Technical Difficulties

Alchemy of Bones: Chicago's Luetgert Murder Case of 1897 by Robert Loerzel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an excellent recounting of a very complicated piece of history: the disappearance of Louise Luetgert on May 1-2 1897, and the investigation, indictment, 2 trials, conviction, and imprisonment of her husband, Adolph Louis Luetgert, for murdering her and then dissolving her body in the basement of his sausage works. Loerzel does a great job with his sources, especially the newspapers (I was dubious at first about all the newspaper drawings he'd included, but he was right to do so; they convey something important that doesn't go easily into words), and he tells the labyrinthine progress of the trials clearly and impartially, without favoring either side. He points out the way that neither prosecution nor defense could put forward a story that didn't have holes and contradictions in it, and he draws the inevitable conclusion: from this distance (and with all of the evidence from the trials having vanished in the intervening century plus), we can't determine whether Luetgert was guilty or innocent, but it is painfully easy to see that he didn't get a fair trial.

(A point that nobody seems to have made, but that is a big stumbling block for me: if Luetgert was innocent, then when Louise Luetgert randomly picked her moment to go crazy and flee into the night, it JUST HAPPENED to be the same night that her husband chose to experiment with making soft soap in the basement of his sausage works, which he'd never done before, AND decided to move the furniture around so his fox terrier could hunt rats, AND sent the night watchman out on two nearly pointless errands, AND, AND, AND . . . The coincidences just have to keep mounting up to make Luetgert's story true.

(Also, the testimony that I found absolutely compelling, and chillingly gruesome, was that of the two workmen who were told to clean up the basement the next morning. They weren't making those details up.)

Luetgert died in Joliet while his attorney was still working on an appeal, so there's no resolution to the story, no final satisfying judgment. Hung jury in his first trial, obvious mistrial in his second trial. I ended up agreeing with Clarence Darrow: "I really believe that he was guilty but that he was convicted on insufficient evidence" (277).

Truth stranger than fiction: Luetgert's sausage works are now loft condominiums.

For more, check out Loerzel's website alchemyofbones.com



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