Belle Gunness was never charged with anything. In the early hours of April 28, 1908, her farmhouse on McClung Road outside La Porte burned to the ground. In the cellar lay the bodies of three children and of an adult woman without a head. A week later, digging in the farmyard turned up the remains of men who had answered her notices for a husband, and of her foster daughter, who was supposed to be away at school. Within weeks the La Porte County sheriff, coroner and prosecutor were treating the widow as the person who had killed them.
By then she was presumed dead. The coroner ruled that the headless woman was Belle Gunness, relying on a set of false teeth and rings found in the ashes. Many people in La Porte never believed it. Her former hired man, Ray Lamphere, was tried in November 1908 for murdering her and her children by setting the fire; the jury convicted him of arson only. In 2007 a university team exhumed the body buried under her name to compare its DNA with her own. The results were reported as inconclusive, and the question of whether she died that night, or set the fire and left, remains open.
Because she was never tried, no court ever found that she killed anyone. The deaths linked to her were attributed to her by the coroner, police and prosecutors of 1908, and by researchers since.
She was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Storset on November 11, 1859, in Selbu, in the Trondheim region of Norway. Store norske leksikon, the Norwegian national encyclopedia, records that she grew up poor on a smallholding and worked from childhood as a shepherd and a maid. She emigrated to the United States in 1881 and joined a sister in Chicago. The sister, Nellie Larson, lived in Chicago for many years and later moved to California, and it was Nellie's great-granddaughter who gave permission for the 2007 exhumation.
In Chicago the young woman took the name Belle. In 1884 she married Mads Sorenson, a fellow Norwegian. According to a 2013 account by Judge R. Marc Kantrowitz, based on Janet Langlois's history of the case, the couple opened a confectionery in 1886 that burned within a year; the insurance money bought a house, which also burned, and a further payment bought another. The Associated Press, summarizing the case in 2007, put these fires in Chicago's Austin neighborhood and said her alleged crimes began there, with fires that produced insurance payments.
Children came into the household, and two of them died. Kantrowitz names them as Caroline and Axel and says both showed symptoms like colitis, which later accounts read as signs of poisoning, and that both were insured. In May 1908, after the La Porte discoveries, Chicago officials searched their records and reported that a daughter, Carolina Sorenson, had died on August 24, 1896, and that an infant had died on April 10, 1896. Whether these were her own children is itself disputed. Kantrowitz calls them the couple's children. The writer Ted Hartzell, in American History magazine in 2008, wrote that birth records and her sister's statements suggest she had no children of her own, although at times she cared for as many as 12. Andrea Simmons, the forensic researcher who reopened the case a century later, said in 2008: "We don't believe Belle Gunness ever gave birth to her own kids."
Mads Sorenson died on July 30, 1900. It was, as several accounts note, the only day on which two of his life insurance policies were both in force. The family doctor attributed the death to heart failure, and no autopsy was done. La Porte County historian Bruce Johnson has said that she told people she had given her husband a powder from the pharmacist when he came home ill. Poisoning was suspected, but she was never charged. She collected 8,500 dollars, according to both Hartzell and Kantrowitz, and in 1901 she used the money to buy a farm near La Porte, Indiana, about 60 miles east of Chicago. She moved there with Myrtle and Lucy, the two surviving Sorenson girls, and a foster daughter, Jennie Olson.
The farm lay on the edge of La Porte, then a town of about 10,000. In 1902 she married Peter Gunness, a Norwegian widower she had known in Chicago, where he had boarded with her while working in a butcher shop, according to his brother Gus. Peter brought two young daughters from his first marriage. The younger, an infant, died while in Belle's care, within a week of the wedding by Hartzell's account; Gus Gunness, interviewed in Minneapolis in May 1908, placed the death some months after the marriage. Either way, there was no official investigation. Peter's brother later took the surviving girl, five-year-old Swanhild, to Wisconsin.
About eight months after the wedding Peter Gunness was dead. Belle said a sausage grinder had fallen from a shelf behind the stove and struck him on the head. Gus Gunness told reporters in 1908 that he arrived before the funeral and saw a small wound on his brother's head, that the coroner weighed the machine and measured the fall and concluded the blow could have killed him, and that although neighbors talked, nothing came of it. Hartzell writes that she was cleared at the coroner's inquest and collected 3,500 dollars in insurance. Gus stayed several days, and she asked him more than once to stay on and run the farm. He declined. "I did not like her looks," he said. He also said she was fond of children and treated Swanhild and her own children well.
A son, Philip, was part of the household after Peter's death. Kantrowitz writes that she gave birth to him shortly after Peter died; Simmons and Hartzell doubt that she bore any children. When the farmhouse burned in 1908, Philip was 5, Lucy 9 and Myrtle 11.
After Peter's death she ran the farm with hired help and began placing notices for a husband. Indiana Public Media's Moment of Indiana History series says she advertised in Chicago dailies and in Norwegian-language papers; Hartzell describes the papers as Scandinavian-American. In 1908 the Morning Oregonian reprinted one notice attributed to her: a comely widow who owned a large farm in La Porte County, Indiana, wished to make the acquaintance of a gentleman equally well provided, and would answer no letter without a personal visit.
The letters she then wrote set terms. Bruce Johnson told Indiana Public Media in 2026 that the conditions were to sell everything, bring only cash and keep the arrangement secret. A letter to Carl Peterson of Waupaca, Wisconsin, published after the fire, described the farm, her three children and her late husband, and asked for a deposit of 1,000 dollars in cash or security before any meeting. Christian Hansen, a 36-year-old Norwegian working at a packing plant in Armourdale, Kansas, received a letter dated March 1, 1908, offering marriage if he brought 1,000 dollars and describing a 72-acre farm. It reached him late, after sitting in the local post office. "My people don't do the way she does," he told reporters.
Hartzell, who obtained 11 of her original Norwegian letters to Andrew Helgelien and two to his brother, describes them as plain and badly spelled. The best-known line attributed to her, "My heart beats with wild rapture for you," does not appear in any genuine letter; Lillian de la Torre's 1955 book on the case says reporters made it up. The real letters, dated from August 8, 1906, to December 9, 1907, urged Helgelien to sell his property, turn the money into bills, sew them into his underclothes and come to La Porte without telling anyone.
The men who came were seen at the farm and then not seen again. In 1904, Hartzell writes, she told a neighbor that one suitor had left in the middle of plowing season to visit the St. Louis World's Fair. The men tended to leave trunks, watches and clothes behind. Her mail carrier said she wrote and received eight to 10 letters a day.
Only some of the dead were ever named. The attribution of their deaths to Gunness comes from the coroner, sheriff and prosecutor in 1908 and from later investigators, not from any court.
Jennie Olson was Belle's foster daughter, raised by her from infancy. She was a teenager when she disappeared in September 1906. Belle told neighbors that Jennie had gone away to college, and later that she was on her honeymoon. A Lutheran school in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, where Belle said Jennie had enrolled, told reporters in 1908 that she had never been there. Her remains were found on the farm in May 1908, and relatives gave depositions to the coroner.
Ole B. Budsberg came from Iola, Wisconsin. He was identified on May 7, 1908, by his sons, Mat, 29, and Oscar, two years younger, who had traveled to La Porte. Like Andrew Helgelien, he was reported to have been drawn to the farm by a matrimonial notice. The coroner's inquest identified him by name. Investigators in May 1908 believed he had been buried at the farm around May 1907.
Andrew Helgelien was 49, a bachelor homesteader from South Dakota; the 1908 press gave his home as Mansfield or Aberdeen. He had corresponded with Belle since the summer of 1906, and his brother later found 80 of her letters. In January 1908 he traveled to La Porte. Frank J. Pitner, cashier of the First National Bank of La Porte, said that Helgelien collected 2,690 dollars sent from his bank in South Dakota, and that Mrs. Gunness insisted on cash and would not take a cashier's check. Then Helgelien was gone. His brother Asle Helgelien told relatives in Norway that Andrew had been an unhappy man who had become content on his farm, and testified at the Lamphere trial that Andrew had been something of a mystic, drawn by the letters' talk of Norway. Hartzell also notes that Andrew had earlier convictions in Minnesota for robbing and burning a post office store.
Several other men were linked to the farm in 1908 but never identified among the remains. A watch found on the property matched a description in a letter about Henry Gurholt, a Wisconsin man, and the sheriff treated that as evidence he had been killed there. Sheriff Albert Smutzer also looked into William Riedinger, a farmer from Delafield, Wisconsin, who vanished after a visit from her. Friends of a man named Konitzer, who had arrived in America three months before he disappeared in January 1906, believed he was the man from Chicago whom Lamphere described as vanishing while a guest at the farm; she had said he went south for his health. Relatives of Gustave Thun, who left Washington with 1,000 dollars to marry a widow, wondered whether he had gone to La Porte. None of these men was confirmed as a victim.
Eight sets of remains were recorded by the coroner as unknown. In May 1908 autopsies on seven of them found that one was a woman, not a man as the diggers had assumed. She had been buried in the same hole as Jennie Olson and Ole Budsberg.
Ray Lamphere was 38 in 1908, a hired man who worked on the farm and, by most accounts, was Belle's lover. Kantrowitz says she hired him in 1906; Bruce Johnson put his time there as a hired hand at about six months. He became jealous of the men who came to visit, and he was dismissed. Prosecutors later alleged that his jealousy centered on Andrew Helgelien. Witnesses said in 1908 that Lamphere had boasted of once driving Helgelien out of the house at gunpoint, and John Rye said that on the day Helgelien was supposedly killed, he and Lamphere drove toward Michigan City and Lamphere got off across from the farm, saying there would be "something doing there" that night.
After his dismissal Belle turned on him in the courts. In the six weeks before the fire, Hartzell writes, she filed four legal actions against him. He was found guilty of trespass twice. She failed to get a peace bond against him, and she failed in an attempt to have him declared insane. Lamphere's own account, given to reporters after his arrest, was that she had urged him to insure his life in her favor and offered to pay the premiums if he married her, and that her hostility began when he refused.
She replaced him with another hired man, Joe Maxson.
On April 27, 1908, according to Hartzell, she kept the children home from school, went into town and made a will, and bought a large quantity of kerosene. Simmons put the purchase at five gallons. The South Bend Tribune reported after the fire that she had gone to her lawyer to draw up the will because she feared for her life. She told people, Simmons said, that her former farmhand was plotting to kill her.
Meanwhile in South Dakota, Asle Helgelien was not satisfied with her letters telling him his brother had simply left.
Before dawn on April 28, 1908, the farmhouse caught fire. Joe Maxson escaped from his room unhurt, and the house was destroyed. In the cellar, searchers found the bodies of Myrtle, Lucy and Philip and the body of an adult woman whose head was missing. It was never found.
Within a day, newspapers named Ray Lamphere as the suspect, and he was arrested. Prosecutor Ralph N. Smith said he would prove that Lamphere was seen near the house before the fire and running from it afterward, and that he set it for revenge.
The question of who the woman was began at once. The body was smaller than Belle Gunness, who was a large woman by every account; she was reported to be about 5 feet 8 and to weigh 200 pounds or more, and the coroner estimated the body's height at about 5 feet 3. Four physicians performed the autopsies. One of them, Dr. H. P. Long, a former coroner, said he was not satisfied that the body was hers. Another, Dr. J. H. William Meyer, said he had no doubt, and suggested that intense heat could explain the difference in size. Coroner Mack had made the first identification. Searchers found in the ashes the remains of a ring she was known to wear, the buckle of a money belt and a key that fit her safety deposit box. The autopsy noted three rings on the body, two of them with inscriptions whose meaning no one could explain. Reporters at the time described the dispute over the body as caught up in a factional fight between local officials.
Sheriff Smutzer hired Louis Schultz, a former miner, to sluice the ashes of the cellar for gold dental work. In mid-May a set of false teeth was recovered from the ruins, and the Gunness family dentist, Dr. I. P. Norton, identified them as hers. On that basis, and on the rings, the coroner ruled that the body was Belle Gunness. Simmons, reviewing the case a century later, said that without the head the coroner had been uncomfortable pronouncing her dead. Indiana Public Media's history series reports that the dental evidence was later judged to have been planted; that remains one view among several.
The children's deaths were examined too. In May 1908 the four physicians reported that the coroner's jury could not establish from their findings how the woman and the three children had died, and an open verdict was expected. In 1908 the coroner announced that Dr. Walter Haines of Rush Medical College in Chicago had found strychnine and arsenic in the stomachs of the adult woman and two of the children, in amounts that could have caused death. Lamphere's lawyer said the finding showed his client could have had nothing to do with their deaths.
Asle Helgelien reached La Porte in early May 1908. He pressed the workers clearing the ruins to dig beyond the house, and in the hog yard behind it they found soft depressions in the ground. In them were his brother's remains, dismembered and buried in a sack. Further digging found more.
Within days the farm had become an attraction. Sightseers came by foot, buggy, bicycle, excursion train and automobile, as many as 15,000 in a day, according to Bruce Johnson and the writer Jane Simon Ammeson. The remains were laid out in a red carriage shed on the property, where visitors could see them. At one point two men broke into the carriage house where nine bodies were being kept; a watchman caught one of them inside. Items from the farm were later taken on tour with the Ringling Brothers circus, the University of Indianapolis reported in 2008. Simmons said the excavation methods were primitive and that a pond on the property was never searched. "They never even made a good attempt to count the bodies," she said.
By mid-May newspapers reported that ten of 14 bodies were being held in La Porte morgues, and a La Porte County grand jury opened an inquiry into 14 deaths at the farm. The coroner's inquests named Andrew Helgelien and Ole Budsberg and listed eight sets of remains as unknown. Jennie Olson was identified among the dead. Store norske leksikon sums up the finds as the remains of about 10 men and two women, with fragments of perhaps 30 to 40 people; Hartzell writes that most researchers estimate 10 to 14 victims and that the figure of more than 40 belongs to popular lore. Bruce Johnson's own estimate, given in 2026, is at least 21, and Simmons said in 2008 that her research in court records, museum files and contemporary newspapers pointed to about 25. The Chicago Tribune, as summarized by the ABA Journal in 2008, put the number at as many as 30 men, women and children.
Bruce Johnson, examining the record, has said the men were probably killed in the house and their remains buried on the farm. Dr. Haines reported strychnine and arsenic in fatal doses in Andrew Helgelien's stomach.
Searches of the house ruins turned up cutting tools, a book on hypnosis and pages on anatomy, Hartzell writes. The press called her the Lady Bluebeard and the mistress of Murder Hill. Elsewhere, people who had dealt with her came forward. In Chicago, police planned to dig at her former home, and the Cook County coroner began reviewing the death of Mads Sorenson. In Syracuse, New York, a widow was arrested on suspicion of being Belle Gunness and quickly proved who she was. Women and men across the country reported seeing her. Ray Lamphere's pastor, the Reverend E. A. Schell of the Methodist Episcopal church in La Porte, told reporters in Baltimore in May 1908 that Lamphere had made a statement to him about events a month or more before the fire, that it did not include an admission of setting the fire, and that he had no doubt Mrs. Gunness was alive. Beyond that, he said, his lips were sealed.
Lamphere was indicted for the murder of Belle Gunness and her three children by setting the fire. Prosecutor Smith said he had letters suggesting Lamphere had threatened to expose Mrs. Gunness unless she paid him. Lamphere, held in the county jail, denied setting the fire and said he expected to be acquitted. "Whatever I may have been guilty of, I did not do that," he said.
The trial opened in La Porte on November 9, 1908, before Judge John Richter, in a crowded courtroom. Lamphere's lawyer was William H. Worden. Choosing a jury was hard. In the first two hours, six men from the regular panel were excused because they believed Mrs. Gunness was still alive. When Worden objected to questions about whether prospective jurors thought she was alive or dead, Smith answered that the state's first task was to prove that someone was dead, and the judge let the questions stand. Joe Maxson, who had helped dig one of the holes where bodies were found, was quoted as saying that 95 percent of the people of La Porte County believed she was still alive. The lawyers talked openly of moving the trial out of the county.
The trial became a national story. Asle Helgelien testified about his brother. A translator, Mrs. Ray Turner, read Belle's Norwegian letters into English for the jury and described them as faulty, the work of an uneducated writer. The evidence on whether she was dead was in conflict throughout.
The jury began deliberating at 5:30 on a Wednesday evening and returned its verdict on the evening of Thursday, November 26, 1908, after more than 24 hours. The foreman announced that the jury found Lamphere guilty of arson. He was not convicted of murder; later accounts, including Hartzell's and Kantrowitz's, describe him as acquitted of the murders. Hartzell writes that the jury acquitted him of murder on the reasoning that the four people in the cellar had died by means other than the fire.
Judge Richter sentenced him within minutes to an indeterminate term of two to 21 years in the state prison at Michigan City, fined him 5,000 dollars and disfranchised him for five years. Asked whether he had any reason to give why sentence should not be pronounced, Lamphere said, "I have none." He told reporters he had no complaint about the verdict, maintained his innocence, and said he was confident the adult body in the ruins was Mrs. Gunness. He was taken to Michigan City the same day.
The jurors would not discuss their deliberations, but reporters learned that the verdict was a compromise: several jurors had held out for first-degree murder with a life sentence, none favored hanging, and but for two members the jury would have convicted him of murder or manslaughter. Worden called the verdict ridiculous, arguing that if Lamphere was guilty of anything, it was murder, and said he would move for a new trial and, if that failed, appeal to the Indiana Supreme Court. Reporters noted that the court's backlog could delay an appeal until after the two-year minimum had been served. The outcome of any such motion or appeal was not reported.
The verdict did not decide whether Belle Gunness was alive. Lamphere had been tried for her murder, and the court had told the jury it could convict on arson alone. The jury did so, and the record of the trial leaves both possibilities where it found them.
Ray Lamphere contracted tuberculosis in prison and died at Michigan City in 1909, about a year after his conviction. He told more than one story, and the stories did not agree.
In January 1910 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published what it called his confession, saying Reverend Schell could confirm it. In that version, as reported by the Cincinnati Enquirer, Lamphere chloroformed Mrs. Gunness and her children, Jennie Olson had not been killed by Mrs. Gunness, and the chloroform had been bought to kill three men. If true, the paper noted, the adult body in the ruins was hers, and the identity of the girl buried in the yard became a new mystery. Schell, by then in Iowa, refused to confirm or deny it. He said he had never repeated what Lamphere told him and, after taking advice from ministers and laymen, regarded it as sacred. Prosecutor Smith dismissed the published story as a cock-and-bull tale.
The warden at Michigan City, identified in the Enquirer as Reid, described a different account that Lamphere gave before he died, and that the warden said was not a confession of crime. In it Lamphere said Mrs. Gunness sent him away with a horse one night, that when he came back he heard her quarreling with Andrew Helgelien, and that when he asked about Helgelien the next day she said he had gone home to Norway. "No he did not," Lamphere said he replied.
Other accounts attributed to him point the other way. Kantrowitz, following Langlois, describes a deathbed statement in which Lamphere said that Belle was alive, that the headless body was a housekeeper, that she had killed her own children, arranged the bodies, left her false teeth in the cellar and set the fire, and that she left by a different route than he did. Indiana Public Media's history series reports that he described her methods, said he had helped bury bodies and said she had killed 42 men and gathered 250,000 dollars. None of these statements was tested in court, and they cannot all be true.
In 2015 the La Porte County Historical Society's president, Bruce Johnson, raised money for a new headstone on Lamphere's grave in a small cemetery off U.S. 20. Johnson told WSBT that he regarded Lamphere as the main scapegoat of the story. "She pinned this whole thing onto him," he said.
For decades after 1908, people in every state wrote to La Porte officials to say they had seen Belle Gunness, Hartzell writes. The strongest of these claims came in 1931. In Los Angeles that year, Esther Carlson, 61, and Anna Erickson, 42, were charged with poisoning August Lindstrom, 81, for the 2,000 dollars in a joint bank account. Carlson was said to resemble Belle Gunness, and two former La Porte residents who viewed her body identified her as Gunness. Carlson denied it, pointing to her work history in Hartford, Connecticut, from 1890 to 1908. She died of tuberculosis before trial. Erickson was acquitted.
The identification was never proven. Simmons said she was not convinced that Carlson and Gunness were the same woman. In 2020 the La Porte County Historical Society Museum released a special edition of its documentary The Gunness Mystery, written and narrated by Bruce Johnson, with a commentary by Knut Eric Jensen on Esther Carlson.
The body the coroner identified as Belle Gunness was shipped to Illinois with the children. Bob Cutler Jr. of the Cutler Funeral Home in La Porte, whose great-grandfather and great-great-uncle handled the shipment, brought the paperwork to the cemetery in 2007: four zinc-lined caskets sent to Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois, on June 18, 1908, three said to hold the children and one Belle Gunness. Forest Home is also where Mads Sorenson and two of the Sorenson children lie in a family lot.
Andrea Simmons grew up in La Porte. A former prosecutor and Army judge advocate, she went back to school at 47 to study human biology at the University of Indianapolis, and made the Gunness case the subject of her master's thesis. In the county museum's archive she found the coroner's inquisitions and witness depositions. "There's an awful lot of folklore and misinformation about this case," she said in 2007. Simmons also said that an unidentified head, believed by some to belong to the body, had been kept at the county museum for decades, "rolling around in a filing cabinet."
On November 5, 2007, with the permission of Belle's next of kin, a team of University of Indianapolis graduate students, directed by the board-certified forensic anthropologist Stephen Nawrocki, exhumed the unmarked grave at Forest Home. A backhoe removed the top soil, and the team dug the rest by hand, sifting the dirt and bagging bones; the work took about seven hours. Suzanne McKay, 63, of Portland, Oregon, the great-granddaughter of Nellie Larson, was there. "We're the first ones to actually reopen the grave and gather forensic evidence," Simmons said.
The grave held more than expected: the remains of an adult woman, with signs of burning, and partial remains of two children. Nawrocki said the find suggested the original investigation had been flawed from the start. "It makes me doubt every conclusion these people came to," he said. Simmons's preliminary measurements put the woman's height at between 5 feet 6 and 5 feet 9, taller than the coroner's 1908 estimate. Jim Peters, the cemetery's general manager, said that from what he had heard he did not believe the remains were Belle Gunness's, and that the family did not want them returned to the family lot if they proved to be someone else's.
The plan was to compare DNA from the bones with saliva on envelopes she had sealed and mailed to a suitor, which had survived with their flaps still closed. "We have several original envelopes she sent to suitors, so that's our best shot for getting her DNA," Simmons said in January 2008. As a fallback, McKay authorized taking a bone from Nellie Larson's grave. If the woman proved not to be Belle, Peters said, the team would go to southern California to exhume Esther Carlson.
On May 13, 2008, the team opened the graves of the three children, Myrtle, Lucy and Philip, prompted by the children's bones found mixed with the adult remains. Their remains were better preserved than the woman's, and several adult bones turned up in Myrtle's casket. The DNA work then lay with Indiana police crime laboratories, which were trying to recover genetic material from the dried saliva, with a laboratory in Texas as the next resort.
The centennial of the fire fell in April 2008. At a memorial in La Porte attended by 55 people, four of the victims received proper burials.
No identification came out of the work. Later reports describe the DNA tests as inconclusive: Kantrowitz in 2013 wrote that the tests were inconclusive and that efforts to find a reliable comparison sample continued; Jane Simon Ammeson's 2021 book, as described on Hoosier History Live, reports the analysis as apparently inconclusive; and Indiana Public Media reported in April 2026 that the DNA tests on the remains exhumed in 2007 were inconclusive. No report says that the woman in the Forest Park grave has been identified, or that Esther Carlson's grave has been opened.
Bruce Johnson, who attended the exhumation, told Indiana Public Media in 2026 that the skeleton had been through a fire and was missing its head, and that he does not believe it is Belle. "I truly feel that she got away," he said.
Belle Gunness was never arrested, charged or tried. The La Porte County coroner ruled in 1908 that she died in the fire of April 28, and that ruling has never been formally overturned, but it has never been confirmed either. The body buried under her name has not been identified, and the 2007 and 2008 DNA work did not settle the question. As of Indiana Public Media's report of April 28, 2026, whether she died in the fire or escaped remains unresolved, and the number of people who died on the farm is still estimated rather than counted.
The farm on McClung Road, by Indiana Public Media's account, drew about 15,000 people at the height of the digging, and the case has drawn writers ever since. Books on the case include Lillian de la Torre's 1955 account, Janet Langlois's Belle Gunness: The Lady Bluebeard, Harold Schechter's Hell's Princess and Jane Simon Ammeson's America's Femme Fatale: The Story of Serial Killer Belle Gunness. The La Porte County Historical Society Museum keeps archives on the case, including at least one of her original letters, and in 2010 released a documentary, The Gunness Mystery.
Families of the dead kept in touch with the case into the 21st century. Simmons said in 2008 that relatives of Gunness and of her victims visit the museum and the graves and stay in touch with one another. Asle Helgelien arranged a Christian burial for his brother before going home to South Dakota in May 1908. Asle's grandson Duane Helgelien suggested to Hartzell that Andrew went to Indiana because women were scarce in South Dakota.
Never proven in court: every death attributed to Belle Gunness. She was not charged, and the only trial in the case was Ray Lamphere's, which ended in a conviction for arson alone.
Whether she died in the fire: the coroner said yes, on the strength of the false teeth and rings; Dr. Long and others doubted it in 1908; the body was smaller than she was by the coroner's estimate, though Simmons's 2007 measurements put it taller; and the 2007 and 2008 DNA tests were inconclusive.
How the people in the cellar died: the 1908 physicians could not establish a cause; Dr. Haines later reported strychnine and arsenic in the adult woman and two of the children; Lamphere's various statements give contradictory accounts.
The number of dead: from 10 to 14 (most researchers, per Hartzell) through 21 (Johnson), about 25 (Simmons) and 30 (Chicago Tribune, 2008) to more than 40 (1908 rumor). Store norske leksikon describes about 10 men and two women plus fragments of perhaps 30 to 40 people.
Her own children: whether Caroline and Axel, and Philip, were born to her or taken in is disputed; Kantrowitz treats them as hers, while Hartzell and Simmons doubt she gave birth.
Esther Carlson: two former La Porte residents identified her as Gunness in 1931; the identification was never proven, and Carlson died before trial.
Details that differ between sources: the life insurance on Mads Sorenson (8,500 dollars in Hartzell and Kantrowitz; 5,000 in some other accounts); the date Lamphere began work at the farm (1906 in Kantrowitz; other accounts say 1907); whether Peter Gunness's infant died within a week of the wedding or months later; Andrew Helgelien's home town (Mansfield or Aberdeen, South Dakota); and Lamphere's sentence, which some later accounts give as 20 years or life, while the 1908 reports give an indeterminate term of two to 21 years.
November 11, 1859: Brynhild Paulsdatter Storset is born in Selbu, Norway.
1881: emigrates to the United States and joins her sister Nellie Larson in Chicago.
1884: marries Mads Sorenson in Chicago.
1886: the Sorensons open a confectionery, which burns within a year; insurance payments follow, and a later house also burns.
1896: Chicago records show the deaths of a daughter, Carolina Sorenson (August 24), and an infant (April 10).
July 30, 1900: Mads Sorenson dies on the one day two of his life insurance policies overlap; she collects 8,500 dollars.
1901: buys the farm on McClung Road, La Porte, Indiana.
1902: marries Peter Gunness; his infant daughter dies in her care; about eight months after the wedding, Peter dies of a head injury she blames on a falling sausage grinder; she is cleared at the inquest and collects 3,500 dollars.
January 1906: a man named Konitzer, later believed by friends to have gone to the farm, disappears.
August 8, 1906: the earliest of her surviving letters to Andrew Helgelien.
September 1906: Jennie Olson disappears.
About May 1907: Ole Budsberg is believed to have been buried at the farm.
January 1908: Andrew Helgelien comes to La Porte and collects 2,690 dollars in cash; he is not seen again.
Early 1908: she dismisses Ray Lamphere; in the following six weeks she files four legal actions against him.
April 27, 1908: she makes a will and buys kerosene.
April 28, 1908: the farmhouse burns; the bodies of Myrtle, Lucy and Philip and a headless woman are found in the cellar. Lamphere is arrested.
Early May 1908: Asle Helgelien arrives; his brother's remains are found in the hog yard, followed by more.
May 7, 1908: Ole Budsberg is identified by his sons.
Mid-May 1908: false teeth are recovered from the ashes and identified by her dentist; the coroner rules the body is Belle Gunness; a grand jury opens an inquiry into 14 deaths.
June 18, 1908: four caskets are shipped to Forest Home Cemetery, Forest Park, Illinois.
November 9, 1908: Lamphere's trial opens before Judge John Richter.
November 26, 1908: the jury finds Lamphere guilty of arson; he is sentenced to two to 21 years, fined 5,000 dollars and disfranchised for five years.
1909: Lamphere dies of tuberculosis in the state prison at Michigan City.
January 1910: the St. Louis Post-Dispatch publishes an alleged Lamphere confession; Reverend Schell declines to confirm it.
1931: Esther Carlson, said to resemble Gunness, dies in Los Angeles awaiting trial for poisoning; the identification is never proven.
November 5, 2007: a University of Indianapolis team exhumes the grave at Forest Home Cemetery.
April 2008: centennial memorial in La Porte; four victims receive proper burials.
May 13, 2008: the children's graves are opened.
2013: DNA tests reported inconclusive.
November 2015: a new headstone is placed on Lamphere's grave.
April 28, 2026: Indiana Public Media reports the DNA tests remain inconclusive and the question of her death unresolved.