Grace Lusk: Old maid, modern woman, and triangle slayer

Small town scandal erupts

“Do you love me better than anything in the world?” thin, pretty, 39-year-old spinster schoolteacher Grace Lusk asked her 51-year-old married lover, well known veterinarian Dr. David Roberts. It was 1917 and the couple had been strolling through the scenic countryside of Waukesha, Wisconsin, the town in which they both lived. They sat down among the daisies when Lusk turned to the vet with this volatile question.

The vet hesitated and Lusk slugged him in the eye. It was the first time domestic violence marred this relationship but, sadly, would not be the last.

Lusk was desperate. She and the vet had been having an affair for almost two years. It was increasingly clear to her that he had no intention of leaving his wife. Continuing indefinitely as a married man’s girlfriend was intolerable to the schoolteacher but so was the possibility of life without Roberts. Soon after this encounter, she bought a gun. Later, she would claim she contemplated only suicide when she made the purchase.

On a hotel rendezvous, she displayed the shiny steel revolver to Roberts and declared, “If you don’t care for me, if you don’t care to be fair and straightforward to both your wife and me, I’m going to kill myself!”

But instead of pointing the gun at herself, she shoved it into his chest and continued, “I’m going to give you just five minutes to live, Dave Roberts. Just five minutes, unless you agree to tell your wife of our relationship.”

That was an offer he could not refuse. The trembling man laid a hand on Gideon’s Bible and swore to tell all to his wife.

Reassured, Lusk put the gun down and said, “Darling, you don’t have to tell her yet if you don’t want to!”

In fact, his wife, the intelligent and observant Mary “Mame” Roberts, had already guessed that her often-straying husband might be having an affair with the unmarried schoolteacher. When Mrs. Roberts confronted him, he firmly denied any dalliance with Lusk but promised to break off their innocent friendship to silence the rumors going around.

On an evening shortly after the vet made this vow, Lusk showed up at the Roberts’ doorstep. Meeting Dr. Roberts at the door, she told him to come out into the street so they could talk.

Suddenly there were joined by the third member of the triangle. Adopting a posture of candied politeness, plump Mary Roberts invited Lusk inside for a three-way discussion.

A frantic Lusk insisted the vet accompany her into the street for a private conversation. He reluctantly agreed, leaving his icily calm wife at the doorstep.

On the sidewalk, the nervous philanderer asked Lusk if she had the gun with her. She said she did not. She went on to say that she had to know if the two of them had a future together.

He assured her that he loved her deeply and the illicit couple kissed in public, protected only by the semi-darkness of early night.

The next morning, Tuesday June 21, 1917, Mary Roberts phoned Lusk at work and demanded to know the meaning of the “asinine” scene of the previous evening. Lusk promised to explain if Mrs. Roberts would meet her at the YMCA studio. Due to overcrowding at the Waukesha high school building, Lusk had been teaching her classes at the YMCA and so had an office there.

At about 10:00 a.m., Lusk looked out the window to see her lover and his wife in front of the YMCA building. From their gestures she assumed the couple were having a heated argument. Neither of them came inside to see her.

A short while after that, the schoolteacher sat down to write a letter to her paramour’s wife, setting out her version of the affair and arguing that she had the higher claim, that of true love, to her rival’s husband. She urged Mrs. Roberts to “read Ellen Key’s book on Love and Marriage” in order to “understand the modern the woman’s attitude on morals.”

She did not mail the letter before going to a dressmaker’s to try on a new dress that she wanted for her wedding gown if her lover married her or her funeral shroud if she committed suicide because he would not.

At 2:00 p.m. Lusk was back at the house at which she resided, that of her friend Bianca Mills. Lusk called David Roberts on the phone. The two did not have time to start quarrelling because Mary Roberts appeared in the room, having let herself in through the unlocked front door. Lusk hung up the phone.

Mrs. Roberts asked if Lusk was going to continue to “run after” her husband and Luck said the vet had “run after” her.

Ironically, as the two women verbally sparred, Luck behaved like a good hostess at an afternoon tea, bringing out a chair for the woman who was denouncing her. Mary Roberts sat down and told Lusk she was a “bad, unprincipled woman.” She went on to claim that her husband “makes fun of you” and that he ridiculed her dowdy dress.

The statement must have stung. Lusk had long doubted the sincerity of her lover’s feelings and she knew she was no fashion plate.

Lusk told her rival that she wanted to bear the vet’s child.

Mary Roberts retorted that it was obvious Lusk was past childbearing age. Then she went on to taunt her with an abortion horror story. “I suppose you know about that girl who died in an attic room after an operation,” she said, “after she had been too interested in my husband.

“And you lived with him after that?” Lusk asked.

“Why, certainly,” Mrs. Roberts replied, “I am a respectable woman.”

Lusk claimed she could prove Dr. Robert’s love through letters he had written to her. Mary Roberts said she would like to see them. Lusk hurried up the stairs to fetch those epistles.

Pulling open the drawer that kept her lover’s precious letters, Lusk also saw her revolver. She went down the stairs carrying both the epistles and the gun, concealing the latter. Just as Mary Roberts began perusing her husband’s letters to his girlfriend, the phone rang. Mrs. Roberts got to it before Lusk did. It was David Roberts. His wife told him to come to Bianca Mills’ place, then put the phone down.

Mary Roberts apparently reasoned that with all three points of the triangle present, this thing could be settled once and for all — which indeed it soon was, although not in the way she would have wished.

The two women continued squabbling and the wife called her rival several ugly names. Finally, she said Lusk was a “slut whom the dogs followed down the street.”

It was more than the distraught schoolteacher could take. Lusk pulled out her .25-caliber pistol and shot. A haywire bullet ploughed through a cabinet. A second shot went straight into the heart of Mary Roberts. She sank to the floor, blood flowing onto her blue sweater. She was dead in a matter of minutes.

A stunned Lusk pondered her next action as she stared at the body of her victim. She decided that she would kill herself. But she wanted to die in the gown that she had intended to be her wedding dress or funeral shroud.

She reloaded the gun, then went up the stairs. Wanting to make sure the revolver still worked, she fired aimlessly out the window only to see that she barely missed David Roberts, who was then parking his car in front of Bianca Mills’ home.

Lusk apparently saw the pointlessness of changing clothes. She shot herself, taking off part of a finger and giving herself a superficial flesh wound in her chest.

David Roberts pushed through the unlocked door. The manager of his veterinary business, L. D. Blott, accompanied him. Seeing the prone body of his dead wife, Roberts collapsed into sobs.

There followed a dramatic scene that could have been made for the motion pictures, whether the silents of the era or the talkies of the near future.

The heartbroken, homicidal and suicidal Grace Lusk came to the head of the stairs with a red and growing bloodstain on the front of her white dress. She threatened to do away with herself while Blott tried to talk her out of it. Blott also telephoned the police and called a medical doctor named R. E. Davies.

When Dr. Davies showed up, Grace asked him if the wound she had was likely to be fatal. He said “no” and she shot herself in the chest again. That wound would not be fatal either. She was still alert, although weakened and bleeding, when Police Chief Don McKay showed up. Lusk told him that she shot Mrs. Roberts “because of the awful names she called me.”

Luck was charged with murder. The schoolteacher’s friends and students were shocked. She was a woman who had lived most of her life immersed in academic subjects and adhering righteously to traditional mores. Superficially, she seemed like the last person to be the subject of a small town scandal much less the defendant in a widely publicized murder trial. But a deep look into her background may make the tragedy more understandable.

Spinster Schoolteacher

Grace Lusk was born in 1878, the only child of Stoughton, Wisconsin dentist Dr. A. P. Lusk and housewife Mary Tipple Lusk.

His patients respected the dentist for his dedication and competency but, according to Ione Quinby’s Murder for Love, he was known for eccentricities “such as brushing flies off his face in winter, when there were no flies about, and talking to his hat after he had hung it on a nail.”

Mrs. Lusk was nervous and high-strung. She made a half-hearted suicide attempt while on her honeymoon. Did she believe the marriage was a mistake? Did she, like so many other women of her era, find the sex act distasteful, even painful? The reason for the attempt is unknown but it is easy to view it as a foreshadowing of the distant, disastrous future of her only child.

Grace grew up a daddy’s girl in Stoughton, Wisconsin, impressing all her elders with her quick intelligence and eagerness to learn. Her elders often complimented the serious, studious youngster who was such a contrast to more frivolous and playful children.

The teenage Grace Lusk was neat and favored simple garments. Projecting an aura of fierce chastity, she took no interest in boys when she was in high school nor they in her. She enjoyed learning languages and took courses in German, Latin, and French.

As a young adult, Lusk excelled at Whitewater Normal College but had to leave it in 1895 because her father’s health was failing and taking the family’s finances down with it. She went to work as a teacher at Menominee Falls, Wisconsin. There she taught elementary schoolchildren and was music supervisor of the high school.

Lusk sought to better her credentials and took advanced French and Latin at the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin.

Her efforts paid off. An educational group called the Moseley Commission appointed her to travel to Europe to examine and report on the school systems of England, Scotland and Holland. Touring Europe allowed the refined and intellectual Lusk to visit galleries where she could see cathedrals and great works of art.

On her return to America, she enrolled at the University of Chicago where she studied philosophy and medieval history.

Sometime in 1912, when she was 34, Lusk began suffering severe, disabling headaches. Soon she had such a bad case of neuritis that she lost the use of her right hand. A doctor who examined her believed these problems were brought on by overwork and prescribed complete rest and relaxation. Perhaps he saw her, as so many did, as an example of a recognizable type: the frustrated spinster.

Following the physician’s advice, Lusk sought refuge with a friend of hers, Bianca Mills, who lived in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Bianca was also unmarried and middle-aged.

Lusk spent much of her ample free time just thinking and reading. She had long been interested in psychology and had taught it. Now she tried to see how psychological doctrines might make sense of her difficulties. She read many works by Sigmund Freud and Ellen Key and was especially influenced by the latter.

Key was a writer who criticized feminists for demanding equality in the work force because she thought motherhood was their proper sphere but believed that marriages based on obligation were less moral than unwed sexual relationships based on love. She also counseled that single motherhood, so strongly stigmatized at the time, was “the lesser evil” for unmarried women who yearned for children. The schoolteacher who had always impressed people as prudish was enthralled by these “modern” ideas.

As Lusk became physically and emotionally stronger, she assisted handyman “Daddy” Smith in Mills’ flower and vegetable garden. Eventually, Lusk felt well enough to return to work. She got a job teaching psychology and agriculture at a Waukesha school. Although well versed in psychology, she had little training in agriculture.

In an effort to familiarize herself with the subject, she made friends with David Roberts, a cow, horse, swine, and dog doctor she met at a Baptist Church social. Roberts was highly regarded in his field but had a checkered personal life.

Playboy Veterinarian

David Roberts was born in Franksville, Wisconsin in 1866. His father was a veterinarian and cattle farmer. David followed in his father’s footsteps, graduating from the Chicago Veterinary College in 1889. Then he moved to Waukesha and hung out his shingle. He located his home in the same building as his veterinary hospital. The doctor called himself the “Cattle Specialist” and many farmers found that Roberts indeed had a knack for healing their cows. Three veterinarians were already practicing in the rural town when Dr. Roberts moved there but his energy, extroverted personality, and talent for publicity meant that he was soon Waukesha’s most popular animal doctor.

In 1890, the same year he opened his veterinary practice, David married pretty Mary Newman. A schoolteacher ten years his junior, she was happily gave up her job for homemaking. Mrs. Roberts kept busy as an exacting housekeeper and an active member of many social and charitable groups. She taught Sunday School at the local Baptist Church and was a member of the Ideal Club, a group dedicated to reading about and discussing current issues. The couple remained childless but it is not known whether this was involuntary or due to the successful use of the generally unreliable contraceptive methods then available. Mary Roberts might have been unable to bear children; David Roberts is believed to have impregnated at least one woman with tragic results. The couple’s pets were a cat and a canary who were assiduously kept apart from each other for the latter’s safety.

A dedicated vet, Roberts did extensive research into the problem of cattle miscarriages and into cattle tuberculosis. In 1904, he incorporated “Dr. David Robert’s Veterinary Company” which made animal medicines. He also published Practical Home Veterinarian; it sold over a million copies.

Wisconsin’s Governor James Davidson appointed Dr. David Roberts the State Veterinarian in 1906. The appointment necessitated a move to the state capitol of Madison. According to Once Upon A Prairie, Roberts “caused a sensation as state veterinarian when he . . . killed two or three [tubercular] cattle in public [at county fairs] to show what a diseased condition they were in.” These demonstrations “resulted in Wisconsin having more tuberculin-tested cattle than any other state in the Union.”

The Robertses lived in Madison until the vet’s term ended in 1908. His brother succeeded him.

The couple returned to Waukesha. Dr. Roberts kept himself in the public eye with frequent appearances at livestock shows as official veterinarian. According to the article “Dr. David Roberts” by Dr. Michael Smith, a veterinarian who has researched Roberts’ life, he served in that capacity at the “National Dairy Show in Chicago, the International Dairy Show in Milwaukee and the American Royal Livestock Show in Kansas City.”

Perhaps his proudest achievement was the “Dr. Roberts Stock Farm” billed as “the most modern barn in the Midwest.” He claimed that the average American cow produced 175 lbs. of butter and 5,000 lbs. of milk per hear while a cow on his farm produced about 629 lbs. of butter and 14,234 lbs. of milk per year. The assertion may have been extravagant but the publicity and admiration it garnered for him and his cattle medicines were real and translated into substantial dollars for the self-promoting vet.

The Roberts marriage was secure but not happy because David Roberts was frequently unfaithful. His wife often berated him about it but had no intention of divorcing him because she liked being married to a successful man and being prominent in the social circles of Waukesha. Divorce was still frowned upon in those days and Mary Roberts did not want to be seen as less than respectable.

Economic success and a robust confidence must have been the keys to David’s success with women since he was not an especially handsome man. However, he was a dapper dresser who favored dark red ties and flaunted a flashing diamond ring.

When he met Grace Lusk, he was working on a new textbook called Cattle Breeds and Origins. The schoolteacher wanted to learn more about barnyard animals for her classes. The vet and writer wished aid from someone more skilled in the English language than he was and suggested they collaborate. Lusk agreed.

She wrote the following poem as a preface to the proposed book.

While o’er the sunny southland
King Cotton still holds sway,
And in the north to great King Corn
His people homage pay,
Through all the land, both north and south,
Our bordering seas between,
From mountains’ crown to river’s mouth
We hail the cow as Queen!

Lusk’s brief poem cannot be called a work of art but it is a satisfactory poem. It has excellent and perfect rhymes: “sway/pay,” “south/mouth,” and “between/Queen.” She is flowery but not saccharine and uses poetic conventions rather than mere clichés –”o’er the sunny southland/King Cotton still holds sway” — for an appropriate tribute to the domesticated bovine.

In the small town of Waukesha, Lusk had joined two groups of which Dr. Roberts’ wife, Mary, was a member, the Ideal Club and the Red Cross sewing circle. At Mary Roberts’ suggestion, Lusk once gave a talk to the Ideal Club on the “New Thought” of Ellen Key.

At the Red Cross sewing circle, they and several other women gathered to knit clothes that would be worn by the young men fighting across the sea in the War to End All Wars. The two saw each other frequently but there are no reports of a scene at the sewing circle.

While working on the doctor’s opus, a romance blossomed between the schoolteacher with new, radical ideas and the married vet who followed the traditional double standard, enjoying the privileges and security of a stable home life plus some fun on the side.

To seduce Grace, David told her the standard married man (or woman’s) story of an unhappy home life and a spouse who does not understand. He claimed that the Roberts marriage was nothing but blazing rows punctuated by chill silences. He intimated that they were childless because they were not having sex.

As the romance burned hotter, Lusk pressured Roberts to tell his wife about their relationship. The spinster thought Mrs. Roberts would agree to a divorce if Dr. Roberts promised to continue supporting her through alimony. He continually put Lusk off, saying that, however miserable he was in the marriage, he had no grounds for divorce.

The vet took frequent business trips and Lusk accompanied him to such major cities as Milwaukee, Peoria and Chicago where the adulterous couple consummated their passion in expensive hotels.

Lusk continued to insist that he should divorce his wife and marry her. The doctor repeatedly said that he could not do that. As their affair went into its second year, passionate lovemaking took a backseat to angry squabbling.

The schoolteacher had converted to the belief that love, rather than the sanction of legal matrimony, is the holiest bond between a man and a woman. Lusk brooded upon and underlined passages such as the following excerpt from Ellen Key’s Love and Marriage: “When two lovers have their desire and have reached maturity; when the will has a right to realization and is in full agreement with the health and beauty of themselves, of the new generation and of society, it is right that they should come together, even though it may not be possible for their pure desire of common life and common work to take the form of marriage.”

Sensation and Judgement

Dr. Roberts did not visit Lusk when she was in the hospital being treated for her self-inflicted wounds. His rejection made the sick woman hysterical. She begged the doctors to let her die.

For several days, it seemed the schoolteacher would get her wish. Her condition worsened and hospital personnel despaired of healing her.

Then she got a visitor who rallied her spirits. He was not the lover for whose presence she cried out in delirium but her stooped, 75-year-old father (her mother had died several years previously). His comforting presence reawakened her will to live.

After Mary Robert’s death, the Ideal Club published a collection of her essays. They show that she was a person of acute observation and active wit.

In an essay entitled “Modern Dress” Mrs. Roberts wrote, “We do not want our daughters to appear in so few and so abbreviated garments that the young men can say when asked, ‘Had he been to the dance?’ – ‘I certainly saw one glorious fat stock show, mostly calves and beefy shoulders.’”

In another wry passage she wrote, “Then fashion decreed that life was too easy for us and that no waist should be beautiful that fastened in the front and we all agreed upon fastenings at the back of the waist, and I arrived at most of the social functions for years not on speaking terms with the man I permitted or persuaded to fasten me up, and many times I had to go to the neighbors to obtain help.”

After Lusk recovered from her injuries and was moved to the Waukesha jail to await trial, grateful former students and supportive fellow schoolteachers visited her, as did Bianca Mills. David Roberts stayed away. Quinby wrote that to keep busy Lusk “knitted five sweaters, a half dozen pair of wristlets, a scarf seventy-five inches lone, and for helmets for the boys who had gone to France [for WWI].”

Although not arrested, the playboy vet was ordered to remain in Waukesha because he was being investigated for violation of the Mann Act that outlawed “transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes.”

The previously sleepy town of Waukesha found itself in the midst of a media storm. Reporters from all over the country descended on it. The story of the scorned spinster, the promiscuous vet and the murdered wronged wife touched a nerve in the general public.

Some viewed the tragedy as symptomatic of the dangers of unnaturally delaying the yearnings of the flesh and heart. Robert M. Wenley, respected psychologist at the University of Michigan, eloquently expressed this view.

“If a woman does not have a love affair until she is thirty years old,” he commented, “the affair will be much more violent than if love comes earlier in life.”

The psychologist also believed Lusk was misled by the work of Sigmund Freud. “Like many amateurs,” he speculated, “Miss Lusk probably took the doctrines of Sigmund Freud to herself. She was a student of that writer and argued that if repression produced hysteria, she was justified in any aberration she might commit because she could not control herself.”

Many observers saw the case as symptomatic of the conflict between the supposedly modern views on love championed by Grace Lusk and the old-fashioned notions of commitment to marriage represented by her victim. Others viewed it as a classic case of women deceived by a cad and cast David Roberts in the role of the predatory male.

Roberts was stung by this perception of his behavior. The vet acknowledged his many extra-marital sexual affairs even as he defended himself.

“I did not deceive her or lead her on,” he claimed. “We were not children. But I did some poor calculation. Other women have thought they cared for me but I was married and they knew their liking for me would come to nothing permanent. So the affairs usually faded away. I thought it would be the same with Miss Lusk but it wasn’t.”

While Grace was in jail awaiting trial, David Roberts looked about for someone to help him write his life story. Eventually it would be published as Life Story of Dr. David Roberts.

When the trial opened on May 16, 1918, Lusk’s attorneys entered a plea of Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity.

Judge Martin Lueck presided. The jury picked for Lusk’s trial was all male and primarily older men. All were farmers except for the hardware merchant elected “foreman.” Wits called it the “barnyard jury” and found it peculiarly appropriate for the women who had fallen so disastrously in love with a cattle doctor.

Each day the courtroom was packed. Many of the spectators were Lusk’s friends and former students. Twenty-four women from the Ideal Club sat together in hopes that they would see justice done to the killer of a dear friend. Others came to slake their curiosity about the staid, middle-aged schoolteacher whose passionate romance had ended in violence. There were also reporters from states all across the nation covering the trial.

David Roberts attended the trial but avoided meeting his ex-lover’s gaze. Instead, he spent his time comforting his grieving mother-in-law as she cooled herself with a black-plumed fan.

The defendant sat up straight and seemed calm and alert, garbed in neat, starched dressed and skirts.

Early in the trial, the jury and all principals in the trial visited Bianca Mills’ home because it was the scene of the crime. Lusk and Mills hugged as the jurors were shown the area of the shooting.

“Daddy” Smith was in the garden, spading up some soil in the May sunshine, when he saw the woman who used to help him and was now being tried for her life. Smith attempted a bit of whimsical role-playing, telling Lusk to “get into the house,” then “Come help Daddy Smith get this ground ready for the planting.”

As Lusk was escorted back to the waiting police car, she said valiantly, “Goodbye, Daddy Smith! I’ll just pretend I’m going into the house and put on my gingham apron and help you.”

Dr. David Roberts testified for the prosecution. He painted Lusk as a harlot who had pursued him and thrown herself at him. “The woman tempted me and I fell,” he claimed from the witness stand. He had violated the Mann Act to please her. “One day she asked me,” he said, “’Why don’t you take me down to Chicago and show me a good time?’”

This was too much for the defendant. Lusk rose to her feet, shouting, “That’s a lie, Dave! Oh, it’s a lie!”

The prosecution put on three “alienists,” as psychiatrists were then called, to testify that Lusk was sane when she killed Mary Roberts

Testifying as a character witness for the defense, a young woman who had been in one of Lusk’s classes said, “We owe her so much. She taught us all we know about pictures and books.”

The defense put on several of its own alienists to testify that Lusk was insane when she killed Mary Roberts. According to Quinby, they based “their opinions on the insanity of the defendant’s great-grandmother, Louisa Bond, who was confined to the Wisconsin State Insane Hospital in 1864, on the temporary derangement of her mother while on her honeymoon, and on the eccentricities of her father.”

Lusk’s attorneys discouraged her from testifying but she insisted that she had to take the stand and explain herself. She went through her background, telling of her bookish childhood and academically oriented adulthood. Her manner changed when she talked of her love affair. She hesitated and squirmed uncomfortably. Often her voice seemed on the edge of breaking.

The jury returned with its verdict on May 29, 1918 at 10:00 p.m. Informed that a verdict had been reached, Lusk collapsed in her cell. Her elderly father held her up by one arm as she shuffled into the courtroom with. The chalk-faced defendant looked around. Roberts was not there.

“I refuse to listen to this verdict,” she told the judge, “unless you send for Dr. Roberts. He brought me where I am. I want him to hear what the jury thinks about it.”

The judge told her that was impossible. She sank into her chair at the defendant’s dock. The jurors filed into the courtroom. The foreman pronounced Lusk guilty of second-degree murder.

After the verdict was read, Lusk stood up and took her hat off. She brushed her father away and walked with zombie-like calm to the prosecutor, D. S. Tullar. For a moment she simply stared at him. Then she reached for his neck and viciously clawed at his jaw with a fingernail, leaving a red streak.

Her hands clamped around his neck and she screamed, “You lied! You lied! You lied my life and my love away!” The sheriff and deputies pried her away from the prosecutor. She continued screaming and started weeping as they dragged her out of the courtroom, down the stairs, and back to the jail. A doctor injected the ranting Lusk with a tranquilizer. Although subdued, she continued raving.

After the verdict, Roberts drove with his mother-in-law to the Prairie Home Cemetery where he placed roses on his wife’s grave. The grieving widower told a reporter, “There has not been a day when I have been in Waukesha since my wife was buried that I have not gone with her mother to Mame’s grave. When I’m away I have arranged for someone else to take mother with her.” Those who viewed Roberts as a classic cad might have noted that he was more faithful to her in death than he had been in life but it is a truism that people often do not appreciate what they have until they lose it.

Lusk’s attorneys put in a motion for a special inquiry into her present sanity. They contended that even if she had been sane at the time of the offense, she was now insane and should be sent to a hospital instead of prison.

Judge Lueck rejected the motion. He sentenced Lusk to 19 years in prison with the provision that she must spend June 21 of each year in solitary confinement.

After sentencing, Lusk appeared to regain her senses. When she spoke to journalists she seemed to repudiate the “modern woman’s” ideas she had embraced putting love above the legal tie of matrimony. Like some of the more conservative commentators on the case, she apparently believed it showed the need to respect traditional mores.

“My life is over,” she said despondently, “and I feel that I am dead now except for that ever constant pain in my heart. . . . I wonder if any of the women who read my story are learning anything from it. . . It isn’t safe to let yourself become the least bit fond of a man who is married. The first step that takes you away from friendship and toward love – that’s the one to avoid. When you go home nights thinking about a man and go to sleep with his face in your mind and wake up thinking of him in the morning – perhaps having dreamed of him during the night – it isn’t safe to go on with the friendship.”

Lusk served six years at Waupun Prison. Because her health was poor, the Governor commuted her sentence. She died in 1938.

Dr. David Roberts spent a year in jail for violation of the Mann Act. He married three more times. He wed his second wife, Violet in 1922. She died in 1935. Then he married an employee of his named Theresa Schlery. Apparently, he had not mended his ways because she divorced him on the grounds of adultery in 1947. When he was 82, he married 31 year old Elisabeth Walker, the woman his third wife named as co-respondent in her divorce suit.

Roberts had a stroke in October 1949 and early in 1950, some of his relatives and business associates tried to have him declared mentally incompetent. According to Once Upon A Prairie, “those who brought the action claimed the veterinarian was completely submissive to the will of his fourth wife after he suffered a stroke . . . One of the petitioners had said at an earlier hearing that Roberts summoned him to his bedside and begged for a glass of water, saying he hadn’t had any water for two days.” The petitioners also claimed that Elisabeth brought a “vicious” dog into her husband’s room.

The supposedly dangerous dog turned out to be a tame and friendly collie. A court ordered interview with Roberts found him, in the words of Waukesha Freeman reporter Kay Dornon, “bright, comfortable and pleased with the care given him by his young wife.” The court denied the petition.

The next year, at the age of 85, Roberts died of a cerebral hemorrhage. His wife Elizabeth was at his bedside.

Dr. Mike Smith says that Cattle Breeds and Origins, the book that brought these ill-fated lovers together, was finished and published. “I’ve seen two copies,” he recalled. “It’s a collectible. His old veterinary patent medicines also sell as collectibles.” The medicines were of little if any medicinal value, Dr. Smith said. “I would say he was selling to a mass audience,” the vet elaborated, “and he was selling things that couldn’t do what he said they would do.”

Perhaps it is somehow fitting that many of the claims Dr. David Roberts made as a professional were hollow since his private tragedy exposed him to the world as a person of deceit and duplicity.

Bibliography

http://user.tninet.se/~uzt234e/EllenKey.htm.

http://writetools.com/women/stories/key_ellen.html, “Women’s Stories.”

http://www.bartleby.com/65/ke/Key-Elle.html.

http://www.ci.waukesha.wi.us/history/gracelusk_murder.htm.

http://petvet.home.mindspring.com/VCR/articles/roberts/html, D.V.M., Dr. Smith, Michael, “Dr. David Roberts: The Private and Professional Life of one of the Mid-West’s most Prominent Veterinarians.”

Koenig, G.H., Once Upon A Prairie, Waukesha Freeman, 1984.

Quinby, Ione, Murder for Love, Covici Friede Publishers, New York, 1931.

I also want to thank Mike Smith, DVM, for answering questions in an interview.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 2:00 am and is filed under Culture, Domestic Violence, Family, Feminism, Mayhem, Men and Mating, Psychology, Society, Vox Populi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. | 195 views | Trackback | Print this page |

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