In early May 1908, Asle Helgelien of South Dakota arrived in La Porte, Indiana, unwilling to accept what a widow named Belle Gunness had written to him: that his brother Andrew had simply left her farm. Asle pressed the men clearing the ruins of her burned house to widen their search of the grounds, and the deaths on that farm came to light.
The six cases take in a farm in Indiana in 1908, a bricklayer in Spain, a carer in Cologne, a series of missing men in Venezuela, a family in Melilla and a teacher in Karnataka. In each, someone related to a victim noticed what the authorities had not, or refused what the authorities accepted. In each, too, the relative’s part was one link, and the cases differ on how much weight it carried. Some relatives set the investigation going. Others pressed against an official verdict of natural death. Others spoke up only at the end.
Belle Gunness was never charged, tried or convicted of anything. The deaths on the farm were attributed to her by the La Porte County coroner, sheriff and prosecutor in 1908, and by researchers since.
Andrew Helgelien was a 49-year-old bachelor farmer from South Dakota. He had corresponded with Gunness since the summer of 1906. In January 1908 he traveled to La Porte, where the cashier of the First National Bank of La Porte, Frank Pitner, said he collected 2,690 dollars sent from his bank in South Dakota. After that he was not heard from.
His brother Asle was not satisfied with her letters, and later turned up about 80 of them. The farmhouse had burned on April 28, 1908, and the bodies of three children and an adult woman lay in the cellar. Asle reached La Porte in early May. He pressed the workers to look beyond the house, and the search of the grounds that followed brought Andrew’s death to light, then others. The coroner’s inquests named Andrew Helgelien and Ole Budsberg of Iola, Wisconsin, and listed eight others as unknown. By mid-May newspapers reported that ten of 14 bodies were held in La Porte morgues, and a grand jury opened an inquiry into 14 deaths.
Here the relative’s part ends and the official part begins, and it did not settle much. The coroner ruled that the adult woman in the cellar was Belle Gunness, relying on a dental plate and rings, and doctors at the time disagreed. Her hired man, Ray Lamphere, was tried in November 1908 for the murder of Gunness and her children by setting the fire; the jury convicted him of arson only, and he received an indeterminate term of two to 21 years. Asle Helgelien testified at that trial about his brother. He arranged for his brother to be laid to rest with Christian rites before returning to South Dakota. The question of whether Gunness died in the fire or left it has stayed open since; a university team’s DNA tests in 2007 and 2008 were reported inconclusive. Estimates of the total number of deaths range from 10 to 14, in the view of most researchers, to at least 21 and about 25. A brother’s refusal to accept a letter did not solve the case. It put the case in front of a coroner.
Between April 1987 and April 1988, 16 elderly women who lived alone died in and around Santander, the capital of Cantabria on Spain’s northern coast. Most of the deaths were first recorded as natural.
The relative in this case was not listened to. Carmen Martínez González, 65, died in January 1988. Cantabria24Horas reported in 2016 that her daughter refused to accept that the death was natural and pressed to have it investigated, and that officials warned her not to keep using the word crime. What, if anything, her persistence changed at the time has not been reported. The case broke open elsewhere.
Julia Paz Fernández, 71, died in April 1988 in Muriedas, about seven kilometers from the city, the last of the 16. Because the town lay outside Santander, the Guardia Civil handled the inquiry. Investigators learned that a bricklayer had recently worked for her, and for her daughter too. Servimedia’s report of the trial called that the decisive lead: the defendant had worked for the last victim two months before her death. The Guardia Civil learned the bricklayer’s name, that he had a criminal record and that he had been out on provisional release since November 1986. The National Police and the Guardia Civil then worked together, and the head of the Santander police ordered him watched for about four weeks. José Antonio Rodríguez Vega was arrested in Santander on May 19, 1988.
The families came into the case after the arrest. Relatives of the dead women identified objects the police displayed, some recognizing gifts they had themselves given their mothers, Cantabria24Horas wrote. At the trial, on November 26, 1991, nineteen relatives and friends testified. The daughter of the first victim insulted him from the witness stand and lunged at him; court police held her back. The Audiencia Provincial de Santander convicted him on December 5, 1991, of 16 murders and sentenced him to a total reported as 440 years, with no more than 30 to be served under the law then in force, and ordered him to pay 8 million pesetas to the family of each woman. The Tribunal Supremo upheld the judgment in 1993. Rodríguez Vega, called El Mataviejas in the Spanish press, was killed by other inmates at the Topas prison in Salamanca on October 24, 2002.
The daughter’s persistence is not recorded as changing the course of the inquiry. A bricklayer’s work for the last victim did.
Marianne Nölle was a paid carer in Cologne who looked after elderly people. In 1993 the Cologne regional court sentenced her to life imprisonment for six murders committed between 1984 and 1992, which prosecutors said she had done out of greed. She said nothing at her trial and denied the killings throughout.
The case began with two daughters. The Nürnberger Nachrichten, in a 2013 retrospective on the verdict, described their mother, an 88-year-old woman who fell suddenly into a coma, was taken to hospital and died a few days later without waking. Her symptoms puzzled the hospital doctor, who asked the daughters whether their mother might have poisoned herself. Then the daughters discovered that her savings were gone. The only other person with access to them was her carer. They went to the police.
Prosecutors ordered an examination of the body. At first the cause of death appeared to be pneumonia. Behind the pneumonia, the examiners determined, lay poisoning. Police then spent months gathering evidence. Jewelry belonging to former patients was in her possession, and when she was questioned about it she contradicted herself. Prosecutors had the bodies of several former patients tested for poison. The number of tests, their dates and the date of her arrest have not been reported.
The same newspaper described an earlier death that went nowhere. Nölle had been caring for the elderly father of a prosecutor, who called her "mein Mariannchen." While she looked after him, 10,000 marks went missing, and blame fell on his cleaning woman. One morning he was lively on the telephone; at midday he was dead on his sofa. His daughter-in-law wanted the body examined. Her husband, the prosecutor, thought that unnecessary, and no examination was done. Whether this death was among the cases tried has not been reported, and it is not among her reported convictions.
So the same kind of relative appears twice in this one case, once ignored and once heeded. The daughters could name a person and a loss. Police believed the true number of victims was far higher than six; the police figures reported at the time of the trial assumed 17 completed killings and 18 attempted ones, and the Berliner Kurier wrote in 2025 that eleven further cases were suspected. None was tried. Nölle died in prison in 2022, aged 84.
The Venezuelan case is the one where relatives did the most and the courts have said the least. Between November 1998 and January 1999, at least ten men went missing around Táriba in Táchira state, according to Infobae. They were runners who used a park, Parque 12 de Febrero, and workers who walked along the Torbes River. Infobae, El Diario and VPItv all report that it was relatives who brought the cases to official attention, asking the police to investigate.
The police did not at first connect the missing men with anyone in particular. Infobae says the theories ran from scores being settled between drug gangs to satanic rituals. Agencia Reforma reports that investigators first looked at a revenge killing tied to the drug trade and set the idea aside because the missing men had no known links to it. The relatives' requests started a search. The search was not theirs.
On February 12, 1999, Civil Defense searchers working at Táriba located evidence of two deaths, and of six more in later searches, according to Infobae and El Diario. Dorángel Vargas, who was living in a shack there, was arrested. Police said he admitted killing men. Reports put the number at about ten or about a dozen, and none of the figures was tested at a trial. He had already come before a court once: in 1995 he was accused in the death of a man who slept under the same bridge, Cruz Baltazar Moreno, and was sent to a psychiatric institute instead of being tried.
Vargas was declared not criminally responsible, and has never been tried, convicted or sentenced. A former Táchira judge, Berro, told La Nación that he has a ruling in his case but not a conviction. A police cell where a court sent him in 1999 as a provisional measure became permanent: he was still there in 2016, in 2020 and in 2024. Reports of his release in 2020 were false. Of the missing men themselves, the press gives almost nothing. They are described by what they did on the days they went missing and by the relatives who asked the police to find them.
Francisca Ballesteros Maravilla, known as Paqui, was a housewife in Melilla, the Spanish city on the north coast of Africa. In June 2004 her daughter Sandra, 15, died in a hospital there, and her 12-year-old son was admitted with the same kind of poisoning. Within days police arrested the mother. She confessed to giving drugs to her husband, Antonio González, who had died that January, and to the two children. Later that month she admitted that she had also killed a baby daughter, Florinda, in 1990.
Her husband’s death in January 2004 was put down to a cardiac event, and for five months the signs around the two children were visible to others. The children grew thin. Neighbors told Diario de León that after the father died the two looked sickly and painfully thin, and Sandra’s school was told she was away with gastroenteritis and depression. El Español described a shopkeeper who noticed the day after the father’s death that the boy was pale and shaking and asked why he had not seen a doctor. The mother said he was upset about his father. Friends who called to see Sandra were turned away and told she was resting. None of this went further.
The alarm was raised by relatives. El Español reported that the children’s grandmother insisted on seeing Sandra, saw that she was gravely ill and refused to accept her daughter-in-law’s explanation that a doctor had already been called. She contacted the children’s uncle, who came and called an ambulance himself. Noticias Argentinas also credited the uncle with summoning help, and said a police investigation began from that point. Sandra died on June 4. Her brother’s tests confirmed that he, too, had been poisoned, and El Español wrote that the arrest came in time to save him, though he needed months of hospital care.
Investigators then went back to the husband’s death. Noticias Argentinas reported that later tests on his body showed the same drug. On September 26, 2005, the Audiencia Provincial de Málaga, sitting in Melilla, sentenced her to 84 years: 25 for Sandra, 20 for Florinda, 20 for her husband and 19 for the attempted murder of her son, with loss of parental authority over him. The Supreme Court upheld the sentence. The grandmother and uncle did what the shopkeeper, the school and the neighbors had not. They did it five months after a death that nobody had questioned, and they did it for a boy who survived.
Mohan Kumar, a former government school teacher from Bantwal taluk in Karnataka, was convicted in a long run of separate trials between 2013 and 2020 of the murders of young women. The women died far from their villages, in Mysuru, Bengaluru, Hassan and other towns, and their deaths were recorded as suicides or unexplained. Open magazine reported that police at the time did not match missing person reports from the coast with unidentified deaths at inland towns.
The series was connected only after a 22-year-old woman from Bantwal taluk went missing in June 2009. The Deccan Herald reported that her parents and neighbors in the village pressed the police for weeks, and that public anger over the failure to trace her led to the formation of a special team more than a month after she went missing. Open wrote that local police had first treated her case as an elopement with a man from another community, and that the case nearly set off communal trouble in the area. The special team examined her call records. One number she had called belonged to a woman who had gone missing from Kodagu district in February 2009; the dead woman’s phone had been used to call the Bantwal woman. Calls from one victim’s handset to another showed that a single man was using the phones and SIM cards of the missing women, the Deccan Herald reported. Open added that Kumar had given the Bantwal woman’s handset to a teenage nephew, and that when police traced the phone, the boy said his uncle had given it to him.
Dakshina Kannada police arrested Kumar on October 21, 2009, at Deralakatte, near Mangaluru. The family’s pressure had opened the case; it did not finish it. After the arrest, other families were shown photographs. In the case of a 25-year-old cook at a women’s hostel in Kasaragod district who died in Bengaluru in July 2009, her sister recognized him from the photographs and filed a complaint, after which the state Criminal Investigation Department took over the case, PTI reported. It became the 20th and last of the trials.
The courts treated the cases separately and did not always agree. Sessions courts in Mangaluru sentenced Kumar to death in December 2013 in three cases. In October and November 2017 the Karnataka High Court confirmed one death sentence, commuted another to life without remission, and set aside a murder conviction in a third for lack of proof that he had been with the woman when she died. He was convicted in the 20th case in June 2020. Police and later press figures of 30 or more victims are attributions, not court findings.
Set side by side, the relatives did different work. Asle Helgelien turned a brother’s silence into a search; the daughters in Cologne turned their mother’s missing savings into a police report; the grandmother and uncle in Melilla called an ambulance for a child who would have died. In Karnataka, a family’s anger and a sister’s recognition came at two points in a longer chain of phone records. In Santander, a daughter’s insistence is not recorded as changing the course of the inquiry, and the arrest came from a bricklayer’s earlier work for the last victim. In Táriba, relatives asked and the system answered with a search whose results it has never put before a court.
None of these relatives solved a case alone. Each supplied one thing: the question, the name, the first call, the identification. In most of them the answer came from investigators who followed it. In several, the relative’s earlier warning had been put aside, and the record shows what that cost. In Cologne the elderly father of a prosecutor died in Nölle’s care without an examination, because his son thought one unnecessary. In Santander an official told a daughter to stop saying crime.
• January 1908: Andrew Helgelien travels to La Porte and collects cash from a bank.
• April 28, 1908: fire at the Gunness farm.
• Early May 1908: Asle Helgelien reaches La Porte; the search of the grounds follows.
• November 1908: Ray Lamphere is convicted of arson.
• 1984 to 1992: the deaths in Cologne for which Nölle was later convicted.
• April 1987 to April 1988: 16 elderly women die in and around Santander.
• January 1988: Carmen Martínez González dies; her daughter later presses for an investigation.
• April 1988: the last of the Santander deaths, in Muriedas.
• May 19, 1988: Rodríguez Vega is arrested in Santander.
• December 5, 1991: Rodríguez Vega is convicted of 16 murders.
• 1993: Nölle is sentenced to life in Cologne; the Tribunal Supremo upholds the Santander verdict.
• November 1998 to January 1999: at least ten men go missing around Táriba.
• February 12, 1999: Vargas is arrested at Táriba.
• October 24, 2002: Rodríguez Vega is killed in Topas prison.
• January 2004: Antonio González dies in Melilla.
• June 2004: Sandra dies; her brother is admitted; Ballesteros is arrested.
• September 26, 2005: Ballesteros is sentenced to 84 years.
• June 2009: a 22-year-old woman from Bantwal taluk goes missing.
• July 2009: a hostel cook from Kasaragod district dies in Bengaluru.
• October 21, 2009: Kumar is arrested at Deralakatte.
• December 2013: Kumar is sentenced to death in three cases.
• October and November 2017: the Karnataka High Court rules on three of the death sentences.
• June 2020: Kumar is convicted in the 20th case.
• 2022: Nölle dies in prison.