That added element of violent sadism made her very unique to me. Belle, again, would not only murder these victims, apparently by administering poison and then delivering a death blow with a hammer, she would drag their bodies down to the cellar of her farmhouse and chop them up like farm animals, then bury them in this backyard graveyard that she had.
#CRAIGLIST KILLER VICTIMS SERIAL#
That made her unique in the annals of American serial murder. The thing that made Belle Gunness unique and fascinating to me, in a morbid kind of way, is the fact that she butchered her victims' bodies like farm animals. All the atrocities he committed were postmortem, where these female serial poisoners take great sadistic pleasure in prolonging the agony of their victims. But some of these women are worse than Jack the Ripper. Women tend to dispatch their victims with poison, and people tend to think of poisoning somehow as this quaint, Victorian way of killing somebody. That kind of sexual-mutilation murder is very specifically the male form of serial killing. There's a culture critic, Camille Paglia, who says there are no female "Jack the Rippers," which is basically true.
On the spectrum of female serial killers, how does Belle Gunness stack up?Ĭontrary to popular notions, there have been many female serial murderers. By the time I began writing the book, I had plenty of material. She was able to go to various Chicago courthouses and dig up some really interesting stuff. I hired a genealogical record searcher to assist in digging up information. I came back from that trip with hundreds of pages of primary source material that I had scanned onto my iPad.
#CRAIGLIST KILLER VICTIMS TRIAL#
There's trial transcripts and the local newspapers covered her case extensively. I made a research trip out to La Porte, Indiana, where they have this historical society museum, and I found all kinds of documents relating to Belle Gunness.
I had been interested in the whole phenomenon of female serial murderers for a while. The title of my book comes from one of the ballads, in which she's referred to as the Princess of Hell, and there's another ballad that I quote as the epigraph to the book where she talks about butchering men. There are a couple of Belle Gunness ballads in that book. It's a collection of murder ballads that were orally transmitted and printed with little descriptions of the crimes that they relate to. There's also a 1950s book, American Murder Ballads and Their Stories, by Olive Woolley Burt. Harold Schechter: I first came across a reference in a book called Women Who Kill by Ann Jones. VICE: How did you learn the story of Belle Gunness?
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