The Ogden Standard, Utah, September 5, 1914

Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick met and fell in love when Wright was designing a home for Borthwick’s husband, Edwin Cheney, in 1903. Both were married with children (Wright had six with his wife, Kitty), but they left their partners in 1909 - first going to Europe and then returning to America in 1910, settling down to live together at Taliesin, a home and architecture studio Wright designed in 1911. 

On August 15, 1914 a servant, Julian Carlton, who had recently been told he was being fired, decided to exact his revenge on everybody in the house. The person his vengeance was mainly focused on was one of Wright’s draftsmen, Emil Brodelle, who had had many altercations with Carlton, which culminated when Brodelle called Carlton a “black son of a bitch" three days before the attack. 

Wright was out of town (in Chicago) on business and Borthwick sent him a telegram sometime that morning, asking him to “Come as quickly as you can. Something terrible has happened”, which he didn’t receive until that night. Around noon Carlton, after telling his wife to leave the house, went first to where Borthwick and her two children were having lunch, an screen verandah, and first attacked Borthwick, killing her with one hatchet strike to the face. He then slayed her children with the axe, the son (John, 11), sitting in a chair, and the daughter (Martha, 9), who had managed to run to the courtyard, but was eventually caught, lit them on fire.

He then proceeded to douse and light the dining room (first locking the doors and windows) where the five architecture employees and the 13 year old son of a carpenter were. When the men, clothes on fire, fought their way out of the windows of the burning room Carlton stood waiting outside. He attacked Brodelle with his axe, killing him, and then carpenter William Weston and his young son, Ernest (William survived but Ernest did not). One draftsman, Herbert Fritz, survived but broke his arm while escaping through the window. The other two men, David Lindblom, a landscape designer, and Thomas Brunker, a foreman, managed to fight off Carlton but both later succumbed to their injuries. Fritz and Weston ran for help at a neighboring farm but much of the house was destroyed before help could arrive. Of the nine attacked, seven died.

Carlton took muriatic acid, attempting suicide, and hid in a furnace room in the basement clutching his bloody axe. He didn’t die immediately, but after being discovered and taken to jail the acid made it almost impossible for him to swallow, and he died 46 days later from starvation.

The headlines in the newspapers were written as if Mamah Borthwick’s murder was retribution brought upon her for her loose morals, the fact that she - a married woman - was living in sin with a married man, was pointed at almost as justification for her death.

(Frank Lloyd Wright would begin rebuilding the house only months after the murders, the house would burn a second time in 1925.)