THE SIGHTSEERS: DARK TOURISM AND SERIAL-CASE SITES

On a single day in May 1908, as many as 15,000 people are said to have come to a farm outside La Porte, Indiana. They arrived on foot, by buggy and bicycle, by excursion train and in automobiles, according to the La Porte County historian Bruce Johnson and the writer Jane Simon Ammeson. The woman who had owned the place, Belle Gunness, was presumed dead. The county’s officials were by then treating her as the person responsible for the deaths of the men who had answered her matrimonial notices. The visitors did not wait for a verdict, because there was never going to be one.

That crowd has counterparts in each of these cases. The visitors come first, in the days after a case becomes public, and they are followed by authorities who must decide what to do with a building, a belonging or a stone in the pavement. Later come the guides, the books, the film crews and the local historical societies. The cases run from the early nineteenth century to the present, and in each of them a town, a family or a city has had to answer.

La Porte, 1908 Belle Gunness was never charged with anything. In the early hours of April 28, 1908, the farmhouse she owned outside La Porte burned. Three children and an adult woman died. The coroner ruled that the woman was Gunness, relying on a dental plate and rings, and four physicians who examined the body disagreed about it. Within weeks the La Porte County sheriff, coroner and prosecutor were treating the widow as the person responsible for the deaths of the men who had answered her notices, and of her foster daughter. Her former hired man, Ray Lamphere, was tried in November 1908 on a charge of murdering her and her children by setting the fire. The jury convicted him of arson only.

Store norske leksikon gives her birth name as Brynhild Paulsdatter Storset, born in Selbu, Norway, in 1859, and says she emigrated to Chicago in 1881. According to Hartzell and to Judge R. Marc Kantrowitz, she bought the farm near La Porte in 1901 with insurance money collected after the death of her first husband. The men who came to her were mostly Scandinavian immigrants who answered her notices and arrived with cash. The coroner’s inquests named two of the dead, Andrew Helgelien of South Dakota and Ole Budsberg of Iola, Wisconsin, and listed others as unknown.

What the town did next is the part that concerns visitors. Within days the farm had become an attraction, with as many as 15,000 visitors in a day by Johnson’s and Ammeson’s account. The dead were put on view for visitors, and at one point two men broke into the building where the dead were being kept; a watchman caught one of them. Items from the farm were later taken on tour with the Ringling Brothers circus, the University of Indianapolis reported in 2008. Andrea Simmons, the forensic researcher who reopened the case a century afterward, said that the work of the time was crude and that no one made a real attempt to establish how many had died. The crowds helped blur a count that is still unsettled. Most researchers, Ted Hartzell wrote in American History in 2008, put the number of victims at 10 to 14, and the figure of more than 40 belongs to popular lore. Johnson’s own estimate, given in 2026, is at least 21, and Simmons said in 2008 that her research pointed to about 25.

The question of who died in the fire never closed. In 2007 a University of Indianapolis team examined the body interred in Illinois under her name to compare its DNA with her own. The results were reported as inconclusive, and a later report of April 28, 2026, did not change that. The La Porte County Historical Society Museum, for its part, announced a special-edition DVD, "The Gunness Mystery," in July 2020, and Hoosier History Live devoted an October 2021 broadcast to Belle Gunness and her La Porte murder farm, with Ammeson as the guest. A town that once posted a watchman to keep intruders from a building of the dead now offers the story on DVD.

Clarksburg and Quiet Dell, 1931 Harry Powers was a married grocer in Clarksburg, West Virginia, who wrote love letters to widows under a false name, posing as a prosperous man in search of a wife. In August 1931 the deaths of Dorothy Lemke, a widow from Massachusetts, of Asta Eicher, a widow from Park Ridge, Illinois, and of Asta Eicher’s three children came to light at his property at Quiet Dell, near Clarksburg. He was charged that August, according to e-WV, the West Virginia Encyclopedia, and the West Virginia and Regional History Center at West Virginia University says he confessed to the deaths of the two women and three children. Newspapers named him the "Bluebeard of Quiet Dell." He was tried only once, for the murder of Dorothy Lemke, and convicted in December 1931. He was executed at the West Virginia Penitentiary at Moundsville on March 18, 1932.

The crowd came first. On September 19, 1931, the history center says, a crowd gathered at the jail in Clarksburg to threaten Powers. Its members were frustrated by the slow pace of the courts and wanted swift justice. Police expected violence and moved him to the state penitentiary at Moundsville.

The courtroom had to accommodate the same public. Clarksburg’s new Harrison County courthouse was not finished until 1932, e-WV says, and the history center explains that the trial was moved to an opera house in the town both because of that construction and because of the size of the crowds. e-WV adds that the theater was chosen to hold the spectators. A case that had begun with a letter to a lonely widow thus ended its public life in a hall built for performances.

The case reached the radio before it reached a jury. According to the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina, two West Virginia song publishers, Leighton D. Davies and A. H. Grow, wrote a ballad called "The Crime at Quiet Dell." They said they meant it to answer the idea that West Virginia was a bad state, not to profit from the killings. The song was published and performed on West Virginia radio before Powers came to trial, which worried his lawyer, the collection says, citing an article by Donald Lee Nelson in the JEMF Quarterly in 1972. The same case later gave the novelist Davis Grubb the starting point for The Night of the Hunter, published in 1953, according to e-WV.

Provincetown and Truro, 1969 Antone Charles Costa, known as Tony, was a 24-year-old carpenter in Provincetown, Massachusetts, when he was charged in March 1969 with the murders of two young women from Providence, Rhode Island, who had come to the tip of Cape Cod for a weekend in January. A Barnstable County jury convicted him of first-degree murder on both indictments at a trial in 1970 and recommended that the death penalty not be imposed. The Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the judgments on November 1, 1971. Two more young women from the Outer Cape, whose deaths came to light in Truro in the same weeks, were never the subject of a trial. Costa died by suicide in a Massachusetts prison in 1974.

Kurt Vonnegut’s July 1969 article in Life, preserved by the Provincetown History Project, describes a town that lived on visitors. In the late 1960s the summer season ran from June to Labor Day, and in those months Provincetown filled with tourists. It had also become a gathering place for young people from the counterculture, who called themselves "freaks." Local businesses made money from them, Vonnegut wrote, and tourists came to stare at them. The killings, he noted, happened outside the tourist season.

The sightseers came anyway. In the weeks after the deaths came to light, Vonnegut reported, off-season visitors came out with shovels and picnic lunches, to the disgust of local officials. It is a small detail, and in its way a complete one: an outing equipped like any other.

The town’s name for itself had a history of its own. The Associated Press, reviewing Casey Sherman’s 2022 book on the case, noted that Provincetown had been nicknamed "Helltown" in the 1600s for its drinking and gambling, and that the Costa case, though sensational in early 1969, was soon overshadowed by the killings of Sharon Tate and six others by followers of Charles Manson in southern California later that year. In October 2024 CapeCod.com reported that Sherman’s book, "Helltown," was headed for the screen.

Loksbergen, 2012: a house emptied and sold Ronald Janssen was a teacher who lived in Loksbergen, a village that is part of the municipality of Halen in the Belgian province of Limburg. In January 2010 his neighbor, 18-year-old Shana Appeltans, and her boyfriend, Kevin Paulus, died. Investigators doing routine inquiries among the neighbors judged Janssen strange and nervous, and he was taken in for questioning on January 5, 2010. He confessed to the double murder two days later and, within days, to the 2007 murder of Annick Van Uytsel, an 18-year-old student from Diest. An assize court at Tongeren convicted him on October 20, 2011, of premeditated murder on three counts, with other charges, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. VRT NWS reported that he was still serving that sentence in October 2021.

The house in Loksbergen had an aftermath of its own. In November 2012 Janssen’s half of the semi-detached house was put up for public sale, with the proceeds going to a compensation fund for the victims, VRT NWS and the regional broadcaster BRF reported. Municipal workers had emptied the house completely beforehand, because they feared souvenir hunters. At the public auction on November 20, 2012, the highest bid, 67,000 euros, came from an uncle of Shana Appeltans. The family’s interest had discouraged other bidders, and the Appeltans family said it wanted to demolish the house.

The house thus passed to the family of one of the dead, who said they would take it down. Municipal workers had emptied it first, and the stated fear was souvenir hunters.

Milwaukee: an auction that did not happen Jeffrey Dahmer was convicted in 1992 of 16 murders, 15 in Wisconsin and one in Ohio. In Wisconsin he pleaded guilty but insane, a Milwaukee jury ruled him sane on February 15, 1992, and he received fifteen consecutive life terms. A sixteenth followed in Ohio in May 1992. Another inmate killed him at Columbia Correctional Institution on November 28, 1994.

The families of his victims won judgments against his estate. In 1996 they obtained a court order to auction his belongings to collect on those judgments. A Milwaukee real estate developer, Joseph Zilber, raised $407,225 through a group called the Milwaukee Civic Pride Fund and bought the items instead, so that, in his words, "these tools of death be permanently destroyed." They were destroyed in June 1996, the Deseret News reported. The collector’s market that the families' own court order would have fed was closed off by a civic fund.

The apartment building where Dahmer had lived was torn down. According to a report in the Marquette Wire, the city later sold the lot for $500 on condition that it be kept as green space, and it is still an empty, grassy lot in Milwaukee. In 2022 Netflix released a ten-part drama about the case that drew objections from relatives of the dead, among them the mother of Tony Hughes, ET Online reported. The empty lot and the streaming series answer the same question in different ways: what a city does with the place, and what an industry does with the story.

Gunma Prefecture, 1971: the town and the family Kiyoshi Okubo killed eight girls and young women in Gunma Prefecture, northwest of Tokyo, in the spring of 1971. He was 36, unemployed and newly paroled after earlier convictions. The eight were between 16 and 21 years old, and four of them were 17 or younger. He was caught in May 1971, tried at the Maebashi District Court, admitted all the charges and was sentenced to death on February 22, 1973. He did not appeal. He was executed at the Tokyo Detention House on January 22, 1976, at the age of 41.

The case was one of the most widely reported crimes in Japan in the early 1970s, and the journalist Keiko Horikawa’s account of the chaplain who attended him describes what it did to the place. Reporters, she writes, implied that local young women had been careless in accepting rides, gave the routes Okubo had driven his name, and competed there to see who could get women into their own cars. Sightseers came to photograph the places connected with the crimes and disrupted daily life.

Both the victims' families and Okubo’s family lived in the same area of Gunma, and both were changed by the case. Okubo’s family had been well off and locally prominent. After the crimes his elderly parents sold their house and moved into a care facility, but they were asked to leave once their identity became known, and they had to keep moving. When news of the execution spread, local people demanded that he not be brought home, and overnight the family’s headstones were broken. The chaplain, Fuso Watanabe, called this a plain crime, whether or not anyone reported it.

Okubo’s ashes were kept at Watanabe’s temple in Mita, Tokyo. Months after the execution his sister came to say that the family could find no cemetery that would take them. With the family’s consent, Watanabe kept the ashes in the main hall of the temple. In the spring of 1986, about ten years after the execution, he arranged for them to be placed in a shared memorial for Tokyo Detention House prisoners at a cemetery in Tokyo, which was also easier for the family to visit from Gunma.

The press did not stop. A veteran weekly-magazine reporter writing in Nikkan Gendai in 2026 recalled that he and a younger colleague tracked the elderly couple down at a hot spring in Gunma, approached them after their bath, and were sent away with a sharp rebuke. A memoir published under Okubo’s name in October 1973 and a 1983 television drama in which the comedian Beat Takeshi played him, according to Gendai Business, kept the case before the public, and the crime of 1971 followed his family for more than half a century.

Bremen: the stone in the square Gesche Margarethe Gottfried was executed in public in Bremen on April 21, 1831, in the square beside the cathedral. A Bremen court had sentenced her for 15 murders by poison, and a crowd estimated at 35,000 came to watch, according to the Bremen edition of the Berlin daily taz. It was the last public execution in Bremen. For most of the time she was killing, the city saw her as a devoted nurse to the sick and dying and called her the "Engel von Bremen," the Angel of Bremen. Her arrest came on her birthday, March 6, 1828, and she confessed to 15 killings between 1813 and 1827, WEB.DE reported in a 2022 account.

The city later set a block of basalt engraved with a cross into the pavement of the square to mark the place where she died. The taz reported in 2023 that it was meant as a memorial to the last death sentence carried out in Bremen. People began to spit on it to show their contempt for her, and it became known as the Spuckstein, the spitting stone. The City of Bremen’s tourism portal presents the spitting as a local custom. In 1931 someone used a hammer and chisel to turn the cross into a swastika. The stone was removed, reportedly ground down, re-engraved and returned to the square.

The city’s tourism portal lists the stone among its sights, under legends and monuments. A work by Korpys and Löffler documenting it, from the series "Etagentraum" of 2003, is catalogued in the Kunsthalle Bremen’s online collection. In 2012 a spokeswoman for Bremen’s tourism office, Maike Lucas, told the taz, in an interview headed "Kein Sensationstourismus," that city crime tours stop at the spot. The interview’s headline states the office’s position: no sensation tourism.

In 2023 the taz reported on an argument that turns the usual debate over its head. A Bremen resident had begun laying flowers and candles at the stone, arguing that spitting on it offends the human dignity protected by Article 1 of Germany’s Basic Law, a protection that in her view extends beyond death. She wanted the stone moved to the state museum, which holds a cast of Gottfried’s death mask. Some tour guides now ask visitors not to spit. The tourist custom is thus being renegotiated by tourists, guides and a single determined neighbor, with the city’s own portal still describing the custom as a custom.

Her story has also drawn films and stage works. filmportal.de lists "Gesches Gift" and "Effigie: Das Gift und die Stadt," and the Berliner Festspiele programmed "Bremer Freiheit: Frau Geesche Gottfried" in 2021.

Charleston: the legend that outlived the record Lavinia Fisher was executed in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 18, 1820, beside her husband, John Fisher. A Charleston court had convicted the couple of highway robbery in May 1819. In South Carolina at that time robbery on the highway could be punished with death, and it was this conviction, not any finding about a killing, that sent them to the gallows. No court charged either of them with murder.

Two centuries later she is better known by another description. Ghost tours of the city’s old jail, paranormal television programs and a concept album (the Charleston City Paper reported on the album in 2017) present her as "America’s first female serial killer": a charming innkeeper who killed travelers at the roadside boarding house she and her husband kept north of the city, and hid the dead. The Post and Courier, reporting on the research of the Charleston author Bruce Orr, set that story against what the records of 1819 and 1820 contain. They show a married couple running a roadside house that was raided by a sheriff and a crowd of citizens, two indictments for assault, a conviction for robbery, a failed jail escape, a delayed execution and a double execution. They do not show a trapdoor or a cellar of the dead.

The raid came in February 1819. A sheriff and what the paper calls a lynch mob entered the house, and the Fishers and others there were arrested on February 18, 1819. The first charges were assault with intent to murder and common assault over the treatment of two men at the house; they were later changed to highway robbery, in connection with a trader traveling into the city. One of the others arrested, William Heyward, was tried separately and executed later. Residents burned the boarding house with the couple’s belongings inside, and a neighboring roadhouse burned as well. Orr’s conclusion, as the paper reports it, is that no murders were ever attributed to the Fishers by the authorities of the time.

The murder story did not wait long to appear. In 1830, ten years after the execution, Peter Neilson published a book of his travels in Glasgow and Edinburgh. In a passage on executions in Charleston he described a man and wife who kept a tavern about six miles from the city and were put to death for murder and robbery, carried out, he said, to an unknown but terrible extent. In his version, a traveler overheard the people of the house through a wooden partition planning to kill him; when the authorities came, the people inside resisted and gave up only after the house was set on fire. He added that the scorched walls were still standing as a reminder to passers-by. It is an early record of the ruined house standing as a warning to passers-by, set down in a book printed in Glasgow and Edinburgh a decade after the couple were dead.

The place the tours visit is also not the place the Fishers knew. The old jail building, the National Park Service says, took its present form later: in 1822, two years after their deaths, the architect Robert Mills designed a fireproof wing with individual cells, and in 1855 the Charleston firm Barbot and Seyle altered the building and added a rear octagonal wing. The 1886 earthquake damaged the tower and top story, which were later taken down. The same National Park Service page states that the Fishers and members of their gang were convicted of robbery and murder. The trial record as Orr and the Post and Courier describe it does not support the second word. Lavinia Fisher was never tried for a killing.

Local media have kept the tour trade supplied. The Post and Courier’s account ran on October 30, 2019. WCIV’s "Creepy Carolina" segment, in which a tour company’s guide manager gave the gallows location as the northern end of the peninsula, ran on October 31, 2022. The station’s earlier feature, "Charleston’s dark past: The tale of Lavinia Fisher," ran on October 26, 2015, and Charleston Magazine’s "Holy Spirits: Learn the Haunted History of the Old City Jail" in October 2025. SCETV published "The Ghosts of Charleston’s Old City Jail" in August 2019. The calendar of these pieces follows Halloween more reliably than it follows the court records.

On the gallows, John Fisher said he had been framed. Lavinia protested her innocence, cursed, and damned the governor, the Post and Courier reported. A story that she leaped from the platform is disputed; the paper says she mistook a document in the sheriff’s hand for a pardon and was about to jump with excitement before the sheriff told her that no pardon was coming. She is sold on ghost tours as "America’s first female serial killer," and the only crime a court ever convicted her of was highway robbery.

Timeline

• February 18, 1819: John and Lavinia Fisher are arrested near Charleston after a raid by a sheriff and a crowd; in May they are convicted of highway robbery.

• February 18, 1820: The Fishers are executed at Charleston.

• 1822: Robert Mills designs a fireproof wing with individual cells for the Charleston jail.

• 1830: Peter Neilson’s book prints the earliest known murder version of the Fisher story.

• April 21, 1831: Gesche Gottfried is executed in Bremen before a crowd estimated at 35,000.

• April 28, 1908: The farmhouse near La Porte, Indiana, burns; sightseers fill the farm in May; Ray Lamphere is convicted of arson in November.

• August 1931: The Quiet Dell case becomes public; on September 19 a crowd gathers at the Clarksburg jail; in December Harry Powers is convicted at a trial held in an opera house.

• 1931: Someone turns the cross on Bremen’s stone into a swastika.

• March 18, 1932: Powers is executed at Moundsville.

• January to March 1969: Tony Costa’s case becomes public on Cape Cod; off-season sightseers arrive with shovels and picnic lunches.

• Spring 1971: Eight killings in Gunma Prefecture; Kiyoshi Okubo is caught in May.

• January 22, 1976: Okubo is executed at the Tokyo Detention House.

• Spring 1986: Okubo’s ashes are placed in a shared memorial in Tokyo.

• November 28, 1994: Jeffrey Dahmer is killed in prison.

• June 1996: Dahmer’s belongings are destroyed instead of auctioned.

• 2007: A University of Indianapolis team takes DNA from the body interred under Belle Gunness’s name.

• January 2010: Ronald Janssen is taken in for questioning; he is convicted on October 20, 2011.

• 2012: A Bremen tourism spokeswoman tells the taz that city crime tours stop at the stone.

• November 20, 2012: A victim’s uncle buys Janssen’s house at public auction for 67,000 euros.

• 2022: Netflix releases its drama about the Dahmer case.

• 2023: A Bremen resident asks that the stone be moved to a museum.