Belle Gunness (La Porte, Indiana serial killings)

Belle Gunness, born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth in Selbu, Norway, in 1859, immigrated to the United States in 1881 and settled near her sister in Chicago, where she worked as a domestic servant and later at a butcher's shop. She married Mads Ditlev Anton Sørensen in 1884. During their marriage, the couple's candy store and home each burned down, generating insurance payouts, and two infants in Gunness's care died of what was recorded as inflammation of the large intestine, with insurance collected after each death. Sørensen himself died on July 30, 1900—the same day two of his life insurance policies overlapped in coverage—of a cerebral hemorrhage; Gunness said she had given him quinine powder for a headache before finding him dead. She collected a total of $5,000 and used the funds to purchase a pig farm in La Porte, Indiana.

In 1902, Gunness married Peter Gunness. Within a week, his infant daughter died in Belle's care of unknown causes, and Peter himself died eight months later of a skull injury that Gunness attributed to a falling meat grinder. A coroner's jury examined the case on suspicion of murder but took no further action, and Gunness collected $3,000 in insurance money.

Beginning in 1905, Gunness placed marriage advertisements in Chicago newspapers, corresponding with men who subsequently disappeared after visiting her farm, including Henry Gurholt and John Moe; their belongings were later found among more than a dozen trunks in her house. Her activities came to public attention in April 1908 when the Gunness farmhouse burned to the ground. The ruins contained the body of a headless adult woman, initially identified as Gunness, along with the bodies of her three children. Subsequent excavation of the property uncovered partial remains of at least eleven more people, including Andrew Helgelien, identified after his brother Asle Helgelien alerted police to correspondence urging Andrew to visit with money. Bodies were found dismembered in a consistent manner—decapitated, with arms removed at the shoulders and legs severed at the knees—buried in shallow depressions across the property. Most remains could not be identified.

Ray Lamphere, Gunness's hired hand and periodic lover, was convicted of arson in November 1908 in connection with the fire. He later gave confessions—one published by journalist Edward Bechly and a separate account recorded by Reverend Edwin Schell—asserting that Gunness had lured and murdered the men who answered her advertisements, and that the headless female body was a victim planted to simulate her own death. Dr. Harry Long of La Porte, who had known Gunness personally, stated the body was not hers based on its size, build, and manicured nails, while Gunness's dentist identified a dental crown found in the ruins as hers. Whether Gunness died in the fire or escaped has never been conclusively resolved; a 2008 attempt at DNA testing on the corpse was inconclusive due to sample degradation.