Whodunit? The conniving lover? A Russian duke? Readers ponder true tale of sex, murder

On the windiest, coldest day of the month, the Kansas City Public Library’s FYI Book Club met at a winery that the owner would rather not label as “haunted.”

Matt Mallinson of Mallinson Vineyard and Hall in Sugar Creek prefers the terms “entity,” “spirit” and even “orb,” over the standard “ghost.”

And perhaps that was for the best. In question at the winery that evening was an event in spring 1908 — an unsolved double murder possibly perpetrated by a power-hungry Parisian social climber named Meg Steinheil.

Sarah Horowitz’s “The Red Widow: The Scandal That Shook Paris and the Woman Behind It All” (Sourcebooks, $26.99) details those crimes as well as the suspicious death of the French president nine years earlier, which also took place in Meg’s presence.

Meg was never convicted of any crime, but her lying, manipulative ways — strategies she used to access the era’s rich and powerful — were downright scary.

Particularly after three people in Meg’s life went belly up. The six readers who met to discuss the book had a lot of visceral reactions.

They’d seen the interview with Horowitz in The Star in early October, which served as an announcement of the November book club meeting, free and open to the public.

Even Kaite Stover, the library’s director of readers’ services and organizer of the book club, was shaking her head at the subject matter. For starters, she said she had to keep reminding herself that this was a true crime story that is old, but not ancient history.

Horowitz included actual photographs of the bodies and forensic descriptions of the crime scenes.

“It’s not Lizzie Borden, someone’s going to draw a picture of the trial,” Stover said. “I had to remind myself that 1908 was not all that long ago.”

Horowitz, who joined the book club discussion via Zoom from her home in Virginia, said there are modern parallels of people famous for being famous, stories like that of the Kardashians. And then the modern tales of those who would lie and manipulate to gain higher social standing, like Anna Delvey as portrayed in the series “Inventing Anna.”

But what set Meg apart from modern day, run-of-the-mill scandal artists was her lovers. Well, and the dead people.

Meg had droves of lovers and manipulated them all to climb higher and higher.

Book club participants could hardly stand that the double murder — of Meg’s mother and husband — is still unsolved over a century later.

Hanna Cusick who lives in Kansas City, tried to work through the facts: a car idling in the driveway the night of the crime; Meg’s involvement with a Russian grand duke known to have a brutal temper.

Cusick thought the duke was the most obvious criminal, second only to Meg herself. Perhaps Meg’s husband woke up in the night to find the famously neurotic duke under his roof.

“She had a guy over and, for whatever reason, it all got out of hand. The only way she could salvage the situation was to tell him to tie her up — but not too tight,” Cusick mused.

Even after years of primary source research, the crime is still a matter of speculation for Horowitz. “I don’t think she would have wanted to kill her mother. And I’m not 100% on board with the idea that it’s the Russian grand duke, but I do think it was one of her very powerful lovers,” Horowitz said.

Cusick said that, come to think of it, the duke does drop off the story’s radar after only a couple of pages.

“It was a political hot potato no one wanted to touch,” Stover said. “This is the best kind of true crime because we don’t know who did it at the end.”

Participants also questioned the validity of Meg’s trial. Not long after the murders, she was taken into custody despite her tight relationships with Paris’ top judges, attorneys and law enforcement.

Those esteemed members of society vacillated in their views of what Meg may — or may not — have done, and the trial ended up resting largely upon the woman’s own persuasive laurels.

In the end, Stover pointed out, she was acquitted by a jury of her peers, though with three dissenters among them.

And who were the few who found her guilty? They were the working-class people, those most likely to see right through her wannabe elitist status grabs.

Denise Fletcher, also of Kansas City, pointed out that because of how privileged the elite of the time were, an investigation wasn’t even a given.

“They didn’t want to ruffle any feathers or harm any diplomatic relationship between Russia and France, and I think it was frustrating to me to not really know what happened,” Fletcher said.

And the common people of the time must have felt the same.

An investigation of sorts was carried out, and the “facts,” such as they were, showed up in the trial — but weren’t enough to garner sympathy from Meg’s social class of origin.

Additionally, Horowitz explained, Meg had tried to pin the murder on her 20-year-old valet. That didn’t play well with the working class either.

Horowitz said a little stack of postcards was among the most moving documentation she ran across.

“These postcards were written to the valet when he was released from jail. They were from factory workers who said, ‘We cried tears of joy when you were released.’ They saw themselves in him,” Horowitz said.

And really, it’s this sort of personal reflection that also keeps Mallinson tender-hearted toward the spirits that inhabit his winery.

“No, not ghosts,” he insisted again as the book club broke so he could cut the lights and show off the orbs floating by his security monitors.

No, these “entities” may have transcended the world the book club still finds itself in, but, like high-flying Meg, when it gets down to it, they’re still no different from anyone else in the room.

Join the club

The Kansas City Star and the Kansas City Public Library present a book-of-the-moment selection every few weeks and invite the community to read along. To participate in the next discussion led by Kaite Stover, the library’s director of readers’ services, email kaitestover@kclibrary.org.