It made all the headlines—the lurid tale of Grace Lusk, a schoolteacher who succumbed to the charms of a philandering veterinarian and ended up murdering his wife. The scandal of the bloody 1917 love triangle, along with the ensuing trial and media frenzy, rocked Waukesha, the prosperous upper-crust watering hole re-nowned as “The Saratoga of the West.”
The man in the eye of the hurricane was Dr. David Roberts, pillar of the community, successful businessman, and widely admired veterinarian. Born in a log cabin on his family’s farm in Racine County, Roberts inherited a love of animals. His grandfather, J.P. Roberts, tended early settlers’ horses and cattle, and his father, John M. Roberts, was a stockman and dairy farmer. After graduating from Beloit Col-lege, he earned his D.V.S. at the Chicago Vet-erinary College in 1889 before moving to Waukesha, where he set up practice in a mod-est building on West Main Street.
Roberts was bright and ambitious. He gained a reputation as a cattle specialist and an innovator, becoming the first farmer in Wisconsin to electrify his barn in 1898. In 1906 he was appointed by Gov. Davidson to serve as State Veterinarian of Wisconsin, taking the job vacated by his brother, E.D. Roberts.
In 1909, David Roberts relinquished the post, returning to his Waukesha animal clinic and a lucrative spin-off business selling medications. He enjoyed great success with his self-published Dr. David Roberts’ Practical Home Veterinarian, a nearly encyclopedic compendium of maladies ranging from nasal gleet to heaves, spavin, and wire cuts. Crisp black-and-white photos show a confident, solidly built man, immaculately dressed, with a full head of hair and a brushy moustache. Illustrations showcase the doctor’s splendid model dairy barn, his prizewinning sheep, and his Arabian team.
Roberts’ acclaim spread; he lectured widely and joined an Iowa professor aboard the Iowa Dairy Train, from which they addressed large gatherings of farmers. His eponymous product line expanded to 70 prescriptions and 20 types of instruments, sold from a fleet of trucks retrofitted to resemble tiny mobile barns. Roberts’ client list skyrocketed to 250,000 nationwide; he was invited to officiate at national livestock shows and was even summoned to Tarrytown, N.Y., to personally tend to William Rockefeller’s herd of Jerseys.
But the stalwart image Roberts cultivated was, as is so often the case, too good to be true. As he observed in his preening 1949 autobiography, The Life Story of Dr. David Roberts, written at the age of 82, “I do not like to be alone. I like to have the companionship of women. I do not know whether to be proud, complimented, or ashamed to confess that many women have told me that they were in love with me.”
Grace Lusk was one such woman. Born in Stoughton in 1878, she was a well-educa-ted teacher and self-reliant woman, given the standards of her age. She had traveled twice to Europe with friends, once as an emissary of the Milwaukee Superintendent of Schools, for whom she compiled a 1909 report on school systems in England, Holland, and Scotland. In 1914, Lusk was 36 years old, teaching in Waukesha, when she encountered Dr. Roberts, age 49, and his wife Mary, 49, at a dinner party.
The teacher and the vet struck up a conversation on cattle breeds, as one of the courses Lusk was required to teach involved that very topic. Roberts mentioned that he was writing a book on cattle, and eagerly enlisted Lusk’s help as his assistant. As the pair worked together in the early months of 1915, they grew closer, until one day, as Lusk later testified in her murder trial, “I was seated at my desk, looking at some of this manuscript, and he leaned over and kissed me. I stood up and I said he ought not to do that or something to that effect, and then I think we kissed each other.”
From the beginning, the enamored Roberts misunderstood the independent Grace Lusk, suggesting that she study stenography so she could become his private secretary. As she later testified, Lusk scorned the scheme as “a rather foolish sort of thing for me to do with my rather expensive education.”
Roberts won Lusk’s sympathy by be-moaning his married state, lonely and misunderstood, forced to support a demanding mother-in-law and finance the education of his wife’s two brothers. During their two-year love affair, the pair arranged trysts outside Waukesha, traveling south to Chicago and Peoria.
Roberts claimed he wished he could free himself of his wife so he could marry Lusk, whom he loved “10,000 times more.” Lusk begged Roberts to be honest with his wife and admit their affair. Although he promised he would, Roberts repeatedly avoided admitting his infidelity to his wife.
In a dramatic last-ditch effort to force his hand, Lusk bought a .25-caliber pistol and a new dress to wear in her coffin. Leaving a will bequeathing her possessions to friends, she cornered Roberts in a hotel room, fuming, “If you don’t love me enough, if you don’t care to be fair and straightforward to both your wife and me, I’m going to kill myself.” Roberts took an oath on the Gideon Bible to confess the affair to his wife. But he didn’t.
It is unclear exactly how Mrs. Mary New-man Roberts finally learned of her husband’s affair, but when she did she became furious. Leaving her grand home on Wisconsin Avenue on Tuesday, June 21, 1917, Mrs. Roberts strode through Cutler Park, arriving at the house on West Park Avenue where Grace Lusk was lodging.
Angrily facing the teacher, Mary Roberts said that her husband had admitted to being “chased” by Lusk. “Whenever I said anything to Dr. Roberts about you, he has always made fun of you,” she asserted. In an attempt to further wound Lusk, Mary Roberts quoted the pathetic defense offered by her philandering husband: “If I am going to have anything to do with a woman, at least give me the credit of picking out a nifty dresser.” After calling Lusk a “scrawny old maid,” ridiculing her friends, and threatening to report her to the school board if she didn’t leave town, Mrs. Roberts vowed that her friends would “tar and feather” the wayward Lusk.
Reaching a crescendo, the spurned wife threatened Lusk, as Lusk later related in court testimony: “‘I suppose the trouble with you is that you are in the family way, and we will have to deal with that.’ She said, ‘Don’t you know how [she mentioned the name of a young woman we both knew] this young woman died? Well, she died in the third story in a little room of a second-class boardinghouse, as the result of an abortion after she had been too friendly with my husband. You will die that way, too, but it won’t be in Waukesha.’”
Lusk’s response to the shocking accusation reveals the younger woman’s grit. Instead of wilting under Mary Roberts’ onslaught, Lusk turned the tables on the older woman, asking, “You knew that and you went to church the next Sunday with your husband?”
Mrs. Roberts’ blithe response: “Why shouldn’t I? I am a respectable married woman.”
Climbing the stairs to her bedroom in search of love letters from Dr. Roberts to show his wife, Lusk made the fateful decision to bring her gun back downstairs. Asked during her trial if she intended to shoot Mrs. Roberts, Lusk replied, “Never, never, never, never. I intended to shoot myself.”
Mary Roberts insisted on calling her husband to come to the house and explain the situation. According to later testimony by Grace Lusk, Mrs. Roberts completed her phone call and continued to hurl obscenities. Lusk later claimed, “I don’t remember what happened after that.” But in fact, Grace Lusk fired two shots and killed the doctor’s wife.
Running back to her room, Lusk reloaded the pistol and fired out the window before turning the gun on herself. She missed her heart, hitting only her left arm. Meanwhile, Dr. Roberts arrived downstairs, discovered his murdered wife, and fled, returning shortly with Dr. R.E. Davies and Don McKay, chief of police. A dazed Grace Lusk loomed above the men at the top of the stairs, her white blouse covered in blood, the gun in her hand. She rambled on for 45 minutes about her love for Dr. Roberts and the promises he’d made her.
When Lusk asked Dr. Davies if her wound was life-threatening, he replied that he didn’t think it was. She asked him to tell her the precise location of her heart, and Dr. Davies obliged. Then she shot herself again, blowing the tip off her index finger and piercing her lung but once more missing her heart.
Grace Lusk was imprisoned for nearly a year before her trial began. The jury was composed largely of farmers, and the melodrama of the proceedings drew crowds of more than 500 press and spectators. Many of Lusk’s friends and former students showed their support with daily attendance.
In his testimony, Dr. Roberts displayed a curious loss of memory, failing to recall key aspects of their relationship and accusing Lusk of pursuing him. Ultimately, the celebrity vet confessed to seven romantic interludes in Chicago hotels with Grace Lusk; he was
sentenced to one year in the Milwaukee House of Corrections for violating the Mann Act, which prohibited transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes.
Grace Lusk was found guilty of second-degree murder and was sentenced to 19 years at the state prison in Waupun. Due to health problems, she was transferred to Waldheim Park Sanatorium in Oconomowoc for treatment in 1921, and was pardoned by Gov. John James Blaine in 1923. At the time of her release, she vowed “to devote the remainder of my life to prison reform work.” Ever the teacher, Lusk was troubled by the lack of training or rehabilitation provided to her fellow inmates, especially the women.
In 1925, Lusk married an enigmatic man whom she referred to simply as “Mr. Brown,” insisted on being called Mrs. Brown, and disappeared from view. The elusive Mr. Brown never made a public appearance, and after Lusk’s death, The Milwaukee Journal gave voice to popular suspicions: “There are those who believe that ‘Mr. Brown’ is only a creature of Miss Lusk’s imagination, a name to shelter her from the name of ‘Grace Lusk,’ which has blazed in newspaper headlines since the murder.”
When Lusk died in 1930 after a goiter operation, there was no husband there to mourn her. Nor was he at her graveside when she was buried in Stoughton’s Riverside Cemetery, where The Milwau-kee Sentinel reported that “hundreds of curious” members of the press sparked a “near riot” with mourners.
The murder of his first wife and a year of incarceration did little to dim Dr. David Roberts’ professional success—or his romantic ardor. His long and eventful life reads like the plot of an overripe soap opera: His second wife died on Christmas Day, and his third wife divorced him and was granted a hefty $91,107 “love balm” settlement in 1947.
The enmity of the breakup was due to another case of infidelity between the 83-year-old Roberts and a 32-year-old divorcée, who eventually became wife number four. Deputy Mike Lombardi found the illicit pair in the backseat of a car on a lonely road near Delafield. When questioned, Roberts, lipstick emblazoned on his cheek, told the deputy he was “prescribing medicine for her horse.”
To the end, Dr. David Roberts maintained that his conduct had been misunderstood. One wonders what Grace Lusk might have made of these lines in his autobiography: “Unfaithfulness will wreck any home and too much caution cannot be taken to prevent anything of this nature from occurring no matter how innocent one may be.”
Laura Beausire has a weakness for tragic tales of romantic disaster. She writes, and weeps, from Monroe.
