“A deeply researched and morbidly fascinating chronicle of one of America’s most notorious female killers.” —The New York Times Book Review
An Amazon Charts bestseller.
In the pantheon of serial killers, Belle Gunness stands alone. She was the rarest of female psychopaths, a woman who engaged in wholesale slaughter, partly out of greed but mostly for the sheer joy of it. Between 1902 and 1908, she lured a succession of unsuspecting victims to her Indiana “murder farm.” Some were hired hands. Others were well-to-do bachelors. All of them vanished without a trace. When their bodies were dug up, they hadn’t merely been poisoned, like victims of other female killers. They’d been butchered.
Hell’s Princess is a riveting account of one of the most sensational killing sprees in the annals of American crime: the shocking series of murders committed by the woman who came to be known as Lady Bluebeard. The only definitive book on this notorious case and the first to reveal previously unknown information about its subject, Harold Schechter’s gripping, suspenseful narrative has all the elements of a classic mystery—and all the gruesome twists of a nightmare.
Download and start listening now!
Harold Schechter’s Hell’s Princess had me on the edge of my seat to the last page! Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles, Schechter’s hound that is always ready to pounce is Belle Gunness, America’s most notorious female serial killer. Schechter’s achievement is humanizing this inhuman monster, while making us feel the neediness and loneliness urging Belle’s victims to give up everything to get into her bed. How the case ultimately turns out is a seminal event in jurisprudence, [portrayed here] by one of America’s greatest storytellers and historians.
—
Fred Rosen, author of Murdering the President: Alexander Graham Bell and the Race to Save James Garfield