Indiana Bicentennial 7.6: Belle Gunness – “Triflers Need Not Apply”

You’ll notice I’m deviating from my normal convention of naming a post after the governor in office during the era. I feel like Belle deserves her own heading. Her story is incredible. How I didn’t know about her before is beyond me.

Belle Gunness: “triflers need not apply”

Backroad Brewing Company out of La Porte has a good stout named “Belle Gunness.” Until I got into this Indiana history kick I’ve been on, I didn’t pay too much attention to the name except to vaguely note that the name sounded a little like “Guinness.” Turns out Belle Gunness was the name of a Norwegian born, American serial killer who lived, at least for part of her career, in  La Porte. She was 6 feet tall, 200 pounds, and had extraordinarily bad luck with fires and loved ones dying. In Chicago, the unsuccessful confectionary store owned by her and her husband burned down. It was insured. She had four children with this husband. Two died. They were insured. Her husband died July 30, 1900. He had insurance policies that overlapped on that day.

In 1901, the grieving widow used her (in today’s dollars) $240,000 insurance payout to buy a farm in La Porte. The boat and carriage houses at her new home burned down shortly after she moved in. I don’t know whether those were insured. On April 1, 1902, she married a widower. A week after their marriage his daughter died. In December 1902, this husband died too. According to Belle, he died “reaching for his slippers next to the kitchen stove when he was scalded with brine.” Or maybe a sausage grinding machine fell from a high shelf onto his head. She told both stories. He was insured. In 1906, Belle had a foster daughter who disappeared. She told neighbors that the foster daughter had gone away to a Lutheran college in Los Angeles. Her body was later found buried on the property.

In 1907, Belle ran the following column in the Chicago dailies:

Personal — comely widow who owns a large farm in one of the finest districts in La Porte County, Indiana, desires to make the acquaintance of a gentleman equally well provided, with view of joining fortunes. No replies by letter considered unless sender is willing to follow answer with personal visit. Triflers need not apply.

Suitors came to the farm and, with one exception, they never left. George Anderson of Missouri had a nice dinner with Belle, then slept in the guest room. He woke with her holding a candle, staring at him. The look on her face was so murderous, he fled without taking his stuff. He made it back to town and caught the first train back to Missouri. Belle took delivery of large boxes during the day and was known to spend time digging in the hog pen late at night. In 1907 and 1908, several suitors appeared and disappeared, including John Moe of Minnesota, Ole Budsberg of Wisconsin, and Andrew Helgelien of South Dakota. All of them brought money. The flow of suitors was apparently interrupted for a period of time when there was another fire at the Gunness farm.

Throughout this period of time, she had a farm hand named Ray Lamphere who was in love with Belle. Despite helping Belle with a lot of these unusual chores and his being in love with her, perhaps she regarded him as a trifler. Belle kicked him off the farm and tried to have him committed as insane, then arrested as a trespasser. Lamphere started running his mouth in ways that were inconvenient. She started telling people that Lamphere had threatened to burn her house and kill her. On cue, a fire started at her house on April 28, 1908. The new farm hand barely escaped with his life. Investigators found four bodies — three of Belle’s children and a headless woman who may or may not have been Belle. The head wasn’t found. Lamphere was charged with arson and murder. Further investigation resulted in witnesses who were certain the woman’s body couldn’t be Belle’s. The headless woman, examining doctors said, would have been about 5’3” and 150 pounds — far short of Belle’s 6 feet, 200 pounds. Also, the woman’s internal organs contained lethal doses of strychnine. Eventually, investigators checked out the hog pen. About a dozen bodies were found there, and she appears to have killed more than 40 people.

Lamphere was found guilty of arson but acquitted of murder. He died of tuberculosis in prison not long after, but not long before his death, he provided information about Belle’s methods:

When a victim arrived, she made him comfortable, charming him and cooking a large meal. She then drugged his coffee and, when the man was in a stupor, she split his head with a meat chopper. Sometimes she would simply wait for the suitor to go to bed and then enter the bedroom by candlelight and chloroform her sleeping victim. A powerful woman, Gunness would then carry the body to the basement, place it on a table, and dissect it. She then bundled the remains and buried these in the hog pen and the grounds about the house. Belle had become an expert at dissection, thanks to instruction she had received from her second husband, the butcher Peter Gunness. To save time, she sometimes poisoned her victims’ coffee with strychnine. She also varied her disposal methods, sometimes dumping the corpse into the hog-scalding vat and covering the remains with quicklime. Lamphere even stated that if Belle was overly tired after murdering one of her victims, she merely chopped up the remains and, in the middle of the night, stepped into her hog pen and fed the remains to the hogs.

She was reported to have been very wealthy, having potentially amassed something like $6 million before she left La Porte. She was never positively identified after the fire. Reports came in from all over the country but none was ever definitive. In 1931, a woman going by the name of Esther Carlson was arrested for poisoning a man for money in Los Angeles. Some people claimed to recognize her as Belle Gunness from photographs, but the identification was never proved. Carlson died in 1931 while awaiting trial.

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And, just to wrap up Governor Durbin: Apropos of Ms. Gunness’ experience with fire loss, Governor Durbin recommended that there be a fire marshal law passed. Apparently Indiana’s experience with fire loss had resulted in higher insurance rates in the state. He also urged regulation that would prevent “wildcat” insurance companies that did not pay out when there were losses and oversaw a recodification of the laws of Indiana. He closed, in his 1905 biennial (and farewell) address by warning the General Assembly that it “would be called upon to resist the importunities of the most corrupt professional lobby which has visited itself upon any General Assembly in the history of the State.”