bereaved widow told authorities that Gunness` tragic death occurred when a sausage grinder fell from a high shelf and crushed his skull as he sat in the cellar.
Never mind that 6-year-old Myrtle babbled to her little friends at school, ”Mamma brained papa with a meat cleaver. Don`t tell a soul.”
Authorities dismissed it as childish prattle and returned a verdict of accidental death.
Peter was buried by the same minister who had officiated at his wedding to Belle eight months earlier, the Rev. George C. Moor, and the widow collected another bundle in insurance.
Not long afterwards her last child, Philip, was born. He was 5 when he died, with his two sisters, in the flaming farmhouse.
It was after Gunness was killed by the free-falling sausage grinder, or mamma`s cleaver, depending on whom you believe, that Belle, a stout woman with a mannish appearance who did her own hog butchering, began to advertise in lonely-hearts columns in Scandinavian communities.
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