Belle Gunness- female serial killer

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.