Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men Read online

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  Belle Gunness was a lady fair

  In Indiana State.

  She weighed about three hundred pounds,

  And that is quite some weight.

  That she was stronger than a man

  Her neighbors all did own;

  She butchered hogs right easily,

  And did it all alone.

  But hogs were just a sideline

  She indulged in now and then;

  Her favorite occupation

  Was a-butchering of men.

  —Anonymous,

  “The Ballad of Belle Gunness”

  Prologue

  Bluebeard’s Door

  Fairyland, as every child knows, is a terrifying place, populated by all manner of nightmarish beings: the snaggletoothed witch who lusts for the fattened flesh of little children; the bloodthirsty giant ready to roast any trespassing human on a spit; the smooth-talking wolf with a sweet tooth for tasty young girls. Of all the scary stories told about that realm of dark enchantment, however, none more closely resembles a modern-day horror movie than the tale of Bluebeard.

  Though scholars have identified variants of this folktale in societies throughout the world, the version best known in our own culture was originally put into writing by French author Charles Perrault in his 1697 classic, Mother Goose Tales (Contes de ma mere l’Oye). Supposedly modeled on the infamous fifteenth-century sadist Gilles de Rais—Joan of Arc’s onetime field marshal, accused of the torture-murder of countless peasant children—Perrault’s Bluebeard is a highborn serial wife slayer whose creepy castle contains a locked secret chamber in which he stores the dismembered body parts of his fatally curious brides. To test her obedience, each new wife is left alone with a complete set of keys and a warning not to enter the mysterious room. In every case but one, however, the temptation proves too strong. No sooner has her husband gone than she runs down to the forbidden chamber and, with trembling hand, unlocks the door—“ouvrit en tremblant la porte,” as Perrault writes.[1]

  Not many years before Perrault set down his harrowing tale of the grisly horrors hidden behind Bluebeard’s door, one of his countrymen, the famed explorer Rene-Robert Cavelier de La Salle, undertook an expedition around the Great Lakes. While passing through a stretch of present-day Indiana—then part of the Potawatomi nation—he and his men followed an old Indian trail that cut through a dense hardwood forest before opening onto a rolling tall-grass prairie. To La Salle and the early French fur traders who came after him, this opening became known as “the door”—“la porte,” in their language.[2]

  For the next century and a half, the area remained devoid of white inhabitants. “In all the West, prolific in beauty, there was not a lovelier region,” writes an early historian, “but it was in the sole possession of the red man, who roamed at will over the prairies and encamped in the groves, living on the game and fish which were abundant on the land and in the sparkling lakes.”[3]

  It wasn’t until 1829 that the first white pioneers appeared: a widow named Miriam Benedict, her seven grown children, and a son-in-law, Henly Clyburn. By the beginning of 1832, more than a hundred other families had settled in the territory. In April of that year, the county of La Porte, consisting of 462 square miles, was officially incorporated by an act of the state legislature. After casting his vote, one crusty old lawmaker demanded to know the meaning of the new county’s “outlandish name.” Informed that it was French for “the door,” he indignantly proposed that the “high-flown” foreign word be replaced with something more suitably American. Happily, observes one chronicler, “his advice was not followed; and the county received the beautiful name ‘La Porte,’ instead of being forever known to the world as Gateville or Doorburg.”[4]

  Seeking a site to establish a county seat, a few enterprising settlers acquired a particularly choice tract of land, 450 acres in size and adorned with a “chain of small lakes, gem-like in their dazzling beauty.”[5] A courthouse and jail were promptly erected and a government land office opened. Within a few years, the new county seat—also named La Porte—had grown from a tiny village of scattered log buildings into a flourishing town with “all the departments of human life which go to make a thriving community”: churches and schools, taverns and hotels, merchants and mechanics, doctors and lawyers, as well as two newspapers, one promoting the Whig Party, one the Democratic.[6]

  In 1852, the town of La Porte was upgraded to a city. By then its population had grown to roughly five thousand. The following decades witnessed the construction of a waterworks plant, the installation of street lighting, the introduction of a telephone system, and successive waves of other civic improvements. Roads were paved, cement sidewalks laid down, dozens of old wooden buildings demolished and handsome brick ones erected in their places. Besides several large drugstores and dry goods emporiums, La Porte’s places of business included twenty-five grocery stores, six flour and feed stores, six furniture dealers, four bakeries, ten butcher shops, four hardware merchants, six boot and shoe firms, twenty-six tobacco shops, four sewing machine dealers, nine milliners and dressmakers, two book and stationery stores, nine boardinghouses, twenty-four saloons, six billiard rooms, six barbers, seven livery stables, two tanneries, and three undertakers.[7] Its residential streets were lined with so many trees that it became known as “the Maple City.” Altogether, crowed one lifelong resident, the city of La Porte—“with her magnificent court-house, excellent city hall, and splendid school buildings, her fine streets, her beautiful adjacent lakes, her spacious outlying country, and her excellent railroad facilities”—was “the fit capital of one of the best counties in the state.”[8]

  Life along Lincoln Way in “the Maple City,” La Porte, Indiana, 1890.

  It wasn’t only the physical attributes of the place that made the county and city of La Porte so exceptional in the eyes of its boosters but the caliber of its residents. La Porteans have always taken pride in the achievements of their most distinguished fellow citizens. Among the notables celebrated in local histories were Jacob J. Mann, manufacturer of a harvesting machine that predated the famous McCormick reaper; Dr. F. T. Wrench, creator of a collapsible “sanitary toothbrush”; Antipas J. Bowell, inventor of a dog-powered butter churn; Dr. S. B. Collins, discoverer of the Collins’ Painless Cure for Opium Eaters; and such local literati as Benjamin F. Taylor and Mrs. Clara J. Armstrong, authors, respectively, of the poetry volumes Old-Time Pictures and Sheaves of Time and La Porte in June.[9] In later decades, La Porte would be the home of other, even more widely known figures, including Zerna Sharp, cocreator of the “Dick and Jane” books that taught reading to generations of American schoolchildren; Frederick C. Mennen, inventor of Jiffy Pop popcorn (as well as a patented instrument for detecting gonorrhea); William Mathias Scholl, our nation’s preeminent manufacturer of foot-care products; singer Dorothy Claire, who performed with the Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey bands and starred in the 1948 Broadway smash Finian’s Rainbow; and Brewster Martin Higley, lyricist of the American standard “Home on the Range.”[10]

  Of course, even its most ardent champions had to concede that, along with these and other luminaries, La Porte h
ad produced its share of criminals. In early 1836, a resident of the county named Pelton was waylaid, murdered, and robbed of “a considerable sum of money” by an acquaintance named Staves, who was promptly apprehended, tried, and sent to the gallows. Two years later, in February 1838, nineteen-year-old Joshua M. Coplin, a native of La Porte Township who had just returned home from Virginia, where he had collected a long-overdue debt, was shot to death and robbed of the money—six hundred dollars in gold and silver coins—by his traveling companion, a young man named David Scott. Tracked down, jailed, and tried in La Porte, Scott was hanged before an approving crowd a few months later.[11]

  In December 1841, tavern keeper Charles Egbert, “enraged against” a rival named James Smith who had opened a competing establishment that had “taken all the trade away from Mr. Egbert’s place of business,” went to Smith’s barroom armed with a newly purchased dirk knife and stabbed the latter to death. Arrested and held on $5,000 bail, Egbert managed to come up with the money, then promptly fled to Texas—still a part of Mexico—where, according to later reports, he underwent a religious conversion and became “a Methodist class leader.”[12]

  “A most remarkable murder” took place in 1862. Following the discovery of the newly slain corpse of a German émigré named Fred Miller, suspicion fell upon his wife. A group of Miller’s male friends, intent on “extorting a confession,” strung the woman up by the neck from a tree limb until she gasped out the identity of the ostensible culprit: a man named John Poston, who—so she claimed—had murdered her husband “in her presence and had promised to marry her if she would not denounce him.” Though Poston was promptly arrested and brought to trial, his accuser’s testimony, having been coerced through torture, was deemed to be invalid, and the presiding magistrate “felt constrained to acquit him.”[13]

  Three years later, another German farmer, John Lohm, while driving his wagon back home after a day of husking corn, encountered a pair of strangers, James Woods and William Fulton, who—having spent the afternoon in a local saloon—were “in that condition when whisky most inflames the blood and leads its victims to the most desperate ends.” Some sort of altercation ensued, instigated by the two intoxicated men. When Lohm attempted to continue on his way, Woods drunkenly “drew a revolver and discharged it . . . inflicting a mortal wound” upon the unarmed farmer. Convicted of second-degree murder, Woods was sentenced to “the term of his natural life” in the state penitentiary, while Fulton, guilty of manslaughter, was given a term of thirteen years.[14]

  During the last weeks of 1902, the people of La Porte County were lashed into a fury by a particularly heinous killing that occurred in the town of Westville. The victim was sixteen-year-old Wesley Reynolds, a “trusted clerk” at the Westville State Bank, who doubled as the watchman, “sleeping in the institution at night with three revolvers within reach.” At daybreak on the morning of Sunday, November 30, Reynolds was startled awake when a beer keg came crashing through the rear window of the bank building. Leaping to his feet, a pistol in each hand, the young man confronted a pair of heavily armed robbers and opened fire. In the ensuing gun battle, Reynolds was struck three times, one bullet passing through his chin and lodging at the base of his brain, another entering his neck and exiting between his shoulder blades, the third striking him directly in the heart, killing him instantly. Fleeing the bank empty-handed, the two desperadoes—one badly wounded by the “heroic youth” (as he would be hailed in newspapers throughout the country)—stole a horse and surrey from a nearby barn and fled.

  Young Reynolds’s funeral, held on December 3, was attended by the entire population of Westville, and a fund, overseen by State Senator Charles E. Herrold, was immediately established to erect a monument in his honor. A large reward was also offered for the apprehension of his killers, but—despite the involvement of Pinkerton detectives who were put on their trail—the culprits were never apprehended.[15]

  Two weeks after the people of Westville turned out to pay their last respects to the martyred young bank teller, the Fort Wayne Daily News ran a story on a sudden epidemic of crime that seemed “to be reigning in La Porte County.” Besides the Reynolds murder, there had been the recent armed robbery of two local young men “by negro footpads,” an “attempt to administer poison to a La Porte woman by means of arsenic,” and the “killing of Albert Bader of La Porte by a train, following his attempt to escape arrest after breaking into” a lakeside boathouse.

  The immediate occasion of the news article, however, was the violent death of a local farmer that had occurred the previous day and whose circumstances were so bizarre that the town official called to the scene instantly suspected foul play.[16] In the end, the death was ruled a tragic accident. Another six years would pass before the official’s initial impression was confirmed. The supposedly accidental death of the farmer, a Norwegian émigré named Peter Gunness, would be recognized as the sinister handiwork of one of the most monstrous killers in the history of the state, if not of the entire nation. Casting about for comparisons, newspaper articles would invoke not only Charles Perrault’s fairy-tale ogre Bluebeard but his ostensible historical prototype, Gilles de Rais.[17] Unlike those earlier figures, however—and adding to the horror of the case—this midwestern serial murderer was a woman. Like Fall River, Massachusetts, and Plainfield, Wisconsin—the homes, respectively, of two of the country’s criminal legends, Lizzie Borden and Ed Gein—La Porte, Indiana, would become a macabre tourist destination, forever identified not as the birthplace of such proud native sons as William Mathias Scholl and Brewster Martin Higley but as the site of an unspeakable horror: the ghastly “murder farm” of Belle Sorenson Gunness, the Lady Bluebeard.

  Part One

  BELLA

  1.

  Paul’s Daughter

  Reduced to charred ruins by the Great Conflagration of 1871, Chicago roared back to life in the following years, a phoenix of limestone, granite, and brick reborn from the ashes. By the early 1880s, a decade after being laid waste by the disaster, it had resurrected itself as the “gem of the prairies,” the “most American of America’s cities”: a vast, teeming “magnet metropolis,” drawing hordes of eager young men and women in flight from their stultifying midwestern small towns, villages, and farms.[1]

  Along with these “life-hungry” seekers pouring in from the provinces,[2] great tides of immigrants swept into the rebuilt city: Germans and Poles, Scots and Irish, Italians and Jews. By 1890, according to one eminent historian, close to 80 percent of the city’s population “was of foreign parentage, drawn from every civilized quarter of the globe.”[3]

  A significant percentage of these foreign-born newcomers hailed from Norway. Indeed, Norwegians were among the earliest settlers to the area, establishing a colony there when Chicago was nothing but a cluster of crude timber buildings planted on the swampy shores of Lake Michigan—a frontier “mudhole” where fetid muck oozed up from beneath the wood-planked sidewalks, and the unpaved streets were such quagmires that wagons would sink to their axles and remain stuck for days.[4] In 1850, there were 562 Norwegians living in Chicago, making them the third-largest immigrant group, after the German and Irish. Ten years later, that number had increased threefold. By 1870, Norwegian-born Chicagoans numbered more than eight thousand.[5]

  Like their fellow Scandinavian immigrants, the Norwegians of Chicago were widely regarded as a frugal, industrious, and upstanding people, who enhanced the moral character of the metropolis. “We get no better population,” one early editorialist declared of them, “and we most cordially welcome them to the land of ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity.’”[6] Their native honesty and integrity were epitomized by the inspirational tale of little Knud Iverson, recounted by the turn-of-the-century historian A. T. Andreas. On the sweltering day of Tuesday, August 3, 1856, as Andreas tells it, ten-year-old Knud had gone down to the river to swim, when he encountered a gang of teenaged
ruffians who attempted to force him to sneak into the garden of a gentleman named Elston and “steal fruit for the larger boys to eat.” When Knud refused to do so “because of the consciousness in his own mind that to steal was wrong,” the older boys drowned him in the river. Reported in the national press, the tragedy inspired the inimitable P. T. Barnum to contribute two hundred dollars toward the erection of a monument to “the immortal child”: an “enduring memorial” (so the showman proclaimed in his typically bombastic style) that would “be for ages the Mecca to which pilgrims from every quarter of this great continent will gladly flock with their little ones, who may be thus fully impressed with the important and glorious principle so feelingly taught in the cruel death of this infantile martyr, that ‘it is better to die than to steal!’”[7]

  Norwegians could point with pride to other members of their ethnic community, men of enormous enterprise and ambition who seemed the living validation of the American dream. One of the most prominent was Iver Lawson, who rose from day laborer to millionaire by investing every penny of his hard-won savings into vacant city lots; enjoyed a sterling political career as city council member and state legislator; and—among his other contributions to his countrymen—helped organize the First Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Scandinavian Emigrant Aid Society.[8] Another local icon of self-made success was Christian Jevne. Emigrating to the United States as a twenty-five-year-old, the determined young man clerked in a grocery store by day while attending night school to improve his English and study bookkeeping. With two hundred dollars in savings that he painstakingly accumulated, he eventually opened his own business, which he ultimately “built into the largest wholesale and retail grocery concern in Chicago,” importing “coffee direct from Sumatra and Arabia; tea from China and Ceylon; wine from Europe; cheese, fish, canned goods, and aquavit from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.”[9] And then there was John Anderson, who arrived in Chicago at the age of nine and worked his way up from newspaper delivery boy to cofounder (with Iver Lawson) of Skandinaven, the most widely read and influential Norwegian-language newspaper in the country: a journal so vital to America’s Norwegian population that, for his services as publisher, Anderson would ultimately be knighted by King Oscar II.[10]