Belle Gunness: The Murderous Widow of La Porte

In April 1908, a farmhouse in La Porte, Indiana burned to the ground, and neighbors mourned a mother who seemed to die saving her children. Within days the narrative violently flipped, revealing one of the most prolific serial killers in American history. This episode traces the life of Belle Gunness.We follow her from a hard, laboring childhood in Norway through her arrival in America and work in a Chicago butcher shop, to a string of insurance-funded deaths and a pig farm where she lured and murdered lonely men answering her lonely hearts ads.How her butcher-shop skills desensitized her and gave her anatomical knowledgeExploiting the honor-system life insurance industry of the eraA husband dying on the single day two insurance policies overlappedNewspaper ads targeting isolated, property-owning men who were never seen againThe headless body in the fire and the enduring mystery of whether she escaped