Belle Gunness

This woman’s life of crime started with the supposed accidental deaths of her first two husbands and two of her children. She collected insurance money on each of them. Belle moved to La Porte, Indiana, where she started sending out ‘lonely hearts’ ads in the newspaper. Belle would lure lonely men back to her home through these ads, where she would rob them and kill them with the help of her farm hand and presumed lover, Ray Lamphere.

On 28th April 1908, Belle’s house was set on fire. Lamphere was arrested and accused of arson, plus the murder of Belle and her children. Lamphere claimed that the female body in the burned house wreck was not Belle. The body was missing a skull, but Belle’s dentures were found beside it. She had seemingly faked her own death.

Investigators excavated belle’s ranch, and there they found countless human bones and dismembered bodies wrapped up in gunnysacks and covered with lye. Some of the victims had been fed to the pigs too. It is believed that Belle may have killed up to 150 people, but this was never confirmed. She was not seen much after faking her own death, but the last sighting of Belle was apparently in a bordello in Ohio in 1935.