True Crime Chronicles, Volume One

Serial Killers, Outlaws, and Justice ... Real Crime Stories From The 1800s

Mike Rothmiller

• Publisher: WildBlue Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781952225253
• eBook ISBN: 9781952225260
• Subtopic: Journalism

Original newspaper reports of Wyatt Earp, Belle Gunness, Billy the Kid, Dr. H.H. Holmes, and others compiled by the New York Times–bestselling author.
 
Former detective and bestselling author Mike Rothmiller has brought together classic works of journalism that will take the reader back to when these horrific tales mesmerized a nation. Some may find these articles and their descriptions of people and crimes shocking by today's standards, but they are representative of the most colorful true crime stories of the day.
 
True Crime Chronicles, Volume One includes stories about Belle Gunness, who had a penchant for killing men and feeding them to her hogs, Dr. Holmes and his "murder castle," The Bloody Benders, and Amelia Dyer, the "baby farmer," the darker side of Wyatt Earp, and the forerunners of the American Mafia, "The Black Hand." Imagine yourself accompanying these reporters visiting the crime scenes, interviewing witnesses, and penning the stories of murder, lynchings, evil, and swift frontier justice.

SERIAL KILLERS

BELLE GUNNESS

AUTHOR’S COMMENTARY

Belle was a heartless and ruthless killer, and the following newspaper accounts are excellent representatives of the dozens written about her murderous exploits. They are gruesome, yet fascinating, and provide you with a glimpse inside her “murder farm.”

After reading these stories, you will wonder: Was the headless female body found in the smoldering ruins of her home with three dead children truly Belle Gunness? To this day, no one can conclusively say it was. Or was not.

Some believe she faked her own death in the fire, by killing a woman of approximately the same size and age, beheading the corpse, torching her home, and quietly moving to Los Angeles. This theory is based on events which arose due to the 1931 poisoning of a man by a woman who went by the name of Esther Carlson, who died awaiting trial.

Esther was of similar age and body size as Belle Gunness. What convinced many Esther was indeed Belle was the fact Esther had in her possession photographs of three children who resembled Belle’s deceased children.

The repudiation of Belle’s body as the headless, burnt corpse found in the remains of her incinerated home, as suggested by Ray Lamphere, her farmhand and accomplice, was hoped to be confirmed in 2008 when DNA from the body found in the burned home was tested. Unfortunately, the samples were too degraded so the testing proved inconclusive. Did Belle escape to Los Angeles or other parts of the world, or was her corpse found in the burnt remains of her home? We will never know. But we do know she was a prolific and sadistic serial killer.

In the various Gunness stories you’ll notice names are sometimes spelled differently. This is how they appear in the original articles.

The Weekly Advocate

Saturday, May 30, 1908

INVESTIGATION ADDS TO MYSTERY

New York American.

Laporte, Ind., May 20.

Late developments in the murder farm mystery have strengthened the belief of the people of Laporte that Mrs. Belle Gunness, the most remarkable criminal since medieval times, is alive. With the aid of her accomplice, Ray Lamphere, the woman burned her house, sacrificing the lives of her three children, and fled, in an automobile provided by one of her agents probably in Chicago.

As the investigation into the horrors of “murder farm” has progressed it becomes apparent that Mrs. Gunness was so steeped in crime that she would shrink from nothing. This woman was utterly devoid of moral sense. It is known that she committed sixteen murders, and arson and robbery were to her commonplace.

The bodies of ten of her victims have been recovered from the garden where they were buried in quicklime. Three of these are known. They were in life Jennie Olson, her little adopted daughter; Andrew Helgelin, the suitor from Aberdeen, S.D., and Ole E. Budsberg, of Iola, Wis. She murdered her first and second husbands, Max Sorensen, of Chicago, and Gunness.

She chloroformed the three children for whom she posed as mother, although they were not hers, and burned their bodies in the ruins of her house. She must have killed that other woman whose headless body she left in the flames to give the impression that she herself had perished.

The children bore the names of Myrtle and Lucy Sorensen, eleven and nine years old, and Philip Gunness, five years old. Mrs. Gunness had always posed as the mother of three children. It now appears that they, like little Jennie Olson, whom she killed because the child had become possessed of the secret of her horrible crimes, were adopted.

It is believed that the woman ran a “baby farm” and adopted young children for a consideration. How many of these innocents have been turned over to her and murdered will never be known.

There is one piece of evidence that convinces the authorities that Ray Lamphere was the woman’s accomplice. He is a carpenter, a good workman when sober, but lazy and good for nothing when drinking. For years he had been in love with the fat, coarse, masculine creature who enslaved him. He is as unprepossessing as Mrs. Gunness was, but a distinctive feature of his appearance is rough, curly, brown hair.

In the clenched hand of Andrew Helgelin when his body was examined by the surgeons who performed the autopsy was found a lock of coarse, curly, brown hair exactly like Lamphere’s.

Helgelin had awakened when the plotting murderers entered his room and struggled for his life. He must have grappled with Lamphere, but under the blows of some weapon in the huge hands and bony, muscular arms of the woman he succumbed.

With this as a key to the mystery, District Attorney Smith, Sheriff Smutzer and the other authorities are trying mightily to get from Lamphere a complete confession. He has told his share in the crimes, or part of them at least, to a clergyman. A part of that confession he has repeated to others. When Lamphere tells all he knows the mystery of “murder farm” will be solved and the number of murders to be traced to Belle Gunness will be known.

This woman’s many crimes were so appalling that they transcend the ordinary horror felt by rational human beings at murder, and cause a feeling of wonder. That any human being could make a cold-blooded business of the murder of men, women and children, numbering her victims by the score, seems beyond belief.

But in every particular the Indiana mystery surpasses in horror, in the grotesque extravagance of conception and execution, the Bender and Holmes cases that startled the world.

Belle Gunness was born in Trondhjem, Norway, forty-eight years ago. Her maiden name was Belle Paulsen, and she has still a brother and sister living in Norway. When a girl she was a member of a troup of acrobats, and thus she build up a splendid physique. Lack of exercise in her middle life had caused her to grow fat, gross and unwieldy, but she still possessed the arms and big bony hands of a giant, and was tremendously strong.

She had relatives in the United States, and she came here when she was twenty-four when she married Max Sorensen, her first husband.

Even as a girl she had shown a greed for money, and this passion grew with her. She made her husband take out life insurance, and kept at him until he had several policies, aggregating $8,500. Then he died mysteriously. There is little doubt now that he was poisoned, but his widow got the $8,500 life insurance. She got fire insurance on two buildings which she occupied and burned down, and in 1892 she went to Laporte as the wife of Gunness.

They bought the farm which has since become the horror spot of the civilized world. It has been a resort of evil reputation for many years and when Belle Gunness and her husband took possession it was hoped by the neighbors that they would prove desirable residents. But they kept aloof. Mrs. Gunness drove the friendly neighbors from her, and soon the house was shunned.

She adopted little Jennie Olson, more as a slave than as a daughter. The child was made to work from morning until night and was an object of pity in Laporte County. But no one apparently dared to interfere with Belle Gunness, so quick was her temper, so sharp her tongue and so menacing her big, bony hands when she clenched them in a rage

When Gunness was killed Laporte was suspicious. The woman explained that a meat chopper had fallen from the shelf on his head. The coroner made an investigation, but there was no evidence to show that Belle Gunness crushed in his skull with a blow of the meat chopper, and a verdict of accidental death was given.

The woman had made Gunness take out life insurance policies for $3,000 and she collected this sum. After that she began in earnest her career in crime. She scorned marriage as too slow a route to riches. But with marriage and her own possessions as a lure, she realized soon the possibilities that lay in further crime.

Men began to come to Laporte–strangers to the residents–and ask the way to the Gunness farm. They would stay around a day or two, transact some business with the bank, always in favor of the woman, and disappear.

Mrs. Gunness always had some plausible story to account for their going, but the truth was never even suspected until Helen Helgelin came to Laporte on the trial (sic) of his brother early in May.

It was Else Helgelin whose spade uncovered the secret in the gruesome garden of the murder farm. Joe Maxson, a farm hand, had told Helgelin and the Sheriff that Mrs. Gunness made him pile fertilizer on some soft spots in the garden mould. Helgelin and the sheriff quickly swept aside this covering and began to dig. A few strokes of the spade revealed the awful truth.

Not only had Helgelin been murdered, his body dismembered and buried in quicklime, but there within a few feet of it lay the bodies of Jennie Olson, Ole Budsberg and two others. Five other bodies, all as yet unidentified, were exhumed on further search.

Then all Laporte began to tell what it knew about Mrs. Gunness. Many men had gone to the farm, never to return. People had taken babies there and left them, and they had never been heard to cry and had never been seen alive again. It was a veritable house of mystery, because no one in the neighborhood ever went there. When she had farm hands at work around the house, Belle Gunness watched them like a hawk. She had a cellar floor covered with cement, and she sat in the cellar all day lo...

Table of contents

• INTRODUCTION
• SERIAL KILLERS
• THE BABY FARMERS
• THE HORROR OF LYNCHINGS
• THE CRIME OF BEING A WITCH
• THE OLD WEST
• THE BLACK HAND & THE MAFIA
• THE ASSASSINATION OF JAMES GARFIELD
• SHORT CRIME STORIES
• PHOTOS