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Claims to fame: Republican U.S. Senator from Utah (1896-1897); failed contender for state attorney general; successful Salt Lake City lawyer; serial adulterer; divorcé; homewrecker; bastard sire
Moral apex #1: Started an affair with one Isabel Cameron, daughter of a Michigan state senator; left his wife (and his own daughter) for his bit-o’-fluff only after the affair became public. He finally married Cameron and fathered a son by her.
Moral apex #2: After settling with his second family in Salt Lake City, the 53-year-old Brown took up with 23-year-old Anne Bradley, wife and mother of two, active participant in a number of respected women’s clubs, charter member of the city’s First Unitarian Church, secretary of the Fifth Ward Republican Committee, and secretary of the State Republican Committee. When they weren’t shagging in Salt Lake, he was taking her along on out-of-state trips, introducing her as his wife.
Ultimately, Bradley left her husband, and Brown filed for divorce from his second wife — who promptly put a private investigator on his philandering tail. Mrs. Brown filed an adultery charge against her husband, and, in September, 1902, both Brown and Bradley were arrested.
Mrs. Brown offered to drop her adultery complaint if her husband dropped the divorce. He wouldn’t, so she didn’t — and Brown and Bradley were arrested a second time the following January.
“The illicit affair,” wrote Linda Thatcher for History Blazer…
…continued with all parties involved in a dramatic confrontation in a Pocatello, Idaho, hotel where Isabel Brown … threatened to kill Bradley and intimidated Arthur by ordering him to open the door to his hotel room or she would “mash it in.” The former senator did. The combatants spent the night accusing each other of all sorts of indiscretions, and Brown, according to Christensen, gave Bradley a revolver as protection against his wife.Bradley apparently believed matters had been settled. Brown would make a financial settlement with his wife, secure a divorce, and marry her. When Bradley returned to Salt Lake, however, she found the couple had reconciled. She was three months pregnant with a second child she claimed Brown had fathered. Brown promised to arrange matters to give Bradley and her children “the protection… necessary.” When Isabel Brown died of cancer on August 22, 1905, a solution seemed at hand. Bradley obtained her divorce and expected a quick marriage to Arthur, but he was in no hurry to gain legal access to what he had enjoyed illicitly, postponing wedding dates and evading all attempts to pin him down about marriage or his promise to set her up in business.
In December 1906 she followed Brown to Washington, D.C., where she found letters to him from Annie Adams Kiskadden, mother of the famous actress Maude Adams and an actress in her own right. Enraged by the letters and believing Brown and Kiskadden planned to marry soon, Anne Bradley confronted Brown in his hotel room and shot him.
Arthur Brown died in the hospital five days later, on December 13, 1906.
What happened next: Tried for his murder, Bradley claimed temporary insanity, and was acquitted.
Suggested Bible reading for… Oh, heck, they’re both dead now, so there’s no reason to bludgeon their corpses with their own Bible.
