Rua do Arvoredo murders

The Rua do Arvoredo murders were a series of killings that took place between 1863 and 1864 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The perpetrators — José Ramos, a former police inspector and informant; his wife, Catarina Palse, a German immigrant from the Hungarian part of Transylvania; and Carlos Claussner, a German immigrant butcher — targeted predominantly German immigrants. Palse, who spoke little Portuguese, would seduce and lure victims to appointments, drawing them to the couple's residence on Rua do Arvoredo, where Ramos killed and dismembered them. According to testimonies from the period, Claussner had suggested processing the remains into sausages sold at his butcher shop as a means of destroying evidence.

In August 1863, a wave of disappearances caused public panic and pressure on local authorities. Fearing exposure, Claussner reportedly planned to flee to Uruguay, prompting Ramos to kill him as well and hide his body in the couple's backyard. Ramos and Palse then took over Claussner's shop, though the business soon failed due to their lack of experience running it.

The case unraveled in 1864 following the disappearances of traveling salesman José Ignacio de Souza Ávila and Portuguese merchant Januário Martins Ramos da Silva, both last seen at Ramos' house. A police search of the property uncovered decomposing human remains in the basement, later identified as Claussner's, and the mutilated bodies of Januário and José Ignacio in a well. Palse, already arrested on other charges, confessed that six men had been killed at the house and that their bodies had been processed into sausages by Claussner. Her account reportedly became a starting point for further investigation into the killings.

At trial, Delegate Dario Rafael Callado — who had employed Ramos as a police informant and reportedly expedited proceedings to avoid embarrassment — presided over Ramos' conviction on multiple counts of robbery and murder. Ramos was sentenced to death by hanging, later commuted to life imprisonment; he denied the crimes until his death in 1893 at a Porto Alegre hospital. Palse was convicted as an accomplice and sentenced to 13 years' imprisonment; a report from May 1891 indicated she had been released after completing her sentence.

Historian Décio Freitas, who researched the case for his 1996 book on the killings, noted that documentation is incomplete — several trial pages were lost, and surviving records are written in archaic Portuguese — and stated that the extent to which the sausage-making detail can be definitively proven was undermined during the trial and over time. The case, while historically documented, has also become the subject of local legend and inspired several books, documentaries, and a 2006 televised dramatization.