In 1883 she immigrated to Chicago to live with her sister while her brother stayed in Norway.
In 1884 she married Mads Albert Sorenson and they had four kids and one foster child. Her husband owned a candy store.
In 1890 their house burned down and in 1895 the store burned down and they received insurance money for both. During this time two of their children died from acute colitis.
Interestingly acute colitis and strychnine poisoning share some common symptoms, such as abdominal pain and this will come into play later in Gunness’ life.
Her husband also died in this time period on the one day that his two life insurance policies overlapped. His family demanded an inquiry but no charges were filed. The family thought that it was strychnine poisoning but her doctor overruled them and ruled it as heart failure.
With the insurance payout, Gunness bought a farm with more than 40 acres near La Porte, Indiana. She remarried Peter Gunness, who had two children. He suspected that something wasn’t right and sent his oldest daughter to live with relatives. She is the only child who survived Gunness. Peter and his younger daughter both died shortly after.
After this Gunness began posting in a singles column in the local paper. Many men answered the posting. She demanded that the men sell everything they had before coming to see her.
In July 1907 Gunness hired Ray Lamphere to be farm hand and began sleeping with him. He didn’t like all of her suitors but she refused to be with him because of his gambling problem.
She began a long distance relationship with Andrew Helgelien from South Dakota. They wrote each other for 16 months before meeting. He arrived in January 1908 with $2839 to build a new life with her.
Shortly after Gunness and Lamphere got into a fight and she kicked him off the property. She complained to the sheriff that she saw him through her windows and had him arrested and fined for trespassing.
During this time Helgelien’s brother Asle began to worry about him. One of their farmhands found their letters and Asle became suspicious of her motives when he read the she asked him to withdraw all of his money and come to her.
He wrote to Gunness and asked where his brother was. She claimed that he left for Chicago and speculated that he may go to Norway. Alse didn’t think that that sounded like his brother.
Gunness was still worried about Lamphere and in April went to a lawyer and had a will drawn up. After the meeting, she went shopping and came home with cakes, a toy train, and two gallons of kerosene. She treated her family that evening to a large meal of meat and potatoes and spent the night sitting on the floor, playing with her children and their new toy train.
The following morning her house had burned down. Four burnt bodies were found, three were children and the last was an adult female. The woman’s corpse was headless. It was assumed that the woman’s body was Gunness’. Lamphere was arrested immediately and when Alse read this in the paper he rushed to Indiana.
Alse went to the sheriff’s office and the sheriff drove him to the house to search for clues. A week later and the skull of the woman’s body had yet to be found. Some assumed that Lamphere had hidden it.
Since they weren’t having luck digging through the rubble Asle suggested that they look in the hog pen. There they a gunny sack Inside were two hands, two feet, and one head. Asle recognized the withered, rotten face: It was his brother. Then the men digging realized that there were dozens of slumped depressions in Gunness’s yard. As the property was searched more body parts were found. Between 14 to 40 bodies were recovered.
Each body was butchered into six parts: The legs chopped at the knee, the arms hacked at the shoulder, and the head decapitated. Most of the remains could not be identified. The skulls had evidence of blunt force trauma. The bodies that were still in tact had evidence of rat poison.
Gunness was nicknamed th
