The most notable American multiple murderer of the nineteenth century was a man named Herman Webster Mudgett, who (understandably) preferred to to call himself Harry Howard Holmes. He belongs to the history of mass murder, but the fact that many of his murders were motivated by sex, and that he was an obsessive seducer, warrants a brief description of his career in this volume. Like so many con-men—Landru, Petiot, Heath, Haigh—Holmes seems to have been one of those born crooks who, from the beginning, looked for a way to do down his fellow human beings. He provides a powerful argument for the belief that certain people are just born bad—in fact, downright rotten. Born in 1860 in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, son of a postmaster, he studied medicine, and was practising his first swindle in his early twenties—involving the faked death of a patient and the theft of a corpse. When he abandoned his wife and child to move to Chicago in 1886, he soon married a girl from a wealthy family and tried forging the signature of a rich uncle. Then he became the assistant of a Mrs Holden, who ran a drugstore; within three years she had vanished, and Holmes was the new owner. He did so well that he built himself a large boarding house opposite the store—which has been christened ‘Murder Castle’ and ‘Nightmare House’. It had chutes leading from most rooms to the basement—where there was a large furnace—and gas pipes so arranged that he could flood any room with gas. It is not known how many ‘guests’ vanished during the Chicago World Fair of 1893, but it probably ran into double figures. Meanwhile, he had seduced the wife of a jeweller named Conner who rented space in the drugstore; when Conner moved out, both the wife, Julia, and her 18-year-old sister Gertie became his mistresses. Then Gertie became pregnant, and vanished. So did a pretty 16-year-old girl named Emily Van Tassell, who often came into the shop with her mother. If, as seems probable, Holmes killed her in order to possess her, then he certainly qualifies as a sex killer. When Julia objected to Holmes’s new secretary, Emily Cigrand, Julia and her daughter disappeared. Soon after that, so did Emily Cigrand. The following year, so did another mistress—Minnie Williams—and her sister Nannie.
After the World Fair was over, Holmes was hoist with his own petard when he fell in love with a girl called Georgiana Yoke and married her. In jail for fraud, Holmes met a famous train robber called Marion Hedgepeth, and asked his advice on acquiring a crooked lawyer, offering to cut him in on an insurance fraud.
The ‘fraud’ was actually planned as a mass murder of a family of seven. A fellow crook named Pitezel was supposed to die in a laboratory explosion; Holmes would substitute a corpse bought from a medical school, and would share Pitezel’s insurance money with Pitezel’s wife. In fact, Pitezel’s death was all too real, as was that of three of Pitezel’s children who were allowed by their mother to accompany Holmes on a flight around various cities in America and Canada.
Marion Hedgepeth, angered by Holmes’s failure to pay him his share of the insurance money, told his story to the insurance company and Holmes was arrested before he could complete the murder plan; a policeman named Geyer followed Holmes’s trail around the country and located the remains of the three children—two daughters, aged 11 and 15, and a 9-year-old boy. Holmes was found guilty, and wrote a confession in which he admitted twenty-seven murders; he was hanged in 1895, choking slowly to death on the end of a rope that had been tied by an inefficient hangman.
Was Holmes a serial killer in the modern sense of the word? If we are speaking of obsessive sex killers like Jack the Ripper and the Boston Strangler, the answer is probably no. But if we mean a man who is in the grip of a sexual fever, and who kills repeatedly and obsessively, then the answer must be yes. We are once again confronting the problem of the dividing line between the serial killer—whose motive is rape—and the mass murderer, who kills for gain. There are some cases of mass murder—like Joseph Smith, the ‘Brides in the Bath’ killer, or Marcel Petiot, the French doctor who offered to help Jewish refugees to escape and then killed them for their money—where there can be no possible doubt that the motive was simply financial gain. But in Holmes, as in Landru, we confront a man in whom the criminal urge and the sexual urge are so closely linked that it is impossible to separate them. Crime itself has become sexualized.
The first decade of the twentieth century was remarkable for the detection of two ‘bluebeard’ killers, one male, one female.
Johann Hoch—born Schmidt—was a native of Horweiler, Germany; born in 1860, he was destined for the ministry—his father and two brothers were already in the church. In 1887 he abandoned his wife and three children and sailed for America. In Wheeling, West Virginia, he opened a saloon, and married a widow named Caroline Hoch. The minister who performed the ceremony saw Hoch giving his wife some white powder, and hours later she died in agony. Hoch quickly sold the house, claimed on his wife’s insurance policy, then faked a suicide by leaving his clothes on a riverbank; after this he disappeared. Later in the same year he married two more women, Martha Steinbucher and Mary Rankin; the first also died in agony, but the second was luckier: Hoch only deserted her.
During the course of the next eight years he married an unknown number of women—ten is a conservative estimate—abandoning some and burying others.
In December 1904, Hoch (as he now called himself) advertised in a Chicago newspaper published in German, claiming to be a wealthy widower in search of a wife. Soon he married a woman named Marie Walcker, who owned a sweet shop. His wife presented him with her entire savings. But she also made the mistake of mentioning that her sister, Mrs Julia Fischer, also had $800 or so deposited in a savings bank. It sealed her fate. A week later she became seriously ill, and the doctor diagnosed the trouble as nephritis. Mrs Fischer was sent for to nurse her sister, and soon Hoch was flirting with her. Mrs Walcker died on 12 January 1905, and Hoch immediately proposed to her sister. Julia protested that it was too soon to think of such things, but nevertheless married him three days later.
They moved to a flat in Wells Street, but there Hoch was upset to learn that he was being denounced as a murderer and a swindler by one of the tenants—a friend of his late bride, and the woman who had drafted the letter in reply to Hoch’s advertisement. While Julia was trying to placate this lady, Hoch vanished, taking $750 he had borrowed from Julia.
Julia notified the Chicago police. The man who was placed in charge of the case, Inspector George Shippy, already had some knowledge of Hoch—in fact, had been instrumental in jailing him six years earlier. Shippy had investigated Hoch on a charge of swindling a furniture dealer by selling furniture that was on hire-purchase, and Hoch had received a twelve-month sentence. The clergyman who had seen Hoch slip a white powder into the food of Caroline Hoch, the Revd. Hermann Haas, learned that Hoch was in jail, and contacted Shippy to tell him of his suspicions. Shippy had Mrs Hoch’s body exhumed, but it proved that Hoch had been too clever for him. The vital organs (presumably the stomach and liver) were missing. Shippy investigated Hoch and learned of a trail of abandoned wives from New York to San Francisco. Unfortunately, Hoch had already been released from jail and had vanished.
Shippy immediately requested that the body of Marie Walcker should be exhumed. The post mortem revealed 7.6 grains of arsenic in the stomach, and 1.25 in the liver. Shippy handed over a picture of Hoch to the press, and requested nationwide publicity.
This quickly produced results. A Mrs Catherine Kimmerle, who ran a boarding house in West Forty-Seventh Street in New York, recognized the photograph as that of a recently arrived boarder named Bartella, who had proposed to her within twenty minutes of entering the house. His ardent manner had frightened her and she had declined.
‘Bartella’ was quickly arrested, and admitted that he was Hoch. A fountain pen in his possession proved to contain arsenic—which Hoch declared he had bought to commit suicide. The New York police returned him to Chicago.
There Shippy was waiting for him, with a list of a dozen women whom he had married since 1896, five of whom had died soon after the marriage. Five wives whom he had deserted were brought to Chicago to identify him, and the police had difficulty restraining them from attacking the prisoner.
Tried for the murder of Marie Walcker, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. A lady named Cora Wilson, who had never met Hoch, advanced the money for an appeal, declaring that she was convinced of his innocence; this appeal was rejected, and Hoch was hanged on 23 February 1906.
The number of Hoch’s victims is a matter for speculation. In the Encyclopedia of World Crime, Jay Robert Nash speaks of ‘dozens’, but the brides who are known to have died soon after marrying him amount only to six. On the other hand Hoch was in America for nine years before he poisoned Caroline Hoch—listed by Thomas S. Duke as the first known victim—so it is highly probable that there were more.
Belle Gunness, America’s most notorious murderess, (there was even a Laurel and Hardy film about her) was luckier than Hoch; she escaped before her misdeeds were found out. At least, we think she did.
The end came on the night of 27 April 1908, near the small town of La Porte, Indiana. Earlier that day, Belle Gunness had been to a local lawyer to make her will, leaving her property to her three children, or, if they failed to survive, to the local Norwegian orphanage. She told the lawyer that she was being bothered by her ex-hired man, Ray Lamphere, and that she suspected that he intended to burn down her farm. Just before dawn the next day, the new hired man, Joe Maxson, woke up and smelled burning; when he looked out of the window he saw that flames were bursting out of the windows of the kitchen below. He tried to break into the bedroom in which Belle Gunness should have been asleep with her three children; the door was locked. As Maxson rushed outside, the fire took hold. Neighbours began to arrive, and Maxson harnessed the horse and drove off for the sheriff. By the time the volunteer fire brigade arrived, the farmhouse was little more than a heap of embers. Late that afternoon, investigation of the cellar disclosed the charred corpses of the three children, and the headless corpse of a woman. Ray Lamphere was immediately arrested.
A week later, a man with a Norwegian accent walked into the office of Sheriff Al Smutzer and introduced himself as Asle Helgelian. He was in search of his younger brother Andrew, who had left his home in Mansfield, South Dakota, to marry a rich widow who signed her letters Bella Gunness. Mrs Gunness had advertised for a husband in a Norwegian newspaper, Andrew had replied, and they had been in regular weekly correspondence for sixteen months before he left for Indiana the previous January. There he had drawn out all his money from the local bank, with Mrs Gunness at his elbow. But when his brother wrote to Mrs Gunness to ask about Andrew, she had answered that Andrew had gone off looking for a friend in Chicago. It was the cashier of the local bank who had sent Asle Helgelian newspaper cuttings about the burning down of the farm. Now he was convinced that his brother was dead—probably buried somewhere on the farm.
Sheriff Smutzer did not seem to take Asle Helgelian seriously. He made sympathetic noises and recommended that he go and stay with a fellow Norwegian who lived close to the Gunness farm. And it was due to Asle Helgelian’s urging that Joe Maxson and a neighbour called Daniel Hutson—who had been paid to dig in the ruins—transferred their attention to a ‘hog pen’ where Mrs Gunness buried rubbish. There all three men began to dig. Soon there was an unpleasant smell like rotten fish, and minutes later they uncovered a dismembered body covered with oilcloth. Asle Helgelian identified it as his brother Andrew. The wrist of the left arm had a defensive cut as if he had been trying to wield off the blow of a hatchet, and the fingers of his right hand were also missing. There was still a tuft of brown curly hair in the hand, presumably torn from the head of his murderer. Medical examination would later reveal strychnine in his stomach.
Four feet down, under rubbish, they uncovered the hacked-up remains of four more victims. The topmost body was that of a blonde girl; this was identified as Belle Gunness’s adopted daughter Jennie—who according to Mrs Gunness, had left for school in California eighteen months earlier.
Told about the discovery, Ray Lamphere gasped, and said he had always suspected it. Mrs Gunness had asked him to buy rat poison and chloroform…
A few days later they found more graves. One contained the disjoined skeleton of a young man whose head had been split open with an axe. In another grave were the bones of three men. Two days later they found another grave containing a woman’s shoes, the remains of a purse, and the skeleton of a youth. That made fourteen bodies so far.
Slowly, most of the bodies were identified. One was Ole Budsberg, who had sold up his home in Iola, Wisconsin, in March 1907, and moved in with Mrs Gunness. Soon after, his sons opened a letter addressed to him; it proved to be from Mrs Gunness, and said that she hoped he was not offended that she had refused him, and hoped he would get settled out west. Other relatives identified the remains of Olaf Lindboe, Henry Gurholt and John Moe (or Moo).
Now it was clear that Belle was a mass murderess, doubts began to arise about the headless body in the cellar. There was evidence that the children had also been poisoned—although a careless mix-up of the stomachs of all four corpses left some doubt about this. The small skulls certainly had holes in them, suggesting that they had been killed by hammer blows. The headless woman’s body seemed too small for Belle. Was it not conceivable that she had killed another woman in her place, and removed the head to make sure she was not identified through her teeth?
A number of witnesses soon came forward to state that they had seen Belle on the evening of the fire, driving in a buggy with a dark-haired woman, whom she had apparently fetched from the station…
But this theory was also undermined when, after ‘sluicing’ the ashes as if searching for gold, an ex-miner found Belle’s false teeth, and also two of her real teeth, to which the set was anchored. The dentist who made the false teeth had no doubt they were Belle’s.
The story was now on every front page in America. Journalists soon ferreted out the life story of Belle Gunness, and it confirmed everyone’s worst suspicions.
She had been born Brynhild Poulsdatter Pedersen on 11 November 1859, in the fishing hamlet of Innbygde, on the west coat of Norway. Her father was a poverty-stricken farmer. In 1883, she followed her eldest sister Nellie to Chicago, and in the following year married a watchman named Mads Sorenson. Money was scarce, and Belle supplemented their meagre income by taking in lodgers, and at one point running a candy store. She was living in Chicago during the 1893 World Fair when H. H. Holmes was running a rather more expensive—and successful—boarding house. But after twelve years of marriage. Mads was still earning only $15 a week. Belle (as she now called herself) hated poverty—her sister Nellie remarked ‘My sister was crazy for money.’
She seems to have learned to supplement her income with insurance fraud. In 1896, the candy store she owned was burned down, and in 1898, their home in the suburb of Austin was damaged by fire. Their daughter Caroline died in 1896, and her son Axel in 1898. Both had symptoms of acute colitis, and both were insured. And in July 1900, the day that two insurance policies on her husband happened to overlap, Mads Sorenson died of a similar illness. The young doctor who was summoned to the deathbed noted the arched body, and suspected strychnine poisoning. But an older colleague told him that he had diagnosed an enlarged heart, and advised him to sign the death certificate. The young doctor later regretted that he had not insisted on a post mortem.
In fact, a post mortem was later held, at the request of the dead man’s brother, but when it was discovered that the heart was enlarged, the coroner did not bother to examine the stomach.
With the $8,500 in insurance money, Belle purchased the farm a mile north of La Porte, a pleasant, small community a dozen miles from Lake Michigan. The farm had been a sporting house, and was a stately-looking building, half brick and half wood, with a large garden, an orchard and numerous outbuildings. It came complete with the brothel’s impressive furniture—heavy sideboards, massive chairs and comfortable beds.
Belle now decided to captivate a Wisconsin farmer named Frederickson, but when Frederickson’s housekeeper frustrated her plans, married instead the housekeeper’s recently widowed son, Peter Gunness. He moved in with Belle in April 1902. Less than a week after their marriage, his baby died suddenly. The doctor who signed the certificate suspected smothering, but he kept his suspicions to himself until many years later.
Eight months later, her husband was the victim of a curious accident. Peter Gunness died on the kitchen floor, scalded with hot brine, and apparently struck down by a heavy meat grinder which, according to his wife, had fallen from the shelf above the stove. His widow explained that she always kept the meat grinder on the shelf, and that Gunness must have dislodged it so it struck the bowl of brine on the stove, then hit him on the head. She did not explain how the meat grinder jumped off the shelf, struck the brine on the stove, then jumped up again to strike the fatal blow. But her 12-year-old adopted daughter Jennie corroborated the main part of the story, and the coroner brought in a reluctant verdict of accidental death.
Six years later, not long before the farm burnt down, her youngest daughter Myrtle told a schoolfriend: ‘Mamma killed my papa—she hit him with a meat cleaver.’ A more likely weapon was the back of a chopper.
Belle had adopted Jennie when she was a baby, soon after her mother’s death. Her father, Anton Olsen, had later invited his daughter for a visit to Chicago, hoping she would want to stay, but Jennie had pined for the farm and gone back. A young hired man named Emile Greening had been in love with her, and had been deeply hurt when Jennie—now sixteen—had departed for California without saying goodbye, just after Christmas 1906. Significantly, Belle had been due to pay Jennie a legacy of $1,800 when she was 18. Emile later identified Jennie’s skull.
When Peter Gunness died, Belle was pregnant again; she called the baby Philip.
Over the next few years Belle had a series of hired men, and most of them seem to have been her lovers. Now in her mid-forties, she was not particularly attractive—a massive woman with high cheekbones and stern eyes—but the few men who slept with her and survived recorded that she had a natural talent for sex that soon made them her slaves. Regrettably, most of them soon began to think of themselves as Belle’s husband and the master of the house, and she seems to have disliked this intensely—as far as she was concerned, she was the mistress and they were employees. Many of these hired men left suddenly and unexpectedly—so unexpectedly that Belle was left to finish the ploughing. Relatives later identified some of them in Belle’s home-made cemetery.
Belle also introduced a number of suitors to her neighbours—one from Minnesota, one from Wisconsin, one from South Dakota. She later explained that they had changed their minds and left.
In June 1907, Belle approached a young odd-job man named Ray Lamphere and told him she was looking for a man about the house. Ray was a weak-chinned individual with a droopy moustache and eyes like an anxious koala bear. The first evening he spent at the Gunness farm, he experienced the delights of Belle’s excellent—if somewhat heavy—Norwegian cuisine, then retired to a comfortable bed in the spare room. Later that night Belle joined him, and proved that she was as skilled in the arts of lovemaking as of cooking. When she left in the early morning, Lamphere could hardly believe his luck. This magnificent woman, with her comfortable home and equally comfortable income, had chosen him as her mate. It seemed too good to be true.
Six months later he learned that it was too good to be true. Just before Christmas 1907, a man arrived at the farm, and Belle explained they were engaged. For the next week Ray was in a frenzy of jealousy; then, to his relief, the man disappeared.
But not long after, in early January, another man appeared; this was Andrew Helgelian, who (as his brother later revealed) had spent ten years in jail for post office robbery. Realizing that his mistress was now spending her nights in Helgelian’s bed, Ray was again tormented by jealousy.
On the cold, snowy night of 14 January 1908, Belle ordered him to drive to Michigan City to pick up a horse that was being sent by her cousin Mr Moe. But when Lamphere, together with a friend he took along for company, arrived at his destination, there was no horse. The two men went drinking, then to a vaudeville show. Finally, on the way home, the spurned lover announced that he was going to the farm to see what ‘the old woman’ was up to. The following afternoon, he saw his friend, and told a strange story. He had, he claimed, bored a hole in the floorboards so he could overhear what Belle and Helgelian were talking about. And, he claimed, they were discussing how to poison him…
Whatever happened that night, it made Lamphere morose and jumpy. He declined to sleep under Belle’s roof, and on 3 February she discharged him, and hired Joe Maxson in his place. And although she was not sexually interested in Joe, or vice versa, Lamphere continued to haunt the farm. He muttered to friends that he had information that would place Belle behind bars. But if he was really trying to blackmail her, she took it remarkably coolly; in fact, she sued him for trespass, and he was fined. She also alleged that he had stolen a silver watch; but Ray insisted that she had given it to him. And since he had displayed it to friends at the time he and Belle were lovers, the sheriff chose to take his word. (The silver watch later proved to be the property of John Moe, one of the vanished suitors.)
And so Ray Lamphere continued to pester his ex-mistress until that afternoon in April when she went to see a solicitor about her will, and told him that she expected Lamphere to burn down her house…
This, then, was the situation when Ray Lamphere’s trial opened on 9 November 1908, accused of murdering Belle and her children by setting fire to the house. The defence, led by Wirt Worden, based its case on the argument that Belle Gunness was still alive. A witness was produced who claimed to have seen Belle driving to the farm with another woman—and this woman, said Worden, was the headless body found in the ruins. Belle had a long scar on her thigh, and the corpse had no such scar. Moreover, Belle’s neighbour Daniel Hutson claimed that he had actually seen Belle in her orchard three months after the fire. Worden’s case was that Belle had killed her own children, then escaped. Lamphere had told him—Worden—that he had helped Belle to escape on the night of the fire. The implication was that Ray had set fire to the house, believing it to be empty…
The prosecution case was that Lamphere had started the fire to revenge himself on his ex-mistress. The body found in the fire was that of Belle Gunness, and the head was missing because it had been burnt off. The false teeth—attached to a real tooth from Belle’s head—proved it. Lamphere had admitted to getting up at three on the morning of the fire, and leaving the house twenty minutes later. He had admitted passing the farm on his way to work, and telling his new employer that Belle’s house was on fire. Lamphere, said the prosecution, had started that fire. A neighbouring boy stated that Lamphere had seen him hiding in the bushes, and had threatened to kill him if he did not go away. Not long after that—just before the first signs of the fire were noticed—he had seen Lamphere running away.
All the same, Worden succeeded in sowing many doubts in the mind of the jury. A doctor stated in court that there was poison in the bodies of the children and the female corpse. The injuries to the skulls were mentioned as proof that the children were murdered. By the end of the trial on Thanksgiving Day (26 November) the jury was confused and divided. But eventually, after many ballots, the foreman announced the verdict. Ray Lamphere was guilty of setting fire to the farm. But Belle, the jury believed, had taken her own life with strychnine…
Ray Lamphere was sentenced to from two to twenty-one years’ imprisonment. His comment, as he approached the penitentiary, was that he felt he was lucky to be alive when he might have ended up in ‘the old woman’s’ chicken run.
Just over a year later, he died of consumption. Shortly before his death, he told a strange story to a fellow prisoner. Belle, he insisted, was alive; he had taken her away, disguised as a man, in a hired rig, and handed her over to an accomplice. That accomplice, he implied, was the load sheriff, who was in Belle’s pay. Then he had returned and set fire to the house. Belle later sent back her false teeth—plus the real ones—for him to place in the ashes after charring them in a fire.
According to Lamphere, he had been Belle’s accomplice for the past year or so, and had helped her dispose of several of the bodies. Belle had killed and dissected them, he had buried them. But he had come to suspect that she intended to kill him, and had refused to sleep on the property. They had quarrelled and he left. He was in no position to denounce her because he had been an accomplice. But when she decided it was time to disappear, she offered Ray $500 to help her. She had hired a woman she had seen sitting on a stairway in Chicago, and brought her back to the farm two days before the fire. But the woman had a full set of teeth, and her nose was quite different from Belle’s. So her head had to be removed—Ray buried it, together with three other heads, in a rye field. Then he had driven Belle away, handed her to an accomplice, and then set the house on fire early the next morning.
At first sight this sounds by far the likeliest story. But there are strong objections to it. If Lamphere was her accomplice, then presumably he helped her to bury her last victim, Andrew Helgelian. But if he knew that Helgelian was going to die, why was he so frantic with jealousy? And why did he go back to the farm that night to see what the ‘old lady’ was doing? He should have known what she was doing.
His story of Belle and Helgelian planning to poison him sounds equally unlikely. If Belle wanted to poison Lamphere, she certainly did not need an accomplice. The likeliest explanation is probably that he hung around the farm with a masochistic craving to find out if Belle was in bed with Helgelian. But she had taken care to draw all the curtains and lock all the doors—as a murderess would when she intends to dispose of another victim.
Lillian de la Torre, the author of the best book on the case, The Truth about Belle Gunness (1955) has provided a possible solution to the mystery. She is convinced that Lamphere was telling the truth about one thing: that the ‘accomplice’ in the case was Sheriff Al Smutzer himself, and that he had been in the pay of Belle Gunness from the beginning. He was the man to whom Lamphere handed Belle over after driving her away from the form that night. But what Belle had not anticipated was Smutzer’s treachery. He knew she was carrying a large sum of money (usually estimated at $30,000). There was nothing to prevent him from killing Belle and helping himself. A few weeks later, when it was necessary to prove that it was indeed Belle’s body in the ruins, he had returned to the corpse and taken out the dentures, which he planted in the ashes after placing them in a fire to char them.
De la Torre points out that Sheriff Smutzer went to Texas in the course of his investigation—a man there had falsely confessed to being implicated in the case—and that this would be an ideal opportunity to open a bank account and deposit the $30,000. In fact, Smutzer made a habit of going to Texas in the years that followed, and finally stayed there for thirty years, before he returned to Laporte, where he died penniless.
The main objection to this theory is that there is not a scrap of evidence that Smutzer was corrupt. Yet we also have to admit that it is hard to fault Lillian de la Torre’s logic. Either it was Belle in the burnt-out farmhouse or it was not. And if it was Belle, then either she killed herself, or she was murdered—probably by Lamphere. But there was not time for Lamphere to walk out to the farm, kill Belle and the children, set fire to the house, and hurry on to his other job, all in the space of an hour. In any case, Lamphere was hardly the type—he was too weak. Besides, there was poison in the bodies—we are not sure which because the stomachs were accidentally put in the same jar—which suggests that Belle administered it the night before.
So if the headless corpse was Belle, she committed suicide. That, it might be argued, is just conceivable. Although she may have poisoned two of her children in Chicago, we may assume that she felt attachment to the children she had brought up in La Porte, particularly to baby Philip. Maxson spoke of her love of playing games with the children—they were playing just before the last time he saw them—and everyone agreed that she seemed to be a good mother. But now, at last, after at least eight years of murder, her crimes looked as if they were catching up with her. Relatives of the victims were asking questions, and any day might arrive and make trouble. If they did, that fool Lamphere might tell all he knew, and although it was not much, it might be enough to bring the sheriff with a search warrant of her property. She may have felt that the end was close. And for all we know, she was running out of money. It was true that she had collected many sums of a thousand dollars or so over the years, but with a farm to run and children to bring up, she might well be coming close to the end of her resources. (There was only $700 in her account when she died.) And it was too risky to advertise for yet another husband. So Belle may have decided it was time to die, and to take her children with her, as many suicides do. She also may have decided to take Lamphere with her—which is why, after she made her will, she remarked that she expected him to burn down the house.
Against this hypothesis we have to place what we know of Belle’s psychology. She was a survivor. She had killed two husbands, and possibly as many as twenty other men (there were twenty watches found in the ruins). She had murdered her own adopted daughter and possibly two of her children. If it meant killing her own family to save her neck, Belle would not have hesitated. The headless body seemed too small for Belle, and the suggestion—made by a doctor at the trial—that it had shrunk by two-thirds in the heat sounds unlikely.
Yet the most convincing evidence that Belle died in the fire—the evidence that convinced the coroner—is the teeth. When a reporter asked the sheriff whether Belle could not simply have removed her teeth before she fled, the sheriff shook his head, and pointed to the real tooth the false teeth were attached to. This tooth had a gold cap, and a dentist in court said that it would have been impossible to pull out the tooth without splitting this cap.
But if Belle was lying dead and buried, then her killer could have removed her teeth by digging them out of her gums. So we are faced with the unavoidable conclusion: either Belle committed suicide, or someone else killed her—the accomplice to whom Lamphere claimed he delivered her. And we know enough of Belle to know that it is highly unlikely that she committed suicide.
Lillian de la Torre suggests that Jennie was killed because she suspected that Peter Gunness had been murdered. That is unlikely. She gave her evidence in Belle’s favour at the inquest, and the coroner signed a certificate of accidental death. That was old history. From what we know of Belle’s psychology, Jennie was murdered because Belle was due to pay her $1,800 on her eighteenth birthday, and Belle hated to part with money. A secondary motive may have been the fact that having a 16-year-old girl around the house robbed her of the privacy necessary for murdering and dismembering husbands.
There is one other point on which we might take issue with Lillian de la Torre. That accomplice may not, after all, have been Sheriff Smutzer. Clutched in Andrew Helgelian’s hand was a bunch of hair torn from the head of his killer. It was not Belle’s hair, or Ray Lamphere’s. We do not know if it belonged to Sheriff Smutzer, but it seems unlikely—surely someone would have recollected that Smutzer looked as if he had been in a fight four months earlier, with a lock of his hair torn out by the roots? Belle had had a number of lovers over the years, including a hired man named Peter Colson, who was never under suspicion. That lock of hair in Helgelian’s hand certainly belonged to somebody, and that somebody was not Belle.
One other person seems to have known the truth. Ray Lamphere’s best friend, a woman known as Nigger Liz, claimed to know exactly what happened, and told Wirt Worden that she would send for him and reveal it on her death bed. Unfortunately, Worden was out of town when Nigger Liz sent for him, and by the time he got back, she was dead.
How do we explain a woman who can murder husbands and children, and dismember lovers? The key undoubtedly lies in Nellie’s remark: ‘My sister was crazy for money.’ Belle went to America to escape the poverty of the Norwegian farm; it was the land of opportunity, and she hoped to become—at the very least—a comfortable, middle-class housewife with a home to be proud of. But marriage to Mads Sorenson proved a mistake; it soon became obvious that he was never going to rise in the world. Then, after twelve years of uphill struggle, the candy store caught fire, and she received the insurance money. It may well be that the fire was accidental. At all events, it taught her that there were ways of making large sums of money without slaving like a dirt farmer. Significantly, it was at this point that they moved to the comfortable Chicago suburb of Austin, and at last Belle had the kind of home she wanted. (Nellie quoted her as saying: ‘I would never remain with this man if it was not for the nice home he has.’) Mads was still earning only $15 a week, but fortunately there were a few more insurance windfalls on fires, and on the death of two children from colic. And finally, on 30 July 1900, Belle made a killing in both senses of the word when Mads died in convulsions on the day two insurance policies overlapped, and she received the huge sum of $8,500.
Now, at last, she was able to buy the home of her dreams. The sporting house that had belonged to Mattie Altic was a kind of mansion. At last, she was living in the surroundings she felt she had always deserved. But more insurance fraud was out of the question—it would have raised too much suspicion. She had to find new ways of increasing her wealth. And she did it with a boldness that in a businessman would have been a guarantee of success. The truth is that Belle shared the sense of enterprise that turned Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt into millionaires. It is not surprising that Americans feel ambivalent about her.
A quarter of a century after the Jack the Ripper murders, New Orleans had its own spectacular series of apparently unsolved murders; the killer became known as the Mad Axeman. But in this case, they seem to have been inspired by the same deep resentment against Italians that the Ripper felt against prostitutes.
On the morning of 24 May 1918, an Italian cobbler named Jake Maggio was awakened by a groaning sound coming from the next room, where his brother Joe slept with his wife. As he entered the room, he saw a woman lying on the floor, her head almost severed from her body; Joe lay in bed groaning. Nearby lay a bloodstained axe and a cut-throat razor, which had been used to slash Joe’s throat. He died soon after.
By the time the police arrived, Jake and his second brother Andrew had found how the intruder entered—through a panel chiselled out of the back door. Jake and Andrew were arrested as suspects, but soon released.
On the pavement two streets away someone had chalked on the pavement: ‘Mrs Maggio is going to sit up tonight, just like Mrs Toney.’ It reminded the police that seven years earlier there had been four axe murders of Italian grocers including a Mrs Tony Schiambra. They had been attributed to the criminal organization, ‘the Black Hand’, which was rife in New Orleans.
Five weeks after the Maggio killings, a bread delivery man found a back door with a panel chiselled out. When he knocked the door was opened by a man covered in blood. He was a Pole named Besumer, and inside lay a woman who was known as his wife. She was still alive, and told of being struck by a big white man wielding a hatchet. She died later, and Besumer was charged with her murder.
But that night the axeman struck again—a young married man, Edward Schneider, returned home to find his pregnant wife lying in bed covered in blood. Rushed to hospital she survived, and gave birth a week later. The attacker seemed to have entered by an open window.
Five days later, a barber named Romano became the next victim. His niece heard noises in his bedroom, and went in to find him being attacked by a big man wearing a black slouch hat. As she screamed, the man ‘vanished as if he had wings’. A panel had been chipped out of the door.
New Orleans was in a panic reminiscent of that which had swept London in the days of Jack the Ripper. There were several false alarms, and one man found an axe and chisel outside his back door…On 30 August 1918, a man named Nick Asunto heard a noise, and went to investigate; he saw a heavily built man with an axe, who fled as he shouted. All New Orleans began taking elaborate precautions against the Axeman.
For the time being, the attacks ceased, and the ending of the war in 1918 gave people other things to think about. But in March 1919, a grocer named Jordano heard screams from a house across the street, and found another grocer, Charles Cortimiglia, unconscious on the floor, while his wife—a dead baby in her arms—sat on the floor with blood streaming from her head. She said she had awakened to see a man attacking her husband with an axe, and when she snatched up her baby, he killed the child with a blow, then struck her…The door panel had been chiselled out. Yet when Mrs Cortimiglia began to recover, she accused Jordano, the man who had found her, of being the killer, and although her husband (now also recovering) insisted that this was untrue, Jordano and his son were arrested.
Three days after the attack, the local newspaper received a letter signed ‘The Axeman’, datelined ‘From Hell’ (as in the case of a Jack the Ripper letter), and declaring that he would be coming to New Orleans next Tuesday at 12.15, but would spare any house playing jazz music. The following Tuesday, the streets of New Orleans rocked with Jazz, and the Axeman failed to appear…Someone even wrote a ‘Mysterious Axeman Jazz’.
Besumer, who had been in custody since his arrest, was tried and acquitted. But the Jordanos, to everyone’s amazement, were found guilty, although Charles Cortimiglia repeated that they were innocent.
And the attacks went on—although there was to be only one further death. On 10 August 1919, a grocer named Steve Boca woke to find a shadowy figure holding an axe beside the bed. When he woke again, he was bleeding from a skull wound. He managed to stagger down to the home of a friend, Frank Genusa, and the frantic police arrested Genusa—then shamefacedly released him.
On 2 September a druggist named Carlson heard scratching noises from the back door, and fired his revolver through the panel. The intruder fled, leaving behind a chisel.
The next day, neighbours found 19-year-old Sarah Lauman unconscious; she had been attacked with an axe and three teeth knocked out. She could remember nothing when she recovered.
The last attack was on a grocer named Mike Pepitone. His wife—in a separate bedroom—heard sounds of a struggle, and entered his room in time to see a man vanishing. Her husband had been killed with an axe blow so violent that it spattered blood up the wall. Again, a chiselled door panel revealed how the axeman had gained entry.
Then the murders ceased. The Jordanos were finally released when Mrs Cortimiglia confessed that she had lied because she hated them. Now, she said, her husband had left her, and she had smallpox—Saint Joseph had appeared to her and told her to confess. The Jordanos were released.
But Mrs Pepitone, widow of the last victim, was to enter the story again. On 7 December 1920, in Los Angeles, she had shot and killed a man named Joseph Mumfre, from New Orleans, in the street. She claimed he was the axeman. She was sentenced to ten years in prison, but released after three.
Was Mumfre the Axeman? He could well have been. He had been released from prison just before the 1911 murders, then sent back for the next seven years. Released again just before the first of the 1918 murders, he had been back in prison during the ‘lull’ between August 1918 and March 1919, when they began again. He left New Orleans shortly after the murder of Mike Pepitone.
What was his motive? Almost certainly, he was a sadist who wanted to attack women, not men. Joe Maggio was left alive; his wife was killed. Besumer was only knocked unconscious; his attractive wife died of her injuries. Many of the later victims were women, and it seems likely that he attacked the men when in search of women victims.
Why Italian grocers? In fact, many of the victims were not Italians. But all kept small shops. And a small shop is a place where an attractive wife can be seen serving behind the counter. Mrs Pepitone never revealed how she tracked down Mumfre, but it seems likely that he was a customer, and she recognized him and followed his trail to Los Angeles.