Lye is a corrosive alkali, commonly found in household cleaners. While acids are generally known to be corrosive, their chemical opposites, alkalies, can be just as destructive. Deadly Doses- A Writer’s Guide to Poisons rates lye’s toxicity at the highest as super toxic.

It takes less than seven drops in an oral dose, a mere taste, for it to be lethal to a 68 kilogram (150 pound) human being. A single taste of lye would cause third-degree burns on the mouth and the esophagus, the muscular tube that connects the throat to the stomach. If a sufficiently large dose of lye is swallowed, the alkali can cause perforations in the esophagus and stomach, which can lead to death in fatal cases.

In August 2014, large quantities of lye was accidentally mixed into iced tea at a restaurant after an employee mistook lye cleaner for sugar.

67-year-old Jan Harding was the first customer to fill her cup with the toxic mixture at the self-serve beverage station. She took a sip from her cup and felt her mouth and throat burning immediately. She spat the liquid out and frantically tried to throw up the rest of the swallowed drink into a trash bin.

“I think I just drank acid,” she told her husband.

Jan Harding was hospitalised for nearly two weeks in hospital. The lye-laced drink caused burns in her mouth and severe ulcerated burns in her upper esophagus. She was unable to speak during her entire stay in hospital.

Fortunately, she survived the lye poisoning.

Others in history were not so lucky.

The Texas Serial Murderess

In January of 1913, Ellen Etheridge was an elated Texan bride. At age 47, this was her second marriage. Her first husband had passed away two years ago. She had met James Etheridge, a ranchman, while working as a housekeeper for her brother-in-law and feelings had blossomed between the two of them. Ellen was looking forward to a new life of marital bliss with her new husband.

James Etheridge appeared to be a well-off man by all counts. He was the proprietor of the Looney Ranch and owned a large house in the Bosque County. Like Ellen, this was not his first marriage as well. James was a widower. Accompanying him at the wedding ceremony were eight children from his previous marriage, ranging from 2 years old to 17 years old.

As church bells rang in that early January, it seemed to be a joyous beginning to a new year as the happy couple walked down the church aisle, surrounded by friends and family. But by the end of the year, Ellen would have murdered four of her step-children with concentrated lye and arsenic, and attempted to kill a fifth child the same way as well.

Six months into the marriage, two of the Etheridge children, 2-year-old Beulah and 8-year-old Harrison, died suddenly in June 1913. Their deaths were attributed to acute indigestion. The bereaved family were beside themselves with grief. But barely four months later, tragedy struck the Etheridge family again when three other young children were seemingly struck down with the same malady.

On the 2nd of October, 5-year-old Oscar complained of pains and nausea half an hour after finishing a hearty meal at home. He fell to the floor in convulsions. His older brother and sister, 9-year-old Richard and 7-year-old Pearl, collapsed to the floor as well, exhibiting the same convulsing symptoms.

When the family physician arrived to answer the call of the frantic parents, the two boys were already beyond his medical help. Both boys died in the arms of their family. The doctor managed to save the life of the girl with the aid of emetics.

The deaths of four children, one after the other, raised questions from the community. A cloud of suspicion lay over the family. Authorities began to investigate. On the 5th of October, Mrs. Etheridge was placed under arrest and charged with double murder after a packet of poison was found in her trunk.

Nine days later, Mrs. Etheridge broke down and confessed that she poisoned the first two children with concentrated lye and the other three with arsenic. She had been consumed by jealousy of her husband’s affection for his large brood of children. Feeling neglected, she had schemed to get rid of the children through murder.

In her confession to James, Ellen wrote:

“Jim, I did it all, darling, but I want you to forgive me. I did not mean to do anything wrong. The children are out of their misery now and you know how poor we were. We could never have raised them as we ought. My mother always said that her children who were dead were a greater consolation to her than those who were living. You know none of these children who are gone had reached the age of accountability to God, and I am sure they are all right now. I have asked God to forgive me and he has heard my prayer. I want you to be as good to me as God was. Be a friend to me if you can, Jim.”

When James visited Ellen in prison, she implored him to forgive her. She had committed murder because of her love for him. He left the prison cell without answering her. He later told the sheriff, “If she is guilty, I want no more to do with her. I would stand by her if she were innocent, but if she were innocent, but if she has killed my children, she will have to go to route.”

Ellen Etheridge was sentenced to four life sentences and one sentence of five years for the murder of four of her step-children and attempted murder of a fifth child. She spent the rest of her life incarcerated in prison.

A Mexican Stew

Under high heat and pressure, lye can turn corrosive enough to disintegrate fat, bones and skin. A lye solution, heated to 300 Fahrenheit degrees (148 Celsius), can dissolve an entire body into an oily brown liquid in just three hours.

Dissolving of bodies in lye is a time-tested method used by Mexican drug cartels to get rid of tell-tale corpses. In 2008, one of FBI’s most wanted drug dealers, the notorious “stew maker” Santiago Meza López, claimed to have dissolved more than 300 bodies in nine years.

Born in 1976, Santiago Meza López was a Mexican native born in Guamuchil, Sinaloa. At age 19, he joined the drug dealers as a construction worker at the border. Before long, he was working full-time for the Arellano Felix family, one of the most violent criminal groups in Mexico. He worked his way up the ranks and was trusted enough to be promoted to be a drug office keeper to oversee the drug depot’s surveillance matters.

In 2000, the cartel decided to change their method of disposing bodies. Usually, they ditched the corpses in sewers or in the river, but this method carried its own risks. Dead bodies could contain evidence that could be dredged up to be used against them. The Arellano Felix family brought in two “teachers” from Israel who would train Santiago and other gang members in the art of dissolving bodies.

It was the beginning of Santiago’s nine-year career as a corpse disposer.

Santiago would buy empty oil barrels and purchase caustic soda from hardware shops at $1.50 per pound. It takes around a hundred pounds of powdered lye to dissolve a body. A curious lady once asked Santiago why he needed so much caustic soda. “I told her I used it to clean houses,” Santiago said.

His employers would arrange for Santiago to pick up the bodies for dissolving. “… at a certain hour, in a certain place, I was to be given the merchandise,” Santiago explained. “They would call me and tell me in which car they were. They would make a light signal and the delivery was made.”

Equipped with protective latex gloves and gas masks, Santiago boiled the corpses in the lye solution for eight hours until only the teeth and the nails were all that remained of the bodies. He would destroy the final remains by burning them with gasoline in a landfill.

Santiago became known as “El Pozolero”, The Stew-maker, because his brew of bodies and lye resembled pozole, a Mexican meat soup.

Chillingly, the pozole reference may have ancient roots in Aztec civilisation more than 500 years ago. According to research by the National Institute of Anthropology and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, early pozole was made with human meat. The Aztecs tore out the hearts of prisoners in ritual sacrifices and chopped up the rest of the body to cook pozole with maize.

A steady stream of dead bodies kept Santiago busy. The constant enmity between warring drug cartels meant that Santiago dissolved as many as thirty corpses in a month. Despite the grisly nature of his daily routine, Santiago considered his work to be a normal job. “They bought me the bodies and I just got rid of them,“ he said to reporters. “I don’t feel anything.” He was paid $600 a week, on top of the costs of the ingredients for his meat stew.

Santiago was finally arrested in January 2009. He was seized in a military raid on a party in a hotel. He was in the midst of cooking (seafood, this time) and he was too drunk to escape. However, he has done his work so well that there was no evidence against him. He was imprisoned in the El Rincon Federal Prison and he was only charged with possession of illegal firearms.

A Sausage Vat Murder

But as prolific as Santiago was in stewing bodies, he did not pioneer the method of using lye to dissolve bodies for criminal purposes. The origin of this crime technique dates back a century ago in late nineteenth century Chicago in the steam vat of a sausage factory.

Adolph Louis Luetgert, a German-American businessman, first tried out the technique in 1897 on his ill-fated wife in what was known as the “The Sausage Vat Murder”.

In 1865, Adolph arrived in the United States as a young 24-year-old German immigrant with only thirty dollars in his pocket. He took on odd jobs at tanneries and did ad hoc work moving houses. Fourteen years later, he saved enough money, a sum of four thousand dollars, to start his own business, the A.L. Luetgert Sausage & Packing Company.

Adolph proved to be an shrewd sausage maker and businessman. He developed a breakthrough process to produce sausages in summer as well as in winter, a manufacturing feat that other rival sausage companies could not replicate. Adolph’s sausage business expanded briskly over the decade. At the height of the company’s success, Adolph was known as the “sausage king” of Chicago and he supplied frankfurters for The Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.

Adolph’s early personal life, however, was marked by a series of small tragedies. His first wife passed away and out of his six children, only three of them survived past the age of two.

Shortly after Adolph’s first wife passed away, he married Louisa Bicknese.

Louisa Bicknese was a beautiful, petite woman who stood around five feet tall (1.5 metres) and weighed 115 pounds (52 kgs). Like Adolph, she was also an immigrant from Germany. She was working as a domestic maid in Chicago when she met Adolph by chance. He was 32 years old. She was 23 years old. They married in January, 1878. Adolph gave Louisa a gold ring with her new initials “L.L” engraved on it as a wedding gift. Little did he know that the ring would later lead to his downfall.

In 1893, one of the worst economic depressions to hit the United States began to sweep across the country. Over 500 banks closed and 15,000 businesses failed. After a decade of booming business, the sausage company’s fortunes took a sharp fall. Adolph’s business suffered as sausage orders dropped. Adolph attempted to sell off the company, but was swindled of his money by a potential buyer.

It was around this troubled financial time that Adolph’s relationship with Louisa turned stormy. Fierce arguments could be heard emanating from their family home over money troubles. Friends and family would later testify in court that Adolph had been cheating on Louisa and was physically abusive towards her. The couple’s relationship deteriorated to the point that Adolph moved out of his three-storey house to sleep inside a room inside his sausage factory.

Louisa Bicknese vanished on the 1st of May, 1897.

She was last seen taking an evening walk with Adolph. On the same day, Adolph told his two young sons that their mother was visiting their aunt and he was not sure when she would be returning. Nothing was heard or seen of Louisa for several days. Louisa’s brother, fearing the worst, reported her as missing to the authorities. The police began to investigate Louisa’s mysterious disappearance.

During the investigations, an A.L. Luetgert Co. worker told the police that he had seen his employer and his wife enter the factory on the 1st of May at around 10.30pm. Adolph had turned on the steam line to a vat to set it boil before telling the night watchman to take the night off. The next day, Adolph had workers enter the factory to clean up a foul smelling liquid on the basement floor that had boiled over from the vat. The workmen noticed that the vat, originally used for dipping sausages, now contained a thick, reddish rancid residue.

Further probing also turned up receipts that showed Adolph had ordered 50 pounds of arsenic and 378 pounds of potash recently. He had received the goods a few days before Louisa disappeared. While the bulk purchase of potash and other chemicals for meat curing would not have been suspicious under normal circumstances, the sausage factory had been closed for ten weeks before Louisa’s disappearance.

The police now turned their attention to the huge 12 foot by 5 foot (3.6 metres by 1.5 metre) vat by the furnace. When they drained the cauldron, they found pieces of bones and two gold rings, one of them inscribed with the letters “L.L” on it — Louisa’s wedding ring. A search in the furnace revealed more bone fragments.

Police believed that Adolph had boiled and dissolved his wife in the vat and disposed whatever was left of her remains in the furnace. Adolph was arrested and put on trial for the murder of his wife.

The court trial of Adolph Louis Luetgert was a media sensation, attracting journalists from all over the country. Despite the fact that Adolph was being charged for burning and dissolving his wife, rumours spread that Louisa had been grounded into sausages which were then sold to unsuspecting customers. Neighbourhood children would sing rhymes about the case:

Old man Luetgert made sausage out of his wife!

He turned on the steam,

His wife began to scream,

There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight!

Needless to say, sausage sales plummeted during the investigation and the trials.

Adolph was adamant that Louisa was alive and that she had ran away to escape from the marriage. There was no corpse and the bones found in the vat were those of hog and sheep bones, he claimed. As to why his wife had not come forward to prove his innocence, Adolph believed that his wife was wandering the streets, either insane or in a distracted condition, unaware of the court case.

The prosecution had a challenging case on their hands. With no body as evidence, they had to prove that the bones in the vat were human.

The prosecution conducted an experiment with a real human cadaver which they boiled in a cauldron of potash. They presented the liquified remains of the body as proof that a potash solution could have dissolved Louisa’s body. The prosecution also brought in George Dorsey, an anthropologist at Chicago’s Field Columbian Museum to testify that the bones fragments found on the factory premises were that of a human female. It was one of the first few cases that an anthropologist was brought to the court to testify as an expert witness in a criminal case.

The twelve man jury found Adolph guilty of the murder of his wife.

He was sent to Joliet State Penitentiary to serve out a life sentence. Throughout his incarceration, Adolph maintained his innocence. On the 7 July 1899, Adolph Louis Luetger passed away from heart problems, two years into his jail sentence.