◆Part 1: From Norway to Indiana
Belle Gunness was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størset on November 11, 1859, in Selbu, a small farming community in the Trondheim region of Norway. She was the youngest of eight children. Her father Paul Størset was a farmer and stonemason. The family was poor.
She emigrated to America in 1881, following her older sister to Chicago. She changed her name to Belle. She worked as a domestic servant.
In 1884 she married Mads Ditlev Anton Sorenson. Together they opened a confectionery shop on the north side of Chicago. The shop burned down in 1898 under circumstances that were never fully explained. They collected the insurance money.
Mads Sorenson died on July 30, 1900. It was, notably, the only day on which two life insurance policies he held overlapped. Belle collected both policies, totalling approximately $8,500. His family requested an investigation into the cause of death. Investigators found symptoms consistent with strychnine poisoning. The case was not formally pursued.
Belle Sorenson, now a widow with two surviving children and approximately $8,500 in insurance money, bought a farm in La Porte, Indiana. She was 40 years old. She was just getting started.
◆Part 2: The La Porte Farm
The farm Belle purchased in La Porte, Indiana sat on the northern edge of the town on a quiet road. It was a substantial property — a white two-storey farmhouse, outbuildings, a large yard, and fields stretching to the surrounding countryside.
In 1902 she married Peter Gunness, a Norwegian immigrant who had recently lost his wife. Peter Gunness moved to the farm with his infant daughter Jennie, who died within a week of arriving — the official cause was recorded as natural causes. Eight months after the marriage, Peter Gunness died when, according to Belle, a meat grinder fell from a shelf and struck him on the head.
His daughter from his first marriage, Swanhild, later told investigators she had seen Belle do something to her father, though she could not say what. Belle collected Peter Gunness's life insurance policy.
She was now twice widowed, twice insured, and in sole possession of a remote Indiana farm that her nearest neighbours described as quiet and well-kept. She placed an advertisement in several Norwegian-language newspapers and in Midwestern farming publications.
The advertisements sought a partner. A man who understood farm life. A man who could bring resources to help build something lasting. A good man.
◆Part 3: The Advertisements
The advertisements Belle Gunness placed between approximately 1902 and 1908 were carefully written.
They presented a prosperous widow — a woman with a working farm, established in her community, seeking not charity but partnership. The language was practical. She was not looking for romance as an end in itself. She was building something and she needed a man who could contribute to that building.
The key phrase in multiple advertisements was a requirement that respondents come prepared to invest in the property. The wording varied. Some advertisements specified bringing funds to help clear a mortgage. Others mentioned the need for capital to expand the operation. The message was consistent — a man who answered this advertisement should come with money.
The men who responded were predominantly Scandinavian immigrants, drawn by the Norwegian-language advertisements and by the prospect of a partner who shared their background. They were men in their forties, fifties, and sixties, many of them widowers themselves, men who had built something modest in America and were looking for someone to build it with.
They wrote to the box number. Belle wrote back. She was warm, engaged, specific. She asked about their lives, their work, their dreams. She was, by every account of those who saw the correspondence, a gifted letter writer. The men she was writing to fell in love with the woman in the letters.
Then they came to the farm.
◆Part 4: The Men Who Came
The men who travelled to Belle's farm in La Porte did so with hope and with money.
John Moo of Elbow Lake, Minnesota, visited in 1897. He was never seen again. His brother later confirmed he had withdrawn his life savings before travelling to Indiana.
Ole B. Budsberg of Iola, Wisconsin, mortgaged his farm and withdrew the proceeds before visiting Belle in 1907. He was never seen again. His sons travelled to La Porte to look for him and found nothing.
Andrew Helgelien of Aberdeen, South Dakota, corresponded with Belle throughout the winter of 1907 and 1908. His letters to her, later recovered, show a man deeply in love with the woman he was writing to. He told her she was his heart's desire. He withdrew approximately $3,000 from his bank account before travelling to La Porte in January 1908. He was never seen again.
His brother Asle Helgelien became suspicious when Andrew stopped writing. He wrote to Belle asking about his brother. Belle wrote back. She said Andrew had gone to Norway to visit a sick relative. The answer did not satisfy Asle Helgelien. He kept writing. He threatened to come to La Porte himself.
On April 28, 1908, the farmhouse burned to the ground.
◆Part 5: The Fire
The fire that destroyed Belle Gunness's farmhouse began in the early hours of April 28, 1908. By the time neighbours reached the property the building was beyond saving.
In the ruins, investigators found four bodies. Three were identified as Belle's children — Myrtle, Lucy, and Philip. The fourth was an adult female, headless, the skull never recovered. The body was substantially larger than Belle Gunness had been in life — Belle was a heavyset woman of approximately 200 pounds. The body in the ruins appeared to weigh less. The teeth found near the body were later examined and found to fit a set of false teeth belonging to Belle. Some investigators believed the teeth had been placed there deliberately.
The official presumption was that Belle Gunness had died in the fire along with her three children. A formal inquest returned a verdict of murder by persons unknown — concluding that someone had set the fire and that Belle and her children were the victims.
Asle Helgelien, Andrew's brother, was not satisfied. He came to La Porte anyway. He hired workers to dig in the yard of the burned farm.
What they found changed everything.
◆Part 6: The Excavation
The digging began in the yard of the Gunness farm in May 1908. Asle Helgelien directed workers to areas that seemed disturbed. The ground was soft in places. The smell in certain sections of the yard was distinctive.
The first body was found on May 4, 1908. It was Andrew Helgelien.
The digging continued. More bodies were found. Workers and investigators worked through May as the discovery grew larger and the newspapers began carrying the story. The farm had attracted sightseers within days. The La Porte sheriff was overwhelmed.
In total, investigators recovered the remains of at least 11 individuals from the grounds of the Gunness farm, in addition to the four bodies from the burned house. Some of the remains were fragmentary — bones, teeth, pieces of tissue preserved by the Indiana soil. Some had been dismembered before burial. Some had been placed in burlap sacks. Some had been burned or treated with quicklime.
Identification was difficult. The bodies were in varying states of decomposition. Family members came from across the Midwest and from Scandinavia to attempt identification. Some remains were never definitively identified.
The confirmed count of victims in the yard stood at 11. Adding the adult female from the house and Peter Gunness, investigators were looking at a minimum of 13 deaths connected to the farm. Some researchers have argued the true number could be 40 or more.
◆Part 7: The Hired Hand
Ray Lamphere was the hired hand on the Gunness farm. He was a local man from La Porte who had worked for Belle on and off for several years. Their relationship had been complicated — he had been dismissed and rehired multiple times, and Belle had sought a restraining order against him at one point, claiming he had threatened her.
When the fire was discovered and the bodies began to be unearthed, Lamphere became the primary suspect. The official theory was that he had set the fire, killing Belle and her children.
He was tried on charges of arson and murder. The murder charges were not sustained — the jury could not determine that Belle was actually dead, and therefore could not convict Lamphere of killing her. He was convicted of arson.
In prison, before his death in December 1909, Ray Lamphere made a series of statements to a fellow prisoner and to a local minister. The accounts of what he said varied, but multiple sources reported that he claimed Belle had faked her death.
He said she had obtained the body of a woman — some accounts specify a woman from Chicago — and placed it in the farmhouse before setting the fire. He said she had left the property before the fire started. He said she had money and had gone somewhere else to start over.
Ray Lamphere died in prison before he could be formally questioned about these claims under oath.
◆Part 8: The Search
If Belle Gunness faked her death and escaped from the La Porte farm in April 1908, she left with money, a new identity, and a head start.
Investigators took the possibility seriously. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency was hired to search for her. Sightings were reported across the country — in Chicago, in California, in New York, in Canada. None was ever conclusively confirmed.
In 1931, a woman named Esther Carlson was arrested in Los Angeles in connection with the poisoning of a Norwegian-American man named August Lindstrom, who had died after changing his will in her favour. Carlson died before her trial, but several people who had known Belle Gunness in Indiana saw photographs of Carlson and stated she was the same woman. Investigators compared what physical records existed. No definitive conclusion was reached. Carlson died in custody and was buried without her identity ever being formally established.
In 2007, a team from the University of Indianapolis conducted forensic testing on remains associated with the Gunness case, including dental records and DNA samples. The results were inconclusive. The forensic techniques available could not definitively establish whether the headless body found in the farmhouse ruins was or was not Belle Gunness.
The question has never been answered.
◆Part 9: What She Knew
Belle Gunness understood something specific about the men she targeted.
They were alone. They were hopeful. They were old enough to have accumulated something worth taking and young enough in their loneliness to believe that a warm letter from a Norwegian widow in Indiana represented a genuine opportunity for happiness.
She understood the economics of loneliness. A man who has been alone long enough and who receives a letter that speaks directly to what he is missing does not apply rigorous scrutiny to the source of that letter. He applies hope.
The advertisements were honest in their way. She was a widow. She did have a farm. She did need capital. The only dishonesty was in what she intended to do with the men who provided it.
She was systematic. She maintained correspondence with multiple men simultaneously. She structured the visits so that one man's disappearance would not immediately raise questions in another man's community. She used the isolation of the farm and the distances involved to create gaps in time during which a man could simply disappear without anyone in his home community being certain enough to investigate.
She killed them and she buried them and she wrote more letters.
The mechanism was simple. It required patience, a degree of physical strength, and the capacity to write warmly to a man you intended to murder. She had all three.
◆Part 10: The Children
Myrtle Gunness was 11 years old when she died in the fire on April 28, 1908. Lucy Gunness was 9. Philip Gunness was 5.
The children are the part of the Gunness case that the historical record has treated most inadequately. The focus of the investigation, the trial, the journalism, and the subsequent true crime literature has been almost entirely on Belle — her method, her victims, her possible escape, her psychology.
The children were murdered. If Belle Gunness set the fire herself, she killed her own three children to maintain the fiction of her death. If Ray Lamphere set the fire, the children were killed to silence them or simply because they were in the building.
Either way, three children who had survived the deaths of their father and multiple stepfathers, who had lived on a farm where men came and disappeared, who had grown up in the orbit of their mother's operations without any apparent awareness of what those operations were, died in a fire in a farmhouse in Indiana in the early hours of April 28, 1908.
Myrtle, Lucy, and Philip Gunness. They are listed in accounts of the case as victims alongside the men buried in the yard. They deserve to be listed first.
◆Part 11: The Count
The minimum confirmed death toll connected to Belle Gunness is 14. That figure includes the three children, the adult female found in the house, and 10 men identified from the yard.
Belle's first husband Mads Sorenson died in 1900 under circumstances that were investigated and not formally resolved. Peter Gunness died in 1902 under circumstances that his own daughter considered suspicious. If both are included the figure rises to 16.
Researchers have identified as many as 28 men who corresponded with Belle, visited the farm, and were never seen again. Some of those men may have returned home without telling anyone, or moved elsewhere, or died of unrelated causes. But the pattern of withdrawal of savings, the sale of property, and the silence that followed their visits suggests the majority did not leave the farm alive.
A figure of 40 or more has been cited by some historians. It cannot be confirmed. The bodies are not there to be found — or if they are, they have not been found yet.
What can be confirmed is that Belle Gunness killed for money, systematically, over approximately a decade, using a method so ordinary — a newspaper advertisement, a warm letter, a visit to a farm — that it was effectively invisible until a brother's persistence and a burned building forced the ground to give up what it was holding.
◆Part 12: The Open Question
Belle Gunness is either buried in an unmarked grave in Indiana or she is somewhere else entirely.
The case has never been formally closed. No death certificate for Belle Gunness has ever been filed on the basis of conclusive evidence. The forensic testing conducted in 2007 was inconclusive. The body in the farmhouse has never been definitively identified as hers.
If she escaped, she was 48 years old in April 1908. She had money — estimates of the total amount she extracted from her victims range from $30,000 to $100,000, equivalent to between $1 million and $3 million today. She had demonstrated the capacity to present herself convincingly as a respectable woman. She had no criminal record under her own name at the time of the fire, because nobody had yet connected the deaths at the farm to a living suspect.
She could have gone anywhere.
The Esther Carlson identification in 1931 remains the most tantalising thread. If the woman who died in Los Angeles custody in 1931 was Belle Gunness, she survived for 23 years after the fire, operated under a different name, and was still targeting elderly men with money when she was finally caught.
If she was not Belle Gunness, the question remains open.
The farm in La Porte is a private residence now. The yard has been built over. The bodies that were found were exhumed and reburied or returned to families. The bodies that were not found are still there, or they are somewhere else, or they were destroyed so completely that they left nothing behind.
Belle Gunness has never been found. The case has never been closed. The file is open.