Her real name was Brynhild Paulsdatter Storset. She was born in Norway in 1859, emigrated to Chicago at 21, and arrived in La Porte, Indiana, in the early 1900s having already collected insurance money on a burned candy store, a dead husband, and two infant children whose symptoms a doctor said resembled poisoning. Nobody had charged her with anything.
In La Porte she bought a 48-acre farm and married a butcher named Peter Gunness. He was dead within the year — Belle said a sausage grinder’s auger fell from a shelf onto his head and a crock of hot brine fell on him at the same time. The coroner noted signs of strychnine. She collected $3,500 from his estate. No charges filed.
Then she started placing ads.
They ran in Norwegian-language newspapers and Midwestern lonely-hearts columns. Her ads ended with a line that became notorious: Triflers need not apply. She asked each man to bring cash so there wouldn’t be delays when he arrived. They came from Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Norway itself. Most were never seen again.
One man almost wasn’t. George Anderson, a suitor from Tarkio, Missouri, woke in the middle of the night to find Belle standing over him in the dark, holding a candle, her expression — he said — sinister and murderous. He yelled. She left without a word. He caught the first train home and left his belongings behind. He was the only known suitor to survive a visit to the farm.
Belle also had a teenage foster daughter named Jennie Olson. When Jennie disappeared, Belle told the neighbors she’d sent her to a finishing school in Los Angeles. Jennie had told a classmate something different: “My mama killed my papa. She hit him with a meat cleaver, and he died. Don’t tell a soul.” Jennie’s remains were found buried on the farm in May 1908.
On April 28, 1908, Belle’s farmhouse burned to the ground. In the basement: four bodies. Her three children — Myrtle, 11; Lucy, 9; Philip, 5 — and a headless adult woman in Belle’s clothing, with dental bridgework her dentist confirmed as hers.
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There was a problem. The headless body was approximately 5’3″ and 125 pounds. Belle Gunness was 5’9″ and weighed over 200. Several neighbors who saw the remains immediately said it wasn’t her. When investigators dug up the surrounding property, they found the dismembered remains of at least 11 men. Families of missing men began arriving from across the Midwest.
Her farmhand Ray Lamphere was convicted of arson. On his deathbed in December 1909, he gave a confession through a reverend. He said Belle had lured a woman from Chicago to the farm, killed her, dressed the body in Belle’s clothing, and planted Belle’s false teeth in the ashes. He said she used chloroform on her own three children before setting the fire. He estimated her total take at more than $250,000 — roughly $8 million today. He was supposed to meet her on the road afterward. She never came.
In 1931 — twenty-three years after the fire — a woman calling herself Esther Carlson was arrested in Los Angeles for poisoning a Norwegian-American man for his money. Two people who had known Belle said the resemblance was striking. Carlson had photographs of children who looked like Belle’s. She died before trial. Her identity was never established.
In 2007, University of Indianapolis researchers exhumed the La Porte grave and attempted to extract DNA from saliva on envelopes Belle had licked. The sample was too degraded. The identity of the woman in that grave has never been confirmed.
Belle Gunness has never been officially confirmed dead. The case is still open.
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