by Paul Martin
Between the late 1890s and 1908, Belle Sorensen Gunness (she married a second time in 1902) is believed to have slain over forty people, including her two husbands and all seven of her children, profiting repeatedly from fraudulent property and life insurance claims and other financial scams.2 Her victims included a string of love-starved, cash-bearing suitors she lured to her farm in Indiana, where, instead of finding romance, the men found violent death. The so-called “Lady Bluebeard” had a streak of the pyromaniac in her. She apparently faked her own demise in a 1908 house fire and disappeared for good, leaving behind a blood-drenched legacy as one of the country’s most notorious lonely hearts killers and our worst female serial killer ever.3
Sorensen’s grim story began on the cold shores of Lake Selbusjoen in central Norway. She was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Storset in November 1859. Her impoverished family lived in a farming village in the municipality of Selbu, a region known today as the birthplace of the Norwegian wool sweater industry. Around 1881, Brynhild immigrated to the United States, where she adopted the name “Belle.” In 1884, she married Mads Sorensen, a Chicago department store guard.
When the candy store she and Mads opened on Grand Avenue failed to prosper, the calculating Mrs. Sorensen found another way to turn a profit—fraud. Less than a year after the store was opened, a fire destroyed the well-insured shop. Sorensen was present when the blaze broke out. She raised the alarm, telling authorities that a kerosene lamp had exploded. The money Sorensen collected enabled her and Mads to buy a new house on the city’s West Side. It also paved the way for Sorensen’s occupational makeover, one that entailed far less hard work and a generous helping of mayhem.
The most shocking aspect of Sorensen’s criminality was the ease with which she directed her violence at her own family. She and Mads claimed four children in a 1900 census. Two of their children, Caroline and Axel, died as infants. The official cause of death for both was listed as acute colitis—a malady whose symptoms parallel those of strychnine poisoning.4 As with her store, Sorensen had insured her children and collected a payout on the two deaths. She still had little Myrtle and Lucy to look after, and there was an older girl in the household as well, a foster child named Jennie Olsen. None of the children would live to adulthood.
In addition to the deaths of Caroline and Axel, other mishaps befell the Sorensens around this time. Their new house in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood was destroyed by fire, generating an additional insurance check that paid for yet another home. That was followed by the death of Mads Sorensen, who perished on July 30, 1900—the only day that his two life insurance policies overlapped, boosting his widow’s payout significantly. Poor old Mads died of convulsions, which the family doctor attributed to his heart condition. Other observers noted that the deceased’s symptoms closely resembled strychnine poisoning.5
The ostentatiously grief-stricken Mrs. Sorensen collected an insurance windfall of $8,500 (she pulled herself together long enough to apply for the money the day after the funeral). Along with the $5,000 she got for selling their home, Sorensen had amassed a tidy nest egg—equivalent to nearly $350,000 today.6 With her newfound wealth, she packed up the surviving kids and made for the Indiana countryside northwest of La Porte, where, in November 1901, she purchased a hog farm with a two-story brick home. Sorensen was about to enter the most prosperous—and bloody—period of her murderous life.
In April 1902, Sorensen married a Norwegian man from La Porte named Peter Gunness. Their union was star-crossed from the outset. Just one week after the wedding, Peter Gunness’s seven-month-old daughter from an earlier marriage died of unknown causes while she was alone in the house with her new stepmother. In December of the same year, tragedy struck again when a sausage grinder fell on Peter Gunness’s head and did him in. His widow had to find solace in her husband’s $3,000 life insurance policy.7
The locals were curious about two mysterious deaths occurring in the same family in such a short span of time, especially in light of a remark one of Belle’s daughters made to a classmate: “My momma killed my poppa,” the girl is said to have confided to a friend. “She hit him with a cleaver and he died.”8 The comment naturally caused an uproar, but the kindly people of La Porte took pity on the twice-widowed Mrs. Gunness when they learned that she was pregnant with her late husband’s child (she would give birth to a son, Philip). The coroner’s inquest looking into Peter Gunness’s suspicious death dropped the matter and Bloody Belle went about her business.
Fresh out of husbands to clobber or poison, Gunness turned to the lonely hearts columns for a new stream of income. Not long after Husband Number Two was safely tucked away, she ran the following advertisement in several newspapers aimed at Scandinavian readers: “Personal—comely widow who owns a large farm in one of the finest districts in La Porte County, Indiana, desires to make the acquaintance of a gentleman equally well provided, with view of joining fortunes. No replies by letter considered unless sender is willing to follow answer with personal visit. Triflers need not apply.”9
Soon after the ads appeared, a lengthy procession of suitors began calling. How Gunness attracted all those men speaks to the innate desperation of the male contingent of our species. Gunness was by no means an attractive woman. In her forties by this time, she bore a striking resemblance to grizzled baseball manager Leo Durocher. A newspaper article described her as “a coarse, fat, heavy-featured woman . . . with a big head covered with a mop of mud-colored hair, small eyes, huge hands and arms, and a gross body with difficulty supported on feet grotesquely small.”10 Another newspaper description said she had a “generally vicious appearance” and lacked “womanly characteristics.”11 Her personality wasn’t all that winsome either. In a family portrait taken with Myrtle, Lucy, and baby Philip, she wore an expression of barely suppressed rage, as if she were itching to strangle the photographer. But then, owning a nice spread in prime farm country could make up for a few deficiencies.
One of the suitors who hauled up on Mrs. Gunness’s doorstep was fifty-year-old John Moo of Elbow Lake, Minnesota. Moo brought along a thousand dollars to pay off Mrs. Gunness’s mortgage (that was her standard ploy for wangling money out of her visitors). Mr. Moo disappeared less than a week after his arrival.
Widower Ole Budsberg of Iola, Wisconsin, also came a-courting. After mortgaging his farm and withdrawing a large sum at the La Porte Savings Bank, Ole vanished. When his sons wrote to determine their father’s whereabouts, Gunness told them she had no idea where he was, but that she was still willing to marry him if he could be located.12
Herman Konitzberg of Chicago showed up with a hatful of cash, as did Henry Gurholdt of Scandinavia, Wisconsin; George Berry of Tuscola, Illinois; Bert Chase of Mishawaka, Indiana; and Charles Ermond of New Castle, Pennsylvania. No one ever saw any of them again after their visits to the Gunness farm.
Andrew Helgelein, a farmer from Aberdeen, South Dakota, exchanged a series of letters with Gunness. Even though she hadn’t met him in person, Gunness professed her love for Helgelein, writing, “I can tell from your letters that you are the man I want.” She added prophetically, “Come prepared to stay forever.”13 Shortly after Helgelein showed up in La Porte and cashed a large check, he too disappeared.
The only suitor who met Belle Gunness face-to-face and lived to tell about it appears to have been George Anderson of Tarkio, Missouri. Anderson only managed to survive because he hadn’t brought all his money with him. Gunness insisted that he send home for the rest of his savings. While waiting for the money to arrive, Anderson slept in the guest bedroom. On his last night there, he awoke to find Gunness leaning over him with a malevolent look in her eyes. Terrified, Anderson jumped up, grabbed his clothes, and dashed out of the house, to his good fortune.
Evidently, Gunness’s favorite method of dispatching her victims was to drug or poison them at dinner and then brain them while they slept.14 At five foot eight and well over two hundred pounds, Gunness was a powerful woman, strong enough to butcher her ow
n hogs, so manhandling a measly human would have been no great challenge for her, and the grounds of her farm provided a convenient place to get rid of the bodies.
Gunness’s grisly moneymaking scheme continued until the early months of 1908. That’s when she began having trouble with the hired help. After her second husband’s death, Gunness had employed a local handyman, Ray Lamphere, to assist her in running the farm. Lamphere fell in love with Gunness, despite witnessing the parade of gentlemen callers she entertained. When Lamphere began pressing his attentions on his employer, she fired him. She then started building a public case against the man, complaining to the sheriff that he’d threatened her and telling county authorities that Lamphere was mentally unbalanced.
In truth, Lamphere wasn’t her chief concern. She was more worried about the brother of Andrew Helgelein. Asle Helgelein had written Gunness to find out what had happened to his brother after he didn’t return home from his trip to La Porte. Gunness replied that she didn’t know where Andrew was, but that she would help search for him if Asle would “sell off everything he owns, get together as much of your own money as you can and come here.”15 Gunness may have sensed it was time to make one final score and move on. To set the stage for her escape, she called on a lawyer in La Porte to draw up her will, telling him that she needed the document because Ray Lamphere had threatened to murder her and her children and burn down their house.16
Early the next morning—April 28, 1908—Gunness’s new hired man, Joe Maxson, was awakened by the smell of smoke. Stumbling out of his bedroom, he found the house on fire. After shouting to alert the sleeping Gunness family, Maxson escaped from the burning house and ran to get help, but by the time the La Porte firefighters finally made it out to the Gunness farm the house was destroyed. Looking through the smoldering ruins, the firemen found four bodies in the basement—the three Gunness children, Myrtle, Lucy, and Philip, along with an adult victim, presumed to be their mother, although, strangely, the head of the adult victim was missing.17 Ray Lamphere was immediately arrested for murder and arson.
While searching the farm for the missing head of the adult victim, investigators made a shocking discovery. Buried out in the yard were several more bodies. Some had been hacked up and stuffed in gunnysacks. Asle Helgelein, who’d just arrived in town, identified the remains of his brother. Another body was identified as Jennie Olsen, Gunness’s foster daughter, who’d been absent from the household for more than a year (Gunness had spread the story that she’d sent the girl to school in another state). Three other bodies were identified as those of missing suitors John Moo, Ole Budsberg, and Henry Gurholdt.
The remains of the four fire victims and Andrew Helgelein were examined and found to contain high levels of arsenic and strychnine. The situation grew more tangled when authorities found some of Belle Gunness’s dental bridgework in the ashes of her home. At first, the teeth appeared to indicate that Gunness had died in the fire, although they’d miraculously survived the conflagration in excellent condition, a physical impossibility according to tests. It seemed likely the teeth were a plant, and there was other evidence that things were amiss. Just days before the fire, Gunness had purchased a large quantity of kerosene and withdrawn most of her money from local banks. Also, the bodies discovered in the basement were pinned beneath the family piano, which had fallen from the first-floor parlor. If the fire victims had died in their second-floor bedrooms, they couldn’t have ended up underneath the piano.
Suddenly, newspapers that had been reporting sympathetically about the deaths of Mrs. Gunness and her children began running stories about the Indiana “House of Horrors,” raising the question of whether Belle Gunness had faked her own death and pulled a vanishing act.18 Doctors determined that the headless fire victim would have been about five feet three and around one hundred fifty pounds—a much smaller woman than Belle Gunness (the body may have been that of Mae O’Reilly, a domestic worker hired by Gunness who was never seen again after the fire).19 Despite the confusion, Ray Lamphere was still prosecuted for the murders of Gunness and her children. Found innocent of the killings but guilty of arson, he died shortly after being sent to prison. Just before his death, he confided to a fellow inmate that he’d assisted Gunness in disposing of the bodies of her many victims and had helped her escape the day before the fire.20 No one knows if what he said was true.
As for Belle Gunness, she quickly passed into myth. The same issue of the New York Tribune that announced the headless victim’s body couldn’t have been that of Mrs. Gunness because of its size also ran an article about the murderess being spotted on the streets of Chicago. The claims were highly unreliable though. The article stated that she’d “been seen in several parts of the city and on different streetcars at the same time.”21 Even a devil like Gunness couldn’t have pulled that off. The Tribune reinforced the suspicion that Gunness had murdered her own children, noting that the foreheads of all three victims appeared to have been bashed in.
In the following years, Gunness sightings were reported all over the country, none of them ever substantiated. Exactly what became of the woman was never discovered, although someone matching her description was arrested in Los Angeles in 1931 for poisoning a rich businessman. The woman went by the name of Esther Carlson, but two former residents of La Porte who were then living in California identified her as Belle Gunness. The woman’s friends insisted she was really a Swedish immigrant named Esther Johnson. Whoever the prisoner actually was, she died in jail before she could be brought to trial.
The legend of Belle Gunness, however, didn’t end in a Los Angeles jail cell. It continued to grow, sometimes in curious ways. Magazine covers depicted her as a beautiful Gibson Girl or glamorous flapper. In 1955, Gold Medal Books published a biography called The Truth about Belle Gunness. The cover featured a gorgeous, chesty blonde in the tradition of bodice-ripping romance novels, with a provocative blurb proclaiming that “men swarmed like flies to her embrace and one by one were loved—and died.”22 Hokie poems and ballads were written about the bloodthirsty black widow (“Lay that cleaver down, Belle, Lay that cleaver down”). She also inspired the 2004 movie Method, with the beautiful Elizabeth Hurley slowly going nuts in the starring role.23 And Gunness’s lonely hearts murders even have contemporary relevance—as a warning about the dangers of searching for love long distance via the Internet.
Countless unanswered questions remain about this horrible woman, but this much has been established as fact: the bodies of at least ten victims were dug up on Gunness’s Indiana “murder farm.”24 The death list doubles if you add in the four burned bodies found in the basement of the home, plus Gunness’s two dead husbands, her two children who died in Chicago, and Peter Gunness’s infant daughter. And the list doubles again if all the missing suitors whose bodies were never found are counted. Handyman Ray Lamphere said that Gunness killed forty-two men on her farm—by no means an unbelievable number.25
Judging from old newspaper articles, people of Gunness’s time were fascinated with this perverted creature in the same way that we’re drawn to storybook monsters. But Gunness wasn’t some made-up bogeyman. She was disgustingly real, a woman bereft of human feelings or maternal instincts. Belle Gunness was obviously an irredeemable psychopath, a person whose bloodlust had to have been fueled by something deeper and darker than greed (even though her sister said she was “crazy for money”).26 Gunness could have lived in ease for the rest of her days with the proceeds from her Chicago crimes, but she was driven to continue luring victims to her Indiana lair when there was no compelling reason for her to do so other than for the thrill of getting away with murder—the most frightening motivation of all for taking a human life.
Isaac Harris and Max Blanck
Max Blanck (left) and Isaac Harris
The afternoon of March 25, 1911, was a fine time to be out and about in Greenwich Village. On this bracing Saturday in early spring, New Yorkers with errands to run hurried along the streets with collars raised against the
gusty winds, their pale winter faces knotted in concentration. Weekend idlers casually sized up the passing crowd from park benches or took their ease indoors—maybe reading a book in the old Astor Library over on Lafayette or nursing a drink in a cozy MacDougal Street café.
For the five hundred workers of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, however, it was just another workday. Occupying the top three floors of the Asch Building—a modern ten-story structure on the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street just off Washington Square—the Triangle factory produced the long-sleeved women’s blouses known as shirtwaists . . . and lots of them, more than a thousand a day.1 Modeled on men’s shirts, the blouses were part of the Gibson Girl look and had become the unofficial uniform of working women everywhere.
The factory’s seamstresses, mostly Eastern European and Italian immigrants, sat elbow-to-elbow at long rows of tables, hunched over their ceaselessly clattering sewing machines for hours on end six days a week. Even though the ten-year-old building’s lofty ceilings and large windows were improvements over the typical cave-like sweatshops of early-twentieth-century America, the seamstresses still faced the usual problems of overcrowding, long hours, and abysmal pay. And the poorly ventilated factory lacked basic safety features such as sprinkler systems and reliable emergency exits. But then worker output was the main concern here, not creature comforts.
Late in 1909, the Triangle seamstresses had gone on strike to better their conditions. They were joined by other New York garment workers in the largest walkout of women employees in the country’s history.2 While the strike forced smaller factories to agree to raises, shorter hours, and improved working conditions, the owners of the Triangle factory refused to give in. Isaac Harris and Max Blanck—known as the “Shirtwaist Kings” for their domination of the industry—paid hooligans to beat up the women picketers.3 But after three months, even the wealthy Harris and Blanck were ready to make a few token concessions. The men agreed to minimally higher wages and shorter hours, although they adamantly refused to recognize the garment workers’ union. They also disregarded complaints about workplace safety.4 On this brisk March afternoon, that last oversight would foster a national tragedy.
