THE LA PORTE MURDERS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LI, Issue 291, 3 December 1908, Page 4

THE LA PORTE MURDERS.

IS lilts. GUNNESS ALIVE i POSSIBLE ESCAPE TO NEW ZEALAND, Hag Widow Belle Gunness, the marderer of 20 people, who it was at first supposed was incinerated with her three children when her home was burned down, escaped to New Zealand or Australia ? This question is being aske.i by the newspapers of America, vuiic the police stick to the theory that the woman lost her life when her homestead was destroyed. No talc ever told by Edgar Allan Poe, the pastmaster in retailing liorrois ranks with the revelations concerning the Widow Gunness' "house of death' on the outskirts of La Porte, Indiana. The woman attracted so many men there by the lure of matrimonial advertisements, and then killed them, that the plaee has been fancifully called "the port of missing men." She advertised for a man with money j to join a woman of property. The a-i- 1 vertisemcnt concluded thus:—"No iv-' plies by letter considered unless sender j is willing to follow answer with personal visit." Numerous letters in the 1 hands of the police show that she received hundreds of replies to lier attractively-baited advertisements, ana that to a large number of men she wrote, urging tliem to convert their property into cash, mid come and settle on her large farm, which the combined capital would make very valuable. She lured many victims through tlie mails. Twenty bodies were dug i:]> around her house. In her house oi death, with the bodies of her slain around her very doorstep, she gave dances, and held riotous parties. Finally this high priestess of murder was either burned to death or she has escaped over the seas. It will take some time to determine whether she is alive or dead. It true that the body, of a headless woman was found in the ruins after the conflagration—the only female body, except that of her young daughter, among the score dug up from benead the eharnel house. It is pointed out, however, that the night before the firo a trunk believed to have contained bodies was received at the house. There may have been the slain body of a headless woman in that trunk, to be left as a ruse. With a score of human bodies and skeletons already dug out of the ground, it is a generally accepted fact that Mrs. Gunness took every step to ' prevent recognition of her victims. Every body so far discovered was dismembered before it was thrust into its grave. That she must have had an accomplice seems evident, but no clues point that way. Lamphere, the man sentenced, is said by the police to hav° been her assistant. He asserts that ' instead of aiding the woman she conspired with one of the men now dead to

put him out of the way. Coming as a final commentary on the woman's fiendishness—or possibly it is to be construed as a final act of contrition and atonement for her wickedness—is the will of the widow Gunness. Shfc left her fortune to an orphan's home in Chicago! Although her crim -s were principally committed for money, she left but £3OOO. Ttut, having murdered only she herself knows how nianv fathers of children, she bequeaths that money,to the orphans! Large numbers of people in America adhere to the conviction that Widow Gnliness is not dead, but lias escaped across the Pacific, and perhaps to New Zealand. , * i i