Frank lloyd wright taliesin tragedy

Famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright was not at home when a hatchet-wielding employee murdered seven people and set fire to the Wisconsin house that Wright had built for the woman he loved.

She was the killer’s first victim.

Wright, then 47, lived for another four decades after the tragedy, and the mass murder remains a nearly forgotten chapter of his life.

But headlines at the time screamed about the bloodshed at Wright’s “Love Cottage” — so dubbed by scandal-hungry newspapers because Wright had left his wife and six children and built the Wisconsin home to live with Martha “Mamah” Borthwick.

The two had met through her husband, Edwin Cheney, who’d commissioned Wright to design a house for his family.

Wright and Borthwick began an affair and lived together for a period in Europe.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin

The Cheneys got a divorce, but Wright’s wife, Catherine Lee Tobin, refused to grant him one. So Wright and Borthwick moved to Spring Green, Wisconsin, to live openly as a coupl Book Review: A Brave and Lovely Woman - Frank Lloyd Wright ... RAZAM