December 15, 2020 • 37 mins
Belle Gunness wanted what every American wants: the American Dream. And through insurance fraud and murder, she eventually found it. "Hell's Belle," as she was known, used strychnine -- and a meat cleaver -- to kill an estimated 40 victims she met through personal ads, almost all in Indiana. The popular theory about Belle? That she managed to elude authorities for years by transforming into a woman named Esther Carlson.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda Land Audio and
partnership with I Heart Radio. Seeking comely widow who owns
a large farm in one of the finest districts in
Laporte County, Indiana, desires to make the acquaintance of a
gentleman equally well provided with view of joining fortunes. No
(00:23):
replies by letter considered, and less sender is willing to
follow answer with personal visit. Triflers need not apply. Hello,
and welcome to the latest episode of Criminalia, where we've
already gotten things started. This season, we are exploring the
lives and motivations of some of the most notorious lady
poisoners throughout history, whether they considered themselves as comely widows
(00:47):
or not. I'm Maria Tremarqui and I'm Holly Fry. And
the comely widow we're talking about today is Belle Gunnis,
who killed an estimated and this is crazy forty victims
and possibly more in Chicago, Illinois and Laporte, Indiana between
(01:08):
eighteen eighty four and nineteen o eight and then poof
like Kaiser SoSE she vanished. Yeah, I feel like bell
Gunnis is one of those topics that if we hadn't
included her there, we would be stoned to death in
the streets. I feel like I'm actually she's a popular
poisoner in history. Is very Her story is long. Yeah. So, Bell,
(01:32):
who picked up the nickname Hell's Bell later in life,
was born Brynhild Start in November of eighteen fifty nine, Norway.
She was the daughter of a stonemason, and the family,
which was large, lived on a small farm. By all accounts,
Bell had a pretty normal childhood. Yeah, And historians who
have studied her life looking for any reason why Bell
(01:55):
could and would turn into one of the most prolific
killers in the United States eight they've found nothing particularly
notable in her upbringing that would suggest that she would
grow up to be who she grew up to be.
There is one story, though, that pops up a lot
in her folklore, but no one has been able to
solidly confirm or deny it. They just tell it. So
(02:19):
this story, which may or may not be true, goes
like this. At the age of eighteen, Bell, at this time,
still living in Norway, was pregnant and attending a country dance.
One evening, she was physically assaulted by a man and
she miscarried. The perpetrator, the story goes, was from a
wealthy family and he very likely bribed his way out
(02:39):
of the charge, basically got away with this assault. But Bell,
it is said, was never the same again. So not
long after this she immigrated to America and at the
age of twenty one, which puts us here at about
eighteen eighty one, she left Norway and she settled in Chicago.
Um some stories say that her sister had left a
(03:01):
few years prior and she just kind of went into
the same city that her sister was at, but it's
really unconfirmed. She changed her name to Bella Peterson and
for a time she worked as a domestic. Three years later,
Bell married MUDs Sorensen, who was also originally from Norway.
In just a few years into their marriage, the couple
opened a candy shop at the corner of Grand Avenue
(03:23):
in Elizabeth Streets in Chicago. Now this sounds literally and
figuratively like kind of a sweet story, but this was
an unsuccessful endeavor and within a year they had closed
their doors for good, and actually closed is not really
an accurate description. The shop went up in flames a
little bit different, but they turned their bad business look
(03:45):
around there, at least they tried to. They collected the
insurance money and with it they bought themselves a house. Now,
it has been suggested in several accounts that Bell and
MUD's might not have been able to have had biological
children of their own well. Looking to grow a family,
the couple instead opted to adopt and care for foster children.
(04:06):
They could not seem to shake that bad luck, though,
and this time it was unfortunately with their kids. So
two of their young daughters passed away, both quite unexpectedly.
Caroline died in eight and Alex, whose name actually may
have been Axel, but it's a little difficult to know
because reports are differing, passed away in eight and the
(04:29):
cause of death was reported as acute colitis in both instances,
and the symptoms of acute colitis include things like nausea, fever, diarrhea,
lower abdominal pain, and they're also symptoms of many forms
of poisoning, which is no surprise to anyone who has
been following this podcast from episode one. So this just
(04:50):
seemed like a string of bad luck, and no one
was suspicious at the girl's deaths. The parents collected on
the life insurance policies for both kids. Then in dred
not long after, they lost the shop and their two daughters,
their home mysteriously burned down. This is really bad luck.
But at this point Bell felt that her husband needed
(05:14):
a bigger and better life insurance policy, which I mean,
I don't blame her at this point, She's like everyone's
dying and everything's burning down, so he took one out.
But I really kind of hate to dwell and say
this again, but tragedy again struck Mods died of heart failure. Curiously,
his death happened on the one and only day that
(05:38):
his two life insurance policies, the new bigger one and
the older, smaller one, overlapped. The family doctor listed the
cause of death as heart failure, but there was another doctor,
and that doctor suspected that Mods had been poisoned with
strict nine. We don't want to spoil what's to come,
(05:59):
but yes, I think we are all pretty comfortable at
this point, guessing that that second doctor was probably onto
something right. Bell's in laws were suspicious of her, but
still no charges were filed, and Bell collected eight thousand,
five hundred dollars. And it's really hard we always say
to extrapolate, like the value of money then to what
it is now, because there are a lot of differing
(06:19):
factors that impact that calculation. But roughly it's probably a
bit more than two hundred thousand dollars. Seems like a
lot of money in nineteen hundred. Whether you know we
can do the proper math on it or not, it
sounds big um. So with this money from her husband's
life insurance pay out, Bell decided to get out of town.
(06:40):
She bought a forty acre farm, far from the whispers
that were growing around her and her tragic life. In
nineteen o two, Bell and her three foster children, Jenny, Myrtle,
and Lucy, moved to Laport, Indiana, and not long after
settling in, she married Peter Gunness, a fellow widower who
(07:00):
also had children. He had two young daughters. But of
course Bell's bad luck followed her to Indiana. That seemed.
Just a few days after the wedding, peter seven month
old daughter died unexpectedly while she was in Bell's care,
and then just eight months later, Peter also died, and
under some very very strange circumstances. Let me describe these
(07:24):
very strange circumstances because they're crazy pants. Peter was struck
on the back of his head when a sausage grinder
fell off a high shelf in the kitchen, because that's
definitely not a typical way to meet one's demise. The
corner for sure looked into it. And on top of that,
(07:45):
one of Bell's children, Jenny, who was fourteen, was said
to have confided to a classmate that, and I'm quoting
her here, my mama killed my papa. She hit him
with a meat cleaver and he died, but don't tell
his soul. There is a period of time when I
needed to know I c D codes for medicine, and
(08:05):
I remember there were so many crazy ones like struck
by a duck, and you know, like just just nonsense
that you think would never happen. And it made me wonder, like,
is there one that says struck on the head with
a sausage grinder because Peter needed it. But when questioned
about it, Jenny denied that she said those things, and
so this incident was considered a freak accident. Bell was
(08:26):
cleared and she received about three thousand dollars in insurance money. Again,
rough equivalency here, but we're guessing right around fifty grand today.
But Peter's brother very smartly so decided to take custody
of Peter's older daughter. Then, shortly after Peter's death, Bell
told her neighbors that she had sent Jenny to a
(08:47):
finishing school for young girls all the way to the
west coast in Los Angeles, which is not suspicious, kind
of random, right, Yeah, it just seems it seemed sudden
to me. Yes, at this point, after the deaths of
two husbands and three children, all of whom had insurance
policies that Bell collected on, she had become fairly wealthy
(09:10):
from those insurance payouts. She decided to look for a
new partner, and she was very practical in her search,
practical like at the level of the way an employer
might fill a job opening that she turned to the personals,
and she picked the interest of many men through matrimonial
(09:30):
ads that she placed in primarily three different weekly Norwegian
language newspapers throughout the Midwest, and she would follow up
with sexually suggestive correspondence once a potential suitor got hooked.
It's unknown how many men actually corresponded with Bell, However,
(09:50):
accounts from her mail carrier suggested it was not unheard
of for her to receive as many as eight letters
a day from potential suitors, and it wasn't all of
about romance. In one letter to a potential suitor who
was named Carl Peterson, Bell wrote, and I'm going to
quote her again here, I have picked out the most
respectable and I have decided that yours is such. If
(10:13):
you think that you were able in some way to
put up a thousand dollars cash, we can talk matters
over personally. I like to think that, like today, it
would be like send me a travelers check and right idea.
I mean there's part of me that's like, I get it.
You're being very pragmatic. She certainly had a strict vetting
(10:36):
system right. Bell's neighbors watched her goings on, and they
whispered as men came knocking at Bell's door. She was
often seen going for carriage rides with a different man
each Sunday afternoon, and always wearing the finest hair and
clothing styles. One of her farm hands told the New
York Tribune that Bell often concealed the identities of the
(10:58):
men who visited the farm, and there was a new
man there just about every week. She would introduce them
if it came up to anyone who inquired as her cousins.
And Bell, as it turns out, had a lot of
cousins from Kansas, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and the greater Chicago area.
(11:20):
Very big family. Well we did mention she came from
a large family. She did. We are going to stop
here and take a quick break, and when we come back,
we're going to talk about bell suitors who were, as
it turns out, and I don't think we're giving anything
away here her victims welcome back to criminalia. Here's where
(12:01):
Bell's bad luck begins to look a lot more like
murder than tragedy, all right. Here is where we start
seeing the list of deaths grow beyond Bell's spouses and children.
Bell's suitors were, as we said before the break, her
next victims. Each of them brought cash when they visited
her farm, as she requested, and then each of them disappeared.
(12:25):
Potential suitors like John mo of Minnesota, brought a large
sum of cash to prove his worth and then strangely
never seen again. More suitors followed, John mu Ullah By
Budsburg and olaf Lynn Bloom, to name only a few,
all went missing in this same pattern. Between nineteen o
five to nineteen o seven, there were dozens and dozens
(12:46):
of men who knocked on Bell's door. She didn't marry
any of them, but none of them were ever seen again.
After visiting her in July nine seven, Bell hired a
new farm hand. That was a man named Ray lamp Here.
And Ray was a thirty seven year old with an
unsavory reputation. He was known as a drinker and a
gambler and kind of just an all around slacker. But
(13:09):
unexpectedly he turned out to be a competent carpenter and
a really loyal employee to Bell. So she was really
pleased by that, and she moved him into her home
and the two began a sexual relationship, but by all accounts,
this was not any sort of romance or love. Bell
considered Ray too poor to be a real suitor or
(13:30):
her partner. But Ray did fall for her, and he
began to resent the men who answered her love lorn abs,
And wow, were there a lot of men to be
resentful over. They just kept showing up, and they often
were so foolish they signed over deeds, they handed over
bank account numbers. In some cases, they wrote checks, or
(13:54):
they showed up as she requested, flush with cash and
promised to pay for this or that, including even paying
for Bell's mortgage, and every single one of them was
never seen after visiting that farm, Bell though, would tell
her neighbors who asked after these men that it was
a sign of their untrustworthiness and that they had abandoned her.
(14:15):
She told relatives who inquired about missing men that they
had gone elsewhere, maybe back to Norway or off to Chicago.
And frankly, there was one instance where I read that
she told someone that their brother had gone to Oregon,
and I just found that very random. All the while,
Bell continued to exchange deeply personal love letters with her
(14:37):
potential suitors. Um, but maybe now we should start calling
them victims. She developed a long distance romance with one
suitor in particular. This was a forty something South Dakota
wheat farmer and also fellow Norwegian immigrant named Andrew Helgaline,
and over a period of about a year and a
half or so, Belson andrew upwards of eight lea give
(15:00):
or take a letter too. That has a lot of letters, um,
one letter meant for Andrew was found on his farm
and read like so to the dearest friend in the world.
No woman in the world is happier than I am.
I know that you are now to come to me
(15:20):
and be my own. I can tell from your letters
that you are the man I want. It does not
take one long to tell when to like a person,
and you I like better than anyone in the world.
I know. Think how we will enjoy each other's company.
You the sweetest man in the whole world. We will
be all alone with each other. Can you conceive of
(15:42):
anything nicer? I think of you constantly when I hear
your name mentioned. And this is when one of the
dear children speaks of you, or I hear myself humming
it with the words of an old love song. It
is beautiful music to my ears. My heart beats in
wild rapture for you, Andrew. I love you, come prepared
(16:02):
to stay forever. She is so good atous, like no
wonder so many men were coming to She's good, so right.
She is excellent at crafting narrative, but she subtly hits
the important words and points that will titillate the reader
and think like they will clearly get her message that
(16:25):
she is promising like a really really uh you know,
exciting romance, even while she's kind of cloaked it in
these words of like sweetness and almost demure, like I'm
so excited about you. But clearly they will know exactly
what is going to happen. So I copy ed it
for a long time, and if someone turned this into
me as a sample, I would hire them on the spot.
(16:46):
So that letter, that that amazingly girl letter got Andrew
uh in January of NINETEENA. Wait, so you didn't take
very long. Um he came to visit Bell. Uh not
intend in this day forever, but at least for a
few weeks. For his first first visit, um Andrew had
brought with him close to three thousand dollars and Bell
(17:09):
and Andrew together went to the local bank to cash
that check. Bell wanted it in all cash, despite Andrew
and the bank teller suggesting that she keeps some in
an account as a safety net. Ray and remember that
was her handyman, argued with Belle about Andrew, who he
did not want Bell to get married to. So she
(17:32):
probably fired Ray Andrew. And we would love to say
that this was unexpected, but at this point, is it really?
Is it? Andrew was mysteriously gone the next day, and
when he did not return home, his brother naturally grew concerned, right,
so then he found the letters from Bell, and doing
(17:53):
a little amateur investigating, he learned that Andrew had cashed
a large ac in Laveport, and as far as Bell
was concerned, she admitted freely that Andrew had visited her,
but that he had also left. But Andrew's brother was
not willing to just take that as the answer, and
(18:14):
so he actually showed up in Laport looking to talk
to Bell personally, and alarmed that there may have been
foul play, he wanted the farm searched, and then, as
all of this was playing out, around four am on April,
Bell's farmhouse burned to the ground. Tragedy struck again when
(18:37):
we return, Well, it wasn't potatoes that were found in
the dirt at Bell's farm. Welcome back to Criminalia. We
(19:03):
are at the point in Bell Gunnis's story where skeletons
come out of the closet. Okay, really, I mean the ground.
They came out of the ground literally, as skeltons are
in the ground now There's a really interesting thing that
Bell did the day before her house burned down that
we should talk about. She visited her lawyer, um As
(19:26):
she asked him to draw up her will, leaving everything
she owned firstly to her children and, according to some
accounts fewer accounts though, secondly to an orphanage in Chicago.
While this aspect of drawing up a will isn't necessarily
so interesting, this next part is During her meeting, she
(19:47):
was quoted as telling her lawyer and again direct quote,
I'm afraid he's going to kill me and burn the house.
And the heat that she's referring to there is her
now former handyman and person who fell in unrequited love
with her Ray. She never went to the police about this,
She only spoke to her lawyer. But the next thing
(20:08):
you know, the Laporte County Sheriff Albert Smutzer was questioning Ray,
and Ray denied setting fire to anything. Um He even
asked if Bell and her kids had gotten out of
the house safely, based on one eyewitness account of Ray
fleeing the scene of the fire. The former handyman was
charged with arson and because the bodies of three children
(20:32):
and one woman specifically one headless woman were found in
the basement crazy. He was also charged with four counts
of murder. So initially that headlessness just oh my goodness.
So in actually authorities believed the bodies were those of
Bell and her children, Myrtle who was a Lennon, Lucy
who was nine, and Philip, who was five at the time.
(20:54):
And why wouldn't you assume that right there, the three
children and the mother who lived in the house. But
it was quickly to remand that this headless body couldn't
actually be Bell. And the most obvious problem was that
Bell stood six ft tall and weighed about two hundred pounds,
but the person found in the basement was only about
(21:15):
five three up to maybe five six inches in height
and weighed about seventy five pounds um, of course minus
the way to the head. But the headless person had
also been poisoned with Stryck nine before the fatal fire,
so it was also assumed that everyone had been asleep
(21:36):
on the second floor when the fire broke out, right
and like, as the house collapsed and the floors collapse,
they fell. However, and rather weirdly, the family's piano, which
was normally on the first floor of the home was
found directly on top of those four bodies. Happens all
the time the old piano jump right there was there
(21:58):
was no way not to consider this a murder scene
at this point, right, I mean it could have been previously,
but now the sheriff launched an investigation into what was
going on. The search of Bell's farm began, and at
the time um Bell's farm hand was a man named
Joe Maxon, and he suggested to the authorities that they
(22:19):
start digging for evidence near the pig pen. The sheriff
took about a dozen men to Bell's farm to see
what they could dig up literally and uh, Holly would
they find. Well, it's a bit grizzly. So they found
the small bodies of two unidentified children, and then just
a few days later, Andrew's body was found, as were
(22:41):
about twelve other bodies along with a variety of body parts.
And they also unearthed the body of Jenny Olsen, who
had vanished in December of nineteen o six. If you recall,
Bell had at the time said that Jenny had gone
to school in Los Angeles, Jenny also having been one
who told the schoolmate that her mother had killed her
(23:02):
father with the meat grinder. All of these bodies were
found in shallow graves. So a little bit about Bell.
Bell was a really strong woman who um if you
want to imagine her, um, imagine her as a woman
who preferred to wear men's overalls. And she did her
own pig butchering on the farm. And addition, in addition
to writing all of the letters she wrote and all
(23:24):
of that butchering, um Bell had been spending her money
on large wooden trunks as well as digging in her
farm's pigpen late at night, the late at night. And
you know, I'm not suspicious at all, right, I mean,
I always dig at night. Listen, she's got a busy
letter writing a pig butchering schedule. You gotta fit it
(23:44):
in where you can. Of the bodies that were found,
seven were identified pretty quickly, but then there were also
all of these unidentified bodies, and these bodies were considered
additional victims, though authorities could never prove it. If you
haven't their hour or two to spare, we could share
all of these names and the small bits and pieces
of their stories that have been pieced together over the years.
(24:08):
But ultimately the bottom line is that Bell's victim list
is just really really low. It actually, if you have
it like in a word document, it scrolls like it's
not just one page, you have to keep going. So
we decided not to talk about the specific victims because
of that, but UM primarily because of the crude recovery
(24:29):
methods UM at that time. The exact number of individuals
that were unearthed on the farm remains kind of still unknown.
There could be more. Fourteen of Belle's victims were eventually
literally pieced together, but there were a number of teeth
and bones, and there's this one detail that I just
(24:51):
really it's hard to like something in this story, but
I did like this watches UM that were found uh
in the ground. UM. In total, her victims are estimated
to be at the very very least the minimum is forty.
The coroner declared Bell dead after dentures found in the
(25:11):
debris two weeks later were identified by the local dentist
as hers. Curiously, though these dentures were found intact, they
were not at all burned, and that suggested to a
lot of people that this was planted evidence. So Bell
was gone right, But according to the former handyman, Ray.
(25:32):
She definitely was not dead, Ray um, and since he
lived with her, he seemed to know quite a bit
about what happened in her home. Um. He said that
Bell murdered for suitors by poisoning their after dinner coffee
with Stryck nine and as an asside in a personal note,
I am very pleased that it was not arsenic and
(25:52):
that we get to talk about a different poison. Thank you,
Bell gunns Um. And while they were in this stupor,
she would hit them over the head with her meat
cleaver to finish the job. But next she would bring
the body to the basement and butcher it and would
distribute its parts among her hogs. Some she would bury. Um.
(26:16):
He said that she was very skillful, and she skillfully
sliced it apart, wrapped in an oilcloth and put it
in the dirt. And believe it or not, this is
actually where things get more disturbing, even more, according to
Ray's account, Bell smothered her children and fled with her money.
(26:37):
Ray's estimate was that she had gotten anywhere from one
thousand dollars to thirty two thousand dollars from each man.
Just amazing, and he was certain that she had taken
up a new identity, So while Belle, who would have
been about forty eight years old at this point, she
may or may not have been living a new life.
Um But on May nine, know eight, Ray was tried
(27:01):
from murder and arson. He pleaded innocent to all of
these charges, but he did admit that he had helped
Bell bury her victims. His defense hinged on the assertion
that the headless body was not Belle's body, so he
was found guilty of arson, but he was acquitted of
the murder charges. On November, Ray was sentenced to two
(27:25):
to twenty one years in the state prison in Michigan City, Indiana.
He eventually died there of tuberculosis. That was just about
a year later, and on his deathbed, Ray confessed to
a priest that he had helped Bell escape to a
nearby town and from there she caught a train to Chicago.
He confessed that he was the one who set the
(27:45):
house on fire as a cover up, and that the
headless corpse had been a woman that Bell had hired
as a housekeeper. Interestingly, Ray also said in this confession
that there was another accomplice, but he never shared that name,
and it remains a complete question mark. Right, that's so
interesting and it's nowhere. So interest in Bell's story, or
(28:09):
at least raised account of Belt's story grew nationwide and
for years, and I'd I'd actually be comfortable saying even
decades after the fire and her disappearance, there were Bells
sightings everywhere around the US. So we have a few
of the most interesting examples of these sightings that also
(28:29):
kind of show you how varied they can be. Yes,
as late as ninety one, Bell was reported to be
living in Mississippi, where she supposedly owned quite a bit
of real estate and was living her life as a
prominent citizen. Another report, and this one is the most
popular theory that you're here a lot as part of
(28:50):
the story of bell Um. It's also from one and
it suggests that she may have changed her identity to
Esther Carlson so after Arleson is really interesting because Esther
kind of came to light when she was arrested in
Los Angeles for poisoning a man named August Lindstrom that
was a Norwegian American gentleman who may have been her boss.
(29:13):
And that happened in February one, and she did it
for the money. Two people who had known Bell claimed
that she and Esther were the same woman, and those
claims were based on those people having seen a few
photographs of Esther. Now, if you've seen older photographs, you know,
from the early nineteen hundreds, this could be a part
(29:33):
of the story that's a little bit squishy. They certainly
did not have all the detail we are used to today.
A lot of times those photographs, um, you know, diminished
over time and lost their their sharpness and clarity. So
it's a little uncertain. Esther did absolutely resemble Bell, though
the two were about the same age. And the really
curious part of the story to me is that there
(29:55):
had been no record of Esther before night Esther on
May sixth, nineteen thirty one, while awaiting trial for that
poisoning charge. Just it's yeah, I agree with you, though,
the no record of Esther before n is curious. But
we'll see as recently as two thousand and seven, So
(30:16):
this is something that people are still today talking about
a hundred years later. Scientists have tried to link Esther
and Bell through DNA, but so far things have been
mostly unsuccessful, mainly because samples have degraded. H families have
been very supportive and have offered their help. But it
(30:36):
would seem that Bell has taken her secrets to the grave,
but her legacy certainly lives on. There's actually quite a
musical and theatrical body of work surrounding Bell and her story.
She has been the subject of at least four American
musical ballot amazing one song, for instance, is entitled The
(30:58):
Battle of Bell Gunness, The Battle One Song. One song
for instance is entitled the Ballad of Bell Gunness, and
it is sung to the tune of Love, Oh, Careless Love,
and it's been described not so much as a song
as a crime report. In Romo. There is also Bell
Gunness the Murder Musical, and there was also a movie
(31:19):
made about ten years ago that was called The Gunness Mystery.
You know. So her farm as well, which has since
been nicknamed Murder Farm, has become quite a tourist attraction,
and they offer concessions and there are souvenirs for sale.
Bell has even become part of local history. The Laporte
County Historical Society Museum in Indiana has a permanent Bell
(31:43):
Gunnis exhibit. So that is the story of Bell. We
may never know what happened to her. I was trying
to think of a good way to make a drink
(32:06):
that um reflected one of the things that really stood
out to me about Belle's story, which is perhaps shockingly
not all the murder, but the way that she shifted
her identity over and over right, even when she moved
to the United States from Norway, she switched over. Then
you know, with any of these men, she went from
(32:28):
being like very coquettish and sweet to killing them and
then ultimately went from being Bell Gunnis to being possibly esther.
So I wanted to make a drink that changes its
identity as you're drinking it. That's fantastic. So okay, so
this this is not a difficult drink to make, but
(32:48):
you do have to do some prep ahead of time.
So first of all, you need an ice cube tray,
some cranberry juice and uh some pickled hallepeen yours and
an eye dropper. I know this sounds ridiculous, but stick
with me, typic experiment drink. Honestly, it was so fun
(33:13):
to test this one because it worked the way I
hoped it would, and then I was like, um, so
you fill your your ice cube receptacles halfway up with
cranberry juice, put that in the freezer and let it set.
Then with like an eye dropper. You don't want a lot.
You're literally all you're getting out of that pickled hallepeen
(33:33):
your jar is a little bit of juice. So you're
picking up like three to five drops and putting those
into each of the pre frozen uh cranberry juice half cubes.
Let that freeze for just a little while, and then
top it up with cranberry and finish your ice cubes.
So now you have cranberry ice cubes with a little
(33:55):
bit of Halloween you hidden in them. And then uh,
you're just gonna x two ounces of vodka. The actual
drink part super easy. So you're gonna mix two ounces
of vodka and five ounces of ginger ale uh six
ounces if you like a different you know, um proportion there.
Then you will drop these ice cubes in and as
(34:16):
you are drinking, you first just get this very light
ginger ale and vodka drink, and then you get a
cranberry drink, and at the very end you get a stinger.
You know that drink actually is very well right, right,
like I think you kind of nailed her, like at
the end you die well. And that's the thing too,
(34:38):
I I always, you know, and I'm just doing fun
experiments in the kitchen to get to any of these,
so like I always want everybody to experiment with their
own stuff. One you can use, you know, a different
mixer if you like gin and ginger ale, that's fine.
You just want two things that are are going to
be impacted by the shift to the cranberry and the
(34:58):
hall of peen you And then the other thing you
want to think about is whether or not you are
a fast drinker or a slow drinker. Like if you
are a slower drinker that SIPs a little at a time,
you want to mix your ginger ale and vodka with
some regular ice before you add these cranberry hallopeen you
ice cubes, because then it will make them take a
(35:19):
little bit longer to to melt and dissolve into your
drink and change the flavor. Um. If you are a
fast drinker, like I tend to drink my any beverage,
not just cocktails, but pretty quickly, so I leave the
ice out because then by the time I'm done, is
right about the right timing. Um. The other thing that
I like about a recipe like this is you can
completely change it up right if you are not uh,
(35:40):
if you don't like to drink, if you're not an
alcohol person, you can do this with just ginger ale
and ice cubes. Um. You can also switch it out
and use a different juice than Cranberry, but I just
like the way Cranberry kind of mixes in. So I mean,
keep in mind that that finish you is not something
you're sipping a lot of. You kind of want your
last sip or two to have that little bite of
Halloween you, but not too much. So that is my
(36:02):
what's your poison for this time? And I'm just gonna
call it secret identity, or maybe we should call it
the Esther Carlson. I think I like that. I kind
of like that. I kind of like the kind of
call it the ester Carlson. Please don't use it to
make anybody go into a stupor, so you can do
away with them. Not only drink responsibly, but serve responsibly.
(36:24):
You know. I know there's like an element of surprise
that people enjoy, but I like to let people know
what they're in for. So uh, we hope that you
are in for a few more episodes about poisoners. We
have a few more coming, so you can absolutely join
us here next week. If you haven't subscribed yet, absolutely
do that on the I heart Radio app, the Apple podcasts,
wherever it is you listen. Criminalia is a production of
(36:51):
Shonda land Audio in partnership with I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, please visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or ever you listen to
your favorite shows. M hmmmm.
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda Land Audio and
partnership with I Heart Radio. Seeking comely widow who owns
a large farm in one of the finest districts in
Laporte County, Indiana, desires to make the acquaintance of a
gentleman equally well provided with view of joining fortunes. No
(00:23):
replies by letter considered, and less sender is willing to
follow answer with personal visit. Triflers need not apply. Hello,
and welcome to the latest episode of Criminalia, where we've
already gotten things started. This season, we are exploring the
lives and motivations of some of the most notorious lady
poisoners throughout history, whether they considered themselves as comely widows
(00:47):
or not. I'm Maria Tremarqui and I'm Holly Fry. And
the comely widow we're talking about today is Belle Gunnis,
who killed an estimated and this is crazy forty victims
and possibly more in Chicago, Illinois and Laporte, Indiana between
(01:08):
eighteen eighty four and nineteen o eight and then poof
like Kaiser SoSE she vanished. Yeah, I feel like bell
Gunnis is one of those topics that if we hadn't
included her there, we would be stoned to death in
the streets. I feel like I'm actually she's a popular
poisoner in history. Is very Her story is long. Yeah. So, Bell,
(01:32):
who picked up the nickname Hell's Bell later in life,
was born Brynhild Start in November of eighteen fifty nine, Norway.
She was the daughter of a stonemason, and the family,
which was large, lived on a small farm. By all accounts,
Bell had a pretty normal childhood. Yeah, And historians who
have studied her life looking for any reason why Bell
(01:55):
could and would turn into one of the most prolific
killers in the United States eight they've found nothing particularly
notable in her upbringing that would suggest that she would
grow up to be who she grew up to be.
There is one story, though, that pops up a lot
in her folklore, but no one has been able to
solidly confirm or deny it. They just tell it. So
(02:19):
this story, which may or may not be true, goes
like this. At the age of eighteen, Bell, at this time,
still living in Norway, was pregnant and attending a country dance.
One evening, she was physically assaulted by a man and
she miscarried. The perpetrator, the story goes, was from a
wealthy family and he very likely bribed his way out
(02:39):
of the charge, basically got away with this assault. But Bell,
it is said, was never the same again. So not
long after this she immigrated to America and at the
age of twenty one, which puts us here at about
eighteen eighty one, she left Norway and she settled in Chicago.
Um some stories say that her sister had left a
(03:01):
few years prior and she just kind of went into
the same city that her sister was at, but it's
really unconfirmed. She changed her name to Bella Peterson and
for a time she worked as a domestic. Three years later,
Bell married MUDs Sorensen, who was also originally from Norway.
In just a few years into their marriage, the couple
opened a candy shop at the corner of Grand Avenue
(03:23):
in Elizabeth Streets in Chicago. Now this sounds literally and
figuratively like kind of a sweet story, but this was
an unsuccessful endeavor and within a year they had closed
their doors for good, and actually closed is not really
an accurate description. The shop went up in flames a
little bit different, but they turned their bad business look
(03:45):
around there, at least they tried to. They collected the
insurance money and with it they bought themselves a house. Now,
it has been suggested in several accounts that Bell and
MUD's might not have been able to have had biological
children of their own well. Looking to grow a family,
the couple instead opted to adopt and care for foster children.
(04:06):
They could not seem to shake that bad luck, though,
and this time it was unfortunately with their kids. So
two of their young daughters passed away, both quite unexpectedly.
Caroline died in eight and Alex, whose name actually may
have been Axel, but it's a little difficult to know
because reports are differing, passed away in eight and the
(04:29):
cause of death was reported as acute colitis in both instances,
and the symptoms of acute colitis include things like nausea, fever, diarrhea,
lower abdominal pain, and they're also symptoms of many forms
of poisoning, which is no surprise to anyone who has
been following this podcast from episode one. So this just
(04:50):
seemed like a string of bad luck, and no one
was suspicious at the girl's deaths. The parents collected on
the life insurance policies for both kids. Then in dred
not long after, they lost the shop and their two daughters,
their home mysteriously burned down. This is really bad luck.
But at this point Bell felt that her husband needed
(05:14):
a bigger and better life insurance policy, which I mean,
I don't blame her at this point, She's like everyone's
dying and everything's burning down, so he took one out.
But I really kind of hate to dwell and say
this again, but tragedy again struck Mods died of heart failure. Curiously,
his death happened on the one and only day that
(05:38):
his two life insurance policies, the new bigger one and
the older, smaller one, overlapped. The family doctor listed the
cause of death as heart failure, but there was another doctor,
and that doctor suspected that Mods had been poisoned with
strict nine. We don't want to spoil what's to come,
(05:59):
but yes, I think we are all pretty comfortable at
this point, guessing that that second doctor was probably onto
something right. Bell's in laws were suspicious of her, but
still no charges were filed, and Bell collected eight thousand,
five hundred dollars. And it's really hard we always say
to extrapolate, like the value of money then to what
it is now, because there are a lot of differing
(06:19):
factors that impact that calculation. But roughly it's probably a
bit more than two hundred thousand dollars. Seems like a
lot of money in nineteen hundred. Whether you know we
can do the proper math on it or not, it
sounds big um. So with this money from her husband's
life insurance pay out, Bell decided to get out of town.
(06:40):
She bought a forty acre farm, far from the whispers
that were growing around her and her tragic life. In
nineteen o two, Bell and her three foster children, Jenny, Myrtle,
and Lucy, moved to Laport, Indiana, and not long after
settling in, she married Peter Gunness, a fellow widower who
(07:00):
also had children. He had two young daughters. But of
course Bell's bad luck followed her to Indiana. That seemed.
Just a few days after the wedding, peter seven month
old daughter died unexpectedly while she was in Bell's care,
and then just eight months later, Peter also died, and
under some very very strange circumstances. Let me describe these
(07:24):
very strange circumstances because they're crazy pants. Peter was struck
on the back of his head when a sausage grinder
fell off a high shelf in the kitchen, because that's
definitely not a typical way to meet one's demise. The
corner for sure looked into it. And on top of that,
(07:45):
one of Bell's children, Jenny, who was fourteen, was said
to have confided to a classmate that, and I'm quoting
her here, my mama killed my papa. She hit him
with a meat cleaver and he died, but don't tell
his soul. There is a period of time when I
needed to know I c D codes for medicine, and
(08:05):
I remember there were so many crazy ones like struck
by a duck, and you know, like just just nonsense
that you think would never happen. And it made me wonder, like,
is there one that says struck on the head with
a sausage grinder because Peter needed it. But when questioned
about it, Jenny denied that she said those things, and
so this incident was considered a freak accident. Bell was
(08:26):
cleared and she received about three thousand dollars in insurance money. Again,
rough equivalency here, but we're guessing right around fifty grand today.
But Peter's brother very smartly so decided to take custody
of Peter's older daughter. Then, shortly after Peter's death, Bell
told her neighbors that she had sent Jenny to a
(08:47):
finishing school for young girls all the way to the
west coast in Los Angeles, which is not suspicious, kind
of random, right, Yeah, it just seems it seemed sudden
to me. Yes, at this point, after the deaths of
two husbands and three children, all of whom had insurance
policies that Bell collected on, she had become fairly wealthy
(09:10):
from those insurance payouts. She decided to look for a
new partner, and she was very practical in her search,
practical like at the level of the way an employer
might fill a job opening that she turned to the personals,
and she picked the interest of many men through matrimonial
(09:30):
ads that she placed in primarily three different weekly Norwegian
language newspapers throughout the Midwest, and she would follow up
with sexually suggestive correspondence once a potential suitor got hooked.
It's unknown how many men actually corresponded with Bell, However,
(09:50):
accounts from her mail carrier suggested it was not unheard
of for her to receive as many as eight letters
a day from potential suitors, and it wasn't all of
about romance. In one letter to a potential suitor who
was named Carl Peterson, Bell wrote, and I'm going to
quote her again here, I have picked out the most
respectable and I have decided that yours is such. If
(10:13):
you think that you were able in some way to
put up a thousand dollars cash, we can talk matters
over personally. I like to think that, like today, it
would be like send me a travelers check and right idea.
I mean there's part of me that's like, I get it.
You're being very pragmatic. She certainly had a strict vetting
(10:36):
system right. Bell's neighbors watched her goings on, and they
whispered as men came knocking at Bell's door. She was
often seen going for carriage rides with a different man
each Sunday afternoon, and always wearing the finest hair and
clothing styles. One of her farm hands told the New
York Tribune that Bell often concealed the identities of the
(10:58):
men who visited the farm, and there was a new
man there just about every week. She would introduce them
if it came up to anyone who inquired as her cousins.
And Bell, as it turns out, had a lot of
cousins from Kansas, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and the greater Chicago area.
(11:20):
Very big family. Well we did mention she came from
a large family. She did. We are going to stop
here and take a quick break, and when we come back,
we're going to talk about bell suitors who were, as
it turns out, and I don't think we're giving anything
away here her victims welcome back to criminalia. Here's where
(12:01):
Bell's bad luck begins to look a lot more like
murder than tragedy, all right. Here is where we start
seeing the list of deaths grow beyond Bell's spouses and children.
Bell's suitors were, as we said before the break, her
next victims. Each of them brought cash when they visited
her farm, as she requested, and then each of them disappeared.
(12:25):
Potential suitors like John mo of Minnesota, brought a large
sum of cash to prove his worth and then strangely
never seen again. More suitors followed, John mu Ullah By
Budsburg and olaf Lynn Bloom, to name only a few,
all went missing in this same pattern. Between nineteen o
five to nineteen o seven, there were dozens and dozens
(12:46):
of men who knocked on Bell's door. She didn't marry
any of them, but none of them were ever seen again.
After visiting her in July nine seven, Bell hired a
new farm hand. That was a man named Ray lamp Here.
And Ray was a thirty seven year old with an
unsavory reputation. He was known as a drinker and a
gambler and kind of just an all around slacker. But
(13:09):
unexpectedly he turned out to be a competent carpenter and
a really loyal employee to Bell. So she was really
pleased by that, and she moved him into her home
and the two began a sexual relationship, but by all accounts,
this was not any sort of romance or love. Bell
considered Ray too poor to be a real suitor or
(13:30):
her partner. But Ray did fall for her, and he
began to resent the men who answered her love lorn abs,
And wow, were there a lot of men to be
resentful over. They just kept showing up, and they often
were so foolish they signed over deeds, they handed over
bank account numbers. In some cases, they wrote checks, or
(13:54):
they showed up as she requested, flush with cash and
promised to pay for this or that, including even paying
for Bell's mortgage, and every single one of them was
never seen after visiting that farm, Bell though, would tell
her neighbors who asked after these men that it was
a sign of their untrustworthiness and that they had abandoned her.
(14:15):
She told relatives who inquired about missing men that they
had gone elsewhere, maybe back to Norway or off to Chicago.
And frankly, there was one instance where I read that
she told someone that their brother had gone to Oregon,
and I just found that very random. All the while,
Bell continued to exchange deeply personal love letters with her
(14:37):
potential suitors. Um, but maybe now we should start calling
them victims. She developed a long distance romance with one
suitor in particular. This was a forty something South Dakota
wheat farmer and also fellow Norwegian immigrant named Andrew Helgaline,
and over a period of about a year and a
half or so, Belson andrew upwards of eight lea give
(15:00):
or take a letter too. That has a lot of letters, um,
one letter meant for Andrew was found on his farm
and read like so to the dearest friend in the world.
No woman in the world is happier than I am.
I know that you are now to come to me
(15:20):
and be my own. I can tell from your letters
that you are the man I want. It does not
take one long to tell when to like a person,
and you I like better than anyone in the world.
I know. Think how we will enjoy each other's company.
You the sweetest man in the whole world. We will
be all alone with each other. Can you conceive of
(15:42):
anything nicer? I think of you constantly when I hear
your name mentioned. And this is when one of the
dear children speaks of you, or I hear myself humming
it with the words of an old love song. It
is beautiful music to my ears. My heart beats in
wild rapture for you, Andrew. I love you, come prepared
(16:02):
to stay forever. She is so good atous, like no
wonder so many men were coming to She's good, so right.
She is excellent at crafting narrative, but she subtly hits
the important words and points that will titillate the reader
and think like they will clearly get her message that
(16:25):
she is promising like a really really uh you know,
exciting romance, even while she's kind of cloaked it in
these words of like sweetness and almost demure, like I'm
so excited about you. But clearly they will know exactly
what is going to happen. So I copy ed it
for a long time, and if someone turned this into
me as a sample, I would hire them on the spot.
(16:46):
So that letter, that that amazingly girl letter got Andrew
uh in January of NINETEENA. Wait, so you didn't take
very long. Um he came to visit Bell. Uh not
intend in this day forever, but at least for a
few weeks. For his first first visit, um Andrew had
brought with him close to three thousand dollars and Bell
(17:09):
and Andrew together went to the local bank to cash
that check. Bell wanted it in all cash, despite Andrew
and the bank teller suggesting that she keeps some in
an account as a safety net. Ray and remember that
was her handyman, argued with Belle about Andrew, who he
did not want Bell to get married to. So she
(17:32):
probably fired Ray Andrew. And we would love to say
that this was unexpected, but at this point, is it really?
Is it? Andrew was mysteriously gone the next day, and
when he did not return home, his brother naturally grew concerned, right,
so then he found the letters from Bell, and doing
(17:53):
a little amateur investigating, he learned that Andrew had cashed
a large ac in Laveport, and as far as Bell
was concerned, she admitted freely that Andrew had visited her,
but that he had also left. But Andrew's brother was
not willing to just take that as the answer, and
(18:14):
so he actually showed up in Laport looking to talk
to Bell personally, and alarmed that there may have been
foul play, he wanted the farm searched, and then, as
all of this was playing out, around four am on April,
Bell's farmhouse burned to the ground. Tragedy struck again when
(18:37):
we return, Well, it wasn't potatoes that were found in
the dirt at Bell's farm. Welcome back to Criminalia. We
(19:03):
are at the point in Bell Gunnis's story where skeletons
come out of the closet. Okay, really, I mean the ground.
They came out of the ground literally, as skeltons are
in the ground now There's a really interesting thing that
Bell did the day before her house burned down that
we should talk about. She visited her lawyer, um As
(19:26):
she asked him to draw up her will, leaving everything
she owned firstly to her children and, according to some
accounts fewer accounts though, secondly to an orphanage in Chicago.
While this aspect of drawing up a will isn't necessarily
so interesting, this next part is During her meeting, she
(19:47):
was quoted as telling her lawyer and again direct quote,
I'm afraid he's going to kill me and burn the house.
And the heat that she's referring to there is her
now former handyman and person who fell in unrequited love
with her Ray. She never went to the police about this,
She only spoke to her lawyer. But the next thing
(20:08):
you know, the Laporte County Sheriff Albert Smutzer was questioning Ray,
and Ray denied setting fire to anything. Um He even
asked if Bell and her kids had gotten out of
the house safely, based on one eyewitness account of Ray
fleeing the scene of the fire. The former handyman was
charged with arson and because the bodies of three children
(20:32):
and one woman specifically one headless woman were found in
the basement crazy. He was also charged with four counts
of murder. So initially that headlessness just oh my goodness.
So in actually authorities believed the bodies were those of
Bell and her children, Myrtle who was a Lennon, Lucy
who was nine, and Philip, who was five at the time.
(20:54):
And why wouldn't you assume that right there, the three
children and the mother who lived in the house. But
it was quickly to remand that this headless body couldn't
actually be Bell. And the most obvious problem was that
Bell stood six ft tall and weighed about two hundred pounds,
but the person found in the basement was only about
(21:15):
five three up to maybe five six inches in height
and weighed about seventy five pounds um, of course minus
the way to the head. But the headless person had
also been poisoned with Stryck nine before the fatal fire,
so it was also assumed that everyone had been asleep
(21:36):
on the second floor when the fire broke out, right
and like, as the house collapsed and the floors collapse,
they fell. However, and rather weirdly, the family's piano, which
was normally on the first floor of the home was
found directly on top of those four bodies. Happens all
the time the old piano jump right there was there
(21:58):
was no way not to consider this a murder scene
at this point, right, I mean it could have been previously,
but now the sheriff launched an investigation into what was
going on. The search of Bell's farm began, and at
the time um Bell's farm hand was a man named
Joe Maxon, and he suggested to the authorities that they
(22:19):
start digging for evidence near the pig pen. The sheriff
took about a dozen men to Bell's farm to see
what they could dig up literally and uh, Holly would
they find. Well, it's a bit grizzly. So they found
the small bodies of two unidentified children, and then just
a few days later, Andrew's body was found, as were
(22:41):
about twelve other bodies along with a variety of body parts.
And they also unearthed the body of Jenny Olsen, who
had vanished in December of nineteen o six. If you recall,
Bell had at the time said that Jenny had gone
to school in Los Angeles, Jenny also having been one
who told the schoolmate that her mother had killed her
(23:02):
father with the meat grinder. All of these bodies were
found in shallow graves. So a little bit about Bell.
Bell was a really strong woman who um if you
want to imagine her, um, imagine her as a woman
who preferred to wear men's overalls. And she did her
own pig butchering on the farm. And addition, in addition
to writing all of the letters she wrote and all
(23:24):
of that butchering, um Bell had been spending her money
on large wooden trunks as well as digging in her
farm's pigpen late at night, the late at night. And
you know, I'm not suspicious at all, right, I mean,
I always dig at night. Listen, she's got a busy
letter writing a pig butchering schedule. You gotta fit it
(23:44):
in where you can. Of the bodies that were found,
seven were identified pretty quickly, but then there were also
all of these unidentified bodies, and these bodies were considered
additional victims, though authorities could never prove it. If you
haven't their hour or two to spare, we could share
all of these names and the small bits and pieces
of their stories that have been pieced together over the years.
(24:08):
But ultimately the bottom line is that Bell's victim list
is just really really low. It actually, if you have
it like in a word document, it scrolls like it's
not just one page, you have to keep going. So
we decided not to talk about the specific victims because
of that, but UM primarily because of the crude recovery
(24:29):
methods UM at that time. The exact number of individuals
that were unearthed on the farm remains kind of still unknown.
There could be more. Fourteen of Belle's victims were eventually
literally pieced together, but there were a number of teeth
and bones, and there's this one detail that I just
(24:51):
really it's hard to like something in this story, but
I did like this watches UM that were found uh
in the ground. UM. In total, her victims are estimated
to be at the very very least the minimum is forty.
The coroner declared Bell dead after dentures found in the
(25:11):
debris two weeks later were identified by the local dentist
as hers. Curiously, though these dentures were found intact, they
were not at all burned, and that suggested to a
lot of people that this was planted evidence. So Bell
was gone right, But according to the former handyman, Ray.
(25:32):
She definitely was not dead, Ray um, and since he
lived with her, he seemed to know quite a bit
about what happened in her home. Um. He said that
Bell murdered for suitors by poisoning their after dinner coffee
with Stryck nine and as an asside in a personal note,
I am very pleased that it was not arsenic and
(25:52):
that we get to talk about a different poison. Thank you,
Bell gunns Um. And while they were in this stupor,
she would hit them over the head with her meat
cleaver to finish the job. But next she would bring
the body to the basement and butcher it and would
distribute its parts among her hogs. Some she would bury. Um.
(26:16):
He said that she was very skillful, and she skillfully
sliced it apart, wrapped in an oilcloth and put it
in the dirt. And believe it or not, this is
actually where things get more disturbing, even more, according to
Ray's account, Bell smothered her children and fled with her money.
(26:37):
Ray's estimate was that she had gotten anywhere from one
thousand dollars to thirty two thousand dollars from each man.
Just amazing, and he was certain that she had taken
up a new identity, So while Belle, who would have
been about forty eight years old at this point, she
may or may not have been living a new life.
Um But on May nine, know eight, Ray was tried
(27:01):
from murder and arson. He pleaded innocent to all of
these charges, but he did admit that he had helped
Bell bury her victims. His defense hinged on the assertion
that the headless body was not Belle's body, so he
was found guilty of arson, but he was acquitted of
the murder charges. On November, Ray was sentenced to two
(27:25):
to twenty one years in the state prison in Michigan City, Indiana.
He eventually died there of tuberculosis. That was just about
a year later, and on his deathbed, Ray confessed to
a priest that he had helped Bell escape to a
nearby town and from there she caught a train to Chicago.
He confessed that he was the one who set the
(27:45):
house on fire as a cover up, and that the
headless corpse had been a woman that Bell had hired
as a housekeeper. Interestingly, Ray also said in this confession
that there was another accomplice, but he never shared that name,
and it remains a complete question mark. Right, that's so
interesting and it's nowhere. So interest in Bell's story, or
(28:09):
at least raised account of Belt's story grew nationwide and
for years, and I'd I'd actually be comfortable saying even
decades after the fire and her disappearance, there were Bells
sightings everywhere around the US. So we have a few
of the most interesting examples of these sightings that also
(28:29):
kind of show you how varied they can be. Yes,
as late as ninety one, Bell was reported to be
living in Mississippi, where she supposedly owned quite a bit
of real estate and was living her life as a
prominent citizen. Another report, and this one is the most
popular theory that you're here a lot as part of
(28:50):
the story of bell Um. It's also from one and
it suggests that she may have changed her identity to
Esther Carlson so after Arleson is really interesting because Esther
kind of came to light when she was arrested in
Los Angeles for poisoning a man named August Lindstrom that
was a Norwegian American gentleman who may have been her boss.
(29:13):
And that happened in February one, and she did it
for the money. Two people who had known Bell claimed
that she and Esther were the same woman, and those
claims were based on those people having seen a few
photographs of Esther. Now, if you've seen older photographs, you know,
from the early nineteen hundreds, this could be a part
(29:33):
of the story that's a little bit squishy. They certainly
did not have all the detail we are used to today.
A lot of times those photographs, um, you know, diminished
over time and lost their their sharpness and clarity. So
it's a little uncertain. Esther did absolutely resemble Bell, though
the two were about the same age. And the really
curious part of the story to me is that there
(29:55):
had been no record of Esther before night Esther on
May sixth, nineteen thirty one, while awaiting trial for that
poisoning charge. Just it's yeah, I agree with you, though,
the no record of Esther before n is curious. But
we'll see as recently as two thousand and seven, So
(30:16):
this is something that people are still today talking about
a hundred years later. Scientists have tried to link Esther
and Bell through DNA, but so far things have been
mostly unsuccessful, mainly because samples have degraded. H families have
been very supportive and have offered their help. But it
(30:36):
would seem that Bell has taken her secrets to the grave,
but her legacy certainly lives on. There's actually quite a
musical and theatrical body of work surrounding Bell and her story.
She has been the subject of at least four American
musical ballot amazing one song, for instance, is entitled The
(30:58):
Battle of Bell Gunness, The Battle One Song. One song
for instance is entitled the Ballad of Bell Gunness, and
it is sung to the tune of Love, Oh, Careless Love,
and it's been described not so much as a song
as a crime report. In Romo. There is also Bell
Gunness the Murder Musical, and there was also a movie
(31:19):
made about ten years ago that was called The Gunness Mystery.
You know. So her farm as well, which has since
been nicknamed Murder Farm, has become quite a tourist attraction,
and they offer concessions and there are souvenirs for sale.
Bell has even become part of local history. The Laporte
County Historical Society Museum in Indiana has a permanent Bell
(31:43):
Gunnis exhibit. So that is the story of Bell. We
may never know what happened to her. I was trying
to think of a good way to make a drink
(32:06):
that um reflected one of the things that really stood
out to me about Belle's story, which is perhaps shockingly
not all the murder, but the way that she shifted
her identity over and over right, even when she moved
to the United States from Norway, she switched over. Then
you know, with any of these men, she went from
(32:28):
being like very coquettish and sweet to killing them and
then ultimately went from being Bell Gunnis to being possibly esther.
So I wanted to make a drink that changes its
identity as you're drinking it. That's fantastic. So okay, so
this this is not a difficult drink to make, but
(32:48):
you do have to do some prep ahead of time.
So first of all, you need an ice cube tray,
some cranberry juice and uh some pickled hallepeen yours and
an eye dropper. I know this sounds ridiculous, but stick
with me, typic experiment drink. Honestly, it was so fun
(33:13):
to test this one because it worked the way I
hoped it would, and then I was like, um, so
you fill your your ice cube receptacles halfway up with
cranberry juice, put that in the freezer and let it set.
Then with like an eye dropper. You don't want a lot.
You're literally all you're getting out of that pickled hallepeen
(33:33):
your jar is a little bit of juice. So you're
picking up like three to five drops and putting those
into each of the pre frozen uh cranberry juice half cubes.
Let that freeze for just a little while, and then
top it up with cranberry and finish your ice cubes.
So now you have cranberry ice cubes with a little
(33:55):
bit of Halloween you hidden in them. And then uh,
you're just gonna x two ounces of vodka. The actual
drink part super easy. So you're gonna mix two ounces
of vodka and five ounces of ginger ale uh six
ounces if you like a different you know, um proportion there.
Then you will drop these ice cubes in and as
(34:16):
you are drinking, you first just get this very light
ginger ale and vodka drink, and then you get a
cranberry drink, and at the very end you get a stinger.
You know that drink actually is very well right, right,
like I think you kind of nailed her, like at
the end you die well. And that's the thing too,
(34:38):
I I always, you know, and I'm just doing fun
experiments in the kitchen to get to any of these,
so like I always want everybody to experiment with their
own stuff. One you can use, you know, a different
mixer if you like gin and ginger ale, that's fine.
You just want two things that are are going to
be impacted by the shift to the cranberry and the
(34:58):
hall of peen you And then the other thing you
want to think about is whether or not you are
a fast drinker or a slow drinker. Like if you
are a slower drinker that SIPs a little at a time,
you want to mix your ginger ale and vodka with
some regular ice before you add these cranberry hallopeen you
ice cubes, because then it will make them take a
(35:19):
little bit longer to to melt and dissolve into your
drink and change the flavor. Um. If you are a
fast drinker, like I tend to drink my any beverage,
not just cocktails, but pretty quickly, so I leave the
ice out because then by the time I'm done, is
right about the right timing. Um. The other thing that
I like about a recipe like this is you can
completely change it up right if you are not uh,
(35:40):
if you don't like to drink, if you're not an
alcohol person, you can do this with just ginger ale
and ice cubes. Um. You can also switch it out
and use a different juice than Cranberry, but I just
like the way Cranberry kind of mixes in. So I mean,
keep in mind that that finish you is not something
you're sipping a lot of. You kind of want your
last sip or two to have that little bite of
Halloween you, but not too much. So that is my
(36:02):
what's your poison for this time? And I'm just gonna
call it secret identity, or maybe we should call it
the Esther Carlson. I think I like that. I kind
of like that. I kind of like the kind of
call it the ester Carlson. Please don't use it to
make anybody go into a stupor, so you can do
away with them. Not only drink responsibly, but serve responsibly.
(36:24):
You know. I know there's like an element of surprise
that people enjoy, but I like to let people know
what they're in for. So uh, we hope that you
are in for a few more episodes about poisoners. We
have a few more coming, so you can absolutely join
us here next week. If you haven't subscribed yet, absolutely
do that on the I heart Radio app, the Apple podcasts,
wherever it is you listen. Criminalia is a production of
(36:51):
Shonda land Audio in partnership with I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, please visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or ever you listen to
your favorite shows. M hmmmm.
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Holly Frey
Maria Trimarchi
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