Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

People have been making wine in the San Julian region of France for centuries.

The wine harvested from their grapes is their pride and joy.

But like any product that depends on a plant in order to survive, the wine production there is vulnerable to crop failure.

The year was fifteen forty five.

That season, the vineyards were utterly ravaged by insects, devastating the winemakers of the region.

So what did they do?

Well?

If it was you or I, the most we could do is start from scratch and hope that things turned out better next season.

But remember this was France in the early Renaissance.

For all the advancements in art and culture, it was still a very spiritually driven society, and there was recourse for the average person who felt that they had been wronged by an animal.

They could take that animal to ecclesiastical court, and so that year the people of San Julyllen decided to do just that to a species of weavil that they blamed for the destruction of their vineyards.

They hired Pierre Ducal to be their legal representative, and he filed a complaint with the court.

It named the weevil species ringkites oroctus as the culprits and demanded punishment for the offending insect.

The state appointed a legal team to defend the weavils and the trial was set.

Predictably, the weavil trial did not last long.

After hearing the opening statements of both sides, the chair of the court, Frescois Bonivart, made a ruling.

He declined to pass sentence on the weevils, saying that the creatures acted according to their nature and according to the laws of God.

Therefore, it was the prosecution who needed to reflect on their own worthiness in the eyes of God.

The weevils represented, in the court's view, divine punishment on the people of Sant july En.

Bonavard said that the citizens of San Julien needed to demonstrate that they were a good Christian community.

They had to collectively repent of all their sins, pay their tithes to the church, and march in solemn procession around the vineyards.

The list of pious activities was extensive, with the mandate that at least two people from every Son Julienne household participates in order for the repentance to be true.

Not long after, representatives from Saint Julienne submitted a report to the local curate saying that they had done everything the court had asked and the weevils subsequently were no longer a problem.

It was maybe inconvenient for the people, but their problem was over for forty one year years at least in fifteen eighty seven, a new generation of weavils would return and cause trouble for the people again.

On April thirteenth of that year, representatives of San Julien requested legal assistance for dealing with another wave of their weavil driven blight.

In their petition, they referenced the earlier decision of the Ecclesiastical Cords, saying that the weavils had an i quote, resumed their pegradations and are doing incalculable injury, and as such, they asked the Prince Bishop to appoint new legal representatives for the weavils since their original legal defendants were deceased, they wanted to try the case again, the same crime, just different culprits.

This time, the state complied, and the Weavils, for the second time, now went to trial for destroying the vineyards of San Julien.

As you'd imagine, the defense maintained the argument from fifteen forty six, saying that the weavils were created by God and thus had a right to feed on the grasses of the earth.

The prosecution, on the other hand, argued that orrding to the Bible, animals are subservient to man, to which the defense rebudded that man certainly has a right to command the animals, but not to prosecute them.

The trial finally ended not with a punishment for the weavils or another round of piety for the people of San Julienne, but with a compromise of sorts.

The mayor offered the weavils a patch of land to live on where they could feast to their hearts content.

The legal team for the Weavils agreed to this, but before the agreement was finalized, one of the weavil's advocates pointed out that he couldn't sign the agreement after seeing the land.

It was barren and unwelcoming.

Experts were dispatched to examine the land on behalf of the Weavils, and that's where the story ends as far as we know.

You see, the final two pages of the court documentation no longer exist because, in an ironic twist, it seems that at some point in the past few hundred years, those pages were eaten by bugs.

Bell was a hard woman, born of hard times.

She grew up working on a farm in Norway before emigrating to the US in eighteen eighty one she was only twenty one years old.

She worked other hard jobs in the Chicago area until she met and married another Norwegian immigrant, Mads Sorensen, in eighteen eighty four, and it was around this time that Bell was awoken to the wonders of insurance.

It struck her as odd that you could pay for something that you would hope you would never need, whether it was home fire or health insurance.

She planned to get her money's worth out of it.

Bell and Mad's Chicago home mysteriously burned down, and they received an insurance payout.

Next, they purchased a small business, which, wouldn't you know it also burned down, and then they used that insurance money to buy a new, larger home.

It was at this point that Bell's insurance schemes took a turn for the macabre.

We mentioned that there are more than one type of insurance.

Well, now Bell wanted to see what kind of money she could get off of life insurance.

She and Mads took in four foster children and purchased policies on all of them.

Within a few years, two of them had died from and I quote colitis.

That's essentially colon inflammation caused by things like bacteria or food allergies or you know, poison.

Mads must have been at least somewhat of an accomplice in these schemes.

If he was, he should have considered that Bell's greed new no bounds, because next she took out a policy on him.

The truly remarkable aspect of this next scheme was that Bell decided her initial plan was thinking too small.

After taking out one policy on Mads, she decided the limits weren't high enough.

She took out a second, higher policy, and she wasn't content for one policy to end and the other to begin.

No, she waited until the one day that the two policies briefly overlapped, and then well Mads mysteriously passed away.

Bell next married a man named Peter, who, surprise surprise, she also took out a life insurance policy on.

He had two young daughters from a previous marriage.

One of them died just a week after he and Belle married, and he only lasted a few months himself Beyond that.

She claimed that Peter died after a meat grinder fell and hit him on the head.

But the thing about meat grinders is while they tend to be secured to a counter at waste level, so how one happened to wind up falling on Peter's head is a mystery.

Bell used all of this insurance money to buy herself a farm, and this would be the final most horrific stop on her murder spree.

For this next phase of her plan, she actually put an ad in multiple newspapers across the Midwest asking for a husband to come live with her on the farm.

Through this process, she attracted a man from South Dakota named Andrew Helgalin.

Andrew traveled from his home in South Dakota to Illinois to be with Belle.

But this time she didn't even wait for marriage before trying to get money out of him.

She convinced him to withdraw a large amount from his savings at a local bank and give the cash to her.

And Andrew, well, he doesn't seem to have been the wisest man of all time.

He did exactly as she said, and he went missing the next day.

But this time Bell might have bit off more than she could chew is Hee.

Andrew had a brother who soon came looking for him.

He was smart enough to check with the bank, who confirmed that Andrew had been there recently with Bell and withdrawn a large amount of money.

Belle knew that her murder spree might finally be at an end.

On April twenty eighth of nineteen oh eight, the workers on Bell's farm awoke to find the main house on fire.

The house burned to the ground before the fire department could arrive.

Once they did arrive, though, they found more than they ever could have bargained for.

Beneath the ruins in the house's basement, they found the bodies of three children, as well as a woman's decapitated corpse, they wondered if this perhaps was Bell.

Later, Andrew's brother arrived and helped the police identify Andrew's body buried elsewhere on the property, and more bodies were uncovered elsewhere.

Ultimately, historians believe that Belle's final body count to be somewhere between twenty to forty people.

It's hard to know for sure, given the nature of her crimes though.

Oh and the body of that headless woman they found in the basement, well, it was exhumed in two thousand and seven, and the testing showed that the body was probably someone other than Belle, which means that she likely killed someone and cut their head off an attempt to make the authorities think that she had died in the fire and somehow lost her head in the process.

Belle then set fire to her own house and fled out into the night, leaving historians very curious as to where she might have traveled next.

Nowadays, Bell Ganess is known as the most prolific female serial killer in American history, and she's also the most successful, having made the modern day equivalent of about a million dollars off of those crimes.

Whether or not she ever got to spend it, though, is one mystery that will probably never saw.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.

The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works.

I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com.

And until next time, stay curious.