Harold Schechter - Hell’s Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

Prologue

Bluebeards Door

F airyland, as every child knows, is a terrifying place, populated by all manner of nightmarish beings: the snaggletoothed witch who lusts for the fattened flesh of little children; the bloodthirsty giant ready to roast any trespassing human on a spit; the smooth-talking wolf with a sweet tooth for tasty young girls. Of all the scary stories told about that realm of dark enchantment, however, none more closely resembles a modern-day horror movie than the tale of Bluebeard.

Though scholars have identified variants of this folktale in societies throughout the world, the version best known in our own culture was originally put into writing by French author Charles

For the next century and a half, the area remained devoid of white inhabitants. In all the West, prolific in beauty, there was not a lovelier region, writes an early historian, but it was in the sole possession of the red man, who roamed at will over the prairies and encamped in the groves, living on the game and fish which were abundant on the land and in the sparkling lakes.

It wasnt until 1829 that the first white

Seeking a site to establish a county seat, a few enterprising settlers acquired a particularly choice tract of land, 450 acres in size and adorned with a chain of small lakes, gem-like in their dazzling beauty.

In 1852, the town of La Porte was upgraded to a city. By then its population had grown to roughly five thousand. The following decades witnessed

Life along Lincoln Way in the Maple City, La Porte, Indiana, 1890.

It wasnt only the physical attributes of the place that made the county and city of La Porte so exceptional in the eyes of its boosters but the caliber of its residents. La Porteans have always taken pride in the achievements of their most distinguished fellow citizens. Among the

In December 1841, tavern keeper Charles

A most remarkable murder took place in 1862. Following the discovery of the newly slain corpse of a German migr named Fred

Three years later, another German farmer, John

During the last weeks of 1902, the people of La Porte County were lashed into a fury by a particularly heinous killing that occurred in the town of Westville. The victim was sixteen-year-old Wesley Reynolds, a trusted clerk at the Westville State Bank, who doubled as the watchman, sleeping in the institution at night with three revolvers within reach. At daybreak on the morning of Sunday, November 30, Reynolds was startled awake when a beer keg came crashing through the rear window of the bank building. Leaping to his feet, a pistol in each hand, the young man confronted a pair of heavily armed robbers and opened fire. In the ensuing gun battle, Reynolds was struck three times, one bullet passing through his chin and lodging at the base of his brain, another entering his neck and exiting between his shoulder blades, the third striking him directly in the heart, killing him instantly. Fleeing the bank empty-handed, the two desperadoesone badly wounded by the heroic youth (as he would be hailed in newspapers throughout the country)stole a horse and surrey from a nearby barn and fled.

Young Reynoldss funeral, held on December 3, was attended by the entire population of Westville, and a fund, overseen by State Senator Charles E.

Two weeks after the people of Westville turned out to pay their last respects to the martyred young bank teller, the Fort Wayne Daily News ran a story on a sudden epidemic of crime that seemed to be reigning in La Porte County. Besides the Reynolds murder, there had been the recent armed robbery of two local young men by negro footpads, an attempt to administer poison to a La Porte woman by means of arsenic, and the killing of Albert Bader of La Porte by a train, following his attempt to escape arrest after breaking into a lakeside boathouse.

The immediate occasion of the news article, however, was the violent death of a local farmer that had occurred the previous day and whose circumstances were so bizarre that the town official called to the scene instantly suspected foul play. Higley but as the site of an unspeakable horror: the ghastly murder farm of Belle Sorenson Gunness, the Lady Bluebeard.