Chicago's Shocking Sausage Vat Murder

There's an old story about a mother who sends her daughter off to the butcher to buy sausage. Along the way, the daughter vanishes. The next time her mom is frying up some bratwurst at home, she spots a piece of jewelry stuck inside the casing of the sausage. She breaks it open and pulls out a ring. She recognizes it because she bought it. It's the very same ring she gave her daughter for her birthday, right before she disappeared. And the mother realizes in horror what became of her lost child. Nowadays we consider this an urban legend, a silly tale with a sickening twist that's too absurd to believe, except urban legends are born from common anxieties, fears we can all relate to, of unseen dangers, like a stranger in your backseat, or feeling unsafe in your own home. In today's story, an arrogant sausage king and his wife battled their fears when faced with financial ruin, and they realize they don't want to go through that failure together. She wants to leave, but he can accept another defeat, and just like in the legend, he's a sicko with a keys to a sausage factory. I'm Harvey Gien, and this is Killer Stories. A Chicago Illinois in the 1890s, a symbol of a growing nation's economic progress, a place where immigrants can realize the American dream of becoming the next wealthy jerkoid of the gilded age, especially if you could get into the meat game, famously called the hog butcher for the world, Chicago in the 19th century is the epicenter of the meat industry for the whole country. Thanks to a central location and some new fangled train cars that can keep food cold, Chicago can deliver all the meats a person could ever want, which also makes some places in the city really stanky. From the Union stockyards on the south side to the factories along the river, Chicago at this time has a unique and infamous stench, but hey, you get used to it. I know I did. In 1892, a man stressed down one of those smelly streets on the north side. He's tall, solid, in his mid-40s, his walrus mustache, and semi-pompadour hairdo are wax to perfection. This is a man who works hard for his success, and yet he's still a little too proud of himself. His name is Adolf Lutkert. Everything he's hoped for worked towards and dreamed of his entire life has brought him to this moment. He is finally the sausage cane of Chicago. Here's how he got there. Nearly 30 years earlier, Adolf left his small hometown in Germany and came to the United States. He was young, naive, and optimistic that one day he would build his own fortune. But it doesn't come easy. He spent a couple of decades in tanneries and meat-packing plants, saving every dollar he earned. He settled down and built a family. But shortly after becoming a father, he also became a widower. His first wife passed away, leaving him alone to raise their son. That's how he met Luisa. They don't have the greatest love story ever told, okay? She needed a wife and she was there and attractive and German, so check, check, and check. That was all Adolf needed to know. In 1878, two months after losing his first wife, he married Luisa. As a bonus, she understands the value of hard work, the need to rise and grind. For years, she cleaned and looked after the homes of the wealthy as a domestic worker, as she wants a better life for herself, too. So while their marriage wasn't born out of passion, they do share a vision for the future they want – stability, comfort, and money. Their family grows during the 1880s, and all that time, they keep saving every penny. Once they have a big nest egg, Adolf quits his job. Along with Luisa's help, he opens a saloon. Now he's in business for himself, and he's a success. After a while, they sell the saloon and use the profits to start a new company. That's how Adolf gets his foot in the door of the meat industry. He knows this is where the real money is. I mean, it's been going strong for all these years. What could go wrong, right? So he starts a butcher shop. There's a storefront, and he also makes deliveries, kind of like the milkman. But for meat. Knock-knock-knock. Meat's here. I got some meat to deliver. But things really take off when Adolf gets the idea to make his own sausages. Frankly, it's not the worst idea, and Adolf really brought his A-game. Okay, sorry, that was a lot of sausage puns in a row. And what can I say, "I'm on a roll." Anyways, just in case you were wondering, Adolf is a sausage genius. Well, according to him anyway, his customers rave about how delicious the Frank Virtures are. He gets invited to sell them at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, which brings in millions of visitors from all over, and people reportedly talk about them for years. Things are going so well, Adolf scales up, way up. He opens his own sausage factory. By the early 1890s, he manages over 50 employees. Besides the tasty reputation, he has another advantage over the competition. See, usually in the summer, it's hard to store sausage for very long. And Adolf comes up with a type of sausage he can sell all year. So he never has to stop making money. Suddenly, the company is selling millions of pounds of sausage. They have customers all over the country, and they're raking in $100,000 per year. That's a few million dollars worth today. After all of Adolf and Luisa's hard work, they've made it. It's the big time, the sausage keen and by default queen of Chicago. Luisa will always remain stingy with her money. She never goes out to fancy restaurants or parties, but she does splurge on a new house. One that's far enough away from the factory that they don't have to smell it night and day. Now they have money and comfort. As for stability, well, Luisa knows that hard work alone doesn't always cut it. Success also relies on good luck, timing, and business savvy. And her husband doesn't really have any of those things. First, the panic of 1893 sets in. The financial crisis affects everyone. Adolf has just reached the pinnacle of his career. And now, his customers have no money to buy what he's selling. And the timing couldn't be worse. Before the panic hit, he started building a larger factory. Which he funded through a really big loan. Now, he owes a bank $50,000 and sales are dropping like flies around his stinky useless new factory. All along, Luisa hasn't asked her husband for much. They were always moving in the right direction. Things were always getting better, but now they're in danger of losing everything. And Luisa is scared. Adolf does try to pay off his debt. His best friend sets him up with a British investor for the sausage factory. If the deal goes through, Adolf will make enough money to pay off his debt and stay afloat. And he can stay on as the boss with a generous salary. But the money never comes through. Because the investor is really a con man. And to make matters worse, Adolf had lent him at least $16,000. So now, he's even further in the hole. When Luisa learns that Adolf fell for a con, she's beside herself. She tells him she would rather leave than lose everything, leave Chicago, leave him. It would be better than seeing the looks of pity on everyone's faces for the rest of her life. Adolf feels like she's constantly harping on his failures. All they do is fight. So once he opens a new factory, he spends less time at home. He puts a smog. bed in his office so he can sleep there on late nights, and avoid his wife. Reportedly, he's not alone in that little bed either. Adolf juggles up to three affairs at the same time. There's the saloon owner's wife. Oh! Then there's his widowed neighbor, and most often his own domestic worker, Mary, who by some accounts happens to be Louisa's cousin, hopefully a distant one. Mary stops by the office all the time, and Louisa seems to figure out what's happening between them. She demands that they fire Mary, but Adolf won't allow it. By the spring of 1897, things between the loot curses are as frigid as the winds blowing in from the Chicago River. Other economic depression hits the Midwest. The factory teeters on the brink of failure. For years now, Louisa has been talking about leaving her husband, although she hasn't made good on her threat. Meanwhile, Adolf has resorted to straight up ignoring his wife. He goes weeks without so much as glancing her way. It's his way of punishing her for making him so angry. But even that doesn't temper his growing rage, and confiding with friends, he insinuates that what he'd actually like to do is to crush or strangle Louisa. His friends ask him, "Why don't you just get a divorce?" But for some reason he never explains, Adolf doesn't like that idea. He now spends almost all of his time at the factory. He's scraping by, keeping the lights on with the skeleton crew. He factoring is almost at a standstill. There's barely any money, and he defaults on his death. Any day now, the bank will take ownership of his sausage kingdom. On May 1st, 1897, one of Louisa's sons comes to her. He's 11, and he begs his mom to go to the circus. It's only in town for a short while, but a ticket is 10 cents. Louisa has to tell him they don't have a dime to spare. Just then Adolf returns home and hands his son a coin. He figures the boy may as well have some fun while he can. It's around 10 p.m. that night when their son comes back from his adventure. As he's giving Louisa the full rundown, his dad appears and tells him to go to bed. He obeys and heads to his bedroom. He looks back and he sees Louisa remove her slippers as she curls up in a chair to read the newspaper. It's the last time he'll ever see his mother again. An eight year old snatch from her bedroom comes back 20 years later to take down her kidnapper. A mother goes on an international man hunt to track down her daughter's killer. A young woman leaves clues behind, outsmarting her kidnapper. This is Unseen. Stories told through the eyes of survivors that prove that even in the darkest places, there's light and justice to be found. Follow Unseen for more on Spotify. So is brought to you by No CD. You know that feeling after hearing a story like the ones on the show? Your home, you lock the door and an anxious thought pops into your head. What if I didn't lock it? For millions of people, that's not just anxiety, that's OCD. And most have no idea. OCD comes with persistent, unwanted intrusive thoughts that feel totally out of character, along with mental or physical behaviors you feel driven to do to get relief. Good news is, OCD is highly treatable with ERP, exposure and response prevention therapy, proven to be the most effective treatment. No CD provides specialized OCD treatment with licensed therapists who specialize in ERP therapy in live face-to-face virtual sessions, with support between sessions. If you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, no CD can help. Book a free 15-minute call to get started at learn.noCD.com. Lisa Lutkerge goes missing on the night of May 1st, 1897. A month or two before that, her husband Adolf was very busy at work. He's been trying to keep the business alive, but he's also been making some odd demands. One day, he summoned a trusted employee. Everybody knows this guy as Smokehouse Frank, because he works as smokers. And this is true, Frank has so many colleagues who are also named Frank that they all have to use nicknames. Otherwise, it gets confusing. I mean, you can't be mixing up Smokehouse Frank with Picklehouse Frank or Ham Frank. That would be ridiculous. They have totally different specialties. On this day, Adolf has a special task for Smokehouse Frank. His domain is down in the basement of the factory where the smokers are kept. Next to the smokers, Adolf shows Frank a barrel. It's full of some kind of mysterious substance. Adolf doesn't say what it is, only that Frank should not touch it. And Adolf is deadly serious about this. It is extremely dangerous, he tells Frank. For anyone out there who remembers reading the jungle, by Uptons and Claire, in high school, you probably know that if the head of an old-timey Chicago factory is this concern about an employee's well-being, you know it's got to be something really that. Smokehouse Frank gets to work, breaking up this mysterious stuff into smaller chunks. He wraps his hands and rags to protect them. But even so, they get really irritated. Every now and then, while he works, a tiny speck of the stuff flies off and lands on his skin, it burns him instantly, like holy water, on a vampire. But he finishes the job. He puts all the dangerous material back in its barrel and leaves it exactly where his boss asked him. There in the basement, next to three big vats, they're about three feet high by 11 feet long. Normally, that's where they brine or cure the meats. But right now, the middle of that is empty. So a few weeks after Smokehouse Frank does his part, Adolf gets another employee to load the mystery substance into that middle of that. On May 1st, the same evening Luisa goes missing, Adolf makes another odd demand. The night watchman on duty sees his boss arrive at the factory. Adolf always works late, all hours of the night sometimes, so it's not out of the ordinary for him to burn the midnight oil. It is weird, though, when Adolf starts a fire to light the boiler. That is not a normal thing for him to do so late at night. But he tells the watchman he wants to heat up one of the vats. He doesn't say why, and he refuses any help. In fact, he sends the watchman out of the factory on some errands. That night, when the stores he needs are closed. As in Adolf is getting rid of the watchman for a while. But the watchman, who, yes, is also named Frank, figures, well, who is he to question the boss? Watchman Frank probably has to wonder, though, why is Adolf blocking the doorway into the basement? What's going on in there? The next morning, a young woman peaks into Luisa's bedroom. That's Mary. The lute-curred, stomastic worker. She's not supposed to go in there. Luisa tells her to keep out. I mean, Mary is reportedly sleeping with her husband after all, but at some point around 9 or 10 a.m., Mary realizes that Luisa isn't home. Mary gets up at the crack of dawn, and she hasn't seen or heard anything all morning. Inside the room, Mary finds the bed in disarray. She also spots two piggy banks belonging to Luisa's sons. The few dollars that were inside have been stolen. The next day, May 3, is a terrible day for Adolf, but not because his wife appears to be missing. That doesn't seem to bother him at all. No. This day goes badly because the bank finally takes possession of the sausage factory. Meanwhile, somebody is growing concerned about Luisa's disappearance. Her brother, Dietrich. He shows up at the lute-curred house asking about her, but his brother-in-law shrugs him off. Adolf tells Dietrich, quote, "She might have gone away or wandered away, something like that." Then he actually accuses her of running off with another man. Dietrich is like my sister, the one who never goes anywhere, or does anything. Her? In that moment, Dietrich starts to believe his sister is dead. He thinks there's no way she would have left her children behind with this guy. However, Adolf claims he's hired some private detectives to make sure she's okay. He doesn't really. trust the police he says, but he's sure that any day now they'll hear that his wife is fine. Well, Dietrich isn't one to sit around and wait. Over the next couple of days, he pays a visit to all of his friends and family members. Nobody has seen Luisa. So Dietrich goes back to Adolf to do him the courtesy of giving him an update, and Adolf literally falls asleep while Dietrich is trying to talk to him about his missing wife. He is that unbothered. Maybe it's because Adolf knows something Dietrich does not. Down at the sausage factory, he'd already given Smokehouse Frank one more task. A day or two after Luisa's disappearance, Adolf told him to clean the entire basement. I didn't seem weird at first, but Smokehouse Frank definitely saw some things that day he wished he hadn't seen. The smokers are huge, and that alone is a big task, but then Frank got to the middle of that, the three-foot by 11-foot one, and inside it looked like a science experiment had gone terribly wrong. Okay, just a warning here, and even scaling away back on the details, the next few seconds are going to be gross. If you're eating anything right now, you might want to skip ahead. Around the tank is bloody splatter, and some kind of wet slime. There's a door across the top of the vet, which Smokehouse Frank has never seen before. As for whatever is in that tank, he has no clue what it is, but it's sticky, slimy, and reddish brown. It smells worse than the other parts of the factory, and the thing that rattles Smokehouse Frank, a guy who works in a 19th-century meat-making factory for a living, is when he thinks he spies little pieces of bone in the vet. Frank kind of takes it all in for a second, trying to figure out what he's dealing with. It's disgusting, but so are a lot of his jobs around there. Then he goes to Adolf, like, "Oh, hey boss, what should I do with all the slime?" Adolf tells Frank to empty the vet, scatter everything out in the yard, cover it up, and never tell anybody about it. And he keeps repeating, "That's all right." As he was saying, "Eh, don't worry about it." If Frank can follow those steps, Adolf promises he will never have to look for another job again. Luis's brother D-Drick doesn't know any of that yet, of course, but he is already suspicious of how his brother-in-law has been acting. So on May 7, D-Drick files a missing person's report with the Chicago Police Department. Investigators go straight away to the sausage keen of Chicago, looking for answers, but Adolf sticks to his story. He claims Luis is alive and well, and she got sick of her failing husband and left him and her kids. He does admit that he never really hired any private detectives as he told D-Drick, but that's only because he knows what happened to her. It does make some sense. Luis did tell multiple people she'd thought of leaving. And Adolf just lost ownership of the factory, and he's apparently been too timing her for years. Police find it a little puzzling, though. See, a few weeks ago, Adolf had come running into the precinct. Two of his dogs had run off, and he was frantic to make a police report. He demanded the police officers hit the streets to help and find his great-dames. And sure, I can relate to that scenario. Nobody wants their dogs to run away, but now that his human wife is also missing, he's completely blasé about the whole situation. When the police investigate Luis's disappearance, they probably hear a lot of stories that seem to contradict each other. Some people describe Adolf's behavior towards his wife as cruel. He either didn't speak to her at all, or he was harsh. He belittled her, like the times she made pancakes for breakfast, and he threw them out the window because they were too hot! Some say he called her names, or even admitted to wanting to harm his wife, and two witnesses describe an incident at the factory years ago when he chased Luis while waving a revolver at her. But others say they never witnessed him act that way, and Mary denies she ever carried on in a fair with her employer. The disappearance gets picked up by the newspapers, and suddenly there's a new wrinkle in the investigation. People claim they've seen Luis in Kenosha, Wisconsin, alive and well. Just like Adolf's head, police follow up on the leads and are able to debunk most of them. But then, tips pour in from other cities and states too. Investigators can't keep up. They don't find Luis or any credible reports, but it's hard to know if they're investigating a woman who willily chose to vanish. In the 19th century, that's easy enough to do if you want to. If there has been any foul play here, there's one place investigators still need to check the sausage factory. Two weeks after Luis's disappearance, police get their chance. They've been questioning the employees, and it turns out Smokehouse Frank had some stories to tell. He's able to lead them straight to the middle vet down in the basement. The vet has been cleaned already, of course, but it's not spotless. There's a bunch of sediment at the bottom. Working together, they lift up one end of the vet, tilting it, so the last drags pour out. They collect the liquid and send it off to a lab. And they also discover a few other items in that vet, including one long hair, bone fragments, including what looks like a partial skull, and two gold rings, one of which is inscribed with the initials, L-L, Luisa Lutkert. Once investigators discover Luisa's rings in the vat of slime, a theory comes into focus. Somehow Adolf murdered his wife. Probably after he lured her to the factory, then he discarded her body in the middle of that, which was loaded with some kind of caustic potash. It's a strong alkaline, a base, kind of like lie. And like with lie, it could be used to make soap. In some forms, it can be extremely hazardous. It can burn your skin. It can dissolve things like fat and other organic materials. And perhaps detectives think it could even dissolve an entire human body, if given enough time and heat. Now the police start gearing up to arrest Adolf. They send one officer home with Smokehouse Frank, their informant, for protection. And the two of them are hanging out in Frank's house when up the sidewalk comes an uninvited guest. Adolf, the officer dives under Smokehouse Frank's bed out of sight, maybe not the best bodyguard of yes me, but in his mind, he's thinking he can hide there and e-strop on the conversation. Adolf stomps inside, agitated. He corners Frank demanding to know where the police search, what they found. Frank lies and tells the boss they found nothing. Nothing. Adolf is clearly relieved, but he shouldn't be. He's just given the Chicago PD yet another reason to suspect he killed his wife. Now long after that, Adolf is arrested. Once he's in prison though, he acts like he has nothing to worry about. He acts old buddy buddy with the jailers. He gives interviews to reporters and exchange for cigars. It seems like he loves holding court. Like being infamous is just as good as being rich. Adolf tells his audience that he's an innocent man. That this whole thing is preposterous. Everything will be explained at trial, he says. He's sure that he's going to be acquitted. And he's got a good reason to hold out. Oh, the prosecutor is gearing up to bring Adolf to trial face a daunting challenge. How are they going to convict Adolf of murdering his wife if they can't even prove Luisa is dead? Throughout the trial, the story of the sausage vat murder dominates headlines. All eyes are on Chicago and it's sausage keen. The general feeling among the public is that Adolf is guilty as charged, but all of those interviews he gives have a bizarre side effect. Women are drawn to him. Yeah. This heartthrob, right there. Even the ones who think he killed Luisa, especially the ones who think he killed her, want his body. They write love letters to him in his first 5 months in custody, more than 30 women proposed to him. As in, they want to marry an accused wife killer who on top of everything else throws pancakes out the window for being too hot. Killed at age ladies, what is wrong with you? Luisa does have a small but loyal group of friends and family, who stand by him. Like his best friend and his oldest son from his first marriage, they do everything in their power to try to prove Adolf is an innocent man, including sending people out on bikes throughout Kenosha, yelling "Luisa, Luisa!" To track her down and prove she's alive, they don't find her. But yeah, aside from those guys, most people think Adolf did it. When the trial begins in August 1897, the prosecution lays out their theory, Adolf killed Luisa, then dissolved her body in the vat to get rid of the evidence. As they call their witnesses, one thing definitely becomes clear about Adolf. The man has no poker face. Half the time somebody speaks ill of him, he has an outburst, or at least an over-the-top about villain reaction, like a silent film star mugging for the camera. But then Adolf gets a chance to tell his side of the story. His lawyer say on the night of May 1st, Adolf wasn't murdering anybody, he was simply making soap all night long behind a locked door. They claim he wasn't alone. He was there with his best friend, William, who backs up the story. Apparently, the two besties wanted to make soap out of potash and left over animal parts from the factory. That way, they could get the factory old nice and sparkling clean for its new owners. Aw, how nice. And whoops, wouldn't you know it, they didn't really know what they were doing. And they accidentally made slime instead. The story is pretty hard to buy, especially when the prosecution points out that Adolf already had a bunch of soap at his factory, and that making soap this way is far more expensive than just buying it from the store. But that's Adolf's story, and they say that's why there were bone fragments in the slime. Those were animal bones, not an uncommon thing to find at a meat factory. Remember, it's 1897, there's no DNA, no modern forensics, nobody's even been convicted based on fingerprints yet, that comes a few years later. But the prosecution does something that nobody has ever done at trial before. They call an anthropologist to the stand as their expert. Dr. George Dorsey is not exactly a Dr. Temperance Bone's Brennan from the TV show Bones, he's not equipped with all the know-how of a modern forensic anthropologist, but he is one of the first people to earn a PhD in anthropology from Harvard, and he's made quite a name for himself. If you ever want to know what kind of animal a bone comes from, well, he's your guy. Dr. Dorsey analyzes all the bone fragments found in the middle of that, and he testifies with certainty that they came from a human woman. This is a huge blow for the defense, and in response, they call in their own expert witness. He says the bones are not human, but on cross-examination, their expert screws up. He's handed a bone from a monkey, he examines it for a while, and then he mistakenly identifies it as a bone from a dog. So yeah, that doesn't look good, and then after he's called out on his mistake, the so-called expert tries to double down. He's like, "Well, it might be a dog monkey." So now everyone's like, "Oh yeah, okay, dude, yeah, a dog monkey. Get this guy out of here." But the defense isn't done yet. Really, they only need to drive home that there is reasonable doubt in this case. They argue that Luisa could have just left her husband. It's for the two gold rings found at the bottom of the fat. Well, who knows, they could have been planted there to make aid off a pure guilty. Now they don't back up that claim with any strong evidence. In fact, it seems pretty clear that those are Luisa's rings. And according to her son, she could never remove her wedding band. It was too tight. So the only explanation for how the rings got in that fat. It seems to be the most disturbing one. And yet, the defense team's strategy works. The jury can't come to a decision, and the case ends in a mistrial. But justice doesn't wait much longer. A second trial begins almost immediately. The main difference is that this time, Adolf takes a stand to testify on his own behalf. And well, long story short, this time the jury votes to convict. In January 1898, Adolf Lutkerd is sentenced to life in prison. He's shocked at the outcome, but he chokes that he's going to write a book and make a lot of money off of his story. One year into his sentence, though, at the age of 53, he dies in prison. Dr. says it has something to do with a bad heart. Might have been all that process neat. You know, it's kind of strange that this case is called the sausage fat murder, right? It makes you think Luisa was turned into sausage when, in fact, nobody ever charges Adolf with doing anything like that. But guess what? That did not stop rumors from spreading. It didn't stop people from making assumptions. While this story was in the news, people looked at their sausage plateers a little differently. Customers stopped buying it, so restaurants stopped selling it. The fear took over and sales plummeted all over the country. Once upon a time when Adolf walked down the street, people had moved out of his way, out of respect, and fear. In the end, he was just a coward, masking his panic with arrogance. And when the sausage keen was dethroned, he tried to take his whole industry down with him. Thanks for tuning in to Killer Stories, the Spotify podcast. New episodes release on Mondays. If you like today's story and want to learn more, we'd drop some of our favorite sources in the episode description. Until next time, I'm Harvey G.N. Stay safe out there.