There is a farm outside La Porte, Indiana, that no longer exists. The buildings burned to the ground on the morning of April 28, 1908, but what the fire left behind was a cellar full of horrors that the people of La Porte and the country at large spent the better part of that spring trying to comprehend. Investigators found the remains of several bodies that had been dismembered, wrapped, and buried with the kind of efficiency that suggested someone had done the work many times before. Remains were found in the cellar, the yard, and in the hog pen, and every time authorities believed they had found everything, they found more. By the time the excavation was finished, the count stood at somewhere between 14 and 28 confirmed victims, with the true number almost certainly higher.

Among the ruins of the house itself, they found a woman’s body without a head and the remains of three children. The woman’s body was presumed to be that of Belle Gunness, the owner of the farm, but everything about the body, except its location, was wrong for Belle Gunness, and the head was never found. Without the teeth that would have provided definitive identification, the question of whether the body in the cellar was Belle Gunness’ or someone whose headless corpse Belle Gunness had placed there before walking away from a fire she set herself remains a question that still cannot be answered with certainty.

The case of Belle Gunness is one of the most extraordinary in the history of American crime in ways that go beyond the staggering body count. It is astonishing because of who she was and how she operated as a Norwegian immigrant widow who understood, with a clarity that bordered on genius, the particular loneliness of immigrant men far from home. For reasons that can only be speculated, she weaponized that understanding to create a murder operation that ran for years in a quiet Indiana town without attracting the kind of attention that should have been impossible to avoid.