On May 4, 1897, Louisa Luetgert, the wife of the well-known Chicago sausage dealer Adolph Louis Luetgert, was reported missing. Police began to suspect the sausage-maker himself, and when they searched his factory, they found the following items in the sediment at the bottom of a large sausage vat: a tooth, two corset steels, and two gold rings, one of them engraved with the initials “L. L.” On May 17, Adolph Luetgert was arrested and charged with murder, accused of killing his wife and dissolving her body in lye.
The case became a national sensation, splashed on the front pages of newspapers across the country, and the lurid details of the crime and Luetgert’s pending trial captured the morbid public imagination throughout the summer. On August 6, the Topeka State Journal reported that sausage-makers in Chicago were beside themselves with fury over the case, and not because they sympathized with their fellow craftsman Luetgert.
“The sausagemakers declare,” the State Journal reported, “that when the first alleged discovery of the residuum of Mrs. Luetgert was made public, the appetite for sausage fell off to an extent that nearly bankrupted them. The butchers, their customers, they assert, would make purchases of pastroma, or pepper roulade of beef, but would shake their heads darkly when sausage was mentioned.”
