Episode 52: Negative Consequences

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The con artist.

The master thief.

When they're good, we tend to use words usually reserved for creative geniuses.

They are people who have taken their skills and elevated them to a form of art, however criminal those skills might be.

And Hollywood knows we love them too.

After all, these flawed and complicated characters make for great movies.

Blockbusters even.

The Italian job, the usual suspects, Ocean's 11 or 12 or 13.

There's something oddly attractive about criminals, isn't there?

Take Sophie Levy.

She was born in 1848 and managed to steal her first purse by the age of 6.

By 12, she'd been arrested for shoplifting and by 20, she'd been locked up in New York's Sing Sing Prison three separate times.

Soon after, she married an internationally renowned safecracker and together they pulled off jobs, spent time in prison, and somehow also managed to raise a family.

For the next 30 years, Sophie perfected her craft.

She made shoes with hollow heels so she could smuggle diamonds between Amsterdam and New York.

She sold fake gold bricks.

She even learned to speak French and then traveled to Europe, where she picked jewels right off the wealthy elite, bringing in close to 4 million in modern American dollars after just one year of work.

And when she wasn't picking pockets, Sophie was luring married men into her web.

Once, she blackmailed a man for the equivalent of half a million dollars.

Another time, she walked into a fancy office building, approached the first CEO she could find, and threatened to reveal their torrid affair.

The man paid her off immediately.

Sure, Sophie took money from the men she tricked, but that was about it.

Yes, they lost some dignity, and yes, they probably had a lot of explaining to do back home.

But their lives were never at risk.

Sophie's victims, for all intents and purposes, made it out alive.

Some, though, haven't been so lucky.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

Right about the time that Sophie Levy was arrested for the first time in 1859, a woman named Brynhild Stursit was born in Selbu, Norway.

We don't know a lot about her childhood, but there are a few important details that still survive to this day.

Secondhand reports from the area tell us that Brynhild was an angry child.

We can speculate why, but speculation won't give us more details.

She was angry and spent her childhood living as an outsider without friends.

But she was also smart.

Everyone remembers that.

Brynhild, they always said, was a clever girl.

In 1877, at the age of 18, She went to a local dance to confront a young man who had gotten her pregnant.

But rather than agree to help her, he attacked her.

During the altercation, he knocked her down and kicked her.

As a result of the injuries, she miscarried the child.

But despite this, the young man never faced criminal charges.

Those who knew her say that her personality changed after that.

She grew darker, more brooding, more angry, if that was possible, and more determined.

Interestingly, shortly after the attack, the man who kicked her became sick and died.

Stomach cancer, they said.

But maybe also his just reward.

In 1881, Brynhild made the shift that so many of her fellow Norwegians had made.

She moved to America.

Her sister had moved there a few years earlier, so Brynhild traveled to Chicago and reconnected with her.

She also changed her name to Belle.

Once settled, Belle found work, and she also found a husband.

Maas Sorensen was a fellow Norwegian immigrant, and together as husband and wife, they worked toward a better future.

Within two years of their marriage, the couple had opened a candy store and had five children living with them, including a foster child named Jenny Olson.

It's not clear if Belle was the mother of any of the others or if Maas brought them all into the marriage, but it certainly made life interesting.

But business was challenging and the couple struggled to make ends meet.

Then, two years later, the shop unexpectedly burned to the ground and the resulting insurance money helped support them.

For a while, at least.

We need to step aside for a moment, though.

Set Belle on the back burner.

We'll come back to her, I promise.

But first, I want to talk to you about insurance.

For you and I, in a relatively modern world, insurance is a common idea.

Insurance on property, insurance on lives.

All these types of policies, at their basic level, are designed to pay money upon tragedy.

but it hasn't always been commonly accepted.

In the early 1800s, life insurance was mostly seen as taboo.

Exchanging money for human life just didn't sit well with most people, so for decades it was a major struggle to sell life insurance policies.

And then, after a massive 1840s advertising campaign in major cities across the country, something clicked and the industry took off.

By the late 1800s, life insurance had moved from taboo to common sense.

Interestingly, there was someone else living in Chicago at the same time as Bell, a serial killer known as H.H.

Holmes.

And while his story is told elsewhere, there's one aspect of his crime spree that's relevant to this story.

Holmes, you see, loved to scam insurance companies.

As a medical doctor, faking the death of policyholders with real stolen corpses was a relatively easy crime, and he made a killing at it.

No pun intended.

But in 1896, Holmes had been caught, tried, convicted, and executed, which meant his his story was all over the newspapers in town.

And maybe, just maybe, that news coverage gave Belle some inspiration.

Because in 1900, a lot of tragedy struck her family, and all of it netted her insurance money.

First, part of their home burned down early in the year.

Tragic, yes, but Belle collected on the Holmes insurance policy.

Then, in June, two of the couple's five children died.

The cause of death was listed as acute colitis, which basically manifests as nausea, diarrhea, and intense pains in the abdomen.

The couple buried their children, and Belle collected their life insurance policies.

And finally, a little over a month after the children passed away, Belle's husband died unexpectedly.

His death drew more suspicion though, and there were two reasons for that.

First, one physician diagnosed the man while he was still alive as suffering from some form of poisoning.

The symptoms will sound familiar to you too.

Nausea, diarrhea, and abdominal pain.

Another doctor though, one who was a personal friend of Bell's incidentally, blamed it on an enlarged heart, and that's the cause of death that was officially recorded.

The second oddity was the insurance paperwork.

It seems that July 30th of 1900, the day that her husband actually died, was the only day that his two separate life insurance policies overlapped each other, meaning they were both valid and binding, but only within a small 24-hour window.

Together, they netted Belle the modern equivalent of a quarter of a million dollars.

With life now a bit more complicated and with a lot more eyes on her as a result of the mysterious deaths in her family, Belle decided to pack up the remaining three children and move away.

Of course, she also had a small fortune to fund that move now.

She didn't go far, though.

In 1901, she purchased a large 40-acre farm in Laporte, Indiana, about 70 miles to the east of Chicago.

And it's during the process of buying the home and moving to Indiana that Belle met a man named Peter Ganess.

Like her, he was a Norwegian immigrant.

He worked as a butcher and he was a widower with two young children.

Their relationship blossomed after the move.

By April of 1902, Peter and Belle were married and set about converting their property into a pig farm.

Just a week after the wedding though, there was an accident.

While Peter was outside working, his youngest daughter suddenly died.

No one could determine the cause of death, but it should be noted that Belle was the only other person in the house with the child at the time.

If Peter suspected anything, he didn't act like it.

The couple carried on with the pig farm and raised Peter's remaining daughter alongside Belle's other three children.

They cured bacon and made sausage right there in the farmhouse, selling it all locally.

And then, in December, Peter had an accident.

Belle told two versions of what happened.

At first, she claimed Peter bent over near the stove to pick up his slippers and was injured by a pot of brine.

Then she changed her details.

A meat grinder had fallen off a shelf and hit him on the head.

And that wavering, that indecision.

Well, it drew suspicion.

Belle was immediately arrested and put on trial for murder.

After failing to prove anything with concrete evidence, though, she was set free.

Which didn't sit well with the neighbors.

They knew Peter.

He'd been a competent man and a skilled butcher.

He wasn't prone to accidents as preventable as a meatgrinder to the skull.

Peter's brother agreed as well and had Peter's only surviving daughter sent away to live with family in Wisconsin.

Still, Belle kept on with the farm despite all the hostility.

She hired a farmhand named Ray Lamphere to take over Peter's job and she collected on Peter's life insurance policy, a payday that would be worth over $80,000 today.

Then, Life on the Ganess farm went quiet, but only for a while.

Sometime in late 1906, neighbors noticed that it had been a while since they'd seen Belle's adopted daughter, Jenny Olson.

Belle told them Jenny had gone off to school in California.

About that same time, Belle placed an ad in a widely distributed Scandinavian-American newspaper.

Here's what she posted.

Comely widow who owns a large farm in one of the finest districts in Laporte County, Indiana, desires to make the acquaintance of a gentleman equally well provided with view of joining our fortunes.

No replies by letter considered unless sender is willing to follow answer with personal visit.

Triflers need not apply.

In other words, Belle wanted men who were rich, single, and willing to travel right to her front door to prove it, which doesn't sound suspicious at all, does it?

Right.

And you thought Craigslist was sketchy.

The first man to answer the ad was George Anderson from Missouri.

He arrived at the farm and the two had dinner together.

Of course, she asked him how much money he had and he confessed that he wasn't actually rich at all.

Later that night, he awoke to find Belle standing over his bed, a crazed look in her eyes.

He jumped out of bed, quickly dressed, and bolted out of the house.

He never looked back.

The personal ad proved to be incredibly successful.

Over the course of most of 1907 through early 1908, a number of men responded to Belle's request.

John Moe traveled all the way from Minnesota, carrying more than $1,000 with him to help pay off her mortgage.

About a week after he arrived, John Moe went missing.

Fred Redinger journeyed from Wisconsin and promptly disappeared.

Ula Budsberg, also from Wisconsin, was seen just once at the Laporte Bank of all places.

and then he too vanished from public eye.

Bell and Andrew Helgelin exchanged letters for months before he finally traveled to see her.

He disappeared shortly after, and Belle made more large deposits at the bank.

And through it all, there were odd stories being whispered around town.

Once, a delivery man named Clyde Sturgis reported that he delivered a number of oversized trunks to Belle's farm throughout the year.

He was amazed at how strong she was, tossing the trunks onto her shoulder and walking into the house with them.

Others reported that the farm's house's shutters were always closed, and on more than one occasion, locals passing the farm in the middle of the night said they saw Belle working outside.

According to each report, she was digging holes in the hogpen.

Toward the end of these disappearances, in early February of 1908, Belle fired her farmhand Ray and replaced him.

According to her, Ray was madly in love with her and jealous of the men who visited.

Ray had trouble letting go, however, and about a week later, Belle appeared in the courthouse to request that Ray be declared insane.

It didn't work, though.

Ray was cleared and set free.

Then he continued to stalk Belle at the farm.

He was arrested for trespassing at least least once, and Belle continued to express fear.

He was threatening her, she said.

She was afraid for her life and the lives of her two children.

Then, in late April, the new Ganesh farmhand, Joe Maxson, awoke to the smell of smoke.

He stepped out of his room to find the entire house filled with flames.

The man managed to escape out his bedroom window, but by the time help arrived, the farmhouse was a smoldering pile of burned timber.

And no one but Joe, it seems, had made it out alive.

The wreckage of the house was searched for survivors, what they found was more gruesome.

The two Ganesh children were found dead in their beds.

Another body, that of an adult woman, was also found.

But there was a problem.

The body didn't have a head.

And that made it difficult to identify as Belle Ganesse.

So they tried other methods.

First, they allowed neighbors to view the corpse.

All of them, without fail, said that the shape of the body didn't seem like it could have been Belle.

Then her clothing measurements from the local department store were compared to the body, and those, too, came up incorrect.

As far as the police were concerned, the body's identity was a mystery.

They did have one piece of evidence, though, that helped them get a better picture of what happened that night.

A local boy came forward and claimed to have seen Ray Lamphere running away from the farm just before the fire.

That was enough for the police.

Even though he adamantly denied it, Ray was arrested and charged with murder.

That said, they still weren't sure who he'd murdered, apart from Belle's children, of course.

But before they could get answers, they encountered more questions.

After searching the wreckage, the police found a set of fake teeth belonging to Belle.

Maybe she didn't survive after all.

Soon after, the new farmhand pointed out some of the work Belle had ordered him to do recently in the hogpen.

There were a number of low spots that she claimed were old refuse pits.

She told him to bring in soil from another area of the farm and fill them in.

After the fire though, he was a bit more suspicious.

So the police brought in a team of men to dig it all back up.

When they did, they found something horrific.

Corpses.

Lots and lots of corpses.

They identified the bodies of Jenny Olson and Andrew Helgeline easily enough.

A head was uncovered that belonged to Ula Budsberg.

They found Joe Moore's body too.

Body after body began to appear in the dark soil, confounding everyone present.

But a lot of what they found was too badly decayed to allow for identification.

Partly, they say, because most of it had been fed to the hogs first.

Hogs, mind you.

that became sausage, which became someone's meal.

Accounts vary depending on which historian you read, but between the physical evidence uncovered in the hogpen and the reports of missing men from the previous two years, most think that Belgianess was responsible for the murder of over 40 people.

Most had shown up as a result of her personal ad, and most showed signs of strychnine poisoning.

Then they were butchered and buried in the yard, sometimes with quicklime, sometimes without.

And this revelation put a lot of her personal tragedy into question.

Had her first husband really died of an enlarged heart?

Or had he been poisoned?

And what about her children or her second husband?

It seems that Belle had been active and deadly for over 20 years.

And no one had any idea.

Well, almost no one.

Ray Lamphere clearly knew something.

That's probably why Belle tried to get him committed and locked away.

Lucky for him, it hadn't worked.

But he had been guilty of of setting the farmhouse on fire.

So, in November of 1908, seven months after his arrest, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

He died a year later from tuberculosis.

Thanks to the false teeth found in the remains of the house, the court decided that the headless body belonged to Belle Guness.

Those remains were prepared for burial and then transported back to Chicago a short while later.

She was buried beside her first husband, Maas.

It would be nice to believe that the consequences of a life of crime always catch up with the criminal, but that's not always the case.

It's poetic, sure, but unrealistic.

Yes, we have examples like Sophie Lyons.

She did hard time for her crimes, serving at least 50 short prison sentences before the age of 50.

What's fascinating about Sophie though is that after that last stint in prison, she went clean.

So clean that she wrote a book about her life as a warning to other criminals.

Crime, according to Sophie Lyons, doesn't pay.

For the rest of her life, she used her fame and sizable fortune to help prisoners seek reform.

She offered rent-free housing for former inmates who wanted to change their lives.

She went from being the infamous queen of the underworld to serving as Santa Claus to the inmates of Sing Sing every Christmas, delivering gifts that she bought with her own money.

According to her, any crook who wants to go straight can do it.

But some crooks don't want out of the game.

They just want a fresh start somewhere else, where they can pick up where they left off.

Bel Ganesh was clearly one of those criminals.

Looking back, we can see a woman who most likely poisoned the man who kicked her at that dance in Norway when she was 18.

In Chicago, she killed her husband and two of his children.

And then, in Indiana...

Well, you get the idea.

As I said already, Ray Lamphere died in prison a year after he was sent there.

But before he did, he made a deathbed confession to the Reverend E.

A.

Schell.

According to Ray, he did indeed burn down the house.

That much was true.

But he did it because Belle told him to.

In fact, she helped him and the headless body was part of that plan.

Belle, he said, had lured a woman to the farm with a promise of a job as a housekeeper and she'd poison her before cutting off her head.

Even the children were a lie.

They hadn't died in the fire as everyone suspected.

No, Belle smothered her two remaining children prior to the fire because, according to Ray, they had started to ask too many questions.

Questions about all the men who had visited the farm.

Questions about their disappearances.

And questions about all that money.

Belle, you see, had amassed a fortune.

Between all the men she lured to her farm and each of their past insurance frauds, it's estimated that she raked in a massive total worth over $6 million

today.

And right before the fire, she went to the bank in town.

and withdrew it all.

If Ray was telling the truth, Belle Ganess didn't actually die in the fire.

Her body wasn't the headless corpse pulled from the wreckage.

She wasn't the one buried beside her first husband in a Chicago graveyard.

She vanished.

But Belle Guinness wasn't the type to quit the game and go straight like Sophie Lyons.

If she moved, she took her wicked web with her.

In 1931, an elderly Los Angeles woman named Esther Carlson was arrested and brought to trial for murder.

She was a Norwegian immigrant.

Her victim was a Scandinavian man.

And the crime involved poisoning the man for his money.

If all of that sounds familiar to you, then you've been paying attention.

And so were the police in Los Angeles.

So they sent a photo of Carlson to the authorities in Laporte, Indiana.

Now, it had been decades, 30 years in fact, so the memory of anyone who might have known Belle was a bit fuzzy.

An old neighbor of hers took a glance at the photo and said, yep, that woman sure looks like her.

Same build, same face, same weight.

But he couldn't be sure.

And the Belle that he knew had a wart on her face.

This new woman, Esther Carlson, did not.

The police refused to give up, though.

They reached out to the photographer and asked for the original negative to the photo.

Even back then, in 1931, it was common to retouch a photo.

The Photoshop software, after all, is modeled after photo manipulation techniques that did just that sort of work dating back over a century.

When they received the negative and opened the envelope, they were amazed at what they saw.

There, right on Esther Carlson's face, was the wart.

Belle's old neighbor had been right after all.

Sadly, Belle Ganesse, if it was indeed her, managed to slip away one last time, although this would be her final escape.

You see, shortly after the photo was identified, Esther Carlson became sick with tuberculosis.

She died before her trial could begin.

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This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research research help from Marcette Crockett.

Lore is much more than a podcast.

There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both.

Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place, theworldoflore.com/slash now.

And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Just search for lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

When you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi.

And as always,

thanks for listening.

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