Welcome to part two of my weird, creepy series called Five Women Who Should be as Notorious as Lizzie Borden. This one is a doozy and I’m shocked that I had never heard of Belle Gunness, a woman arguably considered one of the most prolific female serial killers of all time.
A Norwegian native, Belle moved to the United States in 1981 at the age of 22. Like many Norwegians of that period, she ended up in the Midwest. A strong believer in insurance policies, Belle had two taken out on both her first two children, who both died of intestine infections and two taken out on her husband who died of a brain hemorrhage. With the payouts, she bought a pig farm in LaPorte, Indiana. (She was a big, strong woman with deep agricultural roots.)
She remarried and after her husband skull was crushed by a meat grinder, (he was reaching up on a shelf to get something down and the meat-grinder fell on his head. TOTAL ACCIDENT, I’m sure), Belle collected $3000 from insurance.
Anyhoooooo, Belle must have discovered that she liked money but disliked men because she started placing adds in newspapers searching for a husband. Belle would correspond with each potential suiter, no doubt to discern how well to do they were. They were then instructed to come to her farm with their money and tell no one. (Like that’s not suspicious? No alarm bells, guys?)
The crazy thing is… THEY DID. *blinks rapidly*
After a fire burned the Gunness farm to the ground, inspectors found the remains of a headless women, they assumed to be Belle, as well as the remains of her three children. Upon further inspection, the inspectors found so many bodies buried around the farm that they lost count. Her on again off again lover and farm hand confessed that he had burned the house with the children in it as instructed by Belle. The headless women was actually a murder victim.
Wait, what?
The farm became a tourist attraction where you could buy souvenirs because people are apparently weird and macabre, and several movies and songs were written about her. So definitely almost as notorious than Lizzie Borden and honestly sort of makes Lizzie’s alleged crime seem like nothing.
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More on the Gunness Murders
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