"You've lost your job,
You've lost your dough.
You're jewels and handsome houses,
But things could be worse, you know,
You haven't lost your trousers."

Louisa could not satisfy his insatiable sexual tastes, so Luetgert had a variety of lovers, including Louisa's maid, a longtime mistress, and a barkeeper, Mrs. Agathia Tosch, whose establishment was located near the sausage factory. Luetgert, morose an arrogant, fancied himself as a special gift to women.

In 1897, Louisa, 42, was about at the end of her rope with his tomcatting. After many angry confrontations, Luetgert decide to kill her. On March 24, 1897, the 275-pound Luetgert strangled his 115-pound wife and dumped her body into a huge vat that contained quicklime and acid. The quicklime and acid did not eat away all the flesh from her bones, so after an hour or two, he placed what remained of her into a sausage-curing vat and turned up the heat to 200 degrees. What little that was left of her, he threw into the boiler furnace in the engine room. Satisfied that there was nothing left, Luetgert went in the house, washed up and ate breakfast. The next day, an employee noticed a slime-like substance on the floor. He placed it in a barrel and dumped it by the nearby railroad tracks.

When relatives of Mrs. Luetgert reported that she was missing, the police talked to employees, who told them of the slime and glue that they had found. When the police opened one of the vats, they found it full of brownish fluid. After the vat was drained, they found several pieces of bone and two gold rings. One of them was a wedding band with the initials "L.L." on it. Luetgert was arrested for the murder of his wife.

Ruth fell to the floor with two bullets in her. Carl went berserk with rage, smashing his gun and fists against a man dressed in rags who was also on the floor, shot full of holes. Ruth lived just long enough to to whisper "My baby . . . my baby is dead." The stranger later died in Ravenswood Hospital. He had just $3.80 in his pocket. Carl was praised by the people of Chicago for his bravery.

A few days later, reporter Ben Hecht of the Chicago Daily News sat at his desk looking at a picture of the two guns used in the shooting. One was Carl's army issued gun and the other belonged to the dead stranger. Something was not right. Both guns were identical. Over at the Chicago Examiner, reporter Charles MacArthur also noticed that the identical guns looked suspicious. A check of the stranger's gun, by the pair, revealed that it had been purchased by a Peter Hoffman. Hoffman told MacArthur that he sold the gun several years before to a man name Fred Wanderer. Fred was Carl Wanderer's cousin.

A few days later, Hecht interviewed Carl in his apartment here on Campbell. While Carl left the room, Hecht found some incriminating letters Wanderer had written . . . to a man. Love letters of deep devotion. Hecht then realized that the war hero was a homosexual. Hecht and MacArthur went to the police with the letters and their suspicions. Carl was brought in for questioning. When confronted with the evidence of the gun and letters, he broke down and confessed to both killings.

Carl told police that he had always been a homosexual and married Ruth for her money. When Ruth began to doubt his war record, he went to skid row and met a drifter named Al Watson. He told Watson that he would pay him to stage a holdup in which he would hand a gun to Watson when the couple entered the vestibule and when Ruth turned on the light, he would floor him with a punch. Watson would run away and once again Carl would be a hero to his wife. Watson thought it was a harmless way to make a few dollars, and agreed.

That night in the vestibule, Wanderer did not hand the gun to Watson. Instead he kept both guns and fired at both his wife and Watson. After they had fallen, he fired several more shots into them to make sure they were dead.

After two sensational trials, Wanderer was sentenced to death by hanging. As Wanderer stood on the gallows on March 19, 1921, he threw back his head and began to sing "Dear Old Pal O'Mine." Carl was singing when the hang man placed the black shroud on his head and lowered the rope to his neck. His pathetic voice sang on behind the mask. The trap door opened and he shot to an instant death. MacArthur turned to Hecht and said, "You know Ben, that son-of-a-bitch" should have been a song-plugger." Humorist Alexander Woolcott, who also witnessed the hanging, was heard to say, " Wanderer deserved hanging for his voice alone."

It was here in the bedroom that Dr. Wilhelm Loeser and Dr. Harold Cassidy performed plastic facial surgery on both Dillinger and Van Meter. Dillinger's heart stopped while under the ether and it took several minutes before he could be revived.

While Dillinger and Van Meter recuperated here, gangster "Baby Face" Nelson came to visit them several times. Dillinger even ventured out to visit the World's Fair twice and to take in several Cub games. They moved out on July 4. 2509 Pulaski.