Hosts discuss the Taliesin massacre's tragic lunch (Part 2)
historytrue crimeFrank Lloyd WrightTaliesinearly 20th century events
Transcript
Foreign. Okay, Chuck, so let's just go ahead and get in the Wayback. Well, I don't want to see this. We'll just talk about it. We'll leave the Wayback Machine out of this one. Okay, so on Saturday, August 15, 1914, around lunchtime, actually, exactly at lunchtime, Mama Borthwick, Frank Lloyd Wright's mistress, longtime mistress, was sitting down for lunch on a terrace at Taliesin with her two kids. To his great credit, Edwin Chaney, her ex husband, by this time, was not interested in keeping Mama from seeing her children as punishment. So they went to visit pretty frequently. And this was a time when they were visiting. So the three of them were sitting down to lunch. John, I think he was 10, and her daughter Martha, who was 8. And Mama. Mama were sitting down to lunch on the terrace. Okay, just put that in your pin. Put that pin in your hat and smoke it. Wow. Really mixing metaphors. So there out on the terrace, inside in the dining room, there are five of Frank Lloyd Wright's employees. Emil Braudel, Thomas Brunker, David Lindblom, Herbert Fritz and William Weston. And then Weston's son, Ernst. So they were all sitting down to eat, I think. Put a pin in maybe both of these scenes. And we'll tell you a little bit about the handyman of the property named Julian Carlton, who in the weeks and months leading up to this date had been acting really weird. He was aggressive. He was getting in arguments with other people. He was acting very strangely. He started sleeping with a hatchet and a sack beside his bed. He was married, and his wife, you know, verified this stuff. He was talking about killing people. And there was rumor that he was being let go and that there was this. He and his wife were already had basically a train booked to Chicago to look for other jobs. So this is sort of the mindset of what's going on with Julian Carlton at the time of this lunch, right? So Julian was actually. So he was the handyman, but at this point, he also helped out, helped his wife, Gertrude, when she was cooking, he would serve. So he served lunch to Mama, and then he served lunch to the five employees in the dining room. And then as they started to eat, he approached.