Everything that is known about Belle Gunness is known because a farmer in South Dakota would not accept a letter. Andrew Helgelien had traveled to La Porte, Indiana in January 1908 with his savings, to marry a widow he had been corresponding with. Letters came back to his brother Asle in Andrew's name, and Asle did not believe them. He wrote to the woman. He came to Indiana. He stood in her burned-out farmyard in May 1908 and told the sheriff where to dig, and then he watched them dig, and the hog lot gave up his brother and a great many other people.
She was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth in Selbu, Norway, on November 11, 1859, the youngest of the eight children of Paul and Berit Størseth, and was confirmed in the Church of Norway in 1874. From fourteen she milked and herded cattle on neighboring farms to save for her passage, and in 1881 she landed at Castle Garden in New York, where the passenger list recorded her as Belle. She joined her sister Nellie in Chicago and worked as a domestic servant and then in a butcher shop, cutting up carcasses. In 1884 she married Mads Sorenson. Their candy store burned, and so did their house, and both fires paid out insurance. Two infants in her care died of what was recorded as inflammation of the bowel; she had insured both, and neighbors noticed she had never looked pregnant. Sorenson had two life insurance policies, one expiring and one taking effect on July 30, 1900, and he died that day of what was certified as a cerebral hemorrhage, after she gave him quinine powder for a headache. She collected on both, $5,000 in all, and the money bought a hog farm on McClung Road outside La Porte.
She married Peter Gunness on April 1, 1902. The following week, while he was out, his infant daughter died of unknown causes in Belle's care. Eight months later he was dead himself, his skull broken; by her account a meat grinder fell from a high shelf onto his head as he reached for something. The coroner suspected murder and convened an inquest jury, but nothing came of it, and she collected $3,000. Her foster daughter Jennie Olson told a classmate that her mother had killed Papa. In 1906 Jennie was said to have gone away to school in Los Angeles.
Then, from 1905, she began to advertise. The Norwegian-language matrimonial columns of the Chicago and Minneapolis papers carried notices addressed to comfortably situated Norwegian men: a widow with a fine farm wanted a partner, triflers need not apply, and any serious suitor should bring cash sufficient to clear the mortgage. The specificity of that last condition is the whole business model. Men came from Minnesota, South Dakota and Wisconsin. They were seen arriving in La Porte. They were seen out at the farm. They were not seen after that. Henry Gurholt, a farmhand from Wisconsin, wrote home that he liked the farm and asked for seed potatoes, and when his family inquired, she said he had gone off to Chicago with some horse traders; she kept his trunk and his fur coat. John Moe of Minnesota corresponded with her for months in 1906, came with a large sum of cash, and vanished, and a carpenter who worked for her noticed his trunk in the house among more than a dozen others. And because they had come a long way to marry a stranger, there was often nobody nearby to ask where they had gone.
In the early hours of April 28, 1908 the farmhouse burned to the ground. In the cellar were the bodies of her three children, Myrtle, Lucy and Philip, and the body of an adult woman with no head. The head was never found. The woman measured about five feet three and the coroner estimated her weight at some fifty pounds less than Belle Gunness, who was a large woman by every account of her. On May 9 Dr. Harry Long of La Porte, who had known her, said flatly that it was not her body: by his account it weighed about 160 pounds against her 325 or more, stood some five inches shorter, and had manicured fingernails. On the charred hand were rings, one of them the diamond Sorenson had given her on their wedding day, and her dentist identified a gold crown found in the ashes as his work. Investigators noted that a woman of her cunning could have put rings on a planted corpse.
Ray Lamphere, the handyman and former lover she had dismissed weeks earlier and then tried to have committed as insane, was charged with arson and murder. The jury convicted him of arson only. That verdict is a finding in itself: the same twelve men who accepted that he burned the house declined to accept that he had killed anybody in it, which amounts to a conclusion that Belle Gunness did not die there. He was convicted in November 1908, and when he was arrested he had been wearing John Moe's overcoat and Henry Gurholt's watch. He died in the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City in 1909. His statements did not agree with one another. In one he said she had lured men with her advertisements to rob and kill them, had asked him to burn the house with the children in it, and had planted another woman's body before fleeing; in another, which the Reverend Edwin Schell of the La Porte Methodist church wrote down, had him sign and locked in his safe, and which was published in January 1910, he gave a different account, and a woman he named, Elizabeth Smith, was arrested and denied it.
The digging went on through May. The hog lot produced bodies wrapped in sacks and covered in quicklime: Andrew Helgelien, whose brother recognized a sack holding two hands, two feet and a head, and Jennie Olson, identified firmly enough that the coroner issued a death certificate, who had never reached California, and others in pieces, each cut up the same way, the head off, the arms taken at the shoulders and the legs at the knees, the skulls battered. Parts of five bodies came up on the first day and six on the second. Eleven were recovered and identified in whole or part. The sheriff's own estimates ran past forty. Historians have generally settled on somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, and nobody has ever been able to do better than that, for a reason Andrea Simmons, the forensic anthropologist who reopened the case a century later, put bluntly: the police never even made a good attempt to count the bodies.
What happened around the excavation is part of why. The farm became an attraction within days. Thousands came out to look. Bones were put on display at the site. Artifacts from the murder farm were later taken on tour with the Ringling Brothers show. Souvenir hunters worked the same ground as the investigators, and reporters filled in whatever the record left empty, which was most of it. The largest crime scene in the state was picked over as entertainment before anyone had finished counting what was in it.
She was never charged with anything, because she was never found. And here the case becomes genuinely unusual: it is not merely unsolved, it has been actively tested and has refused to resolve.
In November 2007, Andrea Simmons, a La Porte native, an attorney of more than twenty years and a former Army JAG who had gone back to school to study human biology, led a University of Indianapolis team to the cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois, where the headless body had been buried beside Mads Sorenson. They worked with shovels, then with chopsticks and paintbrushes, and took seven hours to lift the skeleton. Her supervisor was Professor Stephen Nawrocki, a forensic anthropologist. They were the first people ever to reopen that grave and gather evidence from it.
The plan was elegant. Gunness had written letters to at least one suitor, and those envelopes survived in the hands of historians with the flaps still sealed, because the man who received them had opened them with a letter opener rather than tearing them. A century of dried saliva on a sealed flap was, in theory, her DNA. In practice it did not work; nobody could recover a usable profile, and Simmons spent part of the project looking for a laboratory that specialized in antique saliva.
So they went to the family instead. Suzanne McKay, the great-granddaughter of Gunness's sister Nellie Larson, had authorized the exhumation and permitted a bone to be taken from Larson's grave as well. In October 2008 a woman in Norway who had seen a documentary about the work came forward and gave a sample of her own. McKay, who had been researching her ancestor for over a decade, said before the results came in that if the bones turned out to be Belle's she would be so shocked she would not believe it.
The comparisons were inconclusive. The samples were too degraded. The headless woman in that grave has still never been positively identified, and the question the exhumation was meant to answer is exactly where it was in 1908.
There was a contingency, and it says something about how seriously the team took the alternative: if the remains proved not to be hers, they intended to travel to southern California and exhume Esther Carlson. Carlson had been arrested in Los Angeles in 1931 for poisoning a man for money, and died awaiting trial, and people who had known Belle Gunness in Indiana looked at a photograph of her and thought it was the same woman. That trip was never made, because the first test never produced an answer clear enough to justify it.
The family, for their part, told the cemetery caretaker that if the correct remains were ever identified they did not want them returned to the family plot.
So the file stands like this. A woman advertised for husbands, took their money, and buried at least eleven people and probably two or three times that in a hog lot in Indiana. She was never arrested, never charged and never tried. A headless body was buried under her name and has twice been the subject of doubt and once the subject of forensic science, and it remains unnamed. She has no confirmed date of death. By any strict standard this case is unresolved, and after 2008 it is probably unresolvable.