SPEAKER_00 0:44

Welcome to the Femme Fatal, a true crime podcast with an astrology twist. I'm your host, Stacy Dotson. Each week I'll be joined by a guest host because this femme fatale prefers not to work alone. Hey everybody, welcome back to the Femme Fatal. I'm joined today by my good friend Becky, and we're gonna talk about Belle Gunnis. Hey Becky. Hey, Stacy, it's good to see you. It's good to see you too. Thanks for joining me on this Friday evening, or prevening, I guess, if you will. Thanks for having me. So, what made you interested in Bell Gunnis?

SPEAKER_01 1:22

I've had a lifelong interest in serial killers. Yes, we mean. Yeah. I mean, I remember in college and taking that first English class you have to take. That's all writing, all the different types of essays. And all of mine were about serial killers. They probably reported you, like your professor, like uh let's keep an eye on that one. Interesting side note, it was at HCC, and my teacher was actually Glenna Bell, who wrote for public news at the time. She was a musician and also she wrote articles sometimes for the public news. So, anyway, kind of cool.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

And for people that don't know, public news was the coolest. It is so sad that it's gone. Oh, I loved it. But sorry to cut you off. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 2:11

And so I remember like she would pick people's essays to read or to have them read. She picked mine and she gave a preface of like, you know, this may not be up everybody's alley. It may be a little hard for some to listen to. And everybody knew it was me that wrote it. And I don't even remember what that was about, probably Richard Ramirez or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 2:38

But he's a good one.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

To get back to why Belle Gunnis, it's because really she is one of America's most prolific serial killers. It's believed that she killed between 14 and 40 people. And I mean, if you're thinking about she's one of the first women documented for this many people, it's pretty crazy. Yes. Let's get in. Let's dive in. Belle Gunnis, who is also often called Hell's Belle, is, as I said, one of America's most prolific serial killers. Mysterious as well, because we'll talk about it more later on, but she has never been found. And so it's pretty interesting. She's a Norwegian immigrant who settled in the Midwest. As I said, she's believed to have murdered between 14 and 40 people between the years of 1884 and 1908. The alleged murders included husbands, her children, and numerous suitors who were attracted by personal ads that she would place in the Norwegian language newspapers.

SPEAKER_00 3:48

Oh, I didn't know that.

SPEAKER_01 3:50

I also didn't know about the kids. I thought it was just men. No, kids. And I don't think she actually gave birth to any children. These were children that were adopted, or even her husband's kids. Oh, okay. Now that makes sense. Yeah. Her story is a mix of insurance fraud, lonely hearts ads, and a disappearance that remains unsolved to this day.

SPEAKER_00 4:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

In her early life, she was born Brynhild Paul Stadter Sturset on November 11, 1859, in an impoverished farming community in Norway. She was the youngest of eight children, and her father was a stonemason. At the age of 14, she began saving money to come to America. And she worked in neighborhood farms where she milked and herded cattle. In 1881, she came to the United States, arrived in Chicago, Illinois, and the name on the log was recorded as Belle in the passenger log. So obviously she had changed her name. She ended up in Chicago meeting up with her older sister. And that's where she met her first husband, Mads Sorensen. But before B, she embarked on her notorious life of crime. She worked as a domestic servant and later took a job cutting up animal carcasses at the butcher's shop, which would be a lot of help later on.

SPEAKER_00 5:30

Yeah. You get to desensitize yourself enough, you know? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

So her early life was also marked by a suspicious pattern of tragedies that were followed by insurance payouts. So her and Mads, they had a business and a home, and both their business and their home burned down in separate incidents. In both cases, she collected the insurance money. Oh, she did have babies. Sorry. Two of her infants died of acute colitis. Oh. Which I guess that's like severe stomach issues, right? And so whether they determined what caused it or not, I don't know, but that's what's listed as how they died.

SPEAKER_00 6:16

So her and Mads had two kids together and they did not survive. Right.

SPEAKER_01 6:23

She had taken out life insurance policies on the babies already. On both of them? And so she ended up collecting on that. Mads died on the exact day two of his life insurance policies overlapped. So I guess one he already had, and then the other one came to be, you know, there's a certain amount of time before it goes into effect. So she was able to collect on that about $5,000, which was a lot of money at the time. And she claimed that he died of a brain hemorrhage. An accident happened where like an anvil, some heavy machinery fell and hit him on the head, is what she said. Wow. That it just fell off the shelf.

SPEAKER_00 7:18

Very wily coyote anvil type thing.

SPEAKER_01 7:22

Yeah. So then she moved. She moved from Chicago to a place called LaPorte, Indiana. Once there, she bought a pig farm and married husband number two, Peter Gunnis. Within a week, his daughter, who he had from a prior marriage, died while in Bell's care. Less than a year later, Peter himself died when a heavy meat grinder allegedly fell from a high shelf. Oh my god. And crushed his skull. At that point, Bell collected $3,000 from that insurance payout.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

So again, you know, it doesn't sound like a lot to us right now, but back then I'm sure it was a ton. Yeah. So after Peter's death, she began placing ads in the Norwegian language newspapers to find a new husband. And her ads were like really direct. I looked up to find out if I could like find any of the wording or find any pictures of the ads. And I found this one. It was like personal. Comely widow who owns a large farm in one of the finest districts in LaPorte County, Indiana, desires to make the acquaintance of a gentleman equally well provided. Ah, with view of joining fortunes. Triflers need not apply. Triflers. That's a great word. It's totally funny.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

So she's like Craigslist right there.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

Yeah, totally. And I mean, you know, the fact that she's advertising, hey, I'm not much to look at, but I own, I own this stuff, and let's uh, you know, get our stuff together and have a lot of money. Yeah. So men would come to the farm with their life savings in hand, ready to marry her and live a comfortable life. But none ever left. Yeah, none were ever seen again. Yeah. They didn't leave the house and nobody knew of their whereabouts. Actually, did they officially ever get married? She only married Gunnis. No, yeah. She had many other men that came through that, but I mean, basically, she just got them there and within days they were gone. Yeah. Yeah. No chance to get married. So in April 1908, the farmhouse burned down to the ground. And in the ruins, the investigators found the bodies of Belle's three children and a headless female corpse. While digging through the property, specifically in the hog pen and the garden area, authorities found remains of at least 11 more people, dismembered bodies of suitors who had responded to her ads, and the body of her former foster daughter, Jenny Olson. Belle had said at one point that she was away at school when people asked for her because she had been missing for a while. The bodies were found. The headless female was found, no head found anywhere on the property. So it's assumed that the headless woman is Belle. And of course, her three children are there. So that's that. And nobody has seen or heard from her since. Right. And wouldn't now, anyways, but yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:54

So yeah, so there's suspicion that she just did that on her own. I mean, obviously, you mentioned the fires in the beginning. So she knew how to set a fire.

SPEAKER_01 11:05

That's right. You know, there's a lot of talk about it's a legend, the legend of Belle Gunnis, but whether she actually died in the fire, and there were a lot of clues that suggested that the headless body wasn't hers. One was the size that the body was lots smaller than Belle. Belle was not a small woman. She was like almost six foot, right? Yeah. And a heavier, you know, stocky, strong woman worked the farm and to chop people up into tiny pieces, I guess. There is the the head part of the height that was missing. Right. Yeah, that's right. But I think, you know, they mentioned too, not just the height, but like the weight, the actual size of the person was not large enough to have been her. The missing head, of course, is a mystery. The it was never found, and it leads many to believe that she just murdered somebody else, of course, and put them in there to look like her. And whatever may have happened to the head, who knows? Yeah. And then she had a hired hand. His name was Ray Lampier. And he was convicted of arson, but not murder, because he was the only person that they could find that may have been responsible for doing this. And since at first they didn't necessarily suspect her, they were looking for somebody who would have done this because they find a dead woman and her children. And so he was the one that the guilt fell on. But on his deathbed, he claimed that Belle had orchestrated the whole thing and had escaped with her money. So he, you know, lived out his life convicted of the arson. And then in the end said that she planned it all. I know, and I don't know why he would have made that up if it wasn't true. And especially like if it's like, you know, you hear people when they're dying, they want to tell the truth and come clean about things, you know. It's likely that she paid him a lot of money, maybe, or what he thought to be a lot of money at the time to help her. And so he did it and then got caught.

SPEAKER_00 13:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:23

Uh, since you know, we have more access to DNA. I haven't noticed, you know, I actually did do a little bit of searching to find out if there'd been any more recent tests conducted, but the one I read about was from 2008, and it came up as inconclusive that that body or the whatever remains of that body was hers or not. So they didn't have enough information.

SPEAKER_00 13:48

I would wonder what they used to test it again. So they had to excavate her or I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

Yeah. And so then they just, you know, bone. It's amazing. Like when you think about bone and if there's hair left and all the way people can be connected.

SPEAKER_00 14:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:06

And what they can get out of the DNA. Now, this was 2008. So if they tried it now, I bet you they could find out for sure. Because the technology has just grown so much.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

Yeah, I guess if they have her DNA, you think about all those sites like 23andMe and Ancestry and stuff like that, and how that kind of stuff has been important in solving a lot of unsolved crime. And it's like, so you have her DNA somewhere. Maybe you find a relative, and then you find that relative, and it turned out to be her. You know, she started a whole new identity. But that's part of the great mythology of this story, is everybody loves a conspiracy theory. For sure.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

And like it's probably some women out there, as women were like, yeah, wow, she got away with it.

unknown 14:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:00

You know, they had to prosecute a man because they never thought women would do stuff like this. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 15:07

That's right. And it's her own children. And, you know, even though there's all kinds of evidence and strange happenings in her life, it seems impossible that a woman would do such a thing.

SPEAKER_00 15:19

So I did a little research when they discovered the bodies. People were like selling food and trinkets outside to people like that were gonna come try to see the house and property. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

So it was like a circus event, you know, this was like a big deal. This is a small rural area. It's not like living in the city where there's crime all the time. And I mean, kids. There were kids out there, you know, riding their bikes around playing. I mean, what was it like 48 acres or something? Yeah, and people just watching them excavate these bodies and pieces of bodies. Yeah, it's like, oh gosh. I mean, entertainment, however, they can it's basically would be like watching Game of Thrones or something right now.

SPEAKER_00 16:11

Yeah, instead of binging a docuseries on Netflix that she would most definitely get immediately after that.

SPEAKER_01 16:19

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

You know, it's like they get to go there. But there was also, I found there was a ballad that was written about her. People sung it to the tune of Careless Love, which I do not know what that song is. But if anybody wants to like go find a good old song, Careless Love, and sing the Belle Guinness ballad, I put some lyrics here. So Hell's Belle Guinness, the Black Widow of the Heartland. She and Love will never be together, a sick, twisted joker, her heart beats in wild rapture. They all came to stay forever. Sheriff Schmutzer's man was the inquiring kind. No ge, of course, inquiring, inquiring, inquiring kind. And he wondered the reason Belle's head they couldn't find. Soon the mystery began to unwind. All they had to do was ask questions. And apparently, or this is actually a lyric, apparently Belle wrote her last will a day before, afraid her life was not too safe anymore. A jealous man she personally threw out her door, promised he'd return and burn her house down. There's a lot more to the song. So a band, like kind of a death metal band, macabre. Have you heard of them?

SPEAKER_01 17:40

Yeah, uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 17:41

They took some of those lyrics from that ballad and they wrote a song called Bella the Butcher.

SPEAKER_01 17:46

Oh, I listened to that one. Yeah. And I was reading the lyrics. I was like, oh my gosh, okay. And then there's actually this Tennessee Jet guy. Uh-huh. It's not that old of a song. I'm curious about whether that is to the actual tune of the original song.

SPEAKER_00 18:06

There's no documentation on who wrote it. So I'm, you know, I'm probably like, we could just record it too. I don't think we have to pay any royalties.

SPEAKER_01 18:14

Right, yeah. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 18:17

But I have to look up that guy and see if he sang the whole ballad.

SPEAKER_01 18:21

Yeah. And I wonder too what that other song. It was a popular song at the time, I think. The tune. I'll have to check that out.

SPEAKER_00 18:29

Careless Love. That's right. Careless Love. So we'd already caught up before we did this, and we talked a little bit about the pop culture. And in research, I went and watched the movie Method. It's not great. No. It came out, God, I want to say like 2005, 2004, and it had Elizabeth Hurley, and she played an actress that was playing Belle in a movie. And then there's Ray, played by Jeremy Sisto. I remember him first from Six Feet Under. And I realized I went back and looked, and this movie came out during the run of Six Feet Under. So you know, he's probably getting all kinds of attention. But I think I text you while I was watching it, like, oh my God, it's so bad I'm falling asleep. How can I get through this? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:26

What's funny? I was like, when you said you were gonna watch it, I was gonna tell you, oh, I'm gonna go ahead and watch it too. And I had already watched it, but I literally did not remember because it was so bad.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

And so I texted you and I said, luckily, Elizabeth Hurley and Jeremy Sisto are easy on the eyes because that is the only reason I stayed in that movie. I still am not even sure how it ended. Like I think maybe I dozed off. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 19:57

Yeah, I know I did because that's why I was like, when I went back to it to watch it, it was playing the credits. I was like, oh, I fell asleep. Falling asleep. Well, luckily you didn't talk Greg into watching it with you. You didn't have to subject him to that night.

SPEAKER_00 20:15

I usually make him watch these bad movies, but he did not, he was not there that night.

SPEAKER_01 20:19

So another thing uh is do you remember that show that was on HBO, Autopsy? Dr. Michael Baden. Yeah. Every week there was a new episode, and it would have like two or three autopsy strange things that happened. And there is an autopsy segment about Belle Gunnis and just about the mystery of, you know, the headless woman or whatever. And it does give a little history about her and then talk about like, and it was really pretty short segment of the show. Just talk about like what DNA could find out now. Of course, that episode, who knows when it aired, it was a long time ago. So, I mean, that show was popular. I remember watching it in high school. So it was like in the 80s, you know.

SPEAKER_00 21:06

I need to go back and re-watch some of that. And it was HBO as well.

SPEAKER_01 21:10

It was HBO, it was like when HBO was first out. I don't know how we had cable, but we did somehow.

SPEAKER_00 21:17

We had that little box with the knob. And I was like, you just keep flipping until you got the channel you wanted.

SPEAKER_01 21:25

You got to a channel, yeah. Oh my gosh. Oh my, forget remote controls. Our TV at that time, too, was also still a knob TV. There's a lot of knobs.

SPEAKER_00 21:37

Rotary phone. Rotary phone, like a lot of turning things in the past.

SPEAKER_01 21:42

Just keep clicking. There's a short YouTube documentary, too, that's not that long. That's pretty good. And a really short PBS documentary that's pretty well done. But that PBS one is only like eight or nine minutes, something like that. And another video on Vimeo, which I don't really even remember. It was short too, I think, because I remember I watched all these things kind of like back to back. The PBS one for me was like really the best one as far as a short documentary would go. The YouTube one, if I remember correctly, was done like Ghost Hunter or, you know, something kind of like that.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

So exciting. Right. But you also mentioned once you said it to me, I was like, oh my God, I'd look it up because Tracy Lords, that's a name I hadn't heard in a while. But you can't find it, right? There's a movie she's in.

SPEAKER_01 22:33

The Farm was the name of the Tracy Lords where I had looked it up and found it, and it kept saying that it was on Amazon. But when I went to Amazon, there was a movie called The Farm, but it definitely was not this movie. And so it's just the other day when we were talking about it, I started looking for it again because, like, if you find it, it says 2023. So, you know, it was supposed to already be out. But then there's no evidence of this film anywhere.

SPEAKER_00 22:59

I know.

SPEAKER_01 23:00

If anyone finds it, email us. Please let us know. But the other thing that I found is that when you and I were talking about it the other day and I did a search again, I came across that Bell. Tracy Lord's Bell is just the name of the film will just be Bell. And it's the same director that was for the farm. So my only thinking is that maybe they scrapped it for a while or wanted to who knows. Maybe they shot it and they've never released it or anything. Or it was not finished and they finished it because I mean, obviously, Tracy Lords is not super young anymore or anything. Yeah. But the movie poster for Belle is pretty cool looking compared to what the cover was of the farm. It was like just looked like a woman looking off into the distance. I don't know. It was kind of strange. It was not really a very serial killer looking cover, but this one shows her in front of an old farmhouse and she's wearing the period clothing and she just looks mean. Scary.

SPEAKER_00 24:12

I wonder if she had anything to do with producing that or any why she's starring in it. Because she kind of just disappeared for a little while.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

Yeah. It's obviously an artist rendering. It's the cover, it's not a photograph per se, but she looks really like older, a lot older.

SPEAKER_00 24:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:31

But they would probably naturally make her appear that way for this to be more worn looking, you know. Farm life hard. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. If anybody knows any information about this movie, I would love to know.

SPEAKER_00 24:45

I did see that there is a Laporte County Historical Society museum that has a Belle Gunnis exhibit with artifacts from the farm, including a piece of the actual chicken coop. Wow. So if we ever take a trip to Laporte, that's right, road trip. That would be fun. Some weird serial killer museum type road trip.

SPEAKER_01 25:08

Yeah, like for that movie. What was that movie with uh Brad Pitt and Juliet Lewis? It was California with the K. Yes, yes, is that right? California with the K. Yeah, yeah. So like they were going around because he was a photographer. He and his girlfriend were going to different sites of famous murders or infamous murders or something.

SPEAKER_00 25:31

And then they ran into serial killers. Yeah, it was a good movie. God, that was a long time ago. That was a really good movie. I'll have to revisit that one. Hey, uh, earlier you mentioned that episode of autopsy, and I had watched it in preparation for this episode. One thing that really stood out to me was the theory that Belle Gunnis may not have died in that farmhouse fire at all, and was actually found years later living under the name Esther Carlson.

SPEAKER_01 25:58

Yeah, autopsy dies into one of the biggest mysteries surrounding Belle. Officially, authorities concluded that Belle died in the fire at her Indiana farm in 1908. But decades later, in 1931, a woman named Esther Carlson died in Los Angeles. And one of her friends came forward with an incredible claim that Esther was actually Belle Gunnis, living under an assumed identity. And that friend was a neighbor who supposedly was assisting Esther in the commission of her crimes and said that Esther had told her that she was Belle Gunnis.

SPEAKER_00 26:36

Oh. But there was also some evidence, right, that made police take the theory seriously.

SPEAKER_01 26:43

Yeah, so there was. So Esther died of tuberculosis before she could go on trial. There were people living in Los Angeles at the time that had lived in Laporte and knew Belle when they lived in Laporte. One of these women saw Esther's photo in the paper and recognized and identified her as Belle Gunnis. And this led investigators to search Esther's room where they found photographs among her belongings that appeared to connect her to Belle, including a photo of Belle's daughters. People had said that she had said these were her daughters, but these were obviously Belle's daughters from pictures from the past from Belle. Given that Belle had already been suspected of faking her own death, it wasn't completely out of the question. And there was also the coincidence that they both use poisoning as their method of murder.

SPEAKER_00 27:34

But of course, there's still a lot of unanswered questions, right?

SPEAKER_01 27:37

Well, exactly. I mean, Esther died from tuberculosis, and because of the disease, an autopsy wasn't performed that could definitively prove whether she was Belle. And then thinking about the forensics of that time, too, like fingerprinting and that technology was just nowhere near what they have today. So while some people believed the case had finally been solved, others remain skeptical. And the autopsy episode is fun because it also brings up Ray Lampier, who was the farmhand who was believed to have assisted Belle in the commission of her crimes and helping her burn down the house and hide. Hide the evidence. Yeah. And before heading to prison, he said, Belle must have loved me because I am the only man she never killed. She said she would have married me if I had any life insurance. One thing I do know, I know that she is still alive. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 28:32

Poor misguided Ray.

SPEAKER_01 28:34

I know, right? I wonder if he loved her. He didn't say that.

SPEAKER_00 28:37

I mean, I think he did. He showed it by his actions, I guess. Yeah. What he did for her. And said more than a century later, Bill Guinness still manages to keep one final secret. Did she really perish in that fire, or did America's most infamous black widow escape and start over under a new name?

SPEAKER_01 28:55

And honestly, you know, we might never know. Historians and researchers have found that the timeline doesn't match up for Belle and Esther to have been the same person. According to records, Esther was born in Sweden and had lived in Arizona and Connecticut during the time that Belle lived in LaPorte. She was married, and there's like marriage licenses and a couple other things that researchers have found. I mean, talking about Esther, they found evidence of her living in these places.

SPEAKER_00 29:22

So Well, it sounds like we may have another Femme Fatal Badgirl to explore. I think so, because she was suspected of killing several men. So, Esther, welcome to the show. You'll be a future subject. Well, I'm gonna just wrap us up with some astrology real quick. And so remember, I'm working with an 1859 rural Norway birth.

SPEAKER_01 29:46

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 29:48

There's really no records there, no birth time, no rising sign, but we know her birth date, November 11th, 1859, and it gave us something to work with. So Belle Gunnis was born on November 11th, 1859, under a Scorpio sun. And on a site I found use that uses a farmer's almanac, I was able to go back and look in that she was born on a full moon. Okay. Yeah. When a full moon happens, the sun and the moon are sitting directly opposite of each other in the sky. So a full 180 degrees apart. And because she was born during a full moon, it's almost certainly a Taurus moon. That combination creates one of astrology's most intense oppositions, Scorpio versus Taurus. Okay. And Scorpio is associated with secrecy, power, transformation, and what lies beneath the surface. It's a sign that wants to know where the money is hidden, what people are concealing, and how power operates behind closed doors. Well, that fits her very well, doesn't it? Very, very much. Didn't she ask people to sew the money in their clothes or something like that?

SPEAKER_01 31:08

Yeah. You know, she was worried about them getting robbed partially, you know, but that she wanted them to have it hidden. To hide their money. Yeah. I don't know what her other intention behind that was. Any other intention could be other than hiding from thieves or keeping them from spending it on the way or somebody else giving it to somebody else. Who knows?

SPEAKER_00 31:30

Oh, maybe like if someone had come across them, they wouldn't think they had that much value on them that she knew where the value is. Or I don't know. I'm gonna get back into astrology. Okay, where did I stop? Scorpio energy is drawn to extremes life and death, loyalty and betrayal, intimacy and destruction. So Belle's story is drenched in Scorpio symbolism. Insurance payouts, secret graves, false identities, missing bodies, and a farmhouse that literally burned to the ground.

SPEAKER_01 32:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:06

Power and money. Power and money. Even the lingering question of whether she escaped feels incredibly Scorpio coded as well. Her legend survives because nothing about it ever feels fully resolved. Now to that full moon opposition, okay? Across the zodiac sits Taurus, the sign associated with land, possessions, comfort, security, and survival. And Belle didn't stalk the city streets or choose notoriety. She built a farm. She acquired property. She advertised for financially secure husbands again and again. And investigators found money and material security at the center of her alleged crimes. So astrologically, Taurus wants to preserve, Scorpio wants to transform. Taurus gathers resources, Scorpio controls them. And Bell's life seemed to embody that tug of war in its darkest form. And then there's the full moon itself. Full moon births are traditionally read as tension between two opposing pulls, a push me, pull you, between what the head wants and what the heart needs. Often played out dramatically and publicly. And Bell's particular access, Scorpio Taurus, is the money axis of the zodiac. Taurus is what's mine, possessions, land, security, comfort, and Scorpio is what's yours becomes ours. Shared resources, inheritance, assets. And Belle's whole life was a violent short circuit of that access.

SPEAKER_01 33:39

Definitely. I mean, it's like it was written just for her. Yeah. It really is. I mean, it describes her perfectly. She security, money, the land. Yeah, the fact that she didn't become some high society person where she probably still could have got away with all of the things she did. But that she instead wanted more and more. Yeah. Wanted more. And I guess growing up too, and not having a lot and in a rural farming community that was poor, she wanted things. She wanted things to demonstrate her wealth.

SPEAKER_00 34:13

So plus, as a tourist person myself, I'm a homebody. So it makes sense that she didn't really want to get out there and be social and do that. She wanted money at home. That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 34:27

I think the other thing to me was one of the things that was most disturbing. And then I don't think it doesn't necessarily have to do with the astrology, but it doesn't necessarily fit in any sign either. Is like her choice to kill the children. It just shows just how greedy she was, or the expectation that she needed to have more money or the money was going to run out, or whatever it was that spurred her to want to get all this money. It's strange to me, too. I wonder, you know, what's the history with that, with the children, or what was the thinking?

SPEAKER_00 35:04

What was the thinking behind that? And you don't want to think she did that. You don't want to think she killed her own two children for insurance money, but it doesn't look good when you look at everything afterwards. One last thing I did was a little numerology bonus. She was born on 1111. An 11 is a master number of heightened intuition, magnetism, and uncanny ability to read people. And its shadow expression is straight up manipulation. And so she got two of them: a double master 11 and a Scorpio sun under a full Taurus moon. So that wraps that up. Wow. Yeah. Put a little bow on it. Yeah, it was fun figuring out. I was like, oh, wait, she was born on a full moon. Like I can do stuff with this.

SPEAKER_01 35:51

Yeah, that's so cool. And it's so interesting to me because I don't know a lot about astrology and how all those things work. It's one of the reasons why I love your show so much, is because I learn a little bit more about it. Sometimes a little about myself, if the person happens to be in a Leo. But yeah, so I think it's really a cool thing to get to see how it really does fit the personalities of people.

SPEAKER_00 36:18

I always loved looking up like my sign and looking at numerology and things like that when I was younger. And then when I got the idea to do this, I was like, okay, everybody has a true crime podcast, right? You know, it's like I want to do one little different thing. And then I was like, I love doing astrology. You should see some of the books that I have had for like 20-something years. Like I've taped the spine together because I've used them so many times. That's so cool. I love that. So yeah, like I got right back into it. It's totally fun. But as you know, every sign has good qualities and bad qualities. So just because you might be a Scorpio with the Taurus moon doesn't mean you're gonna be a serial killer. Catfish wealthy widowed men for money and kill them. That's right. But you might. You might. You might. Yeah. Well, thank you, Becky, so much for joining me and you know, co-hosting with me on this was so fun and so interesting. You're so welcome.

SPEAKER_01 37:21

Yeah, I really enjoyed it, and I can't wait to do another one.

SPEAKER_00 37:25

I can't wait to have you back. Okay. I will link to things in the description that we talked about, the autopsy episode, a book, maybe uh the macabre song, I believe I mentioned.

SPEAKER_01 37:37

Yeah, that's right. Oh, yeah, definitely the autopsy episode. So people can hear Dr. Baden seeing the ballad of Bill Gunnis.

SPEAKER_00 37:45

The ballad of Bell. That's right. Yes. Okay, well, take care. Good night. Bye. The Femme Fatal. Created and hosted by Stacy Dotson, produced by Mark Williams, music by Marcia Yingling, Chad Jake, and Breg Loicano.