Murder Plus: True Crime Stories From The Masters Of Detective Fiction

D. L. Champion contributed some of the most offbeat private-eye series ever published in Black Mask and Dime Detective. His characters included a midget investigator; a hard-nosed, legless ex-cop; a gaudily dressed Mexican PI; and “the unchallenged world’s champion penny pincher.” Champion never made the leap to book form when the pulp market collapsed in the early 1950s. That is why he isn’t better known today. He turned, instead, to true crime (it paid faster!), and he published as many as fifteen stories a month under a dizzying slew of preposterous pen names, until his death in 1968. This story about a most unlikely femme fatale is one of his best.

Madame Murder

When she was six years old, Belle Gunness underwent a searing, traumatic experience as usual as it was unnerving. Every day of the week, save Sunday, she watched her father as he neatly decapitated her mother.

Belle’s parents were members of a theatrical troupe which traveled extensively through the Scandinavian countries.

Her father was a magician and the climax of his act consisted in placing his wife’s head on a block and releasing a miniature guillotine — which apparently decapitated her. Synthetic blood gushed realistically all over the stage and the head appeared to fall with a delightful macabre pop into a wicker basket.

It was an extremely effective act and the audience ate it up. So did little Belle Gunness. She witnessed this execution at each matinee and enjoyed it more than any other spectator.

It wasn’t too long before she invented her own play act. It was a simple game which required only a doll and a hatchet. Little Belle began chopping off the head of every doll she could get her hands on.

The world at this time was totally unaware of Sigmund Freud, and psychiatry had not yet been invented. No one knew what a psychic trauma was and no one had the slightest idea that her father’s guillotine act would profoundly affect Belle Gunness’s later life — and the lives of at least a dozen men and possibly as many as 50.

Belle’s father died while she was still a child and her mother brought her from Norway to Chicago. It was there that she met Merrel Sorenson. Sorenson was a man of middle age and a widower. By profession he was a private detective, but whatever talents he had in his field never bothered Belle.

They had been married for a year when a fire in their Chicago home destroyed the furniture. Belle, to her delight, collected something better than $2000 in insurance. She considered this in the light of found money, and began to wonder how she could get more of it.

It occurred to her then that Sorenson carried a $3500 policy on his life.

Her first move was to persuade her unsuspecting husband to take out a second insurance policy in the amount of $5000. Her second was to negotiate for the purchase of a farm in La Porte, Indiana. Belle Gunness was not possessed of many virtues but she was by no means a fool. It seemed to her that in the event of Merrel Sorenson’s dying under curious circumstances, a rural sheriff could be more easily tricked than the Chicago police department. In addition, the farm at La Porte was a bargain. Some years before an entire family, consisting of seven members, had been mysteriously slaughtered during the night. The house reputed, locally, to be thoroughly haunted — not by a single ghost but by seven.

Belle bought the place cheaply. She did not fear ghosts. By the time she left the property, however, the ghosts had excellent reason to be terrified of her.

Ninety days later, Merrel Sorenson dropped dead. In Chicago, he may have been a first-rate private detective. But in La Porte he died without ever knowing who had put arsenic in his coffee. The doctor who signed the death certificate was quite satisfied that Sorenson had died of a digestive ailment, and Belle eagerly collected the insurance, which totaled up to $8500.

Belle’s next husband was Peter Gunness and it was his name by which she was generally known. Probably because with one exception, he lasted considerably longer than her other consorts.

During the two years she spent as the wife of Peter Gunness, Belle went about establishing herself as a solid citizen of the community. She became a pillar of the church and no one sang hymns more loudly, praised the Lord with more gusto. She visited the La Porte County Orphanage and adopted three infant children, two girls and a blue-eyed boy. She was active in local charities, spoke harshly of no one, and laid down saucers of milk for stray cats. It was a convincing and effective cover-up and nobody could have been more amazed than Peter Gunness on the morning that he got hit in the head with a meat cleaver.

Belle Gunness summoned the doctor who shook his head sadly and, in turn, summoned the sheriff and the coroner.

Belle, with tears streaking down her cheeks, announced in a broken voice that the meat cleaver had fallen from the kitchen shelf directly onto the balding pate of her poor husband.

The coroner looked at the dead man’s skull and gave it as his opinion that the cleaver would have had to fall from the top of the Eiffel Tower in order to split Gunness’s head almost down to the chin. The kitchen shelf was five feet from the floor and Gunness who had been sitting down when the accident occurred would have been a scant foot beneath it.

Belle Gunness then wanted to know how a man who called himself a Christian could make such a horrible implication before an hour-old widow.

The sheriff inquired politely if the deceased had been insured in his wife’s favor.

It seemed he had — to the extent of $4000. But averred Belle Gunness, if any mean-minded member of the community thought that she would break the law, much less one of the Lord’s Commandments for a measly $4000, he was badly mistaken. She had never been so insulted in all her life.

The sheriff, after hearing Belle’s speech, was hesitant. But the coroner insisted that the cleaver could not have fallen on the head of the deceased; it had been wielded by an outside agency. Since Belle was the sole outside agency present when the tragedy had occurred, the sheriff took her to the county jail.

She wasn’t there long. Public sentiment was outraged. Belle Gunness was a staunch churchwoman. Belle Gunness carried soup to the sick and old clothes to the poor. Belle Gunness had taken three little waifs from the orphanage into her home. How then, asked the community with more passion than logic, could she be a murderess?

The authorities yielded to public pressure. Belle Gunness was released. The insurance company sighed and handed over the $4000 without further argument.

Even though Belle Gunness was completely vindicated, she had learned a lesson. It occurred to her that if, in the future, there were to be any corpses lying about her property, it would be far better if they were kept in a place where the suspicious eye of the coroner would not fall on them.

She announced that she was going into the hog raising business, and to that end engaged a mason to erect a smokehouse.

The smokehouse, which was made of cement, was attached to the kitchen by a narrow passageway. It contained all the accessories incidental to hog butchering: meat hooks, a vat, a cutting machine, and a number of keen knives and cleavers.

In the plot of ground contiguous to the smokehouse, Belle Gunness announced she planned to plant a vegetable garden. She fenced this land in with a rabbit-wire wall which was eight feet in height. When all this was done, she acquired several hogs, sat herself down at her writing desk, chewed the end of her pen thoughtfully, then composed an advertisement which was duly inserted in a farm periodical with a large Midwest circulation: “Personal: Charming but lonesome young widow, owning a fine farm in La Porte County, Indiana, wishes to make the acquaintance of a respectable gentleman of substantial means. Object matrimony. No letter considered unless writer is willing to become personally acquainted at the earliest opportunity.”

This advertisement, to say the least, was rather misleading. At this stage of her life, Belle Gunness could have been considered attractive only by the standards of a lecherous hippopotamus.

She was five feet, eight inches in height, and weighed some 230 pounds. Her hair, which had been dyed red a year before, was faded and unkempt. Her skin was weathered and tough. Her arms were thick, muscular, had the power of pile drivers. Her bosom was vast, held in check by a straining steel corset. She wore, as a rule, overalls and a man’s battered felt hat.

The first respectable gentleman of substantial means to reply to Belle Gunness’s advertisement was Ole Lindboe of Chicago. Lindboe was a middle-aged bachelor. He arrived at La Porte with $200 in cash, a $500 diamond ring, a costly gold watch and a light and amorous heart.

Belle apparently had little trouble in relieving Lindboe of his tangible possessions. But when he asked to marry her and, as her husband, share the profits of the farm, Belle demurred.

“I can only marry you if you really love me,” Belle said. “I’ve already had a couple of unhappy experiences.”

Lindboe inquired exactly how he could prove the depth of his affection.

“Work here for me for a while,” said Belle. “If you prove worthy, I’ll marry you.”

Lindboe nodded assent. “All right. How much do you intend to pay me?”

Belle was shocked at this solecism. “Pay my fiancé?” she exclaimed. “I never heard of such a thing.”

Lindboe finally went to work for nothing. At the end of the two months he was still a bachelor and he was still unpaid. He confronted Belle, laid down an ultimatum. Either he was to be married or paid. And that very night, too.

Belle eyed him quizzically. She said, “You’ve been very patient. Tonight, I’ll settle with you in full. In the meantime, go out to the vegetable garden and dig a big hole. I want to bury the garbage later.”

Ole Lindboe dug a great big hole. In the morning, it had been filled in — and Ole Lindboe had vanished. His skeleton was dug up, and identified by his teeth, some six years later.

Belle Gunness spent no time weeping over Ole Lindboe. She wrote a letter to the farm magazine asking them to repeat the advertisement that had run before.

This brought Mr. John Moos of Elbow Lake, Minnesota, into her life. Mr. Moos, a prosperous farmer, did not come empty handed. He brought $5000 in cash along with him.

What evidence is available indicates that John Moos surrendered his capital and became Belle’s combination hired man and lover. Apparently, he was not indispensable in either capacity. Three months later he disappeared during the height of Belle’s hog butchering season.

Belle announced to her neighbors that Moos had returned to Elbow Lake, and smoothed over a new vegetable patch in her garden.

It was then that Belle Gunness met Ray Lamphere, who seemed to have signed an iron-clad contract with his guardian angel at birth. As far as Belle Gunness was concerned, he led a charmed life.

They met, not through the matrimonial advertisement, but on the street in La Porte. Lamphere was a graduate of Indiana University, and he was broke. This latter fact was not destined to win over Belle Gunness, but oddly enough, she took a liking to him.

She offered him a job on her farm and she actually paid him wages. Moreover, whatever affection Belle Gunness entertained for Lamphere was reciprocated. Lamphere was genuinely fond of Belle. He importuned her to marry him. She never did. Since they soon became lovers, the wedding would have been a technicality only and Belle was of no mind to marry a man not possessed of “substantial means.”

Lamphere was still working on the farm when Eric Anderson, a Swede and widower who had just collected his wife’s insurance, arrived on the scene carrying a copy of the farm journal, which at Belle’s instructions had just printed her luring advertisement for the third time.

Ray Lamphere resented Anderson’s presence, but Belle quickly relieved her new suitor of what cash he had brought with him and tenderly promised her hand in marriage. Lamphere, despondent, took to drink.

He frequented the town’s saloons during the time that Eric Anderson was presumably pressing his wedding suit. However, upon his return home one evening, Belle Gunness gave him to understand that things between them were as they had been before.

“What about Anderson?” asked Lamphere, amazed.

“He’s gone. He jilted me. Decided to marry a girl in Chicago, instead.”

Lamphere frowned, “How come he knows a girl in Chicago? He told me once that he’d never been in the state of Illinois.”

Belle shrugged her ample shoulders. “What’s the difference? We’ll never hear from him again. Forget it.”

Lamphere forgot it — for the moment.

Between 1903 and 1906, Belle Gunness’s matrimonial proposition was printed several times in various rural periodicals. And during that time there were half a dozen applicants for her ponderous hand. In spite of the fact that she married none of them, their presence invariably aroused Ray Lamphere’s jealousy. He never knew if he was to sleep in the main bedroom or in the cubicle off the kitchen which was assigned to the hired man.

However, Lamphere’s fear of losing his mistress to another always vanished at the same time as did his rival. If he ever wondered that Belle Gunness was busy in her smokehouse both in and out of hog butchering season, he said nothing. If he was ever curious as to what she did with the sacks of quicklime she ordered from Indianapolis, he held his peace.

The only man, apparently, to escape from Belle Gunness’s lethal embrace was George Anderson of Tarkio, Missouri. He had read Belle’s advertisement with interest. He was a widower with a neat bank account and he was lonely. He packed his bags, bought a book of travelers’ checks and took the cars to La Porte and the “charming but lonesome young widow.”

It was Belle Gunness’s first experience with travelers’ checks. When she learned that each check must be signed by Anderson she was keenly disappointed. This, obviously, complicated matters.

After serving Anderson an ample supper on the night of his arrival, she said, “You know, it would be a good idea if you signed those checks before you went to bed.”

George Anderson, by no means as naive as some of Belle’s suitors had been, lifted his eyebrows and said, “Sign them before I go to bed? For goodness sake, why?”

Belle shrugged. “Something might happen to you during the night.”

“If anything happens to me there’s no reason to endorse the checks. The money will eventually go to my heirs.” He paused, had an afterthought. “Besides, what could possibly happen to me?”

Belle shrugged her power-packed shoulders. “You never can tell. Lots of persons die in their sleep, you know.”

Anderson frowned and looked at Belle sharply. He was still frowning when he bedded down on the couch in the living room.

He was awakened in the middle of the night by a slight, shuffling sound. He opened his eyes to see Belle Gunness clad in a capacious nightgown, staring at him. In one hand she held a lighted candle. In the other, a meat cleaver.

Anderson sprang from the couch as if it was afire. He said, “What are you doing here?”

“Oh,” said Belle blandly, “I couldn’t sleep. I remembered that some of my butchering tools needed sharpening so I figured I might as well do the job now. I stopped by here to make sure that you were comfortable.”

There may have been moments in George Anderson’s life when he was more uncomfortable than he was at the moment but they did not come immediately to his mind.

He dressed with the speed of a volunteer fireman and departed La Porte forever, taking his unsigned travelers’ checks and the memory of Belle’s meat cleaver along with him.

Early in 1907 John Alden arrived at the La Porte farm via the same lovelorn route as had the others. He avoided the cleaver for two whole weeks.

At the end of that period, Belle Gunness dispatched Lamphere on an errand which guaranteed his absence for at least three hours. Then she invited Alden into her smokehouse and gave her attention to more serious matters.

Lamphere, however, did not carry out Belle’s instructions. He went instead to a La Porte tavern. He enjoyed only three glasses of beer, since the bartender refused to grant him any credit. Then Lamphere returned home.

He arrived at a most inauspicious moment. He strode into the smokehouse just as Belle had laid the corpse of John Alden on a chopping block and was honing the edge of the cleaver. She turned red.

Lamphere’s face turned gray. It was doubtless true that he had suspected dirty work was going on. But actually to see his mistress calmly readying to chop up a suitor was something else.

“My God,” he said, “what are you doing?”

“I’m cutting him up,” said Belle coolly. “The quicklime will work better that way. Then I’m going to bury him in the vegetable garden.”

“You mean,” gasped the horrified Lamphere, “that you murdered him?”

“Self-defense,” said burly Belle. “He tried to trick me. Goodness knows what sort of girl he thought I was. I’ve never been so insulted in my life.”

Lamphere, through either desperate love or desperate fear of his own life, kept his mouth shut.

Shortly after John Alden had been run through the sausage grinder, Ole Budsberg, powerful, blond painter, brought himself and $200 in cash to La Porte. He was, in a short time, relieved of both his wallet and his life. The vegetable garden was growing in size.

The last suitor of record to pay court to Belle Gunness was one Andrew C. Helgelin of Aberdeen, South Dakota. He had replied to Belle’s provocative advertisement and had received, in return, a burning love letter.

Helgelin withdrew some money from the bank, packed his clothes and headed for Indiana. He only lived a week but he proved to be the biggest bonanza of all.

For some reason or other he failed to observe that Belle Gunness in no wise resembled the “charming widow” who had written of herself for publication. He was immediately smitten. He was all for an instantaneous marriage, but the obese object of his affection wasn’t having any. What sort of girl did he think she was?

When Belle requested her customary proof of genuine love, Andrew Helgelin daringly slapped his wallet on the table and offered her the entire contents. Since this obviously did not move the 230-pound bulk of his beloved, he vowed that he would get in touch with his bank back in Aberdeen, instructing them to convert his securities to cash and wire the funds to Belle.

This struck Belle as a capital idea. It took exactly a week to complete the transaction. And in exactly a week, Belle invited Helgelin on an inspection tour of her modern smokehouse. He did so, and finished the trip in the adjacent vegetable garden.

Back in South Dakota, Alex Helgelin, brother to Andrew, became worried. He knew Belle’s address, since Andrew had told him where he was going. He communicated with Belle, asking, anxiously, for news of his brother. This disconcerted Belle no whit. She answered promptly. Andrew, she wrote, left the farm a week after his arrival. She loved him and was as interested as Alex in his whereabouts. She suggested that Alex come at once to La Porte, bringing an adequate amount of cash with him. They would use the money to search for the missing Andrew. She was certain that with some cash she could bring the brothers together.

Alex, however, never made the trip.

At this period, in early April of 1908, Belle Gunness’s position became shaky for the first time. She heard from a sheriff's deputy that Ray Lamphere, while drunk, had told a group of fellow drinkers that if anything ever happened to him at the farm, they were to request the sheriff to investigate. He had hinted darkly at horrendous doings at Belle’s place.

Belle Gunness’s reaction was characteristic. She didn’t defend herself. She attacked.

Vowing that she had never been so insulted in all her life, she showed up at the county courthouse and announced that Lamphere had threatened her life on several occasions. She swore out a warrant for his arrest. However, after a private session with him in his cell, during which no one knows what compromise was reached, Belle withdrew the charge and Lamphere was freed.

But Belle remained uneasy. Perhaps, the little racket of running gentlemen possessed of substantial means through the sausage grinder was petering out. Perhaps, the time had come for a “twenty-three, skiddo,” which in those days meant to take it on the lam.

Late in the evening of April 27th, 1908, the Gunness farm was suddenly ablaze. No one gave the alarm until it was too late, and the buildings were burned to the ground.

On the following morning, the charred ruins were carefully searched. Four blackened bodies were found. One was that of a woman. The other three were bodies of children — two girls and a boy. The inference was obvious. Belle Gunness and her three children had been destroyed by the flames. Moreover, there was a natural suspect for the sheriff — Ray Lamphere, who curiously enough had not slept at the farm that night. Too, it was a matter of record at the courthouse that Belle had sworn he had often threatened her life.

Ray Lamphere was arrested, tossed in jail and charged with murder, arson and everything else that the prosecutor was able to think of at the moment. The charred corpses were sent to the morgue. There, the coroner, who Belle Gunness rightly had considered a most suspicious man, viewed them. He conceded that the smaller bodies were those of Belle’s adopted children.

He announced flatly that the adult corpse was not that of Belle Gunness.

“It was three inches shorter,” he stated. “It is eighty pounds lighter, Belle Gunness was possessed of good, sound teeth. This cadaver is wearing an ill-fitting plate.”

By this time Ray Lamphere, in order to demonstrate his own innocence, was talking like a radio announcer trying to beat the clock. He told the sheriff of the death of John Alden and of the mysterious disappearance of Belle’s other suitors. The sheriff promptly armed his deputies with shovels and sent them out to the farm.

By dusk they had dug up the remains of what were twelve recognizable skeletons. In addition, they had discovered four cartons full of miscellaneous bones. Helgelin and John Anderson had not entirely decomposed, thus they were identifiable.

Further examination by the coroner revealed that the children had not died by fire. They had been neatly cracked on the skull before the blaze had started. It was evident now that Belle had committed murder and arson to hide her own tracks. Exactly where she had obtained the woman’s body which she hoped would be taken for her own was never known.

That isn’t all which was never known. The State of Indiana offered a large reward for her apprehension. Every police headquarters in the United States was notified. But Belle made her 230 pounds hard to find. During the years the search spread into Australia, Canada, England, Europe, both Americas and Africa. But no one ever wittingly laid an eye on Belle Gunness.

If “Madame Murder” — Belle Gunness — still lives, she will be about 80 years old. Most officials are inclined to believe that she is dead, that she died quietly and respectfully in a feather bed — not while being run through a sausage machine.