Throughout this nonfiction narrative, my brain kept shouting "Forensics! Autopsy! DNA!" despite the fact that this trial occurred in a small town in 1908. Well, all of those factors, if the science had progressed to that point, would have been immensely helpful. However, science wasn't available, so those who tried to determine facts were adrift on a sea of gossip, Narcissistic manipulation, political ambition, and personal agendas, none of which are ever effective tools of truth.


In the long run, unless some Court somewhere orders exhumations, no one will ever know. However I found the author's suggested conclusion quite compelling, and indeed possible. Unfortunately the fact that we will never know grates on my imagination, that and unpunished injustice.

Many thanks to Lillian de la Torres, Mysterious Press, and Netgalley for the free copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.

At the time of request I was under the assumption that this was a current publication; however, it is a reissue of the tale of murder for profit by a hussie in Laporte, IN about 60 miles outside Chicago. The book was written in the 1950s, the deaths in the 1900s. What becomes just as consequential is the possible death of Gunness herself and the possible perpetrator as well as accessory to the charnel house of Northern Indiana.
Where I find the book falls flat is the areas of the author's suppositions. Chapters based on fact are well written and seemed to be well researched, but de la Torres inveighed a bit too much for my tastes. This was certainly a basket of crime I has never heard of occurring in my home state, but I appreciate source material more than grand supposition.

Belle is an interesting woman. She obviously was smart to be able to get by with her killings for so long. I feel so sorry for her victims, many who were only trying to help her. I enjoyed the author's writing.

What an intriguing, yet horrifying read! What makes it even more terrifying, is that it's true! A farm woman and her love of children are cast into a grotesquely chilling true story. She lives her foster children so much, it seems like she poironed them to death. Afterwards she poisons herself and has a cohort fire her house down down with them in it. That in itself is chilling. However, what's more unbelievable is that she is not the sweet farmer that she seems to be. She entices men to court her, steals their money and butts them in the pig fence.
A truly great true crime! Wait till the ending! 5 Stars!

When I requested this book I expected a recently written book about Belle Gunness. It is neither new nor really about Belle. Now I don’t mind the not new part much. It’s a re-release of a book from the 1950s but considering that it’s still fine. I’ve read some older true crime books that were very sensationalist and cheerfully mixed fact and fiction. (Not that newer ones are always better, especially when it comes to sensationalism). However, that wasn’t the problem. Yes, the facts were sometimes dressed in (light) purple prose and especially at the beginning we are told a lot about the thoughts and feelings of the people involved but that gets better.
However, it’s also not really a book about Belle Gunness. It opens with her farm burning down and the discoveries of the bodies on the ground. Then it spends only a short time on Belle’s life and her crimes. I already knew more about her and my only previous contact with Belle had been my favourite true crime podcast doing an episode on her.
The book’s actual focus is Ray Lamphere’s trial. Only at the very end, it returns to Belle and the author poses her own theory about Belle’s fate. (A theory that’s plausible but also one that hasn’t any more proof than any other). Now I wasn’t that interested in that trial before I started reading and the book didn’t change that.
Mainly because the trial is mainly told via court transcripts. Just one after the other (with the occasional newspaper article thrown in) with the minimum linking narration possible. Sure, some original quotes from the time are good but this book goes beyond that. Often the information from several pages of transcripts could have been summed up in a few paragraphs. And then the next transcript just repeats the information we already got in the last one. It makes for some rather tiresome reading.

The book simply has a misleading blurb. I wouldn’t have picked it up if I had known that it focussed so heavily on the trial. If that’s your thing you might enjoy it more than I did.
ARC provided by NetGalley

Good book on Belle Gunness. Very well thought out and put together. Explains her crimes and the aftermath of them. Good insight on the wrongs that Belle committed. I was especially interested in the author's take on the events. The way it is presented, the facts are presented and you make up your mind. I know a few people in my reading circle that would enjoy this book. I would think it would make for a good book club read just for the discussion afterwards. See what different people took away from the book. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book in return for my honest review.

As a murderino, how could I not read a book about Belle Gunness? My issue with this book is that I'm used to a formula for true crime books -- start with the crime, then go back and give a ton of background, then move back to the crime and the fall out from the crime. This book spent less than a paragraph talking about Belle's childhood and how she ended up in the US, an aside in parenthesis about how one of her husbands oddly died, and then list her suitors with barely a sentence devoted to each one. I learned more about her and enjoyed the storytelling more while listening to a podcast. The book devotes the bulk of the story to a trial, which is never the most interesting plot. Also, this is obviously a reprint of a much older book and could have used some updating -- for example, I'm pretty sure that no one who was associated with the people in this story, which occurs in the early 1900s is still alive and fondly remembering anyone. The life and crimes of Belle Gunness is a great story; this book just doesn't tell them in a particularly interesting way.

While it's a full telling of Belle's story, it is also this author's theory of what she felt really happened to Belle in the end. Spends a lot of time on Lamphere and his trial. Looks to be a reprint of her 1955 book. I've read several books on Belle including a more recent one putting forth a new theory that she may have taken on the identity of yet another victim after the fire. The new victim being from another state that she killed. She was then later able to assume her identity and live on as her for the remainder of her life. Lots of theories out there.

( My thanks to NetGalley and Open Road Integrated Media for providing me with an ARC in return for my review.)

On a spring day in 1908, police were called to the scene of a fire in a farmhouse in La Porte, Indiana. In the ruins of the house, they discovered four bodies: three children and a headless adult believed to be the farm's proprietress, Belle Gunness. A former employee, Ray Lamphere, was charged with the murders.

But much about the situation didn't sit right with investigators or the town citizens. Evidence as to what was wrong was later unearthed when a man named Asle Helgelien arrived at the farm looking for his brother Andrew, who had left Aberdeen, South Dakota a few months earlier to meet Belle through a newspaper lonely hearts ad, but never returned.

Sure enough, once they started digging, his remains were found, and a number of other "soft spots" in the dirt around the farm and in the pig pen yielded a dozen sets of human remains, plus strange things like a suspicious number of men's watches.
A widow twice over, the Norwegian-born Belle had begun killing her husbands to commit insurance fraud and then couldn't seem to stop. She was viciously manipulative too, managing to finagle what she wanted out of doctors, investigators, and her hired help, all to maintain her growing murder-for-money schemes.

She placed the lonely hearts ads in Norwegian-language newspapers and men traveled from throughout the Midwest to meet her with a mind to marry. The ads or her corresponding letters always instructed them to bring cash to support the marriage or the farm. But this prolific "black widow" lured and killed at the very least 25-30 men and potentially many more, making her one of the most prolific serial killers in American history. Spooky.

And spookiest of all, the biggest mystery is whether Belle herself actually died in the fire. Almost fro the beginning,

Prolific novelist Lillian de la Torre wrote this account of Belle's crimes, or at least what was known about them, and their aftermath in 1955. Open Road Integrated Media is releasing a new ebook edition from their backlist. In its day, the book was a finalist for the Edgar Award. It holds up for the most part. As the title promises, it's indeed factual but with a readable narrative structure and none of the breathless sensationalism that often accompanies crime fiction or nonfiction of the era.

The majority of the book is about Ray Lamphere's trial and the town's and media's reactions to his and Belle's alleged crimes. The biggest question is how much truth he was telling, and to what extent he was involved. And of course, if the body in the fire was actually hers, and if not, where she was. The story itself is compelling (if uncomfortably gruesome) but the trial aspect and its repetitive courtroom dialogue dragged somewhat.
De la Torre posits an interesting theory about how Belle met her end and who may have helped her escape, and based on what was presented up until then in the book, it sounded plausible.

She alleges that Belle "avenged a long resentment against male domination", and realized she could "free" and "enrich" herself at the expense of lovestruck men. She has theories about Belle's use of sex and her obsession with power and dominance over men, which do make sense based on what we know about murderers and serial killers especially. It's all interesting enough, if brief and ultimately inconclusive. Much of this has to do with the times and the limited forensics available then.

Speaking of which, there's no update to the case included here, but some Googling revealed that 100 years after the fire, the remains of Belle (or the body from the fire believed to be hers) and the children were exhumed and DNA testing was done to determine conclusively whether it was Belle who died or if she escaped. Bizarrely, there were children's bones mixed with hers in the coffin. This story gets stranger and stranger, even 100 years on.

The results were inconclusive, so the mystery remains.

A quickly readable account of the basics of a very strange character in Indiana history.