Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm to blame a chocolate boarding and I'm fired out
Speaker 1: and this topic the topic of this episode was a
Speaker 1: suggestion from listener Jesse, and I feel like I should
Speaker 1: say that because it's such a gruesome story. I don't
Speaker 1: want Sarah to be mad at me for picking it.
Speaker 1: It does have a decapitated body. Yeah, that's true. Are
Speaker 1: you putting that in the plus category? No, that's not
Speaker 1: why I selected it. I selected it because it was
Speaker 1: a listener's suggestion, and it is an interesting story. It's
Speaker 1: a fascinating mystery, and you know how we love those.
Speaker 1: It starts, at least for most of the world, this
Speaker 1: is when it started with a fire that took place
Speaker 1: the morning of April eight at a small farm just
Speaker 1: outside of Laporte, Indiana, which was then a town of
Speaker 1: about ten thousand, about sixty miles from Chicago, and the
Speaker 1: farm was owned by a widow named Bell Gunness, and
Speaker 1: her home there was completely destroyed by the fire. But
Speaker 1: it was after the fire that the real mystery started.
Speaker 1: So four charred bodies were found in the cellar and
Speaker 1: three appeared to be the bodies of Gunnis's children, Myrtle Sorensen,
Speaker 1: Lucy Sorensen, and Philip Gunnis, who were eleven, nine and
Speaker 1: five years old, respectively. The fourth body, though, was kind
Speaker 1: of a puzzle, and like I said, that's where the
Speaker 1: mystery really started. Yeah. First, people assumed that the body
Speaker 1: was Gunnesses. Makes sense, right, It's a woman's body, and
Speaker 1: Gonnas live there, so you imagine that she would be
Speaker 1: there with her kids. But there were a couple of
Speaker 1: problems right off the bat. People thought that the body
Speaker 1: seemed a little too small to be bell. She was
Speaker 1: a woman of some stature. Let's say she was about
Speaker 1: five eight and approximately two thirty pounds, and this body
Speaker 1: appeared to belong to someone who was much shorter and lighter.
Speaker 1: It was also missing head, making it even harder to
Speaker 1: confirm the identity. I should correct my earlier statement. This
Speaker 1: is why I thought you might have selected because of
Speaker 1: the head. I know you like missing heads, but only
Speaker 1: with the ned Kelly things. Okay, okay, well, and Henry
Speaker 1: the fourth too. Whoops, Okay, never mind. But what really
Speaker 1: made people suspicious about this this find was the arrival
Speaker 1: of a man named awful Hell Glen who came on
Speaker 1: the scene looking for his brother Andrew, and he said
Speaker 1: that Andrew had been corresponding with Bell and insisted that
Speaker 1: the police searched the property and a look for this
Speaker 1: missing brother. What they found, though, was really disturbing, Andrew's
Speaker 1: dismembered body plus the body of a lot of other people.
Speaker 1: So listener Jesse commented on what a media storm the
Speaker 1: story would have created if it had happened today. But
Speaker 1: it actually started a bit of a media frenzy back
Speaker 1: then too, as more bodies were dug up and it
Speaker 1: became more and more clear that Bell had been a
Speaker 1: ruthless kill or. Newspapers gave her catchy nicknames like the
Speaker 1: Mistress of Murder Hill and Lady blue Beard. But who
Speaker 1: was Bell Gunnis really and why and how did she
Speaker 1: kill all of these people? And another question, which is
Speaker 1: probably one of the main questions that people want to
Speaker 1: know now, did she really die in that nine eight fire.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna look at all of the stuff, but
Speaker 1: we're gonna start with that first question. Who was Bell Gunnis?
Speaker 1: So we don't know too much about Bell Gunnis's early life,
Speaker 1: except that she was born in a small village in
Speaker 1: Norway on November eighteen fifty nine, and her name was
Speaker 1: originally Brynhild, Paul's daughter store Set, and her family was
Speaker 1: very poor, and several sources actually suggest that her father
Speaker 1: may have been a Stonemason and that she probably had
Speaker 1: to work as a farm hand at an early age
Speaker 1: to help her family make ends meet. But what we
Speaker 1: do know is that sometime in or shortly after eight
Speaker 1: bryn Hild immigrated to the United States in her early twenties,
Speaker 1: specifically to Chicago, and changed her name to Bell. She
Speaker 1: had a sister named Nelly Larson who had immigrated to
Speaker 1: Chicago office, so she had a connection there. But she
Speaker 1: again returned to pretty grueling work. Yeah, and again we
Speaker 1: don't know too much about those first years in the
Speaker 1: United States for Bell, but we do know that she
Speaker 1: probably worked as a house servant, which would have been
Speaker 1: pretty tough work, and she probably didn't like it very much,
Speaker 1: because her sister was later quoted as saying, quote Bell
Speaker 1: was crazy for money, and working as a house servant
Speaker 1: would not have afforded her much of that. By about
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty four, she married a man named Max Mad's
Speaker 1: Sorenson who was also a Norwegian immigrant, but that wouldn't
Speaker 1: have really been her ticket to instant wealth either though.
Speaker 1: He was a department store detective and later worked for
Speaker 1: the Chicago Railroad. In the eight nineties, they opened up
Speaker 1: a confectioner shop in downtown Chicago, but that wasn't very successful.
Speaker 1: It was, however, ensured. Oh indeed, the building and actually
Speaker 1: really burned down around a year into their business venture,
Speaker 1: and after that they were able to collect a little
Speaker 1: bit of insurance money. Maybe it doesn't seem like such
Speaker 1: a big deal on the surface, but this kicked off
Speaker 1: a pattern for Bell that would probably raise a few
Speaker 1: red flags today. In eight the Sorenson's house also burned down,
Speaker 1: and they collected insurance money for that, and the couple's
Speaker 1: first two kids, who were also insured, died in infancy,
Speaker 1: officially of acute colitis, but now looking back, people say
Speaker 1: the symptoms are similar to if they had been poisoned. Okay, so,
Speaker 1: even if you look at all of that is just
Speaker 1: really really bad luck or really weird coincidence, what happens
Speaker 1: next has to make you a little bit suspicious at least,
Speaker 1: so mad Sorenson dies on July n which just happens
Speaker 1: to be the one day that to life insurance policies
Speaker 1: from different mutual associations overlapped. Officially, the cause of death
Speaker 1: was heart failure, but his symptoms actually indicated strychnine poisoning.
Speaker 1: And the insurance payout because of those two policies was
Speaker 1: pretty huge eight thousand, five hundred dollars, and that was
Speaker 1: quite a large sum for the time, and it said
Speaker 1: that Bell tried to go collect it just a day
Speaker 1: after the funeral, so she was certainly not playing a
Speaker 1: part of the grieving widow. It was probably suspicious that
Speaker 1: there wasn't an autopsy. So Bell got the insurance money
Speaker 1: and went on her way. She did. She used the
Speaker 1: money actually to buy the farm on the outskirts of Laport,
Speaker 1: and she moved there with three kids, Jenny, Myrtle, and Lucy.
Speaker 1: And just an aside here about the kids. It's generally
Speaker 1: accepted that Jenny, whose full name was probably Jenny Olson,
Speaker 1: was a foster child, but some say that none of
Speaker 1: Bell's children were her own. According to an article by
Speaker 1: Ted Hartzel in American History, Bill's sister, Nellie Larson, once
Speaker 1: said that Bell never had any children of her own,
Speaker 1: though she would at times have as many as twelve
Speaker 1: children in her care, So just an interesting thing to
Speaker 1: think about as we go on. I mean, maybe there
Speaker 1: was some money associated with fostering children, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: you got some money from the government for that or something. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, it's something that people don't focus on the
Speaker 1: most when they're talking about Bell Gunnis, but it's something
Speaker 1: that stuck out to me definitely in her story. It's unusual.
Speaker 1: So in Bell married again and her second husband, this
Speaker 1: time as a widower and a butcher by trade named
Speaker 1: Peter Gunnis, who was also a native of Norway. And
Speaker 1: Peter Gunnis came to the marriage with two kids already.
Speaker 1: One was an infant named Jenny, and she mysteriously died
Speaker 1: just a week after the wedding when she was home
Speaker 1: alone with Bell, and the other was a five year
Speaker 1: old girl. And after that incident with the baby, she
Speaker 1: was removed from her father and Bell's care and taken
Speaker 1: away by her uncle to Wisconsin. Peter Gunnis didn't really
Speaker 1: last that much longer. Only eight months after the wedding,
Speaker 1: he was struck on the head by a heavy cast
Speaker 1: iron sausage grinder that fell off of a kitchen shelf,
Speaker 1: and it was a fatal injury that, according to Hartzel's article,
Speaker 1: was quote augmented by the crock of hot brine that
Speaker 1: quote fell on him simultaneously. Sounds kind of suspicious, doesn't it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you would think so. And in fact, Bell's fourteen year
Speaker 1: old foster daughter was said to have told people after
Speaker 1: that that she had seen mama smack him on the
Speaker 1: head with a cleaver, but later she denied this when
Speaker 1: she was questioned by the corner. The corner and other
Speaker 1: people actually were suspicious of this, but ultimately there was
Speaker 1: no evidence, so they had to buy Bell's story and
Speaker 1: she collected another thirty in insurance money. But after Peter
Speaker 1: Gannis's death, Bell started taking out matrimonial ads in Scandinavian
Speaker 1: newspaper She's looking for Love. She describes herself as good
Speaker 1: looking quote stout quote womanly an example of how one
Speaker 1: of these ads might read. Quote comely widow who owned
Speaker 1: the large farm in one of the finest districts of
Speaker 1: Laporte County, Indiana, desires to make the acquaintance of a
Speaker 1: gentleman equally well provided with view of joining fortunes. No
Speaker 1: replies by letter considered unless senders willing to follow answer
Speaker 1: with personal visit. And probably my favorite part of these ads,
Speaker 1: they'd end with lines like triflers need not apply. So
Speaker 1: she wanted serious inquiries. She was not messing around, and
Speaker 1: she didn't just want to chat either. Scrubs exactly. She
Speaker 1: got several responses to these ads, and basically this is
Speaker 1: how it worked. She started exchanging letters with a guy
Speaker 1: and they would get to know each other. She'd tell
Speaker 1: him how great her set up at the farm was,
Speaker 1: tell him, you know, express some sort of affection or something,
Speaker 1: tell him that she loved him, even make veiled sexual overtures.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, she made it clear that
Speaker 1: she expected these guys to bring something to the relationship,
Speaker 1: namely cash. So after corresponding with the guy for a while,
Speaker 1: she'd invite him to report, but encourage him to sell
Speaker 1: all of his belongings and property before hand and bring
Speaker 1: the clash along with them, Like I got the farm,
Speaker 1: we just need the money, Come and bring it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But here's the catch. She didn't want any of these
Speaker 1: guys to tell anyone close to them what they were doing.
Speaker 1: So guys would show up run a few errands with
Speaker 1: her usually one of those errands would be to the bank,
Speaker 1: go to her house, and then they'd pretty much never
Speaker 1: be seen again. And this happened with several men, including
Speaker 1: a guy named John Moe another named ol Budsburg. Both
Speaker 1: were from Wisconsin. And if anybody at all came looking
Speaker 1: for these guys after the fact, Belle would just say
Speaker 1: that she hadn't seen him, or oh, yeah, they were here,
Speaker 1: but they left. And that's what she'd tell her suspicious
Speaker 1: neighbors too, because they would see these men go in
Speaker 1: and then never come out again, and she just say
Speaker 1: they had left at night. They were gone already. And
Speaker 1: in nineteen o six something happened that really people couldn't
Speaker 1: ignore quite as much. Belle's foster daughter, Jenny, disappeared, but
Speaker 1: Belle had an excuse there too. She told people that
Speaker 1: Jenny had gone off to college in California, making something
Speaker 1: of herself. It seemed, yeah, and it seemed the daughter
Speaker 1: being missing was barely a hiccup for her. She just
Speaker 1: kept up the letter writing, and Bell's Melman even said
Speaker 1: that she wrote around ten letters a day and got
Speaker 1: about the same number back in the mail, and on
Speaker 1: days that she didn't get any letters, she would be
Speaker 1: kind of upset, kind of cranky. So this all went
Speaker 1: smoothly for her, relatively so, until she struck up a
Speaker 1: correspondence with South Dakota farmer Andrew Helgaline. Presumably she used
Speaker 1: the same strategy on him that she did with others.
Speaker 1: His brother later found some of their letters, and several
Speaker 1: of these have actually been preserved so people have translated them.
Speaker 1: They were written in Norwegian, and and saw the kind
Speaker 1: of methods that she used and talking to them exactly
Speaker 1: so throughout the letters, Bill would constantly remind him about
Speaker 1: bringing the money to report and give him all kinds
Speaker 1: of advice about how to bring it to She would say,
Speaker 1: you know, tell him the denomination of the bills to bring,
Speaker 1: and tell him to sow it inside is underwear, and
Speaker 1: that he again that he shouldn't tell any buddy about it,
Speaker 1: and just kept sort of repeating these things throughout. And
Speaker 1: Catherine Ramsland, who is a forensic psychologist who has written
Speaker 1: about the Gunness case, says Bell's technique of regularly harping
Speaker 1: on the money thing is actually a technique called seating
Speaker 1: that's used in hypnosis. So she would try to implant
Speaker 1: this idea of bringing her money into his unconscious mind
Speaker 1: with constant repetition seems a little suspicious that, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess they were distracted almost by the sentiments that
Speaker 1: were also in her letter, because she would appeal to
Speaker 1: the needs of the immigrant man too. He was probably
Speaker 1: lonely and homesick in South Dakota, and her talk of
Speaker 1: Norway probably comforted him. They weren't They weren't all just
Speaker 1: about the money, so they could relate, They could relate
Speaker 1: to each other. It seemed like a promising relationship. So
Speaker 1: after a year and a half of writing these letters
Speaker 1: back and forth, Andrew came to Lport in early nineteen
Speaker 1: o eight and then vanish, just like all of the
Speaker 1: other guys. But what Bell wasn't banking on was his
Speaker 1: brother Osle, who knew where Andrew had gone. So Andrew
Speaker 1: must have broken one of those rules of Bells couldn't
Speaker 1: tell anyone. Yeah, he broke that rule. I think he
Speaker 1: didn't actually follow instructions either, as far as selling his
Speaker 1: farm and you know, sewing the bills and his underwear
Speaker 1: and all those things. He did have a lot of
Speaker 1: money sent to the bank in Laporte, but he didn't
Speaker 1: necessarily follow all the rules, but Osley was concerned and
Speaker 1: he started writing to Bell. He really thought that his
Speaker 1: brother was going to return in a week or so,
Speaker 1: and so when he didn't, he he reached out, and
Speaker 1: he didn't believe Bell's explanations that Andrew had simply gone away.
Speaker 1: Around the same time, Bell had some other trouble. She
Speaker 1: fired her hired hand Ray lamp Here, and he was
Speaker 1: said to be in love with her. He was probably
Speaker 1: jealous of all the guys coming around, who knows, but
Speaker 1: he started making public scenes after he was let go,
Speaker 1: and Bell tried to take legal action against him and
Speaker 1: have him declared insane. So maybe it was a combination
Speaker 1: of pressure from this as well as some increasing questions
Speaker 1: from these relatives of the men who she had written to,
Speaker 1: as well as questions from her neighbors. But on April seven,
Speaker 1: nineteen o eight, Bell kept her kids home from school
Speaker 1: and she went into town and saw her lawyer and
Speaker 1: wrote her will. And she was also seen buying a
Speaker 1: lot of kerosene, so went into town and did some
Speaker 1: did some errands. Of course, from the intro we know
Speaker 1: what happened next. Her house burned down, the bodies were found,
Speaker 1: and ultimately they found between twelve and fourteen bodies, including
Speaker 1: the body of the foster daughter, Jenny, who hadn't gone
Speaker 1: off to college, and a couple of other unidentified children,
Speaker 1: and there were several theories as to what happened with
Speaker 1: the fire. Immediately after, a lot of people thought that
Speaker 1: Belle had committed suicide because she was afraid that all
Speaker 1: of her crimes were about to come to light that
Speaker 1: they had been discovered. Land Fear, however, was the one
Speaker 1: that the police immediately arrested. Belle had told her lawyer
Speaker 1: the day before that she was afraid of him, and
Speaker 1: he was charged with four counts of murder and with arson,
Speaker 1: so it seemed initially that that maybe he was to blame.
Speaker 1: It was found later, though, that the four people in
Speaker 1: the cellar had died by means other than the fire.
Speaker 1: They had probably been poisoned by Strict nine. They found
Speaker 1: traces of strictnine and their bodies actually, but the bodies
Speaker 1: had been mishandled so that they couldn't prove it. So
Speaker 1: at lamp Here's trial in May eight he was only
Speaker 1: convicted of arson. He died less than two years later
Speaker 1: in prison, and on his deathbed he confessed to setting
Speaker 1: the house on fire and to helping Bell escape. He
Speaker 1: said the headless body belonged to a woman from Chicago
Speaker 1: whom Bell had just hired as a housekeeper. She killed
Speaker 1: the housekeeper and the three children and planted the bodies
Speaker 1: to make it look like an accident. He also admitted
Speaker 1: to helping Bell bury the other victims, although he said
Speaker 1: that he wasn't involved in actually murdering them, But he
Speaker 1: did describe how Bell did murder her victims. It turns
Speaker 1: out that she poisoned a lot of them. Some of
Speaker 1: um she left their bodies intact, some of them she butchered.
Speaker 1: Some of the bodies she actually dropped into a vat
Speaker 1: of hot water and then covered with quicklime, which is
Speaker 1: a substance that kind of burns like acid. So I'm
Speaker 1: assuming she did this to disguise the bodies. So who
Speaker 1: knows how many of these details are actually accurate, but
Speaker 1: this is probably the closest scenario to most to what
Speaker 1: most people think happened as far as Bell. What happened
Speaker 1: to Bell after the fire, Though nobody knows for certain
Speaker 1: what happened to her after that or to her money,
Speaker 1: historians estimate that she may have extorted up to ninety
Speaker 1: dollars from her suitors, but the day after the fire,
Speaker 1: there was only seven hundred in her Laport bank account.
Speaker 1: So we mentioned in the beginning that Bell's story did
Speaker 1: get a lot of attention at the time, and since
Speaker 1: then she's become sort of a spooky local legend in
Speaker 1: that part of Indiana. Neighbor has, for instance, claimed to
Speaker 1: have seen her in the weeks after the fire, and
Speaker 1: there have been numerous Bell sidings since then, but the
Speaker 1: most notable one happened in Los Angeles in nine so
Speaker 1: a considerable amount of time after after her disappearance, a
Speaker 1: woman named Esther Carlson was accused of poisoning a man
Speaker 1: she worked for named August Lindstrom for two thousand dollars
Speaker 1: that he'd put in a joint bank account, and Carlson
Speaker 1: died before this went to trial, but a couple of
Speaker 1: people familiar with Bell they were Laport residents who were
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles at the time, claimed a newspaper photo
Speaker 1: of Carlson matched that of Bell, and others also confirmed
Speaker 1: the connection, but there wasn't any definitive proof that this
Speaker 1: was the same woman. Still up to her old murdering
Speaker 1: ways all the way in l A. Yeah, So, I
Speaker 1: mean the question is still out there. Did she die
Speaker 1: in the fire or not. It's really tough to say.
Speaker 1: I mean, people have wondered about this for years. Authorities
Speaker 1: eventually found a dental bridge with one tooth in it
Speaker 1: in the ruins of the fire that a dentist positively
Speaker 1: identified as Bells, but historians were hardly convinced that this
Speaker 1: And how can we I mean, if you were going
Speaker 1: to fake your death and a fire, leave behind your
Speaker 1: dental bridge. Yeah. Another point that I found in some
Speaker 1: of my research was, Okay, Bell Gunness is obviously a psychopath.
Speaker 1: She's killed all of these people, So is she really
Speaker 1: going to care to pull out one tooth to leave
Speaker 1: in the dental bridge? Probably not when you look at
Speaker 1: it that way. People have not let this go though.
Speaker 1: In two thousand seven, late two thousand seven, Suzanne Mackay,
Speaker 1: a great granddaughter of Bell Gunnis's sister and one of
Speaker 1: the last living relatives of the infamous serial killer, gave
Speaker 1: a team of US researchers permission to exhume the headless
Speaker 1: body that was found in the cellar of the torched farmhouse,
Speaker 1: and they were going to compare the DNA from the
Speaker 1: remains there to saliva samples from bell sealed letters. So
Speaker 1: as far as we know, the tests were inconclusive with that.
Speaker 1: And I think that they got a sample from a
Speaker 1: DNA sample from the family member also, and we're trying
Speaker 1: to test that as well. And I looked for more
Speaker 1: recent updates on that, and I couldn't find anything more
Speaker 1: recent in the last couple of years, So I don't
Speaker 1: know for sure if they were able to find a
Speaker 1: match or not. I think what they're really looking for
Speaker 1: is to find the opposite of that, is to find
Speaker 1: that there's not a match, because most people believe that
Speaker 1: it was her that Bill's missing, and then you know,
Speaker 1: the mystery will still stand. Where did she go? What
Speaker 1: did she do? Yeah? Yeah, by Jinks. So I don't
Speaker 1: want to Jinks because we still have a few things
Speaker 1: left to say. Um, if you have any other fun
Speaker 1: spooky topics, this is coming out right before October, I think,
Speaker 1: so we're gonna be kicking off a gruesome well not
Speaker 1: necessarily gruesome, it can just be spooky fun whatever Halloween
Speaker 1: kind of topics. We love doing Halloween episodes. It's kind
Speaker 1: of an October tradition at stuff you missed in history class.
Speaker 1: So send us your suggestions and we would love to
Speaker 1: have an October full of Halloween beam. Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: don't send us a bell gun us up to it's
Speaker 1: if you know anything else about the story as it's progressed,
Speaker 1: or if you just have a favorite aspect of the
Speaker 1: story that we didn't talk about. I mean, we always
Speaker 1: try to cover as much as we can, but we
Speaker 1: have time limits, so there are definitely details here that
Speaker 1: we left out. Has a good conspiracy theory kind of story,
Speaker 1: it really is. So we want to know what people think.
Speaker 1: Please write us at history podcast at how stuff works
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Speaker 1: or on Twitter at Myston History. And if you want
Speaker 1: to learn more about people kind of like Bill Gunneths,
Speaker 1: we do have an article on serial killers. You can
Speaker 1: look for it by searching for how s serial killers
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