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Hell’s Belle — The 19th Century Female Serial Killer

For nearly two decades, Belle Gunness butchered men for money.

Pranshu "Maverick" Dwivedi
6 min readApr 6, 2021
Belle Gunness with children | Image in Public domain

Research shows that men are more likely than women to kill a stranger than someone they know. However, some of the more fascinating and often most twisted serial killers happen to be women.

Many of the male serial killers are driven by the “motive” of sexual compulsion, while women rarely ever kill for that motive. For women, more often than not the motive for one-off murders is revenge, but for it to become a habit — it has to be more than just that.

This is where greed and money come in. Hence the modus operandi for some female serial killers can be similar. There’s the case of the Black Widow Granny, who may have married and killed five men, in a very similar fashion, without ever being convicted for any of the five murders.

But one of the most intriguing cases of greed driving a woman to relentlessly kill comes from over a hundred years ago. The story of Belle Gunness.

Who was Belle Gunness?

Belle Gunness was born in Selbu, Norway in 1859 and while not much is known about her early life — one known fact is that she grew up in an environment of poverty and had to work on a farm to save up enough to move to…

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Pranshu "Maverick" Dwivedi
Pranshu "Maverick" Dwivedi

Written by Pranshu "Maverick" Dwivedi

Stay-at-home-dad who "retired" from a 12-year career in finance at the age of 35. Curious thinker with an opinion on nearly everything and is here to share it.

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