A mostly forgotten infamous crime

In the late summer of 1914 Europe’s march toward war dominated the front pages of American newspapers. Then, for a few weeks, they competed for reader attention with news of a shocking crime in rural Wisconsin. The butler at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin studio killed seven people using fire and a hatchet. It was the worst case of mass murder in Wisconsin history.

Wright was already winning fame as an innovative architect. He became infamous when he deserted his wife and family to establish Taliesin with his married mistress Mamah Borthwick. The murder victims included Borthwick and her two children aged 11 and 9.

#ad

The crime was cold-blooded and premeditated. Julian Carlton, the butler, had hidden clothes in the brush near Taliesin indicating that he planned to escape after the crime. When that proved impossible, he drank hydrochloric acid in an attempt to commit suicide. (He had purchased tha acid one week before the attack, another indication of preplanning.)

Carleton died several weeks after his arrest so there was no trial. He never offered an explanation for his crimes. The two workmen who survived his rampage could offer little information: nothing seemed amiss as he served them lunch just before he locked them in the dining room and set it ablaze with gasoline. The killer’s wife claimed that he had become increasingly paranoid at rural Taliesin and was eager to move back to Chicago.

William Drennan lays out the facts and eschews excess speculation in his account of the crime. The Carletons were actually due to leave their jobs before the end of August. Instead, Julian slaughtered seven people and wounded two others. Three of the victims were children. Discerning “reasons” for such actions risks justifying evil.

In the course of his research, Drennan discovered that most accounts of the murders were riddled with errors. He offers a bit of useful advice for anyone writing history:

Some things we think we have right we do not: errors in fact, once reduced to print or circulated in the oral tradition, become picked up by subsequent inquirerers and repeated endlessly, accreting layers of undue credibility with each retelling.

The author also makes the interesting point that the murders changed Wright’s architecture. Where Taliesin was open with windows that captured views of the rural landscape, his next designs were more compact and almost fortress-like. Drennan also deserves credit for never forgetting that Frank Lloyd Wright was not the only one who suffered a grievous loss on 15 August 1914. William Weston was a foreman at Taliesin. Not only was he badly wounded in the attack, Carleton also murdered his 13 year old son Ernest who was working with his father that day. Then there is the tragic figure of Edwin Cheney. He had sent his only two children to Wisconsin to visit their mother only a little time before. Now they were dead. In a cruel twist of fate he had to share the train ride from Chicago with Wright.

#ad