Hell's Princess Quotes

“Religion in its fanatic state may be a passion devoid of morality that will take any means to an end.”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“In comparing Belle to Jack the Ripper as a murderer driven by bloodlust and employing a signature MO, this anonymous expert accurately identified her as the type of homicidal maniac for which no name had yet been coined: what a later age would call a serial killer.”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“this person saw Mrs. Gunness as “a maniac of the much-dreaded type that includes the White Chapel murderer.” It is “not money” that drives such killers “but the constantly growing appetite for blood, to cut deep and watch the blood flow, to dabble the hands in it, to revel in the odor of it.” One “distinguishing features of these criminals is their invariable use of the same methods in every case. Mrs. Gunness decapitated every one of her victims. In every case she severed the limbs. Always there was the maximum of mutilation.”[9]”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“No, sir!” cried Maxson, clearly incensed at the suggestion that he might engage in an activity as effete as reading fiction. “I want you to understand here and now that I do not read novels, no kind of novels!”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“She held him spellbound,” he went on, then let out a ragged breath. “So he went to his death.”[”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“British baby farmer Amelia Dyer, believed to have murdered several hundred infants in her care.[1”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“In Chicago, the appetite for every juicy tidbit about the case was fed by the yellow papers, which—when no actual news was available—cheerfully dished out wild rumor, lurid gossip, and even rank fabrication.”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“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”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“Religion is not the same as ethics. Religion in its fanatic state may be a passion devoid of morality that will take any means to an end.”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“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.[”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“In the incident of her husband’s death, her temptation to commit the alleged atrocities may have had its birth.”[”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“Smith bristled. “We don’t sweat people here,” he said. “La Porte is a civilized town. We’re not like Chicago and New York.”[”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“metamorphosed into a creature as evil as any mythical Hulder: “a woman,”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“With the memory of Dr. H. H. Holmes still fresh in their minds”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“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.”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“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.”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“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”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“The scientific investigator, in seeking an explanation for Mrs. Gunness’ unnatural crimes, would say that she was emotionally dead,” Munsterberg wrote.”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“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.”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“The friendly relations Belle enjoyed with her neighbors when she first came to La Porte were not fated to last. “No one was a friend of hers,” Louisa Diessl”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“I have observed that religion is not restraining in a moral see. Religion is not the same as ethics. Religion in its fanatic state may be a passion devoid of morality that will take any means to an end.”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“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.[”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“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]”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“Mrs. Gunness, the paper declared, was “now thought to be still alive.”[”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“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.”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“Belle Gunness was a lady fair In Indiana State. She weighed about three hundred pounds, And that is quite some weight. That she was stronger than a man Her neighbors all did own; She butchered hogs right easily, And did it all alone. But hogs were just a sideline She indulged in now and then; Her favorite occupation Was a-butchering of men.”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“Throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, newspapermen covering highly publicized murder trials rarely failed to comment, generally in tongue-clucking tones, on the large number of women who flocked to these proceedings and often made up the majority of spectators. That ordinary housewives and mothers should evince such eager interest in gruesome and salacious crimes seemed a shocking violation of every prevailing belief about the so-called gentler sex.”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“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”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“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.”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“to the place soon to be known throughout the nation as the “murder farm.”[4]”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men