America's first female serial killer farmed here.

The insurance years

She arrived in America in 1881, took the name Belle, and married a fellow Norwegian named Mads Sorenson in Chicago in 1884. The couple ran a candy store that burned. Their home burned. Two of their children died young, each insured. Then on July 30, 1900, Mads died suddenly at home, and that date is the one everyone remembers, because it was the single day two of his life-insurance policies overlapped.

One doctor suspected strychnine. The family doctor ruled heart failure, and Belle collected, somewhere between $5,000 and $8,500 depending on the account. By 1901 she had bought a farm outside LaPorte, Indiana, with the money.

Peter Gunness and the sausage grinder

On April 1, 1902 she married Peter Gunness, a widowed butcher with a young daughter. His infant died within a week while alone in Belle's care. Eight months later Peter was dead in the kitchen. Belle's explanation: a sausage grinder fell from a high shelf and struck his head while he reached for his slippers. The coroner's jury had doubts. Peter's brother had more. Belle collected $3,000.

She was pregnant with Peter's son Philip, and she now ran the farm alone with her daughters Myrtle and Lucy and her foster daughter Jennie Olsen.

"Some little cash is required"

Belle began placing matrimonial advertisements in Norwegian-language newspapers across the Midwest. The pitch was always the same: a prosperous widow, a fine farm, seeking a man of means who would bring cash to join her.

Men came. John Moe from Minnesota. Henry Gurholt from Wisconsin. Ole Budsberg from Iola, Wisconsin, who was seen at a LaPorte bank cashing out and never seen again. Andrew Helgelien from South Dakota, who arrived on January 2, 1908 with close to $3,000. Neighbors noticed the suitors arrive. Nobody noticed them leave, because they didn't.

Neighbors later recalled Belle digging in the hog lot at odd hours, and the trunks that arrived with the men but never left with them.

The house burns

The day before, Belle had visited a LaPorte lawyer to draw up a will, telling him her former farmhand Ray Lamphere had threatened to burn her out. Before dawn on April 28 the farmhouse went up. In the cellar, searchers found the bodies of three children, Myrtle, Lucy and Philip, and an adult woman with no head.

Lamphere was arrested for arson and murder almost immediately. The case might have ended there, a bitter ex-hired man and a dead widow, except that the headless body looked too small to be Belle. And a man from South Dakota was about to get off the train.

The hog pen

Asle Helgelien came to LaPorte looking for his brother Andrew, who had stopped writing after visiting Belle. He convinced Sheriff Albert Smutzer to dig in the soft spots of the hog lot, places Belle had told neighbors were rubbish pits. On May 5, about four feet down, the first hole produced Andrew Helgelien, dismembered and sacked. Then Jennie Olsen, the foster daughter Belle had said was away at school in California. Then more.

By the time the digging stopped, investigators had recovered the remains of somewhere between eleven and fourteen people, most of them men, many cut apart the same way, and the LaPorte farm had become a national spectacle. Excursion trains brought more than 15,000 people out to look. Vendors sold postcards and refreshments at the gate.

Ray Lamphere

Lamphere went to trial in LaPorte before Judge J.C. Richter that November. On November 26 the jury convicted him of arson but acquitted him of murder, in part because they were not convinced the headless woman was Belle at all. He was sentenced to the state prison at Michigan City and died there of tuberculosis on December 30, 1909, aged 38. Before he died, by one account, he told a minister that Belle had killed far more than were found and had walked away from the fire alive.

LaPorte had its arsonist. It never got its murderer.