Women Who Kill: Belle Gunness
The making of the infamous butcher of men, one of the most prolific murderesses of all time — welcome to the ‘murder farm’.
It was French author Charles Perrault who wrote the tale of Bluebeard, in his 1695 classic, Mother Goose Tales. Bluebeard was a nobleman with a castle containing a hidden chamber. He would put his newest bride to the task of managing their curiosity, testing their obedience; a warning issued not to enter that secret space. Should they disobey and enter that room, there they would remain forever after having been taken apart piece by piece. Harold Schechter reminds us of this tale in the opening of his book Hell’s Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men, reminding us that fairy tales are real. Gunness was a real-life ‘Lady Bluebeard’, a woman who left a burial ground full of dismembered corpses in her wake.
I find women who kill fascinating, particularly those of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It seems wholly unexpected. From Cara Robertson’s The Trial of Lizzie Borden, we learned that women were seen as being less physical, timider than men — they were the weaker sex; murder would be a more intimate act — like poison — not an activity that required brute force. Lizzie Borden would ultimately be acquitted mainly on a series of impossible…
