Mysterious Chicago by Adam Selzer

Author:Adam Selzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2016-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

The American’s composite of how Belle might look in disguise.

The police and authorities decided that the fire had been started by Ray Lamphere, a man Gunness had often employed as an aide. He was charged with several counts of murder.

Lamphere admitted that he’d seen the fire hours before it was reported, but declined to alert firefighters because he assumed, correctly, that they’d suspect him of arson. As far as the law was concerned, Lamphere had poisoned Gunness and the children, then burned the house down to destroy their bodies and the evidence. The sheriff’s working theory was that Gunness had refused to marry him and had threatened to frame him for all of the murders on the farm.

At Ray Lamphere’s trial, his lawyers suggested that the headless body was that of a woman Belle had lured to the farm to work as a housekeeper, then murdered. According to Lamphere’s defense team, she had poisoned the still-living children, dressed the adult body in her own clothes, removed her own false teeth to plant as evidence, then set the house on fire and fled. Lamphere said he had helped her do it.

Belle’s dentist denied that this was possible.

“Could these teeth be removed?” the prosecutor asked.

“By only melting the gold crowns.”

“Could they have been pulled?”

The dentist was emphatic in saying, “No, sir.”160

The prosecution seemed quite intent on showing that Lamphere had committed all of the murders Belle was accused of; an attempt was made to make her look like a tender, loving mother. Lamphere, for his part, said that he thought Belle had killed over forty people. He was acquitted of murder, but convicted of arson, and died in prison months later.

He insisted to the end that Belle Gunness was still alive.

And rumors continued for years that the body buried in Forest Home Cemetery, just outside the Chicago city limits, was not really that of Belle Gunness. Sightings of women thought to be her persisted for decades; another supposed murderess, Esther Carlson, was even strongly rumored to be Belle in disguise years later, but died before anything could be proven.

In 2007, a century after the fire, a team of University of Indianapolis grad students led by Andrea Simmons succeeded in having the skeleton exhumed. To their surprise, the adult bones in the crumbling coffin were mixed with the bones of two children, whom no one had noted were buried with Belle at the time. The three children whose bodies were found after the fire were buried beside her. Could parts of their bodies have been mixed in with Belle’s, for some reason?

The goal of the exhumation had been to attempt to match the DNA to samples taken from the saliva on an envelope Belle had licked more than a century before. While it was noted that, contrary to early reports, the body was about the right height to be Belle, the finding of the children’s bones was a surprise.

The results of the DNA tests were inconclusive, and the true story of what became of Belle Gunness remains an open question.

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