5. Mrs. Gunness Very Numerous

Sheriff Smutzer soon came back from Texas. His trip had not helped the case against Lamphere one bit. He had spent five days getting there, what with floods on the line, and when he got there he found he had gone on a wild-goose chase after a bogus witness.

His quarry turned out to be a jailed bad-check artist whose name wasn’t Thaw. That was just a check-signing name, adopted to exploit the dubious fame of his alleged cousin Harry K. Thaw, now in Matteawan for murdering Stanford White, still wealthy, still mad, and still copy for the newspapers.

Julius Truelson (to give him his right name) had got up an ingenious confession out of the newspapers, simply because he was tired of jail in Texas. He told a thrilling story about how he had joined with Ray in assisting Belle with her murder mill, and how finally, fearing they would become her next victims, he and Ray tossed up to see which one would murder her first. Ray won the assignment. By sheer ill luck, however, young Mr. Truelson confessed a bit too much when he confessed to helping to murder two missing people who subsequently turned up unmurdered. Furthermore, when he decided he preferred jail in Texas to the gallows in Indiana, it came out that he had a cast-iron alibi: He had been in jail at the time.

Sheriff Smutzer was run ragged by such screwball antics. Publicity seekers were crawling out of the woodwork, wasting his time and distracting him from his prime purpose of convicting Ray Lamphere. The Sheriff was at the vortex of the Gunness tornado, which wound itself up and swept the country in a dizzy cyclone of sensation. The press and the public went wild over Gunness.

Everything about Belle was copy for the press. Cesare Lombroso, famous criminologist, diagnosed hysteria and epilepsy. Preachers said she was instigated by the devil. A know-it-all announced that she was a former tightrope walker and her father was a sword-swallower. Another wiseacre told the press that she was Kate Bender, Circe of the Kansas Trail.

When even such copy as this was scarce, the exuberant newsmen at the Hotel Teegarden made up something. Since the authorities were holding back Belle’s genuine letters to Andrew Helgelien, they faked one. “My heart beats with wild rapture for you!” they made her exclaim. “Come, my Andrew, prepared to stay forever!” When they learned that the prosecutor had impounded a trunk of Ray’s, which might contain correspondence, they rushed to the press with another faked letter, to Ray this time, inviting him to move in, “and bring your sweetheart, if she has money enough.” Anybody could have seen that that letter was a fake, since Ray couldn’t read Norwegian and Belle couldn’t write in any other language.

Another enterprising reporter proposed to have Elmore van Winkle photograph an old clothes-wringer that turned up at the farm so he could pass it off as the sausage-grinder that killed Gunness. He figured city readers wouldn’t know the difference.

The name Gunness was a prime attraction in any guise. The Gunness farm was seen in pictures at the “nickel movements” through the enterprise of the Edison Company. A Chicago restaurant advertised “Gunness Stew,” and people ate it, too.

On May 29 there was another Gunness carnival at the farm as they auctioned off Belle’s effects. Hackmen, refreshment vendors, and sellers of postcards reaped another harvest. Souvenir buyers bid up everything to many times its value. A shovel worth $.60 brought $2.10—who knows, it might have buried Andrew. Prince, the lonesome collie dog, brought $107 cash. A single entrepreneur bought the dog, the pony and cart, even the barn cat and her kittens. Then this backwoods Barnum hired Belle’s last farm hand, Joe Maxson, and C. C. Fish, Lamphere’s private eye, and set out to tour the sticks. The dumb creatures were put on display, Fish gave the spiel, and Joe answered questions. He was always sure to be asked: “Is Belle Gunness alive?” and he always answered loudly: “Yes!”

Joe Maxson was now convinced that he did not escape from the fire through the mercy of Belle Gunness, for Belle had no mercy. He now believed that on the night of the fire she had ranged through the house, intending to kill everybody in it, and he had escaped only by a fluke. The press never got hold of his story of that strange night, and he was not asked to tell it in court, but he told it to his sister, Martha Maxson Alderfer.

After dinner, he said, Belle handed him an orange for a treat. He slipped it in his pocket, saying, “I’ll eat it later.”

“Eat it now,” said Belle. “It may be the last treat you get from me!”

Joe thought she was joking. Upon her urging, he ate it then and there. Soon he was so sleepy he tumbled into bed.

In the dead of night he woke with a start. Belle was standing at his bedside.

“Is anybody sick?” was his first thought.

“No,” said Belle hastily. “I just wanted to see if you were asleep.”

Later Joe came to think that she had a hammer hidden in the fold of her skirt. At the time he merely became indignant at what he considered bad manners. Let Belle sleep with Ray and the rest—she wasn’t going to sleep with him in this abrupt fashion! As soon as Belle had beaten a hasty retreat, Joe got up and locked the door behind her.

If she wants me, he said to himself, she can knock on my door!

So Belle got no second chance at Joe, and he survived to assure inquiring yokels at the fair that in his opinion his former employer was alive and at large.

In mid-July the yokels were able to slake their appetite for Gunness by investing a quarter in a paper-back novel entitled The Mrs. Gunness Mystery. No One could resist the lurid cover, on which Mrs. Gunness was revealed as a Gibson girl clad in filmy white, hovering with lethal intent over a mustachioed gentleman asleep in a stylish brass bed.

Inside the paper covers was a mess of undigested newspaper clippings spiced up with red-hot imaginary episodes in thoroughly bad taste. The public ate it up. They couldn’t tell the fact from the fiction, and they didn’t care. They loved the sword-swallower’s daughter with her forty-two victims offering her their “mad old love,” and the culminating amours with “Andrew Helgelien, ruddy-cheeked giant, with hair like a dandelion gone to seed and the masterful manner of the Norsemen of old.” Readers enjoyed an agreeable shudder at the picture of Belle strolling with Ray over the unmarked graves in the hog lot and snuggling her “wanton auburn head on the man’s broad shoulder” as she cooed coquettishly: “You, of all the world, can bring me to my knees!”

The man in question now sat in a cell at the county jail. He had sobered up, willy-nilly, and spent much time reading. It is not known what Ray’s range of reading was, but one thing is certain: He read The Mrs. Gunness Mystery with avid attention.

There was a widespread burning interest in “the Gunness system” of matrimonial bait. The federal government turned a severe eye on courtship by mail, and the press published everything it could dig up on the subject. From the editor of Skandinaven, a Norwegian-language paper, newsmen extracted the text of Belle’s last ad. The indefatigable woman had opened a new campaign in March, 1908, announcing to the world:

WANTED—A WOMAN WHO owns a beautifully located and valuable farm in first class condition, wants a good and reliable man as partner in the same. Some little cash is required for which will be furnished first-class security.

This no-nonsense appeal was designed to fetch good solid farmers, and it fetched them. A Mr. Carl Peterson had been attracted. When the Gunness system became front-page news, he came forward with the come-on letter that Belle had written to him. It was dated April 14, 1908, just two weeks before the fire, and it told him crisply:

There have been other answers to the same advertisement. As many as fifty have been received. I have picked out the most respectable, and I have decided that yours is such.

My idea is to take a partner to whom I can trust everything and as we have no acquaintance ourselves I have decided that every applicant I have considered favorably must make a satisfactory deposit of cash or security. I think that is the best way for parties to keep away grafters who are always looking for such opportunities, as I have had experience with them, as I can prove.

Now if you think that you are able some way to put up $1,000 cash, we can talk matters over personally. If you cannot, is it worth while to consider? I would not care for you as a hired man, as I am tired of that and need a little rest in my home and near my children. I will close for this time.

With friendly regards,

MRS. P. S. GUNNESS

Mr. Peterson was lucky. He did not have $1,000.

Still luckier, in his own opinion, was Mr. George Anderson of Tarkio, Missouri. He had answered an earlier ad, he told the press, liked the lady’s replies, and decided to go to La Porte and look things over.

On the second day of his visit, Mrs. Gunness asked him point-blank how much money he had. He had only $300, but he had a big farm in Missouri. Belle told him to go home and sell it and come back with the cash.

That night, in the small hours, Mr. Anderson woke with a start. Mrs. Gunness was bending over his bed. When he spoke, she ran out.

Mr. Anderson took fright. On the instant he dressed and ran away. Perhaps because he felt he had made a fool of himself, he told nobody of his alarming adventure.

Some people wondered if he should have been so very much alarmed. Ole Budsberg, they pointed out, had been perfectly safe at Belle’s—until he went home and sold out.

Then what was Belle after? Did she bring her suitors love before she brought them death? Was that the charm she used to make grown men willingly give up to her every cent they had?

Thinking of the hog lot, Mr. Anderson was still shuddering over his narrow escape. He recalled how Myrtle had looked at him as on a doomed man. “She would eye me with a pitiful look,” he recalled, “and when I glanced at her during a meal she would turn white as a sheet.”

Frank Riedinger of Delafield, Wisconsin, also went to visit Mrs. Gunness. A letter came back, not in his handwriting, to say he had decided to “go West.” When the hog lot gave up its secrets, those he left behind too quickly lost hope and sold him out. Riedinger, who had in fact left La Porte in one piece, had to sue before he could convince them that he was alive and could claim his possessions.

People all over the country were convinced that missing relatives had ended up in the hog lot. Sheriff Smutzer was pestered to death about it. When a wayward girl eloped, when a henpecked husband deserted his wife, the first thing the bereaved thought of was the Gunness farm. Inquiries poured in. Some were foolish. Others made sense. At least ten other Norwegian men, the inquiries showed, had taken their savings and gone off to La Porte, never to return. Were their bones still buried somewhere on the farm? If Smutzer kept notes on disappearing fellows that he really ought to dig for, they must have read something like this:

George Berry left home in July, 1905, saying he was going “to work for Mrs. Gunness.” He had $1,500. Provisionally identified as the second body in Gurholt’s grave in the hog lot.

Herman Konitzer took $5,000 and left home “to marry a wealthy widow in La Porte” in January, 1906. Posted one letter from La Porte.

Christian Hinkley, Chetek, Wisconsin, in the spring of 1906 sold his farm for $2,000 and left. Changed his Decorah Posten subscription to La Porte. La Porte post office testified that Mrs. Gunness received mail as Mrs. Hinkley.

Olaf Jensen, twenty-three, Norwegian, in May, 1906, wrote to his mother in Norway that he had reflected on a matrimonial ad in Skandinaven and decided to marry the lady, a widow from Norway who lived in La Porte. Went down for a visit, returned home to turn his belongings into cash, and went back to La Porte. Never seen since.

Charles Neiburg, twenty-eight, left Philadelphia in June, 1906, saying that he was going to marry Mrs. Gunness. Took $500 in cash with him. Had a hobby of answering matrimonial ads.

Abraham Phillips, Belington, West Virginia, told relatives he was leaving to marry a rich widow in Indiana. Had a big roll of bills, a diamond ring, a Railway Trainmen badge. Disappeared in February, 1907. A railroad watch turned up in the ashes of the Gunness house.

Tonnes Peter Lien saw an ad, sold his farm, and left Rushford, Minnesota, for La Porte to marry Mrs. Gunness His brother reported that he helped to sew $1,000 in bills in the sleeve of Tonnes Peter’s coat, and asked if a heavy silver watch initialed “P. L.” had been found. It had. Since Lien left home April 2, 1907, and all burials about that time were accounted for, his body had not been found.

E. J. Thiefland of Minneapolis sought by a private detective. Described as a tall man with a sandy mustache. Saw an ad in a Minneapolis paper on August 8, 1906. Corresponded with Mrs. Gunness. On April 27, 1907, wrote to his sister saying he was going down to La Porte “to see if this lady is on the square.” Never heard of since.

Emil Tell took $5,000 in May, 1907, and left Osage City, Kansas, to marry a rich widow in La Porte. Q. Was he the man with the pointed beard seen at the Gunness place in June, 1907?

John E. Bunter of McKeesport, Pennsylvania, fifty-two, light gray hair, left saying he planned to marry a widow in Indiana. Went away on November 25, 1907. Q. Did he accompany Mrs. Gunness into Oberreich’s in December to buy a wedding ring?

S. B. Smith missing. Ring initialed S. B. found in ruins.

Paul Ames disappeared. Initials P. A. on ring found in ashes.…

Sheriff Smutzer soon admitted there had to be more digging. By fits and starts more digging went on. In a disused privy vault they found a detached head of a woman with long blonde hair. They never found the woman’s body that went with it, and they never found out who the woman might be. They never found the man’s head that was missing from Gurholt’s grave.

They dug up an old well, and a soft spot under a lilac bush, and the dirt floor of the cellar, and some more spots in the hog lot. On that seventy-acre farm they passed over the old vineyard by the tracks, the rye field, and the ground covered by the removed barn and the cemented floor of the shed.

Once, looking very sporty in his leather cap and turtle-neck jersey, Sheriff Smutzer brought a pack of foxhounds out to the farm. The hounds ranged about sniffing. They found six places interesting enough to prompt a good deal of whining and scratching. The places were marked for digging; but if they were dug, nothing turned up.

Then one day the hogs rooted out some bones that looked like arm and leg bones; but by that time the authorities were tired of bones.

What was the use? Suppose they did find more bodies; how would that advance the matter in hand—the case against Ray Lamphere? Money was short, Mrs. Gunness was gone, and the Sheriff’s office was being pestered every day with every kind of nonsensical demand.

Nuts anonymous, nuts self-advertising peppered the Sheriff and the prosecutor relentlessly with every species of lunacy. Crank letters threatened and taunted: “Ha! Ha!! Ha!!! Wise Heads, You, Nit. From One Who Knows.” Persons in touch with the Infinite claimed to be in touch with Belle in the beyond, or offered to get in touch with her for a consideration. One seer offered to identify the unknown victims, if he could be provided with some bones. He received some from the butcher shop.

The worst pests, to those who were getting ready to prosecute Ray Lamphere for murdering Belle Gunness, were the people who insisted on reporting that they had seen Mrs. Gunness, in the flesh, since the fire. With public opinion in that state, the prosecutor would have a tough time getting a conviction.

MRS. GUNNESS VERY NUMEROUS, headlined the Herald. The vanishing ogress was turning up all over. She was “seen” in every one of the forty-eight states, Canada, and Mexico. She was “located” on an ocean liner, in an upper berth in Texas, in a Chicago streetcar. She was “arrested” on a New York train. The victim of that arrest was so insulted that she sued the railroad for $30,000.

Excited people deluged Smutzer with letters on the subject, demanding $5,000 reward or enclosing “50¢ for your trouble,” as their natures dictated. A farmer in Illinois wrote that he had a suspect locked up in his granary. The exasperated authorities had thrown away his address before it occurred to them that somebody ought to go and let her out.

Elsewhere the absconding murderess turned up “mysteriously veiled,” or with her teeth covered with chewing gum, or muffled in wraps and transported by stretcher, or publicly changing disguises by the railroad tracks. In July, trusting to two veils, a black one and a white one, she had the effrontery to show up by daylight at the scene of her crimes. The Hutson family reported the apparition.

Sam Ball was a kind of self-appointed detective. He hunted Belle assiduously. At Rubber Bill’s sporting goods store, where the law hung out, they laughed at Sam’s activities.

“Someday I’ll find her!” said Sam stoutly.

One day he appeared with a photograph. It showed a figure dressed in man’s clothes; but the face was the face of Belle Gunness.

“Where did you get that?”

“I snapped it.”

Elmore van Winkle, the photographer, standing by, suppressed a snicker. He knew very well who it was that had cooked up the picture for a joke, putting Belle’s face to a man’s body and throwing the whole out of focus to conceal the joint.

The pool-hall boys had a lot of fun over that photograph. In that guise, they indicated, the missing murderess had been spirited out of town by none other than the Sheriff himself.

“Say, Smutzer, where did you hide her?”

“Hey, Al, want to make some dough? The Chicago Tribune will pay you ten thousand dollars for your confession about where you hid Old Lady Gunness.”

The good-natured official only laughed off this nonsense. A smooth politician, Smutzer was rather enjoying the publicity that the case was bringing him.

In July, Smutzer set out for Salt Lake City via Denver, Colorado, Lincoln, Nebraska, and possibly Vernon, Texas, where the bad-check artist still languished in jail.

At Lincoln the Republican politico got into the limelight by donning a Democratic party badge and calling on William Jennings Bryan, perennial presidential candidate.

“Have you found Mrs. Gunness yet?” inquired the Great Commoner.

“She is buried in Chicago.”

“You are probably right,” said the silver-tongued orator of the Platte.

Smutzer came back covered with glory. At Lincoln he had saved a man’s life. As quick and resolute as he was good-natured, he jumped in and pulled a drowning man from flood waters while others were still staring.

So famous a man could not be excluded from the Argus’ “Men of Affairs” cartoon series. When it appeared, it was a rather left-handed tribute. The cartoon depicted the popular Sheriff with his double bartender’s lick and polka-dotted bow tie, hustling a culprit into Cell 23. The accompanying doggerel insinuated pretty strongly that the Sheriff ought to be in that cell himself:

Smutzer’s a fellow, take him all aroun’,

As good as any you’ll find in town.

Genial, always smiling, never means harm,

He’s cut quite a figure at the Gunness farm.

Looks a little foppy in his runabout.

Twenty-three will get him if he don’t watch out.

It was exasperating to Wirt Worden to see Smutzer spending time and money in an attempt to put Ray Lamphere in the death cell, while he refused to spend a day or a dollar looking for Belle Gunness. The defending lawyer was seriously convinced that Belle Gunness was alive somewhere, laughing at them all, and would have the last laugh unless they sought her in earnest. But there was not enough money in his pocket, or even in the county treasury, to follow up every lead. An influential county commissioner managed to get an official $4,000 reward posted for Belle’s capture, and a gentleman from Kansas started a private reward fund by forwarding $1 in cash. But what was the use of a reward of $4001 if the authorities would not move? Now and then Worden managed to needle them into action; but every false lead made them harder to needle.

Some leads were very pointed, like the anonymous letter that came to Prosecutor Smith:

The body of the woman found in the ruins is a cadaver murdered by Mrs. Gunness, who decapitated her and put her [Mrs. Gunness’] rings on her fingers. She had two persons to help her and one of them drove her to Valparaiso early in the night, where she boarded a Pennsylvania train for New York City. The other was Ray Lamphere, who fired her house early in the morning. They both got $1,000. Mrs. Gunness is now posing as a man.…

Yours,

TRAVELING MAN

Who could the first accomplice be? A letter came, Worden announced, with a name in it; but it was a name too hot to publish. The Herald reported:

The letter charges that a certain man, who is said to live not far from La Porte and who is declared to be quite well-known, was an accomplice of Mrs. Gunness. The name of this person is not disclosed, because it would not be right to drag him into the case if he is an innocent party. The matter is being fully investigated, but no steps will be taken to arrest him unless it is found that he really has information of value in his possession.

Was it the same name as the one the pool-hall louts bandied about? Was it the name that had been heard in whispers even before the hog-lot discoveries made the case notorious? Were Ray’s partisans trying to scare somebody into making a break?

If so, it didn’t work. The owner of the name was too well entrenched to scare easily. Safety lay in sitting tight. He sat tight.

It was a long sit. Ray Lamphere sat it out in the county jail. He sat out the summer and he sat out the early fall. He sat out the wild search for Mrs. Gunness, and the serious building up of the case against himself for murdering her.

While Ray sat, his disreputable old father got busy scouring for evidence on his son’s behalf. Ragged and battered, with tears in his rheumy eyes, he told the press: “Ray was always a good boy, and the only thing against him was that he occasionally drank too much. I don’t believe he set that house on fire, but I do know that that woman was looking for him, and if she had found him he would have been in that burying ground too. She was driving around near my place the very day before the fire, inquiring where Ray was and saying she wanted him to come back to work for her.”

Mr. Fogle, Belle’s man of business, confirmed this; Mrs. Gunness had run all over town that Sunday in a wild search for her former lover. But how could that help the defense of Ray Lamphere?

Ray’s defender was busy trying another strange case. Wirt Worden was representing the son of the King of the Gypsies in a prosaic suit to recover the bride price that had been paid for an unsatisfactory Romany consort.

While Ray sat, American politics went into high gear. Deputy Sheriff Anstiss, Prosecutor R. N. Smith, and Sheriff Al Smutzer all shelved the Gunness case in favor of electioneering. Smith was up for another term as prosecuting attorney, and Smutzer was boosting Taft for President and backing Anstiss to replace himself as sheriff. Ray’s friends worked hard to stop Anstiss; but they failed.

At last, in November, Smith, Anstiss, and Taft had all got themselves elected, and Ray’s day in court was at hand. Ray polished his shoes, brushed his clothes, and sent out for a clean collar and a new necktie. The long wait was over.