The Siren: Belle Gunness, The Husband Luring Serial Killer // MONSTERS SERIES
What would happen if you read an ad in a newspaper for your dream partner. They’re rich, they’re beautiful and they are looking for someone to share their life with. Would you answer, or is that too good to be true? Well, in 1906, dozens of men around the country had that exact problem, except when they answered these ads and went to go meet their future wife, they vanished without a trace.
TW: Child Death
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SOURCES
True Crime Chronicles: Volume One: Serial Killers, Outlaws and Justice – Real Crime Stories from the 1800s by Mike Rothmiller. 2020. Accessed via Perlego.
Hell’s Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men by Harold Schechter. 2018. Accessed via Kindle.
The Gunness Mystery. 2010. Dir. Stephen Ruminski. Wir. Bruce Johnson.
How a farm girl became the ‘butcher’ of lonely men NY POST.
The Odyssey - accessed via personal copy and Project Gutenberg
Metamorphoses by Ovid. Accessed via Project Gutenberg
The Original Sirens in Mythology Weren’t the Seductresses We Know Today by Kelly Faircloth. National Geographic.
https://georginajeffery.com/2015/05/11/folklore-snippets-huldra-the-seductive-troll/
https://undergroundlore.blogspot.com/2013/09/huldra-aint-your-hollow-back-girl.html
https://www.mariannedages.com/huldrapress/tag/what+is+a+huldra%3F
TRANSCRIPT
What would happen if you read an ad in a newspaper for your dream partner. They’re rich, they’re beautiful and they are looking for someone to share their life with. Would you answer, or is that too good to be true?
Well in 1906, dozens of men around the country had that exact problem, except when they answered these ads and went to go meet their future wife, they vanished without a trace.
Who was Belle Gunness, the woman who was luring men to what newspapers called her “Murder Farm?”
If you're interested in true crime that reads like gothic horror, real monsters that mirror mythological ones, and cases that will genuinely keep you up at night, you're in the right place. You're just like me. We upload once a week, so make sure to subscribe. And check out our special Monsters playlist with new episodes all October, our collection of stories of some of the most depraved human beings to ever walk the earth
In the summer of 1906, a man named George Anderson opened his morning newspaper and saw an ad that would change his life. It read
“WANTED — A woman who owns a beautifully located and valuable farm in first class condition, wants a good and reliable man as partner in same. Some little cash is required and will be furnished first class security.”
George was a 39 year old man who lived in Missouri and he had trouble finding a wife, so this seemed like an answer to his prayers. A wealthy woman in want of a husband. He was willing to help her take care of her farm, and the company of a woman would be nice after so many years alone.
At the bottom of the ad there were instructions on how he could get in touch with the author, who just went by the initials “B.G”. For a moment, George thought it was strange that this woman listed no details about herself, not even her full name, only the condition of her property.
But that didn’t stop him from writing her back- he didn’t want to miss out on this opportunity. And eventually, this mysterious bachelorette was inviting him to come visit her “valuable farm” in La Porte, Indiana.
The next day, George boarded a train, a suitcase full of his nicest clothes to make a good impression for his date. In the letters they shared, she had referred to him as a king, and had mentioned that he was the only man in the world for her. She seemed so kind and loving. And he couldn’t wait to see this beautiful farm she spoke of.
Ambience- Eerie, ominous
But when he arrived at the property, something immediately felt “off”. The beautiful farm was desolate, and poorly kept. And there were holes dug all around the property, 6 feet long, 3 feet wide, and deep. If he didn’t know any better, he might think they were….graves.
And then, the front door opened and his bride to be emerged. Except, she looked nothing like he had anticipated….
The woman who came to greet him was short and stout, with a stern, severe look permanently imprinted on her face. She was older than she had made herself seem in the letters, and nothing about her was warm and inviting like their correspondence had suggested.
Not really knowing what else to do, George told her that he was feeling tired from the long journey, and that he wanted to get to bed…
That night, he had a restless sleep. He kept feeling like someone was just outside of his room, waiting to come in. And then, In the middle of the night, George awoke to the sound of footsteps creaking through the space (SFX). Starting at his door, and slowly making their way over to his bed. He opened his eyes and saw the cold face of the woman looming over his bed. Was she just… watching him sleep?
The next morning, George fled without a second thought. There was no doubt in his mind that something was wrong. There was a dark energy about the farm and he didn’t want to stick around long enough to figure out why it was there.
It wasn’t until several years later that he learned the truth.
Because one morning, two years later, George once again opened his morning paper when he saw the headline.
“The Laport Murder Farm: Thirteen victims are found”
The article went to name who it believed the thirteen bodies buried in graves around the property belonged to,most of them suitors who, Just like George, had answered Belle’s ads in papers and traveled across the country to meet her. It even spoke of a supposed murder chamber that was found inside of the home, right beside his room.
So who was this woman, and why was she luring so many men to their death?
Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of Horrors, hauntings and mysteries. I’m your hostess on this macabre journey, Kaelyn Moore.
We’re back with another episode this month in our monster series, and today, we’re exploring the Siren of the Midwest, Belle Gunness.
But first, I wanted to Shout out to our patreon member Kathryn in the UK, who reached out to me to let me know she is an ecologist currently studying bats. Seems very fitting for our monster series, especially considering the vampire episode we did last week. She says “My team and I will often visit old and sometimes abandoned buildings and record videos to see if bats are roosting in any of the buildings. Some places (like the one I'm working at now) feel like the perfect scene for a horror movie and I've definitely had goosebumps when high winds make doors creak or debris fall.” I love when you guys send me your spooky and morbid jobs, hobbies, interests. Please never stop doing that.
October is always a special month for us as spooky season is in full swing, so if you want to really indulge make sure and check out our limited time subscription offer on Apple Podcasts. If you start your trial in October you’ll get a full 30 days to listen to the back catalog, including our monthly bonus episodes, archived episodes and more. You’ll also get a special recording of our upcoming Rogue Detecting Society Book Club meeting where we’ll be discussing Elizabeth Kostava’s The Historian, a book that goes perfectly with our monsters theme.
Hi guys, just a reminder that this is your last chance to sign up for a month free trial on apple podcasts. If you sign up before the end of the month, you’ll get a full 30 days to listen to the back catalog, including our monthly bonus episodes. This month, we did premonitions and prophecies that came true. We’re talking nostradaumus, simpsons predictions, people who predicted their own deaths, and what year the world might actually end. Sign up while you still can, thanks guys
Now, our Monster of the week is a siren. And though you may be thinking of a seductive mermaid sitting on a rock, luring men to their deaths with their voices, you might be surprised to learn that they weren’t always described that way.
These creatures first show up in Homer's Odyssey, as the friends of Persephone that were turned into half birds, half girls by her mother, Demeter, to help look for their friend after she was kidnapped by Hades, the God of the Underworld.
These bird women held onto forbidden knowledge. And they flew around Odysseus’s boat and taunted him, singing a song that said they knew what happened at Troy and everything that happened in the future. But with Sirens, if a man chooses to listen to the song, they become enchanted and sail to their deaths.
So Odyssues had his men stuff their ears with beeswax and tie him to the mast of his ship so he could safely hear the song without damning them all. And that’s the thing about Siren’s, when you engage with them, when you hear the siren song and respond. You die. Unless you tie yourself down. Your desire will literally kill you.
It wasn’t until the Europeans in medieval times got a hold of the legend that the hyper intelligent bird women became seductive half fish- half women, as it more aligned with the churches view of women as temptresses. And soon, the legend became that it was the temptation of women that killed them.
In some versions of the myth, no one ever knows what the siren truly looks like, if she’s as beautiful as her voice is, because no man ever lives to tell the story. As our patreon and apple podcast subscribers know since we covered Sirens in last month’s bonus episode after months of very tight votes.
And of all of the monsters we’re covering this month, Sirens have the highest body count.
But Before she was an infamous killer, Belle was just one of 7 children.
Belle was born November 11, 1859 in a small farming village in Norway as “Brynhild Paulsdatter Størset”. Her father, Paul, was essentially a sharecropper, leasing a small portion of land on the farm where his whole family worked. That’s where Brynhild learned the ins and outs of farm work- her family was poor and really relied on her labor, even as a young child. As a kid, she was tasked with gathering up twigs out in the woods that surrounded her to use as kindling for the fire in her poor family’s home, earning herself the nickname Snurkvistpåla, or “Paul’s twig-daughter.”
Out in those woods, the stories traveled fast, passed from traveller to traveller. Brynhild grew up on tales of the Norwegian Siren, the Huldra—the part-woman part-troll, who played harp and sang from the tree line, drawing lonely men deeper into the dark.
A Huldra’s goal was to marry a human man, but if a man was ever intimate with one, he’d die. It was a cautionary tale, told to men who didn’t know when to turn around. But from a young age, it taught Belle that men had a weakness. Women, regardless of their looks.
Life in Norway was not the life that Belle wanted for herself. As a teenager, she started saving money to go to America. She watched as her older sister, Nellie, moved to the states and found a husband. She had a comfortable life in Chicago where she didn’t have to gather sticks all day. And Chicago at the time was home to twenty-thousand Scandinavian immigrants, so her sister felt right at home.
By the time she was 22, Belle finally had enough money to join her.
On her arrival in America, Belle changed her name to something less scandinavian sounding Bella Peterson. And life in America was good for her. Nellie looked out for her younger sister, and Belle loved playing with and taking care of Nellie’s five children. It seemed like she had this really strong maternal side. And In 1884, she moved out to start a family of her own.
Belle married Mads Sorenson, a man five years her senior. There’s only one photo of him still in existence, but if it’s anything to go by, he was a handsome man, and the couple seemed happy. But as the years wore on, Belle started to change. The old stories she grew up on warned that the danger isn’t only in the forest—it’s in the pull. It’s in desire. And Belle had some very dark desires…
One day, in 1891, Nellie and Belle were sitting together, catching up, when Belle made a strange request. She asked Nellie, seemingly out of the blue, if she could adopt her youngest daughter, Olga. Nellie was taken aback by this, but then Belle got really emotional, and told her that She was unable to have children herself, but desperately wanted to be a mother.
Nellie thought about it for a moment. She was so close to Olga, would she be comfortable just handing her over to Belle? Ultimately, she said no, and this destroyed the sisters relationship. They stopped talking after this, and from what we know, the relationship was never repaired.
Belle did eventually find a child to adopt, however — She and Mads had a neighboring family, the Olsons. They were a mother, a father and a daughter, Jennie. The mother fell ill, and on her deathbed, she agreed to give her eight month old Jennie to Belle to raise as her own.
With a baby in tow, Belle’s life was all coming together how she had planned. Within a few years the couple bought a sweet shop.
But Belle had established a sort of…pattern in her life. When things weren’t going her way, she would take unconventional and somewhat drastic measures.
So when the sweet shop failed to quickly turn a profit, she did something extreme.
One day, less than a year after they opened their candy store, Belle and Jennie, who was now a 3 year old toddler, ran out onto the sidewalk in a panic. Belle was screaming at the top of her lungs “Fire! Fire!” (SFX roar of a fire)
A neighbor ran over to ask her what had happened as flames were jumping out of the store windows. Bell told him that A kerosene lamp had ignited inside and the fire spread so quickly she didn’t know what to do.
Now, the city of Chicago took sudden fires very seriously — in 1871, ten years before Bella moved there, the whole city had completely burned down. So Chicago firemen were among the best in the country. But they still arrived too late, the store was destroyed.
But Luckily for Bella and Mads, the store was also… insured. Sources differ on how much money they put into the insurance policy, but some say it was as much as $3,500. That’s over $130,000 today, and Belle used it to pay for a nice three story house in a nearby suburb. There, She and her husband focused on their ever growing family, which expanded to include two more girls: Myrtle and Lucy. These girls were also probably adopted, but any records of their birth parents has been lost to time.
But with no form of income now after the store burned down, and two more mouths to feed, the money ran out quickly. And on April 10, 1900, Belle and her children ran outside of their home screaming that it, too, had caught fire.
Firemen were quick on the scene, and they were able to put the fire out. Belle went over and asked what she was supposed to do now that her home was destroyed, to which the firemen responded that it wasn’t destroyed. They had saved it, save for a few areas of smoke damage inside.
And this made Belle and Mads furious. They still claimed they’d lost around $650 of household goods. All of which, I’m sure you can already guess, were insured.
No one was suspicious that Belle had essentially been surviving on insurance payouts for the last few years. Even her insurance company just thought she had bad luck.
Especially when, just three months later, tragedy struck again. But this time, it was more than just a fire.
On July 30th, 1900, a pair of doctors were urgently summoned to Belle’s home. They arrived to find Mads lying on top of the bed, not breathing. Checking his body, there were no obvious signs of what had happened. No wounds, no medications by his bed. It seemed like he just laid down and….died. Which was odd for a 46 year old man, even at the turn of the century.
Belle told the doctors that Mads had come home early from work complaining of a headache. She gave her husband quinine powder — which was a common treatment for fever at the time and today can be found in Tonic Water. She then left the room to make dinner for their kids. When she came back, she realized that he’d died. She told the doctors that she thought her druggist had made a mistake and given them morphine rather than quinine powder. And it seems like the doctors thought this was a perfectly acceptable explanation for what had happened.
Now, the timing of her husband’s death was extremely lucky. He’d only recently changed life insurance providers. His old policy — worth $2,000 — was set to expire the very next day, and his new policy — worth $3,000 — had just gone into effect that day. He died on the one day in which both policies overlapped, meaning that Belle could collect from both. She made off with around $192,000 in todays money
Newspapers treated the timing of his life insurance as a silver lining on an otherwise terrible tragedy. Nellie Larson, Bella’s estranged sister, came out to the funeral to pay her respects, even though the two hadn’t spoken in years. She wanted to be there to support her sister as she went through the toughest thing a woman could go through at the time, aside from losing a child. Becoming a widow.
This wasn’t the beginning of a reunion, though. Belle only isolated herself further from her family. In November of 1901, she sold her house in Chicago and moved with her children to La Porte, Indiana. By this point, Belle had proven that what she was doing worked, and she was getting away with it, too. So it was time to up the scale- drastically….
The farm she bought was in good condition – 48 acres, near a lake, capable of raising all sorts of livestock. Unlike a candy store, Bella knew how to run a farm from her upbringing in Norway.
It was practically a fresh start for her – once she moved, she started regularly going by “Belle” rather than Bella. And she reconnected with Peter Gunness, a man who had stayed at her Chicago place several years earlier. Peter had two children, a toddler and an infant, who would join her three children at the farm, after they got married that spring.
But five days after their marriage, the younger of these two children died while in her care. Doctors said the cause of death was edema of the lungs.
Now, we don’t know for sure if this death was truly natural or was part of a larger scheme that she was overseeing, but we do know that shortly after the child’s death, she would lose her second husband in 2 years…
On December 16th, 1902, Jennie Belle’s oldest daughter, ran to Belle’s neighbors. She pounded frantically on their door until they answered (SFX) . She told them that they needed help, because “Papa’s burned himself.”
When they arrived at Belle’s place, they found Peter lying on the parlor floor, unmoving. There was blood all around him, and his nose was broken. Belle was nearby, incoherent with emotion. When the doctor finally got a story out of her, it went like this….
Peter had been putting on his shoes in the kitchen when a meat grinder fell from an upper shelf, landing on his head. A bowl of hot brine (a mixture of salt and water) came with it, burning the back of Peter’s neck. Peter had told Belle that he was fine, and said he would lay down to rest. She’d come back hours later to find him dead on the floor.
Immediately, Belle’s explanation was questioned by the doctors. During an autopsy, it was determined that the injuries Peter sustained did not match Belle’s story really at all. If he got bonked on the back of his head, why was his nose broken? and the injuries on the back of his head were more consistent with severe, repeated blows, not a single hit, like Belle said. A doctor called an inquest to investigate the death for foul play.
For the town of La Porte, this whole ordeal was a minor scandal. Everyone was convinced that something was off about the death of Peter Gunness… but ultimately, the inquest concluded that his death was accidental, in spite of all the unanswered questions.
And I’m sure you’re all wondering the same thing I was by now – did Peter have any life insurance?
Well, Someone showed up in early 1903 to ask Belle that exact thing. It was Peter’s brother from Minneapolis. He knew that Peter had purchased a $2,500 life insurance policy, but the beneficiary was not his wife, but his daughter from a previous marriage, who was named Swanhild.
Belle told Gust that Peter’s life insurance no longer existed. He’d exchanged it for stock certificates in a mining company. Though, of course, she could not show these certificates to Gust. She then insisted that Gust should stay and manage the farm with her, which he declined. He had a really bad feeling about what was happening here, and left while Belle was asleep, taking his niece with him.
It didn’t matter to Belle, though. She soon adopted a baby boy named Phillip and proceeded to run the farm on her own for over a year. She’d buy and raise the livestock, slaughter them, butcher them, sell the meat as well as the produce she was growing. Her fellow farmers noticed what a striking figure she cut – short and stocky, she’d frequently wear her late husband’s leather coat and shoes, sometimes lifting whole hogs all on her own to place them into her cart.
And yet, as strong and self-reliant as she was, 48 acres is a lot for one person to handle. And as her farm struggled to make a profit, Belle seemed to look for a way to make things easier.
So By the end of 1904, Belle set her sights, once again, on finding some help.
Now, a siren sends her song out into the sea to lure in sailors, and Belle’s “song” started as a help wanted ad in a Chicago paper, looking for an extra set of hands to help on the farm. It was answered in early 1905 by a 32-year-old man named Olaf Lindboe.
Olaf was similar to Belle in a few ways. For starters, he was also an immigrant from Norway looking to make a good life for himself in America. He was described as a charming man and a good musician, and before he left He packed a small suitcase that included $600, his life savings up until that point.
One of Belle’s neighbors named Christopher noticed that he was a huge help on the farm over the several months that he worked there. And letters he wrote home showed he was happy.
But neighbors also noticed that he and Belle were growing unusually close for an employer and employee. And one day, his family received a letter from him saying that he thought he’d soon be married. That was the last time they ever heard from him.
One day, Christopher noticed that Olaf hadn’t been helping Belle for a few days, and he asked if he was ok. Belle seemed antsy, and confessed that Olaf had abandoned the job after just a few months. And left it at that.
By April, another man showed up at her doorstep, answering the same help wanted ad. His name was Henry Gurholt, from Scandinavia, Wisconsin. Like Olaf Lindboe before him, he wrote fondly about the farm and people living there. He also had brought his life savings with him. And like Olaf, his letters stopped abruptly not long after. His last letter home was on July 4th of 1905. In it, he told his brother that he’d gone for a pleasant ride through the country with Mrs. Gunness to celebrate the holiday. Christopher watched them leave, but never saw Henry again.
After the disappearance of these two hired hands, Belle put out another set of ads. But these were different. She was no longer looking for a worker, she was looking for a husband.
Her ads were all similar to the one that George Anderson read. They talked about how beautiful her farm was, how much money it could make. She asked for Someone who could be her business partner as well as her lover… but also someone that had the cash to prove it.
Those who responded to her letters were approaching middle age, mostly between 35 and 50, single, working men. And all of them, like her, were Scandinavian immigrants.
There was George Berry, a 40 year old Norwegian-America who came from Tuscola, Illinois to answer Belle’s call. With him he brought $1500 cash…
Christie Hilkven, of Dover, Iowa, sold his farm for $2,000 in cash in 1906. He changed his mailing address to La Porte, and subsequently was never heard from again.
Emil Tell of Osage County, Kansas, left town with $3,000, bound for La Porte. Like the others, he sold all his property before leaving.
Many of these men were widowers, like Ole Budsberg of Iola, Wisconsin. He withdrew $2,000 from the bank, and then claimed another $2,000 from a mortgage. His sons, expecting to hear from their father once he got settled, never did.
We have some surviving letters showing the correspondence between Belle and these men, and she really lays it on thick…One of them reads:
“To the Dearest Friend in the World,
No woman in this world is happier than I am. I know you are now to come to me and be my own. I can tell from your letters that you are the man that I want.
When I hear your name mentioned it is beautiful music to my ears. My heart beats in wild rapture for you I love you. Come prepared to stay here for ever.
Meanwhile, the people of La Porte noticed that Belle had a revolving door of gentlemen callers. Emil Greening, a farm worker who Belle had hired, noticed that there was a different man coming to call every week. Belle introduced each of them as “cousins”, and none of them seemed to stay very long. It was strange to Emil, but what was even stranger was how many of them seemed to leave their suitcases behind when they departed.
And then, there was how the following Summer- in 1906- Belle hired another man, William Brogiski. Emil kept to his farm duties, but William was hired to dig a couple of holes in her hog pen: six feet long, three feet wide, and four feet deep. She told William and Emil they were for trash, but the two of them never saw them filled with any garbage.
In spite of the strangeness, Emil continued working there for the rest of 1906. He was a young man, 19 years old, and had really taken a liking to Belle’s oldest daughter, Jennie, who was now 16 years old.
And he hoped she liked him too, that maybe one day they could get married and leave this weird farm. But then, In mid-December 1906, she abruptly told Emil, that her mother was sending her college in Los Angeles, California. Belle had even arranged for a professor from the College to visit that Christmas.
On Christmas day, Emil watched as The professor and his wife made their way to the farm. But there was another man with them, a man from Elbow Lake, Minnesota named John Moe. Now, Moe wasn’t there with the professor, he was actually answering one of Belle’s ads and had brought around $1,100 with him, which seemed odd to Emil.
Emil even ended up turning in early for the night because he had such a strange feeling about the group that had gathered at Belles
Early the next morning, he came downstairs from his room, looking for Jennie. She’d promised she’d say goodbye before leaving for school and he wanted to see her just one last time before she left. But the house was dead silent. There was barely any trace that the guests had been there that night, and Jennie was nowhere to be found.
When he found Belle, she told him that Jennie had left already. The professor and his wife had taken her to the boarding school out west. But Emil wasn’t an idiot, and he knew Jennie wouldn’t have left without saying something to him
It took him six more months of work on Belle’s farm before he finally had enough money to leave for good, and in that time, he saw many more men come, and none go.
At the time of Emil’s departure, another man was coming after seeing Belle’s ads, this one from South Dakota. His name was Andrew Hegelien, and he’d been writing to Belle for at least a year, and she’d been using all of the same, flowery language she had used on the other men.
Andrew, thoroughly enticed by these letters, gathered his life savings and made plans to move to La Porte.
On the morning of January 3rd, 1908, he arrived in La Porte, where he was greeted by Ray Lamphere, the man who Belle had hired to replace Emil.
And immediately, Ray was confused… see, Ray and Belle had been having a bit of a fling, and Ray had been telling his drinking buddies that he thought the two would be married soon. The only problem was he was a farmhand with no money to his name, and Belle was never going marry someone like that.
So Ray turned away from the fire he was building to go confront Andrew, only to be interrupted by Belle Gunness herself. She must not have been pleased to see the man she’d been wooing talking to the man she was sleeping with, and told Ray to stop bothering Andrew.
Immediately after, she kicked Ray out of his second story room, told him to stay in the barn from now on. Which infuriated him, and he was not one to let things go.
After that, all of her warmth and energy went into convincing Andrew to become hers. But before the wedding, they had to make sure he could pay up.
The following Monday, January 6th, Belle and Andrew went to the First National Bank of La Porte, where Andrew presented three cheques he wanted to cash out, for a total of $2,839. The teller informed them it would take some time to come up with that amount of cash, which clearly annoyed Belle much more than her husband to be.
within a week, though, they had the money, and Andrew Hegelien, like all the rest, was never seen again after they left the bank.
But Andrew had something that the other men didn’t have. Something that Belle didn’t account for.
A brother, one that he was VERY close to, and one that became increasingly anxious after he hadn’t heard from Andrew in 10 days. Enough to want to go figure out what happened to him…
Now, back in the day, tracking down the location of a person was a lot harder than it is now. So andrew’s brother, Asle wound up writing to many friends trying to determine where Andrew might be. When no one had an answer, he had a hired hand search Andrew’s place. There, he found dozens of letters written to Andrew by Belle Gunness of La Porte, Indiana.
Asle wrote to Belle in early March, asking where his brother was. The letter arrived just as Belle was dealing with another problem — her employee turned spurned lover, Ray Lamphere. Rather than welcome him back into her house after Andrew’s disappearance, she’d fired him. Ray hadn’t taken this kindly, he was already upset about being sent to the barn, and had attempted to sue in order to recover carpentry tools he left on the property. Belle, in response, had him arrested for trespassing.
So, you can imagine, when she received the letter from Asle Hegelien, she felt like enemies were coming at her from all directions. She wrote back to Asle, saying that she didn’t know where Andrew was either.
Now, Asle didn’t buy this for a second, but it took him some time to figure out what to do next. In the meantime, Ray would have to go to trial multiple times, because Belle kept accusing him of insanity. She said that he threatened her regularly and that her life was in danger.
She was in danger, but not of death. Of discovery.
On April 15th, 1908, during Ray’s second trial for trespassing, the defence attorney sought to undermine Belle’s credibility as a witness. And while doing so, made a connection that no one in the story had so far:
According to the court transcript, he asked her while she was on the stand:
“Peter Gunness, your husband, died very suddenly, didn’t he?” (…) “He carried considerable life insurance, didn’t he?” “How did that sausage grinder (…) come to drop on Mr. Gunness’ head, anyway?”
Each of these questions was followed by a strong objection from the prosecution and the Judge determined that the questioning had gone a bit too far.
But Belle felt like a woman surrounded. The lawyer was catching on to her. Ray wasn’t going anywhere, and Asle continued sending letters from South Dakota asking about his brother and threatening to come look for him.
And when Belle got backed into a corner she took unconventional and somewhat drastic measures.
On the morning of April 27th, 1908, Miss Garwood, a teacher at the Quaker School in La Porte, noticed something strange. She taught both Myrtle and Lucy Gunness, Belle’s youngest daughters, and that morning both of them had come into school crying. They said their mother had beaten them horribly for playing in the stairwell that leads to the basement — a part of the house they’re strictly forbidden from entering.
Miss Garwood was so concerned that she sent the children home from school early that day.
Meanwhile, Belle Gunness had spent several hours in town with her lawyer, rewriting her will. She told him that Ray Lamphere had threatened to burn down her house with her in it. Setting the stage for what was to come.
Before dawn on April 28th, Joseph Maxson, Ray Lamphere’s replacement farmhand, awoke to the smell of smoke. Struggling to breathe, he stumbled out of his room, down the stairs, and out the back entrance of the house. He looked up, and saw that the entire farmhouse was aflame. Not knowing what else to do, He grabbed an axe and tried to re-enter the building, but found it impossible. Moments later, the roof began to collapse.
Word spread fast among the farms, and people from all over La Porte came down to see if they could help. Someone set up a ladder on the side of the building, and they attempted to check each bedroom from the outside, to see if they could rescue Belle or the kids. But each room was empty. And soon, the fires inside were too thick for anyone to go in.
Joseph then fetched La Porte’s Sheriff at around 5 AM. But by the time the Sheriff arrived, there wasn’t much that could be done. The flames slowly burned out as the sun rose. All that remained of Belle’s farmhouse was a handful of walls, and a pile of rubble.
Firemen, policemen, and men from the Sheriff’s department sifted through the rubble for hours. They tore down the remaining walls for safety, leaving just the basement of the house, which had filled with still-smoldering debris. By mid-afternoon, they were growing frustrated, having turned up almost nothing.
Then, at 3:45, a man made the grim discovery they were looking for:
Four bodies, in the southeast corner of the cellar. Utterly buried in rubble and ash. The children — Lucy, Myrtle and Phillip — were charred and displayed signs of blunt trauma as the house had fallen in on them. Next to them was another body that was unrecognizable. bones protruded from her burnt flesh. It was assumed that this was Belle, however her head was missing. The only reason they thought it was Belle was because of the body’s size.
No matter how long they looked, they could not find her head. Anywhere
The Sheriff caught wind that Belle had recently told her lawyer that Ray wanted to burn down her house, so he tracked him down for questioning. But Ray had an alibi for the night of the fire. If the place had burned down, it wasn’t because of him.
At first, local papers reported this as a senseless, horrible tragedy…
Belle’s estranged sister Nellie took a train out to La Porte to identify the body. Also arriving in town was Asle Hegelien, who continued to search for his missing brother among the ruins.
Once the rubble was fully cleared, Asle found himself dissatisfied. He wandered about the grounds of the farm, wondering whether he should go back home and give up the search for his brother. Then, on a whim, he asked Joseph Maxson if he could recall other holes being dug on the property in spring. The farmhand said that he had, and pointed him to the hog barn, where he had helped Belle dispose of rubbish.
Asle and Maxson started digging there… and that’s when they found the graves.
The bodies inside were in horrible condition – dismembered and badly decomposed. Around each body were several gunny sacks full of body parts. Many of the bodies were nearly unrecognizable, some were missing their heads, having obviously been beheaded.
The men had been buried in quicklime, an ingredient used in cement, which is extremely corrosive in chemical form. Some of them still had mustaches, but their faces were otherwise completely destroyed. I can’t help but think of how Homer describes the Sirens:
“...the Sirens cast a spell of penetrating song, sitting within a meadow. Near by is a great heap of rotting human bones; fragments of skin are shriveling on them.”
The first body unearthed was missing both limbs and head, which were contained in sacks nearby. Asle knew immediately, though, that it was his brother Andrew. Shortly after, the men dug up a skeleton of a 16 year old girl. Jennie Olson hadn’t gone to California after all.
The horror show continued for a while. Word spread fast about the gruesome “Murder Farm” that Belle had run in Illinois. On May 10th, a week after the bodies had been discovered, over sixteen thousand curious individuals trekked out to La Porte to see the ruins for themselves. The event became something like a county fair, with commemorative postcards of the bodies, and eager townsfolk selling their services as tour guides. Some of these amateur guides said that the body count was 40, but the truth is somehow less, and more, impressive.
You see, after a while, the police had just stopped counting. Too many unaccounted for body parts, all mixed together.
Today, any number of websites will tell you Belle killed between 14 and 40 people. From my research, and speaking with Rob who helped me research this episode, we think the most accurate number is somewhere around 28, but that’s still just a guess, and taking it on faith that none of the newspapers we read exaggerated for dramatic effect.
As the public took in the horrifying scope of her crimes, speculation began that Belle Gunness had faked her own death. After all, the body was headless. Where did the head go? And if it was Belle who burned down the farm, which we don’t have any reason to think it wasn’t, how did she remove her own head? Maybe she’d staged it in order to evade the consequences of her crimes.
Speculation also ran rampant that she didn’t work alone. Investigators noticed that Ray Lamphere possessed a pocket watch that belonged to the murdered John Moe. But that was a gift given to him by Belle, he said. He had no idea that it came from a dead man.
Ray denied having any knowledge of Belle’s crimes.
In November of 1908, though, he went to trial. He was acquitted of murder, but he was convicted of arson, in spite of the lack of tangible evidence that he started the fire at Belle’s farm. The judge gave him a minimum sentence of 2 years.
But Ray wouldn’t live to see freedom. He died after a little over a year, from tuberculosis. Less than 2 weeks after he died, a priest came forward saying that Ray had given him a full confession before his death. To quote the newspaper coverage of the story:
“Lamphere (...) confessed that he had guilty knowledge of the murder of three men in the Gunness home during the time he lived there, about eight months in 1907, and he assisted Mrs. Gunness in disposing of the bodies of three men.
He said he thought he had not received as much of the profits of the transaction as he considered himself entitled to and he went to the farm house one night with a woman, chloroformed Mrs. Gunness, her three children and Jennie Olson. He and the woman then searched the house, finding between sixty and seventy dollars. The light they used was a candle and they left the house without knowing they had left behind a spark that soon would burst into flames.”
Now, this almost certainly didn’t happen. Jennie had been missing for a while at this point, so it’s unlikely she was killed with Belle. However, the public thought This confession fully tied up the loose ends of the Belle Gunness story.
And it also helped people understand what happened to the men. That they were chloroformed by Belle while they slept and then were hacked to pieces and buried on the property, though we’ll never know for certain.
Unless the headless woman wasn’t Belle after all… The only thing they ever found of Belle Gunness’s skull was a set of distinctive dental bridges, made of porcelain and 18 karat gold. Her dentist seemed to think that these were hers, but more definitive proof has never emerged.
Sightings of Belle Gunness appeared for many months after the discovery of the bodies, spanning the whole length of North America. Most of these were determined to be hoaxes or mistakes. But they show that she had, like many killers before and since, ascended into the collective imagination of America. She’d become not a fugitive, but a monster on the loose.
Conspiracy theories swirled around the nature of her crimes. Some suspected that Belle was employed by gangsters in Chicago to help dispose of bodies, or that she ran a “baby farm”, disposing of unwanted infants and providing abortion services to poor women in the area. Neither of these theories hold up. She had no connections with gangsters during her time in Chicago, and was isolated enough from her neighbors in La Porte that it’s hard to imagine her being someone that a pregnant girl would turn to for help.
The monstrous perception of her – fueled by penny dreadfuls and lurid true crime reporting – obscures the actual woman who committed these terrible acts.
In a strange way, it gives this story one final parallel with the sirens.
Homer describes them obliquely, mentions their songs and monstrous appetites but little else about them. It was only later myths, and artists from the medieval era, who expanded the sirens into the terrifying sea creatures we think of today.
Likewise, Belle Gunness went from a woman who killed men one at a time for cash to a hired hitman for the mob who was ingenious enough to fake her own death and evade capture afterward.
But she was never that kind of criminal mastermind. Her schemes were brutal, but simple. And in the end, she had no exit strategy.
If you want to learn more about the story of Belle Gunness, the book Hell’s Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men by Harold Schechter was one of the main sources we used in our research, he also goes into the Huldra myth a bit more if you’re interested
And if you want to learn more about sirens and mermaid, you can join me on patreon or apple podcasts because our september bonus episode was all about horrifying mermaid and siren lore from around the world. If you’d like to help vote on what we pick for the bonus episode, or get behind the scenes info on our episodes and more that didn’t make it into the episode, you can join me each week on the high council tier on patreon for our weekly show FOOTNOTES.