Chicago Herald, June 2, 1891. The victimological gamut of “merchants, mechanics and laboring men” establishes that the perp is an equal-opportunity wisenheimer and not some filthy workshy Iowan anarchist targeting the haves and sparing the have-nots. “Mechanic” here is being used in the wider 19th-century sense of a technologically-skilled worker quelconque.
Statistically this was a very strange week here at THC. I can never anticipate which items are going to grow legs and which will not, but on December 7th traffic on this site suddenly spiked from the normal range of 1,000,000 hits per diem to 5,000,000.* To my surprise, the big rainmaker was this. Which was odd because mince, while good for generating comments from the front of the class, has never been a popular favorite. Though it’s 3D celebrity pron when compared to the poor unloved BGN, whose poison extends to the box office.
*Above numbers may differ from reality by several orders of magnitude.
Associated Press, January 9, 1878. No idea whether these reports of the liver-eater’s demise were premature, though a guy named Liver Eating Johnson surely has got to go sometime . Anyway, this one was the inspiration for a 
Chicago Tribune, August 6, 1891. I understand detective Floont Artney broke the case. 