Belle Gunness Burns Murder Farm
In the early hours of April 28, 1908, a fire tore through Belle Gunness’s farmhouse near La Porte, Indiana, and firefighters found the burned bodies of three children and a headless woman that authorities initially identified as Gunness. As investigators dug under her hog pen, they uncovered multiple dismembered human remains in burlap sacks, revealing that Gunness had been luring wealthy suitors to the farm, taking their money, and murdering them.
Police charged her former farmhand and lover, Ray Lamphere, with arson and the murders of Belle and her children, but a jury convicted him only of arson, and he died of tuberculosis about a year into his sentence. Before his death, Lamphere allegedly claimed that Gunness had set the fire herself and fled, and later inquiries never conclusively proved that the headless corpse was hers, leaving her ultimate fate a mystery.