Pod Insights Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries 142. The Siren: Belle Gunness, The Husband Luring Serial Killer // MONSTERS SERIES About this episode Go to https://kachava.com https://kachava.com/ and use code HSP for 15% off on your subscription for a limited time
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What would happen if you read an ad in a newspaper for your dream partner. They’re rich, they’re beautiful and they are looking for someone to share their life with. Would you answer, or is that too good to be true? Well, in 1906, dozens of men around the country had that exact problem, except when they answered these ads and went to go meet their future wife, they vanished without a trace.
TW: Child Death
Show Notes: https://www.heartstartspounding.com/episodes/bellegunness
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Kaelyn Moore? Hi guys, it's Kaelyn. I wanted to take a second to let you know that Heart Sized Pounding was just announced as a finalist for a Signal Award in the horror/paranormal category. I feel so incredibly honored. This little podcast that I still sometimes record episodes of in my closet has truly come such a long way, and it's all thanks to you guys. But I need your help. Being a finalist makes us eligible for the Listener's Choice Award, which is totally dependent on fan voting. So if you have a second, I'm including a link in the description of this episode where you can go vote for Heart Sized Pounding. It's pretty easy. You just have to confirm your email, and it would really mean a lot. Thanks, guys. In the summer of 1906, a man named George Anderson opened his morning newspaper and
0:42 Kaelyn Moore? saw an ad that would change his life. It read, "Wanted. A woman who owns a beautifully located and valuable farm in first-class condition wants a good and reliable man as a partner in same. Some little cash is required and will be furnished first-class security." Now, George was a 39-year-old man who lived in Missouri, and he had trouble finding a wife. So this seemed like an answer to his prayers. A wealthy woman and want of a husband, he was willing to help her take care of her farm, and the company of a woman would be nice after so many years alone. At the bottom of the ad, there was instructions on how he could get in touch with the author, who just went by the initials BG. For a moment,
1:25 Kaelyn Moore? George thought that it was strange that this woman listed no personal details about herself, not even her full name, only the condition of her property. But that didn't stop him from writing her back. He didn't want to miss out on this opportunity. And eventually, this mysterious bachelorette was inviting him to come visit her valuable farm in La Port, Indiana. The next day, George boarded a train suitcase full of his nicest clothes to make a good impression for his date. In the letters that the two shared, she had referred to him as "a king" and had mentioned that he was the only man in the world for her. She seemed so kind and loving, and he could not wait to see this beautiful farm
2:06 Kaelyn Moore? she spoke of. But when he arrived at the property, something immediately felt off. The beautiful farm was desolate and poorly kept, and there were holes dug all around the property, six feet long, three feet wide, and deep. If he didn't know any better, he might have thought they were graves. And then the front door opened and his bride-to-be emerged. Except she looked nothing like he had anticipated. The woman who came out to greet him was short and stout with a stern, severe look permanently imprinted on her face. She was older than she made herself seem in the letters, and nothing about her was
2:50 Kaelyn Moore? warm and inviting like their correspondence had suggested. Not really knowing what else to do, George told her that he was feeling tired from the long journey and that he wanted to get to bed. That night, he had a restless sleep. He kept feeling like someone was just outside of his room, waiting to come in. And then, in the middle of the night, George awoke to the sound of footsteps creaking through the space, starting at his door and slowly making their way over to his bed. He opened his eyes and saw the cold face of the woman looming over his bed. Was she just watching him sleep? The next morning, George fled without a second thought.
3:35 Kaelyn Moore? There was no doubt in his mind that something was wrong. There was a dark energy about the farm, and he did not want to stick around long enough to figure out why it was there. It wasn't until several years later that he learned the truth. Because one morning, two years later, George once again opened his morning paper when he saw the headline. "The Laporte Murder Farm: Thirteen Victims Are Found." The article went on to name who it believed the 13 bodies buried in graves around the property belonged to. Most of them were suitors who, just like George, had answered the woman's ads and papers and traveled across the country to meet her.
4:20 Kaelyn Moore? It even spoke of a supposed murder chamber that was found inside of the home, right beside the room he slept in. So who was this woman? And why was she luring so many men to their deaths?
4:36 Kaelyn Moore? Welcome back to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I'm your hostess on this very macabre journey today, Kaelyn Moore. We're back with another episode this month in our monster series. And today, we are exploring the siren of the Midwest, Belle Gunness. But first, I wanted to give a quick shout out to our Patreon member Catherine in the UK, who reached out to me to let me know that she's an ecologist currently studying bats. It seems very fitting for our monster series, especially considering the vampire episode we did just last week. She said, quote, "My team and I will often visit old and sometimes abandoned buildings and record videos to see if bats are roosting in any of the buildings.
5:20 Kaelyn Moore? Some places, like the one I'm working at now, feel like the perfect scene for a horror movie, and I've definitely had goosebumps when high winds make the doors creak or debris fall. I personally love when you guys send me your spooky little morbid jobs, hobbies, interests. Please never stop doing that. You can shoot me an email or message me on socials." Now, October is always a special month for us here, and spooky season is in full swing. So if you want to really indulge, make sure you check out our limited time subscription offer on Apple Podcasts. If you start your trial in October, you will get a full 30 days to listen to our entire bat catalog, including our monthly bonus episodes, our archived episodes, and more.
6:03 Kaelyn Moore? You'll also get a special recording of our upcoming Rogue Detecting Society Book Club meeting, where we will be discussing Elizabeth Costafus's The Historian, a book that goes perfectly with our monsters theme this month. Now, our monster of the week that we are going to be talking about is a siren. And though you may be thinking of a seductive mermaid sitting out on a rock, luring men to death with her voice, you might be surprised that sirens weren't always described that way. These creatures first showed up in Homer's Odyssey as the friends of Persephone that were turned into half-birds, half-girls by her mother. This was so they could help find their friend after she was kidnapped by Hades, the god of the underworld.
6:48 Kaelyn Moore? These bird women held on to forbidden knowledge and they flew around Odysseus's boat and taunted him, singing songs that said they knew what happened at Troy and everything that would happen in the future. But with sirens, if a man chooses to listen to their song, they become enchanted and they sail to their deaths. So Odysseus had his men stuff their ears with beeswax and tie him to the mast of his ship so he could safely hear the song without damning them all. And that's the thing about sirens. When you engage with them, when you hear their siren song and respond, you die. Unless you tie yourself
7:30 Kaelyn Moore? down, it's your desire that will literally kill you. It wasn't until the Europeans in medieval times got a hold of this legend that the hyper-intelligent bird women became seductive, half-fish, half-women, because that aligned with the church's view of women as temptresses at the time. And soon, the legend became that it was the temptation of women that killed these men. In some versions of the myth, no one ever knows what sirens truly look like. They don't know if they're beautiful as their voices are, because no man ever lives to tell the story. As our Patreon and Apple Podcast subscribers know, since we covered sirens in last month's
8:10 Kaelyn Moore? bonus episode after months of very tight votes, and of all the monsters we're covering this month, sirens have the highest body count, which to me, makes them one of the most terrifying. But before she was an infamous killer, a siren of the Midwest, Belle Gunness was one of seven children. Belle was born on November 11th, 1859, in a small farming village in Norway as Brynhild Paul's daughter Storset. Her father, Paul, was essentially a sharecropper, leasing a small portion of land on the farm where his whole family worked. And that's where Belle learned the ins and out of farmwork. Her family was poor and really relied on her
8:52 Kaelyn Moore? labor even as a young child. As a kid, she was tasked with gathering up twigs out in the woods. That surrounded her to use as kindling in the fire in her poor family's home. It earned her the name of Snurkvist Paula, or Paul's twig daughter. Out in those woods, as Belle was gathering twigs, stories traveled fast. They passed from traveler to traveler. So Belle grew up on folklore stories of the Norwegian siren, also known as the huldra. Part woman, part troll, who played harp and sang from the tree line, drawing lonely men deeper into the dark.
9:31 Kaelyn Moore? A huldra's goal was to marry a human man, but if a man was ever intimate with one, he would die. It was a cautionary tale told to men who didn't know when to turn around. But from a young age, it taught Belle that men had a weakness. Women, regardless of their looks, they could be literal trolls and men would still pursue them to their deaths. Life in Norway was not the life that Belle wanted for herself. And as a teenager, she started saving money so that she could go to America. And that's because she watched as her older sister Nellie moved to the United States and found a husband. She had this comfortable life in Chicago where she did not have to gather sticks all day.
10:13 Kaelyn Moore? And Chicago at the time was home to 20,000 Scandinavian immigrants. So her sister really felt right at home. By the time she was 22 years old, Belle finally had enough money to go join her sister. And on her arrival in America, Belle changed her name to something that was a little less Scandinavian sounding. Bella Peterson. And life in America was pretty good for her. Nellie looked out for her younger sister and Belle loved playing and taking care of Nellie's five children. It seemed like she had a really strong maternal side. And in 1884, she moved out of Nellie's house so that she could start a family of her own. Belle married a man named Mads Sorensen.
10:57 Kaelyn Moore? He was about five years her senior. And there's only one photo of him still in existence that we found. And if it's anything to go by, he was a pretty handsome guy and the couple seemed happy. But as the years wore on. Belle started changing. The old stories that she grew up on warned that the danger isn't always just in the forest. It's in the pull. It's in desire. And Belle, it seems, had some really dark desires that were starting to change her.
11:38 Kaelyn Moore? One day in 1891, Nellie and Belle were sitting together catching up when Belle made a very strange request. She asked Nellie, seemingly out of nowhere, if she could adopt her youngest daughter Olga. Nellie was really taken aback by this, but then Belle got really emotional and told her that she was unable to have children herself, but desperately wanted to be a mother. And Nellie thought about it for a moment. She was so close to her daughter Olga. Would she be comfortable with just handing her over to Belle? Ultimately, she said no, which I think is a totally normal response, but this completely destroyed the sisters' relationship. They stopped talking after that moment,
12:22 Kaelyn Moore? and from what we know, the relationship was never repaired. Belle eventually did find a child to adopt. However, she and Mads had this neighboring family, the Olsons. There was a mother, a father, and a daughter, Jenny. The mother fell ill, and on her deathbed, she agreed to give her eight-month-old daughter Jenny to Belle to raise as her own. So now with a baby in tow, Belle's life was all coming together how she had planned. And within a few years, the couple decided to start their own business, and they bought a sweet shop. But Belle had established a sort of pattern in her life. When things weren't going her way, she would take unconventional and somewhat drastic
13:03 Kaelyn Moore? measures. So when the sweet shop failed to turn a profit, she did something that a lot of us would say was extreme. One day, less than a year after they opened the candy store, Belle and Jenny, who was now three years old, ran out onto the sidewalk in a panic. And Belle was screaming at the top of her lungs, "Fire, fire." A neighbor ran over to ask her what was happening as flames were jumping out of the store windows. And Belle told him that a kerosene lamp had ignited inside and the fire was spreading so quickly she didn't know what to do. Now, the city of Chicago took sudden fires really seriously at the time. In 1871, which was 10 years before Belle moved there, the whole city had completely burned down in the Chicago Fire.
13:49 Kaelyn Moore? So, Chicago firemen were some of the best in the entire country, but they still arrived too late to the candy store and it was completely destroyed. But luckily for Belle and Mads, the store was also insured. Sources differ on how much money they put into the insurance policy, but some say it was as much as $3,500 and that's over $130,000 today. And Belle used that money to pay for a nice three-story house in a nearby suburb. There, she and her husband focused on their ever-growing family, which expanded to include two more girls, Myrtle and Lucy. These girls were also probably adopted, but the records of their birth parents have been lost to time and we weren't able to find any more information on that.
14:34 Kaelyn Moore? However, with no form of income now after the store burned down and two more mouths to feed, the money ran out very quickly. And on April 10, 1900, Belle and her children ran outside of their home screaming that it too had caught fire. Firemen were once again quick on the scene and they were able to put out the fire relatively quickly. Belle went over to one of them and asked what she was supposed to do now that her home was destroyed. To which the firemen responded that it wasn't actually destroyed. They had saved it, saved for a few areas of smoke damage inside. And this made Bell and Mads furious.
15:18 Kaelyn Moore? They still claimed that they had lost around $650 worth of household goods, all of which I'm sure you can imagine was insured. At the time, no one was suspicious that Bell had essentially been surviving on insurance payouts for the last few years. Even her insurance company just thought that she had really bad luck, especially when, just three months later, tragedy struck again. But this time, it was way more than just a fire. On July 30th, 1900, a pair of doctors were urgently summoned to Bell's home. They arrived to find Mads lying on top of his bed, not breathing. They checked his body, and there was no obvious signs of what had happened to him.
16:02 Kaelyn Moore? No wounds, no medications by his bed. It seemed like he had just laid down and died, which was odd for a 46-year-old man, even at the turn of the century. Bell told the doctors that Mads had come home early from work complaining of a headache. She gave her husband quinine powder, which was a common treatment for fever at the time and today can be found in tonic water. Then she left the room to go make dinner for the kids. And when she came back, she realized that her husband had died. She told the doctors that she thought maybe the druggist had made a mistake and given them morphine rather than quinine powder. And it seems like the doctors thought that this was a perfectly acceptable explanation
16:45 Kaelyn Moore? for what had happened, and they didn't ask any further questions. Now, I want to add that the timing of her husband's death was extremely lucky. He had only recently changed his life insurance providers. His old policy, worth $2,000, was set to expire the very next day after his death. And his new policy, worth $3,000, had just gone into effect
17:11 Kaelyn Moore? That day. So Mads died on the one day in which both policies overlapped, meaning that Belle could collect them both. It's estimated that she made around $192,000 in today's money just from Mads' death. Now, newspapers treated the timing of his life insurance as this like silver lining on an otherwise horrible tragedy. Nellie Larson, Bella's estranged sister, actually came out to the funeral to pay her respects, even though the two hadn't spoken in years. She wanted to be there to support her sister as she went through really the toughest thing a woman could go through at the time,
17:51 Kaelyn Moore? aside from losing a child, becoming a widow. This wasn't the beginning of a reunion, though. Belle only isolated herself further from her family, and in November of 1901, she sold her house in Chicago and she moved with her children to Indiana. By that point, she had really proven that the things she was doing with insurance were working, and she was getting away with it, too. So it was time to scale up her operation drastically. The farm Belle bought in Indiana was in pretty good condition. Forty-eight acres, near a lake, capable of raising all sorts of livestock. Unlike the candy store,
18:31 Kaelyn Moore? Belle knew how to run a farm from her upbringing in Norway. It was practically a fresh start for her. Once she moved, she started regularly going by Belle rather than Bella, and she reconnected with Peter Gunness, a man who had stayed at her Chicago place several years earlier. Peter had two children, a toddler and an infant, who would join her three children at the farm after they got married that spring. But five days after their marriage, the younger of these two children died while in Belle's care. Doctors said the cause of death was edema of the lungs, and now we don't know for sure if this death was truly natural, or if it was part of a larger scheme that Belle was overseeing. But we do know
19:16 Kaelyn Moore? that shortly after the child's death, Belle would lose her second husband in just two years. On December 16th, 1902, Jenny, Belle's oldest daughter, ran to Belle's neighbors. She pounded frantically on the door until they answered, and she told them that they needed help because, quote, "Papa's burned himself." When the neighbors arrived at Belle's place, they found Peter lying on the parlor floor, unmoving. There was blood all around him, and his nose was broken. Belle was nearby, incoherent with emotion, and when the doctors finally got her to stop crying and got a story out of her, it went like this.
19:58 Kaelyn Moore? Apparently, Peter had been putting on his shoes in the kitchen when a meat grinder fell from the upper shelf, landing on his head. A bowl of hot brine, which is a mixture of salt and water, came with it, and that burned the back of Peter's neck. Peter had told Belle right afterwards that he was doing fine and that he was just going to lay down to rest, but she came back hours later to find that he was dead on the floor. Immediately, Belle's explanation was questioned by the doctors. During an autopsy, it was determined that the injuries Peter sustained did not match Belle's story really at all. If he had gotten bonked on the back of his head, then why was his nose broken? And the injuries on the back of his head were more consistent with severe, repeated
20:43 Kaelyn Moore? blows, not just one single hit from a meat grinder, like Belle said. So, a doctor called an inquest to investigate the death for foul play. And for the town of La Porte, this whole ordeal was a minor scandal. Everyone was convinced that there was something off about the death of Peter Gunness. But ultimately, the inquest concluded that his death was accidental, in spite of all of the unanswered questions. And I'm sure you're all wondering the same thing I was at this point. Did Peter have any life insurance? Well, someone showed up in early 1903 to ask Belle that exact question. It was Peter's brother from Minneapolis.
21:24 Kaelyn Moore? He knew that Peter had purchased a $2,500 life insurance policy, but the beneficiary was not his wife. It was his daughter from a previous marriage, who was named Swan Heald. Belle told Peter's brother that his life insurance no longer existed. He exchanged it for stock certificates, apparently, in a mining company, though, of course, she could not show the certificates to his brother. And then she insisted that he should actually stay and manage the farm with her, which he politely declined. He had a really bad feeling about what was happening there, and he left while Belle was asleep, taking his niece with him. It didn't matter to Belle, though. She soon adopted another baby boy named Philip and proceeded to run the farm
22:09 Kaelyn Moore? on her own for over a year. She would buy and raise livestock, slaughter them, butcher them, sell the meat, as well as the produce that she was growing on the farm. And yet, as strong and self-reliant as she was, forty-eight acres is a lot of land for one person to handle. And as her farm struggled to make a profit, Belle started looking for a way to make things a lot easier on herself. So by the end of 1904, Belle set her sights once again on finding some help.
22:40 Kaelyn Moore? Now, a siren sends her song out into the sea to lure in sailors. And Belle's song started as a help-wanted ad in a Chicago paper, looking for an extra set of hands to help out on the farm. It was answered in early 1905 by a thirty-year-old man named Olaf Lindbo. Olaf was similar to Belle in a lot of ways. For starters, he was also an immigrant from Norway, looking to make a good life for himself in America. He was described as a charming man, a good musician. And before he left, he packed a small suitcase that included $600, his life savings up until that point. One of Belle's neighbors, named Christopher, noticed that Olaf was a huge help on the farm over the several months that he worked
23:24 Kaelyn Moore? there. And the letters he wrote home that we're able to read showed that he was pretty happy. But neighbors also noticed that he and Belle were growing unusually close for an employer and an employee. And one day, his family received a letter from him, saying that he thought he would soon be married. That was the last time they ever heard from him. One day, Christopher noticed that Olaf hadn't been helping Belle for a few days, and he asked her if he was okay. Belle seemed really antsy and confessed that Olaf had abandoned the job after just a few months, and she just left it at that. By April, another man showed up at her doorstep answering the same help-wanted ad.
24:06 Kaelyn Moore? His name was Henry Gerholt from Scandinavia, Wisconsin. And like Olaf Linbo before him, he wrote fondly of the farm and the people living there. He also had brought his life savings with him. And also, like Olaf, his letters stopped abruptly not long after he arrived. His last letter home was on July 4th of 1905, and in it, he told his brother that he had gone for a pleasant ride through the country with Miss Gunness to celebrate the holiday. Christopher watched as the two left the property, but he never saw Henry again after that. And after the disappearance of these two hired hands, Belle put out another set of ads, but these ones were different.
24:49 Kaelyn Moore? She was no longer looking for a worker. She was looking for a husband. Her ads were similar to the one that George Anderson read. They talked about how beautiful her farm was, how much money it was making, and she asked for someone who could be her business partner as well as her lover, but also someone who had the cash to prove it. Those who responded to her letters were approaching middle age, somewhere between 35 and 50 for the most part. They were single, working men, and all of them, like her, were Scandinavian immigrants. There was George Berry, a 40-year-old Norwegian-American who came from Illinois to answer Belle's call, and with him, he brought $1,500 cash.
25:32 Kaelyn Moore? There was Christie of Dover, Iowa, who sold his farm for $2,000 cash in 1906. He changed his mailing address to Belle's farm and subsequently was never heard from again. There was Emil Tell of Kansas. He left town with $3,000 bound for Belle's farm, and like the others, he sold all of his property before leaving. Many of these men were widowers, like Ull Boldsberg of Wisconsin. He withdrew $2,000 from the bank and then claimed another $2,000 from a mortgage. His sons expected to hear from their father once he got settled, but they never did. We have some surviving letters showing the correspondence between Belle and some of these men,
26:15 Kaelyn Moore? and she really lays it on thick in these letters. One of them even reads, quote, "To the dearest friend in the world, no woman in this world is happier than I am. I know you are now to come to me and be my own. I can tell from your letters that you are the man that I want. When I hear your name mentioned, it is beautiful music to my ears. My heart belts in wild rapture for you. I love you. Come, prepared to stay here forever."
26:47 Kaelyn Moore? Meanwhile, Belle's neighbors noticed that she had essentially a revolving door of gentlemen callers. Emil Greening, who was a farm worker that Belle had hired, noticed that there was a different man coming to call every single week. Belle introduced each of them as cousins, and none of them ever seemed to stay very long. It was really strange to Emil. But what was even stranger was how many of these men seemed to leave their suitcases behind when they departed. And then there was how, the following summer in 1906, Belle hired another man named William. Emil kept to his farm duties, but William was hired to dig a couple of holes
27:31 Kaelyn Moore? in her hog pens, six feet long, three feet wide, and four feet deep. She told William and Emil that these were for trash, but the two men never saw them filled with any garbage. And in spite of all this strangeness, Emil continued working at the farm for the rest of 1906. He was this young guy. He was 19 years old, and he had really taken a liking to Belle's oldest daughter Jenny, who at this point was 16 years old. And he hoped that she liked him too, that maybe one day they could get married and leave this weird little farm. But then, in mid-December of 1906, she abruptly told Emil that her mother was sending her to college in Los Angeles, California. Belle had even
28:15 Kaelyn Moore? arranged for a professor from the college to visit that Christmas. On Christmas Day, Emil watched as the professor and his wife made their way to the farm, but there was also another guy with them, a man from Elbow Lake, Minnesota, named John Mo. Now, Mo was not there with the professor, he was actually answering one of Belle's ads and had even brought $1,100 with him, which seemed very odd to Emil, but at that point, he was used to it. Emil even ended up turning in early for the night because he had such a strange feeling about the group of people that gathered at Belle's that evening. Early the next morning, though, he came downstairs from his room, looking for Jenny. She promised that she
28:58 Kaelyn Moore? would say goodbye before leaving for school, and he wanted to see her just one last time before she left. But the house was dead silent. There was barely any trace that the guests had been there the night before, and Jenny was nowhere to be found. When he finally found Belle, she told him that Jenny had left already. The professor and his wife had taken her to the boarding school out west. But Emil wasn't an idiot. He knew that Jenny wouldn't have left without saying something to him. It took him six more months of work on Belle's farm before he finally had enough money to leave for good, and in that time, he saw many more men come to the farm. And none of them go.
29:44 Kaelyn Moore? At the time of Emil's departure, another man was coming to the farm after seeing Belle's ads, this one from South Dakota. His name was Andrew Hegelien, and he had been writing to Belle for at least a year, and she had been using all of the same flowery language that she used on the other men. Andrew was thoroughly enticed by these letters and he gathered his life savings and made plans to move to La Porte to be with Belle. On the morning of January 3rd, 1908, he arrived at her farm where he was greeted by a man named Ray Lampier. He was a man that Belle hired to replace Emil after he left. And immediately, Ray was confused when he saw Andrew.
30:25 Kaelyn Moore? See, Ray and Belle had been having a bit of a fling and Ray had been telling his drinking buddies that he thought the two of them would be married soon. The only problem was he was a farm hand with no money to his name and Belle was never going to marry someone like that. So Ray turned away from the fire he was building to go confront Andrew about this, only to be interrupted by Belle Guinness herself. She must have not been pleased to see that the man she had been wooing was talking to the man she had been sleeping with. And she told Ray to kindly stop bothering Andrew. Immediately after, she kicked Ray out of his second story room and told him to stay in the
31:03 Kaelyn Moore? barn from now on. And that infuriated him. He was not one to let things go either. And so after that, all of her warmth and all of her energy went into convincing Andrew to become hers. But before the wedding, she had to make sure that he could actually pay up. That following Monday, on January 6th, Belle and Andrew went to the First National Bank where Andrew presented three checks he wanted to cash out for a total of $2,839. The teller informed them that it would take some time to come up with that amount of cash, which clearly annoyed Belle much more than her husband-to-be. Within a week, though, they had all the money and Andrew, like all the rest,
31:45 Kaelyn Moore? was never seen again. But Andrew had something that the other men did not have, something that Belle did not account for, a brother, and one that he was very close to and became increasingly anxious after he hadn't heard from Andrew in 10 days. Enough so that he wanted to go to Belle's farm and figure out what happened to him. Now, back in the day, tracking the location of a person was a lot harder than it is now. So Andrew's brother, Asla, wound up writing to many friends trying to determine where Andrew might be. And when no one had an answer, he had a hired hand search Andrew's place. There, he found dozens of letters written to Andrew by Belle Gunness of La Porte, Indiana.
32:29 Kaelyn Moore? Asla wrote to Belle in early March, asking her where his brother was. And the letter arrived just as Belle was dealing with another problem. Her employee-turned-spurned lover, Ray Lamphier, rather than welcome him back into her house after Andrew's disappearance, she fired him. And Ray did not take this very kindly. He was already upset about being sent to the barn and had even attempted to sue her in order to recover carpentry tools that he left on the property. Belle, in response, had him arrested for trespassing. So you can imagine, when she received the letter from Andrew's brother, she felt like enemies were coming at her from all directions. She ended up writing back to Andrew's brother,
33:11 Kaelyn Moore? saying that she didn't know where Andrew was either. Now, Asla didn't buy this for a single second, but it took him some time to figure out exactly what he was going to do next. And in the meantime, Ray would actually have to go to trial multiple times because Belle kept accusing him of insanity. She said that he threatened her regularly, and that she felt like her life was in danger. And Belle was in danger at the time, but not of death, of discovery.
33:42 Kaelyn Moore? On April 15, 1908, during Ray's second trial for trespassing, the defense attorney sought to undermine Belle's credibility as a witness. And while doing so, he made a connection that no one in the story had made thus far. According to the court transcript, he asked Belle while she was on the stand, quote, "Peter Gunness, your husband, died very suddenly, didn't he? He carried considerable life insurance, didn't he? How did that sausage grinder come to drop on Mr. Gunness's head, anyway?" Each of these questions was followed by a strong objection from the prosecution, and the judge determined that the questioning had gone a little bit too far.
34:25 Kaelyn Moore? But Belle started feeling like a woman surrounded. The lawyer was catching on to her. Ray wasn't going anywhere. And Andrew's brother continued sending her letters from South Dakota, asking where Andrew was. And remember, when Belle got backed into a corner, she took unconventional and somewhat drastic measures. On the morning of April 27th, 1908, Miss Garwood, a teacher at a Quaker school in La Porte, noticed something strange. She taught Myrtle and Lucy Gunness, who were Belle's two youngest daughters. And that morning, both of them had come into school crying. They said that their mother had beaten them horribly for playing in the stairwell that led to the basement.
35:10 Kaelyn Moore? And that was a part of the house that they were strictly forbidden from entering. Miss Garwood was so concerned that she sent the two girls home from school early that day. Meanwhile, Belle Gunness had spent several hours in town with her lawyer rewriting her will. She also told her lawyer that Ray Lamphier had threatened to burn down her house with her and her family in it. And that was really setting the stage for what was to come. Before dawn the next day, April 28th, Joseph Maxon, Ray Lamphier's replacement farmhand, awoke to the smell of smoke. Struggling to breathe, he stumbled out of his room, down the stairs, and out the back entrance of the house.
35:53 Kaelyn Moore? He looked up and saw that the entire farmhouse was on fire. And not knowing what else to do, he grabbed an axe and he tried to re-enter the building, but he found it impossible. And moments later, the roof started collapsing. Word spread really fast amongst those surrounding farms, and people from all over La Porte came down to see if they could help in any way. Someone set up a ladder on the side of the building, and another attempted to check each bedroom from the outside to see if they could rescue Belle or any of her children. But each room was completely empty. And soon, the fires inside were too thick for anyone to go into the house. Joseph then fetched Laporte's sheriff at around five in the morning,
36:37 Kaelyn Moore? but by the time the sheriff arrived, there wasn't anything that could be done. The flames slowly burned out as the sun rose, and all that remained of Belle's farmhouse was a handful of walls and a big pile of rubble. Firemen, policemen, and men from the sheriff's department sifted through that rubble for hours. They tore down the remaining walls for safety, leaving just the basement of the house, a basement that was now filled with still smoldering debris. And by mid-afternoon, they were growing frustrated because they hadn't turned up anything, and they still didn't know where Belle or her daughters were. Then, at 3:45 in the afternoon, a man made the very grim discovery that they were looking for.
37:22 Kaelyn Moore? Four bodies in the southeast corner of the cellar were discovered. Utterly buried in rubble and ash, the children, Lucy, Myrtle, and Philip, were charred and displayed signs of blunt trauma that the investigators thought were from the house falling on them. And next to them was another body that was completely unrecognizable. There was bones protruding from burnt flesh. It was assumed that this was Belle. However, she was unrecognizable because her head was missing. The only reason that they thought this was Belle was because of the body's size, and they made an educated guess. No matter how long they looked,
38:04 Kaelyn Moore? no one could find the head for this body anywhere in the rubble. And the sheriff caught wind that Belle had recently told her lawyer that Ray Lampier wanted to burn down her house with her in it. So he tracked him down for questioning, but Ray had an alibi for the night of the fire. If the place had burned down, it definitely was not because of him. Now, at first, the newspapers reported this as just a senseless, horrible tragedy.
38:29 Kaelyn Moore? Belle's estranged sister Nellie took a train out to La Porte to identify the body. Also arriving in town was Andrew's brother, who continued to search for Andrew amongst the ruins. And once the rubble was fully cleared, Asla found himself dissatisfied. He wandered about the grounds of the farm, wondering if he should go back home and just give up the search for his brother entirely. But then, on a whim, he asked Joseph Maxon if he could recall other holes that were dug on the property in spring. And the farmhand said that he had, and he pointed to them inside of the hog barn. That was where he helped Belle dispose of some garbage, he said.
39:12 Kaelyn Moore? Asla and Maxon just started digging to see what they could find. And that's when they discovered graves. Now, there were a lot of bodies inside these graves, and they were in horrible condition. Dismembered, badly decomposed. And around each body, there were several gunny sacks full of body parts. Many of the bodies were pretty much unrecognizable, and a couple of them were missing their heads, having obviously been beheaded at some point. The men had been buried in quicklime, an ingredient used in cement, which is very corrosive in chemical form. Some of them still had their mustaches on their faces, but other than that, they were completely destroyed.
39:57 Kaelyn Moore? All the skin had melted and decayed. And when I was reading this part, I couldn't help but think of how Homer described the sirens in The Odyssey. He said, quote, "The sirens cast a spell of penetrating song, sitting within a meadow. Nearby is a great heap of rotting human bones. Fragments of skin are shriveling on them." The first body that was unearthed was missing both limbs and its head, which were contained in sacks nearby. Asla knew immediately, though, that this was his brother Andrew. Shortly after, the men dug up a skeleton of a 16-year-old girl. It was Jenny Olsen, and she hadn't gone to California after all.
40:40 Kaelyn Moore? This horror show continued for a while. Word spread fast about the gruesome murder farm that Belle had run in Indiana. On May 10th, a week after the bodies had been discovered, over 16,000 curious individuals trekked out to La Porte to see the ruins for themselves. The event even became something like a county fair with commemorative postcards of the bodies and eager townsfolk selling their services as tour guides. Some of these amateur guides said that the body count was as high as 40, but the truth is somehow less and more disturbing. You see, after a while, the police had just stopped counting the bodies.
41:22 Kaelyn Moore? There were too many unaccounted for body parts and they were all mixed together. And just at the time, they didn't have the technology to figure out what belonged to who. Today, any number of websites will tell you that Belle killed between 14 and 40 people. But from my research and after speaking to Rob, who helped me research this episode, we think that the number is somewhere around 28. And that's still kind of just a guess. And it's taking it on the faith that none of the newspapers we read exaggerated for dramatic effect. Now, as the public took in the horrifying scope of her crimes, speculation began that Belle Gunness had faked her own death. After all, the body was headless. Where did the head go?
42:06 Kaelyn Moore? And if it was Belle who burned down the farm and committed this crime as part of some big scheme, and we don't have any reason to think that it wasn't her, how did she remove her own head? That's a real question I'm asking. If you have any thoughts on this, please comment because I've just been turning that over nonstop, all night, basically. How did she remove her own head? Maybe she staged this whole thing in order to evade the consequences of her crimes and that person that was found in the basement was just someone else. Speculation also ran rampant that Belle didn't work alone. Investigators noticed that Ray Lamphier possessed a pocket watch that belonged to John Moe, one of the men that she murdered.
42:47 Kaelyn Moore? But that was a gift given to him by Bell, he said. He had no idea that it came from a dead man. Ray denied having any knowledge of Bell's crimes, though in November of 1908, he did go to trial. He was acquitted of murder. They figured it wasn't him that murdered the family, but he was convicted of arson in spite of any actual evidence that he started the fire at Bell's farm. The judge gave him a minimum sentence of two years. But Ray would not live to be released from jail. He died after a little over a year from tuberculosis, and less than two weeks after he died, a priest came forward saying that Ray had actually
43:28 Kaelyn Moore? given him a full confession before his death. And to quote the newspaper that covered the story, it says, quote, "Lam fear confessed that he had guilty knowledge of the murder of three men in the Gunness home during the time that he lived there, about eight months in 1907, and he assisted Mrs. Gunness in disposing of the bodies of three men. He said he thought he had not received as much of the profits of the transactions as he considered himself entitled to, and he went to the farmhouse one night with a woman, chloroformed Miss Gunness, her three children, and Jenny Olson. He and the woman then searched the house, finding between $60 and $70. The light they used was a candle, and they left the house without
44:10 Kaelyn Moore? knowing that the spark would soon burst into flames." Now, this almost certainly didn't happen. Jenny had been missing for a while at that point, so it's unlikely she was killed with Bell and the kids. However, the public did think that this confession fully tied up the loose ends of the Bell Gunness story, and it also helped people understand what happened to the men, that they were most likely chloroformed by Bell while they slept, and then were hacked to pieces and buried on the property. Though we will never know for certain exactly what happened. Unless the headless woman wasn't Belle after all. The only thing that was ever found of Belle Gunness's skull was a set of distinctive dental bridges made of porcelain and 18 karat gold.
44:54 Kaelyn Moore? Her dentist did look at them and thought that maybe they did belong to her, but there's never been any more definitive proof than that. Sightings of Belle Gunness appeared for many months after the discovery of the bodies, spanning the whole length of North America. Most of these were determined to be hoaxes or mistakes, but they showed that she had, like a lot of killers before and since, ascended into the collective imagination of America. She had become not just a fugitive, but this monster that was on the loose. Conspiracy theories swirled around the nature of her crimes. Some suspected that Belle was employed by gangsters in Chicago to help dispose of bodies, or that she ran a baby farm disposing of unwanted infants and providing abortion services to poor women in the area.
45:39 Kaelyn Moore? None of these theories ever held up, though. She had no connections with gangsters during her time in Chicago, and she was isolated enough from her neighbors in the port that it's hard to imagine her as someone a pregnant woman would turn to for help. But the monstrous perception of her, fueled by penny dreadfuls and lurid true crime reporting, obscures the actual woman who committed these terrible acts. And in a strange way, it kind of gives this one final parallel to the story with sirens. Homer describes them pretty obliquely. He mentions their songs and monstrous appetites, but little else about them. It was only later myths and artists from the medieval era who expanded the sirens
46:22 Kaelyn Moore? into the sea creatures that we think of today. And likewise, Belle Gunness went from a woman who killed men one at a time to a hired hitman for the mob, who was ingenious enough to fake her own death and evade capture afterwards. But she was never that kind of criminal mastermind. Her schemes were brutal. But they were really simple. And in the end, she had no exit strategy. If you want to learn more about Belle Gunness, I suggest you check out Harold Schechter's book, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men. It was one of the main sources that we used when writing this episode. And if you want to know more about mermaid and siren lore, then, like I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, you can check us out on Patreon and Apple Podcast subscriptions,
47:04 Kaelyn Moore? because we did a bonus episode last month that's all mermaid and siren lore from around the world. And beyond folklore, it also includes some sightings that people have seen around the world of mermaids. So you definitely want to check that out. And if you want kind of behind the scenes looks at the episodes and information that didn't make it into the episodes, you can check out footnotes on the High Council tier of Patreon. We would love to see you guys over there. We give a lot of good extra information, too. Just some stuff that I had to cut out for various reasons from the episodes. Now, you can join me back here next week for another installation of our Monsters series. This time, we're going to be exploring the boogeyman and a time that a faceless villain infiltrated a German family on a small, remote farm. It's a terrifying story, and I hope to see you there for it.
47:49 Kaelyn Moore? And until then, stay curious.
47:56 Kaelyn Moore? Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs. Additional research and writing by Rob Teamstra. Sound design and mix by Petri Sound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Churnigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out heartstarts pounding.com. Do you want more darkly curious stories in your life? Sign up for our Patreon for free and get access to a rotating shelf of bonus content, our weekly Rogue Detecting Society newsletter, and the HSP Book Club. Paid members also get monthly bonus episodes and archive access, which I think is more than 40 episodes at this point. You also get a cool jinx sticker after your first three months. And you can check it all out with a free seven day trial. Link in the bio or go to patreon.com backslash heartstarts pounding.
48:41 Kaelyn Moore? Well, whatever you do, stay curious.
Previous HSP Presents: The Timekeeper Ep. 1 "It's Just a Game." Next HSP Presents: The Timekeeper Ep. 2 "He's Always Watching." Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated