Happy Saturday. Today, we are going back to our previous episode on Belle Gunnis, which is part murder story and part history mystery. Her crimes were discovered after a fire in 1988, but whether she perished in that fire is still a little unclear. This episode is from previous hosts, Sarah and Lena, and it came out September 28th, 2011.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast, I'm Tambellini Chakraborty. And I'm Sarah Downey. And this topic, the topic of this episode was a suggestion from listener Jessie. And I feel like I should say that because it's such a gruesome story, I don't want Sarah to be mad at me for picking it.

It does have a decapitated body. Yeah, that's true. Why are you put in that category? No, that's not why I selected it. I selected it because it was a listener's suggestion.

And it is an interesting story. It's a fascinating mystery. And you know how we love those.

It starts at least for most of the world. This is when it started with a fire that took place the morning of April 28th, 1968, at a small farm just outside of Laporte, Indiana, which was then a town of about 10000, about 60 miles from Chicago. And the farm was owned by a widow named Belle Gunnis. And her home there was completely destroyed by the fire.

But it was after the fire that the real mystery started. So four charred bodies were found in the cellar and three appeared to be the bodies of kinases, children Myrtle Sorenson, Lucy Sorensen and Phillip Gunnis, who were 11, nine and five years old, respectively. The fourth body, though, was kind of a puzzle. And like I said, that's where the mystery really started. Yeah.

First people assume that the body was goodness's makes sense, right? It's a woman's body and gunnis lived there. So you imagine that she would be there with her kids.

But there were a couple of problems right off the bat.

People thought that the body seemed a little too small to be able.

She was a woman of some stature. Let's say she was about five, eight and approximately 230 pounds. And this body appeared to belong to someone who was much shorter and lighter. It was also missing ahead, making it even harder to confirm the identity.

I should correct my earlier statement. This is why I thought you might have selected because of the hair. I know you like missing heads, but only with the Ned Kelly things. OK, ok, well in Henry the fourth two. Oh woops.

OK, never mind.

But what really made people suspicious about this? This find was the arrival of a man named Ophélie Helgeland who came on the scene looking for his brother Andrew, and he said that Andrew had been corresponding with Bell and insisted that the police search the property to look for this missing brother. What they found, though, was really disturbing. Andrew's dismembered body, plus the body of a lot of other people.

So listener Jessie commented on what a media storm the story would have created if it had happened today. But it actually started a bit of a media frenzy back then, too, as more bodies were dug up and it became more and more clear that Bell had been a ruthless killer. Newspapers gave her catchy nicknames like The Mistress of Murder Hill and Lady Bluebeard.

But who was Bell Gunnis, really?

And why and how did she kill all of these people? And another question, which is probably one of the main questions that people want to know now, did she really die in that 1988 fire? So we're going to look at all of the stuff, but we're going to start with that first question. Who was balcony's?

So we don't know too much about Ballgowns early life, except that she was born in a small village in Norway on November 22nd, 1859, and her name was originally brindled. Paul's daughter stauss that and her family was very poor. And several sources actually suggest that her father may have been a stonemason and that she probably had to work as a farmhand at an early age to help her family make ends meet. But what we do know is that sometime in or shortly after 1881, Brindled immigrated to the United States in her early 20s, specifically to Chicago, and changed her name to Bell.

She had a sister named Nellie Larsen, who had immigrated to Chicago also. So she had a connection there, but she again returned to pretty grueling work. Yeah.

And again, we don't know too much about those first years in the United States for Bell, but we do know that she probably worked as a house servant, which would have been pretty tough work.

And she probably didn't like it very much because her sister was later quoted as saying, quote, Bell was crazy for money and working as a house servant would not have afforded her much of that.

By about 1884, she married a man named Max Mad's Sorensen, who was also a Norwegian immigrant. But that wouldn't have really been her ticket to instant wealth either, though he was a department store detective and later worked for the Chicago Railroad. In the nineties, they opened up a confectioner shop in downtown Chicago, but that wasn't very successful. It was, however, insured. Oh, indeed. The building actually burned down around a year into their business venture and after that they were able to collect a little bit of insurance money.

Maybe doesn't seem like such a big deal on the surface, but this kicked off a. For Bell, that would probably raise a few red flags today, in 1898, the Sorensen's house also burned down and they collected insurance money for that. And the couple's first two kids who were also insured, died in infancy officially of acute colitis.

But now, looking back, people say the symptoms are similar to if they had been poisoned.

OK, so even if you look at all of that is just really, really bad luck or really weird coincidence. What happens next has to make you a little bit suspicious, at least so mad. Sorensen dies on July 30th, 1900, which just happens to be the one day that two life insurance policies from different mutual associations overlapped.

Officially, the cause of death was heart failure, but his symptoms actually indicated strychnine poisoning. And the insurance payout because of those two policies was pretty huge, eight thousand five hundred dollars. And that was quite a large sum for the time. And it said that Bell tried to go collect it just a day after the funeral. So she was certainly not playing the part of the grieving widow. It was probably suspicious, but there wasn't an autopsy. So Bell got the insurance money and went on our way.

She did. She used the money, actually, to buy the farm on the outskirts of Laport. And she moved there with three kids, Jenny, Myrdal and Lucy. And just an aside here about the kids, it's generally accepted that Jenny, whose full name was probably Jenny Olson, was a foster child.

But some say that none of Bell's children were her own. According to an article by Ted Hartsell in American history, BHEL sister Nellie Larson once said that Bell never had any children of her own, though she would at times have as many as 12 children in her care. So just an interesting thing to think about as we go on.

I mean, maybe there was some money associated with fostering children. You know, maybe you got some money from the government for that or something.

You know, it's something that people don't focus on the most when they're talking about bulkiness. But it's something that stuck out to me definitely in her story. It's unusual.

So in 1982, Bill married again and her second husband this time was a widower and a butcher by trade name Peter Gomes, who was also a native of Norway, and Peter Gunnis came to the marriage with two kids already. One was an infant named Jenny, and she mysteriously died just a week after the wedding when she was home alone with Bell and the other was a five year old girl.

And after that incident with the baby, she was removed from her father and Bel's care and taken away by her uncle to Wisconsin. Peter Gunnis didn't really last that much longer. Only eight months after the wedding, he was struck on the head by a heavy cast iron sausage grinder that fell off of a kitchen shelf.

And it was a fatal injury that, according to Herzl's article, was, quote, augmented by the crock of hot brine that, quote, fell on him simultaneously.

Sounds kind of suspicious, doesn't it? Yeah, you would think so.

And in fact, Bel's fourteen year old foster daughter was said to have told people after that that she had seen Mama smack him on the head with a cleaver. But later she denied this when she was questioned by the coroner, the coroner and other people actually were suspicious of this. But ultimately, there was no evidence. So they had to Bible story and she collected another 3500 dollars in insurance money.

But after Peter kinases death, Bell started taking out matrimonial ads in Scandinavian newspapers. She's looking for love. She describes herself as good looking, quote, stout, quote, womanly, an example of how one of these ads might read, quote, comely widow who owns a large farm in one of the finest districts of Laporte County, Indiana, desires to make the acquaintance of a gentleman equally well provided with a view of joining Fortune's No Replies by letter considered unless lender is willing to follow answer with personal visit.

And probably my favorite part of these ads, they'd end with lines like Tricolours need not apply, though she wanted serious inquiry. She was not messing around. No, and she didn't just want to chat either. No scrubs.

Exactly. She got several responses to these ads and basically this is how it worked.

She started exchanging letters with a guy and they would get to know each other. She'd tell him how great her setup at the farm was, tell him, you know, expressed some sort of affection or something, tell him that she loved him, even make veiled sexual overtures.

But at the same time, she made it clear that she expected these guys to bring something to the relationship, namely cash. So after corresponding with the guy for a while, she'd invite him to Laport, but encourage him to sell all of his belongings and property beforehand and bring the cash along with you.

Like I got the farm. We just need the money. Come and bring it. Yeah, but here's the catch. She didn't want any of these guys to tell anyone close to them what they were doing.

So guys would show up, run a few errands with her. Usually one of those errands would be to the bank, go to her house, and then they'd pretty much never be seen again.

And this happened with several men, including a guy named John Moe, another named Ollie Budd Seberg. Both were from Wisconsin. And if anybody at all came looking for these guys after the fact, Belle would just say that she hadn't seen him or. Oh, yeah, they were here, but they left. And that's what she'd tell her. Suspicious neighbors, too, because they would see these men go in and then never come out again. And she just say they had left at night.

They were gone already. And in 1986, something happened that really people couldn't ignore quite as much. Belle's foster daughter, Jenny, disappeared, but Bill had an excuse there, too. She told people that Jenny had gone off to college in California, making something of herself, it seemed. Yeah.

And it seemed the daughter being missing was barely a hiccup for her. She just kept up the letter writing. And Belle's Melman even said that she wrote around 10 letters a day and got about the same number back in the mail.

And on days that she didn't get any letters, she would be kind of upset, kind of cranky. So this all went smoothly for her, relatively so until she struck up a correspondence with South Dakota farmer Andrew held the line.

Presumably she used the same strategy on him that she did with others. His brother later found some of their letters and several of these have actually been preserved. So people have translated them. They're written in Norwegian and and saw the kind of methods that she used in talking to them. Exactly.

So throughout the letters, Belle would constantly remind him about bringing the money to Laport and give him all kinds of advice about how to bring it to her.

She would say, you know, tell him the denomination of the bills to bring and tell him to sew it inside his underwear and that he again, that he shouldn't tell anybody about it and just kept sort of repeating these things throughout. And Catherine Ramsland, who is a forensic psychologist who's written about the gunnis case, says Bel's technique of writing. Really harping on the money thing is actually a technique called seeding that's used in hypnosis, so she would try to implant this idea of bringing her money into his unconscious mind with constant repetition.

It seems a little suspicious.

I mean, I guess they they were distracted almost by the sentiments that were also in her letter because she would appeal to the needs of the the immigrant man to he was probably lonely and homesick in South Dakota. And her talk of Norway probably comforted him.

They weren't they weren't all just about the money. You know, they could relate. They could relate to each other. It seemed like a promising relationship.

So after a year and a half of writing these letters back and forth, Andrew came to Laport in early 1988 and then vanished just like all of the other guys.

But Bell wasn't banking on with his brother, Ostler, who knew where Andrew had gone. So Andrew must have broken one of those rules of bells. Yeah, tell anyone.

Yeah, he he broke that rule.

I think he didn't actually follow instructions either as far as selling his farm and, you know, sewing the bills and his underwear and all those things. He did have a lot of money sent to the bank and Laport, but he didn't necessarily follow all the rules.

But Özal was concerned and he started writing Tobel. He really thought that his brother was going to return in a week or so. And so when he didn't, he he reached out and he didn't believe Bel's explanations that Andrea had simply gone away.

Around the same time Bill had some other trouble, she fired her hired hand, Ray Lanphier, and he was said to be in love with her.

He was probably jealous of all the guys coming around, who knows? But he started making public scenes after he was let go.

And Bill tried to take legal action against him and have him declared insane, though maybe it was the combination of pressure from this, as well as some increasing questions from these relatives of the men who she'd written to, as well as questions from her neighbors. But on April 27th, 1988, Bell kept her kids home from school and she went into town and saw her lawyer and wrote her will. And she was also seen buying a lot of kerosene. So went into town and did some did some errands.

Of course, in the intro, we know what happened next.

Her house burned down, the bodies were found and ultimately they found between 12 and 14 bodies, including the body of the foster daughter, Jenny, who hadn't gone off to college and a couple of other unidentified children. And there were several theories as to what happened with the fire immediately after. A lot of people thought that Bill had committed suicide because she was afraid that all of her crimes were about to come to light, that they had been discovered.

Lanphier, however, was the one that the police immediately arrested. Bell had told her lawyer the day before that she was afraid of him and he was charged with four counts of murder and with arson. So it seemed initially that that maybe he was to blame.

It was found later, though, that the four people in the cellar had died by means other than the fire. They had probably been poisoned by strychnine. They found traces of strychnine in their bodies, actually, but the bodies had been mishandled so that they couldn't prove it.

So at landfill's trial in May 1998, he was only convicted of arson. He died less than two years later in prison. And on his deathbed, he confessed to setting the house on fire and to helping Bell escape. He said the headless body belonged to a woman from Chicago whom Bell had just hired as a housekeeper. She killed the housekeeper and the three children and planted the bodies to make it look like an accident. He also admitted to helping Bell bury the other victims, although he said that he wasn't involved in actually murdering them.

But he did describe how Bell did murder her victims.

It turns out that she poisoned a lot of them, some of them, she left their bodies intact, some of them she butchered some of the bodies.

She actually dropped into a vat of hot water and then covered with quicklime, which is a substance that kind of burns like acid. So I'm assuming she did this to disguise the bodies.

So who knows how many of these details are actually accurate.

But this is probably the closest scenario to most to what most people think happened.

As far as Bell, what happened to Bell after the fire, though? Nobody knows for certain what happened to her after that or to her money. Historians estimate that she may have extorted up to 90000 dollars from her suitors, but the day after the fire, there was only 700 in her Laport bank account.

So we mentioned in the beginning that Bell story did get a lot of attention at the time. And since then, she's become sort of a spooky local legend in that part of Indiana. Neighbor has, for instance, claimed to have seen her in the weeks after the fire. And there have been numerous bell sightings since then. But the most notable one happened in Los Angeles in 1931. So a considerable amount of time after after her disappearance, a woman named Esther Carlson was accused of poisoning a man she worked for named Auguste Lindstrom for two thousand dollars that he'd put in a joint bank account.

And Carlson died before this went to trial. But a couple people familiar with Bell, they were Laport residents who were in Los Angeles at the time, claimed a newspaper photo of Carlson, matched that of Bell. And others also confirm the connection.

But there wasn't any definitive proof that this was the same woman still up to her old murdering ways all the way in L.A..

Yeah, so, I mean, the question is still out there. Did she die in the fire or not? It's really tough to say. I mean, people have wondered about this for years. Authorities eventually found a dental bridge with one tooth in it and the ruins of the fire that a dentist positively identified as Bel's. But historians were hardly convinced, Dennis.

And how can we I mean, if you were going to fake your death in a fire, leave behind your dental bridge?

Yeah, another point that I found in some of my research was, OK, Bill Gunnis is obviously a psychopath. She's killed all of these people. So is she really going to care to pull out one tooth to leave in this dental bridge?

Probably not when you look at it that way. People have not let this go, though. In 2007, late 2007, Suzanne Mackay, a great granddaughter of Belgin, is a sister and one of the last living relatives of the infamous serial killer gave a team of U.S. researchers.

Permission to exhume the headless body that was found in the cellar of the torched farmhouse and they were going to compare the DNA from the remains there to saliva samples from Bellfield, sealed letters.

So as far as we know, the tests were inconclusive with that. And I think that they got a sample from a DNA sample from the family member also. And we're trying to test that as well. And I looked for more recent updates on that. And I couldn't find anything more recent in the last couple of years.

So I don't know for sure if they were able to find a match or not.

I think what they're really looking for is to find the opposite of that is to find that there's not a match because most people believe that it was her that bill's missing.

And then, you know, the mystery will still stand.

Where did she go and what did she do? Yeah. Yeah, if we jinxed Ablana. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook Eurail or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete. Now, our current email address is History podcast at I, heart radio dot com, our old HowStuffWorks.

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