January 1, 2026 • 10 mins
Crime can be a curious thing, whether it's the parties involved or the unanswered questions. Either way, they make for fascinating stories.
Order the official Cabinet of Curiosities book by clicking here today, and get ready to enjoy some curious reading!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
(00:36):
People have been making wine in the San Julian region
of France for centuries. The wine harvested from their grapes
is their pride and joy. But like any product that
depends on a plant in order to survive, the wine
production there is vulnerable to crop failure. The year was
fifteen forty five. That season, the vineyards were utterly ravaged
(00:56):
by insects, devastating the winemakers of the region. So what
did they do? Well? If it was you or I,
the most we could do is start from scratch and
hope that things turned out better next season. But remember
this was France in the early Renaissance. For all the
advancements in art and culture, it was still a very
spiritually driven society, and there was recourse for the average
(01:18):
person who felt that they had been wronged by an animal.
They could take that animal to ecclesiastical court, and so
that year the people of San Julyllen decided to do
just that to a species of weavil that they blamed
for the destruction of their vineyards. They hired Pierre Ducal
to be their legal representative, and he filed a complaint
with the court. It named the weevil species ringkites oroctus
(01:43):
as the culprits and demanded punishment for the offending insect.
The state appointed a legal team to defend the weavils
and the trial was set. Predictably, the weavil trial did
not last long. After hearing the opening statements of both sides,
the chair of the court, Frescois Bonivart, made a ruling.
He declined to pass sentence on the weevils, saying that
(02:05):
the creatures acted according to their nature and according to
the laws of God. Therefore, it was the prosecution who
needed to reflect on their own worthiness in the eyes
of God. The weevils represented, in the court's view, divine
punishment on the people of Sant july En. Bonavard said
that the citizens of San Julien needed to demonstrate that
they were a good Christian community. They had to collectively
(02:28):
repent of all their sins, pay their tithes to the church,
and march in solemn procession around the vineyards. The list
of pious activities was extensive, with the mandate that at
least two people from every Son Julienne household participates in
order for the repentance to be true. Not long after,
representatives from Saint Julienne submitted a report to the local
(02:48):
curate saying that they had done everything the court had
asked and the weevils subsequently were no longer a problem.
It was maybe inconvenient for the people, but their problem
was over for forty one year years at least in
fifteen eighty seven, a new generation of weavils would return
and cause trouble for the people again. On April thirteenth
(03:08):
of that year, representatives of San Julien requested legal assistance
for dealing with another wave of their weavil driven blight.
In their petition, they referenced the earlier decision of the
Ecclesiastical Cords, saying that the weavils had an i quote,
resumed their pegradations and are doing incalculable injury, and as such,
they asked the Prince Bishop to appoint new legal representatives
(03:32):
for the weavils since their original legal defendants were deceased,
they wanted to try the case again, the same crime,
just different culprits. This time, the state complied, and the Weavils,
for the second time, now went to trial for destroying
the vineyards of San Julien. As you'd imagine, the defense
maintained the argument from fifteen forty six, saying that the
(03:52):
weavils were created by God and thus had a right
to feed on the grasses of the earth. The prosecution,
on the other hand, argued that orrding to the Bible,
animals are subservient to man, to which the defense rebudded
that man certainly has a right to command the animals,
but not to prosecute them. The trial finally ended not
with a punishment for the weavils or another round of
(04:14):
piety for the people of San Julienne, but with a
compromise of sorts. The mayor offered the weavils a patch
of land to live on where they could feast to
their hearts content. The legal team for the Weavils agreed
to this, but before the agreement was finalized, one of
the weavil's advocates pointed out that he couldn't sign the
agreement after seeing the land. It was barren and unwelcoming.
(04:36):
Experts were dispatched to examine the land on behalf of
the Weavils, and that's where the story ends as far
as we know. You see, the final two pages of
the court documentation no longer exist because, in an ironic twist,
it seems that at some point in the past few
hundred years, those pages were eaten by bugs. Bell was
(05:10):
a hard woman, born of hard times. She grew up
working on a farm in Norway before emigrating to the
US in eighteen eighty one she was only twenty one
years old. She worked other hard jobs in the Chicago
area until she met and married another Norwegian immigrant, Mads Sorensen,
in eighteen eighty four, and it was around this time
that Bell was awoken to the wonders of insurance. It
(05:32):
struck her as odd that you could pay for something
that you would hope you would never need, whether it
was home fire or health insurance. She planned to get
her money's worth out of it. Bell and Mad's Chicago
home mysteriously burned down, and they received an insurance payout. Next,
they purchased a small business, which, wouldn't you know it
also burned down, and then they used that insurance money
(05:54):
to buy a new, larger home. It was at this
point that Bell's insurance schemes took a turn for the macabre.
We mentioned that there are more than one type of insurance. Well,
now Bell wanted to see what kind of money she
could get off of life insurance. She and Mads took
in four foster children and purchased policies on all of them.
Within a few years, two of them had died from
(06:15):
and I quote colitis. That's essentially colon inflammation caused by
things like bacteria or food allergies or you know, poison.
Mads must have been at least somewhat of an accomplice
in these schemes. If he was, he should have considered
that Bell's greed new no bounds, because next she took
out a policy on him. The truly remarkable aspect of
(06:37):
this next scheme was that Bell decided her initial plan
was thinking too small. After taking out one policy on Mads,
she decided the limits weren't high enough. She took out
a second, higher policy, and she wasn't content for one
policy to end and the other to begin. No, she
waited until the one day that the two policies briefly overlapped,
(06:57):
and then well Mads mysteriously passed away. Bell next married
a man named Peter, who, surprise surprise, she also took
out a life insurance policy on. He had two young
daughters from a previous marriage. One of them died just
a week after he and Belle married, and he only
lasted a few months himself Beyond that. She claimed that
Peter died after a meat grinder fell and hit him
(07:19):
on the head. But the thing about meat grinders is
while they tend to be secured to a counter at
waste level, so how one happened to wind up falling
on Peter's head is a mystery. Bell used all of
this insurance money to buy herself a farm, and this
would be the final most horrific stop on her murder spree.
For this next phase of her plan, she actually put
(07:40):
an ad in multiple newspapers across the Midwest asking for
a husband to come live with her on the farm.
Through this process, she attracted a man from South Dakota
named Andrew Helgalin. Andrew traveled from his home in South
Dakota to Illinois to be with Belle. But this time
she didn't even wait for marriage before trying to get
money out of him. She convinced him to withdraw a
(08:02):
large amount from his savings at a local bank and
give the cash to her. And Andrew, well, he doesn't
seem to have been the wisest man of all time.
He did exactly as she said, and he went missing
the next day. But this time Bell might have bit
off more than she could chew is Hee. Andrew had
a brother who soon came looking for him. He was
smart enough to check with the bank, who confirmed that
(08:23):
Andrew had been there recently with Bell and withdrawn a
large amount of money. Belle knew that her murder spree
might finally be at an end. On April twenty eighth
of nineteen oh eight, the workers on Bell's farm awoke
to find the main house on fire. The house burned
to the ground before the fire department could arrive. Once
they did arrive, though, they found more than they ever
(08:44):
could have bargained for. Beneath the ruins in the house's basement,
they found the bodies of three children, as well as
a woman's decapitated corpse, they wondered if this perhaps was Bell. Later,
Andrew's brother arrived and helped the police identify Andrew's body
buried elsewhere on the property, and more bodies were uncovered elsewhere. Ultimately,
(09:05):
historians believe that Belle's final body count to be somewhere
between twenty to forty people. It's hard to know for sure,
given the nature of her crimes though. Oh and the
body of that headless woman they found in the basement, well,
it was exhumed in two thousand and seven, and the
testing showed that the body was probably someone other than Belle,
which means that she likely killed someone and cut their
(09:27):
head off an attempt to make the authorities think that
she had died in the fire and somehow lost her
head in the process. Belle then set fire to her
own house and fled out into the night, leaving historians
very curious as to where she might have traveled next. Nowadays,
Bell Ganess is known as the most prolific female serial
killer in American history, and she's also the most successful,
(09:49):
having made the modern day equivalent of about a million
dollars off of those crimes. Whether or not she ever
got to spend it, though, is one mystery that will
probably never saw. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour
of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
(10:10):
or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast
dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey
in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award
winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series,
and television show, and you can learn all about it
over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time,
(10:32):
stay curious.
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
(00:36):
People have been making wine in the San Julian region
of France for centuries. The wine harvested from their grapes
is their pride and joy. But like any product that
depends on a plant in order to survive, the wine
production there is vulnerable to crop failure. The year was
fifteen forty five. That season, the vineyards were utterly ravaged
(00:56):
by insects, devastating the winemakers of the region. So what
did they do? Well? If it was you or I,
the most we could do is start from scratch and
hope that things turned out better next season. But remember
this was France in the early Renaissance. For all the
advancements in art and culture, it was still a very
spiritually driven society, and there was recourse for the average
(01:18):
person who felt that they had been wronged by an animal.
They could take that animal to ecclesiastical court, and so
that year the people of San Julyllen decided to do
just that to a species of weavil that they blamed
for the destruction of their vineyards. They hired Pierre Ducal
to be their legal representative, and he filed a complaint
with the court. It named the weevil species ringkites oroctus
(01:43):
as the culprits and demanded punishment for the offending insect.
The state appointed a legal team to defend the weavils
and the trial was set. Predictably, the weavil trial did
not last long. After hearing the opening statements of both sides,
the chair of the court, Frescois Bonivart, made a ruling.
He declined to pass sentence on the weevils, saying that
(02:05):
the creatures acted according to their nature and according to
the laws of God. Therefore, it was the prosecution who
needed to reflect on their own worthiness in the eyes
of God. The weevils represented, in the court's view, divine
punishment on the people of Sant july En. Bonavard said
that the citizens of San Julien needed to demonstrate that
they were a good Christian community. They had to collectively
(02:28):
repent of all their sins, pay their tithes to the church,
and march in solemn procession around the vineyards. The list
of pious activities was extensive, with the mandate that at
least two people from every Son Julienne household participates in
order for the repentance to be true. Not long after,
representatives from Saint Julienne submitted a report to the local
(02:48):
curate saying that they had done everything the court had
asked and the weevils subsequently were no longer a problem.
It was maybe inconvenient for the people, but their problem
was over for forty one year years at least in
fifteen eighty seven, a new generation of weavils would return
and cause trouble for the people again. On April thirteenth
(03:08):
of that year, representatives of San Julien requested legal assistance
for dealing with another wave of their weavil driven blight.
In their petition, they referenced the earlier decision of the
Ecclesiastical Cords, saying that the weavils had an i quote,
resumed their pegradations and are doing incalculable injury, and as such,
they asked the Prince Bishop to appoint new legal representatives
(03:32):
for the weavils since their original legal defendants were deceased,
they wanted to try the case again, the same crime,
just different culprits. This time, the state complied, and the Weavils,
for the second time, now went to trial for destroying
the vineyards of San Julien. As you'd imagine, the defense
maintained the argument from fifteen forty six, saying that the
(03:52):
weavils were created by God and thus had a right
to feed on the grasses of the earth. The prosecution,
on the other hand, argued that orrding to the Bible,
animals are subservient to man, to which the defense rebudded
that man certainly has a right to command the animals,
but not to prosecute them. The trial finally ended not
with a punishment for the weavils or another round of
(04:14):
piety for the people of San Julienne, but with a
compromise of sorts. The mayor offered the weavils a patch
of land to live on where they could feast to
their hearts content. The legal team for the Weavils agreed
to this, but before the agreement was finalized, one of
the weavil's advocates pointed out that he couldn't sign the
agreement after seeing the land. It was barren and unwelcoming.
(04:36):
Experts were dispatched to examine the land on behalf of
the Weavils, and that's where the story ends as far
as we know. You see, the final two pages of
the court documentation no longer exist because, in an ironic twist,
it seems that at some point in the past few
hundred years, those pages were eaten by bugs. Bell was
(05:10):
a hard woman, born of hard times. She grew up
working on a farm in Norway before emigrating to the
US in eighteen eighty one she was only twenty one
years old. She worked other hard jobs in the Chicago
area until she met and married another Norwegian immigrant, Mads Sorensen,
in eighteen eighty four, and it was around this time
that Bell was awoken to the wonders of insurance. It
(05:32):
struck her as odd that you could pay for something
that you would hope you would never need, whether it
was home fire or health insurance. She planned to get
her money's worth out of it. Bell and Mad's Chicago
home mysteriously burned down, and they received an insurance payout. Next,
they purchased a small business, which, wouldn't you know it
also burned down, and then they used that insurance money
(05:54):
to buy a new, larger home. It was at this
point that Bell's insurance schemes took a turn for the macabre.
We mentioned that there are more than one type of insurance. Well,
now Bell wanted to see what kind of money she
could get off of life insurance. She and Mads took
in four foster children and purchased policies on all of them.
Within a few years, two of them had died from
(06:15):
and I quote colitis. That's essentially colon inflammation caused by
things like bacteria or food allergies or you know, poison.
Mads must have been at least somewhat of an accomplice
in these schemes. If he was, he should have considered
that Bell's greed new no bounds, because next she took
out a policy on him. The truly remarkable aspect of
(06:37):
this next scheme was that Bell decided her initial plan
was thinking too small. After taking out one policy on Mads,
she decided the limits weren't high enough. She took out
a second, higher policy, and she wasn't content for one
policy to end and the other to begin. No, she
waited until the one day that the two policies briefly overlapped,
(06:57):
and then well Mads mysteriously passed away. Bell next married
a man named Peter, who, surprise surprise, she also took
out a life insurance policy on. He had two young
daughters from a previous marriage. One of them died just
a week after he and Belle married, and he only
lasted a few months himself Beyond that. She claimed that
Peter died after a meat grinder fell and hit him
(07:19):
on the head. But the thing about meat grinders is
while they tend to be secured to a counter at
waste level, so how one happened to wind up falling
on Peter's head is a mystery. Bell used all of
this insurance money to buy herself a farm, and this
would be the final most horrific stop on her murder spree.
For this next phase of her plan, she actually put
(07:40):
an ad in multiple newspapers across the Midwest asking for
a husband to come live with her on the farm.
Through this process, she attracted a man from South Dakota
named Andrew Helgalin. Andrew traveled from his home in South
Dakota to Illinois to be with Belle. But this time
she didn't even wait for marriage before trying to get
money out of him. She convinced him to withdraw a
(08:02):
large amount from his savings at a local bank and
give the cash to her. And Andrew, well, he doesn't
seem to have been the wisest man of all time.
He did exactly as she said, and he went missing
the next day. But this time Bell might have bit
off more than she could chew is Hee. Andrew had
a brother who soon came looking for him. He was
smart enough to check with the bank, who confirmed that
(08:23):
Andrew had been there recently with Bell and withdrawn a
large amount of money. Belle knew that her murder spree
might finally be at an end. On April twenty eighth
of nineteen oh eight, the workers on Bell's farm awoke
to find the main house on fire. The house burned
to the ground before the fire department could arrive. Once
they did arrive, though, they found more than they ever
(08:44):
could have bargained for. Beneath the ruins in the house's basement,
they found the bodies of three children, as well as
a woman's decapitated corpse, they wondered if this perhaps was Bell. Later,
Andrew's brother arrived and helped the police identify Andrew's body
buried elsewhere on the property, and more bodies were uncovered elsewhere. Ultimately,
(09:05):
historians believe that Belle's final body count to be somewhere
between twenty to forty people. It's hard to know for sure,
given the nature of her crimes though. Oh and the
body of that headless woman they found in the basement, well,
it was exhumed in two thousand and seven, and the
testing showed that the body was probably someone other than Belle,
which means that she likely killed someone and cut their
(09:27):
head off an attempt to make the authorities think that
she had died in the fire and somehow lost her
head in the process. Belle then set fire to her
own house and fled out into the night, leaving historians
very curious as to where she might have traveled next. Nowadays,
Bell Ganess is known as the most prolific female serial
killer in American history, and she's also the most successful,
(09:49):
having made the modern day equivalent of about a million
dollars off of those crimes. Whether or not she ever
got to spend it, though, is one mystery that will
probably never saw. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour
of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
(10:10):
or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast
dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey
in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award
winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series,
and television show, and you can learn all about it
over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time,
(10:32):
stay curious.
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
Two Guys, Five Rings: Matt, Bowen & The Olympics
Two Guys (Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers). Five Rings (you know, from the Olympics logo). One essential podcast for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. Bowen Yang (SNL, Wicked) and Matt Rogers (Palm Royale, No Good Deed) of Las Culturistas are back for a second season of Two Guys, Five Rings, a collaboration with NBC Sports and iHeartRadio. In this 15-episode event, Bowen and Matt discuss the top storylines, obsess over Italian culture, and find out what really goes on in the Olympic Village.