Uncle John’s True Crime (41 page)

Conlon:
What did the big fellow shoot you for?

Schultz:
Him? John? Over a million, five million dollars.

Conlon:
John shot you, we will take care of John.

Schultz:
That is what caused the trouble. Look out. Please get me up. If you do this, you can go on and jump right here in the lake. I know who they are. They are French people. All right. Look out, look out. Oh, my memory is gone. A work relief police. Who gets it? I don’t know and I don’t want to know, but look out. It can be traced. He changed for the worse. Please look out; my fortunes have changed and come back and went back since that. It was desperate. I am wobbly. You ain’t got nothing on him but we got it on his helper.

Conlon:
Control yourself.

Schultz:
But I am dying.

Conlon:
No, you are not.

Schultz:
Move on, Mick and mama. All right, dear, you have got to get it.

(Schultz’s wife, Francis, arrives.)

Mrs. Schultz:
This is Francis.

Schultz:
Then pull me out. I am half crazy. They won’t let me get up. They dyed my shoes. Open those shoes. Give me something. I am so sick. Give me some water, the only thing that I want. Open this up and break it so I can touch you. Dennie, please get me in the car.

Conlon:
Who shot you?

Schultz:
I don’t know. I didn’t even get a look. I don’t know who can have done it. Anybody. Kindly take my shoes off.
(They’re already off.)
No. There is a handcuff on them. The Baron does these things. I know what I am doing here with my collection of papers. It isn’t worth a nickel to two guys like you or me but to a collector it is worth a fortune. It is priceless. I am going to turn it over to—turn you back to me, please Henry. I am so sick now. The police are getting many complaints. Look out. I want that G-note. Look out for Jimmy Valentine for he is an old pal of mine. Come on, Jim, come on. Okay, okay, I am all through. Can’t do another thing. Look out mama, look out for her. You can’t beat him. Police, mama, Helen, mother, please take me out. I will settle the indictment. Come on, open the soap duckets. The chimney sweeps. Talk to the sword. Shut up, you got a big mouth! Please come help me up, Henry. Max, come over here. French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone.

Schultz died two hours later, without saying another word.

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Well, I do. What do you want me to say?

I
n November 1997, Minneapolis native Tom Tipton, 63, got the thrill of his life when he was invited to sing the national anthem before a Minnesota Vikings football game. Across town, an off-duty sheriff was watching the pregame show—and recognized Tipton’s name. Tipton, it turned out, was wanted on two warrants in Minneapolis. He was arrested during the game.

• In 2006 a man in Mill Valley, California, was arrested after he called a bomb threat into a Walgreen’s pharmacy. The clerk who answered the phone recognized his voice: The man had just been at the counter to get a prescription filled, and had called in the threat because he thought it was taking too long.

• In 2001 Chicago police arrested 19-year-old Marque Love on bank robbery charges. Love had once worked at the bank, and a teller recognized him—by his distinctive blue suede shoes.

• In 2006 Robert Russel Moore of Prince Frederick, Maryland, was arrested and charged with the robbery of an Arby’s restaurant where he was recently employed. At the subsequent trial, four of his former fellow employees testified that, although he was wearing a mask, they recognized Moore in surveillance tapes—especially when he bent over and they recognized his “butt crack” above the top of his pants. A former manager also testified that he had talked to Moore repeatedly about his “butt crack problem.” Moore was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

• In 1999 a man wearing a long dark coat and a mask walked into the Royal Casino in Aberdeen, South Dakota, pointed a gun at the clerk, and demanded money. The next day, local man Jerold Nissen, 44, was arrested for the crime. Nissen was a regular at the casino, and the clerk had recognized the distinctively powerful odor of his cologne. He was sentenced to seven years in prison.

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.

T
HE DISCOVERY

On the night of April 28, 1908, Joe Maxson, a hired hand on a farm outside of La Porte, Indiana, awoke in his upstairs bedroom to the smell of smoke. The house was on fire. He called out to the farm’s owner, Belle Gunness, and her three children. Getting no answer, he jumped from a second-story window, narrowly escaping the flames, and ran for help. But it was too late; the house was destroyed. A search through the wreckage resulted in a grisly discovery: four dead bodies in the basement. Three were Gunness’s children, aged 5, 9, and 11. The fourth was a woman, assumed to be Gunness herself, but identification was difficult—the body’s head was missing. An investigation ensued, and Ray Lamphere, a recently fired employee, was arrested for arson and murder. Before Lamphere’s trial was over, he would be little more than a side-bar in what is still one of the most most horrible crime stories in American history...and an unsolved mystery.

BACKGROUND

Belle Gunness was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Storseth in Selbu, Norway, in 1859. At the age of 22 she emigrated to America and moved in with her older sister in Chicago, where she changed her name to “Belle.” In 1884 the 25-year-old married another Norwegian immigrant, Mads Sorenson, and the couple opened a candy shop. A year later the store burned down, the first of what would be several suspicious fires in Belle’s life. The couple collected an insurance payout and used the money to buy a house in the Chicago suburbs. Fifteen years later, in 1898,
that
house burned down, and another insurance payment allowed the couple
to buy another house. On July 30, 1900, yet another insurance policy was brought into play, but this time it was life insurance: Mads Sorenson had died. A doctor’s autopsy said he was murdered, probably by strychnine poisoning, so an inquest was ordered. The coroner’s investigation eventually deemed the death to be “of natural causes,” and Belle collected $8,000, becoming, for 1900, a wealthy woman. (The average yearly income in 1900 was less than $500.) She used part of the money to buy the farm in La Porte. But there was a lot more death—and insurance money—to come.

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MORE SUSPICIONS

In April 1902, Belle married a local butcher named Peter Gunness and became Belle Gunness. One week later, Peter Gunness’s infant daughter died while left alone with Belle...and yet another insurance policy was collected on. Just eight months after that, Peter Gunness was dead: He was found in his shed with his skull crushed. Belle, who was 5'8", weighed well over 200 pounds, and was known to be very strong, told the police that a meat grinder had fallen from a high shelf and landed on her husband’s head. The coroner said otherwise, ruling the cause of death to be murder. On top of that, a witness claimed to have overheard Belle’s 14-year-old daughter, Jennie, saying to a classmate, “My mama killed my papa. She hit him with a meat cleaver and he died.”

Belle and Jennie were brought before a coroner’s jury and questioned. Jennie denied making the statement; Belle denied killing her husband. The jury found Belle innocent—and she collected another $3,000 in life insurance money. And she was just getting started.

NOT WELL SUITED

Not long after Peter Gunness’s death, Belle started putting ads in newspapers around the Midwest. One read:

The ads worked, and suitors began to show up at the farm with visions of “joining fortunes” in mind. John Moo arrived from Minnesota in late
1902 with his life savings of $1,000 in hand. He stayed at the farm for about a week...and disappeared. Over the years several more met the same fate: Henry Gurholdt from Wisconsin, who had brought $1,500; Ole B. Budsburg, also from Wisconsin, who brought the deed to his property, worth thousands, and was last seen in a La Porte bank in April 1907; and Andrew Hegelein, from South Dakota, also last seen in the bank, in January 1908.

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Andrew Hegelein turned out to be the last of the disappearing suitors, because a few weeks after his disappearance, his brother, A.K. Hegelein, wrote to Gunness to inquire about him. She replied that he’d gone to Norway. Hegelein didn’t believe her—and threatened to come to La Porte to find out what had happened to him.

LAMPHERE

We said at the start of the story that when the Gunness home burnt to the ground, killing the three children and, presumably, Belle Gunness, former employee Ray Lamphere was arrested. The reason: Lamphere had been hired in 1907 and, by all accounts, had fallen in love with Gunness. The seemingly constant coming and going of suitors enraged him, and he and Gunness fought about it. In February 1908, around the time of Hegelein’s disappearance, Gunness fired Lamphere. Not only that—she went to the local sheriff and told him that Lamphere was making threats against her. The day before the house fire, she went to a lawyer and made out a will, telling the lawyer that Lamphere had threatened to kill her and her children...and to burn her house down. Under the circumstances, the sheriff
had
to arrest Lamphere—but the focus of the investigation would soon turn elsewhere.

THE WOMAN IN THE BASEMENT

Lamphere denied any involvement with either the arson or the murders. Few people believed him...but there were serious questions about the body of Belle Gunness. Doctors who inspected the remains said they belonged to a woman about 5'3" (they had to account for the missing head, of course) who weighed about 150 pounds. Gunness was much larger than that. And several neighbors who knew Gunness well viewed the remains—and said it wasn’t her. Then A. K. Hegelein showed up looking for his brother. He told the police his story and insisted that a search be
made of Gunness’s property. The search began on May 3. Two days later, five bodies, carefully dismembered and wrapped in oilcloth, were discovered buried around the farm.

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BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

The first body was determined to be that of Gunness’s daughter Jennie, who, according to Belle, had been in school in California since 1906. The second body was Andrew Hegelein. The third was an unidentified man; the fourth and fifth were unidentified eight-year-old girls.

Neighbors told investigators that they had often seen Gunness digging in her hog pen, so they dug up that area—and found body after body after body. Included in the group: suitors John Moo, Ole Budsburg, and Henry Gurhold. In the end the remains of more than 25 bodies (some reports say as many as 49) were found, many of them unidentifiable.

Belle Gunness had obviously lured the men to her farm and killed them for their money. People in La Porte began to believe that if she could do that, she could fake her own death, and that the body found after the fire was yet another of her victims. It was beginning to look like A. K. Hegelein’s threat to come look for his brother made Gunness panic and come up with her bloody plan. But then a problem arose: On May 16 a part of a jawbone and a section of dentures were found in the ruins of the house. Gunness’s dentist, Ira Norton, inspected them—and said the dental work on the teeth belonged to Belle Gunness.

THE AFTERMATH

After a long investigation the body of the woman in the fire was officially declared to be that of Belle Gunness, and was buried as such. Ray Lamphere was tried for arson and murder—but because of all the lingering questions surrounding the case, he was convicted only of arson. He received a 20-year prison sentence and died less than a year later of tuberculosis. While in prison he reportedly confessed to a prison minister that he had helped Gunness bury some of her victims—and that the woman in the basement was
not
her. Gunness had hired a woman from Chicago as a housekeeper just days before the fire, he said, and drugged her, killed her, decapitated her, dressed her in Belle’s clothes, and put her in the basement. He helped Gunness start the fire, he said, and was then supposed to escape with her, but she
double-crossed him and left on her own. However, none of his story could be substantiated.

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People reported seeing Belle Gunness at dozens of locations across the U.S. over the following decades. None of those sightings were ever confirmed. Then, in 1931, a woman named Esther Carlson was arrested for the poisoning murder of her husband in Los Angeles...and she reportedly looked a lot like Belle Gunness. Carlson died awaiting trial, but some La Porte residents made the trip to the Los Angeles morgue and viewed the body. They said that they believed it was Gunness.

UPDATE

In 2008 Andrea Simmons, an attorney and graduate student at the University of Indianapolis in Indiana, led a team of forensic biologists to the graveyard where Belle Gunness was buried. With permission from Gunness’s descendants, they dug up the grave with the intent of extracting DNA from the corpse and comparing it to the DNA of living relatives. Results were hoped for by April 28, 2008, the 100th anniversary of the fire at the Gunness farm, but they were, unfortunately, inconclusive. Attempts are ongoing, and someday, possibly soon, the mystery of Belle Gunness, one of the most diabolical serial killers in history, might finally be solved.