100-year mystery: Did Indiana woman get away with murders?

When authorities determined the fire was arson, suspicion turned to a handyman who had worked for Gunness and had been her lover. He was convicted of arson but acquitted of murder.

For a quarter of a century, Gunness sightings were reported all over the country.

The last came in 1931, when a woman named Esther Carlson died in Los Angeles while awaiting trial on charges she killed her employer. Carlson resembled Gunness, was about the same age, and there was no record of her before 1908, Simmons said.

Simmons' team exhumed a body believed to be Gunness' from a Chicago-area cemetery in November. The casket contained body parts from two children but they did not belong to the foster children reported to have died in the fire. They could be remains of other victims whose remains had been buried in the basement and were inadvertently scooped up in the ashes, Simmons said.

"Now we don't know whether we're adding two more people to our body count," she said.