Belle Gunness. Does that name ring a bell? While a myriad of serial killers receive decades worth of continuous analysis and attention, I believe this is the first book dedicated to this particular murderer. Just to set the stage, Gunness is a woman whose first husband died on the one day his old and new life insurance policies overlapped, and whose second husband died 8 months into their marriage when (she said) a meat grinder fell on his head. And she was just getting started. By book’s end, there’s a whole lot of dead people and one really bad house fire.
And while the main story in Hell’s Princess is crazy, you learn some other surprising tidbits along the way. During the process of uncovering the dead, the burial grounds morphed into an impromptu carnival of sorts, complete with vendors selling ice cream, lemonade, and postcards of the dismembered bodies of Gunness’s victims. This initially shocked me, then after a moment I realized: “Of course they were passing out popcorn beside the recently discovered and dug up resting places of murder victims. Of course they were.”
At least it put a smile on my face to learn that when ministers and the media began publicly chastising women for attending the trial (“Let modest, refined, well-bred ladies keep away from the very appearance of evil,” one reverend proclaimed from the pulpit), they immediately responded by crowding into the courtroom in even larger numbers.
But as interesting as I found Hell’s Princess, there were a few decisions the author made that really irked me. He continued to call the Black woman who figured into the whodunit of the mysterious fire by the racial slur she was nicknamed at the time, always then noting it was how the media or neighbors referred to her, as if that somehow excused him for utilizing it now. She had a name. Use it.
I was also taken aback by how, early on in the book, the author makes repeated mention of what a “notably unlovely woman” Gunness was, describing a supposed “wide, fat-lipped mouth that bore resemblance to a frog,” and concluding any man that slept with her was “evidently blessed with highly flexible standards of female beauty” or seduced solely by her 48-acre farmstead. Petty remarks like these really lowered my opinion of the author, especially considering her appearance had nothing to do with the events that followed. But perhaps I too have “a gross body supported by feet grotesquely small” and just don’t understand how painting a picture in such an exaggerated manner is needed. (Her photo is right there on the cover, dude. She’s hardly monstrous.)
Anyway. To summarize, this was an exhaustively researched piece of dark history, marred by a few frustratingly unfortunate choices. Though these issues were brief in comparison to the rest of the story, to me, they did not feel minor. As much as I want you to read about this woman and her “murder farm,” I can’t enthusiastically recommend Hell’s Princess. Maybe just watch the Bailey Sarian video on Gunness instead?
Hell’s Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men
by Harold Schechter
Little A
2018
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