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A review by melissa_who_reads
Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men by Harold Schechter
3.0
Belle Gunness was a Norwegian woman who immigrated to America, settling in Chicago first and then on a farm in LaPorte, Indiana. When her farm house burned down in 1908, they discovered a grisly garden of corpses - she had been writing to lonely Norwegian men, enticing them to her farm, robbing them, and killing them - and not only poisoning them, but also butchering their bodies, and burying the pieces in multiple places on her farm. The question remains: did she set the house fire? Was her body the woman's body found in the cellar with the three children? The head was missing, looking as if it was one of her victims who had been butchered ... did she survive the fire? Did her handyman, convicted of arson, set the fire, or was he her scapegoat?
It's a fascinating story of a woman who was certainly complex psychologically. One wishes one of the children she raised had survived to tell their stories. Schechter tells the story well, though occasionally it gets bogged down in the florid language of the period (he quotes from contemporary newspapers frequently). Sadly, there are no answers to what really happened: the evidence remains as much of a mystery today as it was then.
It's a fascinating story of a woman who was certainly complex psychologically. One wishes one of the children she raised had survived to tell their stories. Schechter tells the story well, though occasionally it gets bogged down in the florid language of the period (he quotes from contemporary newspapers frequently). Sadly, there are no answers to what really happened: the evidence remains as much of a mystery today as it was then.