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: “Personaclass="underline" 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.