Belle Gunness: America’s Most Ruthless Female Killer

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Now, onto today’s video. On the morning of April 28, 1908, everything changed for the small city of La Porte, Indiana. During the night, a fire erupted at the Gunness homestead and burned the farmhouse to the ground, along with everyone inside. The charred remains of four people were recovered from the smoldering ruins: one woman and three young children. It was clear that Belle Gunness, the widow who owned the property, had perished trying to save her children. The whole town mourned the loss of a heroic woman who sacrificed her life for her family.

However, the police had a more sinister idea in mind. The woman’s body had been found headless, leading them to suspect foul play. They thought a former farmhand named Ray Lamphere might be worth looking into, fearing that he could have killed Belle Gunness and then staged the fire to hide his crime. Even so, in the minds of everyone, Belle Gunness was still the victim. But that image would soon be shattered as investigators continued digging around the property in search of a skull.

Almost a week after the blaze, diggers explored a small mound of fresh earth in the pigpens and uncovered a gunny sack buried under a layer of trash. Inside the bag were two hands, two feet, and one head—all belonging to the same man and all chopped up with an axe. A slow sensation of dread crept over the investigators as they realized that dozens of similar mounds were scattered across the pigpens. They started digging them all up, and each one yielded remains from another victim. The true extent of the horror that went on at that homestead was soon apparent. For years, Belle Gunness had been using her farmhouse as a location where she killed, dismembered, and buried her victims. Suddenly, nobody was singing her praises anymore as people saw Belle Gunness for what she truly was: one of the most vicious murderers in the history of the United States.

Belle Gunness was born Brynhild Paulsdatter on November 11, 1859, in the municipality of Selbu, Norway. The daughter of Paul and Berit Dorse, her father worked as a stonemason and expected all of his children to pitch in and help keep the family farm going. Therefore, Belle got used to hard work from an early age. When she got older, she was hired by a wealthy family to work on their farm. Fortunately for Belle, she was a physically strong woman, so she never shied away from manual labor.

Since her early life is poorly documented, it’s hard to pinpoint any reason for Belle Gunness’s murderous actions. Her childhood wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, but it wasn’t entirely tragic either. There is one unverified story that claims Belle got pregnant when she was 18 and attended a dance where she was attacked and kicked in the stomach. The attack caused her to have a miscarriage, and to make matters worse, her assailant got off scot-free because he came from a wealthy and influential family. Soon afterward, karma took matters into its own hands and gave the man stomach cancer. But the whole ordeal left Belle Gunness a different woman. Her friends and family said that outwardly her personality and behavior changed drastically, while inwardly it is possible that she started harboring a vicious resentment towards those around her.

A couple of years later, Belle got the opportunity to move to America. Her older sister Anna had left years earlier and married a man named John Larson in Chicago, starting a new life. In 1881, she asked Belle to join her, and the 22-year-old woman jumped at the opportunity. Later that same year, Belle Gunness left Norway and made her way to Chicago to live with her sister. There, she discovered a familiar setting full of the same traditions and culture she’d left behind, as Anna and her husband lived in a close-knit Scandinavian community.

A short while later, Belle met a man named Mads Sorensen, who worked as a night watchman at a department store. The two got married in 1884 and had a seemingly happy marriage for the next decade and a half. They had four or five children together, most likely foster kids adopted from poor families, but two of them did not live past infancy. Details on their demise are scarce, but it is believed that they both suffered from acute colitis, although the symptoms of the disease could have been caused by various poisons. As you’ll soon find out, they would not be the only children to perish under Belle’s care. Were they simply victims of an unfortunate illness, or were they the first to fall prey to Belle Gunness’s cold and callous murder spree? Either way, Gunness was able to outwardly project the image of a good wife and mother who was kind and doting on the people in her life. Nobody in the neighborhood suspected that something more sinister could have been lurking beneath.

There’s not much to say about Belle’s marriage to Sorensen, but one thing to mention is that the family seemed to be plagued by fires. The house burned down on one occasion, although nobody was injured. On another occasion, the candy store that the Sorensens owned and operated also burned down. Both times, the buildings were insured, and the insurance companies paid out, even though they suspected arson as a possibility. Some could say that this was simply a string of misfortunes, and the fires were not incredibly uncommon back then. Others would see it for what it probably was: a criminal perfecting her modus operandi.

The only real question here is whether or not Mads Sorensen was in on the scam. If he was truly aware of the kind of woman he had married, he probably should have been a bit more cautious about taking out large life insurance policies on himself, given how much his wife liked a big cash payout. In 1900, Mads Sorensen had a $2,000 policy that was about to expire, and he had already taken out a new one worth even more—$3,000. The new life insurance policy kicked in on the same day that the old one expired, July 30, 1900. That meant for one day and one day only, Mads Sorensen was covered by both policies worth a cool $5,000. And wouldn’t you know it, that’s exactly the day he fell mortally ill.

His cause of death is a bit uncertain—maybe a heart attack, maybe a cerebral hemorrhage. According to Gunness, her husband came home complaining of a terrible headache, so she gave him quinine powder, and he died a while later while she was in the kitchen making dinner. Some suspected that the pharmacist may have accidentally given Gunness morphine instead of quinine, but she had thrown away the paper, so nobody could check. Others, including Sorensen’s family, even accused Belle of poisoning her husband since the timing was just so convenient. Ultimately, the family doctor deemed the death natural causes, and Belle Gunness got her insurance company to pay out the big bucks for both life policies.

Flush with cash, the new widow decided it was time to seek greener pastures. Perhaps by now her neighbors had begun noticing all the tragedies that kept happening to Belle Gunness and how they were always followed by insurance payouts. So in 1901, she left Chicago with her three remaining daughters—Myrtle, Jenny, and Lucy—and purchased a farm on the outskirts of La Porte, Indiana. Shortly after the move, Belle met a butcher named Peter Gunness, himself a recent widower. The two got married in 1902, and almost immediately, tragedy struck when Peter’s infant daughter died under mysterious circumstances while in the care of her new stepmother. Peter Gunness did not have a lot of time to grieve because around a year and a half later, he met his own demise when his skull was caved in by something heavy.

Jenny walked into the kitchen to find Peter Gunness slumped on the floor, bleeding from his head, while Belle was standing over him and crying. The story was that a sausage grinder fell from a high shelf and landed on his head. Even though officials found the story a little strange, they ultimately ruled Peter Gunness’s death to be an accident. The death was far more gruesome and violent than the others, so Belle Gunness decided to mix up her killing methods to make it less obvious. Or there was a small chance that this was a genuine accident; it’s still probably the former, especially since Peter’s death came with another profitable insurance policy payout for his family.

Even if she fooled the authorities, clearly not everyone in her life believed Belle Gunness. Her late husband had an older daughter named Swan Hild, and Peter’s brother decided that she would be better off living with him than with Belle, so he took her to Wisconsin. Thus, she became the only child in Belle Gunness’s care to survive her wicked stepmother, as far as we can tell. The next one to go was Jenny Olson, Belle’s foster child. Jenny started spreading rumors around school that her mama killed her papa, so she had to go. Around 1906, she simply disappeared, and everyone believed Belle when she told them that Jenny went to California to study at a Lutheran college. They wouldn’t see the girl again until the police started digging up the yard of the Gunness farm looking for bodies.

Around 1905, Belle Gunness decided that she had been widowed enough and that it was time to look for another husband victim. Her ideal suitor was a middle-aged Norwegian man of some means who wasn’t that close to his family, so they wouldn’t come calling when he inevitably went missing. Such prospects were a bit thin on the ground in La Porte, Indiana, so Belle decided to expand her search by placing ads in the personal section of several Norwegian-language newspapers. Her enticing announcement read: “Personal: Comely widow who owns a large farm in one of the finest districts in La Porte County, Indiana, desires to make the acquaintance of a gentleman equally well provided with a view of joining fortunes. No replies by the considering lsender; willing to follow. Triflers need not apply.”

While we do not know the identities of all her suitors, we do know that over the next three years, Belle Gunness engaged in a vicious killing spree that included at least 10 victims and perhaps as many as 40, according to some estimates. One of them was Henry Gerhald, a farmhand from Wisconsin. He answered Belle’s personal ad and visited her farm in La Porte, Indiana. He liked what he saw, so he wrote to his family back in Wisconsin, telling them that he was well and that they should send him sweet potatoes. Afterward, Gerhold never contacted them again, and when his family wrote to Belle asking for his whereabouts, she simply told them that he had gone off with horse traders to Chicago.

Another example was John Moe from Minnesota, who went missing in 1906. Sometimes, some of these men didn’t bring cash with them and instead wired the money to the bank in La Porte. In these cases, Gunness had to sweet-talk them a bit longer until they felt comfortable enough to withdraw the money from the bank. Once the cash was in Belle’s hands, the men were as good as dead. Poison was Gunness’s preferred method of disposal. Afterwards, she would chop up the body, put the torso in one sack, and the hands, legs, and head in another, and bury them on the property. Soon enough, Gunness had amassed a nice little nest egg. Each prospective suitor brought at least a thousand dollars with him, and some brought double or triple that.

By 1907, she slowed down with personal ads and instead hired a local carpenter named Ray Lamphere as her new farmhand, and they soon became lovers. However, the two of them clearly disagreed over the nature of their relationship. Lamphere was broke and had no prospects, so he was hoping that he would eventually marry Gunness and become a partner in the farm. Belle, however, had no use for a man with no money; for her, Lamphere was just a distraction. By the end of the year, she had ended things with him, kicked him off the farm, and resumed her personal ads.

Allegedly, Lamphere began harassing Gunness and making threats that he would burn her house down. This is what Belle told her neighbors, and she complained to the sheriff, even having Lamphere arrested for trespassing. But was this a legitimate danger posed by a scorned lover, or was it the plan of a devious and clever mind to use him as a scapegoat? Could it be that Gunness’s entire relationship with Lamphere was to facilitate her disappearance and to turn him into the perfect patsy?

By early 1908, Belle found another suitor and was telling everyone that he might finally be the one. He was a burly wheat farmer from South Dakota named Andrew Helgelin, and it took dozens of letters to finally persuade him to visit her in Indiana. Once he arrived in La Porte, Belle turned on the charm. Before long, Andrew was withdrawing money from the bank so the two of them could start a new life together. A few days later, he was gone, and Belle was once again playing the part of the jilted lover who just doesn’t have any luck with men.

This time, though, things went a bit differently because Andrew Helgelin had a brother named Asle, who was a lot more persistent than the other relatives Gunness had dealt with. Asle didn’t even know where his brother had gone, but he found a stack of letters between Andrew and Belle that kept mentioning how Andrew should take all of his money out of the bank and how he should sell everything and leave Dakota without telling anyone what he was doing. He immediately feared that his brother had been conned.

To be honest, the truly surprising part was that none of the other men who fell victim to Gunness found it suspicious at all. Like the other relatives of the missing men, Asle Helgelin wrote to Belle and inquired about his brother. She gave him the standard response that Andrew went to Chicago, but this wasn’t good enough for Asle. So he packed up his bags and headed to Indiana.

When Asle arrived, Belle Gunness had either no idea he was coming or just had a feeling that La Porte was getting too hot for her. On April 27, 1908, she visited a lawyer and made a will, once again reiterating that she feared for her life due to Ray Lamphere. That night, her house burned down, seemingly killing Belle Gunness and her three children. To nobody’s surprise, Ray Lamphere was arrested the following day, but it did not take long for doubts over his guilt to arise.

Everybody in town had heard about the gruesome circumstances of the fire and that the burned woman was missing her head. At first glance, that sounded like the kind of thing a man like Lamphere would do out of rage. But rumors soon started spreading that the body was way too small to belong to the burly 200-pound Belle Gunness. As deputies searched through the rubble looking for the missing head, they found odd things: collections of men’s clothes, men’s watches, men’s trunks—all the sorts of things that a man would travel with, but stuff that you would expect them to take with them when they cleared out. The fact that they left everything behind strongly suggested that none of them ever departed the Gunness farm at all.

A few days after the fire, Asle Helgelin arrived in La Porte and was given permission by the sheriff to check the farm for any clues to his brother’s whereabouts. That same day, farmhands began to dig one of the soft mounds scattered all over the property. They found a gunny sack with the limbs and head of a man. Asle took one good look and recognized the victim immediately; the head belonged to his brother Andrew.

Clearly, something very bad had happened at the Gunness farm, but the exact circumstances were still a bit of a mystery. Did Gunness kill and dismember Helgelin? Did Lamphere? Did they do it together? Maybe they were some kind of killer couple who lured and murdered unsuspecting suitors for their money. The answer came a few hours later when four bodies were excavated that same day. One of them was positively identified as Jenny Olson, a foster child who supposedly traveled to California back in 1906. Obviously, Lamphere couldn’t have had anything to do with it since it happened before he even stepped foot on the farm.

Steadily, everyone began to realize the kind of monster that Belle Gunness truly was. The next day, the nightmare got much worse as another six bodies were dug up. All of them had been chopped up in the same way, and some contained traces of strychnine, while others showed signs of large gashes and blunt trauma to the head. It appears that Gunness sometimes preferred to get her hands dirty instead of letting the poison do all the work.

After 11 bodies were found in just two days, the local police stopped keeping track of how many new victims they uncovered following the fire. The sheriff hoped to avoid too much publicity surrounding the case, but once the true extent of the crimes became known, there was no way to prevent the murders from turning into front-page news across the country. The media jumped at the opportunity; the Gunness property was called a “death garden” or a “horror farm,” while Belle herself earned monikers such as “Indiana Ogress” and “the Mistress of the Castle of Death.” Overnight, La Porte, Indiana, became “Murdertown, USA,” and thousands of tourists flocked to the city each day to watch the digging take place at the most infamous farm in America. All the inns, motels, and hotels were booked, and enterprising vendors sold everything from gruesome photographs to skull replicas and souvenirs that supposedly came from the farm, even some kind of meat concoction dubbed “Gunness