Gunness, Belle (1860–c. 1908)
Gunness, Belle (1860–c. 1908)
American murderer . Born in 1860; may have died in a house fire in 1908; married Mr. Gunness (a farmer); three children.
A Norwegian immigrant who settled with her husband on a farm outside of La Porte, Indiana, Belle Gunness was involved in a grisly series of murders beginning with her husband, whose skull she crushed with a hatchet. Telling the coroner's jury that the hatchet "slipped from the shelf" and killed her husband accidentally, she was believed and acquitted. Later, Gunness began to advertise for a husband in the lovelorn columns, luring dozens of men to her farm, supposedly drugging and strangling them, then chopping their bodies up for hog feed and burying their bones in her pigsty. On April 28, 1908, her deeds came to light when a fire devastated her farm house. Along with her body and those of her children, searchers inadvertently found the remains of 13 victims, although there may have been more. There was later speculation that Belle set the fire herself, substituting the corpse of a female friend for her own, then absconding with the money from her victims to live out her life in San Francisco.