Widow Advertises for Husbands- Kills Forty - Time Machine Case from 1908

 

When the Gunness Farm near La Porte, Indiana burned down during the night of the 28th April, Joe Maxon, the hired hand, was apparently the only person to survive. The bodies of the widow Gunness's four children were found in the basement, together with a headless woman, presumed to be Mrs Gunness, since her false teeth lay alongside her burnt corpse.

 Suspecting arson, police arrested recently sacked hired hand, Ray L'Amphere, whose unrequited passion for Mrs Belle Gunness had led her to make several complaints about him. But once in custody L'Amphere's statements started police digging around Belle's pigsty. 

They unearthed the remains of 14 men. And that was less than half of it! L'Amphere estimated that the widow murdered at least 42 people over the last four years, including her 14-year-old adopted daughter Jennie Olson, who told authorities back in 1904 that she saw Momma Gunness beating Poppa Gunness's brains out with a cleaver. At the time, Belle's alternative story was believed: that a meat grinder fell off of a high shelf on the unfortunate Peter Gunnesss's head. 

 Fat, ferocious and fiftyish, widow Gunness advertised for matrimonially interested men willing to help her pay off the mortgage on the farm. They came with their savings and Belle rapidly disposed of them. She drugged their coffee, or chloroformed them, and finished them off with her trusty cleaver.

Recently she seems to have panicked when the brother of one of her missing suitors enquired about his disappearance. Belle drew up a will and paid off one of her mortgages. Then came the fire. 

 Did Belle perish in it? No part of the head except her false teeth has never been located. The burned body appears to have stood five inches shorter and weighed fifty pounds less than Belle. Moreover, it did not burn to death but was poisoned before the fire consumed it. 

It seems that Mrs Gunness lured some poor vagrant to her farm and killed her to conceal her own escape. The wicked widow is still at large, somewhere, in possession of a small fortune.