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Overall, I chose this case because of how mysterious and strange it is. Belle was one of the first-ever female serial killers, and she was good at it. she managed to avoid suspicion and get away with everything. I learned more about using bones as evidence in a case and also used previous knowledge from class, including types of evidence and fire and arson investigators. even though this case is very old and there weren't very good ways of collecting or testing evidence at that time, I still think the case was well investigated and, since people reopened the case in 2008, it clearly has had a lasting effect not only on the community, but the whole world.

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"Most of the skulls were scarred with giant gashes and showed signs of blunt trauma. Some of the bodies—those still intact, at least—contained traces of strychnine, commonly used as a rat poison. Many of the remains had been quartered like a hog, doused in quicklime to speed up decomposition, and buried under piles of men’s shoes."
-mental floss

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"Body after body after body was found in shallow, trash-covered graves—some under the pig pen, others near a lake, a few by the outhouse. Each body was butchered into six parts: The legs chopped at the knee, the arms hacked at the shoulder, and the head decapitated. Most of the remains could not be identified."
-mental floss

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it is hard to deny that belle was the murderer in this case, no one else could have possibly done it. but how do we know she killed all of her victims, and how do we know for sure? it is confirmed that belle killed at least fourteen, but many believe that she may have killed upwards of forty men, women, and children.

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forensic evidence- was belle killed in the fire?

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forensic evidence- was belle killed in the fire?

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my answer is no, i really dont think that belle was the body found in the burned house. for starters, why would her head be gone, like the body in the house? belle had had dental work done, she had two porcelain teeth and a gold tooth. two porcelain teeth and a gold tooth, still with the roots on them, were found and confirmed to be gunness's by her very own dentist. this might be good evidence to prove that it was really gunness's dead body, but how do you account for her head being gone, and the bones not meeting the stature or size of gunness? how would her teeth even be there if her head was gone? even more, why would belle burn her own house down and kill herself? and how did she get her head off? many people accuse her farmhand of murdering her, but honestly I don't find that possible either. many sightings of people suspected to be belle were reported, but none of them were proven to be her. one sighting that stood out to me was a woman named Esther Carlson, who looked very alike to belle, was around the same age belle would be, and was on trial for poisoning her husband. carlson also had no records before 1908. they tried to confirm that Esther Carlson was belle gunness, but the only DNA they had of belle was from an envelope she had licked to seal, and since they investigated this case in 2009, the evidence was too old and they couldn't get enough DNA off of the sample. keeping the evidence in mind, I do not think that belle was killed in the fire. it seems likely to me that belle staged the teeth, and cut off the head of the woman she was staging as herself to try and make it seem like she was the victim of the fire. i think that Esther Carlson was Belle, simply because all evidence points to it. I think she was tempted to try and kill again, after her long time of not killing, and finally got caught trying to poison her husband.

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even though we don't know the reason for the killings, the violence inflicted on the people she killed, or where she went, we do know that gunness was a cold-hearted killer who wanted nothing but money for herself, even if it meant killing everyone she may have potentially loved.

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the way belle had killed the people she did was quite violent, all the bones found had blunt force wounds, and it is suspected that she would hit them with a meat grinder, meat cleavers, and sometimes feed them to her pigs. the reason for the amount of violence used is possibly because she felt she needed to get back at the men who had taken her baby from her during the attack. 

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in psychology today, katherine ramsland writes,

"I was also fascinated with the details of reports from mental health experts, including criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso and forensic psychologist Hugo Munsterberg. Both remarked on Belle’s absence of empathy, with emphasis on her apparent ability to overcome 'natural feminine feelings.' Lombroso spotted her 'super intelligence for doing evil,' making her 'more terrible than any male criminal.'" (psychology today)

let's also discuss the attack by her former lover that caused the loss of her unborn baby. this could have been emotionally damaging for her and caused her to have a great hatred against men, and possibly children, alike. the emigration from norway to the united states could have been very scary and different for someone as young as she was. the united states was much bigger than norway, and as dr. nicola davies suggests, her coping mechanism may have been money because money can help stabilize you and help you feel more secure. this can be supported because it seems that money is her only motive. she killed her family for their insurance money, and she only killed men she saw after they gave her large sums of money.

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it is still unknown what happened to belle. the woman found could most likely not have been belle, she was too short and too thin. a doctor even said that the woman's body that was found wasn't actually killed in the fire, but was poisoned before. most of the locals believed that the body was, in fact, belle's, but there is little to no evidence suggesting that it was. even more suspicious, gunness had completely emptied her bank account the day before the fire, and she had recently been seen in the company of another shorter and thinner woman that could very likely be the body discovered.

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after being questioned by law enforcement, the farmhand (that had survived the fire) told police that belle had often asked him to carry dirt to behind the farmhouse and belle would spread it around back there. the sheriff had his men dig around the back of the house, and soon they had found at least 40 bodies of men who had all been killed by gunness. of these men, they found the bodies of her daughter who had "gone to college" and her fiance.

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on the night of april 28, 1908, there was a house fire in gunness's home. the farmhand made it out all right, but when firefighters came in to put the fire out, a woman and three children were found dead in the cellar. the woman was found without a head, making it hard to identify the woman. The investigators ruled the fire as intentional.

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after the death of peter gunness, belle's widowed life became fairly routine. she would put ads in the newspaper about looking for a wealthy husband, and when she got an reply from a man, she would tell them to come over and bring a sizeable amount of money to "prove their willingness" of being her husband. after putting the money in belles bank account, the men would disappear. when asked about men, she would explain how untrustworthy men were, saying how they would all show up in her life and then abandon her. if the relatives of the missing men would ask her about him, she would say that he ran off to norway, oregon, or st. louis.

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in chicago in 1884, gunness married her first husband, mads sorenson, and they had at least two children, although no one knows for sure how many they had. two of her children died at a young age, supposedly from colitis, which was fairly common at the time, but it is highly possible that she actually killed them. belle collected their life insurance payouts after their deaths. in 1900, gunness's husband died. one doctor suspected that he was poisoned, but their family doctor put the cause of death as heart failure, therefore an autopsy was never preformed. strangely, on the very day of his death, two of his life insurance policies overlapped, providing gunness two times the amount of money she normally would have gotten from his death. gunness used the money she gained from his life insurance to buy a farm in la porte, indiana.

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born in 1859 in selbu, norway, belle gunness was born into a family where she was the youngest of eight children. her father was a stonemason and her mother was a stay at home mom. her family was very poor and as soon as she and her siblings got a chance, they moved to the united states in search of a better life. little more is known about her childhood or early life. later in life though, she was attacked by her at-the-time lover while she was pregnant. the attack caused the death of her baby.

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in 1902, gunness married again, this time to peter gunness. not long after the wedding, peter died, supposedly because of a meat grinder falling on him from a high shelf, but it is highly probable that gunness killed him. his death was ruled an accident.

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townsfolk looking at the remains of belle's home

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townsfolk looking at the remains of belle's home