World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (5 page)

Ilse Koch at the time of her trial. She eventually died in 1971.

The Black Widow Killings

Belle Gunness can lay serious claim to being the first female serial killer of modern times. She was the archetypal black widow killer, a woman who repeatedly attracted husbands and other suitors, and promptly murdered them for their money. While others, like Nannie Doss, were relatively timid murderers who would wait years for the chance to poison their latest husband, Belle was happy to despatch most of her suitors almost immediately and, if they did not care to take a drop of cyanide, she was quite willing to terminate their prospects with the blow from an axe or hammer. After all, at a strongly built 280 pounds, there were not too many men able to overpower her.

Belle Gunness may also have a second claim to fame. There are very few serial killers who have succeeded in evading the law even after being identified. The Hungarian Bela Kiss was one; Norwegian-born Belle Gunness was another.

Belle Gunness was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Storset on 11 November 1859 in the Norwegian fishing village of Selbu. Her parents had a small farm there and Belle’s father also moonlighted as a conjuror. Allegedly Belle, in her youth, would appear alongside him as a tightrope walker and it is certainly true to say that she walked a tightrope for the rest of her life.

Foster Mother

In 1883 her older sister, Anna, who had emigrated to Chicago, invited Belle to join her in the United States. Belle jumped at the chance of a new life and soon arrived in Chicago. The following year she married a fellow immigrant, Mads Sorenson. They lived together happily enough for the next decade or so. They failed to conceive children but instead fostered three girls: Jennie, Myrtle and Lucy. The only dramas to strike these hard-working immigrants were the regular fires that dogged their businesses. Twice their houses burnt down and, in 1897, a confectionery store they ran also succumbed to fire. Thankfully, each time they were well insured.

Insurance also served Belle well when, on 30 July 1900, Mads Sorenson died suddenly at home, suffering from what was officially listed as heart failure, but strangely showing all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning. Amazingly enough, he died on the day that one life insurance policy elapsed and another one started, so his grieving widow was able to claim on both policies.

Grieving Widow

With her $8,500 windfall, Belle decided to start a new life. She moved her family to the rural town of La Porte, Indiana, a place popular with Scandinavian immigrants, and soon married again, this time to Peter Gunness, a fellow Norwegian. Sadly, this marriage was not to last as long as her first. In 1903 Peter died in a tragic accident after a sausage grinder allegedly fell on his head. If some observed that it looked as if a hammer blow might have caused the head wound, the grieving – and pregnant – widow’s tears were enough to quieten them. Once again there was an insurance payment, this time for $4,000.

Belle never married again, though not, it appears, for want of trying. She placed regular advertisements in the Norwegian language press’ lonely hearts columns. Describing herself as a comely widow, she advertised for men ready to support their amorous advances with a solid cash investment in their future lives together. She received many replies and several of these suitors actually arrived in La Porte, cash or bankbooks in hand. They would be seen for a day or two, tell their loved ones they were preparing to marry a rich widow and then they would disappear.

They were not the only people around Belle to disappear. Her foster daughter Jennie also vanished – Belle told neighbours that she had gone to a finishing school in California. Farmhands seemed to go missing on the Gunness farm on a regular basis. As far as the community as a whole was concerned, however, Belle Gunness was a model citizen who had had some very bad luck.

This view seemed to be compounded once and for all when, on 28 April 1908, Belle’s house caught fire. Fire-fighters were unable to stop the blaze in time and the bodies of two of Belle’s three children were found in the rubble, along with an adult female body assumed to be that of Belle herself – though identification was difficult as the body had been decapitated. The beheaded body was clear evidence that this was no accident but murder. The police immediately arrested an obvious suspect, local handyman Ray Lamphere, who had had an on/off relationship with Belle, but had lately fallen out with her and threatened to burn her house down.

That might have been the end of the matter if investigators had not continued digging around the site, looking for the corpse’s missing head. They did not find the head but they did find fourteen other corpses buried around the farm, mostly in the hog pen. Among those they were able to identify were two handymen, foster daughter Jennie and five of the hopeful suitors. The remainder were mostly presumed to be other unidentified suitors.

No Ordinary Widow

It was horribly clear that Belle Gunness was no ordinary widow but a vicious serial killer. More alarm bells rang when it was discovered that some of the bodies recovered from the fire had cyanide in their stomachs. Rumours immediately began to spread that the adult female corpse was not Belle. These were partially quashed a couple of weeks later, when her dental bridge and two teeth (looking suspiciously untouched by fire) were found in the rubble. Some accepted this as definitive evidence that Belle was dead. Others saw it as simply a final act of subterfuge. The prosecution of Ray Lamphere went ahead, but the jury expressed its doubts as to whether Belle was really dead by finding the handyman guilty only of arson and not of murder.

Sightings of Belle Gunness began almost immediately and continued in the ensuing years. Most of them were obviously wrong, and to this day, the true story of the United State’s first known female serial killer remains shrouded in mystery.

The Blood of Innocents

When Countess Elizabeth Bathory, aged 15, married Count Nadasdy in around 1576, it was an alliance between two of the greatest dynasties in Hungary. For Nadasdy, the master of Castle Csejthe in the Carpathians, came from a line of warriors, and Elizabeth’s family was even more distinguished: It had produced generals and governors, high princes and cardinals – her cousin was the country’s Prime Minister. Long after they’ve been forgotten, though, she will be remembered. For she was an alchemist, a bather in blood – and one of the models for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Elizabeth was beautiful, voluptuous, savage – a fine match for her twenty-one-year-old husband, the so-called ‘Black Warrior.’ But he was forever off campaigning, and she remained childless. More and more, then, she gave in to the constant cajolings of her old nurse, Ilona Joo, who was a black witch, a satanist. She began to surround herself with alchemists and sorcerers; and when she conceived – she eventually had four children – she may have been finally convinced of their efficacy. For when her husband died, when she was about 41, she surrendered to the black arts completely.

There had long been rumours around the castle of lesbian orgies, of the kidnappings of young peasant women, of flagellation, of torture. But one day after her husband’s death, Elizabeth Bathory slapped the face of a servant girl and drew blood; and she noticed that, where it had fallen on her hand, the skin seemed to grow smoother and more supple. She was soon convinced that bathing in and drinking the blood of young virgins would keep her young forever. Her entourage of witches and magicians – who were now calling for human sacrifice to make their magic work – agreed enthusiastically.

Elizabeth and her cronies, then, began scouring the countryside for children and young girls, who were either lured to the castle or kidnapped. They were then hung in chains in the dungeons, fattened and milked for their blood before being tortured to death and their bones used in alchemical experiments. The countess, it was said later, kept some of them alive to lick the blood from her body when she emerged from her baths, but had them, in turn brutally killed if they either failed to arouse her or showed the slightest signs of displeasure.

Peasant girls, however, failed to stay the signs of ageing; and after five years, Elizabeth decided to set up an academy for young noblewomen. Now she bathed in blue blood, the blood of her own class. But this time, inevitably, news of her depravities reached the royal court; and her cousin, the Prime Minister, was forced to investigate. A surprise raid on the castle found the Countess in mid-orgy; bodies lying strewn, drained of blood; and dozens of girls and young women – some flayed and vein-milked, some fattened like Strasburg geese awaiting their turn – in the dungeons.

Elizabeth’s grisly entourage was taken into custody and then tortured to obtain confessions. At the subsequent trial for the murder of the eighty victims who were actually found dead at the castle, her old nurse, Ilona Joo, and one of the Countess’s procurers of young girls were sentenced to be burned at the stake after having their fingers torn out; many of the rest were beheaded. The Countess, who as an aristocrat could not be arrested or executed, was given a separate hearing in her absence at which she was accused of murdering more than 600 women and children. She was then bricked up in a room in her castle, with holes left for ventilation and food. Still relatively young and youthful, she was never seen alive again. She is presumed to have died – since the food was from then on left uneaten – four years later, on 21 August 1614.

Born Under a Bad Sign

Everything was against Aileen Wuornos, right from the beginning. Her father deserted her mother before she was born; and her mother ran off from Rochester, Michigan, not long afterwards, leaving her and her elder brother in charge of her grandparents, both of whom were drunks. Her grandfather beat both his wife and them; allowed no friends in the house; and wouldn’t even let them open the curtains. Malnourished and unable to concentrate in school, the children took to lighting fires with firelighters for amusement, and at the age of six, Aileen’s face was badly burned, scarred for life. By the time she reached puberty, she was already putting out to boys for food and drink, uppers, anything she could get. At thirteen she was raped by a friend of her grandparents. At fourteen, she was pregnant – and the child, she said, could have been anybody’s: the rapist’s, her grandfather’s, even her brother’s. The baby, a son, was put up for adoption almost immediately after birth.

Then, when her grandmother died of cancer in 1971, she and her brother were thrown out of their grandfather’s house and became wards of court. She dropped out of school and took up prostitution, while her brother robbed stores to feed an increasing drugs habit. Soon after her grandfather committed suicide in 1976, her brother died of throat cancer. He was only 21, a year older than she.

As if all this wasn’t enough, even her own genes seemed to be against her. For, quite apart from the cancers, the drinking and the suicide, the father she never met turned out to be a paranoid schizophrenic and a convicted paedophile. After spending time in mental hospitals for sodomising children as young as ten, he hanged himself in a prison cell.

She had a couple of chances to go straight, it’s true. She was picked up while hitch-hiking by an older man, who became besotted with her and married her; and she also got $10,000 from a life-insurance policy her brother had taken out. But the husband she abused and beat; and she used the insurance money to buy a fancy car, which she promptly crashed. So she was soon back on the road as a hitchhiking hooker, hanging out with bikers, and getting regularly arrested: for cheque forgery, breaches of the peace, car-theft, gun-theft and holding up a convenience store. For the latter, she did a year in jail, and when she came out, she tried to commit suicide.

Then, though, in 1986, Aileen, by now known as Lee, met twenty-two-year-old Tyria ‘Ty’ Moore in a Daytona Beach gay bar; and she turned out to be the love of her life – all the love that she’d never had. They rented an apartment together; they worked at motels and bars while Aileen turned tricks on the side. Her looks, though, weren’t getting any better – and at some point Aileen decided that Ty shouldn’t have to work any more: She, after all, was Ty’s ‘husband.’ That’s when she started to kill.

Beginning at the end of 1989, there was a string of deaths that soon had police baffled. All were men; some were found naked; and they’d all been killed by the same small-calibre gun. They included a trucker, a rodeo worker, a heavy-machine-operator, even a child-abuse investigator. And a sixty-year-old missionary had disappeared.

There was only one clue to the killer’s identity. The missionary’s car was involved in an accident and two women seen walking away. The police released sketches to the press; and Ty and Lee were identified. Lee had also pawned the possessions of many of her victims, and she’d left her finger- or thumb-prints – as per Florida law – on the pawn-shop receipts. It was only a matter of time.

There was one final betrayal. Ty, to save herself, went to the Florida police; and then, via a taped call to Aileen, persuaded her to confess. She did, but she said that her victims had beaten and raped her. She wasn’t believed. She was condemned to death, even though her defence presented her as terminally damaged, with a personality disorder.

Almost immediately, her story was told in a made-for-TV movie. Feminist writers defended her; an Aileen Wuornos Defence Group was set up. However, in 1999, she admitted that the claims about beatings and rape had been entirely made up. But she also said that the police had delayed five months before arresting her, because they were negotiating a movie deal with Hollywood producers desperate for the real-life story of a female serial killer. In his 2003 documentary
The Selling of a Serial Killer,
Nick Broomfield claims that there was a meeting to discuss rights to the police investigation a month before she was arrested.