The Gunness Farm / Did She Escape?
A headless body, a set of teeth found three weeks late, emptied bank accounts, a dead man's confession and a 1931 arrest in Los Angeles. Every piece of evidence, laid out so you can decide. Then vote.
On the morning of April 28, 1908, searchers found four bodies in the cellar of the burned farmhouse: three children, and an adult woman lying beside them with no head. Belle Gunness was not seen again. The coroner's problem was simple to state and impossible to settle: was the woman Belle?
Contemporary examiners put the headless woman at roughly 5 feet 3 and 150 pounds. Belle stood about 5 feet 8 and weighed well over 200. Later forensic review argued the skeleton was taller than first reported, but that is not what the 1908 jury heard.
Every other body in the cellar was intact. Decapitation was also how Belle disposed of her victims, and a head is the one part that would have settled identification by the teeth.
On May 19, three weeks after the fire, a hired miner named Louis Schultz sluicing the ashes produced a set of dentures and bridgework that Belle's dentist identified as hers. They showed less fire damage than the surrounding debris, and they appeared only after the estate's attorney had offered a reward for them.
The dentist was certain. Bridgework is specific to one mouth. If they are hers, either she died in the fire or she pulled her own teeth before leaving.
In the days before the fire Belle withdrew most of her money from LaPorte banks. She had also bought a large quantity of kerosene. Both are odd behavior for a woman about to be murdered in her sleep.
On April 27 she visited attorney Melvin Leliter, made a will leaving everything to her children (and, if they died, to a Norwegian orphanage), and told him Ray Lamphere had threatened to burn her out. She was building a story.
Neighbors reported Belle hiring a housekeeper from Chicago shortly before the fire. No housekeeper was ever accounted for. Lamphere later said the body was that woman.
Before dying of tuberculosis in prison in December 1909, Lamphere reportedly told a minister that Belle had killed the children, set the fire with a hired woman's body in place, and been driven away. He had also, at trial, told different stories. He was not a reliable witness about anything.
If Belle staged her death, she killed her own children to do it. People who believe she died in the fire point out that she had already killed Jennie, two infants and a stepchild. People who believe she escaped point out the same thing.
Reports came from Chicago, New York, California, Mississippi and Norway for thirty years. None was ever confirmed. Belle was the most famous woman in America in May 1908; every heavy-set middle-aged woman with an accent was a sighting.
A woman of about Belle's age was arrested in Los Angeles for poisoning the man she kept house for, August Lindstrom, for his money. She died before trial. Two former LaPorte residents saw her photograph and swore it was Belle. No record of Esther Carlson exists before 1908. She was also described as small.
A University of Indianapolis team exhumed the Forest Home grave in 2007 and tried to match DNA from the remains to saliva on an envelope Belle had sealed. The sample was too degraded. The test was inconclusive, not negative.
The 1908 jury acquitted Lamphere of murder in part because they weren't convinced the woman was Belle. No one has been convinced since. The best physical evidence for her death is a set of teeth that appeared three weeks late. The best evidence for her escape is everything she did in the week before the fire. If she died, she did so having prepared, for no reason, exactly as a person about to disappear would prepare.
The grave at Forest Home still holds the answer. Better DNA technology than 2008's exists. Nobody has yet paid to use it.
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