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

  Reporting on Peter Gunness’s death the following day, newspapers exhibited little of the caution that Swan Nicholson had urged on his son. “Crime of High Degree,” blared a headline in the Fort Wayne Daily News. During the past few weeks, so the paper declared, murder had been “running rampant in La Porte County.” Residents were still mourning the death of the heroic young Wesley Reynolds, killed in a shoot-out with two would-be bank robbers. The three “negro footpads” who had murdered grocer John Koonsman remained at large, despite a five-hundred-dollar reward offered for their capture by the local Retail Merchants’ Association. Police were attempting to track down the person who had sent a box of arsenic-laced bonbons to young servant girl Matilda Baker who, “unsuspecting the poison in the candy, partook freely of it.” And the mother of seventeen-year-old George Shearer barely escaped death when the youth “suddenly became demented and tried to kill [her] with a carving knife.”

  This string of tragedies had culminated with the sudden death of Peter Gunness in a “mysterious manner” that gave “strong indications of foul play.”[11]

  On the afternoon of December 16, Dr. Bowell, assisted by another local physician, Dr. H. H. Martin, conducted a postmortem on Gunness’s body. As detailed in his official report, Bowell found “no evidence of scalds or burns on the entire body.” Gunness’s “nose was lacerated and broken, showing evidence of severe blows (or the result of falling upon a blunt article such as the edge of a board).” The most significant wound was “a laceration through the scalp and external layer of skull about an inch long, situated just above and to the left of the occipital protuberance. Upon removing the pericranium, there showed a fracture and depression of the inner plate of the skull at a point corresponding to the external laceration. There was also marked inter-cranial hemorrhage.” Bowell concluded that “Death was due to shock and pressure caused by fracture and said hemorrhage.”[12]

  Far from shedding light on the mysterious circumstances of Gunness’s death, as Bowell had hoped, the autopsy only exacerbated his doubts about the story he had gotten from Belle. Determined to get at the truth, he announced his intention to impanel a jury and conduct an inquest.

  The inquest was held on Thursday, December 18, 1902, at the Gunness farmhouse, in the room where Peter died. Belle, the primary witness, underwent a lengthy and at times quite pointed interrogation by Dr. Bowell, while his clerk, Louis H. Oberreich, transcribed the exchange.

  Asked to describe the events of that fateful night, Belle explained that, after putting her children to bed, she had gone into the kitchen to stuff sausage casings with the freshly butchered pork Peter had ground for her that afternoon. After completing the task, she had washed the meat grinder, then retired to the parlor, where Peter was reading the newspapers.

  “We were sitting here looking at them, I think it was after eleven o’clock,” she recalled. “I said to him, ‘I guess it’s pretty near time to go to bed.’ He thought so, too, and he picked up his pipe and went out into the kitchen. He always used to lock the door before we went upstairs to sleep. And I heard him make some little noise out there, and he always put his shoes back of the stove to warm, and I guess he must have been back to get hold of a pair of shoes, and all at once I heard a terrible noise and I dropped my paper and went and when I came out there, he was raising up from the floor and putting both hands on his head. I had a big bowl with some brine on the back of the stove, and I was going to put it on some head cheese I left there, and the bowl was full and hot and I thought I couldn’t use it until tomorrow morning and thought I might as well leave it there until morning.”

  “Where was that?” asked Bowell. “On the stove or the shelf?”

  “On the back part of the stove. I had washed the meat grinder and wiped it off and put it on a shelf of the stove to dry. I generally put my iron things up there to dry. ‘Mamma,’ he says, ‘I burned me so terrible.’ I was so scared I didn’t know what to do, all his clothes were wet. I said, ‘You had better take your clothes off.’ He said, ‘My head burns terribly.’ I heard baking soda and water was good to put on so it would not get blistered, so I put that on. I bathed a towel in it and put it on his neck.”

  “Was all this brine spilt?” Bowell asked.

  “Yes,” said Belle. “I think the bowl was nearly empty.”

  “Was that brine boiling hot?”

  “Well, it had been boiling,” said Belle, “but it had stood for some time on the stove, so it was not so warm but it was warm enough to burn. I rubbed him with Vaseline and liniment.”

  When Bowell asked if she had noticed the wound on the back of his head while she was ministering to him, Belle acknowledged that she had.

  “Was it bleeding?” asked Bowell.

  “Not very much,” she replied. “The bleeding seemed all to be stopped.”

  Told to continue, Belle explained that they sat in the kitchen while she rubbed Vaseline on her husband’s scalded neck. “He said he was afraid he was going to lose some of his hair on account of that burning, and he was complaining terribly.” They then returned to the parlor and “sat there a couple of hours anyway.” By then, “he was beginning to get a little better and I said, ‘Don’t you think you had better lay down?’ And he said, ‘Probably I will,’ and I said, ‘You had better not go upstairs to bed but lay down on the lounge and I will fix that up there, for it is warmer.’ He thought so, and I went and fixed the lounge for him and took off his clothes and put on his nightshirt. I told him, ‘I think I’ll go up and lay down with the girls, and if there is anything you want call me down.’ So I went up and went to sleep. I was tired.”

  In dramatic terms, Belle narrated the grievous denouement. “All at once, I heard him calling. He was over by the door and calling ‘Mamma’ as fast as he could and so that the children waked up and I was trying to think and said they should keep quiet, that I had to go to Papa, that Papa was burned. I tried to put on my clothes because it was cold. I went down the steps and when I came down he was walking around the room and saying, ‘O Mamma, Mamma, my head. I don’t know what is the matter with my head.’ I asked what the matter was. ‘My head, my head,’ he says. ‘It’s like something going on in my head.’ ‘Papa,’ I said, ‘what are you talking about? Let me see what it is, I suppose you rubbed off the skin.’ ‘O my head, my head.’ ‘Well, if you think it is best, I had better send for the doctor,’ I said, and I went upstairs and I got the girl up and she went over to the Nicholsons. And when I came from upstairs he was holding his head and said, ‘O Mamma, I guess I am going to die.’ I asked him what was paining him so terrible and took him some water and he said not to touch his head. When Nicholson came to the door I was rubbing his head, and I opened the door, I think, and they come in and he then thought he was gone but I did not think he was gone before you came, I think he was only unconscious.”

  “About how long do you think it was from the time that he was hurt out there before he died?” asked Bowell.

  “Well, I guess it must have been after eleven o’clock he was hurt, and I didn’t think he was gone until after you come here.”

  “You sat up with him two hours after he was hurt?”

  “Yes,” said Belle. “Of course I wasn’t upstairs long. I said good night and went upstairs and was there a short time when he called me.”

  “Did you say that he was burned bad?”

  Belle nodded. “He was red on the neck and the skin was blistered by the ear here.”

  “How do you think he got that hurt on his head?”

  “I don’t know, Doctor. I picked up the meat grinder from the floor, and I think that must have tumbled on him one way or another, that’s what I think but I didn’t see it.”

  “Did he say anything about it?” asked Bowell.

  “He didn’t say anything about the hurt on his head.”

 
“When you found that cut, did you tell him his head was cut?”

  “I asked him where he had been with his head because it was sore in the back but he didn’t tell me.”

  In response to Bowell’s further inquiries, Belle averred that her husband never explained how the bowl of hot brine “came to tip over on him” beyond saying that he “must have got against it in some way.” When asked how he broke his nose, she professed ignorance. “I can’t say. I didn’t notice the nose before they told me.”

  “Didn’t he complain of that?” asked Bowell. “Didn’t he bleed from the nose?”

  “He didn’t bleed from the nose at all,” said Belle.

  Bowell wondered if Belle “thought it possible that somebody may have come in here and killed him, hit him with that sausage grinder, and you not hear him?”

  She was emphatic in her denial. “If anybody had come in, I would have heard them some way or another.”

  Bowell had a final question regarding Belle’s relationship with Peter, whose dreadful death in her presence just two days earlier had seemingly sent her into a wild paroxysm of grief.

  “You always lived happily together, you and him?” Bowell asked.

  “As far as I know,” a dry-eyed Belle said with a shrug.

  Jennie Gunness, six months shy of her thirteenth birthday, testified next. Her account of what happened on the night of her stepfather’s death jibed precisely with Belle’s. Her parents, she said, “had been butchering a pig and they were fixing the meat and they were going to make sausage.” After completing the work, “Mamma washed everything and put it on the stove . . . to dry.” She then joined her husband in the parlor, where they sat “reading the paper and then I guess he was just going to go out and get his shoes.” Moments later, after hearing a startling noise, Belle hurried into the kitchen to find that Peter “had burned himself . . . she didn’t know it was anything else and thought he had better take a little rest.”

  After getting him settled on the couch, Belle had gone upstairs to sleep beside her children. A short time later, she “heard him call, ‘Mamma, Mamma.’ He told her his head hurt and she should come down to him.”

  Asked what happened then, Jennie replied that she had “gotten right up” and come downstairs, where she found her stepfather lying on the parlor floor. While her mother tended to his burns, Jennie “went right out to the Nicholsons,” taking “the stove poker to rap on the door to get them up.” When she returned with Swan and his son, Belle, who seemed beside herself, “told them to go right for the doctor.”

  “Did she tell you he scalded himself?” asked Bowell.

  “She said he had burned himself,” Jennie answered. “She didn’t know it was anything serious.”

  “When she was bathing his head, did she find he was cut?” Bowell asked.

  “I don’t know, I guess she only thought it was just a little place, for it didn’t show.”

  “How do you think he got hurt on his head?”

  “Well, I couldn’t tell you, or Mamma either,” said Jennie, “but when she came out there that thing was on the floor.”

  “Didn’t he tell her?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Don’t you suppose he knew his head was cut?”

  “Well, I suppose he did, but I don’t know.”

  Suspecting that the girl was merely repeating what her mother had told her to say, Bowell asked if the two of them had “talked about how he got hurt.” Jennie shook her head vigorously, insisting that “we haven’t talked at all.” At the same time, she admitted that she had been asleep when the purported accident occurred. Given how exactly her story matched her mother’s, it seemed inescapably clear that, despite her denials, she had been carefully coached.

  As Bowell certainly recognized, there were deeply troubling aspects to the story related by Belle and echoed by her foster daughter. Even conceding its weight, could a meat grinder, knocked off a shelf by a stooping man, really strike his head so hard as to fracture his skull? How could Belle and Peter sit together in the parlor for two hours without once discussing the cause of the accident? Why didn’t he mention his head wound? How could she not notice his broken, bloody nose? Why hadn’t the autopsy revealed any evidence of burns?

  Some of Bowell’s questions to Jennie made it unmistakably clear that he not only harbored serious doubts about Belle’s version of events but suspected that she might be what future criminologists would call a “Black Widow” killer—the type of female psychopath who murders a series of mates for their money. Did Jennie’s stepfather have life insurance? Did he leave a will? Had he brought “any money with him” when he moved to La Porte? To each of these questions, the twelve-year-old girl gave the same answer: “I don’t know.”

  She had more to say when Bowell suddenly asked if she had been “in the house” when her mother’s first husband, Mads Sorenson, died.

  Acknowledging that she had, Jennie poured out a breathless account of that day. “He worked during the night for the Mandel brothers,” she said, “and he came home generally at eight o’clock in the morning, and then he slept through the day and every morning we would always sit on the porch and he would play with us, and that morning I went down and sat down on the front porch with some chums of mine and then he said he would go up to bed, and he went there and there were some other people living there by us and Mamma went in the laundry and was washing out some clothes and Mrs. S called to her and told her that Papa was calling her and she ran up and asked him what he wanted and he just told her to lock the door and then she brought him some water but he didn’t drink it, and all at once we heard a scream but I don’t know where Mamma was then, she came downstairs and they said he took hold of his bedclothes and gave a scream and died.”

  “Did he leave you any life insurance?” asked Bowell, revealing once again his forebodings about the now twice-widowed woman who had lost both her husbands under such peculiar circumstances.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Didn’t he leave any money at all?”

  “I don’t know. I think he did, but I don’t know anything about that.”

  Where, asked Bowell, did her mother get the money to “buy this place”?

  “Why, I don’t know,” said Jennie.

  The inquest concluded with the testimony of Swan Nicholson, who stated that he “didn’t see no burns” on Peter Gunness’s body. Nor had he observed any blood on the couch where the severely wounded Gunness had supposedly gone to lie down. Asked if he thought that the “sausage grinder falling from where it did, hitting [Gunness] on the head, could have broken his skull,” he gave a somewhat equivocal answer. “I think it could have possibly but I never thought there was anything else but the way she told me.”

  Bowell ended his brief interrogation by asking directly if Nicholson thought it “possible that [Mrs. Gunness] might have killed him.” This time, Nicholson was more emphatic. “No, I never thought that, no sir. They be like a couple of children, and the same as the day they were married.” Just a few minutes earlier, however, at the start of his deposition, Nicholson had testified that he knew virtually nothing about his new neighbors. Asked about his impressions of Belle, he had replied: “So far as I knew I found her to be all right, but we had so little dealing with her, we were up there, my wife was up there once last winter, but I wasn’t up there but once.”

  By the time Bowell conducted his inquest, the community was aswirl with “rumors regarding foul play,” as one local newspaper reported.[13] Residents scoffed at Belle’s explanation for her husband’s death. “Peter Gunness was killed with a meat grinder dropping on his head,” sneered one farmwife. “A very likely story!”[14] Belle’s reported behavior at her husband’s funeral also raised eyebrows. The service took place in the parlor of the Gunne
ss farmhouse on Friday, December 19. The rites were conducted by the Reverend George C. Moor, the same minister who had united Belle and Peter in marriage just eight months earlier. “During the preaching,” writes one chronicler of the case, “Belle sat moaning with her fingers before her eyes. Albert Nicholson could see, however, that she was peering alertly between them to check the effect she was making.”[15]

  Young Albert remained so convinced of her guilt that, following the funeral, he wouldn’t stop sharing that opinion with other attendees until “Pa told me to shut up.”[16] He was hardly alone in his view. It came as a shock, then, to many La Porteans when Dr. Bowell issued his findings on the same day that Peter Gunness was buried in the Patton Cemetery.

  “After having examined the body and heard the evidence,” it read, “[we] so find that the deceased came to his death by the accidental falling of the augur part of a sausage mill falling from the heating shelf of cook stove in his kitchen and striking him on back of head: the impact of said augur part of sausage mill causing fracture of skull & inter-cranial hemorrhage resulting in death.”[17]

  If Bowell’s report officially put an end to the case, it did little to quell the rumors. One of these would come to be widely accepted as unquestioned truth. It concerned little Myrtle Sorenson, five years old at the time of her stepfather’s death. Just a week before her own death, so tradition has it, “she whispered in the ear of a small schoolmate, ‘My mamma killed my papa. She hit him with a meat cleaver and he died. Don’t tell a soul.’”[18]