Indiana murderess's DNA to be extracted from old letters

They dug up Belle Gunness the other day. Or did they?

Was the headless skeleton exhumed from the unmarked grave in Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park the remains of the notorious "Lady Bluebeard," who lured perhaps dozens of men to her northwest Indiana farm, took their money, then killed and dismembered them?

Or was it what many historians and amateurs have claimed all along: the remains of a woman Belle beheaded and planted as herself before her farmhouse was torched because she feared her crimes were about to be discovered?

DNA testing in the next few months should solve this century-old mystery about the woman who started her curious career in the 1890s in the Austin neighborhood on Chicago's west side, where buildings seemed to catch fire and yield insurance payouts and where two of her children died from symptoms later indicating poisoning. In her wake she also left two husbands -- Mads Sorensen in Chicago and Peter Gunness in LaPorte -- who both died under suspicious circumstances, and at least three children who probably died at her hand.

But it was her butchery at the farm on the edge of LaPorte, where perhaps more than 40 people disappeared in pieces into the ground, that made her notorious nationwide.

"I really think that, given her history and how prolific she was as a killer, answering the question of whether she did or did not die in that fire is an appropriate historical question," said Andrea Simmons, who is among the modern researchers who think Belle did not die in the fire on April 28, 1908, at her farmhouse.

Simmons, 47, is a LaPorte native and master's degree student on a team of forensic anthropology graduate students from the University of Indianapolis that exhumed the body in the cemetery on a blustery Nov. 5. Onlookers included Suzanne McKay, 63, of Portland, Ore., a great-granddaughter of Nellie Larson, Belle's older sister who lived in Chicago.

An excited Bob Cutler Jr. of Cutler Funeral Home in LaPorte was there, too. On June 18, 1908, his great-grandfather and great-great-uncle shipped to Forest Home Cemetery four zinc-lined caskets containing Belle and her three children, who were found dead in the cellar with her after the fire.

Many LaPorte residents have been weaned on the story of Belle Gunness, and Cutler was feeling the excitement of this new chapter in its history as he arrived at the cemetery. He brought with him a picture of the four caskets lying next to a carriage with two white horses, as the caskets were about to be shipped from the train station in LaPorte to Chicago. He also had in hand documentation from his funeral home of the purchase and shipment of the caskets.

"It's like a lore, a legend," Cutler said. "For generations of LaPorteans, it's gone on and on. Now we're going to find out. And if it's her, then it doesn't end," he said, noting that if DNA shows the remains are actually Belle's, that still wouldn't explain what happened to her head, nor who removed it.

Simmons has been working feverishly to wrap up her thesis and answer the mystery of whether Belle staged her own "murder" by the 100th anniversary in early May of the discovery of the Norwegian-born woman's crimes. Her current studies fulfill a lifelong ambition for a woman who until now spent her time in courtrooms as a lawyer specializing in wrongful death and personal injury cases.

Headed by professor Stephen Nawrocki, a board-certified forensic anthropologist, the university team mostly works modern-day Indiana crimes in which bodies are too decomposed for autopsies.

On this day, Nawrocki, Simmons and three young female graduate students brought their van loaded with plastic buckets and dust pans, small trowels, paintbrushes and other items of the scientific digger's craft. After a backhoe dug a few feet, Nawrocki carefully scraped around with a shovel and poked with a long metal pole, establishing the depth of the dirt to the remains and the outlines of the casket, or what was left of it.

From midmorning on, the five team members took turns jumping in and out of the grave to do painstaking scraping and dusting. They handed up buckets of dirt and shook and sifted it through a screen. They called out the types of bones they were finding, then put them in envelopes.

Nawrocki, wearing a hat with flaps, was pleased with the dryness of the grave and condition of the soil. "We could not ask for a better situation," he said.

All that was left of the wooden coffin, and perhaps the wooden crate it was shipped in, were many small pieces of wood. As the team scraped and brushed, the outlines of the skeleton emerged, with the bones seemingly embedded in the zinc lining that apparently had fallen on the remains over many years.

The long leg bones, a shoulder bone and the rib cage were among the features that were clear. The team found what it thought were obvious signs of burning of bone and what appeared to be charred flesh, although there was little flesh left. The flesh looked more like dirt.

If the skeleton is not Belle's, the next step for researchers could be pursuing the remains of Esther Carlson for DNA.

In 1931, Carlson, who would have been about Belle's age if the latter was still living, died while awaiting trial in the Los Angeles area for the murder of a wealthy man she and an accomplice allegedly poisoned. Carlson's MO seemed like Belle's, and two former LaPorte residents who knew Belle in LaPorte and saw Carlson's body in the morgue said the two were the same woman. The alleged accomplice was acquitted of murder.