I was reading the CrimeLibrary about the infamous serial murder Belle Gunness.
For those who don’t know she had a farm and used personal ads in the early 1900s to get men as suitors or laborers. Then she for various reasons killed, them. She also killed her daughter.
Anyway the last she was seen was a huge fire at the farm which burned down the house and the thing is the woman found in the house was said to be Belle, so the cops kind of let it drop. Remember this was the early 1900s so there was no modern forensics.
But the woman had no head, the woman found was not the same shape as Belle and many people think she found a lady, killed her cut off her head and then burned her own place down to make it look like a suicide and then left for California.
I read in another article years later a woman matching Belles description was seen in California. She died and was buried.
My question is would anyone have the authority to dig up the corpse of this supposed woman and try to use modern forensics to see if that really WAS Bell Gunness?
I mean try to match the DNA (if any) to any of her relatives still alive, to see if the woman in California was Belle?
I guess the real question is, even if they couldn’t do that with DNA who would have the authority to make such a request seeing as the crime is so old. I am not really asking if it’d work but who has the authority to open old cases like this, that don’t really matter except as a historical curiosity?
I’d think that funding would be the big problem. It would be pretty expensive to exhumate the body, get DNA samples processed and find relatives for comparison and to what end. There’s no payoff and the local taxpayers would probably be a bit unhappy w/ having their money spent on something that acheived no end.