1 case tagged “matrimonial fraud”
Alleged Offender: Belle Sorenson Gunness (born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth)
They came to La Porte, Indiana, one by one, with their life savings tucked in their coat pockets and her letters folded in their hands. A warm heart waiting, she had promised. A fine farm. A future. Belle Gunness wrote those letters for years, placing matrimonial advertisements in Norwegian-language newspapers across the Midwest, casting for men who were lonely and solvent and, crucially, willing to tell no one where they were going. When investigators finally dug up her farm in May 1908, they found the answer to where those men had gone: butchered, dismembered, folded into gunny sacks, and buried in shallow graves near the hog pen. More than forty victims lay scattered beneath the Indiana soil. Then the farmhouse burned, a headless torso was found in the ruins, and the question of whether Belle Gunness had died alongside her crimes or simply escaped them has never been definitively answered. One of the most prolific female serial killers in American history, she was never charged with a single murder. This is her story.
