In a small place the person later named in the newspapers is rarely a stranger. He or she is someone’s neighbor, employer, landlord or customer, and the first months of a case turn on how well anybody thought they knew the person. Seven cases follow, from villages and small towns in three countries: Indiana, Texas, Montana, New York and Kansas in the United States, then Italy and Bavaria.
The answers differ. La Porte, Indiana, has never settled whether its best-known resident died in a fire. Kaltenbrunn, in Bavaria, nearly lynched the man it had grown up beside. Elmendorf, Texas, kept a legend that investigators could not prove. Delhi, New York, pushed a parolee out soon after his arrival, and state officials sent him on to a city.
In 1901 Belle Gunness, a Norwegian immigrant widow, bought a farm outside La Porte, Indiana, then a town of about 10,000 people some 60 miles east of Chicago. She paid for it with insurance money. Her first husband in Chicago, Mads Sorenson, had died on July 30, 1900. The family doctor attributed his death to heart failure, no post-mortem examination was done, and she collected 8,500 dollars, according to the writer Ted Hartzell and Judge R. Marc Kantrowitz. A second husband, Peter Gunness, died in 1902, about eight months after the wedding. Hartzell writes that a coroner’s inquest cleared her and that she collected 3,500 dollars. She was never charged in either death.
La Porte got to know her as a widow who ran a farm with hired hands and placed notices for a husband in Chicago dailies and Norwegian-language papers, according to Indiana Public Media. Hartzell, who obtained 11 of her original Norwegian letters to a South Dakota man named Andrew Helgelien, describes them as plain and badly spelled. The best-known line attributed to her, "My heart beats with wild rapture for you," is in none of them; the writer Lillian de la Torre said in 1955 that reporters had invented it. The legend of the woman, in other words, grew faster than the record.
The record turns on April 28, 1908, when her farmhouse burned down. Her three children died in the fire, and the coroner took an adult woman who died in the fire to be her. A week or so later Helgelien’s brother came from South Dakota to ask after him, and over the following days the deaths of more than a dozen people came to light on the farm. The La Porte County sheriff, coroner and prosecutor attributed those deaths to Gunness. No court has ever ruled on the cause of any of those deaths. Estimates of the total run from 10 to 14, which Hartzell says most researchers accept, to at least 21, the figure of the La Porte County historian Bruce Johnson, and about 25, the figure of the forensic researcher Andrea Simmons. Figures above 40 come from rumor in 1908.
The town spent November 1908 on a different question. Ray Lamphere, her former hired man, was tried on an indictment for the murder of Belle Gunness and her three children by setting the fire. A jury convicted him of arson only. He received an indeterminate term of two to 21 years, a fine of 5,000 dollars and five years' loss of the vote, and he died in the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City in 1909. Doctors at the time disagreed with that ruling. Many people in La Porte never accepted the ruling, and the alternative, that she had set the fire and left, shaped the retellings for generations.
In November 2007 a University of Indianapolis team sought a DNA comparison with material from her own letters. The results were reported as inconclusive, and the most recent report on the testing, from Indiana Public Media, is dated April 28, 2026. Even the household is disputed: whether she ever had children of her own is in doubt, and Simmons said in 2008, "We don’t believe Belle Gunness ever gave birth to her own kids." The La Porte County Historical Society Museum released a special-edition DVD, The Gunness Mystery, in July 2020.
Correggio is a farming town of about 19,000 people in the province of Reggio Emilia, in northern Italy. Leonarda Cianciulli, who had been born in Montella, in the Irpinia hills of Campania, moved there in 1930. She told fortunes and dealt in secondhand clothes. Between December 1939 and November 30, 1940, three women of Correggio who knew her and lived alone were persuaded to sell what they owned and tell friends they were leaving to begin a new life elsewhere. They were Ermelinda Faustina Setti, 73; Francesca Clementina Soavi, 55, a former kindergarten teacher who sold cloth; and Virginia Cacioppo, 59, a former opera soprano. Postcards in their names reassured friends that all was well.
Cianciulli told investigators and later the court that she had killed the women as sacrifices to protect her eldest son from military service in the Second World War. Prosecutors argued she had killed for their money and goods. The trail that reached her ran through money: Cacioppo had owned state bonds, and police learned that one had been cashed. Il Fatto Quotidiano reports that the bond had been sold by a Correggio parish priest, who said he had received it from a local cheesemaker, who said he had received it from Cianciulli together with money and jewelry. A complaint by Cacioppo’s sister-in-law set the police inquiry moving. Sky TG24 dates Cianciulli’s arrest to 1941. At first, Geopop reports, she denied everything, and she confessed after her eldest son was detained.
On July 20, 1946, the Corte d’Assise of Reggio Emilia convicted her of three murders, theft and desecration of corpses, accepted that she was partly of unsound mind, and sentenced her to 30 years in prison and three more in a criminal asylum. Her son, tried as an alleged accomplice, was acquitted. She was held at the judicial asylum of Aversa and then at the women’s judicial asylum at Pozzuoli, near Naples, where she died of a stroke on October 15, 1970.
What the town made of her is better recorded than what it thought at the time. A chapter by Sandra Sicurella and Elena Bianchini in a 2010 volume on the case collected the memories of well-placed local people 70 years after the killings; its title, "Certo malvagia la era," means roughly "She was certainly wicked." It studied how a small rural community, where everyone knew everyone, had coped with sudden national fame through crime reporting. Il Resto del Carlino has called the case the first great Italian media case. The historian Barbara Bracco, in a 2018 book reviewed by Doppiozero, keeps asking a question no one at the time seemed to ask: she was the only person convicted, yet the people around her seem to have escaped scrutiny. In the years since, Carlo Lucarelli’s television series Profondo Nero (2015), a podcast by the rapper J-Ax (2022) and a local television series (2024) have all returned to Correggio. The Criminological Museum in Rome holds objects connected with the case, according to Geopop.
Elmendorf lies about seventeen miles southeast of downtown San Antonio, in Bexar County, and the Handbook of Texas gives its population as 300 until the 1950s. The town was set up in 1885 by Henry Elmendorf, later a mayor of San Antonio, and not incorporated until 1963, according to the city’s own history. Its leading family was the Balls. Joe Ball, the second of eight children, was born there on January 7, 1896. The family owned the first stone house in the area and ran a general store, Texas Monthly reported in 2002; one brother became a school trustee in 1914, and another, Raymond, became the town’s first mayor on incorporation.
Joe Ball joined the Army in 1917, saw action in Europe and was discharged in 1919. He returned to Prohibition and became a bootlegger and, in the town’s telling, a gambler and a ladies' man. After Prohibition he ran a tavern that KSAT dates to the early 1930s. People who knew him, Texas Monthly reported, remembered a hard man: a resident who was fourteen in 1938 said he was mean and a good shot, and a woman who was 88 when she spoke to the magazine said people were afraid of him.
Texas Monthly says that some of the women who worked for him during the Depression, most of them unnamed, later could not be accounted for. The town supplied its own explanation. Ball’s wife left for San Diego in April 1938; after his death, deputies traced her there, and she gave a statement.
Two deaths were attributed to him. Minnie Gotthardt, who ran the bar and was called "Big Minnie," was last accounted for in the summer of 1937; Ball told people she was pregnant and in a hospital in Corpus Christi. Hazel Brown, called "Schatzie," was 22 and from McDade. Ball’s handyman, Clifton Wheeler, told officers that Ball had killed both women. On September 24, 1938, Bexar County deputies John Gray and John Klevenhagen told Ball they would take him to San Antonio. He asked to close the tavern first, and he died by suicide there before they could. He was never charged. Wheeler’s statements confirmed Minnie Gotthardt’s death in October 1938, and hundreds of people gathered near Ingleside as officers worked. Wheeler was jailed for two years as an accessory.
The rest is legend. The count of victims credited to Ball has run in later accounts from five to twenty-five or more, none of the additional deaths ever shown. The best-known story about him was never proved, and a deputy, Elton Cude Sr., said decades later that he did not believe it. Michael Hall, the Texas Monthly writer who went to Elmendorf in 2002, set out to separate the record from the legend. Klevenhagen went on to a long career as a Texas Ranger and died on November 26, 1958, at 46.
Kaltenbrunn is a village of about 500 people in the Itzgrund, in Upper Franconia. At the time of the killings it belonged to the district of Staffelstein. Between December 1968 and November 1969, three girls from the Itzgrund and the neighboring Lichtenfels area died: Nora Wenzl, 14, of Welsberg, on December 19, 1968; Helga Luther, 16, of Lichtenfels, on August 28, 1969; and Sieglinde Heubner, 16, of Kaltenbrunn itself, on November 15, 1969. Families in the countryside around Coburg, Lichtenfels, Kronach and Bamberg, the Fränkischer Tag wrote in 2020, kept their daughters close. Parents drove girls to dances and fetched them again.
The man arrested on December 12, 1969, in Kaltenbrunn was Manfred Wittmann, a single man in his mid-twenties who lived with his parents in the middle of the village and mixed concrete and bitumen on building sites. The Fränkischer Tag has described the shock when the killer turned out to be a local man whom no one had suspected. Before his arrest, the paper reported, he boasted in the village that the murderer would never be caught because he was "zu schlau," too clever. The local press ran the headline "Der Mörder lebt unter uns," "The murderer lives among us." The paper also brought a self-styled clairvoyant, Erwin Grünig, known as the "Seer of Lake Constance," to Coburg after Helga Luther’s death. His description of a man with dark wavy hair who worked with machines was partly wrong, the Fränkischer Tag noted in 2020, but some of it matched Wittmann, and his appearance seems to have helped push Wittmann toward a confession under questioning. The case was also taken up by Aktenzeichen XY ... ungelöst, the ZDF program that asked viewers to help solve crimes.
Wittmann confessed about eight hours after police came for him. News of the arrest set off an angry reaction in the area: people in the taverns called for the death penalty, and he came close to being lynched, the Fränkischer Tag reported. Karl Schardt, the Staffelstein officer who helped take him into custody, remained certain that it was the biggest event of his working life. The jury court at Coburg, in a trial that opened in November 1971, rejected an argument that he should be sent to a psychiatric hospital, held him fully responsible, and on December 15, 1971, sentenced him to life imprisonment three times over, with a finding of particular gravity of guilt. He was convicted of three murders, with other charges.
The village did not forget. When he was released on probation in June 2013, at 70, after 43 years in Straubing prison and following a ruling by the Higher Regional Court in Nuremberg, the Fränkischer Tag reported that relatives of both the victims and the killer still lived in Kaltenbrunn, and that the calm of the place was deceptive: few residents were willing to talk about what had happened. He was placed in a care facility in Middle Bavaria whose location officials did not disclose. The paper has returned to the case at anniversaries, in a 2016 Kronach retrospective, in a 2017 article on the 50th anniversary of Aktenzeichen XY, and in a long 2020 account that called the three murders traumatic for the region.
Manhattan is a small town in the Gallatin Valley of Montana. David Meirhofer, a 24-year-old contractor who lived there in 1973, was described in Amy Linn’s 2015 account as a loner, and little else has been published about how the town saw him. In June 1973 a seven-year-old girl from Michigan, Susie Jaeger, was kidnapped during a family camping trip near Three Forks, in the same county. About a week later a man telephoned the wife of a sheriff’s deputy and demanded 50,000 dollars, according to an account of a talk by the girl’s mother, Marietta Jaeger, published by the Valley Journal. He never called back with instructions.
The FBI led the investigation, and hundreds of volunteers joined local officers; they turned up no trace of the girl. On February 10, 1974, Sandra Smallegan, a young woman from Manhattan itself disappeared from the town; Linn gives her age as 19 and a 2023 newspaper column as 18. Meirhofer became the prime suspect in her death. In June 1974, on the first anniversary of the kidnapping, the man who had taken Susie telephoned her mother in Michigan, and Marietta Jaeger kept him talking for more than an hour while the FBI recorded the call. Her first reaction to the kidnapper, she said later, had been rage; after a night of struggle she decided to pray for him and to treat him with compassion. The FBI then arranged for her to meet Meirhofer in person, and in a final recorded call he gave details that, investigators said, only the person who took Susie could have known. That call incriminated him.
In 1974 Meirhofer confessed to four killings in Gallatin County, spread across seven years: the 1967 death of a 13-year-old boy, the 1968 death of a 12-year-old Boy Scout, the death of Sandra Smallegan in February 1974, and that of Susie Jaeger. He took his own life in his jail cell on September 29, 1974, a few hours after he confessed, so none of the killings was ever tested in a court. Police suspected him in other unsolved killings of children in Montana. Marietta Jaeger forgave him, told prosecutors she did not want him executed, and spent the following decades campaigning against the death penalty.
Arthur Shawcross lived in Watertown, in northern New York, in 1972. On October 17, 1972, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the first degree in the death of an eight-year-old girl, Karen Ann Hill, a reduced charge, and was sentenced to a maximum of 25 years. He later admitted the death of a ten-year-old boy in Watertown that year, Jack Blake, for which he was never convicted. He served about 15 years and was released in 1987.
The release is where the small towns come in. He went with a woman who had written to him in prison to the village of Delhi, in Delaware County in the Catskills. "It got out who he was a day after his arrival, and people said they were fearful for their children," Delhi’s police chief, Frank Harmer, said in 1990. Some residents asked him how they could get guns. Vivian Carpenter, a village trustee who was also his landlord, had him evicted. "We all agreed, we don’t want him," she said. "I had children living in that building." Within about a month he moved for a few days to the village of Fleischmanns, also in Delaware County, and Harmer was later told Shawcross had gone to a "large city." That city was Rochester. State parole officials sent him there after two communities had forced him out, UPI reported at his trial.
In Rochester he took a part-time night job cleaning and stocking shelves at a food service company; the owner, Barry Goldman, said he mostly worked alone and rode a bicycle to work. About four months before his arrest he married her. He was arrested in the Rochester area on January 4, 1990, and arraigned the next day. On December 13, 1990, a Monroe County jury convicted him of second-degree murder of ten women, rejecting an insanity defense; in March 1991 he pleaded guilty in Wayne County to the murder of an eleventh, Elizabeth Gibson. He died on November 10, 2008, of a pulmonary embolism, after being taken to Albany Medical Center; a New York State Commission of Correction report in 2009 ruled his medical care grossly negligent.
The Watertown Daily Times wrote, two days after his death, that his ties to the north country spanned decades. Delhi’s part in the story was brief and is told mostly in the words of its officials from 1990: a police chief who said the village learned who he was within a day, and a landlord who evicted him.
The Benders were a family of four who kept a small store and inn on a claim in Osage Township, Labette County, Kansas, about six miles northeast of Cherryvale, on the trail from Osage Mission to Independence. They were known as John Bender, his wife, John Jr. and Kate. Their real names, and whether they were related as presented, are disputed. The Kansas Historical Society says Kate was the only one with social skills; she claimed a gift of second sight and spiritualism and handed out circulars around the county advertising her powers.
From 1871, the society says, at least eleven people traveling the trail were last traced to the Cherryvale area. The district had horse thieves and vigilance committees, so suspicion fell first on others, and HistoryNet describes neighbors turning on one another. The last known traveler was Dr. William H. York of Independence, who left Fort Scott on March 9, 1873. His brothers Alexander and Edward York traced him as far as the Bender claim, where the family admitted that he had stopped and gone on, according to the society. HistoryNet adds that Kate offered to consult the spirits about the missing man. It says residents gathered on April 8, 1873, at the Harmony Grove schoolhouse for the annual school board election and that the meeting turned to the men no one had heard from and a call to search every farm; both Bender men were present.
By early May the family was gone. A neighbor passing the claim, named by HistoryNet as Billy Tole, noticed that the stock had not been fed. On May 5, 1873, the township trustee, LeRoy Dick, opened the building. In the days that followed, the deaths of the travelers came to light on the claim, beginning with Dr. York. The count the Kansas Historical Society repeats in its encyclopedia entries is eleven victims; newspapers at the time gave figures from eight to fourteen. Ed York offered 1,000 dollars for information leading to the family’s arrest, HistoryNet says, and Governor Thomas A. Osborn offered 2,000 dollars in mid-May 1873. Humanities Kansas says the state’s reward was never claimed.
The Benders were never traced. For decades people claimed to have seen them, caught them or killed them. None of those claims was proved. No court heard a case against any of the four, and the deaths are attributed to the family rather than legally proven against any of them. The county’s name has stayed attached to the story. The Smithsonian reported in 2020 that the Kansas land where the family had lived was up for sale, and Susan Jonusas’s book Hell’s Half-Acre (2022) re-examined the case for a new generation.
The responses differ with the cases. La Porte put a hired man on trial for the fire and then argued over whether its best-known resident had died in it. In Correggio the court case was finished by 1946, and the memory of it became the subject of a study 70 years later. Elmendorf and Kaltenbrunn each had a native son as the central figure, and one kept a legend and the other a silence. In Delhi the village used the one power it had, a landlord’s, and the parolee left within weeks. In Labette County the neighbors met, searched and posted rewards, and the family was never caught. In Manhattan the case is remembered chiefly through a mother’s decision about her daughter’s kidnapper.
• 1871 to 1873: the deaths later attributed to the Benders in Labette County, Kansas.
• March 9, 1873: Dr. William H. York leaves Fort Scott.
• April 8, 1873: Labette County residents meet at the Harmony Grove schoolhouse and discuss searching every farm.
• May 5, 1873: the Bender claim is opened; the family has gone.
• July 30, 1900: Mads Sorenson, Belle Gunness’s first husband, dies in Chicago.
• 1901: Gunness buys a farm outside La Porte, Indiana.
• April 28, 1908: the Gunness farmhouse burns.
• November 1908: Ray Lamphere is convicted of arson, not murder.
• Summer 1937 to 1938: two deaths later attributed to Joe Ball, Elmendorf, Texas.
• September 24, 1938: Ball dies by suicide.
• December 1939 to November 30, 1940: the three killings for which Leonarda Cianciulli is convicted, Correggio.
• 1941: Cianciulli is arrested.
• July 20, 1946: Cianciulli is convicted in Reggio Emilia.
• December 19, 1968: first of three deaths for which Manfred Wittmann is convicted, Kaltenbrunn area.
• December 12, 1969: Wittmann is arrested in Kaltenbrunn.
• October 15, 1970: Cianciulli dies at Pozzuoli.
• December 15, 1971: Wittmann is sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment.
• October 17, 1972: Arthur Shawcross pleads guilty to manslaughter in Watertown, New York.
• June 1973: Susie Jaeger is kidnapped near Three Forks, Montana.
• February 10, 1974: Sandra Smallegan is reported missing in Manhattan, Montana.
• September 29, 1974: David Meirhofer dies by suicide in jail after confessing.
• 1987: Shawcross is released and is pushed out of Delhi.
• January 4, 1990: Shawcross is arrested in the Rochester area.
• December 13, 1990: Shawcross is convicted of ten murders.
• November 2007: a University of Indianapolis team seeks a DNA comparison using material from Belle Gunness’s letters.
• November 10, 2008: Shawcross dies.
• June 2013: Wittmann is released on probation.
• April 28, 2026: most recent report on the Gunness DNA testing.