13. The Truth about the Gunness Case

What kind of woman was Belle Gunness? What was the secret of that ghastly underground career of blood and death?

Who can fathom that strange mind? She adopted Jennie, and fought to keep her, and killed her and carved her up, and wept for her. She lived with Mads Sorenson for seventeen years, and killed him between sunrise and sundown. She wrote to Andrew Helgelien with earthy tenderness for sixteen months, and cut him down with an ax.

Sometimes she killed suddenly, as if upon impulse. She killed her hired men at moments very inconvenient for her, in the midst of plowing or at oat-cutting, and then had to finish the work herself. If she had planned, she would have planned better.

Generally she did plan. Mads died quickly within exactly the twenty-four-hour period when his life was worth double. The suitors were not abolished until they had produced cash. Jennie’s disappearance was foreshadowed in elaborate preparations for college, and came in time, according to Emil Greening, to save Belle from, having to give Jennie her $1,800 on her eighteenth birthday. Even Peter Gunness lived to finish the butchering, though it is not clear whether Belle impulsively used the hammer to improve upon a genuine accident, or whether Peter knocked things about in a strychnine convulsion before the hammer finished him.

In Murder and Its Motives, F. Tennyson Jesse analyzes the nature of multiple poisoners like Belle Gunness. They are mostly women, she says, and they kill to feed a deranged lust for power. They are not averse to acquiring as a by-product that tangible form of power, money.

Belle Gunness was a barren woman at a dangerous age when, after seventeen years of marriage, she killed Mads Sorenson. She made money by it, and past question she also avenged a long resentment against male domination. After eight months with a second husband, she freed and enriched herself once more by the same process.

After that, she was through with matrimony. She was so much stronger than any man she ever met that she despised the lot of them. True, she had a sensual appreciation of sex, as of food and alcohol. She gave herself freely to her farm hands. As long as they submitted to her, they were safe. When things went wrong, Peter Colson and Ray Lamphere saved their lives by getting out of reach. When Olaf Lindboe turned possessive, Belle with her ax soon showed him who was boss.

By sex, too, she obtained a hold on her mail-order victims. How else did she persuade cautious men, overnight, to hand over willingly every cent they possessed? For her suitors were cautious men. Not one of the three identified dead obeyed her injunction not to trust to banks, but to sew cash money in their underwear. Moo, Budsberg, and Helgelien left their money safe in the bank at home. Overnight they changed their minds. Nose-led by Belle, one by one they appeared at the bank like men under hypnosis and drew out in cash every cent they possessed.

It is not necessary to suppose that their state was the result of magical passes made under their noses. The history of crime is full of frightening evidence of the power of sex in bad hands. Look at Fernandez, the lonely-hearts murderer, or Landru, the French Bluebeard, or “Brides in the Bath” Smith, or Tillie Klimek, the Chicago Borgia, who combined husband murder with the evil eye.

It is a remarkable fact that every one of these irresistible mass seducers was singularly unattractive, half of them more repulsive even than Belle Gunness. The truth is that a high charge of sex energy is a naked force all by itself, and needs no bolstering by beauty, wit, money, cleanliness, or anything else. It acts like a magnet on the repressed and the lonely of the opposite sex, and is enough by itself to subjugate its victims.

That Belle possessed other charms—tidiness, good cookery, pink cheeks, purring manners, an earthy prose style—was quite beside the point. Perhaps the prose style fetched them; once under her roof, they were done for. Mr. Anderson was quite right to run away. After a night with Belle, he might not have wanted to.

As time went on, Belle developed her routine of summoning males with money, enjoying and destroying the males, and taking the money. It was ridiculously easy thus to levy tribute on the whole hated sex. She probably attained a grim satisfaction, as well as efficiency in disposal, when she cut them in pieces.

Sometimes Belle had to kill to keep her secrets. Thus Jennie died, and probably the unknown woman who was buried in the hog lot. When discovery came too close, Mrs. Gunness was quite capable of silencing her foster children and manufacturing a substitute corpse to aid her own escape.

Did she do so?

The victims of the fire were found stacked like cordwood in the basement. The piano from the first floor had fallen down on top of them. There was no head to the adult body, and no mark in the ashes where a head had been. There was strychnine in the viscera, and a hole in each little forehead.

How did the four come to their deaths? The woman died by strychnine. She got the same dose as Andrew, which must have been Belle’s idea of one portion. Belle probably stocked the stuff in the form of rat poison.

The children were drugged and dispatched with the hammer. If Belle had been giving out strychnine at supper that night, Joe Maxson would never have seen the morning.

If those four died in that triple-locked house by Belle’s habitual weapons of strychnine and hammer, then nobody did it but Belle, and Ray’s story, in spite of overembroidery, is true in its essentials. Belle Gunness escaped alive from La Porte.

Then what became of her?

If this book were a work of fiction, it would not be necessary to alter a single detail or plant one additional clue to write the last chapter.

To begin with, the theories of both the prosecution and the defense would be discarded. The truth would be found to lie somewhere between the two.

The prosecution contended that she died in the fire. She didn’t.

The defense insisted that she was still alive. She wasn’t.

What if Ray thought she was? He didn’t know. Bogus messages from “Big Six” would serve to keep him quiet; but he never saw her again.

She was alive when she vanished on the night of the fire; but she was dead when, three weeks later, her teeth turned up in the ashes. With or without her consent, those teeth could not have been pulled intact out of her living jaw.

If Belle Gunness was dead on May 19, who visited the farm on July 9? Perhaps it was somebody who had a right and a reason to be there, somebody who bore a family resemblance to Belle in build and movement—the new owner of the farm, Belle’s heir, her sister.

If Belle Gunness was dead on May 19, who extracted her teeth, passed them through fire, and planted them in the sluice box?

If this book were a work of fiction, the answer would be obvious:

The man who killed her.

On the night of April 27, Belle Gunness put herself in a highly dangerous position. She went to extraordinary trouble to prove that she was dead. She absconded with $30,000 in cash. She fell into the hands of an accomplice who knew both these facts.

She was so infatuated with her own power and her own cleverness that she did not see what she had done. She richly deserved to die; and she had, in effect, put up $30,000 to be had without risk as a reward for murdering her. Had she signed her own death warrant?

Nobody was safe with Belle Gunness. She had just killed four people in cold blood for her own safety. She had to let Ray go; he was needed elsewhere to complete the plot by setting the fire. But why should any other accomplice live to tell on her?

It was on the cards that when she had used him she would destroy him. It was on the cards that he knew it. When she tried it, did she at last meet her match?

You are the jury. Put yourself in his place.

You have been winking at shady doings out on the farm. You don’t even want to know what kind of shady doings, but secretly you are beginning to suspect the worst. You are delighted when the woman tells you she is clearing out. You are even willing to help her, if you can do so outside La Porte.

You meet her as scheduled. But you don’t trust her. Your big revolver is ready. You watch her narrowly, and the first false move she makes, you shoot to kill.

You pocket the $30,000, ditch the body, and speed back to La Porte. You are perfectly safe. The woman herself has gone to great trouble to prove she died in her blazing home. Even if someone stumbles across this body later, no one is going to suspect who she is, still less how she died. The official in charge—that’s you—isn’t likely to raise any awkward questions!

True, there’s Ray Lamphere. He knows too much. But you have a hold over Ray. You are the only man who knows where his mistress is. All you have to do is keep him plied with messages. He won’t expect a letter himself, because he doesn’t understand Norwegian, and Belle Gunness could write only Norwegian. As long as he thinks Belle is alive, and only you can take him to her, he will hold his tongue.

When the hog lot gives up its dead, the man who abolished Mrs. Gunness might be voted a medal by the indignant populace. Why don’t you take a bow?

You would rather have the $30,000. It’s yours for the keeping—as long as you don’t draw attention to it by spending it.

Week goes into week. The $30,000 is burning a hole in your pocket, and things still hang fire. The coroner won’t find that Mrs. Gunness is dead. You go through the proper motions. The coroner holds out. At the very last moment, you realize that nothing but the teeth will satisfy him.

You go back for the teeth. Not many people could force themselves to do that job of dissecting, but you don’t mind. You used to be an undertaker. You char the teeth in a fire and drop them in the sluice box.

As soon as the wrong corpse is declared to be Mrs. Gunness, you leave town at once. With $30,000 in your pocket, you take five days for a two-day journey. Somewhere on the way, probably changing trains in Fort Worth, you will bank the $30,000 under an assumed name.

After that you develop a great affection for Texas. You keep going back there, but you don’t stay. Ray Lamphere is like a time bomb planted at your back. Without word from “Big Six,” he may become talkative, and even suspicious.

When Ray dies, your wait is almost over. You shrug off his dying accusation.

When the last word on the Gunness case has been said, you are free to visit Texas once more—and forget to come back. After two years of waiting, you can start spending that $30,000.

Did it happen that way? It is impossible to say so. But this much is certain—that Belle’s accomplice, whoever he was, had strong motive in the $30,000, and perfect opportunity in the bogus death plot; and that the final verdict on the fate of Belle Gunness, the multiple murderess of the hog lot, must be: Justifiable homicide, on or about April 28, 1908, by a person or persons unknown.

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