Remembering the shocking, yet largely forgotten, murders connected to Frank Lloyd Wright that scandalized the world

Frank Lloyd Wright was never a modest man.Praised frequently as the greatest architect in American history, he would parry “Why limit it to America?” During his long life — he died in 1959 at the age of 91 — he married three times, sired seven children, infuriated clients, ran up debts he couldn’t pay.

Yet he remained steadfast in his self-belief.Perhaps Wright’s greatest feat of strength, a new book argues, was to recover from a shattering personal tragedy which would have broken a weaker man.“The Killer and Frank Lloyd Wright: The True Story of Mass Murder in Paradise,” by Casey Sherman, describes an atrocity committed in 1914 at Taliesin, the Wisconsin residence Wright designed for the great love of his life, Martha “Mamah” Borthwick.“I call it ‘Romeo and Juliet’ meets ‘The Shining,’ ” author Sherman told The Post.“A crime like no other which — strangely — has been almost totally forgotten.”Frank first encountered Mamah (pronounced May-ma) in Oak Park, Ill., where, in the early 1900s, he spearheaded the innovative Prairie School of design.

A typical Wright home had a low-pitched roof, overhanging eaves, an open-floor plan and a horizontal ribbon of windows — very different from the Victorian-style houses previously popular in that prosperous Chicago suburb.Mamah — a “carefree, vivacious and intellectually curious” woman, as Sherman describes her — was married to one of Wright’s clients, a stolid businessman named Edwin Cheney with whom she shared a son and daughter.Wright, meanwhile, felt trapped in his own marriage to Catherine “Kitty” Tobin Wright whom he married when he was 22.He claimed Kitty was too absorbed raising their six children to provide him with stimulating and attentive companionship.When she refused to grant him a divorce, Wright left Illinois in autumn 1909, and persuaded the tall and elegant Mamah, now his lover, to accompany him to Europe.

Sherman describes the ensuing furor as “the e...