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His name at birth in Linz, Austria, was Franz Leopold Maria Möst, and he switched it in 1985 to Welser-Möst in honor of Wels, a nearby city he grew up in.

“Sexual frustration, in fact, was the main cause of Guiteau’s misery,” Wels writes, as he “whined about his lack of access to Oneida’s women.”

Wels has a knack for making connections between disparate facts and coincidences.

The ending is a page turner as Wels describes Garfield’s last days alive, oblivious to Guiteau skulking in the shadows.

Like that once-famous colony, Garfield’s untimely death has been largely forgotten today, but both take on central roles in Susan Wels’s book “An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder.”