[1] Gunness is thought to have killed at least fourteen people (most of whom were men she enticed to visit her rural Indiana property through personal advertisements), while some sources speculate her involvement in as many as forty murders, making her one of the most prolific female serial killers in history.
At age 14, Gunness began working for neighboring farms by milking and herding cattle to save enough money for the journey to New York City.
[6] In Chicago, while living with her sister and brother-in-law, Gunness worked as a domestic servant, then got a job at a butcher's shop cutting up animal carcasses.
Gunness collected money from both the expiring life insurance policy, and the one that went into effect that day, making a total of $5,000.
After travelling to La Porte, Gurholt wrote his family, saying that he liked the farm, was in good health, and requesting that they send him seed potatoes.
In the ruins, authorities found the bodies of a headless adult woman, initially identified as Belle Gunness, and her three children.
[11] A visit by Asle Helgelien to the Gunness farm with a former hired hand led to attention being paid to "soft depressions" in what had been made into a pen for hogs; after briefly digging one of the depressions in the lot, a gunny sack was found that contained "two hands, two feet, and one head", which Helgelien recognized to be those of his brother.
[11] Immediate inspection of the site revealed that there were dozens of such "slumped depressions" in the Gunness yard, and further digging and investigation at the site yielded multiple burlap sacks containing "torsos and hands, arms hacked from the shoulders down, masses of human bone wrapped in loose flesh that dripped like jelly", from trash-covered depressions that proved to be graves.
[11] After finding the parts of five bodies on the first day, and an additional six on the second—some in shallow graves under the original hog pen, others near an outhouse or a lake—"the police stopped counting".
[11] With these discoveries, the perceptions of Belle Gunness, as reported in newspaper descriptions of a praiseworthy woman—dying in the fire that consumed her house, "in a desperate attempt to save her children"—were reassessed.
[11] Despite the initial success with the identification of Andrew Helgelien, and despite the fact that widening news coverage of the mass murders invited inquiries from families with men that had gone missing, "[m]ost of the remains could not be identified.
Lamphere later confessed that Gunness had placed advertisements seeking male companionship, only to murder and rob the men who responded and subsequently visited her on the farm.
[1] Lamphere also asserted that the body thought to be Gunness's was in fact a murder victim, chosen and planted to mislead investigators.
[6] Edward Bechly, a journalist, was given a secret assignment to acquire access to a confession and publish it, thus bringing a second, inconsistent Lamphere account to public knowledge.
[26] In the Garden of Spite: A Novel of the Black Widow of LaPorte is a US-published 2021 novel by Camilla Bruce with elements of "Norwegian noir and true crime" based on Gunness.
[29] In 2024, the novel Bajo tierra seca by César Pérez Gellida, which was awarded the Spanish Premio Nadal, was inspired by Gunness.