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True Crime Historian

Massacre At The Love Bungalow

True Crime Historian

Richard O Jones

True Crime, Performing Arts, Documentary, Arts, Society & Culture

4.5720 Ratings

🗓️ 23 November 2025

⏱️ 49 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Seven Dead at Taliesin

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In Episode 46, we relive a somewhat famous crime involving the noted architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the night that his apparently crazed butler -- yes, the butler did it! -- slaughtered seven people at Wright’s Wisconsin rural home he named Taliesen after the ancient Welsh poet, and built as a hide-away for himself and the love of his life, Mamah Borthwick, who was among the dead.

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Spring Green, Wisconsin, August 16th, 1914.

0:11.8

Fitful flashes of lightning tonight revealed the detected figure of a man kneeling beside an open

0:17.7

grave on a pine-clad slope of hillside valley.

0:21.6

Frank Lloyd Wright, bareheaded and coatless, wept alone over the final haven of his soulmate.

0:27.6

A low wind stirred the pine needles and an occasional drop of cold rain sprayed the flowers,

0:34.6

heaped on a plain white box at the bottom of the grave.

0:39.0

The murmur of the restless Wisconsin River, slipping smoothly through the wood fringes,

0:43.8

accentuated the permanent grief of a heartbroken man.

0:48.6

There was no funeral cortege, no services, no prayers, no casket. It was dark when the pine box containing the body was removed from the drawing room of the country home of Andrew T. Porter, a brother-in-law of the architect.

1:04.0

Four men carried the box down the hill to the road, where it was placed on a spring wagon.

1:10.0

At the right private burial plot placed on a spring wagon. At the Wright private

1:12.3

burial plot, about a mile from the Love Castle, the four men carried the box to the edge

1:18.6

of a freshly dug grave and lowered it. Wright took an armful of flowers from the wagon

1:25.4

and sprinkled them over the grave.

1:28.2

He had plucked them during the day from the dead woman's garden at the Love Castle.

1:35.9

Earlier in the day, two men stood beside two plain, unpainted boxes.

1:41.5

One box contained the body of the woman who bore two children for one of the men and faced social exile for the other.

1:49.0

The other box contained the bodies of two children.

1:53.0

Neither man spoke.

1:55.0

Both were looking across the valley at the black scar at the top of the distant hill, the wrecked monument

2:01.8

of the blasted hopes of four persons, a man and a wife, a husband and a woman.

2:09.3

As four men approached and lifted one of the boxes, Cheney and Wright broke their dry-eyed

...

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