October 24, 2020 • 21 mins
We're revisiting a 2011 episode today. In 1908, a fire leveled the Indiana home of Belle Gunness. Four bodies were found in the cellar, and it seemed possible that Gunnes might have escaped. When about a dozen more bodies were found, Gunness was revealed as a serial killer.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Today, we are going back to our previous
episode on Bell Gunness, which is part murder story and
part history mystery. Her crimes were discovered after a fire
in eight, but whether she perished in that fire is
still a little unclear. This episode is from previous hosts
Sarah and Debilina, and it came out September. Welcome to
(00:28):
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Deblina
Chocolate Boarding and I'm fair Do And this topic. The
topic of this episode was a suggestion from listener Jesse,
and I feel like I should say that because it's
(00:49):
such a gruesome story. I don't want Sarah to be
mad at me for picking it. It does have a
decapitated body. Yeah, that's true. Are you putting that in
the plus category? No, that's not why I selected it.
I selected it because it was a listener's suggestion, and
it is an interesting story. It's a fascinating mystery, and
you know how we love those. It starts, at least
(01:11):
for most of the world, this is when it started
with a fire that took place the morning of April
eight at a small farm just outside of Laporte, Indiana,
which was then a town of about ten thousand, about
sixty miles from Chicago, and the farm was owned by
a widow named Belle Gunness, and her home there was
completely destroyed by the fire. But it was after the
(01:34):
fire that the real mystery started. So four charred bodies
were found in the cellar, and three appeared to be
the bodies of Gunnis's children, Myrtle Sorenson, Lucy Sorenson, and
Philip Gunnis, who were eleven, nine and five years old, respectively.
The fourth body, though, was kind of a puzzle, and
(01:54):
like I said, that's where the mystery really started. Yeah, First,
people assumed that the body was Gonna says, makes sense, right,
It's a woman's body, and Gonnas live there, so you
imagine that she would be there with her kids. But
there were a couple of problems right off the bat.
People thought that the body seemed a little too small
to be bell. She was a woman of some stature.
(02:16):
Let's say she was about five eight and approximately two pounds,
and this body appeared to belong to someone who was
much shorter and lighter. It was also missing head, making
it even harder to confirm the identity. I should correct
my earlier statement. This is why I thought you might
have selected because of the head. I know you like
missing heads, but only with the Ned Kelly things. Okay, okay, well,
(02:38):
and Henry the Fourth too. Whoops, okay, never mind. But
what really made people suspicious about this this find was
the arrival of a man named Ostle hell Glen, who
came on the scene looking for his brother Andrew. And
he said that Andrew had been corresponding with Bell and
(02:58):
insisted that police search the property and a look for
this missing brother. What they found, though, was really disturbing,
Andrew's dismembered body, plus the body of a lot of
other people. So listener Jesse commented on what a media
storm the story would have created if it had happened today.
But it actually started a bit of a media frenzy
(03:19):
back then too, As more bodies were dug up and
it became more and more clear that Bell had been
a ruthless killer. Newspapers gave her catchy nicknames like the
Mistress of Murder Hill and Lady blue Beard. But who
was Bell Gunnis really and why and how did she
kill all of these people? And another question which is
(03:41):
probably one of the main questions that people want to know, now,
did she really die in that fire? So we're gonna
look at all of the stuff, but we're gonna start
with that first question. Who was Bell Gunnis? So we
don't know too much about Bell Gunnis's early life except
that she was born in a small village in Norway
on November eighteen fifty nine, and her name was originally
(04:02):
brin Hilled, Paul's daughter store Set, and her family was
very poor and several sources actually suggest that her father
may have been a Stonemason and that she probably had
to work as a farm hand at an early age
to help her family make ends meet. But what we
do know is that sometime in or shortly after eight
Brynhild immigrated to the United States in her early twenties,
(04:26):
specifically to Chicago, and changed her name to Bell. She
had a sister named Nelly Larson who had immigrated to
Chicago also, so she had a connection there. But she
again returned to pretty grueling work. Yeah, and again we
don't know too much about those first years in the
United States for Bell, but we do know that she
(04:46):
probably worked as a house servant, which would have been
pretty tough work, and she probably didn't like it very much,
because her sister was later quoted as saying, quote Bell
was crazy for money, and working as a house servant
would not have afforded her much of that. By about
eighteen eighty four, she married a man named Max Mad's Sorensen,
who was also a Norwegian immigrant, but that wouldn't have
(05:08):
really been her ticket to instant wealth either, though. He
was a department store detective and later worked for the
Chicago Railroad. In the eighteen nineties, they opened up a
confectioners shop in downtown Chicago, but that wasn't very successful.
It was, however insured. Oh indeed, the building actually burned
down around a year into their business venture, and after
(05:30):
that they were able to collect a little bit of
insurance money. Maybe it doesn't seem like such a big
deal on the surface, but this kicked off a pattern
for Bell that would probably raise a few red flags today.
In eight Sorensen's house also burned down and they collected
insurance money for that, and the couple's first two kids,
who were also insured, died in infancy, officially of acute colitis,
(05:54):
but now looking back, people say the symptoms are similar
to if they had been poisoned. Okay, So even if
you look at all of that is just really really
bad luck or really weird coincidence, what happens next has
to make you a little bit suspicious at least. So
mad Sorenson dies on July nine hundred, which just happens
(06:16):
to be the one day that to life insurance policies
from different mutual associations overlapped. Officially, the cause of death
was heart failure, but his symptoms actually indicated strychnine poisoning.
And the insurance pay out because of those two policies
was pretty huge eight thousand, five hundred dollars, and that
was quite a large sum for the time, and it
(06:37):
said that Bell tried to go collect it just a
day after the funeral, so she was certainly not playing
the part of the grieving widow. It was probably suspicious,
but there wasn't an autopsy. So Bell got the insurance
money and went on her way. She did. She used
the money actually to buy the farm on the outskirts
of Laport, and she moved there with three kids, Jenny,
(07:00):
Myrtle and Lucy. And just an aside here about the kids.
It's generally accepted that Jenny, whose full name was probably
Jenny Olsen, was a foster child, but some say that
none of Bell's children were her own. According to an
article by Ted Hartzel in American History, Bill's sister Nelly Larson,
once said that Bell never had any children of her own,
though she would at times have as many as twelve
(07:22):
children in her care. So just an interesting thing to
think about as we go on. I mean, maybe there
was some money associated with fostering children, you know, maybe
you've got some money from the government for that or something. Um.
You know, it's something that people don't focus on the
most when they're talking about Bell Gunness, but it's something
that stuck out to me definitely in her story. It's unusual.
(07:50):
So in Bell married again, and her second husband this
time was a a widower and a butcher by trade named
Peter Gunnis, who was also a native Norway. And Peter
Gunnis came to the marriage with two kids already. One
was an infant named Jenny, and she mysteriously died just
a week after the wedding when she was home alone
(08:11):
with Bell, and the other was a five year old girl.
And after that incident with the baby. She was removed
from her father in Bell's care and taken away by
her uncle to Wisconsin. Peter Gunnis didn't really last that
much longer. Only eight months after the wedding, he was
struck on the head by a heavy cast iron sausage
(08:32):
grinder that fell off of a kitchen shelf, and it
was a fatal injury that, according to Hartzel's article, was
quote augmented by the crock of hot brine that quote
fell on him simultaneously. Sounds kind of suspicious, doesn't it. Yeah,
you would think so. And in fact, Bell's fourteen year
old foster daughter was said to have told people after
(08:55):
that that she had seen mama smack him on the
head with a cleaver, but later she did eyed this
when she was questioned by the corner. The corner and
other people actually were suspicious of this, but ultimately there
was no evidence, so they had to buy Bell's story
and she collected another in insurance money. But after Peter
Gannis's death, Bell started taking out matrimonial ads in Scandinavian newspapers.
(09:18):
She's looking for love. She describes herself as good looking
quote stout quote womanly an example of how one of
these ads might read. Quote, comely widow who owns a
large farm in one of the finest districts of Laporte County, Indiana,
desires to make the acquaintance of a gentleman equally well
provided with view of joining fortunes. No replies by letter
(09:41):
considered unless senders willing to follow answer with personal visit.
And probably my favorite part of these ads, they'd end
with lines like triflers need not apply. So she wanted
serious inquiries. She was not messing around now, and she
didn't just want to chat either. No scrubs exactly got
several responses to these ads, and basically this is how
(10:03):
it worked. She started exchanging letters with a guy and
they would get to know each other. She'd tell him
how great her set up at the farm was, tell him,
you know, express some sort of affection or something, tell
him that she loved him, even make veiled sexual overtures.
But at the same time, she made it clear that
she expected these guys to bring something to the relationship,
(10:25):
namely cash. So after corresponding with the guy for a while,
she'd invite him to report, but encourage him to sell
all of his belongings and property beforehand, and bring the
cash along with him. Like I got the farm, we
just need the money, come and bring it. Yeah, But
here's the catch. She didn't want any of these guys
to tell anyone close to them what they were doing.
(10:46):
So guys would show up, run a few errands with her.
Usually one of those errands would be to the bank,
go to her house, and then they'd pretty much never
be seen again. And this happened with several men, including
a guy named John Moe another named ole A Budsburg.
Both were from Wisconsin. And if anybody at all came
looking for these guys after the fact, Bell would just
(11:07):
say that she hadn't seen him, or oh, yeah, they
were here, but they left. And that's what she'd tell
her suspicious neighbors too, because they would see these men
go in and then never come out again, and she
just say they had left at night. They were gone already.
And in nineteen o six something happened that really people
couldn't ignore quite as much. Bell's foster daughter, Jenny, disappeared,
(11:31):
but Belle had an excuse there too. She told people
that Jenny had gone off to college in California, making
something of herself. It seemed yeah, and it seemed the
daughter being missing was barely a hiccup for her. She
just kept up the letter writing, and Bell's Melman even
said that she wrote around ten letters a day and
got about the same number back in the mail, and
on days that she didn't get any letters, she would
(11:52):
be kind of upset, kind of cranky. So this all
went smoothly for her, relatively so, until she struck up
a correspondence with South Dakota farmer Andrew Hilgaline. Presumably she
used the same strategy on him that she did with others.
His brother later found some of their letters, and several
of these have actually been preserved so people have translated them.
They were written in Norwegian and and saw the kind
(12:14):
of methods that she used and talking to them exactly so.
Throughout the letters, Bell would constantly remind him about bringing
the money to report and give him all kinds of
advice about how to bring it to She would say,
you know, tell him the denomination of the bills to
bring and tell him to sow it inside is underwear,
and that he again that he shouldn't tell anybody about it,
(12:36):
and just kept sort of repeating these things throughout and
Catherine Ramsland, who is a forensic psychologist who has written
about the Gunness case, says Bell's technique of regularly harping
on the money thing is actually a technique called seating
that's used in hypnosis. So she would try to implant
this idea of bringing her money into his unconscious mind
with constant repetition. It seems a little suspicious. I mean,
(13:00):
I guess they were distracted almost by the sentiments that
were also in her letter, because she would appeal to
the needs of the immigrant man too. He was probably
lonely and homesick in South Dakota, and her talk of
Norway probably comforted him. They weren't they weren't all just
about the money, So they could relate, They could relate
(13:21):
to each other. It seemed like a promising relationship. So
after a year and a half of writing these letters
back and forth, Andrew came to report in early nineteen
o eight and then vanished, just like all of the
other guys. But what Bell wasn't banking on was his
brother Osle, who knew where Andrew had gone. So Andrew
must have broken one of those rules of Bells don't
(13:43):
tell anyone. Yeah, he broke that rule. I think he
didn't actually follow instructions either as far as selling his
farm and you know, sewing the bills and his underwear
and all those things. He did have a lot of
money sent to the bank in report, but he didn't
necessarily follow all the rules. But Osley was concerned and
he started writing to Bell. He really thought that his
brother was going to return in a week or so,
(14:04):
and so when he didn't, he he reached out, and
he didn't believe Bell's explanations that Andrew had simply gone away.
Around the same time, Bell had some other trouble. She
fired her hired hand Ray lamp he here, and he
(14:25):
was said to be in love with her. He was
probably jealous of all the guys coming around, who knows,
but he started making public scenes after he was let go,
and Bell tried to take legal action against him and
have him declared insane. So maybe it was a combination
of pressure from this as well as some increasing questions
from these relatives of the men who she had written to,
(14:45):
as well as questions from her neighbors. But on April night,
Bell kept her kids home from school and she went
into town and saw her lawyer and wrote her will,
and she was also seen dying a lot of kerosene,
so went into town and did some did some errands.
Of course, from the intro we know what happened next.
(15:06):
Her house burned down, the bodies were found, and ultimately
they found between twelve and fourteen bodies, including the body
of the foster daughter Jenny, who hadn't gone off to college,
and a couple of other unidentified children. And there were
several theories as to what happened with the fire. Immediately after,
a lot of people thought that Belle had committed suicide
(15:29):
because she was afraid that all of her crimes were
about to come to light that they had been discovered.
Lamp Fear, however, was the one that the police immediately arrested.
Belle had told her lawyer the day before that she
was afraid of him, and he was charged with four
counts of murder and with arson, so it seemed initially
(15:50):
that that maybe he was to blame. It was found later, though,
that the four people in the cellar had died by
means other than the fire. They had probably been poisoned
by Stryck. Nine They found traces of strictnin and their
bodies actually, but the bodies had been mishandled so that
they couldn't prove it, so at lamp Here's trial in
May eight he was only convicted of arson. He died
(16:11):
less than two years later in prison, and on his
deathbed he confessed to setting the house on fire and
to helping Bell escape. He said the headless body belonged
to a woman from Chicago whom Bell had just hired
as a housekeeper. She killed the housekeeper and the three
children and planted the bodies to make it look like
an accident. He also admitted to helping Bell bury the
(16:31):
other victims, although he said that he wasn't involved in
actually murdering them. But he did describe how Bell did
murder her victims. It turns out that she poisoned a
lot of them. Some of them she left their bodies intact,
some of them she butchered. Some of the bodies she
actually dropped into a vat of hot water and then
(16:51):
covered with quicklime, which is a substance that kind of
burns like acid. So I'm assuming she did this to
disguise the bodies. So who knows how many of these
details are actually accurate, but this is probably the closest
scenario to most to what most people think happened as
far as Bell. What happened to Bell after the fire,
(17:12):
though nobody knows for certain what happened to her after
that or to her money. Historians estimate that she may
have extorted up to ninety dollars from her suitors, but
the day after the fire there was only seven hundred
in her Laport bank account. So we mentioned in the
beginning that Bell's story did get a lot of attention
at the time, and since then she's become sort of
a spooky local legend in that part of Indiana. Neighbors,
(17:36):
for instance, claimed to have seen her in the weeks
after the fire, and there have been numerous Bell sidings
since then, but the most notable one happened in Los Angeles.
In one so a considerable amount of time after after
her disappearance, a woman named Esther Carlson was accused of
poisoning a man she worked for named August Lindstrom for
(17:57):
two thousand dollars that he had put in a joint
bank account, and Carlson died before this went to trial,
but a couple of people familiar with Bell. They were
Laport residents who were in Los Angeles at the time.
Claimed a newspaper photo of Carlson matched that of Bell,
and others also confirmed the connection, but there wasn't any
(18:18):
definitive proof that this was the same woman. Still up
to her old murdering ways all the way in l A. Yeah, So,
I mean the question is still out there. Did she
die in the fire or not? It's really tough to say.
I mean, people have wondered about this for years. Authorities
eventually found a dental bridge with one tooth in it
in the ruins of the fire that a dentist positively
(18:38):
identified as Bell's, but historians were hardly convinced by this
and how convened. I mean, if you were going to
fake your death and a fire, leave behind your dental bridge. Yeah.
Another point that I found in some of my research was, Okay,
Bell Gunness is obviously a psychopath. She's killed all of
these people, So is she really going to care to
pull out one tooth to leave in the stental bridge?
(19:01):
Probably not when you look at it that way. People
have not let this go though. In two thousand seven
late two thousand seven, Suzanne Mackay a great granddaughter of
Bell Gunness's sister and one of the last living relatives
of the infamous serial killer, gave a team of US
researchers permission to exhume the headless body that was found
in the cellar of the torched farmhouse, and they were
(19:22):
going to compare the DNA from the remains there to
saliva samples from bell sealed letters. So as far as
we know, the tests were inconclusive with that, and I
think that they got a sample from a DNA sample
from the family member also, and we're trying to test
that as well. And I looked for more recent updates
on that, and I couldn't find anything more recent in
(19:44):
the last couple of years, So I don't know for
sure if they were able to find a match or not.
I think what they're really looking for is to find
the opposite of that, is to find that there's not
a match, because most people believe that it was that
Bill's missing, and then you know, the mystery will still stand.
Where did she go? Do you have? Jenks to hey
(20:11):
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(20:33):
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(20:55):
listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. Today, we are going back to our previous
episode on Bell Gunness, which is part murder story and
part history mystery. Her crimes were discovered after a fire
in eight, but whether she perished in that fire is
still a little unclear. This episode is from previous hosts
Sarah and Debilina, and it came out September. Welcome to
(00:28):
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Deblina
Chocolate Boarding and I'm fair Do And this topic. The
topic of this episode was a suggestion from listener Jesse,
and I feel like I should say that because it's
(00:49):
such a gruesome story. I don't want Sarah to be
mad at me for picking it. It does have a
decapitated body. Yeah, that's true. Are you putting that in
the plus category? No, that's not why I selected it.
I selected it because it was a listener's suggestion, and
it is an interesting story. It's a fascinating mystery, and
you know how we love those. It starts, at least
(01:11):
for most of the world, this is when it started
with a fire that took place the morning of April
eight at a small farm just outside of Laporte, Indiana,
which was then a town of about ten thousand, about
sixty miles from Chicago, and the farm was owned by
a widow named Belle Gunness, and her home there was
completely destroyed by the fire. But it was after the
(01:34):
fire that the real mystery started. So four charred bodies
were found in the cellar, and three appeared to be
the bodies of Gunnis's children, Myrtle Sorenson, Lucy Sorenson, and
Philip Gunnis, who were eleven, nine and five years old, respectively.
The fourth body, though, was kind of a puzzle, and
(01:54):
like I said, that's where the mystery really started. Yeah, First,
people assumed that the body was Gonna says, makes sense, right,
It's a woman's body, and Gonnas live there, so you
imagine that she would be there with her kids. But
there were a couple of problems right off the bat.
People thought that the body seemed a little too small
to be bell. She was a woman of some stature.
(02:16):
Let's say she was about five eight and approximately two pounds,
and this body appeared to belong to someone who was
much shorter and lighter. It was also missing head, making
it even harder to confirm the identity. I should correct
my earlier statement. This is why I thought you might
have selected because of the head. I know you like
missing heads, but only with the Ned Kelly things. Okay, okay, well,
(02:38):
and Henry the Fourth too. Whoops, okay, never mind. But
what really made people suspicious about this this find was
the arrival of a man named Ostle hell Glen, who
came on the scene looking for his brother Andrew. And
he said that Andrew had been corresponding with Bell and
(02:58):
insisted that police search the property and a look for
this missing brother. What they found, though, was really disturbing,
Andrew's dismembered body, plus the body of a lot of
other people. So listener Jesse commented on what a media
storm the story would have created if it had happened today.
But it actually started a bit of a media frenzy
(03:19):
back then too, As more bodies were dug up and
it became more and more clear that Bell had been
a ruthless killer. Newspapers gave her catchy nicknames like the
Mistress of Murder Hill and Lady blue Beard. But who
was Bell Gunnis really and why and how did she
kill all of these people? And another question which is
(03:41):
probably one of the main questions that people want to know, now,
did she really die in that fire? So we're gonna
look at all of the stuff, but we're gonna start
with that first question. Who was Bell Gunnis? So we
don't know too much about Bell Gunnis's early life except
that she was born in a small village in Norway
on November eighteen fifty nine, and her name was originally
(04:02):
brin Hilled, Paul's daughter store Set, and her family was
very poor and several sources actually suggest that her father
may have been a Stonemason and that she probably had
to work as a farm hand at an early age
to help her family make ends meet. But what we
do know is that sometime in or shortly after eight
Brynhild immigrated to the United States in her early twenties,
(04:26):
specifically to Chicago, and changed her name to Bell. She
had a sister named Nelly Larson who had immigrated to
Chicago also, so she had a connection there. But she
again returned to pretty grueling work. Yeah, and again we
don't know too much about those first years in the
United States for Bell, but we do know that she
(04:46):
probably worked as a house servant, which would have been
pretty tough work, and she probably didn't like it very much,
because her sister was later quoted as saying, quote Bell
was crazy for money, and working as a house servant
would not have afforded her much of that. By about
eighteen eighty four, she married a man named Max Mad's Sorensen,
who was also a Norwegian immigrant, but that wouldn't have
(05:08):
really been her ticket to instant wealth either, though. He
was a department store detective and later worked for the
Chicago Railroad. In the eighteen nineties, they opened up a
confectioners shop in downtown Chicago, but that wasn't very successful.
It was, however insured. Oh indeed, the building actually burned
down around a year into their business venture, and after
(05:30):
that they were able to collect a little bit of
insurance money. Maybe it doesn't seem like such a big
deal on the surface, but this kicked off a pattern
for Bell that would probably raise a few red flags today.
In eight Sorensen's house also burned down and they collected
insurance money for that, and the couple's first two kids,
who were also insured, died in infancy, officially of acute colitis,
(05:54):
but now looking back, people say the symptoms are similar
to if they had been poisoned. Okay, So even if
you look at all of that is just really really
bad luck or really weird coincidence, what happens next has
to make you a little bit suspicious at least. So
mad Sorenson dies on July nine hundred, which just happens
(06:16):
to be the one day that to life insurance policies
from different mutual associations overlapped. Officially, the cause of death
was heart failure, but his symptoms actually indicated strychnine poisoning.
And the insurance pay out because of those two policies
was pretty huge eight thousand, five hundred dollars, and that
was quite a large sum for the time, and it
(06:37):
said that Bell tried to go collect it just a
day after the funeral, so she was certainly not playing
the part of the grieving widow. It was probably suspicious,
but there wasn't an autopsy. So Bell got the insurance
money and went on her way. She did. She used
the money actually to buy the farm on the outskirts
of Laport, and she moved there with three kids, Jenny,
(07:00):
Myrtle and Lucy. And just an aside here about the kids.
It's generally accepted that Jenny, whose full name was probably
Jenny Olsen, was a foster child, but some say that
none of Bell's children were her own. According to an
article by Ted Hartzel in American History, Bill's sister Nelly Larson,
once said that Bell never had any children of her own,
though she would at times have as many as twelve
(07:22):
children in her care. So just an interesting thing to
think about as we go on. I mean, maybe there
was some money associated with fostering children, you know, maybe
you've got some money from the government for that or something. Um.
You know, it's something that people don't focus on the
most when they're talking about Bell Gunness, but it's something
that stuck out to me definitely in her story. It's unusual.
(07:50):
So in Bell married again, and her second husband this
time was a a widower and a butcher by trade named
Peter Gunnis, who was also a native Norway. And Peter
Gunnis came to the marriage with two kids already. One
was an infant named Jenny, and she mysteriously died just
a week after the wedding when she was home alone
(08:11):
with Bell, and the other was a five year old girl.
And after that incident with the baby. She was removed
from her father in Bell's care and taken away by
her uncle to Wisconsin. Peter Gunnis didn't really last that
much longer. Only eight months after the wedding, he was
struck on the head by a heavy cast iron sausage
(08:32):
grinder that fell off of a kitchen shelf, and it
was a fatal injury that, according to Hartzel's article, was
quote augmented by the crock of hot brine that quote
fell on him simultaneously. Sounds kind of suspicious, doesn't it. Yeah,
you would think so. And in fact, Bell's fourteen year
old foster daughter was said to have told people after
(08:55):
that that she had seen mama smack him on the
head with a cleaver, but later she did eyed this
when she was questioned by the corner. The corner and
other people actually were suspicious of this, but ultimately there
was no evidence, so they had to buy Bell's story
and she collected another in insurance money. But after Peter
Gannis's death, Bell started taking out matrimonial ads in Scandinavian newspapers.
(09:18):
She's looking for love. She describes herself as good looking
quote stout quote womanly an example of how one of
these ads might read. Quote, comely widow who owns a
large farm in one of the finest districts of Laporte County, Indiana,
desires to make the acquaintance of a gentleman equally well
provided with view of joining fortunes. No replies by letter
(09:41):
considered unless senders willing to follow answer with personal visit.
And probably my favorite part of these ads, they'd end
with lines like triflers need not apply. So she wanted
serious inquiries. She was not messing around now, and she
didn't just want to chat either. No scrubs exactly got
several responses to these ads, and basically this is how
(10:03):
it worked. She started exchanging letters with a guy and
they would get to know each other. She'd tell him
how great her set up at the farm was, tell him,
you know, express some sort of affection or something, tell
him that she loved him, even make veiled sexual overtures.
But at the same time, she made it clear that
she expected these guys to bring something to the relationship,
(10:25):
namely cash. So after corresponding with the guy for a while,
she'd invite him to report, but encourage him to sell
all of his belongings and property beforehand, and bring the
cash along with him. Like I got the farm, we
just need the money, come and bring it. Yeah, But
here's the catch. She didn't want any of these guys
to tell anyone close to them what they were doing.
(10:46):
So guys would show up, run a few errands with her.
Usually one of those errands would be to the bank,
go to her house, and then they'd pretty much never
be seen again. And this happened with several men, including
a guy named John Moe another named ole A Budsburg.
Both were from Wisconsin. And if anybody at all came
looking for these guys after the fact, Bell would just
(11:07):
say that she hadn't seen him, or oh, yeah, they
were here, but they left. And that's what she'd tell
her suspicious neighbors too, because they would see these men
go in and then never come out again, and she
just say they had left at night. They were gone already.
And in nineteen o six something happened that really people
couldn't ignore quite as much. Bell's foster daughter, Jenny, disappeared,
(11:31):
but Belle had an excuse there too. She told people
that Jenny had gone off to college in California, making
something of herself. It seemed yeah, and it seemed the
daughter being missing was barely a hiccup for her. She
just kept up the letter writing, and Bell's Melman even
said that she wrote around ten letters a day and
got about the same number back in the mail, and
on days that she didn't get any letters, she would
(11:52):
be kind of upset, kind of cranky. So this all
went smoothly for her, relatively so, until she struck up
a correspondence with South Dakota farmer Andrew Hilgaline. Presumably she
used the same strategy on him that she did with others.
His brother later found some of their letters, and several
of these have actually been preserved so people have translated them.
They were written in Norwegian and and saw the kind
(12:14):
of methods that she used and talking to them exactly so.
Throughout the letters, Bell would constantly remind him about bringing
the money to report and give him all kinds of
advice about how to bring it to She would say,
you know, tell him the denomination of the bills to
bring and tell him to sow it inside is underwear,
and that he again that he shouldn't tell anybody about it,
(12:36):
and just kept sort of repeating these things throughout and
Catherine Ramsland, who is a forensic psychologist who has written
about the Gunness case, says Bell's technique of regularly harping
on the money thing is actually a technique called seating
that's used in hypnosis. So she would try to implant
this idea of bringing her money into his unconscious mind
with constant repetition. It seems a little suspicious. I mean,
(13:00):
I guess they were distracted almost by the sentiments that
were also in her letter, because she would appeal to
the needs of the immigrant man too. He was probably
lonely and homesick in South Dakota, and her talk of
Norway probably comforted him. They weren't they weren't all just
about the money, So they could relate, They could relate
(13:21):
to each other. It seemed like a promising relationship. So
after a year and a half of writing these letters
back and forth, Andrew came to report in early nineteen
o eight and then vanished, just like all of the
other guys. But what Bell wasn't banking on was his
brother Osle, who knew where Andrew had gone. So Andrew
must have broken one of those rules of Bells don't
(13:43):
tell anyone. Yeah, he broke that rule. I think he
didn't actually follow instructions either as far as selling his
farm and you know, sewing the bills and his underwear
and all those things. He did have a lot of
money sent to the bank in report, but he didn't
necessarily follow all the rules. But Osley was concerned and
he started writing to Bell. He really thought that his
brother was going to return in a week or so,
(14:04):
and so when he didn't, he he reached out, and
he didn't believe Bell's explanations that Andrew had simply gone away.
Around the same time, Bell had some other trouble. She
fired her hired hand Ray lamp he here, and he
(14:25):
was said to be in love with her. He was
probably jealous of all the guys coming around, who knows,
but he started making public scenes after he was let go,
and Bell tried to take legal action against him and
have him declared insane. So maybe it was a combination
of pressure from this as well as some increasing questions
from these relatives of the men who she had written to,
(14:45):
as well as questions from her neighbors. But on April night,
Bell kept her kids home from school and she went
into town and saw her lawyer and wrote her will,
and she was also seen dying a lot of kerosene,
so went into town and did some did some errands.
Of course, from the intro we know what happened next.
(15:06):
Her house burned down, the bodies were found, and ultimately
they found between twelve and fourteen bodies, including the body
of the foster daughter Jenny, who hadn't gone off to college,
and a couple of other unidentified children. And there were
several theories as to what happened with the fire. Immediately after,
a lot of people thought that Belle had committed suicide
(15:29):
because she was afraid that all of her crimes were
about to come to light that they had been discovered.
Lamp Fear, however, was the one that the police immediately arrested.
Belle had told her lawyer the day before that she
was afraid of him, and he was charged with four
counts of murder and with arson, so it seemed initially
(15:50):
that that maybe he was to blame. It was found later, though,
that the four people in the cellar had died by
means other than the fire. They had probably been poisoned
by Stryck. Nine They found traces of strictnin and their
bodies actually, but the bodies had been mishandled so that
they couldn't prove it, so at lamp Here's trial in
May eight he was only convicted of arson. He died
(16:11):
less than two years later in prison, and on his
deathbed he confessed to setting the house on fire and
to helping Bell escape. He said the headless body belonged
to a woman from Chicago whom Bell had just hired
as a housekeeper. She killed the housekeeper and the three
children and planted the bodies to make it look like
an accident. He also admitted to helping Bell bury the
(16:31):
other victims, although he said that he wasn't involved in
actually murdering them. But he did describe how Bell did
murder her victims. It turns out that she poisoned a
lot of them. Some of them she left their bodies intact,
some of them she butchered. Some of the bodies she
actually dropped into a vat of hot water and then
(16:51):
covered with quicklime, which is a substance that kind of
burns like acid. So I'm assuming she did this to
disguise the bodies. So who knows how many of these
details are actually accurate, but this is probably the closest
scenario to most to what most people think happened as
far as Bell. What happened to Bell after the fire,
(17:12):
though nobody knows for certain what happened to her after
that or to her money. Historians estimate that she may
have extorted up to ninety dollars from her suitors, but
the day after the fire there was only seven hundred
in her Laport bank account. So we mentioned in the
beginning that Bell's story did get a lot of attention
at the time, and since then she's become sort of
a spooky local legend in that part of Indiana. Neighbors,
(17:36):
for instance, claimed to have seen her in the weeks
after the fire, and there have been numerous Bell sidings
since then, but the most notable one happened in Los Angeles.
In one so a considerable amount of time after after
her disappearance, a woman named Esther Carlson was accused of
poisoning a man she worked for named August Lindstrom for
(17:57):
two thousand dollars that he had put in a joint
bank account, and Carlson died before this went to trial,
but a couple of people familiar with Bell. They were
Laport residents who were in Los Angeles at the time.
Claimed a newspaper photo of Carlson matched that of Bell,
and others also confirmed the connection, but there wasn't any
(18:18):
definitive proof that this was the same woman. Still up
to her old murdering ways all the way in l A. Yeah, So,
I mean the question is still out there. Did she
die in the fire or not? It's really tough to say.
I mean, people have wondered about this for years. Authorities
eventually found a dental bridge with one tooth in it
in the ruins of the fire that a dentist positively
(18:38):
identified as Bell's, but historians were hardly convinced by this
and how convened. I mean, if you were going to
fake your death and a fire, leave behind your dental bridge. Yeah.
Another point that I found in some of my research was, Okay,
Bell Gunness is obviously a psychopath. She's killed all of
these people, So is she really going to care to
pull out one tooth to leave in the stental bridge?
(19:01):
Probably not when you look at it that way. People
have not let this go though. In two thousand seven
late two thousand seven, Suzanne Mackay a great granddaughter of
Bell Gunness's sister and one of the last living relatives
of the infamous serial killer, gave a team of US
researchers permission to exhume the headless body that was found
in the cellar of the torched farmhouse, and they were
(19:22):
going to compare the DNA from the remains there to
saliva samples from bell sealed letters. So as far as
we know, the tests were inconclusive with that, and I
think that they got a sample from a DNA sample
from the family member also, and we're trying to test
that as well. And I looked for more recent updates
on that, and I couldn't find anything more recent in
(19:44):
the last couple of years, So I don't know for
sure if they were able to find a match or not.
I think what they're really looking for is to find
the opposite of that, is to find that there's not
a match, because most people believe that it was that
Bill's missing, and then you know, the mystery will still stand.
Where did she go? Do you have? Jenks to hey
(20:11):
so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this
episode is out of the archive. If you heard an
email address or Facebook U R l or something similar
over the course of the show that could be obsolete now.
Our current email address is History podcast at i heart
radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address
no longer works, and you can find us all over
(20:33):
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(20:55):
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