On June 3, 1873, a portly, fashionably dressed, middle-aged man calls the Sturtevant House and asks to see the tenant on the second floor. The bellman goes up and presents the visitor’s card to the guest in room 267, returns promptly, and escorts the visitor upstairs. Before the bellman even reaches the lobby, four shots are fired in rapid succession.
Eighteen-year-old Frank Walworth descends the staircase and approaches the hotel clerk. He calmly inquires the location of the nearest police precinct and adds, "I have killed my father in my room, and I am going to surrender myself to the police."
So begins the fall of the Walworths, a Saratoga family that rose to prominence as part of the splendor of New York’s aristocracy. In a single generation that appearance of stability and firm moral direction would be altered beyond recognition, replaced by the greed, corruption, and madness that had been festering in the family for decades.
"When someone says that a work of narrative history reads like a novel, they almost always mean that the facts are lined up and marched in tight, chronological formation after the fashion of an airport thriller. Geoffrey O’Brien’s The Fall of the House of Walworth: A Tale of Madness and Murder in Gilded Age America does indeed read like a novel, but not that kind. Instead, this true crime story is part Victorian family saga, part creepy gothic, full of haunted people drifting through rooms filled with dark, oversize furniture as immobile and dominating as the past they can neither revive nor escape." —Laura Miller, Salon.com
