BEIJING, Jan. 11 (Xinhuanet) -- Did serial killer Belle "the Black Widow" Gunness fake her own death in 1908 by leaving a headless corpse in her burned-out Indiana farmhouse basement and move to California to continue her killing spree for another 23 years?

    That's the question University of Indianapolis researchers are trying to answer by comparing DNA from the exhumed body to cells stuck to letter Gunness mailed to wealthy suitors -- all of whom probably ended up buried behind the house, said Andrea Simmons, a graduate student in human biology leading the forensic investigation.

    "Gunness has got to be the most prolific female serial killer in history," Simmons told LiveScience. "She clearly killed 25 people, arguably 40, in less than a decade but we're not sure when she died. We're trying to put a lid on this case."

    Simmons explained that relatives of those Gunness allegedly killed for their money want to know exactly what happened to the legendary killer. She is said to have relied on poison for most of her crimes, which reportedly include killing both her husbands and all her children.

    "Days before the fire, she bought five gallons of kerosene and made a lot of noise in town about her farm hand plotting to kill her," Simmons said. Simmons noted that the suspect activities happened shortly after rumors of men showing up at Gunness' door and never being seen again started to circulate around her small town of La Porte, Indiana.

    But perhaps the strangest inconsistency in Gunness' story, Simmons explained, is that the body found in the basement had no head and rested next to the charred bodies of two children.

    "Without the head, the county coroner was uncomfortable pronouncing her dead," Simmons said.

    The convicted farm hand — Ray Lamphere — was locked away in prison for the rest of his life after the fire, but always maintained from his cell that Gunness had cheated authorities. The theory that she fled to California emerged after a woman matching Gunness' description was arrested in 1931 for poisoning a Norwegian man.

    Simmons, a prosecutor who decided mid-career to pick up a biology education, said her team has collected bone samples from the bodies recovered from the basement of the Gunness farm, and expects to extract DNA from them. They plan to compare the samples to those extracted from cells stuck in the glue of envelopes Gunness mailed to her prey.

    (Agencies)