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I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Vaborg Thun, and tonight, dear listener, we continue our stay in the very beginnings of the 20th century in the United States of America. Tonight, we continue our expose into Norway's most notorious serial killer, Bell Gunners.
In the previous episode, I explained Belle's life in the USA, and how she apparently was very unlucky in her marriages and courtships, since all of them seemed to end in the men either disappearing or suddenly dying. In this episode, we will continue to delve into the details of Belle's murderous reign out there on the Midwestern Plains lands.
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Being a poor working farmhand, he naturally had no money for a lawyer. The law alleged he had killed Bell Gunness, but first the law would have to prove it was Bell Gunness who was found dead. And from what he was hearing from friends who visited him in his cell, popular opinion was quickly moving in his favor.
Much of the town really didn't believe that the headless woman found under the rubble of the farmhouse was its owner. Rumors mentioned a much smaller victim than the corpulent and sturdy Norse woman. More so if there was a scoundrel in their midst. It wasn't considered at the moment to be Ray Lamphere.
The name whispered on everyone's lips, with horror those days, was none other than Belle Gunness herself. The good citizens of Laporte was feeling a lot of reticence. There were doubts. It was conspicuous that so many of her suitors seemed to have come and gone, only to fade into thin air. They often left behind all of their personal belongings.
Bell Gunness herself had been seen in the fields afterwards, wearing the men's long coats to plow, their hats to shield from the rain. Perhaps even more worrying was the question of where Jenny, the daughter, was. The college she was supposed to have attended in San Francisco had no record of her.
Finally, people were wondering how Belle Gunness could live such a financially comfortable life, considering her very meager earnings from her trade. Suspect clues were starting to turn up in the rubble of her burnt-down house. Men's watches, men's coat buttons, men's billfolds, all emptied. Then a human ribcage, recently buried. Then a skeletal arm, recently buried.
Then a complete skeleton, recently buried. Sheriff Al Smutser, wanting like hell to keep this scandal to his peace-loving town quiet, hired Joe Maxson and Bell's neighbor, Daniel Hudson, to quietly dig through the rubble to see what else might turn up. In particularly, Bell Gunness' head, and report directly to him, no one else, if they found something relevant.
But the diggers couldn't hide themselves, especially since a daily parade of townsfolk passed the charred remains of the house. Sometimes they would stop their buggies to gawk and whisper and cross themselves, warding off the demon that brooded in the midst over the silent ruin. In May, a small little man approached a sheriff in his office.
and introduced himself as the brother of Andrew Helgelein, that big Swede from South Dakota who, like so many others, wooed Bell one day and were gone the next. This fellow, Asle Helgelein, had known that Andrew arrived in La Porte in January 1908 to withdraw his savings from the bank of South Dakota with Bell at his side.
Having read in the Scandinavian newspaper about the Bell Gunners' fire, and not having heard from his brother since he had left for Indiana, he had come to La Porte to investigate. Andrew, he explained, had first heard of Bell from the mail-order brides column in the Scandinavian, where immigrant brides often advertised for a husband. In his possession were dozens of letters, six months' worth,
that Bell had written to Andrew, entreating him to join him as husband in La Porte. According to the La Porte Historical Society, one of the letters included a four-leaf clover for good measure. Asle found it strange that after so long a communication and after entrusting to her his savings of some $1,800, only for his brother to just run off, it just didn't make sense.
Belle's correspondences were earthy, and she painted herself as a good Norwegian woman desiring a faithful husband, lover and provider for her and her family. As the relationship grew through the written word, however, Belle began to surface more and more with monetary motivation.
After Andrew had made up his mind that he was coming to La Porte, Belle exhibited a wiliness born from experience. She had written, and I quote, "'Do not send any cash money through the bank. Banks cannot be trusted nowadays.'
Change all the cash you have into paper bills, largest denomination you can get, and sew them real good and fast on the inside of your underwear. Be careful and sew it real good, and be sure do not tell anyone of it, not even to your nearest relative. Let this only be a secret between us two and no one else.
Probably we will have many other secrets, do you not think? End quote. Sheriff Smutser thought that Asle was overreacting. Belgenes, he said, was not a gold digger, and he was sure she was no murderess. But Asle Helgelein was unconvinced.
The latter knew of the digging taking place on the farm, and heard that certain belongings, such as watches, were churning over across the property. Perhaps he might find an article belonging to his prodigal brother there himself. Asle introduced himself to Joe Maxon and Daniel Hudson, and offered to help them dig. As he explained later, he had a hunch.
He asked farmhand Maxson if Belle had dug any holes on her property, perhaps for trash or cinders, since January, the time his brother had been there. As a matter of fact, yes, Maxson replied. There was a large garbage pit behind the house, near the hog pen where she had been throwing old boots, ham bones, coffee tins, things like that. She had me cover it over around March. Why?
Without reply, Osler picked up a shovel and began to dig where Maxson had pointed. On cue, the two others followed, unearthing clumps of earth at a time. Near the top they uncovered boots, pieces of crate, trash of a general variety. But as they dug deeper, an unnatural smell began to assail their nostrils.
In a little while, the spades struck something covered over with some old oilcloth and a burlap sack. The stench grew stronger. The diggers lifted off the covering and saw a human arm. They lifted then from the earth, vivid and rotten, the remains of what had once been a man.
Osler looked at the pulpy, sightless eyes, and a fixed, mirthless grin of a face he knew well. "'That's my brother!' he exclaimed with rage and despair in his voice. Andrew Helgeline's body was in pieces. His arms, legs, and head had been packed hastily in a series of flour and produce sacks. The sheriff was summoned, and the digging continued.
Before the day was out, they had disinterred four more bodies, two males and two females, packaged in the same manner as the big Swede. Of the women, one was obviously Jenny, the foster daughter who hadn't gone to California after all. Though badly decomposed, her facial features were recognizable.
Her long blonde hair that flowed so prettily in the Indiana sun still clung to what was left of her skull. A conjecture made by the La Porte County Historical Museum is that Jenny was murdered as she got suspicious because her stepmother, Soutous, always left the farm during the night.
and Belle couldn't have a suspicious girl running around her house and maybe start blabbing to the townsfolk as well. Laporte, as a community, shrieked with dismay and in terror. Belle Gunness. Lonely Belle Gunness who everyone felt sorry for. She was a lady bluebeard with the greed of mammon and the heart of a satan.
Try as he may, Sheriff Smutser could no longer conceal the truth from the world, and Serene Laporte turned into a media circus overnight. Eastbound trains and westbound trains and special flyers chugged into the depot, hourly depositing the reporters from as near as Terre Haute, Indiana, and as far away as Seattle.
They converged on the largest hotel in town, the Tea Garden, quartered its terraced dinette as a virtual newsroom.
Between it and the Gunner's farm, buggies full of notebooks scratching snoops and busy-fingered photographers rambled night and day. Well into the morning, the clitter-clack-clatter-click of their wireless machines clapped out the dirge of Bell Gunners, Black Widow who might still be alive. They intercepted the residents of the town for whatever information they could get about the Woman of the Hour.
Many knew her and expressed their shock. Many replied that, now that they think about it, yes, she did in fact act awfully suspicious, and as for those bodies found on her premises, there was more horror yet to see the light of day.
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had they all unknowingly walked into their mistress's personal execution chamber. Where was Ole Budsberg? asked the town. He had been another of Bell's potentials. Mr. Budsberg had withdrawn eighteen hundred dollars on the 26th of April, 1907. He was escorted by Mrs. Gunness and had not been seen since.
His sons had written to ask what had become of him, and a bank cashier called on Mrs. Gunness to inquire. She said Ole Butzberg had gone to Oregon, far away on the other side of the continental USA. Swan Nicholson, a La Porte resident, was asking, particularly about a fellow he had come to know and like. "'Where is Olaf Lindblow?'
He was fresh from Norway, about thirty years old and a fine-looking young fellow. Chris Christofferson, not to be confused with the famous country singer and actor who lived off McClung Road near Bell, replied, "'The last I saw of Olaf was in the spring of 1904. He was moving the old privy on Bell's property off its hole.'
Next time I visited the farm, there was Mrs. Gunness complaining that he had left her in the lurch and gone off to St. Louis to see the fear. Another name that left people guessing was that of Henry Gurholt. The merchants in town recalled his pleasant disposition and his courteous way of handling Bell's affairs on market day.
Kristofferson remembered the spring-like day. Gerholt arrived in 1905. He had helped him carry his trunk upstairs, and he remembered the week he washed into oblivion. In August, Bell came to Kristofferson to help stack oats, because Henry had left her flat in the middle of oat cutting to apparently go off with a horse trader.
Certain farmhands were on the farm so briefly that the townspeople never had a chance to know their names. For instance, said butcher Emil Palm, there was a young boy at the farm last summer who came into La Porte several times with Mrs. Gunness, but then stopped coming. One time I asked her what had become of the boy, and she looked up at a piece of meat
and remarked what a lovely cut it would make. There were others, many others. The next farmhand disappeared suddenly too, so suddenly that he left his horse and buggy behind him. Throughout May, the digging continued, and some of the above missing persons were, as suspected, discovered under the soil at Gunner's farm. Among them were Bootsberg, Gurholt, and Emil Palms, anonymous lad.
As with the other victims, heads were detached and the bodies were severed at several joints. These latest revelations were found in a pile of soft earth that also contained a woman's shoes, a purse frame and a truss, probably belonging to the unidentified female corpse discovered earlier. Deep down...
Under the others was a skeleton of a young boy, whose wisdom teeth had just begun to grow before he was killed. Speculation turned to the deaths of Bell's two husbands, Mats Sorensen in Chicago, who died of unknown causes, and Peter Gunness, crushed accidentally by a tumbled sausage grinder.
Of the former, a doctor named J. B. Miller from Chicago now came forth to admit that Mutz showed all the signs of strychnine poisoning. However, Miller's superior did not prefer to cause the widow needless pain, as she had apparently been very wrought with grief.
and, since he had been treating his patient for a heart disease anyway, indicated the cause of death as enlargement of the heart, and signed the death certificate. Now, dear listener, before we continue, I need to remind you what strychnine poisoning actually entails. When one reads or hears about people being poisoned to death, it is often thought that this is a humane method of murder.
It rarely is. Ten to twenty minutes after being poisoned, the body's muscles begin to spasm, starting with the head and neck in the form of trismus. Trismus is a painful condition that prevents the mouth from fully opening.
and erysus sardonicus, or eryctus grin, which is a highly characteristic abnormal sustained spasm of the facial muscles that appears to produce grinning. The spasms then spread to every muscle in the body, with nearly continuous convulsions, and get worse at the slightest stimulus.
The convulsions then progress, increasing in intensity and frequency until the backbone arches continually, almost breaking the victim's back. Convulsions then lead to nausea, vomiting, labored and deep breathing, and general weakness, hyperthermia, and rhabdomyolysis.
Rhabdomyolysis is a condition in which damaged skeletal muscle breaks down rapidly. Symptoms of this include muscle pains, further weakness, vomiting, and more extreme states of confusion. Death comes from asphyxiation caused by paralysis of the neural pathways that control breathing, or by exhaustion from the convulsions.
The victim usually dies within two to three hours after exposure. It is a brutal and extremely painful way to die. Muds succumbed on the one day when two insurance policies overlapping made his death worth twice as much as it would have been worth on any other day. Bell had wept her way out of an autopsy.
There had been an inquest a year later when Peter Gunness died. The law questioned the suspicious nature of the death. It bore all marks of mischief. There was, after all, no reasonable explanation as to how that meat grinder could have fallen. Throughout the hearing, Belle veiled and wrung her hands. A picture-perfect martyr evermore. The sheriff wasn't satisfied.
nor was the coroner, who even went as far as to question young Jenny about her foster parents' relationship with each other, inting murder. Briefly surfacing were allusions to Peter's child's death, vile in Bell's care, again tickling foul play. But, in the end, the verdict was accidental death. Mrs. Gunners was cool at the funeral.
During the preaching, she sat moaning with her fingers before her eyes. Townsman Albert Nicholson, however, could see that she was peeking alertly between her fingers to check the effect she was making. That made him certain of her guilt. Even little Myrtle had known it. Only a week before the fire, she had whispered in the air of a small schoolmate, "'My mama killed my papa.'
She hit him with a meat cleaver and he died. Don't tell a soul. Her chum had obeyed her admonition to secrecy until the innocent Myrtle was nothing but ashes. But now, in May 1908, Bell Gunness's secrets were exploding out like pyrotechnics at a Fourth of July celebration.
All the world waited and watched and prayed. They waited to see if the diggers would ever find Bell's head, watched for headlines that read, Bell Gunness Escaped Blaze, and prayed to hear that good death triumph in the end over evil with the arrest and punishment of the Black Widow of Indiana. One of my favorite authors, Aldous Huxley,
famously said, facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. And this can, with ease, be said to be apt in the case of Bell Gunness. Another idiom that can be combined with Huxley's is how every crime has its scapegoat. And in the Gunness case, the goat had a name, Ray Lamphere.
The state believed in his guilt and wanted to prosecute. Because the jealous lover had so many times tried to intimidate, even threaten, the widow, prosecutor Ralph N. Smith, representing the state of Indiana, believed he had it in him to murder. And besides, the political party always fares better at election time when they've caged the wolf that attacked the sheeped herd.
But a technicality existed. Even though the bodies of the Gunner's children were found and identified, until the headless woman found with them was proven to be Belle herself. The court-appointed defense would have in its kitbag of tricks the more enduring loophole. It was Belle who Ray wanted dead, not her children.
and given the state of affairs at the Gunner's Farm, who was to say that Belle didn't commit the murders of her own doves before she flew the coop? In an effort to nevertheless have Lamphere indicted for murder when the grand jury reconvened in May, Smith put pressure on the Gunner's Farm diggers to find Belle's skull. Sheriff Smutser, a staunch Republican and of the Smith regime,
sent his county police in all directions to find evidence, any evidence that might implicate their current guest at the county jail.
But the investigators found nothing, and the only material turning up under ash and brick at the fire site were more watches, scraps of a burned anatomy guide, silverware, and everything useless to ambitious lawyer and sheriff seeking justice and votes, according to some townsfolk.
However, Mrs. Gunness's dentist, Ira Norton, volunteered helpful information. "'If you can find her false teeth, I can identify them,' he explained. "'Last fall I made her a set of six porcelain teeth, backed with gold. If Mrs. Gunness is dead in the fire, those teeth are still in the ashes.'
An ancient Laportian who had once prospected for gold in Colorado was called upon as advisor. Louis Schultz told Smith that if he could have a sluice box, the type they were now using to find nuggets in the Klondike, Smith would have his gold teeth within a week. Schultz provided the promise, Smith the sluice box.
In the meantime, the citizens of La Porte were dividing between pro-Lamphere and con-Lamphere. "'She's dead!' cried the bankers, who disbelieved anyone would leave town with $720 still in their savings. "'She's alive!' argued the local doctor, who examined the headless corpse and found a much more diminutive body than the hefty bell gunners, whom he knew in life."
Nowhere were the factions more evident than in the two opposing papers in town. The Republican-held Herald supported Smith, while the Argos, under the editorship of crusading Democrat Harry N. Darling, derided the notion that Lamphere was anything but a patsy. The Herald saw Bell Gunners dead. The Argos envisioned her alive and well and on the lam to the devil knows where.
Holding half an interest in the Argus was town mayor Lemuel Darrow, a democrat. Because of his political affiliation, the city workers under his patronage naturally, at least vocally, enlisted the pro-Lamphere leanings, to the point that the city police refused to cooperate with Sheriff Smutser's troops in helping to prosecute Lamphere.
Instead, Darrow hired the Private Clark Detective Agency from Chicago and set its agent, one C.C. Fish, out in hot pursuit of fugitive Bell. Simultaneously, Darrow's law partner, Wirt Warden, offered his services all gratis to defend the Republicans' pawn. On Tuesday, the 12th of May, Schultz, the prospector, found Bell's dentures.
Dr. Norton agreed, their hearse, and the coroner expediently pronounced Bell dead of felonious homicide. On the 22nd of May, the grand jury indicted Ray Lamphere of arson and the murder of the Gunness family.
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And so ends part two of the tale of Belle Gunness. But the Serial Killer podcast is far from finished with her. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned next week for part three. I have been your host, Thomas Wabog Thug. Doing this podcast is a labor of love, and I couldn't have done it without my loyal listeners.
This podcast has been able to bring serial killer stories to life, especially thanks to those of you that support me via Patreon. You can do so at theserialkillerpodcast.com slash donate. There are especially a few patrons that have stayed loyal for a long time. Maud, Wendy, Mickey, Sydney, Lexi, Christina, Philip, Jason, Lisbeth,
Sarah, Tommy, Charlotte, Craig, Amber, Troy, and Anne Kay. Your monthly contributions really help keep this podcast thriving. You have my deepest gratitude.
As always, thank you, dear listener, for listening. And feel free to leave a review on your favorite podcast app or website. And please do subscribe to the show if you enjoy it. Thank you. Good night and good luck.
