Left on Her Mothers Front Lawn- The Story of Bella Fontenelle

Left on Her Mothers Front Lawn- The Story of Bella Fontenelle

A woman walked into the police station around midnight. She looked slightly disheveled and disoriented as well. She asked the police if she was able to make a phone call because there was a family problem going on. When the police asked her what was going on in an attempt to help the woman, she simply told them, “I don’t want to talk about it.” Hours later, she, along with her six-year-old stepdaughter, were reported as missing.

The case I have for you today is very disturbing, and it shows what can happen when revenge and jealousy go way too far. What one woman did to a little girl because of her own insecurities is just heart-wrenching. This is the story of Bella Fontenelle.

Bella Fontenelle was born sometime around April of 2017, though there’s no exact birthday available. Her parents’ names were Michael Fontenelle and Jennifer Zeldon. Bella was a beautiful, funny, and kind little girl, and she loved Disney princesses as well as playing dress-up. She was also a kindergartner at Saint Matthew the Apostle School in River Ridge, Louisiana.

Bella’s parents had met in college. They both had received degrees in accounting and both went on to be CPAs. They married and remained together for several years, and during that time, they had two beautiful daughters. Bella was the youngest, and then she had her sister who was only a year older than her, Arya.

Shortly after Bella was born, Michael and Jennifer split up. Even though their divorce was a difficult one, they still maintained joint custody and co-parented to the best of their abilities. Michael and Jennifer ended up living close to one another after the divorce in Harahan, Louisiana, which is a suburb of New Orleans. They both lived in the same neighborhood about two blocks from one another. This neighborhood was quaint, safe, and the neighbors were known to be friendly and considerate.

Two years after Michael and Jennifer ended their relationship, Michael began dating a woman by the name of Hannah Landon. She also goes by the aliases Bunok Lim and Bunok Landon. Now, it’s unclear how her and Michael met; however, she did move into the house that Michael owned and lived in with his girls sometime between 2018 and 2019. Prior to this, Hannah had lived in various apartments in the Mobile, Alabama area, about 150 miles northeast of Harahan.

In May of 2013, Hannah had married her former husband, Donald Dwayne Landon, but it’s unknown when they got divorced. She also has a son in Florida, but it’s unclear exactly what that mother-son relationship looks like. That’s about all we know at this time about Hannah, though there are claims that she had abandoned her previous family.

At the time of this crime in April 2023, Michael and Hannah had lived together for more than four years at their home on Donald Drive. Hannah was seen as a stepmother figure for the girls. Now, Hannah was also very jealous of Jennifer, Michael’s ex-wife. There was no reason to be, as there were no feelings left between the two of them, but you know how some women can be. She also seemed very jealous of Michael’s two daughters.

Because of all this jealousy, Hannah made it a point to make it look like her, Michael, Bella, and Arya were a very close and loving family. She would dress identically to the girls a lot, and not just for the holidays, but for many pictures and occasions. Now, family friends thought this was kind of odd because Hannah wasn’t the girls’ real mother, and their real mother was very much involved in their lives. All of this was just for show, because her relationship with the girls was not as close as she was making it out to be.

In fact, Bella had at one point told a school counselor that she did not like going to her father’s house and that Hannah was mean to her and her sister. Even Michael’s mother, Barbara Fontenelle, was not a huge fan of Hannah. In fact, his entire family found Hannah to be strange and unsettling. They said she wasn’t close to anyone in Michael’s family despite the two having been together for years. And since Hannah was jealous of Jennifer, needless to say, those two didn’t get along either.

It seems like Hannah really didn’t get along with anybody in Michael’s life. It sounds like she was very controlling and wanted to be the only person in his life. Now, I don’t know this for sure, but that’s what it sounds like to me, and why Michael didn’t see that sooner and realize maybe she was a good actress. It’s believed that due to the persistent conflict that Hannah was having with Jennifer, Hannah would take out her anger on Bella. It doesn’t say that she was actually physical towards her, but it sounds like it was more of an emotional and mental type of abuse. Coincidentally, Bella was also the one who most closely resembled her mother.

Then there was an incident on June 8, 2021, that led to a physical altercation between Hannah and the girls’ biological mom. That day, Jennifer, Hannah, Michael, Bella, Arya, and Jennifer’s sister, Evelyn, were attending Bella and Arya’s swim meets at the Riverside Country Club in Harahan. Jennifer approached her daughters to give them hugs and congratulate them on a job well done, but then Hannah intervened and grabbed one of the girls from Jennifer. She would not let Jennifer hug her own daughter.

Yeah, that’d be the day! Hannah started going off on Jennifer about how it was Michael’s custody day and that’s why she couldn’t see them. She was simply trying to talk to her daughters and hug them; she wasn’t trying to take them anywhere. And even if she was, Jennifer and Michael had joint custody, so if it was okay with Michael, she could have taken them.

In order to end the conflict, Michael told Hannah to let Jennifer hug her own daughter for one minute. Hannah agreed—not that it matters, because I don’t care if you agree, I’m hugging my own daughter, get out of the way. So, since Hannah agreed to let Jennifer get a hug from her own daughter, she decided she was going to take out her cell phone and start recording.

Jennifer’s sister, Evelyn, put her hand in front of the camera and told her to stop recording. Well, Hannah didn’t like this and slapped Evelyn’s hand away. Evelyn told Hannah to never touch her again, at which point Hannah decided to do the exact opposite and grabbed Evelyn’s hair and started yanking it. Evelyn reciprocated and started yanking on Hannah’s hair. A bystander ended up stepping in and breaking up the quarrel.

The police were called, and both women were pulled aside and interviewed separately. Hannah was described as being extremely uncooperative, and she kept blaming Jennifer and Evelyn for everything that happened—of course she did. Hannah’s version of the story was that she was simply getting one of the girls out of the pool, and Evelyn came up to her, grabbed her by the shoulder, spun Hannah around, and then attacked her completely unprovoked. Hannah said it was then that she pulled out her phone to record, but she wasn’t sure if she caught anything. She also would not provide the video to police.

It’s also to be noted that Hannah would not give police officers any of her personal information until she was threatened with charges. She at first lied to officers when they asked her for her phone number; she said she didn’t have a phone, which directly contradicted her telling them that she took out her phone to record this all happening. She also told them that people just got in contact with her via email. Oh, okay. So they asked her, just to humor her I’m sure, what Michael’s phone number was. She told them that Michael also did not have a phone. They said, “Well, whose phone did we just see him using earlier?” to which she said, “Oh, I don’t know.”

Hannah received a summons for simple battery due to this incident, and at that time, Hannah decided that she was going to file a temporary restraining order against Jennifer and her sister Evelyn. In order to obtain the restraining order, Hannah had claimed that Jennifer had threatened her many times as well as assaulted her. She also noted a second altercation that happened on March 17, 2021. On that day, the women were attending a children’s soccer game. Hannah claimed that Jennifer approached her, grabbed her by the wrist, pulled her in close, and told her, “I will hurt you.” Hannah said that she approached her a second time during the same soccer game and again grabbed her and threatened her. The temporary restraining order was denied by a judge on August 5th, 2021, as there were no grounds to prove any of the things that Hannah was claiming.

That takes us to April of 2023. Michael, who is a certified public accountant, was in the middle of tax season. It was extremely busy at work, and he was working up until 10 p.m. some nights. So, on the evening of April 25th, Bella and Arya’s grandmother brought the two girls to visit their father at work so they could spend some time with him that day. Afterwards, she brought the girls back home, and Hannah was the one that was waiting there for them. By the time that Michael got home that night, he was overworked and exhausted, and he ended up falling asleep on the living room couch.

It wasn’t until the next morning when he woke up on Wednesday, April 26th, that he noticed that Hannah and Bella were nowhere to be seen. He hadn’t noticed that they also were not there the night before since he had fallen asleep so quickly. He also could not get a hold of Hannah on her cell phone. So, Michael went down to the police station and filed a missing persons report for both of them around 7:30 a.m.

A search of the area ensued. The police first went to Michael’s house, and they didn’t see anything there—no evidence, no trace of them. Next, they decided to go to Bella’s biological mother’s house, Jennifer’s. And while they were there, they saw something very strange on the front lawn. This strange thing was a white 10-gallon bucket just sitting there, and Jennifer said that it had not been there previously. When police looked in this bucket, they found the most unsettling and gruesome discovery. There was Bella’s little body all scrunched up into the fetal position inside of this small 10-gallon bucket.

Around midnight the previous night, apparently, Hannah had gone to the police station, and she looked disheveled and confused, and asked the police if she could make a phone call because she was having some kind of family problem. When they asked her what kind of family problem, trying to help her, she told them she did not want to talk about it. The police noticed that nothing Hannah was saying was really making sense, so they decided to call EMS and bring her to the hospital so that she could get a mental health evaluation done.

Around 2:00 p.m., police went to the hospital where Hannah was. They had not made the connection that the woman from the night previous and the missing woman were the same person, and I’m guessing this was probably because she had aliases, but I’m not sure why they did not connect the dots there. Hannah was placed under arrest at the hospital, and she was charged with first-degree murder as well as obstruction of justice. She was booked into the Jefferson Parish Correctional Center, and she was put on a watch to make sure she didn’t try to get rid of herself, so to speak.

Both of Bella’s biological parents had been questioned and cleared of any involvement. So why was Hannah arrested and charged, you ask? Well, police had spoken to people who lived in the same neighborhood as Jennifer to see if any of them had home surveillance. They happened to find a resident who had a Ring doorbell camera, and his Ring doorbell camera caught something.

As you can see in this footage, Hannah is walking down the sidewalk at 9:35 p.m. with a calm eeriness, as if she were just transporting a load of groceries. She’s pulling a wagon, and in the wagon is the chlorine bucket—the same chlorine bucket that was found on Jennifer’s lawn with Bella’s body in it. She was acting like this was no big deal to be walking down the sidewalk like that, and it was pretty early in the night too. It’s not like it was the middle of the night; it was only 9:30, and nobody said they saw anything. Luckily, the Ring doorbell had caught it.

After Hannah had left Bella’s body behind in the 10-gallon bucket, she then returned the wagon to Michael’s home, put her cell phone into a plastic bag, and buried it nearby. It’s said that investigators are still looking at Hannah’s phone, but it’s also said that Hannah had searched for defense lawyers on her phone prior to her arrest—not that any further proof of this murder is needed, in my opinion. It’s believed that Bella was manually strangulated while in her father’s home before being contorted and shoved into the small 10-gallon bucket that was then transported to her mother’s house.

Even though there was no motive revealed, the most likely cause is that Hannah was jealous, didn’t like Bella, or wanted to get revenge on Jennifer. She very clearly put the bucket on Bella’s mother’s front lawn like she wanted her to be the one to discover her daughter like that. Hannah was arraigned in August of this year for her charge of first-degree murder as well as her two charges of obstruction of justice. At that time, she pled not guilty. Hannah’s lawyers requested that she have access to a psychiatrist. Fabulous idea, fabulous. She could face a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole if she is convicted. She is not going to be facing the death penalty as far as we know, as the prosecution has decided to not pursue that at this time.

Bella’s principal at Saint Matthew’s canceled classes for the rest of the week after Bella’s body was found. They also offered counseling for the students and teachers at her school. Bella is greatly missed by all of the faculty and students alike. They said that she was a kind and caring little girl who had the best smile. Bella Fontenelle was laid to rest on May 5th, 2023. Her services were held at Saint Matthew the Apostle Church. Everyone in attendance wore at least a small amount of red, as it was Bella’s favorite color. She was then buried at an undisclosed location.

Well, thank you for listening to all of Bella’s story today. Why do you think that Hannah did it? Personally, I think it’s a little bit of jealousy because of the affection their father had for the girls, a little bit of jealousy that the girls loved their biological mother more, and I think it was a little bit of revenge on Jennifer as well. I think it was a little bit of all those three things combined, and she just lost it. I also wonder if maybe her and Michael’s relationship wasn’t going so well and that was part of it. It hasn’t been said yet, so we’re not sure, but no matter what the motive, it’s disgusting and incomprehensible how somebody could do this to an innocent little girl.

I will keep you updated on any new information that I see on this case because I really want to know what else was going on in this woman’s head. What made her actually do this? Because this is just a horrendous thing to do, and for what reason? It’s a stupid reason.