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1906–1908
On September 25, 1906, Cecilia Ludwig was killed in Mishawaka — the surname and given name as the Indiana Supreme Court's opinion spells them; the press of the day also printed "Cecelia." Her husband, Frank Ludwig, was tried in the St. Joseph Circuit Court before Judge Walter A. Funk, convicted of murder in the second degree, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He appealed, and the opinion that decided the appeal — Ludwig v. State, 170 Indiana 648, filed July 1, 1908 — preserves the case entire, because the appeal turned on whether the evidence could sustain any conviction at all. What follows is the record as the opinion states it, the husband's account and the state's kept apart.
The opinion's abstract of the evidence runs so. The wife was packing her trunk to leave him. That afternoon, smoke was seen coming from the second story of the house, and Ludwig was found with his throat, wrists, and calves cut, a bloody razor in the bedroom. His wife's body was in the closet off the bedroom; a potato masher was in the closet with it; an empty can smelling of kerosene or gasoline stood in the case's evidence, and Ludwig had bought gasoline that morning. The physicians who made the post-mortem examination were of the opinion that death had been caused by burning; there was a wound on her head and her throat was bruised, but the skull was not fractured. His own testimony was that his wife struck him on the head once or twice with her hand and attacked him with the potato masher; that he seized her by the throat to keep her from injuring him; that she went down; and that he remembered nothing after. The state's closing theory, as the opinion recites it, was that he rendered her unconscious, dragged her into the closet, cut himself, went downstairs for gasoline, poured it upon her clothes, and set the fire. The court's ruling settled the law of the verdict: a killing in the commission of arson was murder in the first degree, so a defendant convicted of the second degree on such evidence could not complain the verdict was too favorable to stand — the judgment was affirmed.
The case's modern documentary account is Gary Sosniecki's The Potato Masher Murder (Kent State University Press, 2020), built on twenty-five newspapers and the trial transcript; by the book's account Ludwig served sixteen years of the life sentence. The instrument in the book's title deserves its sentence of care: on Ludwig's own testimony the masher was his wife's weapon, not his, and the appellate record — the strongest paper in the case — carries it exactly so, as an object found in the closet and a contested fact, not as the murder weapon. Peter Young of the South Bend Times, quoted in the book's accounts, wrote that the killing's horrors and shocking features had never before been witnessed in Mishawaka; measured against the record this page has just laid out — one indictment in the county's first seventy years, ending in acquittal — the period judgment stands.
Sources:
- Ludwig v. State, 170 Ind. 648 (1908) — opinion of the Indiana Supreme Court, No. 21,144, filed July 1, 1908, affirming the St. Joseph Circuit Court (Funk, J.)
- Gary Sosniecki, The Potato Masher Murder: Cecilia Ludwig's Tragic Death, Shattered the Peace in Tiny Mishawaka, Indiana (Kent State University Press, 2020) — the sixteen years served and the Peter Young quotation, as the book's accounts report them