10. The Bobtail Flush: The Defense

On Friday, November 20, at midmorning, Wirt Worden rose to open for the defense. The courtroom was in a ferment. Supporters of Ray Lamphere were on pins and needles to hear what unexpected evidence the defense was going to offer to back up the lurid suggestions Wirt Worden had been advancing in cross-examination, and how he was going to lift the heavy shadow of the gallows hanging over the white-faced defendant.

Nobody knew better than Worden how dark that shadow was, and how little clear light he could bring to dispel it. The defense attorney had been taken by surprise, but neither his earnest manner nor his resonant voice betrayed it. He had his case at his fingertips. Speaking slowly and with fervor and sincerity, he put his case before the jury:

“In order for the state to prove its case, the first thing that is necessary is to prove the corpus delicti—that is, the identification of the body.

“Now, we have our ideas as to whether it was the body of Mrs. Gunness. We believe our evidence will show you that it was not her body. Whether it was or not, this does not in any way determine the question of the guilt or innocence of Ray Lamphere.…

“Our evidence will show that Mrs. Gunness is still alive. She had motive to set fire to the house and escape. Previous to the time of the fire there were certain murders committed at the farm. Some of our evidence has been submitted by the state, and among this is the fact of these crimes having been committed. The evidence will show that at least ten bodies were dug up on the place. The evidence will show the condition of these bodies as to mutilation.

“Mrs. Gunness was one of the most notorious of women criminals. Her crimes were of the most dastardly nature. We will show that she had a clear motive in burning down her house and poisoning her children on that memorable night. We will show that that was the crisis in her life of crime, and that she was afraid that any hour her career of crime might be uncovered.

“We will show that the trial of Lamphere at Stillwell before Justice Kincaid on a charge of trespass preferred by Belle Gunness gave Mrs. Gunness a very good reason to fear an exposé of her criminal record. At this trial it came out that her first husband had come to his end in a mysterious manner and that she had realized on his life insurance. It also came out that her second husband came to his end by the sausage-cutter route. She was asked when Jennie Olson would return. Mrs. Gunness had a very good hunch that something would be doing and in a very short time.

“I believe that the evidence will show that on April twenty-seventh there was a crisis in her life, that she was expecting Helgelien here to investigate about his brother, and that she thought that Ray Lamphere knew more of these things than she would have him know.

“Our evidence will show that Bella Gunness had reason to commit the crime that was committed. The evidence will show that she did commit the act. On the afternoon before the fire she went to Minich’s grocery and bought an unusual quantity of kerosene,’ more than she was in the habit of buying.

“We will prove by testimony that on the afternoon of April twenty-seventh Mrs. Gunness had a conversation in front of the First National Bank building with a certain man in which she said, ‘It will have to be done tonight, and you will have to do it.’

“Something was done that night. A torch was applied to the Gunness house, and the bodies of the three Gunness children were found in the ruins.

“The evidence will show that the can of kerosene was set by Maxson in the frame part of the house, that this part had no cellar under it, and that on the morning after the fire this same can was found in the middle of the cellar under the brick part of the floor, and there was no debris under it, and no evidence of any explosion.

“The evidence will further show that between the frame part and the brick there were two doors which were kept locked, and that Mrs. Gunness allowed no one to enter the brick part but herself and her children.

“On the Saturday night before, she was seen driving out to the place with another woman, slightly smaller than she, who had never been seen before and has never been seen since, unless it was her body that was found in the ruins of the fire.

“Evidence will be introduced that Mrs. Gunness has been seen alive since the burning of the house. Mr. Hutson, who lived across the road from her, who helped Sheriff Smutzer dig in the ruins, will testify that he saw her at the Gunness place on the ninth of July about four or five in the afternoon. He could distinguish her features; he could describe her dress, her horse and buggy. His two children knew her intimately. They saw her pass them on the road.

“We will show that the bridgework found in the ruins, and claimed by Dr. Norton to be that which he had made for Belle Gunness, could not have been subjected to the terrific heat which played on the bodies. We will prove to you that teeth that had gone through this heat would have become brittle and crumbled away. The chemical composition of the teeth renders them more easily burned than the jawbone. Heat that would destroy the jawbone would destroy every vestige of those teeth. In at least one of the watches, the gold case had melted so that the metal ran into the works in globules.

“We will show that it is possible to remove the teeth from the mouth in various ways.

“These teeth were not found till the nineteenth of May, twenty-one days after the fire.”

After skating lightly over the question of an alibi, Worden advanced his strongest point:

“We think we will be able to show you that Mrs. Gunness committed the crime of killing Helgelien; that the stomach was sent to Dr. Walter S. Haines of Chicago University for analysis; that in this stomach there was arsenic and strychnine in fatal quantities. Dr. Haines will testify that in the stomachs of these bodies found in the fire there was also arsenic and strychnine in fatal quantities. In his opinion death was caused by poisoning.

“We shall show from testimony already introduced that it would have been impossible for Ray Lamphere to have gone there and administered poison.

“Did Mrs. Gunness poison the children, place the adult body with them, and escape? If this be true, Lamphere could not be guilty. Or if that was Mrs. Gunness’ body and she came to death by poison, then Lamphere could not be found guilty.

“I am confident that after the evidence is all in, you will be satisfied that Ray Lamphere had nothing to do with the committing of this crime.”

When Worden had finished, there was a profound quiet. The fighting defender had made a deep impression. Even Ray Lamphere’s bent head came up and he looked at his attorney with silent trust.

Then Worden began to call witnesses, and rather spoiled his effect.

The defense of Ray Lamphere is the despair of lawyers. They are infuriated by it, its patchwork of doubts and irrelevancies, its sorties in all directions, its mixed bag of witnesses. But what could Worden do? His experts could not be conjured into court with a snap of the fingers; they were busy men. He dared not put the defendant on the stand. Ray was at the breaking point; and on the best day he ever had, Ray was still an unpredictable liar.

The prosecution was just longing for’ a chance at Ray.

“He’ll confess on the stand,” predicted Smith ominously. “I’ll give him a grilling that will put the Evelyn Thaw grilling in the shade!”

Ray Lamphere was no Evelyn Thaw, either in sex appeal or in quick wits. Worden dared not expose his client to such a grilling. Neither did he dare produce Nigger Liz with an alibi. Nigger Liz would fight back; but would anybody believe her? The one sure result would be further damage to Ray’s already blackened reputation.

To do him justice, Worden was not trying to put on a show. He was not attempting to impress his fellow lawyers, or to play detective, or to get off bright sayings and Socratic questions that would look good in a book. He had one concern, and one only: to save Ray Lamphere from the gallows, to which, Worden sincerely believed, Belle Gunness had plotted to send her former lover.

The defense lawyer began a stubborn fight. His weapons were doubt and confusion. No wonder the method of the defense seemed dubious and confused.

The first defense witness was John H. Ball, local undertaker’s helper. Worden proposed to prove by him that the burned body was not that of Mrs. Gunness; but at once he was thrown for a loss. Mr. Smith immediately objected to this testimony, since Mr. Ball was no expert, and therefore his opinions were not evidence. Mr. Ball was silenced. To make matters worse, having canceled the undertaker out as a witness for the defense, Smith proceeded to try to convert him into a witness for the prosecution by asking:

“Mr. Ball, in handling the body, was any embalming fluid used?”

Worden gave the questioner a quick look, took a note, and underlined it with a sharp slash. He saw where that question was tending. Mr. Ball’s answer tended nowhere:

“Not to my knowledge.”

“It might have been used and you not known it?”

“Yes, sir.”

Having helped nobody, Undertaker Ball left the stand. Fishing for witnesses, Worden now brought forward a bystander to impeach Smutzer’s testimony. That too was a fizzle.” The witness could not be heard until the clerk had checked on what Smutzer’s testimony was.

Wirt Worden was out of witnesses. A recess was taken until after lunch.

During the recess, Worden was able to muster up his experts. The defense lawyer rightly regarded the mysterious teeth as a crucial piece of evidence. If they had burned inside Mrs. Gunness’ head, as the prosecution sought to prove, then she was dead in the fire. But if the teeth had not gone through the fire, but had been thrown in the ashes afterward, then the headless corpse wasn’t hers, and Ray hadn’t murdered her.

To prove the latter contention on behalf of the defense, Worden called, in all, three experts, two dentists and a doctor. As soon as court reconvened, he put George Wasser, D.D.S., on the stand.

Q. I will ask you, Dr. Wasser, if you have made any comparative tests as to the effects of heat upon bone and teeth.

A. I have. The results were that at the end of four or five minutes the bone showed a good deal of resistance, while the tooth was about collapsed.

Q. I will ask your opinion, Dr. Wasser, if a head had been consumed, and all the jaw except the fragment produced, could the teeth have been left in the condition of these teeth?

A. No, sir.

Q. Could you state from this piece of bone, Doctor, whether it is the bone of a human being or not?

A. No, sir.

Tall Mr. Sutherland was back in court with his medical books, for it was he that had got up the medical aspect of the case for the prosecution. He rose to cross-examine, and soon elicited several points more favorable to the state’s case. Dr. Wasser had to admit that the two sets of charred teeth fitted one another reasonably well, that the color matched, and that they showed signs of having been used in the mouth, thus shaking the defense contention that they might have been faked to order.

Fighting for lost ground, Worden re-examined:

Q. Crowns could be removed without burning or destroying them, could they not, Dr. Wasser?

A. Yes, sir, by splitting the gold.

But the crowns had not been split. Attorney Sutherland returned to the attack and had the last word:

Q. Do you think these teeth were removed that way, Dr. Wasser?

A. I do not know.

Q. The teeth might have been burned off?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. Do you think they have been in a fire?

A. Yes, they have been through a fire.

The second dental expert was serious-faced Dr. W. S. Fischer. Worden again produced the contested teeth and the fragment of bone. Ray Lamphere looked at the sinister things with a face drained of emotion. His eyes rested on them a moment, and then his nervous gaze flicked away. Dr. Fischer looked at the exhibits gravely and then said positively that the teeth could not possibly have gone through the fire that destroyed the skull; the porcelain was free of checks and cracks such as an intense fire must have caused.

On cross-examination this defense expert, like the proceeding one, said that the two sets of teeth were probably made for the same mouth, that they had been worn, that they had passed through fire in some way, and that if fire were applied to the back and top of the skull, it would have to eat its way through the skull before reaching the teeth.

There was some lively cross fire on the subject of the alleged jawbone. The state produced a copy of Gray’s Anatomy. Wirt Worden capped that, and gave the attorneys a high old time, when he proposed to put in evidence as a test case the lantern jaw of his learned friend Ralph N. Smith.

“I don’t want to be an exhibit in this case!” ejaculated Smith, rolling his eyes over the skulls and bones on the table in mock dismay.

After this bit of comic relief, Worden produced a pair of excising forceps, and Dr. Fischer explained how they could be used in snipping live teeth from a person’s head. He admitted that the teeth did not look as if they had been removed by force.

The medical man whom Worden called was Dr. Bo Bowell. It was he that, as coroner, had investigated Peter Gunness’ death in 1902, but he was not asked about that. He was asked to look at the much-disputed scrap of bone. He said it was a jawbone. Was it human? He could not positively say.

In between experts, Worden kept the pot boiling with neighbors, amateur detectives, and theorists. There was a lot of evidence about what time the fire broke out; but since Ray had no solid alibi earlier than six A.M., it all added up to nothing but a smoke screen.

At the shank of Friday afternoon, the defense had the impudence to call the prosecuting attorney to the stand and burn him up for another smoke screen.

Outside of court the opposing attorneys, Smith and Worden, were close friends. Worden detailed his associate, Ellsworth Weir, to apply the torch to Smith. The prosecution, it would be suggested, had treated the defendant with monstrous unfairness in building up the case against him. The topic of examination, the Argus reported gleefully, was that famous night ride that Mr. Smith and Mr, Marr made in a closed hack to impound a trunk from the locked buggy shed the previous spring. “The first set-back,” said the Argus, “came at the discovery that the keys to the ‘bone-house’ had been forgotten. But this did not discourage the night riders. Their courage had been screwed to a sticking point, and maybe ‘never again’ they would dare to ride. The watchman of the ruins was summoned in a hasty consultation. The door must be opened—that was all there was to it. The watchman removed the staple, and the door swung off its hinges.”

Mr. Weir prodded the prosecutor gleefully:

Q. What did you do?

A. Nothing. I gladly allowed others to do the heavy work.

Q. (pretending to misunderstand) What’s that, you left the dirty work to others?

A. The heavy work.

Q. What was done with the trunk?

A. It was placed on the hack and removed from the premises.

Q. Where was it taken, Mr. Smith?

A. To my office.

Q. Where is it now?

A. It is still there.

The hackman and the watchman went over the same story. Mr. Smith had told them to keep mum. They did not know who owned the trunk or what was in it.

By this time the whole courtroom, right up to the Judge himself, was burning with curiosity. The Judge ordered the bailiffs to produce the trunk in court on Saturday morning.

The first thing Saturday morning, the trunk was duly hauled into court. Ray Lamphere looked at it without interest. He knew all about it. It was his trunk. Amid general suspense the mystery box was opened. It contained a few dirty shirts and rumpled neckties, books and old papers, none of them having any possible connection with the case. The whole trunk rumpus was just one of Wirt Worden’s red herrings. The trunk was removed amid general disappointment.

It was a dull morning in court. Joe Maxson was called once more, to testify again that he put the kerosene under the stairs, and that nobody could get into the main house that night because Mrs. Gunness had locked all the doors. Joe was followed by a witness who saw the same kerosene can, empty and unexploded, inside the cellar. Somebody must have carried it down and emptied it out before the fire started.

Evidence was then offered by a jeweler about a gold watch that the fierce heat of the fire had melted shut. Worden passed the congealed watch case to the jury. Then the defense attorney began to question the witness about a certain scientific experiment:

Q. Did you make tests as to the comparative heat at which porcelain and gold would melt?

A. Yes, sir. I took a soup bone, removed the marrow, and put into the cavity a twenty-two-carat-gold crown, platinum, and porcelain teeth with meat wrapped around. I put these into a stove with a wood fire and let it burn for an hour and a half.

“Object!” rapped out Mr. Smith with an ill-concealed grin. “This witness has not been qualified as an expert.”.

Anybody could see from his amateurish experiment that he wasn’t one. The jeweler was not allowed to finish his experiment.

Whether by instinct or because of the weekly baking chores or because their hearts had been converted to higher things, the women of La Porte were conspicuous by their absence from the Saturday-morning session. At the Thursday-night prayer meeting, the indignant minister had delivered a scathing blast against trial-going for women. The women, he cried, had camped out by the cesspool that was the Gunness trial for fear of missing one of the rotten words or scenes that were being described. He took particular exception to the young lady whom he had noticed “fortunately situated down front. She was artistically squashing a big piece of gum, her cheeks bulging out on both sides with a fat cud, and her head bobbing like a cow’s.”

When the women began staying away, the minister must have felt rewarded for his eloquence.

On Saturday afternoon, however, the women came back in droves. They seemed to sense something in the air, and they were right, for Wirt Worden that afternoon gave them one sensation coming quick on the heels of another.

The first startling testimony was given by Fred Rickman, who had done odd jobs for Mrs. Gunness two years ago. Worden questioned him:

Q. Do you remember an automobile coming to the Gunness place?

A. Yes, I do. I was plowing corn near the house on that particular day. After dinner Mrs. Gunness hitched up to go to town. She came to me and said, “I must go to town, and two men are coming here while I am gone. You are to show them the key under the door mat and let them into the house.”

Shortly after, two strange men rode into the farmyard in a green automobile. I showed them the key, and they made themselves at home, while I went back to my plowing in the field back of the barn.

I had been working about an hour when Mrs. Gunness came back. She put up her rig and came at once to me. “I want you to dig a hole for me,” she said.

“What kind of a hole?” I asked.

“Just a hole for a brick foundation,” she said. “The masons will be here tomorrow.” She showed me where to dig, and put stakes to mark the corners. “Dig it five and a half feet deep,” she said. I obeyed to the letter. It did not occur to me at the time that it was about the size of a grave.

Q. Where was it you dug, Mr. Rickman?

A. Under the wagon shed. As soon as I started digging, Mrs. Gunness hurried to the house. When I finished, I went to the front door for my money. It was open, which was unusual. She generally kept all the doors fastened tight. Inside I could see the three of them drinking wine. There were several bottles on the table. One of the men came to the door and paid me. He brought a bottle and poured me a drink. I drank it, and liked it, and started for home in my buggy. I distinctly remember passing a farmer on the road, but after that I remember nothing until four o’clock the next afternoon. I was not drunk. I had nothing else to drink that day. I think now the wine must have been doped.

Worden called Rickman to tell this quaint story in order to show that if Mrs. Gunness had an accomplice, it wasn’t Ray. Listeners with imagination could perceive the whole story:

Accomplice locates victim, brings him down in green automobile. Mrs. Gunness, notified in advance, hurries to town to replenish supply of dope, or wine, or both. Returning, she orders victim’s grave dug beforehand, and hastens to house to process him. With accomplice she plies victim with drink, filling his glass from doped bottle, theirs from another bottle. Rickman interrupts. Mastermind accomplice pays him off and gives him a drink from the drugged bottle, either by mistake or just to keep his hand in.

Listeners with less imagination might suppose that Rickman got drunk on his own hook and dreamed the rest of it.

The one thing that must have occurred to everybody in the courtroom was that Sheriff Smutzer ought to have dug under the new concrete foundation of the buggy shed.

Sensational as Rickman’s story was, it paled into insignificance when the next witness came to the stand. Mr. Hutson had held everybody spellbound with his vivid narrative of the fire when he had appeared as a prosecution witness. Now he had an even more astounding story to tell, and he told it with dramatic gusto as Worden started him off:

Q. You say, Mr. Hutson, that you knew Mrs. Gunness. How well did you know her?

A. I worked for Mrs. Gunness for about four weeks last spring. During that time I saw her four or five times a day.

Q. Have you seen Mrs. Gunness since the fire?

A. Yes, sir!

Q. Where?

A. On the road near the hog pen.

Q. What date did you see her?

A. On the ninth day of July. I was coming from town with a hay rack, and I saw through the trees Mrs. Gunness and a man walking in the orchard. Even at that distance I could recognize her plainly. I knew her size, I knew her shape, and I knew her lumbering walk. I never saw another woman who walked like her. She had on a light skirt, black waist, a wide trimmed hat with a black veil that came down to the chin and a white veil over that. There was a man with her. He weighed about a hundred and sixty-five pounds. He had a gray mustache and gray hair.

Q. Describe the rig, please, Mr. Hutson.

A. The buggy had a yellow running gear and black top. The horse was a gray one with dapples on its hips as big as a half dollar.

Q. What did you do?

A. I started up my horses to try to get up the hill to the orchard before she could get away, but when I got within two wagon lengths of the buggy, they ran to it, clambered in, and raced straight for the main road. I tried to follow them, but they got ahead “of me, and I did not like to follow them any more. There was a good chance of getting a chunk of lead!

The courtroom shuddered. Under Mr. Hutson’s spell, the crowd would hardly have been surprised if the Viking figure in the two veils had suddenly pushed open the door and walked in, to laugh in their startled faces or accuse Ray Lamphere to his teeth. Ray’s haunted eyes almost seemed to see her there.

In vain did Prosecutor Smith, cross-examining, try to restore common sense:

Q. Doesn’t John Welker, the cabman, have a buggy with a yellow running gear, and a gray horse also?

A. I don’t know.

Q. If you couldn’t see her face, how did you know it was Mrs. Gunness?

A. I couldn’t see her features under the veils, but I knew her by her build and her walk.

There was a sentimental murmur as the next witness was tenderly led to the witness chair. She looked very young and small in it. She was Evaline Hutson, eleven years old, a pretty, appealing child with dainty features and beautiful trusting eyes. She spoke right up to corroborate her father’s story:

“I saw Mrs. Gunness, in hay time, near our woods. She was in a buggy with a man. She had on two veils. The black one was over her face. When she saw me, she turned her face away from me.”

The next witness, even smaller and more appealing, was Evaline’s younger sister, Eldora. She too spoke up in her small childish voice:

“I was playing by the big gate by the road. I saw Mrs. Gunness go by with a man. I did not know the man.”

Worden’s reasonable doubt of Mrs. Gunness’ death was somehow transmuted, as the afternoon grew dark, into unreasonable fear. The effect was all that the defense could wish; but Wirt Worden still had two more shocks to deliver.

In the atmosphere the Hutsons had created, belief was ready that the ogress of the hog lot was alive somewhere, gloating, as the toils threatened to enmesh her victim, the defendant.

Then whose headless body had turned up in the fire?

To answer that, as well as it could ever be answered, Worden called a neighbor of Belle’s to the stand. He said his name was John Anderson, and he lived on the McClung Road near the Gunness place. Worden asked him:

Q. Mr. Anderson, did you see Mrs. Gunness shortly before the fire?

A. Yes, I did, on the Saturday evening before the fire. She was driving by in her buggy, and she stopped and asked how the flowers were getting along.

Q. Was anybody with her?

A. There was a strange woman with her.

Q. Describe her, please, Mr. Anderson.

A. She was a large woman, not quite so large as Mrs. Gunness.

Q. Did you ever see her again?

A. Never. After the fire I told the Sheriff about her.

Where else did this fat girl disappear to, if not into the fire? And what became of her head?

The last witness of Saturday was William P. Miller, county commissioner. He suggested an answer to that question:

“I was at the Gunness place when the bodies were taken from the fire. I observed the adult body. There was no head on the body. I made investigation around the place, and discovered fresh digging. I looked in the vault of the privy, and saw a large stone. I spoke to Mr. Smutzer about it. The second time I looked, the rock was about half sunk. At a third time, the rock was out of sight.”

Was it a rock? Or was it the missing head? That was the kind of question that Wirt Worden liked to leave in people’s heads as the second week of the Lamphere trial ended.

Ray Lamphere was guided out of the darkened courtroom like a man in a trance. Others besides Ray walked out into the windy November night with horror stiffening their spines. If the wind moaned in dry branches, the timid stopped their ears. If dead leaves ran with light footsteps on the pavement behind them, only the hardiest dared to turn their heads. Who knew when or how the ogress would show herself?

Worden had scared the impressionable. He was too hardheaded to feel fear himself. He packed up his papers with the satisfying feeling of a job well done.

The jurors, stretching and yawning and scratching their heads, were shepherded out by a bailiff. In their third-floor-dormitory at the top of the courthouse, where twelve cots were set up in a row, they repelled gloom and ghosts over a good supper sent in by the Hotel Teegarden.

On Sunday they would go in a body to church before dining, and then in a body they would aid digestion with a country walk. They would not walk in the direction of the Gunness place. The attorneys could not agree on that procedure. Books and tobacco and more food would have to while away the time till court convened again on Monday morning.

Early on the morning of Monday, November 23, before courttime, Wirt Worden was visited by Mr. Lingard, the cattle buyer whom C. C. Fish had located as the witness to Belle’s instructions that something had to be done “tonight.”

“I want to look at Ray Lamphere,” he said.

“Come along with me,” said Worden. “You can see him as he goes into court.”

Soon Ray appeared.

“That’s the man!” cried Lingard.

“What man?”

“That’s the man I saw on the street corner with Mrs. Gunness, on the afternoon before the fire—the man with the basket of mushrooms—the man to whom she said, ‘It’s got to be done tonight, and you will have to do it!’”

Worden felt as if somebody—probably C. C. Fish—had hit him a blow in the solar plexus. A fine defense witness this man had turned out to be! He was much too close to home with that accurate detail of Ray’s basket of mushrooms. Worden wished he had not taken Fish’s word for him. There was nothing to do but drop him in a hurry. Suppose it was proved that Mrs. Gunness plotted the fire; how could that help the defense if the plot was hatched with the defendant?

Rain was lashing the windows and darkening the courtroom as Worden, much against his inclination, opened his third day of stalling. His star witness, Dr. Haines, the poison expert, was unavoidably absent. Worden chose fill the time of waiting by raising more questions and scattering more doubts.

A neighbor said she saw an automobile near the farm early on the morning of the fire. Was Mrs. Gunness escaping in it?

One of the diggers said he had seen the woman’s skull, with its long light braid, found at the farm on May 22. Was it the dead woman’s head?

Joe Maxson, called again, told of the finding of the teeth, and his brother-in-law Isaiah Alderfer corroborated his account. It was about nine o’clock, they said, when the sluice man pulled the teeth out of his vest pocket, both sets, remarking, “We have got what we wanted!” Then he stowed them in his pocket again. It was near noon when Smutzer appeared. The sluice man pulled out the teeth and gave them to him.

That was not the way Smutzer had told it. Was Smutzer lying?

A crematory attendant testified that in all cremations he had seen, the small bones went first, and the skull was the last thing to burn. To Mr. Tag, the levelheaded bailiff, that just about settled it; that skull never was in the fire.

Were the bodies, when found in the ashes, resting amid the ruins of a bed? Smutzer had said they were. The impeaching witness had finally testified that he had once heard Smutzer admit the contrary. Worden called three Gunness neighbors who had seen the bodies found, and they all said there were no bedsprings under them. One good lady was especially positive when Worden asked her:

Q. Were you present when the bodies were removed from the Gunness ruins?

A. Yes, sir, I was sitting right there on top of the wall. I saw them digging. The remains of the piano were on top of the debris above the bodies.

Q. What was under the bodies?

A. I couldn’t see anything but a little ashes under the bodies. When that had been shoveled away I could see the floor as plain as I see the floor of this courtroom.

Cross-examined, the witness estimated that the layer of ashes underneath might have been six inches deep.

Had the ex-Sheriff lied when he said the bodies had been found surrounded by the ruins of a complete bed? Had they been placed, rather, on a kerosene-soaked mattress on the basement floor, before somebody kindled the fire?

Finally, Wirt Worden tossed into the grab bag Mrs. Gunness’ will; but before he did so, Bessie Folant was called to the stand. As the girl took the stand and directed her luminous brown gaze on the examining lawyer, both attorney and witness must have remembered vividly the day when they, too, sat in the rain, side by side, on the ruined wall of the burned Gunness place, watching narrowly to see what the diggers would find. What exactly the diggers did find was the crux of the dispute in this courtroom.

Worden, however, did not mean to involve his favorite secretary in that dispute. She was there only to identify Mrs. Gunness’ signature. Worden questioned her formally:

Q. What is your occupation, Miss Folant?

A. I am stenographer for Darrow and Worden.

Q. Did you know Mrs. Gunness?

A. Yes, sir. She came to the office a year ago last June.

Q. What did she come for?

A. She wanted to complain to Mayor Darrow about the neighbors.

Q. What was said on this occasion?

A. I asked her her name. I couldn’t understand it the way she said it, so I asked her to write it in a little book.

Q. Is this the book?

A. Yes, it is.

The signature, book and all, was placed in evidence. Haying proved the signature, the defense finally produced Mrs. Gunness’ will and had it read out. Was that will, made the day before the fire, proof that Mrs. Gunness was thinking of suicide?

By lunchtime on Monday, what with calling innocent bystanders and amateur experts, borrowing state’s witnesses and summoning the prosecutor himself, the defense had managed to parade thirty witnesses. It had scattered doubts like bird shot. But Ray’s fate still hung in the balance. The Argus exclaimed:

The psychological moment has come! The defense must turn the tables now or never. On the tables, in the parlance of the gambling room, rests a flush of hearts, and it is held in the hands of the prosecution. The best the defense has so far been able to do is draw four of a color. They must upset the tables, or make good on the only one draw left—and Haines is the card.

The poison expert from Chicago was still in Chicago, and could not be expected to reach La Porte for another twenty-four hours. It was exasperating to Worden to let the jury cool off for a whole day, but there was no help for it. He had to ask for a recess while they waited for the witness who was the last forlorn hope of the defense.

While they waited, the papers and the public had to make what grist they could. The best they had to work on was the presence of Mr. Randolph Churchill, a fascinating English writer who had come among them to study Belle and the temperance question, and a couple of crank letters in Mayor Darrow’s hands. The letters purported to be from Belle and her accomplice, and proclaimed the innocence of Lamphere:

Mrs. Gunness is alive and well. I got a letter from her no more than five days ago, and she hoped Lamphere would get hung or a life sentence, but I could not think of him, an innocent man, being so treated!

Crank letters written by screwballs weren’t evidence, but they provided something to talk about until the trial was resumed. Hardheaded observers, ignoring such stuff, were saying that the defense had failed to shake the strong case established by the prosecution. Would the last witness do what the first thirty witnesses had not been able to achieve?

At last, on Tuesday, November 24, at one-thirty P.M., Dr. Walter Haines, professor of toxicology, came to the stand. A teeming crowd jammed into the courtroom to hear the star witness. Five hundred people were crowded into the courtroom where barely two hundred could sit. The overflow jammed the stairs and clustered on the lawn.

As. Dr. Haines ascended the stand, the defendant looked at him without hope. Even his closest friends had given up any thought of an acquittal.

Wirt Worden had not given up. His steady look of confidence was unimpaired as he played his last card for the defense.

Dr. Haines said he had received three jars containing matter to be tested. One jar contained one stomach, which was Andrew Helgelien’s. Worden asked him:

“When you made a chemical examination of this stomach, what did you find?”

“Object!” said Prosecutor Smith promptly. “Irrelevant, incompetent, and immaterial!”

“I contend that it is admissible,” countered Worden, “on the ground of similarity between the Helgelien case and the case before us.”

“I will admit the evidence,” ruled Judge Richter.

Worden asked the witness again: “What did you find?”

“I found arsenic and strychnine in the Helgelien stomach.”

No wonder Andrew came out of the earth so well preserved. As many a poisoner has learned to his sorrow, arsenic is an excellent preservative. Undertakers know this well, a fact of which the prosecution intended to take advantage later.

Dr. Haines stated that he found one and a half grains of strychnine in the stomach, and that one-third grain would be enough to cause death.

Then Worden raised the question of the stomachs in the others jar. What had the doctor found in them?

“The examination revealed an abundance of arsenic and a quantity of strychnine,” Dr. Haines replied. “There was almost two grains of strychnine in the whole mass, enough to have caused the death of three persons. But as to whether it did cause the death of three persons, I am unable to state.”

The three persons in question were the adult and the two younger children, Lucy and Philip. Myrtle’s stomach had been too charred to test. When the worthy coroner saved freight by bundling the other three stomachs into one jar, he made it impossible to tell whether the woman only, or the children only, or all of them, had died by poison. By the holes in the little foreheads, the children might have died by the hammer; but there was now no way of making sure.

Dr. Haines went on to point out that it was a waste of arsenic to administer it with strychnine, since the strychnine would kill before the arsenic got to work. Violent convulsions would start very quickly, sometimes so violent as to throw the victim out of bed. Death would ensue in a very short time. Usually in cases of strychnine poisoning there would be intense rigidity, the heart would be empty and contracted, and the feet would be arched.

Before turning over his expert for cross-examination, Worden got ahead of the cross-examiner. Smith had tipped his hand last Friday when he asked about embalming fluids. Worden got his question in first:

“Dr. Haines, is strychnine ever used in embalming?”

“No, sir. There are no antiseptic preservative properties in strychnine.”

R. N. Smith rose to cross-examine. It was his turn to sow doubts. He ignored embalming fluids, but he suggested other ways by which strychnine might have got itself into the stomachs in question. Was it taken in medicine? Was it sneaked into the remains by some curiosity-seeker? However unlikely these suggestions were, the expert, of course, could not conscientiously say a flat no to either possibility.

The hearts of the three out of the four fire victims had been not empty, but clotted with blood. Did this mean that they could not have been the victims of strychnine?

No, said the expert; there is nothing determinative about the condition of the heart. The only distinctive appearance is that intense rigidity.

When the poison expert stood down, the defense rested.

Had Wirt Worden filled his bobtail flush?