Reading : ͲའԱƐ ↻འįⱮƐ ϚͲටའįƐϚ

🔪 1 ƬӇЄ ƠƦƤӇƛƝ ƘƖԼԼЄƦ (MƛƓƲƛƊ ƧƖƁԼƖƝƓƧ ƇƛƧЄ MƲƦƊЄƦ) On December 10, 2021, a tragic event occurred in the Philippines. Two teenagers, Crizzle (18) and Crizzule (16), who were known for their happiness and intelligence, were brutally killed in their own home in M’lang, North Cotabato. The crime happened in broad daylight, which is unusual for such violent acts. Normally, crimes like this occur at night. Here's what happened: Mr. Maguad, the father and a high school teacher, received a call informing him that their house had been broken into. When he rushed home, he found a horrifying scene. There was a lot of blood, and his children were dead. Crizzle had bruises and stab wounds, while Crizzule was tied up and also had stab wounds. There were also broken bottles, a hammer, and a baseball bat nearby. What makes things suspicious is that Janice, a teenager they had adopted in July 2021, acted strangely. She had just started calling them "Mama" and "Papa" that morning. She also knew where the murder weapon, a hammer, was kept. The baseball bat was in a place where Crizzule used to sleep. Janice told a different story from what the crime scene showed. She claimed three men had entered the house and killed Crizzule first. However, when Mr. Maguad arrived, Crizzule's blood was still fresh, and Crizzle's body had started to stiffen and was covered in ants. Janice also posted for help on Facebook, but when people called her, she didn't say anything. 🔪2 The police found that Janice's hiding place was messy, and it looked like the criminals had searched every corner of her room. So, it seemed impossible that they wouldn't have seen her hiding under the bed.The investigators also noticed that the perpetrator had enough time to wash and change clothes before attempting to dispose of them in an irrigation ditch. However, the police found the clothes. On December 16th, Janice, the girl who was adopted into the Maguad family, confessed that she was guilty. She said that jealousy and anger drove her to commit this terrible crime. She admitted that she had help from two other people, one of them being her boyfriend. Janice and the other person are now in the custody of the Department of Social Welfare and Development because they are minors. Janice's boyfriend is still on the run. The chief of the municipal police, Major Realan Mamon, confirmed that Janice, who was adopted into the Maguad family, confessed to brutally killing the two siblings. Mr. Maguad, the father, explained that Janice was jealous and insecure, which is why she became very angry with Crizzle, one of the siblings. Janice wanted to take Crizzle's place, and this seemed to be part of her personality. When she's angry with someone, she would do whatever it takes to harm them. 🔪3 Janice was adopted by the Maguad family just five months before the incident. Crizzle, the daughter, had insisted on helping Janice finish her studies because she was an orphan. However, the police later found out that Janice's parents are still alive, and she has three siblings. Janice had a liking for watching movies, and one of her favorites was "The Orphan." Mr. Maguad mentioned that she introduced this movie to him, but he didn't like it. "The Orphan" is a thriller movie about a family adopting a young girl who turns out to be a psycho killer. It's shocking and terrible to think that a 16-year-old girl, who had the opportunity to have a better life with a loving adopted family, could commit such a brutal murder. "We feel very sorry for the parents of the young kids who were killed. With these new developments, we believe they can get justice for their children," said North Cotabato Vice Governor Emmylou Mendoza. "What's really sad is that the main person responsible for the Maguad siblings' murder is someone they adopted into their family and treated very well, like a real relative," Mendoza added. We hope the souls of the Maguad siblings can find peace, and we pray that God helps and comforts the parents as they try to heal from this heartbreaking loss.

💉 1 𝙎𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙝 𝙆𝙤𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙣 𝙋𝙡𝙖𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙘 𝙎𝙪𝙧𝙜𝙚𝙧𝙮 𝘽𝙮 𝙂𝙝𝙤𝙨𝙩 𝘿𝙤𝙘𝙩𝙤𝙧 𝙍𝙚𝙨𝙪𝙡𝙩𝙚𝙙 𝙄𝙣 𝘿𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙝 (𝘾𝙖𝙨𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙆𝙬𝙤𝙣 𝘿𝙖𝙚-𝙃𝙚𝙚) The scariest of things could happen to us while we are under general anesthesia in the operating room and being operated on by a Ghost Doctor is one of them... On 8th September 2016, in Seoul, South Korea, 24-year-old Kwon Dae-Hee underwent plastic surgery. It cost him both 6.5 million won ($5,766) and his life because his surgery was performed by a Ghost Doctor. Have you heard of the term Ghost Doctor? If you thought they were ghosts of doctors who had died and now haunt the hospital, then you’re wrong. The term Ghost Doctor refers to a person who is unqualified but secretly performs surgeries in the place of qualified surgeons. There are no medical records listing them as a doctor anywhere or that they had helped with any surgeries. It was almost as if these doctors didn't exist and hence came the term, Ghost Doctors. The switch between the qualified surgeon and Ghost Doctor usually happens when the patients are under general anesthesia and are unaware of it. 💉 2 This is way more terrifying than the ghosts of dead doctors haunting the hospital because these Ghost Doctors have little to no experience whatsoever, some have no medical background and all of them have no idea what they’re doing. All of these were done for the sole purpose of making money and it’s illegal. Most of the time, these Ghost Doctors were resident doctors, dentists, and nurses. Sometimes, even the person who sold medical equipment ended up as a Ghost Doctor! Can you imagine, one minute they’re at the hospital selling scalpels and the next they’re in the operating room performing surgery? That is so terrifying! Kwon Dae-Hee had no idea about these Ghost Doctors and it cost him his life. Kwon Dae-Hee had no idea about these Ghost Doctors and it cost him his life. Dae-Hee was a very humble guy and he valiantly served two years in the Korean Army. He was a high achiever who wanted to do well in life. In South Korea, it’s very normal to get plastic surgery done right after someone had finished high school but it wasn’t for obvious reasons. The job market is very intense in South Korea. Beauty is taken into consideration during the hiring process alongside work experience and academic and non-academic achievements. 💉 3 The most common plastic surgeries done for this purpose are rhinoplasty, double eyelid surgery, and jawline surgery. Dae-Hee was always bullied for his jawline as it did not meet the conventional beauty standards in Korea. He decided to go for a jawline surgery to increase his chances of being hired for any job. He felt it would be a smart choice for his career. Jawline surgeries are excruciatingly painful but the risk of death is very low. Essentially, jawline surgeries are done by peeling off the skin, sawing off the bone to the desired shape, and reattaching the skin. Dae-Hee proceeded to save money for the next two years for this surgery. He was 22 years old when he started saving and was 24 years old when the surgery was performed. His mother, Lee Na Geum (who would be referred to as Lee from this point on), and brother, Kwon Tae-Hoon, did not agree to the surgery. Despite that, Dae-Hee booked a consultation at a well-known plastic surgery clinic that specialized in jawline surgeries. During the consultation, the plastic surgeon explained to him that the surgery would be very simple and scheduled it for 8th September 2016 at 1.00 p.m. The surgery would take approximately two hours and should be successfully over around 3.00 p.m. However, on the day of the surgery, at 11.27 p.m., the plastic surgeon called the local hospital and said that they needed to send Dae-Hee over to the Emergency Room (ER) because his blood pressure was extremely low. 💉 4 The plastic surgeon also claimed that Dae-Hee was still conscious and could still talk. They also said they didn’t think he was in a critical condition but he may need a blood transfusion. When Dae-Hee arrived at the ER, everyone started panicking because he was unconscious and was missing two-thirds of his blood (3.5 liters). The doctors in the ER were baffled because the plastic surgeon sounded so calm on the phone. They also wondered how someone could lose that much blood during plastic surgery and how it escalated to this stage while Dae-Hee was still under the care of the plastic surgeon. The next morning, Dae-Hee’s family was alerted and they arrived at the hospital. Dae-Hee was then declared brain dead. After seven weeks of being in a coma, on 6th October 2016, Dae-Hee passed away at the hospital. The plastic surgeon claimed that Dae-Hee was doing fine when he was still with them and therefore, something must have happened to him on the way to the hospital. They said they did the procedure as usual and even gave the CCTV footage to Lee. Lee seized this opportunity and watched the footage over and over again. She analyzed every single millisecond of the footage, took note of every single thing that had happened, and time-stamped it. 💉 5 This was what Lee gathered from the CCTV footage of 8th September 2016. 12.56 p.m. Dae-Hee was put under general anaesthesia by the anaesthesiologist. The plastic surgeon walked in and started the surgery. 1.59 p.m. The plastic surgeon walked out. That by itself is very alarming but it was nothing compared to when a new random person walked in. It was the Ghost Doctor and they started operating on him. 2.35 p.m. The plastic surgeon walked back in and the Ghost Doctor left. 2.45 p.m. The plastic surgeon left and the Ghost Doctor returned. 2.54 p.m. The Ghost Doctor left and the nursing assistant came in. It was now two hours after the surgery had begun and it was supposed to have been over by now. 3.22 p.m. After 30 minutes of having no doctors at all in the operating room, the Ghost Doctor walked back in and continued with the surgery. 4.17 p.m. The surgery was over and the Ghost Doctor left. 4.28 p.m. The plastic surgeon walked back in and dressed Dae-Hee’s wound. Now, this is three hours after the start of the surgery. Dae-Hee is then left with only the nursing assistant. The plastic surgeon, the Ghost Doctor and the anaesthesiologist left for the day. 7.24 p.m. Dae-Hee was wheeled into the clinic’s recovery room. His vitals were not being taken. For the next three hours, the nursing assistant just sat there using her phone and fixing her make-up. Blood was seen dripping from Dae-Hee’s jaw and the nursing assistant mopped it up and went back to her phone. 💉 6 She didn’t mop his blood up once or twice, but thirteen times! This was how Dae-Hee lost two-thirds of his blood. 10.44 p.m. The anaesthesiologist came back and realized that Dae-Hee wasn’t awake yet, so he was immediately rushed to the operating room. He tried to provide Dae-Hee with blood transfusion but he couldn’t find a vein. Loss of blood usually causes veins to shrink. The anaesthesiologist then called the plastic surgeon. 11.21 p.m. The plastic surgeon arrived and they decided to call the ER but planned to make it seem like it’s not their fault. 11.27 p.m. They made a call to the emergency number 119. This couldn’t be seen in the CCTV footage but CNN confirmed this using call records. 11.34 p.m. The ambulance arrived to take Dae-Hee to the hospital. ****** Upon Dae-Hee’s death, the plastic surgeon and the Ghost Doctor created fake medical records and lied that they provided him with blood transfusion. Their plan was to pin this on the hospital because he died at the hospital, not while he was with them. But Lee had all the evidence she needed in the CCTV footage and she wasn’t going to let this go. Them, giving her the CCTV footage was their undoing. I’m guessing they did not expect her to analyse it as thoroughly as she did. She launched a civil case against the clinic and in May 2019, she won damages of 430 million won ($381,000). 💉 7 The three doctors involved (the plastic surgeon, the Ghost Doctor and the anaesthesiologist) faced criminal charges for manslaughter. Two other doctors and a nursing assistant faced charges of unlicensed medical acts. Another doctor faced charges of violating medical laws by exaggeration of advertisement. These were the clinic’s advertisements: “14 Years In Business Without A Single Medical Accident” “Head Doctor Operates From Start To Finish” They were each given a fine of 7 million won ($5700) and sentenced to two years in prison. Just two years! Even when Lee appealed, the court didn’t want to look further into the matter and dismissed the case. Lee was very frustrated with this and spent literally every waking moment of her life outside the parliament in Seoul because she wanted a bill to be passed where it would be mandatory for every operating room in hospitals and clinics to have a CCTV. Lee was very dedicated to sharing the truth about this clinic to create awareness of what happened in the operating room and the importance of this bill. The doctors opposed this bill by saying they wouldn’t feel comfortable saving lives if that were the case. The public spoke and the general consensus wanted a CCTV in operating rooms. Finally, in August 2021, the Kwon Dae-Hee bill was passed, mandating CCTV in operating rooms. South Korea was the first country to do this on a national level. Now that you know about Ghost Doctors, how do you feel about surgeries and what are your thoughts on this case?

👶_1 𝙇𝙞𝙨𝙖 𝙈𝙤𝙣𝙩𝙜𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙧𝙮 𝘾𝙪𝙩 𝙊𝙥𝙚𝙣 𝙖 𝙋𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙣𝙖𝙣𝙩 𝙇𝙖𝙙𝙮'𝙨 𝘽𝙚𝙡𝙡𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙎𝙩𝙤𝙡𝙚 𝙃𝙚𝙧 𝘽𝙖𝙗𝙮 Lisa Montgomery desperately wanted a baby after undergoing tubal ligation... Lisa Montgomery was an American criminal who only killed one person but it was done in a very gruesome way. Just because she wanted a baby! On 16th December 2004 at Skidmore, Missouri, Lisa Montgomery strangled an eight month pregnant Bobbie Jo Stinnett, cut her belly open while she was still alive, stole the baby, and left her to bleed to death. She then tried to pass the baby off as her own. Lisa was the first woman to be federally executed since 1953. Which means the federal government said, “You’re going to die!” and they executed her on 13th January 2021. This is one crazy story guys, so grab your popcorn and have a seat! Let’s start with Lisa’s traumatic childhood and see the numerous times numerous people have failed her in her life. Lisa was born to Judy Shaughnessy on 27th February 1968 in Melvern, Kansas. She was born with permanent brain damage because Judy was an alcoholic while pregnant with Lisa. Lisa’s biological father left when she was a baby. She never had a stable home because Judy moved them around constantly. To make things worse, Judy was an extremely evil person. When Lisa was still a baby, Judy forced her to sit on her high-chair for hours because she didn’t finish her food. Poor baby Lisa didn’t even know what was going on. Evil Judy also covered Lisa’s mouth with duct tape when she cried and if that didn’t stop her crying, Judy shoved her finger up Lisa’s nose to suffocate her! 👶_2 Judy even proudly told everyone that Lisa’s first words were, “Don’t spank me, it hurts!” Lisa had an older half-sister, Diane Mattingly. Diane was raped by one of Evil Judy’s boyfriend when she was eight years old. She was then sent to foster care by Child Protective Services (CPS). CPS dashed in and was like, “Diane, listen, you can no longer stay in this house because we don’t think that your mom can protect you anymore but guess what? Your half-sister Lisa can continue to stay here!” Diane threw up on the driveway while being escorted out of the house by CPS because she realized that if she’s no longer in the house, the next target would be Lisa. What made me even angrier was, after the CPS took Diane away, they never followed up on Lisa to see how she was doing or if she was ever assaulted. The CPS was among the first to fail Lisa. When Lisa was in elementary school, she did really well. However, in middle school, she started needing special needs classes and constantly spaced out during classes. She just wasn’t doing very well. The school administration thought that this was due to some deep emotional trauma. They suspected she was experiencing sexual, physical or verbal abuse at home. Unfortunately, they also failed Lisa because they did not take any further steps to investigate. There was once when Judy was so mad at her, so she threatened Lisa that she would kill the family dog. 👶_3 TRIGGER WARNING! (ANIMAL CRUELTY) Evil Judy forced Lisa to watch as she repeatedly smashed the dog’s head with a shovel until he died. TRIGGER OVER. Can you imagine the trauma that would have caused Lisa? This was just so sad, for both the dog and Lisa. Both were innocent. Judy got remarried to a man by the name of Jack Kleiner. And this is when shit really started hitting the fan. He’s Lisa’s stepdad now and he began sexually assaulting her when she was eleven years old. Jack even took another step for the worse as he invited his friends over to gang-rape Lisa. This went on for hours and it became a daily routine in a specially-built room. They even physically assaulted her and urinated on her once they were done. And guess what? Evil Judy knew about all of this. She even had the audacity to blame Lisa for it and threatened her with a gun. Judy also took another step for the worse as she pimped out eleven year old Lisa to any guys that came over like the plumber or electrician, just to make some extra money. Only God knows how much this made my blood boil! When Lisa was fourteen years old, she went to stay with her cousin, David. David is a Deputy Sheriff. She told David about everything that had happened to her. David genuinely believed her and he was truly horrified and outraged! So was this the end of her abuse? It would have been but unfortunately Deputy Sheriff David didn’t tell anyone! He just went on with his life. Yet another person to fail Lisa! When Lisa was 17 years old, Judy and her stepdad, Jack got divorced. Judy forced Lisa to follow her to the divorce proceedings to tell the judge how the stepdad sexually assaulted her in order to the upper hand in the divorce! 👶_4 Evil Judy was like, “Oh yeah, that definitely happened and honey, there’s this incident you forgot. Tell the judge about that too!” while Lisa was sobbing her eyes out in front of the judge. “You’re such a disgusting woman! No empathy for your own daughter! Your husband had raped her for years and years and you did nothing?!” the judge was really pissed off. Judy didn’t care, “Yeah, so like, do I get the house?” The worst part of all of this was the fact that Jack was never charged. The social worker created a file on this sexual abuse, turned it over to the Tulsa County District Attorney’s office and nothing happened. They didn’t follow up. They never went after her stepdad. They were like, “Thanks for the file. We will just put it in with the rest of our paperwork where we keep our traffic tickets because it’s such a low priority.” All the people that could have helped Lisa kept failing her. When Lisa was eighteen years old, she got married to her stepbrother, Carl Bowman. He wasn’t the son of her stepdad, Jack. He was the son of Judy’s fourth husband. Carl was a monster. He repeatedly raped her and often used foreign objects. He even physically abused her during these rapes like holding a knife to her throat. He even made video recordings of this! Lisa’s half-brother saw one of the videos and he said that it was like straight out of a horror movie, like a snuff film. And yes, you guessed it! He didn’t do anything about it. “Oh my God! This is so brutal! How could someone do that to my sister?! Oops, I’m hungry! Better go get some food!” I think that’s what went through his mind at that time. So he also failed Lisa. When Lisa was twenty four years old, her husband, Monster Carl went to jail for child sexual abuse. By this time, she already had four children with him. 👶_5 She frequently had psychotic episodes. There was once she woke all her children up at 3.00 a.m. and took them along with the family goat on a road trip because she wanted to teach the goat about life. Lisa also became very bad with hygiene. She never kept herself, her children or their home clean. She had lice for five years and she didn’t even realize it! Before Monster Carl went to jail, he forced Lisa to get tubal ligation in 1990 because he didn’t want any more kids. Lisa claimed to be pregnant five more times after this but Carl ignored her because it was impossible. Lisa and Monster Carl eventually got divorced before he went to jail. She then got married to Kevin Montgomery. He also incorporated sexual violence into the marriage. Kevin was unaware that Lisa underwent tubal ligation. Lisa on the other hand wanted more children although she was barely able to take care of herself and her four children. She told Kevin on three different occasions that she was pregnant. And the first two times, she told him, “Honey, I went to the doctor and there was something wrong, so it had to be aborted!” He actually believed and was very sympathetic and caring towards Lisa. During her third ‘pregnancy’, she had pseudocyesis which is a condition where a woman experiences all the signs and symptoms of pregnancy without actually being pregnant. 👶_6 The most common cause of pseudocyesis is an intense desire to be pregnant until the woman convinces herself that she actually is pregnant. Women who have had phantom pregnancies like this have always experienced emotional trauma and sexual abuse. Now we move on to Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a twenty three year old woman who was eight months pregnant with her first baby. Bobbie Jo and her husband, Zeb, ran a Rat Terrier dog-breeding business. Bobbie Jo ran an online Rat Terrier chat room called Ratter Chatter. In Ratter Chatter, she shared breeding tips and also life updates like how she was due for delivery in January 2005. Lisa was also in Ratter Chatter as she loved Rat Terriers. She also announced in Ratter Chatter that she was ‘pregnant’ with twins but one of them had died so she was due to give birth to the surviving twin in December 2004. She even told this lie to her husband, Kevin and he believed. She got sonograms off the internet and Photoshopped her name onto them. She then showed these to Kevin and all her friends. However, a lot of people were skeptical because they saw her in dog shows but she didn’t look pregnant and there was not even a little weight gain. But they didn’t ask her anything though. Bobbie Jo and Lisa became friends on Ratter Chatter and they would like to talk about the ups and downs of pregnancy and other stuff. Lisa then pretended to want to get a Rat Terrier puppy for her children for Christmas. Bobbie Jo was more than happy because she just had a litter. 👶_7 Lisa said she wanted to have a look at the puppy first and Bobbie Jo agreed and they planned to meet at Bobbie Jo’s house. The moment Bobbie Jo opened the door when Lisa arrived, Lisa barged in and strangled her with a cord until she stopped struggling. Lisa then grabbed a kitchen knife and cut open Bobbie Jo’s belly while she was still alive! Bobbie Jo was in and out of consciousness during this time. She then put her hand into Bobbie Jo’s belly, extracted the fetus and wrapped the baby girl in a blanket. Then Lisa got in her car with the baby and drove off, leaving Bobbie Jo to bleed to death. Prior to Lisa coming to Bobbie Jo’s house, Bobbie Jo was on the phone with her mom, Becky Harper. She hung up because Lisa arrived. Becky called her after an hour but there obviously was no answer so she went over to Bobbie Jo’s house. She walked in and saw blood everywhere and Bobbie Jo was unconscious on the floor. She called 911, “Please hurry, my daughter’s stomach, it looks like it exploded! And I can’t find her baby anywhere!” The paramedics arrived and Bobbie Jo was pronounced dead. After that they put out an AMBER Alert (America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response) to find the baby. One of the breeders in Ratter Chatter came forward with Lisa’s details saying that she was close to Bobbie Jo and asked to check the Ratter Chatter chat room. 👶_8 The next day, 17th December 2004, they traced the IP address to the home of Kevin Montgomery and a bunch of authorities were sent over. Lisa and Kevin on the other hand, were showing off their new born, Abigail. Lisa told Kevin and her friends that she was grocery shopping and suddenly she went into full-on labour and was rushed to a women’s center where she gave birth so easily. The FBI got to their house and asked Lisa some questions about her delivery and she told the same story that she told everyone. The FBI then said that they checked the hospitals nearby and nobody gave birth that day and there was no record of her giving birth anywhere. Lisa immediately broke down and confessed everything. Kevin was shell-shocked. Lisa was arrested an hour later. Before the trial, Lisa was diagnosed with pseudocyesis, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, psychosis, dissociative identity disorder and amnesia. Lisa’s trial was an absolute shitshow. There was just a lot of controversy and political involvement. So, I’m not going to go into that. Lisa’s defense attorneys made numerous attempts to save her life, citing her mental health and the sexual abuse she suffered as a child but to no avail. She was found guilty and sentenced to death on 22nd October 2007 Lisa was executed on 13th January 2021 by lethal injection (Pentobarbital) at the Federal Correctional Complex, Terre Haute, Indiana. The baby, Victoria Jo Stinnett, survived her traumatic birth and is now a healthy teenager. I do not justify what Lisa did in any way but it’s undeniable that Lisa was mentally unstable. Her life was filled with sexual abuse and trauma. And everyone that suspected of such a thing going on or knew what was going on didn’t do anything to help her. I think she deserved a sentence where she could have spent half of it in prison and half of it in a criminal asylum.

🧼_1 𝘿𝙚𝙖𝙙 𝘽𝙤𝙙𝙞𝙚𝙨 𝙒𝙚𝙧𝙚 𝙐𝙨𝙚𝙙 𝙩𝙤 𝙈𝙖𝙠𝙚 𝙎𝙤𝙖𝙥 (𝙎𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙡 𝙆𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙚𝙧 𝙇𝙚𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙖 𝘾𝙞𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙞𝙪𝙡𝙡𝙞) Blood was the secret ingredient in her tea cakes which she ate, fed her son, and her friends... Leonarda Cianciulli (The Soap-Maker of Correggio) was an Italian serial killer responsible for three deaths in 1939 and 1940. Yes, she only killed three people but she made soap out of their dead bodies and tea cakes out of their blood! She then offered these tea cakes to all her friends and even sold them these soaps! The fun fact here is, that Leonarda didn’t like violence. So what made her into a serial killer? Well, that's a completely fascinating story in the most tragic way possible. Leonarda was born in 1893 to Amelia Cianciulli, who just hated the sight of her baby. She blamed poor baby Leonarda for everything that had happened to her and made sure to repeat that to the baby every day, like a mantra. Leonarda was abused physically and verbally every day too. Amelia, when she was fifteen years old, was actually raped by Mariano Cianciulli who was in his forties. He was unemployed and a drunkard. Instead of getting him arrested for rape, both their parents got them married when they found out Amelia was pregnant. That’s why Amelia hated Leonarda so much. Now, fast forward to when Leonarda was about five years old. Mariano had gone out drinking and didn’t come home for days. Normally Amelia doesn’t give a damn but eventually she went around asking for him. Amelia found him knocked out with a high fever in a comatose state at his friend’s house. She had him brought back home under the pretext of taking care of him. 🧼_2 She then conveniently forgot about him thinking that if he woke up, then life would go on as usual but if he didn’t wake up, then he's dead, which means she’s a widow and can get married again. Mariano unfortunately didn’t wake up. Leonarda at this age doesn’t really remember her dad except for the beatings he gave her but she remembered this; at the end of the funeral, after everybody left, her mom spat on his grave and said “Good riddance!” Amelia started hanging out with some dudes doing illegal stuff and ended up marrying one of them. By this time Leonarda was six years old and she had to feed herself because her mom and stepdad would go out on these crazy, fancy dinners. She was always left alone and she had to desperately find food elsewhere. Amelia constantly told her how annoying she was and just how much she hated her. When Leonarda was thirteen years old, she attempted suicide and failed. She tried again when she was fourteen years old but failed again. She was just so depressed. Amelia started to notice that Leonarda had her good looks and her devious mind formed a plan. She thought that if she could get Leonarda married to a rich man, then she would also be settled financially for life. So, Amelia started looking for suitors for Leonarda behind her back. Unbeknownst to Amelia, Leonarda had fallen in love with Raffaele Pansardi. He was a low-paid government clerk but a very nice gentleman. Once Leonarda accepted Raffaele’s proposal, she was so happy mainly because she could finally move out of her mom’s house as Amelia didn’t fail to express her hatred towards Leonarda daily. 🧼_3 But oh boy, all hell broke loose when Leonarda told Amelia about the proposal. Amelia said that she would never approve of this marriage but Leonarda wasn’t having it that day. She refused to stay with her mom and decided to leave. Amelia cursed Leonarda, “You will live a miserable life until the day you die!” Here’s the second fun fact. Leonarda is a big-time believer in superstitions. She fully believed that she was cursed and it lingered at the back of her mind every single day and it kind of became a self-fulfilling prophecy. She kind of manifested it by strongly believing in it. In 1917, Leonarda married Raffaele and she aspired to be the most perfect wife. This took a toll on her mental health. She developed anxiety and had multiple mental breakdowns in a day over the smallest of things. These then started impacting her physical health leading her to have frequent violent seizures and her anxiety caused her insomnia. She had always wanted a lot of kids and wanted to be the best mom ever, unlike Amelia. One day, she had her palms read by a fortune teller. Leonarda warned the fortune teller beforehand about Amelia’s curse on her. The fortune teller saw her palms said, “Oh no, Leonarda, you're not going to die. You will live very long but it'll be a very sad life. You'll actually outlive all of your children!” 🧼_4 Again, Leonarda started to obsess about Amelia’s curse. She believed that’s why she’s still not able to get pregnant. Eventually after some time, she conceived but had a miscarriage three months into her pregnancy because her anxiety skyrocketed and her seizures were more frequent. Raffaele had been such a patient and understanding husband through all of this. He suggested moving back to his hometown in 1921. Leonarda then got pregnant and the whole pregnancy had been very smooth and she gave birth to her first son, Giuseppe Pansardi. She had this new obsession now, not to be the perfect wife but to be the perfect mom. She would stand up all night over his cradle, just watching him sleep all night and she started having seizures again because she was so stressed out about what we now call as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). After Giuseppe, she got pregnant sixteen times but lost three children to miscarriage; ten more died in their youth. So now they were a family of six and she was way too overprotective over her children. She began thinking about the curse again and her physical health deteriorated. Leonarda went to get her palms read by the fortune teller again. The fortune teller said, “On your right palm, I see a prison and on the left, I see a criminal asylum”. Now, keep in mind that this is another self-fulfilling prophecy. You’ll see why by the end of this story. 🧼_5 Due to one of the worst earthquakes in Italy's history, the 1930 Irpina earthquake, with a magnitude of 6.6 that completely destroyed their entire town, Leonarda’s family of six had to find a new home. They moved to this small town and Raffaele immediately got a clerical job. Their new house was connected to an unused shop next door. Leonarda kept to herself mostly as she was an introvert but soon became friends with everyone. She even started giving them relationship advice and they frequently came to see her for that sole purpose. She even started writing poetry and reading to all of them. Leonarda wanted to use the shop next door to sell things and decided it was going to be soap. Yes, this is the part everyone was waiting for. She had a lot of knowledge on chemicals from her cleaning job prior to this and she was confident she can come up with a superior recipe for soap. She ordered all these fancy perfumes and oils from France and made a perfect recipe for soap. She gave the soaps to all of her friends of the area to try and they loved it so much. During the grand opening of her soap shop, everyone showed up and they all bought bars of her soap. Her soap was so good that she started getting orders from all over Italy, especially from high society women. They were like, “Have you heard of this woman? Her name is Leonarda and she makes the best soaps.” She became really famous for her soaps and so successful to the point where Raffaele didn’t have to work anymore. 🧼_6 By this point, Leonarda started collecting magical and supernatural books from all over Italy and had one of the biggest collections in Italy at the time. The more she studied magic, the more she believed the curse existed and the more driven she was to end it. Remember Giuseppe, Leonarda’s first son? Well, he’s actually been trying to get away from her because she’s too overbearing. In 1939, he signed up to join the Italian Army in preparation for World War II without her knowledge. But soon this news reached her ears as her friends praised Giuseppe for his bravery. Leonarda confronted Giuseppe and forbade him from going because she didn’t want to risk him dying during the war. So, she starts studying more magic because there were still a couple of months before he had to go into the army. She now delved into alchemy, which had one important rule. In order to obtain something, you have to sacrifice something in return. So she knew that in order to save her son’s life, she had to sacrifice another life. I think what's fascinating is that she wasn't really a serial killer in the sense that she wanted to kill people. It seemed like she just became one in this desperate attempt to save her son. After pondering for a long time, she decided that the perfect sacrifice would be her customer. She can murder them in her shop and carry out the spell. Her first victim was Faustina Setti. She was seventy three years old and had never been married. Leonarda lured Faustina into her trap by pretending that she had found a potential husband for her who lived in a faraway village. 🧼_7 Faustina quickly agreed to travel to meet him. Under the pretext of Faustina’s family not being supportive of her decision, Leonarda told her to write letters to them stating where she has gone and Leonarda would mail it for her. The next day, Faustina arrived at the soap shop with her suitcases. “Francesca, you look so nervous! Here, have this glass of wine”, exclaimed Leonarda and Faustina chugged it down. As Faustina started to get drowsy, Leonarda grabbed an axe and brought it down hard on Faustina, but without looking. Remember I said she hated violence. So, she missed and the axe went right into Faustina’s shoulder. The second time, she opened her eyes and smacked the axe down on the top of her head. Leonarda then proceeded to dismember Faustina into nine separate pieces and hung her up in the back of the soap shop to drain her blood into buckets. She wanted to make cakes with the blood and soap with the body fat because the protection spell only works if you sacrifice the life of another and the person you're trying to save has to consume it for internal protection and rub it across their whole body for external protection. She made tea cakes with the blood and gave them to Giuseppe to eat. The tea cakes had a distinct taste of iron and were tad bit on the dry side. Now the protection spell was inside Giuseppe and she needed to make the soap to achieve the external protection. She then put all of Faustina’s dismembered body parts into a pot with some caustic soda in it, which is how she made soap. Caustic soda is super strong so she used it to dissolve the body parts. 🧼_8 After several hours, she peered into the pot and saw this thick dark mush and she was like “Oh no, that doesn't meet my standards of soap making, I’m a perfectionist!” She started crying while she dumped the sludge down the drain. She was so upset that the soap didn’t turn out right, not because she killed a poor old lady. Leonarda thought she needed someone who's happier in life and chose Francesca Soavi who was fifty five years old as her second victim. She had a pretty fulfilling life so far. She was a school teacher. Her husband recently died but she had a happy married life before that. Leonarda lured Francesca into her trap by pretending that she had found a potential teaching job for her at an elite school in Italy. She told Francesca not to tell anyone about this as this school really valued confidentiality. Francesca got so excited. She packed her bags, wrote those letters that Leonarda told her to write and she came to the soap shop the next morning ready to leave for the elite school. “Francesca, you look so nervous! Here, have this glass of wine.” Once Francesca passed out, Leonarda reminded herself to collect more blood so as to make sure her tea cakes were not dry like the previous batch. She then dismembered the body and this time she noticed that Francesca had much more fat than Faustina.These new batch of tea cakes with Francesca’s blood and body fat were so ecstatic! 🧼_9 Here’s the third fun fact. Leonarda was actually a really good baker. Even to this day, there are world renowned bakeries in Italy that still used Leonardo's recipes because later on, she wrote a memoir which included recipes. She then dissolved the body parts in caustic soda but it didn’t turn out right again. In a fit of rage, she threw it all away again. She came up with another plan. She thought instead of someone happy, she needed to sacrifice someone who would cause the whole town and Leonarda herself to be sad. Her third victim was Virginia Cacioppo, a fifty three year old former soprano who had this dream of exploring Italy to perform and do what she loved until she died. Leonarda lured Virginia by pretending that she had found this really wealthy financier in Florence, who had set up all these Opera Houses and wanted to get Virginia back on stage. Virginia was over the moon and quickly agreed. So, she did the same things. She packed her bags, wrote her little letters and went to the soap shop. “Virginia, you look so nervous! Here, have this glass of wine.” After much persuasion, she drank the wine and passed out on the ground. Now, this time Leonarda did something a little bit different. She stole all of Virginia’s expensive clothes, diamonds and other jewelry. While dismembering Virginia, Leonarda realised that she too had a layer of fat just like Francesca, but it wasn't yellowish but more like a milky creamy texture. 🧼_10 She excitedly made tea cakes out of Virginia’s blood and started creating the soap which was turning out to look better than the earlier ones. She even went into Virginia’s suitcase and grabbed the entire bottle of perfume that Virginia was wearing and put it in the soap mixture. What Leonarda did next is way more disturbing to me than her murders, dead-body soaps and blood tea cakes. She drew a bath for her oldest son, Giuseppe, who’s a full grown man and she demanded that he got into the bath because she needs to lather the soap on all parts of his body. After so much of fighting, he just gave in and just got into the bathtub naked, and she literally went all over him with the soap. I can only imagine how traumatizing and violating it is. He couldn't even look at her afterwards yet she force-fed him the Virginia-blood tea cakes. This completely wrecked their relationship. The next day, Leonarda went back to the soap shop and started gifting the ‘Virginia-dead-body soap bars to family and friends and they all said it was her best batch yet. She also fed all her friends her tea cakes. Now, this is when Virginia’s sister-in-law, Albertina Fanti started getting suspicious because she got a couple of letters from Virginia but suddenly the letters stopped coming, which is not normal of Virginia because she was really close with her. She started investigating and found out that Leonarda was super close with Virginia and started asking her things. It’s pertinent for us to take note that Albertina is a super religious woman. 🧼_11 She went to the soap shop and asked Leonardo about the day she last saw Virginia and Leonarda was like, “You know, what? Why don't I read your palm?” That was when Albertina realised Leonarda was guilty because her way of manipulating was insane. When people went to get their palms read by Leonarda, they went in open-minded. But Albertina, she went in very close-minded. First of all, she's very religious. Second of all, she thought that Leonarda kidnapped Virginia. She thought Leonarda probably manipulated Virginia to rob her. Albertina started asking all the neighbors and they remember seeing Virginia going into the soap shop that day with suitcases. She then went to the police and they started investigating not only Virginia’s disappearance but also Faustina and Francesca. The police immediately confirmed that all three of them were with Leonardo the day they disappeared and so they questioned Leonarda. “Idiots! That’s what you all are. How could you even think I could murder anyone? I have a soap shop and I do palm readings so there’s nothing weird that these ladies came into my shop that day!” Now they started investigating the letters that were sent to the families. When they asked the post office workers, they all said that it was just Giuseppe dropping them off. So now he became the prime suspect and they got a warrant to search the entire house and the soap shop. They believed that Giuseppe killed them for their money because they found the suitcases with all their clothes and Virginia's diamonds and he got arrested. “Stop this nonsense because I’m the real killer!” Leonarda confessed. They didn’t believe her because they thought she was trying to protect her son. So she told them the whole gruesome story. They still didn’t believe her because she’s a fifty year old short, little Italian woman who doesn’t seem to have enough strength to dismember people. Exasperated, she told them to take her to the local morgue and she dismembered a dead body within ten minutes. She was then happily taken to jail because at least her protection spell on her son had been complete. 🧼_12 Her husband, Raffaele tried to support her while she was in jail but he was jobless and depressed. All of their kids left home and changed their names. Raffaele passed away before trial started for Leonarda. Giuseppe went to war before her trial without even saying goodbye to her. At the trial in 1946, Leonarda seemed like she had lost it. She was making jokes about the murders. They found her guilty and insane. She was sentenced to thirty years in prison and three years in a criminal asylum. Do you remember that fortune teller's reading? “On your right palm, I see a prison and on the left, I see a criminal asylum”. And that is how this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leonarda did really well in prison. She read palms and gave advice. She started working in the kitchen and baked. Everyone loved her baked goods in prison. She even wrote a seven hundred plus pages memoir (titled ‘An Embittered Soul’s Confession) which included recipes while in prison and those are the recipes that a lot of famous Italian bakeries still reference in their baking. They say it's some of the most authentic Italian baking. Then she got transferred to a criminal asylum to finish her sentence. This is when her seizures started up again. She started losing her sight and she had hemorrhage in her brain. In 1970, she died of cerebral apoplexy, one year before she was to be released from the criminal asylum. She had a bad case of caustic soda poisoning. The fumes of the caustic soda had gone into her brain and started dissolving parts of her brain. Then her brain started bleeding. There's no record of what happened to her children because they all changed their names. There was record of Giuseppe entering the army and getting based in a foreign country. The area where he was based, the Italian Army was taken as prisoners of war but there's no record of him on the prisoners of war list. So a lot of people think that he died in battle. In the end, the protection spell didn’t even work.

🙌_1 𝙃𝙚 𝘾𝙝𝙤𝙥𝙥𝙚𝙙 𝙊𝙛𝙛 𝘽𝙤𝙩𝙝 𝙃𝙚𝙧 𝙃𝙖𝙣𝙙𝙨 𝙒𝙝𝙞𝙡𝙚 𝙎𝙝𝙚 𝙒𝙖𝙨 𝘼𝙡𝙞𝙫𝙚 (𝘾𝙖𝙨𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙇𝙖𝙬𝙧𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙎𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙡𝙚𝙩𝙤𝙣 & 𝙈𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙑𝙞𝙣𝙘𝙚𝙣𝙩) Lawrence Singleton chopped both of Mary Vincent’s hands. He then threw her off a 30-foot cliff and left her to die... On 29th September 1978, 50-year-old Lawrence Bernard Singleton, a former merchant seaman in the Navy, chopped off 15-year-old Mary Vincent’s hands and threw her off a 30-foot cliff at Interstate 5 in Del Puerto Canyon. Before we get into the events that led to this gruesome crime, I’d like to give you some information about Lawrence Singleton. Lawrence reportedly had a very bad temper and was a misogynist. He was recently divorced by his second wife. He had a strained relationship with his teenage daughter because they had fought earlier that year and never reconciled. Prior to this, Lawrence had been convicted for his contribution to the delinquency of a minor. He also had a history of alcohol abuse. Early September 1978, Mary Vincent ran away from her home in Las Vegas. Her parents were going through a very messy divorce and Mary just couldn’t handle the chaotic situation at home, unlike her six siblings. She lived on the streets for a brief period before she hitchhiked to her grandfather’s house in California. After some time, she began to feel homesick and decided to hitchhike back to Las Vegas. She went to the side of the road where there were also several other hitchhikers. They all were holding up vague signs in which direction they wanted to go. 🙌_2 Mary was pointing south to indicate the direction she needed to go. An old man in a van pulled up and offered to give Mary a ride, although where she wanted to go was out of his way. That was the first red flag. His van was empty and could fit all of the hitchhikers waiting there but he denied their requests. That was the second red flag. He said he could only take one person and it had to be a female because he was afraid of getting mugged. That was the third red flag. All of the hitchhikers tried to talk Mary out of hitchhiking with him. Mary being so desperate and lonely thought to herself that she just couldn’t go on another day roaming the streets. Then, she took a good look at him. He seemed to be in his fifties, looked like a grandpa, and had a kind smile. He said he had a daughter just about her age and Mary accepted his family man demeanor. She ignored the hitchhikers’ protests and hopped into his van and they made their way. She was extremely exhausted and sleepy. She knew it wasn’t a smart move to fall asleep but she just couldn’t help it. After some time, she jolted awake and realized they were not going south. This was the fourth red flag. She quickly questioned Lawrence and he was very apologetic. He said his eyesight was getting worse and it was an honest mistake. 🙌_3 He said he would turn his van around but he wanted to just stop for a bit because his bladder was going to burst as he had been holding it in for too long. By this time, the sun was setting and it was starting to get dark. While he was relieving himself, he suggested that Mary get out of the van and stretch her legs. This was when the alarm went off in Mary’s head. She realized they were stopped on the side of the road which was completely deserted. She studied him again. He was an old man nearing his sixties, seemed unhealthy, and was a little on the heavier side. She decided that if she booked it and ran away from him, he might not catch up to her easily. As she was getting out of the van, she realized her shoelaces were untied. So she planned to get out of the van, tie her shoelaces and take off. However, when she was tying her shoelaces, she got bonked on the head with a sledgehammer. She immediately passed out. When she gained consciousness, she was naked and tied up at the back of Lawrence’s van. He raped her repeatedly multiple times all through the night and into the morning. She cried and begged. She said she wouldn’t tell anyone and to just let her go. He turned a deaf ear to her. 🙌_4 When it was morning, he pulled her out of the van. She was still tied up, naked, and now bleeding. He took a hatchet from his toolbox and swung it at her left arm. She started to feel like she was falling back to the grass. When we are falling, our reflex action would be to grab onto something to avoid falling. She grabbed onto his arm but she was still falling. She said it seemed to happen in slow motion. She was confused. When she hit the ground, she saw blood gushing out of her left arm as it had been severed off at her elbow. The pain was excruciating and she felt as if her hand was on fire. Lawrence then swung at her right elbow and that was severed off too. She just lay there bleeding and saw that he was trying to flick off her left hand that was still clutching his arm tightly. He then dragged her into the woods. She stayed still to prevent more blood loss. She didn’t scream as she believed that would just make him mutilate her even further. He then threw her off a 30-foot cliff and left her to die! This was his way of murdering her. 🙌_5 Later when he would be questioned, he said he chopped off her arms to get rid of her fingerprints. The dude obviously never heard of dental records. Even Mary’s family would have been able to identify her so I don’t know what he was going on about. The fall from 30 feet above broke four of Mary’s ribs. She was losing so much blood, was in extreme pain and all she could think was, “What if he hasn’t driven off? What if he comes back to finish me off?” She then started to feel extremely sleepy and light-headed. That must have been due to her blood loss. She wanted to doze off but heard a voice in her head, “Hey, you can’t go to sleep, you can’t go to sleep!” She thought that if she fell asleep and died, he would do the same thing to someone else and she didn’t want to let that happen. So she got up into a kneeling position and shoved both her elbows into the mud. This is a 30-second video of Mary Vincent explaining how she climbed up the cliff: She said she did that to stop the blood flow. She was just 15 years old and so smart! Then she crawled all the way up the cliff. She didn’t let the pain from her broken ribs stop her. By the time she reached the top, it was night again. It took her a whole day to climb up. She started walking on the main road looking for people to help her. She kept her arms up the whole time to stop the blood from gushing out. This place was the same deserted area where Lawrence stopped his van. 🙌_6 In the distance, she heard the sound of cars. She walked in that direction for three miles and it was morning again by that time because she could only move very slowly. The first car she saw was a red convertible with its top down. There were two men in it. She screamed at them to stop and help her but they put the pedal to the metal. She was devastated but she said she didn’t blame them because she looked like a horror movie scene; no hands, naked and covered head to toe in blood. Thankfully, an old truck came by after some time. They were a lost honeymoon couple. They saw her and immediately stopped. They helped her into the truck and rushed to the nearest phone booth. Keep in mind, that this was in 1978 and cell phones weren’t prevalent back then. The honeymooners called the paramedics and they sent a rescue helicopter which got Mary straight to the hospital. This would have been a very traumatic honeymoon experience for the couple. 🙌_7 At the hospital, the doctors were baffled as to how Mary was still alive because she had lost over half of the blood in her body and the remaining blood she had got to a very toxic level. Mary then gave a detailed description of Lawrence Singleton to the police. The description was so detailed that the police released a composite sketch of the man. Lawrence’s neighbour saw the sketch and called the police. Lawrence was then brought in for questioning. Lawrence had the audacity to deny everything and said that Mary wasn’t a hitchhiker but a prostitute. He said if his DNA was found on her, that’s because she is a prostitute and he paid her $10. The police questioned why she was in this state because if she was a prostitute like he claimed, he could have just paid her and that would have been it. They wouldn’t be in the hospital now. Lawrence then said that Mary wasn’t the only prostitute in the van as there were others and he also had a guy friend with him. He said he fell asleep and his guy friend must have decided to torture Mary and chop her hands off. When questioned who was his guy friend, this dude just blurted out, “Larry”. The police saw through his bullshit and arrested him. He was charged with mutilation, kidnapping, and assault of Mary Vincent. 🙌_8 The next Mary saw Lawrence was in court. She was still a teenager and she was terrified as he was just 10 feet away from her when she was on the witness stand. She now had prosthetic arms. After she testified, she had to walk by him and he whispered to her: “I’ll finish this job, if it takes me the rest of my life” With Mary’s strong testimony and all of the evidence, Lawrence was convicted of kidnapping, rape, mayhem (mutilation), attempted murder, and sex crime. she saw him attacking a woman through the window of his house. The police immediately arrived at the scene and found Roxanne Hayes dead. She was a single mom of 3 kids and worked as a prostitute to support them. She was stabbed multiple times in her upper body. Lawrence was found with blood all over his clothes. He again tried to play defense. He said he’s just an old man who didn’t know what he was doing because he maybe had dementia or Alzheimer’s. Mary came once more to testify against him. She told the judge that her life was turned upside down by what he did to her and ever since he was sentenced to prison, she had been trying to get her life back together. She said since he got paroled, all she could hear were the words that he whispered to her: 🙌_9 “I’ll finish this job, if it takes me the rest of my life” She said she started falling apart; she couldn’t focus on anything, she couldn’t hold down a job and it just ruined her life. She pleaded to the judge to do something because he’s not a confused old man and he’s going to keep hurting people. Finally, in 2001, the judge sentenced him to death. This is a death sentence I agree with but here’s the bad news. He died of cancer in prison that same year before he was executed. There was a lot of outrage after this which resulted in legislation. California then passed a ‘Singleton bill’ which prevents the early release of offenders who have committed a crime where torture is used and now the maximum punishment is 25 years to life. Mary Vincent won a civil lawsuit that awarded her $2.56 million against Lawrence Singleton. However, she was unable to collect even a little bit because he was unemployed. He was in poor health. He was old and he only had $200 in his savings account. She was only awarded about $6000 from the California victim fund. She said that when Lawrence died, she didn't feel any relief. She didn't feel good because she knew that there were still a lot of evil people like him out there. Mary ended up becoming an artist. She got married and has two sons. She moved to Orange County. She started the Mary Vincent Foundation to help victims of traumatic crimes.

🧓_1 Ʈᖾᥱ 'ᘜɩɠɠꙆɩᥒɠ ᘜɾᥲᥒᥒყ' ᔑᥱɾɩᥲꙆ КɩꙆꙆᥱɾ Nannie Doss (Giggling Granny) was an American serial killer responsible for eleven deaths between the 1920s and 1954. She killed four out of her five husbands, two children, her stepsister, her mother, her two grandchildren, and her mother-in-law. Nancy Hazel (Nannie) was born in 1905 to Louisa who wasn't married. Louisa wouldn’t reveal to her parents who Nannie's father was. No one wanted to marry Louisa as she had a child out of wedlock. Along came James Hazel. He was a farmer who was knee-deep in debt so no one wanted to marry him either. James proposes to Louisa and she accepts as he's the only one willing to marry her. Therefore, he became Nannie's stepdad. Nannie had neither a healthy nor a happy childhood. James had an ulterior motive for marrying Louisa. He wanted more manpower to work on his farm. He was very controlling and abusive towards Louisa and Nannie. Nannie was forced to work at the farm from a very young age and did not attend school. By the time Nannie was six, Louisa had four children with James. As Louisa had to work at the farm, Nannie took care of her four stepsiblings. 🧑‍🦳_2 When Nannie was seven, she had a major head injury from a train accident. For years, she had severe headaches, blackouts, and depression but James didn’t bring her for treatment as she wasn't his biological daughter. When James's biological daughter was molested by his cousin, he beat the shit out of him. But when the cousin did the same thing to Nannie, she was punished for it. Although Nannie wasn't properly educated, she was very good at speaking and writing as she loved to read. Her favorite genre to read was romance novels. Charley's mom also lived with them and she always nitpicked at how Nannie does the cleaning and cooking and everything else. But the thing is, Nannie is the perfect housewife; who happens to get things done in a different way than Charley's mom. Nannie decided things may get better if she had children. Nannie and Charley had four daughters. The eldest is Melvina and the youngest is Florine. This is when Charley started cheating on Nannie. She had a diary in which she kept track of all his activities like which days he came back late and how many days he was gone at a time. Although his mom knew about this, she still supported Charley. 🧑‍🦳_3 There was this time when Charley was gone for three days. When he came back, the whole town was at his house and they were all wearing black. He thought ‘Oh shit! My mom died!’ But he found her in the kitchen comforting a crying Nannie. He also saw Melvina and Florine but not his second and third daughters. Upon questioning, James, Nannie's stepdad informed him that the girls had died. If you asked Charley's mom, although she nitpicked at everything that Nannie did, she would never deny that Nannie is the best mom anyone could be. But little did everyone know that Nannie was acting. She despised her kids. But she never showed her hatred to anyone or her kids. So, what happened was, that Nannie put rat poison in the breakfast porridge. Melvina normally has a light breakfast so she had toast. Florine was still breastfeeding. So the second and third daughters ate the porridge and died. Seeing at what a loving mom Nannie was, the people of the town never suspected her and concluded that the rice was contaminated. Charley somehow felt guilty for the death of his daughters and couldn’t look at Nannie in the eye for months. One night, as Nannie placed dinner in front of him, they made eye contact and Charley saw there was no emotion in Nannie's eyes. That creeped him out. 🧓_4 So he packed his things, grabbed Melvina, and fled in the middle of the night. He wanted to take Florine along too but as she was still a baby, Nannie had fallen asleep with her. Now Nannie had to care for Charley's mom and Florine. Hence she started working. Although Charley's mom wasn't as terrible as before, it soon became tiresome for Nannie to look after her as she became very sick and was bedridden after Charley ran away. So, Nannie put rat poison in Charley's mom's prune stew and she died. The whole town was so sad for Nannie. They never suspected her. They just assumed she died from sickness and old age. After one year, Charley came back with his new girlfriend and Melvina. Nannie and Charley got divorced. Nannie moved back into her mom's house with Melvina and Florine. Then Nannie got married to Frank Harrelson and moved in with him along with Melvina and Florine. And yet again she discovered that this marriage too isn't anything like in the romance novels. She discovered that Frank was an alcoholic and had been to prison for assault. He also had multiple affairs. Oftentimes, Frank would come home drunk and abuse Melvina and Florine. 🧑‍🦳_5 Once Melvina was eighteen, she had enough and wanted to move out and get married. She met a guy and brought him to Nannie. Nannie really wanted her to get married to him. Within a year Melvina got pregnant. Nannie wasn't happy as she believed that kids take away freedom and happiness. But she thought ‘Okay maybe one kid won't be too bad’ and pretended to be happy. A few months after giving birth to a baby boy, Melvina became pregnant again. Nannie was pissed but pretended to be happy again. When Melvina delivered her baby girl, she fell right asleep as she was really tired and groggy from the drugs. The doctor gave the baby girl to Nannie to hold as she was the granny. After a few hours, when the doctors came back to check, the baby was dead. Nannie was so sad and Melvina was devastated. No one suspected Nannie as sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) was common and also because she was such a great granny to Melvina's son. After a few days, when Melvina was discharged, she was being taken home by her sister Florine. Melvina then confides in Florine a strange and absurd dream that she had in which Nannie took a hatpin and punctured her baby's head with it. 🧑‍🦳_6 Florine however looked shocked because when the doctors were checking on the dead baby, Nannie was fiddling with a hatpin. Now it was Melvina’s turn to be shocked because looks like she didn’t dream it but maybe that’s what actually happened when she was high on drugs. Melvina's husband however started blaming her for their second child's death and soon they drifted apart. Melvina started seeing other guys and would often dump her son with Nannie. One day, tired of pretending to take care of her grandson happily, Nannie told Melvina that she had to start taking responsibility for her son. Melvina refused and left. So Nannie baked cookies with rat poison in them. After lunch with her grandson who's now two years old, she kept giving him cookie after cookie. He was dead the next morning. Once again, no one suspected Nannie thanks to her Oscar Award-winning acting skills, and also back in the day, it was common for children to die suddenly. Melvina however begins to suspect her mom but can’t confront her as Nannie is surrounded by the people of the town who blame Melvina for being so irresponsible. After the funeral, Frank, Nannie's second husband decided to have a drink with Melvina and Florine. And that’s when he said, “I think I’m next”. Both the girls cried in unison “Oh my God, you suspect her too?!” Then they shared the hatpin incident with him. 🧓_7 After this, Frank no longer ate or slept at home. He'll just be out drinking. One day he came home super drunk and raped Nannie as she didn't consent to sex. He felt that it was his right as her husband. He then passed out while she was crying and was super pissed. She decided that he has to die but she can't poison him as he doesn't eat at home anymore. He also hides his whiskey so that she doesn't tamper with it. Furious with herself for not being able to come up with a way to kill him, she goes to her garden to get some work done and she notices a hole beside her rose bush. This pissed her off even more. Curiosity got the better of her and she began digging deeper into that hole and found Frank's hidden whiskey bottle. She saw that as a sign from God to kill him. Quickly she put rat poison in it and buried it back the way she found it. The next morning, Frank was found dead on the front lawn. Police said it was death due to drinking too much as there was no suggestion of foul play. Melvina and Florine came to his funeral but they no longer wanted anything to do with Nannie. Nannie got a huge amount of life insurance money from Frank's death. She then decides to get married again. She was forty by now. She met her third husband, Arlie Lanning through a Lonely Hearts column in the newspaper. 🧑‍🦳_8 She learned that he's a womanizer but due to the influence of her romance novels, she knew she could change him so they got married. This time, there was the romance that she was always looking for. Despite keeping Nannie happy, he was always having affairs at the same time. Nannie didn’t like this. This went on for years. Towards the end of their marriage, the Flu Influenza was spreading like how Covid-19 is spreading now. Everyone had to stay at home because people were dropping dead everywhere. So she starts cooking him all this fabulous food daily and one day, one of them is his favorite pie. Seeing that she put a lot of work into it, he ate without complaining although it seemed a tad bit bitter to him. The next morning, he was dead. The doctor who came to check Arlie had just checked six other people who were dead due to influenza. He took a look at Arlie’s body and said “Yup, he's dead due to influenza”. No one suspected Nannie and she got the insurance money. Nannie is forty-five now and decided to go back to her hometown to find a new husband. But she got a letter conveying that her stepsister was very ill with only her skin draping around her bones. Nannie volunteered to take care of her. Just after one week of nursing her stepsister back to health, Nannie got tired of it because all she wants is to get married again. So Nannie put rat poison in her stepsister’s prune stew and she died. At her funeral, Nannie realized that her mom, Louisa, and her stepdad, James didn’t come. She questioned her stepsiblings regarding their whereabouts. It seems James recently died and that’s why Louisa couldn’t make it. 🧓_9 Nannie was furious because she couldn’t kill James who abused her profusely during her childhood. Nannie then had to take care of Louisa, as she was the only person in her family with money. So Louisa moved in with Nannie and she was extremely demanding. Nannie didn’t like that. Her mom became increasingly sick and eventually died because Nannie poisoned her. Again, everyone was filled with sympathy for Nannie. Nannie then finds her fourth husband, Richard Morton and he works from home. So she didn’t have to worry about him cheating on her. He always brought her out for dinners and bought her expensive gifts. She was having her romance novel moment. One day, gossip reaches her ears that Richard is not only getting gifts for her but for many other girls as well. So she starts looking for her next husband by posing as a widow while Richard is still alive. She then added rat poison to his prune stew and he died. The police didn't suspect her because Richard was very old. And yet again, she got the insurance money. 🧑‍🦳_10 Now she's looking for her fifth husband. She got married to Samuel Doss who is her final husband and her undoing. He was a strict Christian. He didn’t gamble, he didn’t drink and he was an absolute gentleman. He didn’t really approve of her love for romance novels. He was a miser. He won't even let her switch on the fan or light to save electricity. And he won't let her spend money. She wanted to kill him because she wanted to get married again. But it was so difficult for her to poison him because he was always around, micromanaging her cooking and everything else that she did. Since he was a miser, he hated sugar and sweets but she needed sugar to mask the bitterness of the poison. This was proving to be a huge problem for her. So, she gradually added a little poison to his coffee daily up until he was hospitalized. She was super pissed to learn that he survived but she put on an act of being a caring wife and never left his side from the hospital. 🧓_11 The doctors had no idea what was wrong with him, so Samuel was discharged. Once he was back home, she made him a huge meal. She also assured him that she didn’t spend a lot of money on it. She said she wanted to celebrate his survival and being back home. She kept giving him more and more coffee. He then went to bed and died the next morning. Finally, there was a doctor who was suspicious of Nannie and suggested they do an autopsy. Nannie was forced to agree because he suggested this in front of everybody. The autopsy results came back stating Samuel had so much of cyanide in his system and Nannie was arrested in 1954. At first, she kept denying everything. As some time went by, she started giggling while confessing to the murder of four out of her five husbands. The next day, an FBI agent made a timeline of the mysterious deaths that happened around Nannie. She then confessed to murdering four out of her five husbands while giggling the whole time. She didn’t confess to the other murders but this was enough evidence. That’s eleven people she killed altogether but she was only convicted of one. She escaped the death penalty but got life imprisonment. She then died in 1965 in prison due to leukemia.

𝐂𝐨𝐫𝐩𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐢𝐠 𝐏𝐞𝐧: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐓𝐚𝐥𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐚’𝐬 𝐌𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐍𝐨𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐊𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐫 When a widow and three children are found dead after a suspicious fire, an investigation ensues that uncovers one of the victims’ monstrous past... When a widow and three children are found dead after a suspicious fire, an investigation ensues that uncovers one of the victims’ monstrous past... The scent of smoke wafted through Joe Maxson’s bedroom as dawn broke on April 28, 1908. At first, he thought an early breakfast was cooking below—he lived on the second story, somewhere above the kitchen—but the smoke drifting through his window looked unusually thick. Maxson rose from bed, peered outside, and saw a wall of flames. His mind immediately turned to the other people living in the house. Three children, as well as the home’s owner—a 48-year-old widow named Belle Gunness—were likely sleeping. Maxson was the family’s hired farmhand and had lived on the small La Porte, Indiana, farm for barely three months. It was his job to protect the property and the people in it. He ran across his bedroom and tried to open the door leading to Gunness’s half of the home. It was locked.

With smoke choking his throat, Maxson cried out in a desperate attempt to get the family’s attention. “Fire! Fire!” But nobody stirred. The only thing Maxson heard was the ominous creaking of burning timbers. As a haze filled the bedroom, Maxson scrambled down a set of rear stairs, ran outside, and grabbed an ax. He desperately hacked at the door leading to Mrs. Gunness’s part of the home, but it was no use. Nobody inside was responding. By the time the authorities reached the property, the building was a charred husk. When the embers finally cooled, firemen sifting through the rubble found evidence that the fire was not accidental. In the basement, they discovered the four burnt bodies of three children and an adult female. The woman’s corpse was headless.

Immediately, neighbors began mourning the tragedy: Belle Gunness, a lonely widow who had spent years fruitlessly looking for love, had died surrounded by her children in a horrendous fire. For all her life, it seemed that tragedy had followed Mrs. Gunness—she had lost two husbands and multiple children to terrible accidents—and now it looked as though fate had come for her, too. Within days, a disgruntled former farmhand named Ray Lamphere was arrested for setting fire to the building. As the village mourned, a South Dakota man named Asle Helgelien walked into the La Porte sheriff’s office. He had heard about the blaze and was deeply worried. Months earlier, his brother, Andrew Helgelien, had come to La Porte with the intention of moving in with Mrs. Gunness. He hadn’t heard from his brother since. The ensuing investigation would turn the town of La Porte, Indiana, into the center of America’s attention.

By all outward appearances, Belle Gunness had a hard lot in life. Born on a farm in Norway, she emigrated to the United States in 1881 when she was 22 and settled in Chicago, where she met her first husband, Mads Ditlev Anton Sorenson. Two of their children (who may have been adopted) never lived past infancy. Around 1895, a candy store they owned burned to the ground. In 1900, one of their homes was turned to ash. That same year, Mads mysteriously died. Using her husband’s life insurance payout, Belle bought a farm with more than 40 acres near La Porte, Indiana, and married a fellow widower named Peter Gunness. Marital bliss, however, was in short supply. Not even one week after the wedding, Peter’s 7-month-old daughter died unexpectedly. And that December, Peter died in a freak accident after a sausage grinder fell from a high shelf and struck his head. The circumstances seemed strange enough that the coroner looked into it, but Belle was cleared.

In the ensuing years, the two-time widow kept few constant companions. She lived alone with her surviving children and a revolving cast of farmhands, who helped her pitch hay, butcher hogs, and manage a menagerie of chickens, horses, cows, and a single Shetland pony. Around 1905, she decided it was time to find love again and began placing classified ads in Scandinavian-language newspapers. "Personal—comely widow who owns a large farm in one of the finest districts in La Porte County, Indiana, desires to make the acquaintance of a gentleman equally well provided, with view of joining fortunes. No replies by letter considered unless sender is willing to follow answer with personal visit. Triflers need not apply."

According to her mail carrier, Mrs. Gunness sometimes received as many as eight letters a day from suitors. Her neighbors watched as men came knocking. One of her farmhands, Emil Greening, would tell the New York Tribune that she often kept the identities of the men concealed: “Mrs. Gunness received men visitors all the time. A different man came nearly every week to stay at the house. She introduced them as cousins from Kansas, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and from Chicago ... She was always careful to make the children stay away from her 'cousins.'” Gunness was extremely private and practical in her search for a new partner. As much as she was looking for romance, she was also looking for a man who could help take care of her property and its finances, and she vetted the incoming suitors as if she were an employer looking to fill a job opening. Money was always at the top of her priorities. In one letter to a potential suitor named Carl Peterson, Gunness reportedly wrote, “I have picked out the most respectable and I have decided that yours is such … If you think that you are able in some way to put up $1000 cash, we can talk matters over personally.” From 1905 to 1907, dozens of potential suitors knocked on her door, though none appeared to please her enough to actually tie the knot.

In July 1907, Gunness hired Ray Lamphere to be her new farmhand. A 37-year-old with an unsavory reputation as a drinker, gambler, and all-around loafer, Lamphere defied expectations: He was a competent carpenter and loyal employee. Immediately, Gunness gave Lamphere a room on the second floor of her home, and soon the two began a strictly sexual relationship. Too poor to ever be considered a potential suitor, Lamphere resented the men coming in trying to woo the woman he grew to love. Mrs. Gunness didn’t care. While she was sleeping with Lamphere and auditioning potential suitors, she was busy exchanging deeply personal love letters with a 40-something South Dakota wheat farmer (and fellow Norwegian immigrant) named Andrew Helgelien. Over about 16 months, Gunness sent him approximately 80 letters.

The long-distance romance burned slowly. Gunness explained that all of her other suitors had been duds, but Helgelien sounded like a true, red-blooded Norwegian. She begged him to come to Indiana. According to Harold Schechter’s book Hell’s Princess, Gunness wrote: “This is a secret between us and no one else. Probably we will have many other secrets between us, not so, dear friend?” ***** Andrew Helgelien’s arrival in La Porte broke Ray Lamphere’s heart. When the South Dakota farmer came in early January 1908, Gunness kicked Lamphere out of his room and told him to sleep in the barn. “After he came, she had no use for me,” Lamphere later lamented. Helgelien and Gunness appeared to have fallen in love immediately. Just a few days after meeting, they walked into the First National Bank of La Porte together and attempted to redeem three of the South Dakota man’s Certificates of Deposit. Within days, they pulled out $2839—money to build a new life together.

A few weeks later, Mrs. Gunness and Lamphere got into a fight. Some say it’s because she owed him money. Others say it was because he was jealous of Gunness’s new man. Whatever the reason, Lamphere was fired and replaced with Joe Maxson. Over the next three months, Lamphere became an endless source of grief for Belle Gunness. She wrote multiple letters to the local sheriff, Albert Smutzer, complaining that Lamphere, playing the part of a creepy ex-lover, was prowling on her property and peeking through the windows. In March, Belle tried to get Lamphere declared insane, which failed. She then had him arrested and fined for trespassing. Days after that, he was arrested again and acquitted, though by this time nearly every La Porte city official was aware that Lamphere seemingly had it out for the poor widow. He wasn’t the only one. **** When Andrew Helgelien left for Indiana, he told his brother, Asle, that “he would be back home in a week surely,” according to the La Porte Argus-Bulletin. Andrew never explained why he was leaving. Nor did he return as promised.

Back in South Dakota, Asle worried endlessly. He checked with family and friends to see if anybody knew of Andrew’s whereabouts, but nobody had the answers. It wasn’t until a farmhand found a stack of letters in Andrew’s cabin from a “Bella Gunness” that Asle realized that his brother had run off to Indiana to bed a rich widow. He pored over the love letters and was immediately suspicious of the woman’s motives. “Take all your money out of the bank,” one letter advised, “and come as soon as possible.” “Now see all that you can get cash for, and if you have much left you can easily take it with you, as we will soon sell it here and get a good price on everything,” she wrote in another. “Leave neither money or stock up there but make yourself free from Dakota so you will have nothing more to bother with up there.” In a third letter, the mysterious woman wrote: “Do not say one word about it to anyone, not even your nearest relative.”

Worried that his brother was being bilked by a con woman in Indiana, Asle wrote to Mrs. Gunness in mid-March and inquired about his brother, more than two months after Andrew had arrived. The widow wrote back promptly. “You wish to know where your brother keeps himself,” Gunness wrote. “Well this is just what I would like to know but it almost seems impossible for me to give a definite answer.” She claimed that Andrew had left for Chicago. In fact, she had received a letter from him sent from the Windy City telling her not to write back for a while. In it, Andrew said that he had left to search for a family member. She speculated he might go to Norway. “Since then I have neither heard or seen anything of him.” For Asle, the excuse raised eyebrows. This was very uncharacteristic of his brother. When he asked Gunness to forward the letter his brother had sent from Chicago, the widow remorsefully told him that the letter was missing.

“I got the letter in the morning and read it and laid it in a china closet in the kitchen and went to milk & when I came back the letter was gone,” she wrote, blaming her ex-farmhand for the note’s disappearance. “That Lamphere was here and he had probably taken it.” Asle remained suspicious of the story. Meanwhile, Gunness continued to voice her suspicions of Lamphere. On April 27, she visited her attorney, Melvin E. Leliter, and asked to have a will drawn up. She seemed extremely anxious. She told the lawyer what she had been telling everybody in town: Ray Lamphere was causing her more and more trouble, and she was afraid he was going to do something dangerous. “I want to prepare for an eventuality,” she reportedly told her lawyer. “I’m afraid that fool Lamphere is going to kill me and burn my house.” The lawyer signed the will.

After the meeting, Belle Gunness went shopping and came home with cakes, a toy train, and two gallons of kerosene. According to Schechter, 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 burned. Ray Lamphere was arrested almost immediately. And when Asle Helgelien received a newspaper clipping announcing that the house had burned, he rushed to Indiana. *** On May 4, Asle Helgelien walked into the La Porte sheriff’s office in hopes of gaining information on the whereabouts of his brother. Sheriff Smutzer drove Helgelien to the Gunness house and told him to see if he could find any clues in the burnt rubble.

By then nearly a week had passed since the fire, and the skull of Belle Gunness had yet to be found. All of the bodies had been mangled and charred, but it was curious—and frustrating—that the head of the oldest woman had somehow gone missing, especially because the coroner needed it to make a proper identification. The La Porte Argus-Bulletin claimed that a vengeful Ray Lamphere must have disposed of it, writing that he had “decapitated her, and then set fire to the house to cover the evidence of his crime.” When Helgelien arrived, Joe Maxson and another man were digging through the charred rubble in search of the missing head. Asle grabbed a shovel and joined in hopes of finding some sign of his brother. After two days, he gave up. According to Schechter, he told the men goodbye and started walking down the road—until a creeping sense of doubt compelled him to stop and turn around. “I was not satisfied,” Helgelien later said, “and I went back to the cellar and asked Maxson whether he knew of any hole or dirt having been dug up there about the place in spring.”

In fact, Maxson had. There was a fenced-in hog lot about 50 feet from the house. Earlier that spring, there were a couple of soft depressions in the ground—buried rubbish, Mrs. Gunness had explained—and Maxson was ordered to level the divots with dirt. Helgelien asked the men to dig up the trenches: Perhaps there was something buried in the trash that would indicate his brother’s whereabouts. The men slogged over to the pig pen and thrust their shovels into the muck. They didn’t have to dig deep before they penetrated a putrid layer of trash. As they dug further, somebody gasped—poking from the ooze was a gunny sack. Inside were two hands, two feet, and one head. Asle recognized the withered, rotten face: It was his brother. When the men looked back up from the gruesome hole, they peered across the pig pen and realized that there were dozens of slumped depressions in Belle Gunness’s yard.

**** The earth was filled with burlap bags of torsos and hands, arms hacked from the shoulders down, and masses of human bone wrapped in loose flesh that dripped like jelly. On the first day of digging, five bodies were found. On the second, the count totaled nine. Then 11. After a while, the police stopped counting. “The bones had been crushed on the ends, as though they had been … struck with hammers after they were dismembered,” reported The Chicago Inter Ocean. “Quicklime had been scattered over the faces and stuffed in the ears.” Body after body after body was found in shallow, trash-covered graves—some under the pig pen, others near a lake, and a few by the outhouse. Each body was butchered into six parts: The legs were chopped at the knee, the arms hacked at the shoulder, and the head decapitated. Most of the remains could not be identified.

Just days earlier, newspapers and neighbors had been singing Belle Gunness’s praises. There was a heroic woman who died in a desperate attempt to save her children from an awful fire. But as this mass grave of burlap-wrapped bodies came to light, the people of La Porte realized that Mrs. Gunness was not the woman they believed her to be. Most of the skulls were scarred with giant gashes and showed signs of blunt trauma. Some of the bodies—those still intact, at least—contained traces of strychnine, commonly used as a rat poison. Many of the remains had been quartered like a hog, doused in quicklime to speed up decomposition, and buried under piles of men’s shoes. It was clear that this was not some crude family cemetery, but a mass grave. And for people familiar with Mrs. Gunness’s matrimonial advertisements, there was no question to whom these bones belonged. As the police soon pieced together, Belle Gunness had lived a double life as a serial killer. She lured bachelors with her classified newspaper ads. When she believed the right man had replied, she’d convince him to come to La Porte and would seduce him into surrendering his life savings. After the man withdrew the cash, she killed him

“I was not satisfied,” Helgelien later said, “and I went back to the cellar and asked Maxson whether he knew of any hole or dirt having been dug up there about the place in spring.” In fact, Maxson had. There was a fenced-in hog lot about 50 feet from the house. Earlier that spring, there were a couple of soft depressions in the ground—buried rubbish, Mrs. Gunness had explained—and Maxson was ordered to level the divots with dirt. Helgelien asked the men to dig up the trenches: Perhaps there was something buried in the trash that would indicate his brother’s whereabouts. The men slogged over to the pig pen and thrust their shovels into the muck. They didn’t have to dig deep before they penetrated a putrid layer of trash. As they dug further, somebody gasped—poking from the ooze was a gunny sack.

The yellow press pounced on the story. Just a week after calling her a heroic mother, reporters nicknamed Gunness the “Indiana Ogress" or “Female Bluebeard,” and even compared her to Lady Macbeth. Reporters described her home as a “horror farm” and a “death garden.” These details attracted gawkers, who came in droves to La Porte—some estimates say 20,000 people gathered at the farm one weekend—to watch body parts yanked from the dirt. Vendors reportedly sold ice cream, popcorn, cake, and something called “Gunness Stew.” “As a result of the nationwide coverage of the case, police officials in La Porte were flooded with inquiries from people who feared that their long-missing loved ones had ended up in the muck of Belle Gunness’s hog lot,” Schechter writes in Hell’s Princess. Stories poured in about missing men believed to have heeded Mrs. Gunness’s siren call: There was Christie Hilkven of Wisconsin, who sold his farm in 1906 to live with a widow in La Porte. There was Olaf Jensen, who wrote his relatives that he was off to get married in Indiana. There was Bert Chase … and T.J. Tiefland … and Charles Neiburg. The names went on. It didn’t take long for it to dawn on investigators that the identity of the headless woman in Gunness’s basement was a matter of public safety. If the body didn’t belong to Belle Gunness, then it meant a serial killer was on the loose.

Sightings of Belle Gunness were reported across the country. She was lurking in the woods of La Porte, shopping the streets of Chicago, riding a train bound for Rochester, New York. But on May 19, a pair of dental bridges were discovered in the rubble of the Gunness home. A La Porte dentist identified the bridges as belonging to Gunness, and authorities quickly claimed that they had secured proof that the headless corpse belonged to the murderous widow. Many people, however, were skeptical. According to hearsay, neighbors who had seen the charred corpse believed it was too short and skinny to belong to their neighbor, a tall woman who weighed upwards of 250 pounds. Reporters wondered if the serial killer could have lit the house on fire, torn the bridges from her mouth to throw off the police, and fled the blaze. Rumors swirled that, days earlier, Gunness had hired a housekeeper and that the remains might have belonged to that woman instead. Despite any lingering doubts, the police continued to pursue arson and murder charges against Ray Lamphere. There was solid evidence that Lamphere had been near the Gunness home the morning of the fire. (He had admitted to seeing the smoking building; he even claimed that he had refused to report it to the police because he feared he’d be blamed him for causing it.) At best, Lamphere was negligent in failing to report an emergency. At worst, he had started it.

The prosecution acknowledged they were in a tricky position. After all, they were fighting on behalf of Belle Gunness, a woman, they admitted, who had “engaged in the wholesale slaughter of humanity.” But it didn’t matter: It was still a crime to burn down another person’s house, prosecutors said, even if that person is later found to be a serial killer. The lawyers even insinuated that Lamphere knew about the Gunness murders. According to the Chicago Inter Ocean, Lamphere denied this. “I have led a pretty loose life, maybe, and possibly I drank too much at times,” he reportedly said. “But there are others who have done as bad as me who are walking the streets of La Porte today. I know nothing about the ‘house of crime,’ as they call it. Sure, I worked for Mrs. Gunness for a time, but I didn’t see her kill anybody, and I didn’t know she had killed anybody.” The ensuing court case became a media circus. As Lamphere pled for his innocence, his lawyers argued that Gunness had started the fire and had framed her old farmhand. For weeks leading up to the event, she had diligently worked to hurt Lamphere’s reputation and credibility, constantly bad-mouthing him around the town’s authorities.

It’s a plausible theory. Gunness had duped authorities before. As investigators later learned, her first husband had died on the one—and only—day that two of his life insurance policies overlapped. In fact, she had collected insurance on all of her deceased family members, as well as on two properties that had mysteriously burned down. She was a master at framing herself as a victim of tragedy, when in fact she was tragedy’s greatest beneficiary. “My sister was insane on the subject of money,” her sister, Nellie Larson, would later tell the Chicago Examiner. “She never seemed to care for a man for his own self, only for the money or luxury he was able to give her.” Indeed, the insurance payouts and matrimonial schemes earned her more than $1 million in today’s money. It also led to the deaths of at least 20 people. But for whatever reason, the jury still believed there was convincing evidence that Lamphere had started the fire. Lamphere’s only saving grace came when a chemist found traces of strychnine in the bodies of the burnt children, evidence that Gunness’s kids had not died from arson, but from the same poison preferred by their mother (though the testifying doctor refused to declare strychnine the cause of death). That evidence helped acquit Lamphere of any charges of murder, but it failed to protect him from the charge of arson—a crime that carried up to a 21-year sentence.

After just one year in prison, Lamphere died of tuberculosis. Before his death, he purportedly confessed to a pastor, saying he had witnessed the murder of Andrew Helgelien and had demanded hush money from Gunness. She fired him instead. And when Lamphere returned to the house to take back his personal belongings, Gunness charged him with trespassing and began defaming him in public. Today, many believe that Gunness was probably responsible for the fire: With her old farmhand turned against her and Asle Helgelien breathing down her neck, Gunness knew her ruse was up—so she destroyed everything. But that’s just one of many theories. For now, the lingering question of whether Gunness got away—whether the headless body belonged to a rumored housekeeper or to the Female Bluebeard herself—remains unanswered. In 2008, forensic anthropologists exhumed the murderer’s suspected body and attempted to analyze the DNA, comparing it to DNA samples Gunness had left on a postage stamp and envelope. The sample, however, was too degraded to provide conclusive results. Little has been resolved since. At the time of Ray Lamphere’s trial, the Cleveland Plain Dealer prophesied that “The La Porte case may always remain one of the most puzzling things in the annals of crime.” It appears it will forever be that way.

🍀_1 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗺𝗮𝘇𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗦𝘂𝗿𝘃𝗶𝘃𝗮𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗻 𝗕𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗮 (𝗖𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗙𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀 𝗱𝘂 𝗧𝗼𝗶𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘂𝗻𝘀 𝗞𝗿𝘂𝗴𝗲𝗿) So many miracles occured which helped Alison Botha who was brutally disembowelled, almost decapitated and left for dead to survive... On 18th December 1994 in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, 27-year-old Alison Botha was abducted, raped, disembowelled (stabbed 36 times), almost decapitated (cut 16 times) and left for dead by Frans du Toit and Theuns Kruger. Despite the gruesomeness of this case, nine miracles came together which eventually helped Alison to survive. I’ll list those nine miracles at the end of this article. Let’s first take a look at how this horrifying tragedy took place and how Alison survived despite her intestines being out of her body and her head almost severed off completely. On 18th December 1994, Alison Botha and her friends spent the day at the beach before heading to her house for pizza and games. 🍀_2 Once the party was over, Alison’s friends slowly started to leave. One of her friends didn’t drive and asked Alison if she could send her back home. Alison agreed. She then remembered that she did her laundry at that particular friend’s house. So she picked up her laundry when she dropped her friend off and drove back home. It was completely dark by this time. She was frustrated as her usual parking spot right in front of her apartment unit was taken. So, she parked a little further away. 🍀_3 She turned to the passenger side to grab her laundry and stuff before getting out of the car. The next thing she knew, her driver’s side door flew open and a guy put a knife to her throat. He told her to move over to the passenger side. She was so scared and obediently moved to the passenger side. This guy ever so casually slid into the driver’s side and started driving. He told her that he just needed to use her car for about an hour. During this time, he made small talk with her. When he asked her name and if she has a boyfriend, she lied. Alison said her name is Susan and that she has a boyfriend waiting for her at home right now. 🍀_4 She then said she should probably head back home because her boyfriend was probably getting suspicious and worried right now. She also offered him to take her car and assured him that she wouldn’t go to the police. He refused and kept saying he just wanted some company as he was just going to pick up a friend. He then lied to her that his name is Clinton. Alison was terrified this whole time but it was nothing compared to the fear she felt when this guy’s friend got into her car. She made eye contact with him through his reflection in the rearview mirror and his eyes were pure evil. 🍀_5 That’s when she realized she wouldn’t be going back home. The guy drove them to a deserted place with no streetlights. Both the guys then took turns raping her multiple times. She just laid there like a rag doll with no emotions. This is what she kept repeating in her mind nonstop during this whole ordeal, “It’s okay. Let them rape me because I can survive this. I got this, I can get through this. I can go home. I can go to the police. I can tell my family. My parents are going to support me. He is doing this to your body, not you because he can never really touch you”. 🍀_6 After this was over, one of the guys strangled her. She peed herself during the strangulation. Her peeing herself saved her life and is one of the miracles that I’ll get into later. She was then dragged out of the car onto the ground. When she thought it was finally over, one guy started slicing her throat and the other was stabbing her abdomen. Her throat was cut 16 times. Her abdomen and the pelvic area were stabbed 36 times. She was just staring at the full moon in the sky and which happened to be another miracle that I’ll get into later. She was conscious the whole time and eventually, she felt no pain. While lying there, she saw their feet getting smaller and their voices were disappearing. 🍀_7 They threw her clothes almost right next to her and drove away thinking she is dead. She just laid there with her intestines outside her body on the ground and her neck almost completely severed off. She was in and out of consciousness now and kept hearing a wheezing sound. She then realized that sound was coming from her severed windpipe. That’s when she realized she wasn’t going to survive although she felt no pain. Little did she know that her severed windpipe saved her life and was another miracle. She then remembered that because the guys thought she was going to die, they started addressing each other by their real names, Frans and Theuns. 🍀_8 She didn’t want what happened to her to happen to anybody else. She struggled and wrote their names on the sand where she was lying. Below that she wrote, ‘I love Mom’ in case she doesn’t make it. She then did some quick thinking. The denim shirt that she wore was tossed out close to her. She grabbed it, placed her intestines back into her abdomen and used the denim shirt to hold everything in. She then tried to crawl onto her knees but it was more difficult to keep her intestines in place when she was in that position. She struggled to stand up and when she finally did, everything went black. She brought her hand to touch her head and it completely went inside her throat! She was practically decapitated. So she had to hold her head up with one hand and her abdomen with another. 🍀_9 She slowly walked inch by inch until she reached the main road. She then just collapsed in the middle of the road. After some time, she saw a car approaching her. She suddenly was scared what if they run over her or worse what if it’s those guys again. But this car just sped off past her. She said she wasn’t mad because she understood but she felt very sad. Then a second car approached and it stopped at the sight of her. This car was jam-packed with people who were on vacation in Port Elizabeth and one of them was Tiaan Eilerd, a veterinary student. Tiaan rushed out of the car, got on his hands and knees, and immediately took Alison’s hand. At that moment, she felt very safe because there was just something about his face that was so calm, collected and kind. 🍀_10 He told his friends to call the police immediately. Tiaan had completed one year in veterinary school so he has some medical knowledge. He quickly took off his shirt and used it to apply gentle pressure to her neck to reduce blood loss. To make sure Alison doesn’t lose consciousness, Tiaan kept talking to her and helped her work on her breathing. He then noticed her denim shirt covered in blood and pulled it away gently. He was greeted by a horrifying scene but he remained calm to not freak her out. At this point, he wasn’t sure if she was going to make it but he wanted the guys who did this to her to be caught.

🍀_1 So he started asking her yes or no questions to find out everything. Since she couldn’t talk, for yes she would squeeze his hands once and twice for no. He gathered a lot of information from that and to keep her conscious, he was talking the most random things to her and at that moment, Alison realized that she had to live, at least for him because he was doing his best to keep her alive. So earlier when the police were called, they said the ambulance would arrive in 15 minutes but it was one and a half hours later when the police and paramedics arrived. Tiaan got into the ambulance with Alison because she refused to let go of his hand. Once they arrived at the hospital, that was when Tiaan decided that he wanted to be a doctor instead of a veterinarian. Later in life, he would be the doctor who delivers one of Alison’s children. 🍀_2 Alison then signed the consent form to be operated on, wrote her mother’s phone number right underneath it, and was immediately brought into the operation theatre. Another miracle was that the doctor on call that night was a throat specialist. The operation wasn’t an easy one but it was successful. She was then brought to the ICU. The next morning, Frans and Theuns were arrested. They had already been arrested twice for two different rape charges. They were actually out on bail when they tried to murder Alison. The police went to the hospital and showed a folder of photos to Alison. She picked out the photos of Frans and Theuns and wrote their names on them. She couldn’t talk because she had a tube going through her throat. 🍀_3 The police returned in the afternoon and said that the prosecutors wanted Alison to verbalize Frans and Theuns' names to build a stronger case. The doctors were horrified because, for her to talk, they had to remove the tube from her lungs through her trachea that had just been operated on. After all, it was going through her vocal cords. They said speaking through the tube would be too painful and might jeopardize the good work they did for her and that she might even die. But Alison was so brave and determined. She wrote on a paper asking the doctor to take the tube out, so they took it out and she told the police that her attackers were Frans and Theuns. 🍀_4 Frans and Theuns let their first and second victim walk free. The victims went to the police and they were arrested for both charges of rape. That was why they wanted to murder Alison, to make sure they didn’t get caught. I’m still trying to understand how they were even out on bail. So now, after Frans and Theuns were arrested for kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder of Alison, Frans kept claiming that a demon is trapped in his body and it told him to do all those things. The police saw right through him. Even during the trial, Frans kept saying that he was a Satanist and it was Satan who possessed him to do all those things to Alison. 🍀_5 Judge Chris Jansen sentenced Frans and Theuns to life in prison without the chance of parole. However, due to a political decision, all prisoners who were sentenced before October 2004 were eligible for parole. In October 2015, it was determined they would not be out on parole but they would have the chance of parole every two years. Alison was told that she would never be able to have children due to the extent of her injuries. But this incredible woman got married and went on to have two sons! Tiaan Eilerd, the one who found her in the middle of the road became a gynaecologist and was the one who delivered her second son. Alison wrote a book titled ‘I Have Life’. There was also a documentary about her titled ‘Alison’. 🍀_6 Frans, the convicted monster wanted to be a part of the documentary and wanted to do an interview. Frans also had a list of demands: A letter of forgiveness from Alison that was signed Profit shares from Alison’s book sales and motivational speaking! He wanted a portion of all that money because he believed that what he did to Alison was the only reason for her success story. The audacity! Well, none of those demands were met. 🍀_7 Now, let’s go into the miracles that came together the day Alison was attacked which eventually helped her to survive: 1. She remained calm and emotionless without fighting back throughout the whole ordeal. This ensured she still had energy when she had to stand up and walk all the way to the main road. 2. When she was strangled, she peed herself. The doctors explained that if she didn’t do that, her bowels would have exploded and that would have caused serious fatal infections in her intestines. 3. It was a full moon the night she was attacked. The place she was in had no streetlights and the full moon helped her find her way to the main road. 🍀_8 4. A person was sure to be dead when stabbed 37 times in the abdomen and pelvic area. Miraculously, they missed every single vital organ of hers that helped her survive. 5. They sliced her throat 17 times but they missed all of her vital arteries and her voice box so she could talk. 6. Them cutting through her windpipe was fortunate because this allowed her to breathe. If they didn’t, she would have died. 7. Instead of taking her clothes with them, they threw them out beside her. If she didn’t have her denim shirt, she wouldn’t have been able to stand up as she wouldn’t have been able to keep her intestines in. 🍀_9 8. Tiaan Eilerd doesn’t even live anywhere near the place where she was attacked. He was on vacation there and had also completed one year in Veterinary school. His ability to keep calm and his basic medical knowledge helped keep her alive until the paramedics arrived. 9. The doctor on call the night Alison was almost decapitated was a throat specialist. Despite this case being so gruesome, it was very inspirational. Alison had such a strong will to live and never gave up easily. She’s incredibly amazing!