Brynhild Paulsdatter Storset was born in Selbu, Norway, on November 11, 1859, and emigrated to Chicago in 1881, where she became Belle. Her first husband, Mads Sorenson, died in 1900 on the single day two of his life insurance policies overlapped, and the payout bought a farm outside La Porte, Indiana. Her second husband, Peter Gunness, died there in 1902 when, by her account, a sausage grinder fell from a shelf onto his head. The coroner recorded an accident. Her foster daughter Jennie, who told a classmate that her mother had killed Papa, was said in 1906 to have gone away to college in California.
She then began advertising in the Norwegian-language matrimonial columns of Chicago and Minneapolis papers, addressing herself to comfortably off Norwegian men and asking that triflers not reply and that any suitor bring cash to clear the mortgage. Men came from Minnesota, South Dakota, Wisconsin. They were seen in La Porte, they were seen at the farm, and they were not seen again. Andrew Helgelien arrived from South Dakota in January 1908 with his savings, and his brother Asle would not let it go.
In the early hours of April 28, 1908, the farmhouse burned to the ground. In the cellar lay the bodies of her three children and a headless adult woman. The woman was about five feet three and weighed, by the coroner's estimate, some fifty pounds less than Belle Gunness, and no head was ever found. Ray Lamphere, the handyman and former lover she had recently dismissed and accused of insanity, was charged with arson and murder. The jury convicted him of arson only, which amounted to a finding that Belle Gunness had not died in the fire. He died in prison in 1909, having reportedly told a chaplain that she had planned it and got away.
Asle Helgelien came to look for his brother and made them dig. Through May 1908 the hog lot gave up body after body, quicklimed and in sacks, including Andrew Helgelien and Jennie Olson, who had never gone to California. Eleven were recovered and identified in whole or part; the sheriff's estimates of the total ran past forty, and the ground was worked over by souvenir hunters as much as by investigators. Newspapers put the figure wherever they liked.
Sightings continued for decades. In 1931 a woman named Esther Carlson was arrested in Los Angeles for poisoning a man for money and died awaiting trial, and people who had known Gunness thought a photograph of her looked right. An exhumation of the headless body in 2007 produced no usable DNA identification. The case is unresolved by any strict standard and probably now unresolvable.