Quotes from Harold Schechter

set off a marketing frenzy, during which the heroine's name was bestowed upon a hat, several shoe designs, candy, toothpaste, soap, a brand of sausage, and even a town in Florida.

There had, of course, been notorious murders in Indiana before. Perhaps the most sensational was the 1895 case of Reverend William E. Hinshaw. A much-admired figure in the village of Belleville, Hinshaw was accused of killing his wife, Thirza—who had discovered his affair

God made man and woman. He made man the stronger and set him over a particular field. He gave woman a peculiar nature and set her in the home to be the presiding spirit there.

After consulting census books, cemetery records, city directories, and various other documents, he definitively established that the story the dying Carlson told about her background was true in every detail. She was not Belle Gunness.[

In our nation's popular culture, country life in the 1800s has often been portrayed as an idyllic experience, one that cultivated such quintessentially American values as self-reliance, rugged independence, a reverence for the land, a belief in the importance of hard work and self-sacrifice, and a willingness to fight when necessary for home, family, and community.

With the memory of Dr. H. H. Holmes still fresh in their minds

play The Tempest

Lewis Petrinovich, The Cannibal Within (New York: Aldine de Gruyter

unwanted notoriety to La Porte. It was not his purpose, said Smith, either "to defend the character of Belle Gunness" or "to drag it down." From the "dismembered bodies of nine persons [that] were found

The wayward morality of the country's "flaming youth" was blamed, at least in part, on their easy access to enclosed automobiles, which one outraged critic described as "bordellos on wheels.

In America, the advent of the modern serial killer coincided absolutely with the coming of the automobile.

She made me love her," said Colson, "and she scared me at the same time. I was suspicious of her on account of the way her husband, Peter Gunness, died.

would achieve lasting notoriety, becoming a permanent part of our national folklore. His name was Alfred Packer

None of these men stayed around very long, though neither Greening nor anyone else ever witnessed their departure. Strangely, every one of them left his trunk behind.

metamorphosed into a creature as evil as any mythical Hulder: "a woman

the Weeping Willow love slayer

Elsewhere in the journal, he transcribes the rules laid down by Benjamin Franklin as a prescription for happiness and success: "Eat not to dullness," "Avoid trifling conversation," "Waste nothing," "Let all things have their place," "Use no hurtful deceit," "Tolerate no uncleanness in body, clothes, or habitation," and so on.

May 5, the Chicago American, within the space of a few paragraphs, branded her as both "the most fiendish murderer of the age" and "the most fiendish murderess in history.

One would think there was enough unavoidable tragedy in everyone's existence to keep him from seeking the hideous and unsightly," he mused. "And yet it may be the fact that each has his cross to bear that leads him to come in contact with the world's wretchedness as a sort of palliative to his own."[11]

When Halliburton expressed curiosity about this "inconceivable power," Bob took him into his room, showed him his "immense file of pictures," and gave him a lecture on visualization. Far from being impressed, Halliburton became convinced that "Irwin had no pre-imagination, none whatsoever. That was his whole problem. He could imitate things. He couldn't create things.

Mrs. Gunness, the paper declared, was "now thought to be still alive."[

Several Indiana communities seemed seized by a perverse envy. When rumors spread that "a new 'death farm' where Mrs. Belle Gunness buried many of her victims" had been discovered near Warsaw, "the citizens of that place were thrown into a fever excitement" and appeared crestfallen when the story proved false.[

In the view of one prominent alienist, she was "a woman of dual personality: a kind and indulgent mother at certain times and at others a demon without fear of God of man or of the law.

Only the technology has changed. The public's appetite for sensational true-crime stories has remained exactly the same.