Adolph Luetgert came to the United States from Germany in the 1870s and settled in Chicago. He immediately began to establish his own sausage business here, and these sausages were very popular with the locals.
Adolf's first wife died in 1877, leaving him with four children, and a few months later he already married a German woman named Louise Biknez.
The demand for delicious sausages grew, Luetgert's profits increased and in 1894 he decided to build a large sausage factory. By 1897, he was already considered the "sausage king" of Chicago, and his company bore the solid name "AL Luetgert Sausage & Packing Company".
Right next to the four-story sausage factory, Luetgert built a large three-story mansion for himself, his wife and children. Everything went well with him both in business and in family life.
Louise Biknez was a very attractive woman 10 years younger than her husband. She was small in stature and very graceful in build, which is why next to Adolf she looked more like his daughter.
For the wedding, Adolf presented her with a heavy gold ring created especially for Louise. The inside of the ring was engraved with "LL" (Louise and Louis). Then Luetgart did not yet know that it was this ring that would ruin both his work and life.
However, the happy life of the spouses soon began to crack, they often began to argue over every little thing, and all the neighbors and even factory workers heard these disputes. In the end, Luetgert was so tired of this that he moved to live in his office at the factory.
And on May 1, 1897, Louise suddenly disappeared somewhere without a trace. The elder sons began to look for their mother and came to their father at the factory, but Adolf told them that his wife had gone to visit her sister yesterday.
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Several days passed and Louise was still nowhere to be found. The first to lose patience was Didrich Biknez, Louise's brother, who filed a report with the police about his missing sister. Captain Hermann Schutter, who was described as a cruel, but honest detective, undertook the investigation into her case.
Schutter and his assistants began their search for Louise by interviewing neighbors and relatives. It quickly became clear that she did not go to her sister and none of her relatives had seen her at all in recent days. And from the neighbors, the captain learned about Louise's frequent quarrels with her husband.
Then the captain guessed to question one of the employees of the sausage factory by the name of Wilhelm Fulpeck and he said that on the eve of the loss he saw Louise entering the factory. Later, the night watchman confirmed that he had seen Louise at the factory late in the evening, who was with her husband Alfred.
When the same watchman said that Luetgert had given him a certain order to leave the factory for the whole night, Schutter's first suspicions crept in. They were strengthened when he learned that before Louise disappeared, the plant was closed for 10 weeks for reorganization, and the day before Louise disappeared, Luetgert ordered 378 pounds of crude potash (potassium carbonate) and 50 pounds of arsenic.
After that, a clear scheme lined up in Schutter's head - the sausage maker killed his wife, and then boiled her in acid, after which he burned the remains in the factory oven. With this theory in mind, Schutter's men began searching in the basement of the factory, where a huge vat of shredded chicken was located very close to the ovens.
The meat was removed from the vat and the thick residue at the bottom was carefully checked for bones or pieces of cloth from Louise's clothes. And soon Officer Walter Dean found there a piece of clearly from a human skull and part of a gold ring engraved with "LL" - Louise's rings.
On May 7, 1897, Adolf Lütgert was formally charged with the murder of his wife and arrested, despite the fact that he shouted his innocence. The search for Louise's remains continued, but nothing else was found. However, one piece of the ring was enough for the accusations.
When the details of the crime appeared in the press, a completely different version began to spread quickly among the local residents - Louise's body was not burned in acid and oven, but was put into minced meat for sausages.
And since many days have passed between her murder and the arrest of her husband, the sausage from her body has probably already been bought and eaten. People were horrified by such thoughts.
Needless to say, no one else bought Luetgert's products after that.
On October 21, 1897, a trial was held on Luetgert and the jury could not figure out the punishment. Someone wanted the death penalty for him, while others wanted to give him life. Luetgert's lawyer, Laurence Harmon, considered him innocent and believed it devoutly.
After the second court hearing on February 9, 1898, Adolph Luetgert was sentenced to life in the prison of Joliet, near Chicago. In prison, Adolf quickly became emaciated, became very restless and finally confessed to the guards that the ghost of his murdered wife Louise was coming to him. According to him, she wants to take revenge on him, although he did not kill her. Two years later, Adolf died of nervous and physical exhaustion.
His lawyer Lawrence Harmon, to the last, considered his client innocent and even spent 2 thousand dollars of his money trying to find Louise. But he never found her and ended his days in a mental hospital, as he went crazy from searching.
Soon after Adolf Luetgert died in prison, the ghost of the murdered Louise began to be seen next to their three-story mansion.
Now on this place (on the south-western corner of Hermitage Avenue and Diversey Parkway) there is neither a factory for a long time (it was heavily rebuilt in the later years), nor houses once standing here, but a translucent woman in an old dress is sometimes seen here to this day since. They say that the chance to see her is especially high on May 1, the day she was killed.
