100 Murder Cases

Corpses in the Pig Pen

The scent of smoke wafted through Joe Maxson's bedroom as dawn broke on April 28, 1908. At first, he thought an early breakfast was cooking below—he lived on the second story, somewhere above the kitchen—but the smoke drifting through his window looked unusually thick. Maxson rose from bed, peered outside, and saw a wall of flames.

His mind immediately turned to the other people living in the house. Three children, as well as the home's owner—a 48-year-old widow named Belle Gunness—were likely sleeping. Maxson was the family's hired farmhand and had lived on the small La Porte, Indiana, farm for barely three months. It was his job to protect the property and the people in it. He ran across his bedroom and tried to open the door leading to Gunness's half of the home.

It was locked.

With smoke choking his throat, Maxson cried out in a desperate attempt to get the family's attention. "Fire! Fire!" But nobody stirred. The only thing Maxson heard was the ominous creaking of burning timbers.

As a haze filled the bedroom, Maxson scrambled down a set of rear stairs, ran outside, and grabbed an ax. He desperately hacked at the door leading to Mrs. Gunness's part of the home, but it was no use. Nobody inside was responding. By the time the authorities reached the property, the building was a charred husk.

When the embers finally cooled, firemen sifting through the rubble found evidence that the fire was not accidental. In the basement, they discovered the four burnt bodies of three children and an adult female. The woman's corpse was headless.

Immediately, neighbors began mourning the tragedy: Belle Gunness, a lonely widow who had spent years fruitlessly looking for love, had died surrounded by her children in a horrendous fire. For all her life, it seemed that tragedy had followed Mrs. Gunness—she had lost two husbands and multiple children to terrible accidents—and now it looked as though fate had come for her, too. Within days, a disgruntled former farmhand named Ray Lamphere was arrested for setting fire to the building.

As the village mourned, a South Dakota man named Asle Helgelien walked into the La Porte sheriff's office. He had heard about the blaze and was deeply worried. Months earlier, his brother, Andrew Helgelien, had come to La Porte with the intention of moving in with Mrs. Gunness. He hadn't heard from his brother since.

The ensuing investigation would turn the town of La Porte, Indiana, into the center of America's attention.

***

By all outward appearances, Belle Gunness had a hard lot in life. Born on a farm in Norway, she emigrated to the United States in 1881 when she was 22 and settled in Chicago, where she met her first husband, Mads Ditlev Anton Sorenson. Two of their children (who may have been adopted) never lived past infancy. Around 1895, a candy store they owned burned to the ground. In 1900, one of their homes was turned to ash. That same year, Mads mysteriously died.

Using her husband's life insurance payout, Belle bought a farm with more than 40 acres near La Porte, Indiana, and married a fellow widower named Peter Gunness. Marital bliss, however, was in short supply. Not even one week after the wedding, Peter's 7-month-old daughter died unexpectedly. And that December, Peter died in a freak accident after a sausage grinder fell from a high shelf and struck his head. The circumstances seemed strange enough that the coroner looked into it, but Belle was cleared.

In the ensuing years, the two-time widow kept few constant companions. She lived alone with her surviving children and a revolving cast of farmhands, who helped her pitch hay, butcher hogs, and manage a menagerie of chickens, horses, cows, and a single Shetland pony. Around 1905, she decided it was time to find love again and began classified ads in Scandinavian-language newspapers.