Belle Gunness

What the record shows

Belle Gunness is a Norwegian-born woman suspected of killing suitors, husbands and children at her farm outside La Porte, Indiana, and earlier in Chicago, Illinois, between about 1900 and 1908. She was never arrested, charged or tried. After her farmhouse burned on April 28, 1908, investigators unearthed the remains of at least 11 people on the property in addition to the three children and the headless adult woman found in the ruins. The Library of Congress research guide on the case summarises the press coverage of 1908 as reporting "over a dozen bodies" dug up between May 8 and May 29. Estimates of her total victims range from about 14 to more than 40; no court ever fixed a number.

According to the Wikipedia article and a Detroit Legal News case history, Gunness married Mads Sorenson in Chicago in 1884. Two of their four children, Caroline and Axel, died after showing symptoms the Legal News describes as consistent with poisoning; both were insured. Sorenson died on July 30, 1900, on the one day that two of his life insurance policies overlapped, and his doctor recorded natural causes. Gunness used the payout to buy a farm near La Porte in 1901. She married Peter Gunness there in April 1902; his infant daughter died within a week of the wedding, and he died about eight months later from a skull injury that Belle attributed to a falling sausage-grinder part. A coroner looked into the death, and she was not charged.

From about 1905 she placed matrimonial advertisements in Scandinavian-language newspapers describing herself as a comely widow with a large farm, Mental Floss and the Legal News report. Middle-aged men arrived with cash, and neighbours later recalled that they were not seen leaving. Among those named in later reporting were Wisconsin farmhand Henry Gurholt, Minnesota man John Moe and her foster daughter Jennie Olson, who disappeared in 1906 and whom Gunness said had gone to California. In January 1908 Andrew Helgelien, a South Dakota farmer who had exchanged dozens of letters with her, came to La Porte and withdrew $2,839 from a bank within days; he was never seen again.

At dawn on April 28, 1908, farmhand Joe Maxson woke to find the house on fire. Firefighters found four bodies in the basement: Gunness's children Myrtle, Lucy and Philip, and an adult woman without a head. Andrew Helgelien's brother Asle, who had grown suspicious after reading her letters, went to the sheriff on May 4 and then to the farm, where digging in the hog pen produced his brother's remains wrapped in burlap. Further digging turned up more burlap-wrapped remains in shallow graves; the count rose from five on the first day to 11 the next, after which, Mental Floss reports, police stopped counting. Traces of strychnine were found in some remains.

The county coroner concluded that the headless woman was Gunness. A La Porte dentist identified dental bridgework recovered from the ruins on May 19 as hers, while a physician who examined the body on May 9 said its height, weight and hands did not match the tall, heavy widow, according to the Wikipedia article. No explanation was ever established for the missing head, and reported sightings of Gunness continued for years.

Her former farmhand Ray Lamphere, whom she had dismissed after a quarrel, was arrested and charged with arson and four counts of murder. His trial began on November 9, 1908. On November 26, 1908, the jury found him guilty of arson and acquitted him of murder; the Morning Oregonian of November 27 reported that he was sentenced to the state prison on an indeterminate term and that two jurors had refused to convict on murder. He died of tuberculosis in prison about a year later. A confession he made to a clergyman before his death, published in January 1910, claimed that Gunness had killed another woman and planted the body before leaving.

In 1931 a Los Angeles County sheriff believed that Esther Carlson, a woman charged with strychnine poisoning, was Gunness; Carlson died of tuberculosis before trial and the identification was never confirmed. In 2007 and 2008 a University of Indianapolis team led by graduate student Andrea Simmons and anthropologist Stephen Nawrocki exhumed the body buried in Chicago as Gunness and sought a comparison sample from envelopes she had mailed; the material was too degraded, and the results were inconclusive.

Gunness was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth on November 11, 1859, in Selbu, Norway, and emigrated to Chicago in 1881 to join her sister. Her farm site in La Porte remains a subject of local history, and the Library of Congress maintains a guide to the 1908 newspaper coverage.