Belle
Gunness
Many more male serial killers are reported than
female. Is this because men really do
commit murder more, or is it because women are better at getting away with
it? Belle Gunness is a famous female
serial killer from the early 1900s who killed many people and managed to
conceal her activities long enough to escape.
This is a woman who had the means, motive, and opportunity, and she
committed the crimes with incredible foresight and planning, and without
feeling guilt or remorse.
Case Summary
In September of 1881, a young woman named Brynhild
Storset arrived in America from Norway.
She lived with her sister for a time, before marrying Mads Sorensen
around the year 1883 and changing her name to Belle. They operated a confectionary store which
burned in 1898, allowing the Sorensens to collect insurance money (Shepherd,
2001). This event marked Belle’s
realization that she could gain money by collecting on insurance policies.
Just two years later, in 1900, Mads Sorensen died
suddenly. The death certificate named a
cerebral hemorrhage as the cause of death, but Mads’ brother and Belle’s
neighbors were suspicious that she had poisoned him for the life insurance,
which was $5,000 (Shepherd, 2001). Belle
escaped official blame, but her neighbors gossiped and made her life
unbearable, so she traded her city home in Chicago for a farm in LaPorte,
Indiana. The farm was sixty miles from
Chicago and sat on a hill on 48 acres; the property contained the two-story
farmhouse, barn, carriage shed, chicken yard, and pond (Shepherd, 2001). This is where she lived until the house
burned down in 1908.
She married Peter Gunness five months after moving to the
farm. Eight months into the marriage, he
was killed by a blow to the head. Belle
was questioned about the incident, and she explained that a sausage grinder
fell on the back of his head while a container full of hot water simultaneously
fell on his face (Shepher, 2001). Her
comments were consistent with the injuries found in the postmortem examination,
but the death and the explanation Belle gave seemed very strange. She collected $3,500 in life insurance.
Over the next five or so years, Belle continued her
murder spree. Her nefarious activities
were totally unbeknownst to her neighbors and the town of LaPorte. She placed matrimonial ads in Scandinavian newspapers
published in America . . . She lured men out to her farm, and they eventually
disappeared (Hartzell, 2008). Some of
her letters to potential suitors have been preserved in a museum in
LaPorte. In these cunning and
manipulative letters, she made herself seem very desirable, and even required
men to send her $1,000 before she would agree to meet them (Shepherd,
2001). This money was meant to prove
that they were serious about her, but all she was serious about was the
money. She hired various farmhands whom
she sent to town while she caused her suitors to disappear. A couple of farmhands later remarked that she
had an entire room in her house full of huge trunks and men’s clothing . . .
supposedly waiting for the men to come back (Shepherd, 2001). This may have seemed suspicious, but Belle
was a master liar, and people believed her answers.
Belle Gunness’ tidy little scheme continued right up
until the brother of one of her missing male visitors kept asking questions,
and the adult sister of Belle’s 17-year-old adopted daughter started poking
around. Apparently, the girl should have
been sent to California for school, but she wasn’t there. Right about the time that Belle may have
been found out, her house burned down.
Her current hired hand escaped and reported the fire to the neighbors,
but it was too late to save anybody or anything from the house by the time help
arrived. When the fire was finally out, men began scouring the house for Belle
and the three children living with her; four bodies were found in the cellar,
one adult female and three children’s bodies.
The children’s bodies were immediately identified as Belle’s children,
but the adult female’s head was missing and the body was much shorter and
slimmer than Belle’s (Shepherd, 2001).
Even with the obvious difference and rising speculation, Belle was
eventually declared dead.
Suspicious men began digging in soft spots around the
farm, and found more and more bodies until the final death count attributed to
Belle rose over forty. Bodies were found
in the pond, along fence lines, in holes left by tree stumps, and buried
garbage piles (Shepherd, 2001). The
eventual number of deaths included babies and men that she may have killed
before moving to the farm, but it is impossible to know the true number; it
could be much higher. Thousands of
people flocked to the crime scene to watch the scene unfold over several
weeks. In the end, although Belle was
officially declared dead, people always wondered if she had escaped and
continued her crime spree somewhere else.
Theories Regarding Belle’s Mental
State
In examining Belle Gunness’ past to possibly uncover why
she committed the terrible crimes, many relatives, past neighbors, and
acquaintances came forward with opinions, observations, and stories to tell the
police and reporters. People in the
small town of Selbu in Norway where Belle was born remembered her as being “a
very bad human being, capricious, and extremely malicious . . . she had unpretty
habits, always in the mood for dirty tricks, talked little, and was a liar as a
child” (Shepherd, 2001, p. 14). Others
who had known her simply called her insane or wild. Her sister said that all Belle loved was
money. Another family member related a story about Belle at age 17 in Norway,
miscarrying a baby after being kicked in the stomach by the baby’s father . . .
and then the father disappeared (McAlpine & Dickerson, n. d.). That may
have been her first murder. Even the
president of the Medico-Psychological Association of the early 1900s had a
theory. He believed that Belle was
“doomed from birth” due to her body being irregular in that her head was an odd
shape, she had a large frame and small feet, and her eyes were strange; the
theory was that “if a person’s body is irregular or unsymmetrical, the chances
are the brain will be formed badly” (Shepherd, 2001, p. 72). At the time of her supposed death, one theory
was as good as any, and there were many.
According to the trait perspective, everyone has a
different personality, and some people are more inclined to be negative than
others. Trait researchers would classify an antisocial person with premeditated
aggression, low fear, and low empathy as being a possible psychopath (Delisi,
2013). According to many people who knew
Belle Gunness, and the facts of her case, she had all of those traits. Her crimes were all premeditated, she showed
no fear, and she showed no empathy for her victims. According to the behaviorist/social learning
theory, a person's environment shapes his or her behavior. People learn by
having their actions reinforced in positive or negative ways by other people
and their environment. Looking at
Belle’s case from this angle, it would seem that her actions were reinforced by
the fact that she kept getting away with murder and insurance money. When she
first moved to America from Norway in the late 1800s, Chicago was a difficult
place for immigrant women to find jobs without resorting to prostitution, so in
this way her environment may have helped shape her behavior. She needed money, and she found a way to get
it.
Psychological and personal influences tempt people every
day. "Self-regulation is the capacity of an individual to inhibit
preferred but inappropriate responses based upon situational demands that favor
non-preferred but socially appropriate responses" (Delisi, 2013, sect.
2.2). For example, a person with little
self-control may steal candy from a store because he or she has the urge
to. People with more self-control are
better at following rules and fitting in to society. One example is Ted
Bundy. He escaped prison and made it to
Florida, where he sincerely meant to stop killing. However, a pretty young girl caught his eye,
and he could not control himself. His
personality also contributed to his relapse.
He was so manipulative, intelligent, and arrogant that he thought he
could always outsmart the law and not get caught. Although his personality suggested he may
become a criminal, his self-control was the key. All he needed was the ability to control his
impulses and he could have led a completely normal life. His little sideline of killing women
destroyed his life. The very famous case
of Ted Bundy reminds me a lot of Belle Gunness: she, too, had trouble with
self-control. A Pinkerton detective
called her “a woman without fear whose nature delighted in intrigue and the
exercise of cunning . . . she developed a blood lust, a mania, which required
that she hacked and hewed until the insanity within her was temporarily
gratified” (Shepherd, 2001). The actions
of these two serial killers indicate that they could appear to fit in to
society, but could not follow society’s rules.
Ted Bundy got caught, but Belle Gunness never did.
Temperament is
present at birth, can be inherited, is resistant to change, and "when
certain negative temperamental features are found at pathologically high
levels, and when those features are present along with other pathologically
high negative temperamental features, criminal behavior is more likely"
Delisi, 2013, sect. 3.2). Personality
evolves as a result of the temperament a person is born with. A baby born with
a negative temperament will develop negative personality traits. It all points back to temperament and biology
being influenced by environmental factors as a person ages. Belle was undoubtedly born with a negative
temperament, and her experiences growing up in Norway and then moving to
Chicago further developed her negative side.
Her pregnancy and miscarriage at age 17 made an impact on her in Norway,
and the difficult living conditions in her part of Chicago helped her along the
criminal path.
The psychoanalytic theory says that "the experiences
of childhood lay the foundation for the psychological functioning and
dysfunction that one experiences" (Delisi, 2013, sect. 5.1). Basically, if a person has a nice,
supportive, happy childhood, he will be more likely to grow up to be a
well-adjusted and productive member of society.
If a person is neglected as a child or has many bad experiences at a young
age, he is more likely to develop negative traits as an adult. The Id is the pursuit of pleasure, and if an
individual's pleasure is interrupted or blocked, psychological problems may
develop. The Ego deals with the
disappointments and problems of life.
The Superego "serves as an individual's internal representation of
the moral code, norms, and values imposed by society and family" (Delisi,
2013, sect. 5.2). So the superego can be different in every person, acccording
to how they are raised and how they learn to deal with problems. The superego of a criminal such as Belle would
likely have a low moral code and low values, thus making criminal activity
okay. Not much is known of Belle’s
childhood other than she was born in 1859, the youngest of eight children, she
worked at several farms in Norway, and her father was a stonemason (McAlpine
& Dickerson, n. d.). The townspeople
of her childhood described her as malicious and a liar, so she was most likely
born with a negative personality.
Somewhere along the way, her superego interpreted having money as being
the most important thing in life, and her moral code developed to accept any
method she used to gain the money she craved.
The PCL-R checklist is a list of traits that psychopaths
are known to typically have. Observing
and interviewing people will reveal whether or not they exhibit the traits on
the checklist. Typically, only a person
who spends a lot of time around the possible psychopath would be able to
recognize the occasional warning signs, and even then there is nothing the person
could do until the psychopath performs some criminal or morally reprehensible
act that can be reported to the authorities.
Of the twenty traits on the PCL-R list, some that describe Belle Gunness
include: glib and superficial charm, pathological lying, cunning and
manipulativeness, lack of remorse or guilt, callousness and lack of empathy, sexual
promiscuity, failure to accept responsibility for own actions, and parasitic
lifestyle (Hare, 2007). Several people
who knew her described how glib and cunning she was, and of course, she was an
expert liar. She methodically
dismembered all the bodies found on her farm with surgical precision, which
displays a lack of remorse, guilt, and empathy.
She had many lovers whom she lured to her farm and killed after
obtaining their money, which indicates sexual promiscuity. She did not accept responsibility for her
actions: she came up with plausible explanations for the deaths of her two
husbands and she set fire to her house and escaped when her criminal actions
were close to being discovered. She
lived off of money she gained by killing her husbands and children, and the
money she received from her many suitors, which is pretty much a version of a
parasitic lifestyle. She was a
psychopath, and she got away with more than forty murders.
In Los Angeles, a woman some people believe was Gunness
died under a different name in 1931 after she and another woman allegedly
poisoned a man. This woman was named
Esther Carlson, and she had the fingers, forehead, and ears of Belle Gunness,
as reported by two LaPorte natives who saw the body (Shepherd, 2001). Many people believe she had an accomplice in
staging her death and escaping. The
world will never know for sure.
