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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Vaborg Thun. And tonight, dear listener, we find ourselves once more at the cusp of the 20th century in the United States of America.
However, since this podcast now has more downloads than the entire population of Norway, I thought it appropriate to bring to you a Norwegian special. This series of episodes will feature none other than the most notorious of all Norwegian serial killers.
She emigrated from Norway to the United States, where she became the most prolific female serial killer since Elizabeth Bathory. Her name was Brynhild Poulstadter Størset, more commonly known as Belle Gunness, and she killed at least 13 people, maybe as many as 42.
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If you're unable to contribute, then you can still help out by telling your friends about your favorite podcast and helping me grow through word of mouth. The larger my fanbase gets, the more stable this program becomes and the more resources I'll be able to devote to it in the future. Brynhild Paulstadter Störset, known in America as Just Bell Gunnars, was cooking breakfast.
At least, that is what Joe Maxon thought she was doing as he was laying in bed the early morning of the 28th of April, 1908. There was a characteristic hickory smell, mixed with cedar to give off a somewhat pungent aroma. But as his senses awoke more to the morning, he realized—
That it was not egg and bacon on the wood stove he was smelling, but a breath-consuming smoky odor of savage fire. He leaped out of bed. Something caught his attention outside his window, something drifting by. His feet found his trusty slippers at his bedside, and he noticed that it was a wisp of gray smoke he had seen, dancing in front of his windowsill.
Soon after, a more sinister-looking cloud followed, black and smelling of hellfire. It rushed up from below, and he saw that flames, snapping at the remnants of white lace curtains. Maxson was not a very educated man, but it took no genius to realize the house was on fire, and all of the inhabitants were asleep.
He quickly grabbed a robe to cover his undergarments and reached for his bedroom's doorknob. It was hot to the touch, and the door, it would not budge. He tried with both hands and pulled all his might, but the wooden frame had blistered to wedge the door shut tight. He started banging on the door frantically. He knew that he himself could escape rather easily through the window and below,
But he had the safety of the other inhabitants in mind, both the landlady, Mrs. Gunness, and her young children. Mrs. Gunness, he cried. Wake up! Fire! Mrs. Gunness, the house is burning! Myrtle! Lucy! Philip! Fire! He listened for a moment, hoping to hear through the keyhole the family scampering through the hall, alerted to reality.
"'Mrs. Gunness,' he tried again, "'children,' but no sound answered him, not even a whimper. His own room was filling with hacking fumes, and he was afraid that at any moment the tin of kerosene he had bought yesterday for Widow Gunness, and which she had him put in the kitchen, might explode.'
He dashed through the smoke-filled window frame and quickly found himself on the ground by the kitchen. A golden morning sun was tipping the eastern horizon of the Indiana cornfields. Unaffected by the unfolding tragedy, flailing arms, yelling in panic at the top of his lungs, he circled the house but found every window lapped by flame, impenetrable.
Somewhere inside, he knew, was the senseless Gunner's family, trapped by the carnage. Belle, 48 years old, and her three children, Myrtle, 11 years old, Lucy, 9, and Philip, only 5, were they already dead, licked by flame.
Or were they yet untouched by the fire, but slowly, methodically, lapsing into a coma under asphyxiation of smoke?
Maxon spotted two neighbors racing toward him on respective bicycles, young Mike Clifford and his brother-in-law, William Humphrey. Both men had spotted the flames in the pre-dawn light. They immediately shot to work, helping the farmhand, waking the household by throwing house bricks used for patchwork and laying in a pile near the storm shelter through every window.
Maxon and Clifford were shoulder-ramming the locked front door, hoping to force it. Only the crackle of flames continued to respond from within. "'Why the hell can't they hear us?' Humphrey shouted. He had found a scaling ladder near the barn and setting it against the exterior walls. Climbing, he peered in several windows but saw no signs of life."
Soon came the Hudsons, and the Leifems, and the Nicholsons, all neighbors from up and down old McClung Road, a cloud of red clay hanging over the entrance to the Gunner's farm, where their buggies and wagons had crossed in a dither, one after another. They yelped and hallooed and howled, but no one could stir the Gunnerses, and they tried to yelp and halloo and howl some more,
until it soon became apparent that the louder they became, the more impossible it was that any living soul could remain in the fireball that had been the gunner's abode. By the time Sheriff Smutser arrived, leading a brigade of volunteer firemen and their clanging host cart from nearby La Porte, it was much too late.
The farmhouse, the outbuildings, and the elm trees whose branches had tipped the window casements were all gone. They all felt very sorry for Belgunus. Not only had she been a widow left to fend for herself and her several children, but now she and her farm had gone up in flames as well. The kindly and sympathetic neighbors of La Porte, Indiana,
Said Belle Gunness had been born under an unlucky star. Since she had come to their town and settled in Old Alty House a mile north of Town Square, she had suffered one disappointment and heartbreak after another, and they admired her quiet suffering, her ability to go on with head held high and with pride in her steps.
By 1908, Belle's once hourglass figure had fattened, but her silken blonde hair, accompanied by a full Nordic smile of white teeth and a pair of flashing blue eyes, still turned heads.
Weighing in at 280 pounds, she nevertheless was able to tighten her corset to emphasize a 48-inch bust and a pair of curving 54-inch hips in an era when curves, no matter how expansive the girth, epitomized glamour and sex appeal.
Bell lived at the time of the corn-fed politician and the billowy beauty, says Lillian de la Torre, author of The Truth About Bell Gunness. 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 Bell's, stuffed their corset covers with ruffles and wore droop-fronted shirtwaists. Bell Gunness was right in style, with a waist that would pull into 37 inches. When she donned her ruffled silk and put her diamonds in her ears, men thought her well worth a second glance."
She had been a familiar presence in the hard-working hamlet of Laporte, a weekly frequenter to its wholesale shops, its bank, its grocers, its milliners. Her greetings of good morning had been pleasant to all she passed, and her kind stare would be remembered by many. Her Norwegian accent was like a song amid the monotonous plains drawl of the Hoosier frontier.
La Porte, with its shingle hoses and its front-port sit-down attitude, and its slowly growing population of 100,000, was not about to claim, nor want, big city ways. Sixty miles from Chicago, its only connection to the big city was the New York Central Railroad line that traversed it.
Laporte, in early 20th century, had many churches, a small factory or two, and a handsome red sandstone courthouse. They boasted of two live wire newspapers, the Herald and the Argus.
Both papers ran the story of the tragedy the following morning, relating how in the debris were found the charred bodies of Mrs. Gunnus and her three children, two adopted, one called Philip had been her own. The body believed to be that of Belle Gunnus was headless. Sheriff Smutser and his deputies, Leroy Marr and William Antis, immediately smelled murder.
So did the courts. So did the clergy. So did the newspapers. So did the townsfolk. So did the neighbors along Dusty McClung Road. And it was no secret who the suspect may be.
Most everyone who walked the streets of La Porche, at least once a day, had heard about Ray Lamphere's threats to get even with the widow after she fired him as her farmhand. The deputies had found Lamphere that morning working at his new job as a field hand at the John Wheatbrook farm. He had no stand-up alibi as to where he had been before sunrise, when the fire was ignited.
He was pinched and tossed in the courthouse jail awaiting arraignment. He cried innocence and told the reporters he was being framed for something he had nothing to do with. Bad luck was bad luck, and he didn't think it right that the widow's ill-lit star was now shining its spoiled glow on him. The town began to wonder if maybe Lamphere had a point.
In retrospect, yes, everyone who had anything to do with bell-gunners had, over the years, seemed to either meet foul fate or, even stranger, disappear into a silent chasm of infinity.
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not too far away from the Norwegian city of Trondheim. I could not find any pictures of her dwelling. Her family was probably too poor to afford such a luxury, and as was quite typical for poor Norwegians at the time, there are also no photographs of a young Belle. She grew up in harsh times. The county of Selby...
also had the most strict priest they had ever had, called Agathon Bartholomeus Hanstén. Since Belle was from meagre means, she and her family always had to sit at the back row in church, and she had to sit at the back desk at school.
However, according to the very limited records that exist, she did get good grades, both from school and from her priest when she stood for confirmation. Her father was a rather poor stonemason whose son, Bella's brother, followed his profession. Sister Anna left for America when Bella was yet quite young and had married a man named John Larson in Chicago.
Knowing that her younger sibling was unhappy in a life that was going nowhere, Anna sent for Bella, who joyously sailed to the New World at the age of 24 in 1883. Eventually making her way to the Midwest, she boarded with the Larsens until she could make it on her own.
They lived in a highly Nordic community that faithfully clung to each other for contentment in their new, flat, mountainless homeland of the Midwest prairie and fields. She wasn't in Chicago long when she met department store guard Mats Sorenson, a hard-working conservative who was eager to start a family in the States.
Attempts at conceiving a child came to nothing. So Mads and Bella, who Americanized her name to Belle, were in a financial position to adopt children in the neighborhood from parents who could not afford them. Over the next 16 years, the Sorensons fostered three girls, Jenny, Myrtle, and Lucy. Domestic life was happy, and troubles were few. Oddly,
The family had troubles with fires. They had to move three times after a fire consumed their houses and miraculously left them all untouched. As well, according to the Lapport Historical Society, the Sorensons owned a small store in Chicago that only turned a profit after it burned and they collected the insurance.
On the whole, Chicago neighbors recalled Belle as a good wife to Matz, and a doting mother who rarely raised her voice except to, here and there, scold her children with a simple, "'Ja, ja, it's the brussel sprouts, or there is no tapioca puddings for da dessert.'" Tragedy struck in early 1900, when Matz died suddenly of undetermined causes.
His only symptom had been chest pains the day of his death. Doctors signed the death certificate as heart attack. What monetary problems Widow Sorensen might have had were eradicated when a pair of life insurance policies on MOTS brought in nearly $8,000, a huge sum in those days.
Packing up her three foster children and the cash tied in her purse strings, Belle moved to La Porte, Indiana, an area heavy with fellow Norsemen that her late husband had known about and where he had been planning to eventually retire. She plopped their insurance money down on a farm up for sale by the county.
A former house of ill repute, a brothel that had fallen into disrepair since its madame, Mattie Alte, passed away at a crisp old age. It was a square house of red brick, two stories high, and set on the edge of an orchard on one side and a shallow swamp and forest on the other.
McClung Road, which paralleled it, rolled over a mild hill and dale south to La Porte, whose church steeples peaked from the patch of woodland a mile south. Bell swept out the ghosts of its painted women and aired out their cheap sour perfume that dallied in the narrow hallways and recesses.
to the Christian relief of her neighbors who had always hated such a business operating so near where their children were playing. Belle Sorensen turned the abode into a comfortable home for her and her happy brood. Matty Alty's showy, marketry parlor floor and its dark walnut furnishings were polished until they shone.
Simple ruffled curtains of white were put up to brighten the tall, narrow, tree-darkened windows. A handsome front fence was put up by a young hardware clerk, Charles F. Parman, who was puzzled by the square of Kokomo-link fence that penned hogs in the back on the rise that sloped to the swamp.
His customer had ordered that the fence be six feet high and topped by barbed wire, unusual for a hog pen, for what hog could ever jump even half that high? The house had six bedrooms, a spacious dining room, a long kitchen and a high-beam cellar. Kerosene lamps throughout kept the place well illuminated.
Carpenters like Parman were retained to free the clogged-up drain sprouts, straighten the sagging shutters and reinforce the small barn that stood across a patch of yard. Not long after she arrived in La Porte, Belle produced out of nowhere a new husband. He was the tall, good-looking, blonde and bearded Peter Gunnes, a farmer by trade.
He brought with him a baby boy from a previous marriage, who, not long after moving in with his father, contacted a virus and died. The Gunners' family's grief soon mellowed out, under the many hours of hard work required to keep the cornfields thriving, irrigating, planting, sowing. Everyone had his or her responsibility.
Her children helped where they could, feeding the hogs, cleaning the corn crib, raking. Peter Gunness and Bell became regulars in town on trade day, selling their cattle for meat and trading manure for tools. Then, one winter eve, just before the close of the year 1900, daughter Jenny, hearing clatter below,
rushed from her upstairs room to find her stepfather Peter writhing in pain on the kitchen floor. Standing over him, weeping, was Belle, who screamed that a large iron meat grinder had fallen off the shelf onto his head. He died before sunrise.
Over the next several years, the farm prospered. Better than Belle's luck with men. Farmhand after farmhand, that she hoped would turn into a husband, left her dry, often in the middle of harvest when muscle was especially needed. Time after time, it appeared that perhaps one of them, such as hefty Peter Carlson, was turning into a suitor.
Some even talked marriage openly. Then they simply disappeared in the dead of night. Nineteen-year-old Emil Greening, son of a neighbor, often came forward to offer his services between Bell's would-be suitors. But of course he had no attraction to the older woman. His interest lay in Jenny, who had developed into a lean, rosy-cheeked blonde of dimples and giggles.
But his interest in the Gunners' place waned after Jenny suddenly decided to go to college in San Francisco, California, and left without an area farewell. Emil was heartbroken. Then came Ray Lamphere. Bell had first seen the curly-headed 30-year-old odd-job carpenter about town in the spring of 1907.
and, knowing he was looking for work, asked him to hire on as her farmhand. He was glad to have the work, if for nothing else than to support his drinking habit, and took up residence in Bell's spare room on the second floor. Lampere was reportedly not too bright, but was talented with hammer and nail and not afraid to work. It wasn't long after that they were seen together, arm in arm, about town.
He as lean as she was obese. In the gin mills which he frequented, Lamphair would boast to his pals that she had seduced him because she thought he was quite a man. Then display the watch she gave him, or the vest, or the beaver hat, or the high-top leather boots. But something wayward happened to their affair, and as the Christmas season of 1907 rolled about,
Bell was suddenly traipsing about La Porte with a new man, who, like most of her others, seemed to materialize out of the ether. More stunned than anyone was Lamphere, when he learned the couple had paused at Oberreich Department Store to purchase a wedding ring.
No sooner had the fires of jealousy begun to send Lamphere to the saloons to rant and rave to his comrades about the treacheries of femaldom, than this latest of suitors vanished. But the farmhand's relief was short-lived, for shortly thereafter yet another gentleman appeared to have captured Belle's devotions.
This time, neighbors said, it looked like true love, described as a big Swede. Andrew Helgeline beamed when he strolled the country lanes and town byways with his woman. He was a slap-happy, good-natured man who seemed in his usual high spirits when he stopped at a town bank to withdraw all his funds from another bank in his native South Dakota.
He announced to the teller that he and Belle were getting married. That evening, Belle asked Ray Lamphere to vacate his quarters at her residence and find other lodging. She was turning the room over to Helgeline until the wedding day, which wasn't far off. Lamphere, vehement, took it a step further by quitting his position and wishing his employer bad luck.
Again he was seen and heard at the bars spouting hellfire to Belle Gunness and the big Swede. A week later Helgelein was gone as well. Belle wept to her neighbors. When am I ever going to learn? What do I do wrong that these men take such advantage of me? Stuck again without masculine help?
Lamphere refused to come back, damned the crop. To help with the spring harvest, Bell hired a local man of good reputation, a man who was known for his truthfulness and get-it-done attitude. His name was Joe Maxon. There never was an insinuation of any relationship between he and Widow Gunness. Away from work, which he kept up long after sunset,
Maxim remained to himself in the cozy room Bell had given him, over the kitchen, reading the newspaper and playing soft refrains on his fiddle. Often, the gunner's children were lulled off to sleep by the soft murmur of his stringed lullabies. The only time he stuck his nose into others' business
was to warn his employer, as directed, when former farmhand and jealous lover Lamphere was trespassing again. Constant threats to the woman's being, even after Andrew Helgelein disappeared, had forced Belle to have him arrested, time and again. But Lamphere would continue to harass by distance.
Maxon would often see Lamphere peering from behind the elms that lined the perimeter of her yard. Knowing he was spotted, the latter darted off like a frightened salamander. On the 27th of April, 1908, Belle visited an attorney, M. E. Lellier, for the sole purpose of writing her last will and testament.
In the meeting, Lelyr noticed that Gunnars looked distracted. She told the lawyer that she feared what Lamphere might do to her. That man, she told him, is out to get me, and I fear one of these nights he will burn my house to the ground. In the will, she left her property to her children, or, in the event of their deaths, to the Norwegian orphans' homes.
When Leliere suggested that that wasn't the official name of the orphanage, that he needed a day or two to get its real name before he could authorize the will, Belle flustered. She insisted that such business could be completed after the fact, and that they should both sign the will now. There's no time to wait, she maintained.
With a sigh, Lelyr consented, placing his name at the bottom of the document beside hers. That very night, the Gunner's farm burned.
Forever!
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But there was one problem. Paperwork. Mountains of it. Filing, invoices, you name it. This work ain't fit for a pilot. Luckily, their captain had an idea. She used the smart buying tools on Amazon Business so they could work more efficiently and get back to doing what they do best. I know, right? Amazon Business, your partner for smart business buying. And so ends part one of the Belgunas saga.
Next week, I will publish part two. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. I have been your host, Thomas Weiborg Thun. Doing this podcast is a labor of love, and I couldn't have done it without my loyal listeners. This podcast has been able to bring serial killer stories to life, especially thanks to those of you that support me via Patreon.
You can do so at theserialkillerpodcast.com slash donate. There are especially a few patrons that have stayed loyal for a long time. Maud, Mickey, Sydney, Lexi, Christina, Philip, Jason, Lisbeth, Sarah, Tommy, Charlotte, Craig, Megan, Thomas, Linda and Wendy.
Your monthly contributions really help keep this podcast thriving. You have my deepest gratitude. As always, thank you, dear listener, for listening and feel free to leave a review on your favorite podcast app or website and please do subscribe to the show if you enjoy it. Thank you. Good night and good luck.
