Jane Simon Ammeson - Americas Femme Fatale: The Story of Serial Killer Belle Gunness

Contents

Brynhild Paulsdatter Storset, later to be known as Bella Sorenson and then Belle Gunness. Photo courtesy of La Porte County Historical Society.

This book is a publication of

Red Lightning Books

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

redlightningbooks.com

2021 by Jane Ammeson

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2021

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ammeson, Jane, author.

Title: Americas femme fatale : the story of serial killer Belle Gunness / Jane Simon Ammeson.

Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Red Lightning Books, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021013229 (print) | LCCN 2021013230 (ebook) | ISBN 9781684351596 (paperback) | ISBN 9781684351619 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Gunness, Belle, 18591908. | Serial murderersIndianaLaPorte CountyBiography. | Women serial murderersIndianaLaPorte CountyBiography.

Classification: LCC HV6517 .A46 2021 (print) | LCC HV6517 (ebook) | DDC 364.152/32092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021013229

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021013230

To my parents, Dan and Lorraine Simon,
who loved a good mystery,
and to my husband, John Fields,
who is always there for me.

CONTENTS

WHEN ASHLEY RUNYON, THEN MY EDITOR AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY Press, first asked me to write a book about Belle Gunness, I wondered what was new to write about. After all, from the very first day of discovery, the story of Belles murder farm garnered national attention. A deluge of reporters, including some from New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, descended upon La Porte, Indiana, a charming and prosperous city circling the shoreline of a large inland lake with tree-lined boulevards of stately homes and a Victorian-era downtown.

The sensational discovery of the butchered body of Andrew Helgelien, a Norwegian farmer who, after visiting Belle in LaPorte, cashed out all his savings and then disappeared, setting his brother Asle on a mission to find him, spurred further searches of the property. They discovered an amazing tangle of rotted body parts and skeletal remains of men, women, and children.

The finding sent reporters and police on a quest to explore every aspect of Belle Gunnesss life. Almost every day a new fact was uncovered. It made for thrilling reading, and reporters, some of whom spent weeks in La Porte, were filing one-hundred-thousand-word stories to meet the demand.

Just when it couldnt get more bizarre, it always did.

The murder farm became a carnival scene with gawkers arriving on special trains packed to capacity and grieving relatives searching among the decaying remains hoping to find their loved ones in the makeshift morgue. But Belle had been prodigious in her use of quicklime, and little was left to be identified, just oozing, putrid masses of flesh and bones.

The news ratcheted up with reports of midwifery and abortions performed late at night, matrimonial agencies sending victims to her house, and connections between Belle and another mass murderer, now mostly forgotten, Johann Hoch. The number of people Belle murdered is difficult to assess. Sheriff Albert Smutzer called off the digging even though there were still soft spots in the earth indicative of burials and many, many families still desperate to find their loved ones. Most likely there are still victims beneath the earth on the farm today.

An odd assortment of players populated Belles story, including Elizabeth Smith, a once-beautiful woman who kept a skull in her home for sances and was called a voodoo queen, and Julius Truelson, a man in jail for forged checks in Texas who confessed to helping Belle dispose of bodies in exchange for her agreement to do away with his first wife. Belles ex-handyman and lover, Ray Lamphere, alcoholic and consumptive, told lots of stories about what happened that fateful night when Belles secrets came to light.

Though theres no lack of information, much of what has been written is wrongback then, a lack of reliable communication led to errors as did suppositions and stories told by those with their own agendas. But even now, facts Ive taken from the coroners inquesttyped up from handwritten notes by forensic anthropologist Andrea Simmons, transcribed from contemporary witnesses and thus accurateare misrepresented in newspaper and magazine articles, not to mention on websites. Even reading the same story in two or more different papers of the time isnt verification. Sometimes a story would go out on the wire with errors, and it would suddenly spread throughout the country. Large papers in big cities that could send their reporters to La Porte and local papers near where the crimes occurred often excelled in their coverage. Others less so.

Researching this book, I also relied on historians and scientists who tend not to make speculative judgments. I cross-referenced newspaper sources and read interviews with those still alive when such books as The Truth About Belle Gunness by Lillian de la Torre, a noted crime writer so famous and respected that her obituary appeared in the New York Times, were researched and written.

For more about the missing men and women, I read the papers from the towns where they lived as they often did extensive stories including interviews with the grieving families and contacted the local libraries and historical societies to dig for more information.

While this story is written as narrative nonfiction, any material within quotation marks or set as an excerpt has been verified as the exact words spoken or reported.

Belle liked to write letters; it was how she lured men to her farm. Ive read the letters still in existence that were translated from Norwegian, provided to me by journalist Ted Hartzell, who came into their possession years ago. Belle had a cruel and arrogant sense of humor. According to Katherine Ramsland, professor at DeSales University in Pennsylvania who has written extensively about serial killers and has studied the letters, when Belle refers to smooth and evil people who are up to fraud and tricks in one of her letters to Andrew, she must have taken such delight in saying that, knowing what she herself was up to. Again, this is classic sociopathic behavior. People like Belle enjoy their own ingenuity and deception; the joke is on the victim who deserved it for being such a dupe. She even has a little joke, funny only to her, writing how he might work himself to death if he stays here.

Heres another sick joke shes said to have played. Her hogs were prized for their taste though it must have turned quite a few stomachs when Ray Lamphere revealed that she sometimes diced up body parts and put them out into the pig lot. And her sausages might not have been wholly made out of pork. Imagine her sly, superior smile when people complimented her on the taste of her pork chops and sausage. The joke, again, was on them. They were stupid; she was smart. She was Belle Gunness, all powerful and impossible to defeatand she was for a long time. But maybe not forever.