The Blood-Soaked Woman at the Top of the Stairs: The True Crime of Grace Lusk

When the married veterinarian Dr. David Roberts, a renowned expert on exotic cattle and distributor of a line of patent medicines for pets and farm animals, approached the spinster schoolteacher Grace Lusk about helping him edit a textbook on cattle, he sparked a three-year illicit relationship that ended in the killing of the doctor's wife. The veterinarian and the school teacher would travel separately to hotels in Chicago and Milwaukee while working on the cow book and would take long rides in the country in the wealthy veterinarian's touring car. On June 21, 1917, Dr. Roberts received a phone call summoning him to the boarding house where Grace Lusk lived, only to find his wife Mary bleeding on the parlor floor, a gunshot wound to her heart and Grace Lusk bleeding from a self-inflicted wound. For nearly an hour Miss Lusk held three grown men--including the chief of police--at bay from the top of the staircase, and even had a doctor take dictation for a farewell note to her father. Her plea would be insanity, and the trial filled with shocking revelations and torrid love letters. Read how the affair and all of its intrigues led to "The Blood-Soaked Woman at the Top of the Stairs," A Two-Dollar Terror No. 5.