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I'm your host Genevieve Mannion and I'm here to talk about mysterious deaths, morbid fascinations, disturbing stories and otherwise spooky events from the Victorian era. Because to me there's just something especially intriguing, creepy and oddly comforting about horror and mayhem from the 19th century. So listener discretion is advised. Hello friends and welcome to this my 40th episode. How exciting. I hope that you had a lovely week. Mine was very well rested. I have stopped doom scrolling before bed, which believe it or not, is really helpful if you actually want to sleep. You may or may not have been able to tell, but last week's episode was recorded entirely on fumes. I think I did a pretty good job of pretending that I wasn't deceased. I was only on about three hours of sleep for that one, but I am now well rested, pert breasted and ready to scare your bloomers to the ground. But first, a little Haunted Housekeeping. Thank you so so much for your ratings on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Thank you as always for your comments. They are my very favorite things to see on the Internet. I use those for bloom scrolling. They're like little flowers you sweethearts leave for me on episodes. I got one the other day on Apple Podcasts that just says terrible one star. Wow, I really know how to ruin a day for some of these folks. But for those of you whose days I do not ruin again, thank you so much for letting me know. You can find photos from today's episode on Instagram Yvictorian Nightmare as well as Blue sky where I am simply Victorian Nightmare. And if you want to listen to the show ad free, join my Patreon. You will find the link on my website myvictorianightmare.com and a thanks thank you to Laura Arnold who subscribed to My Patreon with double the requested price. I hope that wasn't a mistake. If it was, go fix that. But thank you very kindly regardless. And thank you to everyone who has joined. Oh, real quick, before we get started, just gotta pop back into my crypt of corrections for a minute. Someone named Erin Martin was kind enough to shoot me an email and inform me that I was mistaken about Rasputin being a member of the Russian sex cult the Callistes. Turns out this is more likely a myth. The current consensus among modern historians is that he was not a member, so I was wrong about that. Although according to Britannica.com, he did pervert some of their beliefs, specifically the doctrine that one was nearest to God when feeling holy passionlessness, and that the best way to reach such a state was through the sexual exhaustion that came after prolonged debauchery. The extent of Rasputin's sexual deviance is still very much debated, but I just wanted to clarify that particular I am sure you will all rest far easier now knowing that Rasputin was not in a sex cult. Thanks again Erin for that missive. All right, let's get out of here. Oh, what a beautiful day for a cemetery walk. Guys, I have got to talk to you about one skin, which I only started using about a week ago, and I am absolutely delighted. Like, seriously, my skin has been glowing since I started using their OS1 topical supplements. I have no problem looking my age, but I inherited my mom's crepey under eyes and my father's jowls apparently. So I need a product that's going to give me a ton of moisture and target cells that no longer produce collagen. That is why I love One Skin's Face, Eye, Body and Shield products. I am a vampire with numerous skin conditions and I was concerned that these products might have fragrances that would make me break out or inflame my rosacea. But they're fragrance free which is essential for me and they absorb so beautifully into my ghastly pale and sensitive skin. I just remove my makeup and one or two pumps of the moisturizer covers my whole neck and face. I do this twice a day and I can already see a difference. I also like that I can use these products with other products like my retinol and vitamin C C serums which I cannot live without. They also have 4,000 five star reviews for their Face, Body, sun and travel size products. One Skin is the world's first longevity company. By focusing on the cellular aspects of aging, One Skin keeps your skin looking and acting younger for longer. Get started today with 15 off using code Victorian at OneSkin co. That's 15 off at OneSkin co with Code Victorian. After you purchase they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support support my show and tell them that I sent you. Invest in the health and longevity of your skin with One Skin. Your future self will thank you. Okay, I think I am going to stick with the name of my new ghost sightings segment for now called With Their Own Eyes. Folks seem to like it and it is growing on me. Oh and I have to extend a heartfelt thanks thank you to someone named Helen Porter who sent me a really great resource on historic ghost sightings, news reports of the Victorian era. I mentioned that they're a little tricky to find so this resource is really helpful. Thank you so much. And I have a perfectly spine tingly one for you today about a headless female ghost wafting around in the shrubbery. It is so English. The way the farmer in the article talks to this headless woman is so very Downton Abbey. It is from the English illustrated police news 1-8-1898 and it is called A Headless Ghost in Buckinghamshire. A farmer and his friend startled at its appearance and it reads the people of Buckinghamshire and neighborhood are troubled at the appearance of a ghost. The truth of which is voucher for by a well known farmer living in the neighborhood. About six miles from the outskirts of the town there stands a weather beaten handpost at the corner of Four Crossroads and also a small plantation of young oak saplings at the terminus near to this spot some few nights ago, the farmer referred to, accompanied by a friend, was driving his horse and trap along the roadway. The night was well advanced and dark, when suddenly the farmer saw, standing a few yards in front of him, a black object. What's that? He said to his friend and aloud to the figure. Hello there, move on please. There was no answer and the figure remained almost motionless. It was completely enveloped in a long black sheet and had the ghastly appearance of a headless woman. Simultaneously, the horse saw it and trembled like a leaf as if paralyzed with fear. Again the farmer cried, what do you do there? Move on please. But there was no response and the apparition remained still. The horse became restive and commenced backing in into a ditch. At this stage the driver's companion got down, took the reins and endeavored to back by the spot. Then, for a minute or so their queer visitant disappeared as the trap again faced the roadway. The occupants were greatly alarmed at the further appearance of the black sombre figure a few yards ahead of them, in the same motionless position as before. Their situation was now getting positively serious. The farmer, whose presence of mind had stood him in good stead, now finding his nerve on the point of giving way, asked the apparition in the name of God to speak. Then it was that the spectre slowly glided away and appeared to float through the the thick set bordered hedge. The animal at once galloped off at a rattling pace toward the village they were bound for. Other people in the district have related their experiences and the belief now prevails that there is a ghost to be seen. And not a little surprising. The spot referred to has been less frequented of late. End quote. Oh, I wish I could find more info on this. I looked and looked. I wanted to try out who she was or hear other folks sightings, but they appear to be lost to time. At least this one encounter is not. How charming. I wonder if like when they say headless, if her neck was like all gory or smooth like a mannequin. I am starving for more details here, but alas, we have far too many terrible things to discuss today that I cannot wait to tell you. Okay, before we get to the really terrible stuff, this week about two dozen of you sent me an Instagram post about a Victorian all female gang called the 40 elephants asking me to do an episode on them. But I looked them up and there wasn't that much going on with them. Certainly not enough for a full episode, but they're still pretty interesting. So I will briefly fill you in on who these gals were before we get to the meat of the episode, the shank, if you will. It is unclear how long they operated. The first mentions of them were in news reports from 1873. But they could have existed as early as 1838 as accomplices to other male gangs. They were called the 40 elephants because they operated from the Elephant and Castle area of London, which was not a nice place to be in the 1800s. No Apple stores in that part of town you would find slums. Though packed with criminals, the area had a very high crime rate. The name of this gang, the 40 Elephants, wasn't because there were 40 of them. It's most likely derived from the folktale Ali baba and the 40 Thieves, because they also went by the name the 40 Thieves. They ransacked department stores by smuggling clothes and jewelry in pockets that were sewn into their cloaks, their coats and bloomers. They would apply for maid positions in fancy homes and forge references and rob the dickens out of them. But I read something that was really uncool. They'd approach a well to do gentleman on the street and ask them for directions. While the man would explain directions, other ladies would appear and accuse him of assault. Rather than making a scene, these gentlemen would often just quickly pay them off. And if they tried to alert the police, they would just rob the guy. Altogether. The gang lasted at least into the 1950s, but their heyday seemed to be the roaring twenties where they switched things up a bit. In the 1800s. They wouldn't wear the clothes and jewelry that they stole. They would bring them to what were called fences, essentially shops that would sell their stolen items. And most of the ladies were robbing and stealing to support themselves and their families. But by the 20s they became like Hollywood style gangsters. They weren't just robbing stores or fancy gentlemen in the street anymore. They were blackmailing, stealing higher value loot and living flamboyantly as bright young things, dressing extravagantly, living decadent lifestyles, dressing as flappers, spending their money on fancy parties, no doubt smoking cigarettes in lavish clubs with other members of gentlemen's gangs. These ladies were apparently really good at this stuff and didn't often get caught. And if they did, they did not get long circles sentences. This was likely because thanks to their thriving thieving careers, they were so called upper class ladies. And upper class ladies rarely were given hard sentences. Like I said, this gang lasted at least until the 1950s. And it sounds like these ladies, although brazenly villainous, had a great time being very bad Girls. So that is just a little wax on the floor. 40 elephants. I personally think that I died around the 1880s and didn't resurface until the 1980s, sadly. But I do have glitter for the 20s. How glamorous to be like a badass female gang member in a flapper dress with one of those long cigarette holders, drinking champagne with your girls dripping in diamonds, flicking your cigarette button to the face of some skeevy gangster guy and all your girls rush up and they're like, whatcha gonna do? What? Maybe I was there. This anecdote gives me deja vu for some reason. Gotta get on that past life regression therapy. I just get a sense that I have been picking fights with boys for centuries and I want to hear some details. Okay, to the Beefshank we go. I usually try to space out the murdery with the spooky with the macabre y when it comes to to how I release episodes, but I am just so hot for murderesses lately, I don't know what it is. I covered Kate Webster, the Richmond Murderess the week before and I am right back with another psychopathic butchering babe for today's episode. This story is somehow even more messed up than the Kate Webster story, so brace yourself. Today I am talking about the thieving, poisoning, barbarous, butchering Belle Gunness, the blackest of black widows, Hell's Belle herself, otherwise known as the Lady Bluebeard. This lady was a monster believed to have killed at least 14 people, including her own children. But that is equally believed to be a vast underestimation as this is only the amount of bodies that that they were able to distinguish as individuals. The more likely figure is closer to 40. I did see some estimations as high as 180, but that figure is big time speculation without much weight behind it. However, she was clearly a pro and made an obscene amount of money stealing from her victims and cashing in on insurance policies. Her accumulated wealth was estimated to be at least $6 million in today's currency. And the worst part of all of this? She may have gotten away with all of it, which is very disheartening, but we'll get there. Incidentally, she's referred to as the Lady Bluebeard after a brother's grim fairy tale about a man who murders his wives and buries them under his castle. Lovely little bedtime story. My main references for today are a Wikipedia article, a sci fi.com article by Kristi Puchko, a murderpedia.com article, and a crimelibrary.com article by Joseph Gehringer. These and all of my other references can be found in the show. Notes Belle Gunness was born Brynhild Paulstatter Storsethrough in Norway on November 11, 1859. My apologies to my Norwegian listeners. Please feel free to correct my pronunciation in the comments. The youngest of eight children, at age 14 she began working for neighboring farms, milking cows, herding cattle, and other such activities that would no doubt make charming Nordic cottagecore illustrations. She worked these farms in hopes of raising enough money to move to the Big Apple New York City, and she did indeed make her way to the very town I call my own in 1881. But she was only interested in grabbing a slice of pizza because she quickly made her way to Chicago to join her sister Nellie, who had immigrated a few years earlier. She decided to change her name to Belle from Brynhild during processing at Castle Garden while in Chicago, she worked as a domestic servant before landing a job in a butcher shop where she learned a thing or two. Belle was a big girl, about £230, 5 7, broad shoulders and rather stocky. A brick house, so to speak. Although unlike today's farcical pie in the face style comedy beauty standards, this era of the late 1800s, early 1900s saw a fad of buxom ladies, women who corseted their waists tightly but had big boobs and curvy hips. And she was able to lace her corset to emphasize her 48 inch bust and 54 inch hips, a shape that was all the rage at the time. In a book called the Truth About Belle Gunness, author Lillian de La Torre says, in those days men aspired to the bulk of William Howard Taft, who was about to become President of the United States. Ladies whose facades were not naturally as full and flowing as bells, stuffed their corsets with ruffles and wore droop fronted shirtwaists. Belle Gunness was right in style, with a waist that would pull into 37 inches. When she donned her ruffled silks and put her diamonds in her ears, men thought her well worth a second glance. By 1884, Bell married a Norwegian man named Mads Sorensen and they opened a candy store together, which wasn't doing very well, and one day it mysteriously burned down, awarding Belle and her husband a sizable insurance payout. Their home also burned to the ground, granting them another sizable insurance payment. These combined insurance payments payments were enough to buy them another lovely home. They adopted three little girls from people in the town who could not Afford to care for them, named Jenny, Myrtle and Lucy. And either Mads Sorensen came into the marriage with two young children babies, or these were the children of Belle and Mr. Sorensen. It's kind of unclear. Neighbors didn't believe that the man already had children, but also noticed that Belle never appeared appeared to be pregnant. So there's some baby weirdness, baby strangeness to the story, but these two babies both mysteriously died from inflammation of the large intestines. Bell had insured both of the children and collected a large check when they died. About 10 or so years later, Sorensen purchased two life insurance policies. One was set to expire on one day, and the the other was set to expire on that very same day. And ever so coincidentally, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage that very day, Awarding Belle not one, but two life insurance policy payouts for her husband's death. Belle said her husband was complaining of a headache the day before, and she provided him with quinine powder for the pain. She later checked on him and he was dead as a doornail. His cause of death was actually never really established because no autopsy was performed at the time. He had already been diagnosed with an enlarged heart. So to the coroner, it was an open and shut case. It was actually Belle who said that he died of a hemorrhage, not the coroner. Now, there is no way to say for certain, but both of the babies and her husband husband showed signs of either strychnine or arsenic poisoning, two easily accessible poisons that were easy to disguise in foods and drinks. They're tasteless and odorless and happened to be the most common ways to poison people in the time. Incidentally, arsenic was particularly difficult to pin as a murder weapon for a few reasons. Arsenic could actually be detected through toxicology tests, tests ever since 1836. But it was also used in everything from wallpaper to medications to cosmetics. So finding traces of arsenic in a test would not have been uncommon for many cadavers in the 1800s. Also, the symptoms of arsenic poison were very similar to gastrointestinal issues. It can also present symptoms similar to diabetes, rheumatic diseases, and colitis, which was what the two little babies were officially diagnosed with as their cause of death. Not everyone received autopsies back then, and toxicologists would have needed to know exactly what they were supposed to be looking for to even find something like arsenic poisoning. So most often, if it looked like a cerebral hemorrhage and quacked like a cerebral hemorrhage, even if it was arsenic poison, it was likely never double checked. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Upgrade your business with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. Shop pay boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning fewer carts going abandoned and more sales going Cha ching. So if you're into growing your business, get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are. Visit shopify.com to upgrade your selling today. After the death of her husband, Bel took her handsome payout and three adopted children to La Porte, Indiana and bought a pig farm. The home was originally a brothel and neighbors were very happy to see the place bought by such an upstanding lady. The house had six bedrooms, spacious dining room, long kitchen, and a high beam cellar. Kerosene lamps lit the home throughout. Just one year after Mads Sorensen's death, she married another man named Peter Gunness, from whomst Bell established her final surnamesake. This man also had an infant daughter from another marriage. But only one week after the marriage, while he was out of the house, this little girl mysteriously died of an unknown cause in Belle's care. And in December of that year, he would also meet a grisly, mysterious death. And if you would follow me past this large hog pen here, it's quite dark. Luckily there is a full moon tonight to light our way. Oh, that is a stinky stink. Sorry about that. I would have taken us along the road, but I really do not want anyone to know that we are here. It's December 1900 10pm Almost Christmas. Delicate powdery snow covers the hills and icy crystals hang in the air. This is the Gunness Hog Farm. We're making our way up to the house, but we do not want to get too close. Luckily, it's easy to see inside the large lace curtain back window to the kitchen of the Gunness home. From where we're standing, and it appears Mr. Gunness is cleaning a pipe inside. It seems at least that's what it looks like. Here, I brought us a thermos of whiskey hot chocolate. I even added a little Godiva chocolate liqueur to make it extra fancy. I also brought us some Doritos, but I'm worried that they'll hear our crunching. We'll have to pause on the chips for a bit. I'll open them up when we make our way back to the stinky pig pen. Okay. Belle has just entered the kitchen. Mr. Gunness just said hello. I can't see her now. He's still digging some old tobacco out of that pipe over the sink. Where did she go? Oh, my God. She just hit him with a meat cleaver. That is not what most sources say happened. Belle is now climbing up onto the sink and reaching up, she's carefully pulling down what looks like a pretty heavy meat grinder. Okay, that is her yelling and screaming like there was an accident. Oh, Jenny just came into the kitchen. But, like, I can see the meat cleaver on the table. Even from here, we can see that there's blood on. Looks like Jenny's also noticed. But Belle is now taking her by the shoulders, weeping. We know she's pretending. And Jenny is just very still. I don't think she's buying it either. Oh, poor Mr. Gunness. Here. Let's make our way back to the pig pen. And I will tell you why even I had a little confusion here. In most sources you read about what happened to Mr. Gunness, you'll find that Bell said a meat grinder fell off a tall shelf directly onto his head, and that is what crushed his skulm and. Bye. Now, regardless of what really happened, we have a right to be as suspicious as the coroner was when he inspected the scene. And after he talked to Jenny again. Most sources that I found about this situation only state what Belle said happened. And we, the readers, are meant to suspect Belle for murdering her husband by somehow enabling a meat grinder to fall on his head. But I found one source that claims Jenny actually told her friends at school that her mother killed her father with a meat cleaver. Casual conversation for kids on the blacktop. Word got back to the coroner somehow, so he summoned Jenny to him and asked her directly if this is what happened. She denied it, but very sadly. As far as Belle was concerned, little Jenny had to go. Belle told people that she sent her away to a finishing school for young ladies and in Los Angeles. But later, Jenny's body would be recovered at the house with many, many others. Despite Peter's death ultimately being ruled an accident, his brother named Gust wasn't having it. He swooped in and picked up Peter's other daughter, Swanhilde, and took her as far away from Belle's clutches as he could. Clever man. She would become the only child that ever resided with Ms. Gunness to survive. Belle received $3,000 of insurance money upon Peter Gunness death and was probably feeling very proud of herself. She had made a mint off of two husbands and three children. At this point. Perhaps you're thinking it would be a good time to just take her money and live happily ever after. No. She decided to berserk in a matter of speaking. She began placing marriage ads in Chicago newspapers looking for a new well to do husband to come to her home, combine fortunes and live happily ever after. And her personal ad has cult classic status at this point, thanks to a simply marvelous sign off. You will see why it reads 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 a personal visit. Triflers need not apply. The lady did not mince words. What is the modern equivalent to a trifler? Dudebro? Chads. Chads need not apply. And lucky for the chadds, it appears that they took heed and only non trifling gentlemen would find their way to her home and never leave. The very first non trifling gentleman was from Wisconsin. His name was Henry Gerholt. It's difficult to know if he agreed to marry her, but he stayed in her house a short time and wrote his family to tell them that he liked the farm, that he was in good health, and he requested that they send him seed potatoes. And that was the last communication that he had with them. When they failed to hear from him after that, they contacted Belle. She told them that he had gone off with a group of horse traders to Chicago. His trunk and belongings were all later found to see still be in her home. Another gentleman named John Moe of Minnesota, another untriffling gentleman answered her ad and after writing back and forth for a few months, he traveled to Laporte and withdrew a very large amount of money and showed up on Bell's doorstep. No one ever heard from him again, although a carpenter who did occasional work for Bell noticed all of the trunks that the man brought with him were still there, although he was long gone. More and more and more men would come to her house after emptying bank accounts, signing over deeds and bringing all of their things to her home. And neighbors started noticing Belle digging in her hog pen late at night to a man named Andrew Helgelaine. She wrote a letter in response to his interest in her marriage ad. It read, to the dearest friend in the world. No woman in this world is happier than I am. I know that you are now to come to me and be my own. I can tell from your letters that you are the man I want. It does not take one long to tell when to like a person, and you I like better than anyone in the world I know. Think how we'll enjoy each other's company. You, the sweetest man in the world. We will be alone with each other. Can you conceive of anything nicer? I think of you constantly when I hear your name mentioned. And this is when one of the dear children speaks of you. Or I hear myself humming it with the words of an old song I love. It is beautiful music to my ears. My heart beats in wild rapture for you, my Andrew. I love you. Come prepared to stay forever. End quote. Sick joke. Andrew Helgelein was never seen again after he found his way to Bell's home. But one man did actually live to tell a hell of a tale. Allegedly. I couldn't find this man's personal account or the reference, but in a few sources I read that a man named George Anderson came from Missouri to meet Belle. He was prepared to offer money. He offered to pay her mortgage, and on the first night in her home they had a lovely dinner and retired for the night. Hours later, he was awoken by Belle standing over him with a candle underlighting, a sinister look on her face staring down at him. And this creeped the guy out so much that he ran for dear life and never returned. But again, it's worth noting, I did not find the original source for the existence of this man or his description of what happened. Just mentions of it in a few sources. All the while, Belle was entertaining these gentlemen who never appeared to leave once they'd arrived. She had an on again, off again lover named Ray Lampere, who was the only farmhand that she had hired. He did anything for her, any job, no matter how hard or gruesome. He fell into a jealous rage one day and so she fired him. On February 3, 1908, after this event, she went to the local courthouse to have him declared insane, saying that he was a danger to her and her family. The woman who killed almost her entire family. He was quickly declared sane and she went off in a huff back to the farm to lure and murder even more men. Ray was still blindly infatuated with this woman and continued to appear at her house. So he was fairly threatening. But over sloppy drinks with another local farmer, he said something telling. Sorry, I'm leaving that one in. Okay. One of the gentlemen that came and never left, Mr. Helgelein, the one who she wrote that flowery letter to telling him to prepare to stay forever. Ray told this other farmer that, quote, helgelein won't bother me me no more. We fixed him for keeps, implying that he was also involved in the disappearing of this man. Helgelein's brother was desperately trying to find him, and he contacted Gunness, who said he probably went back to Norway to visit relatives. The man insisted this is not what happened. No one in the family had seen or heard from him, and he said he believed he was still in the port. Belong brazenly said, well, I'd be happy to help you conduct a search, but those things can be pretty expensive, so you better be prepared to pay me for my time. The cojones on this woman. His brother did indeed come to do a search of his own without her help. Belle was starting to get a little uneasy. More and more family members were inquiring where their brothers and sons were. There was a man sniffing around the area for clues, and Ray Lampere was a loose little cannon with a loose little tongue wiggling around in his little mouth. So she hatched a plan. It is believed that this is when she set the stage to stage her own death and run off. She went down to a lawyer's office to have a will prepared, leaving all of her money to her children. And if they were not not able to inherit the estate, then a home for orphans in Norway was to receive it. The lawyer was like, I don't think that's the name of an actual children's home in Norway. Let me confirm the real name before you sign anything. And she was like, absolutely not. It was all semantics. She wanted to sign right then and there because she feared for her very life, and it was being threatened by Mr. Lampeer, and she did not want to waste another moment getting her affairs in order. He had, after all, threatened to burn her house down and kill her and her children. And by gum, she believed him. She also went to the bank and paid off her mortgage, which is a bit confusing to me. I'm not sure why she did this, but she did take out all of her money that she kept in separate bank accounts across town, all except for one, which had about $500 in it. On the night of April 28, 1908, a man named Joe Maxon, the new farmhand that Bell had hired. After she fired Lampere, woke up to the smell of smoke in his room, which was on the second floor of the house. He opened his door to a sheet of flames. He called for Belle and the children, but realized he could not escape. So he jumped in nothing but his underpants out a second story window. He did not break his legs, thankfully, and what's more, he ran all the way to town. To try to get help, bless his cotton socks. But by the time the fire brigade got to the home, it was reduced to nothing but smoking ruins with four charred bodies inside. These were the bodies of her two adopted children, her little boy, and her headless body. The lawman who Belle had spoken to just yesterday told the police that she mentioned that she believed her life was in danger because she feared Ray Lampiere was going to burn her house down. And when the police sought him out and found him without saying anything at all, Ray exclaimed, did widow Gunness and the kids get out all right? The cop was like, wow, tell us more about this fire you know all about already, and it gets funnier. He denied setting the fire, of course, but a kid who was sitting nearby was like, dude, I saw you running away from the house, like, five seconds after you set it on fire. And Ray said, quote, you wouldn't look me in the eye and say that. And the kid said, yes, I will. You found me behind the bushes and told me you'd kill me if I didn't get out of there. Good on you, kid. He was also wearing clothes that belonged to two of Belle's victims. He was arrested and charged with murder. He claimed that Belle asked him to burn down her farm with her children inside. He said the impending visit of Helgelein's brother was motivating her to destroy the house, fake her own death, and hightail. And while deputies searched the house for evidence and the coroner examined the inexplicably headless corpse of poor widow Gunness, both he and neighbors who were traipsing around the murder scene determined that that couldn't have been her body. It was a totally different weight and height. More friends and neighbors traipsing through the ashes also contended that that could not be her. And a few months later, the stomach contents of the headless woman revealed lethal doses of strychnine. Remember what I said about how not everyone got the arsenic or strychnine test? Not only did the symptoms of these poisonings look like symptoms of other illnesses, but testing for strychnine itself took a long time to yield results, if they yielded accurate results at all. As analytical techniques for pinpointing strychnine were, were very much still developing at this time, Tests specifically for strychnine heavily relied on the physical symptoms visible on the body, which in this case, as well as much less sophisticated toxicology methods. Today we use chromatography and mass spectrometry to quickly detect it, but again, they weren't that advanced at this time. And I would imagine, since this was a special case, those stomach contents were probably sent away to a more advanced lab than what Joe Schmo's stomach contents would expect to be sent to. So many folks agreed this was not Ms. Gunness. However, her dentures were found nearby, and her dentist confirmed that those were indeed her dentures. And so folks were like, maybe that was Belle after all. But, like, imagine a scenario where your dentures would be found but your head wouldn't. Like, do dentures fly out of your mouth in a fire, like when you get hit by a train and your shoes fly off. I gotta be honest, it all seems like a pretty ramshackle attempt to stage your own death to me. But as far as folks were concerned, the jury was out and remained there. The brother of Andrew Helgelein, who was already in town with this, occurred, quickly made his way to the farm to look for clues that may lead to his brother. He spoke to the police and Joe Maxson, the new farmhand, and asked if he had any idea what could have happened to him. Mr. Maxson came forward and said that Bell had ordered him to bring loads of dirt over to the pig pen. He said there were large depressions in the ground that he was asked to cover with dirt. She had told him him it was nothing but trash that she was burying and she wanted him to make the ground level. So he filled in the depressions with all of these seemingly suspicious aspects of this case. Sheriff Smutzer agreed to investigate the pig pen. He brought a dozen men back with him to excavate, and there they found hundreds and hundreds of bones and partially decomposed bodies. Many of their identities could not be determined. However, hands and feet and one head placed in a sack were identified as Andrew Helgelein by his brother. The remains of Jenny, her adopted daughter, were also identified. There wasn't quite enough evidence to convict Lampeer of murder, as there were still clearly 2 many question marks around Gunness, who clearly murdered many people. And it was raised that she very well may have took the opportunity to murder a woman and skedaddle before the flames also enveloped her own children. So he was charged only with arson. In prison, he confided to another prisoner that he never killed anyone, but he helped Belle bury bodies. He also said that when a young prince victim arrived, she made him a lovely meal that was drugged, and when the man was in a stupor, she split his head open with a meat chopper. He said that she would most often wait for the men to fall asleep, chloroform them, then carry their bodies to the basement and, quote, dissect them. She would then wrap the pieces of their bodies in sacks and bury them in the hog pen. With his help, she would also poison her victims with strychnine. He also mentioned that if she was too tired to bury them, she would simply feed the remains to the hogs. He also told this prison mate that the body found in the house belonged to a woman who came to apply as a housekeeper. He said she drugged the woman, then bashed her head in, decapitated her, took her head to a swamp, tied weights to it and threw it in the water. He said that she chloroformed the children and smothered them to death. This was not an official confession, just one that he told a fellow inmate. But I really hope that that last bit is true, that the children's deaths were quick and painless. He went on to say that the plan was to torch the house together and she was going to meet him down by the road. So he went down to the road, but she never came. That whippersnapper saw him and she disappeared into the wee hours of the morning, double crossing him and getting away with it all. In 2008, DNA scientists set out to prove if the headless body that was found was indeed Gunness. But sadly, they couldn't pull a high enough quality sample from the remains. So it is all still a mystery. Goodness gracious. Oh, as usual, that was a tough one. But here's something to make you feel a little bit better. I looked to see if there were any proper memorials or dedications made to Gunness victims, and sadly, many of them weren't given proper headstones. And there was no memorial to the victims until 2008, when the LA Porte County Historical Society Museum raised money for not only individual stones for two known victims, but a beautiful stone was created for the unknown victims as well. On April 26, a police escorted procession of descendants of the victims and the public was led to tombstone dedications in local cemeteries to finally honor those victims. Stones were placed where Peter Gunness was buried, whose grave was originally unmarked, and Belle's foster daughter Jenny received a beautiful stone as well. One more lovely stone was placed in Pine Lake Cemetery dedicated to the unknown victims who were buried together there a hundred years earlier. May they all rest in peace. If you enjoyed this podcast, would like to hear more, please rate it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Please leave me comments. Oh, and if you post anything about the show on social media, please tag me so that I can thank you personally. That is such a sweet thing to do. Be kind to yourselves, and I will see you in your nightmares.