America's Pet Murderer

an end with the final number. I could love a Million Girls, I heard him says good Luther was lone is rubbish. White cut a larger than life figure in turn of the century New York, and he was a Harvey Weinstein of his age. He indulged his lavish appetites with impunity, and that included beautiful teenage girls. Oh good, love a million girls. Never girl a twin. I could love a John It's girl, and ask you more back. Stanford White's appetites were about to catch up with him.

What I f that thing that I would love about the million girls? People in the audience thought that the gunshots were part of the show. At first, the music kept playing. I love the girl with legs along with Beau did you like you? Then there were a few screams, then panic. The magical evening atmosphere evaporated like a dream. A man wearing a black tuxedo, a white straw boater hat, and an overcoat far too heavy for a hot summer night, raised a pistol over his head. The man screamed, I

did it because he ruined my wife. When thing good love Girl, it was an unforgettable night at Madison Square Garden. One millionaire murdered another millionaire in a fit of rage and jealousy, and that was just the start of the madness. Girl. Welcome back to The Thread, a podcast from Ozzie. I'm Sean Braswell. This season we dig into some of history's most incredible criminal trials, ones that attempted to find a

defendant not guilty by way of insanity. It's a criminal defense fraught with controversy, and it goes back over two hundred years. Our Thread this season began with the recent case of James Holmes, the young man who opened fire on a Colorado movie theater. In homes suffered from a variety of delusions, but experts and the jury at his trial determined that Holmes knew the difference between right and wrong, and he was therefore not legally insane when he committed

the crime. Part of the reason that even mentally ill defendants like Holmes faced an uphill battle and pleading insanity is the public and legal reaction to the outcomes in two earlier insanity cases. In those two cases, which we covered in episodes two and three, both Ringa Bobbitt, who cut off her husband's penis with a kitchen knife, and John Hinckley Jr. Who nearly killed President Ronald Reagan with a gunshot, were found not guilty of any crimes by

reason of insanity. In this episode, we turned back the clock more than seventy years to the nineteen o six murder of Stanford White on the rooftop of Madison Square. Guard White's killer was an eccentric businessman from Pittsburgh named Harry Thaw. Thaw's wealthy family was prepared to pay a million dollars to spare him from the electric chair. They were also prepared to embrace an unorthodox legal strategy. Harry Thaw's murder trial and his insanity plea transfixed the American

public and reimagine the criminal law. America was at a key turning point in its history in the early years of the twentieth century. Paula You're a Bureau is a professor of English and film studies at Hofstra University and the author of American Eve. I gave a recent talk, and I decided to describe New York City at the turn of the century as the city of the temples of power and temples of pleasure, and I would add progress,

because it was the century of progress. Huge fortunes were made in areas like banking, oil, railroads, and steel by men with names like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Henry Clay Frick. And people who made their fortunes such as Carnegie or Frick would usually moved to New York City from wherever they came from, simply because New York was the most exciting and the most interesting place to be.

Simon Botts is a professor of history at the John J College of Justice and author of The Girl in the Velvet Swing. And so New York City became really the repository of a huge amount of wealth as these multi millionaires moved to the city, and when they came here. What they did was they hired architects to build them luxurious houses and mansions. Stanford White was one of those architects. He was determined to sort of remake New York in

his own image. White design luxurious homes for wealthy clients like the Vanderbilts and the Astors and UH. In addition to private houses, he he designed a lot of public spaces, including UH probably the most famous things are that are still there as well to the Washington Square arch the original Penn Station, and of course Madison Square Garden, which was the sort of jewel in the crown of his achievements as in architect Madison Square Garden was a block

long entertainment company lex in Manhattan. It had an enormous amphitheater. We're up to seventeen thousand spectators gathered for horse shows, boxing matches, and political meetings. There was a ballroom, a restaurant, a concert hall, an indoor theater, and an open air rooftop theater. A large nude bronze statue of the Goddess Diana loomed over the rooftop theater on top of a gleaming tower. Madison Square Garden made Stanford White a New

York celebrity. He was very tall, he was very distinctive, he had striking red hair, and by all accounts, he was a very gregarious, charming, considerate individual. But at the same time, he had I think a self destructive tendency inside his character. White's character was also destructive to others.

The woman at the center of the love triangle that would result in White's murder said that he had vicious tendencies he quote performed frequently without remorse, with the sense that he and his friends were immune to the laws of the land. That woman was Evelyn Nesbitt. She was born in a torrent in Pennsylvania, which was a suburb of Pittsburgh, and at least for the first ten years of her life it was a fairly traditional I think

childhood Paula, You're a bureau again. But then her father died suddenly when she was eleven, and she and her mother and she had a younger brother, were thrown into poverty. It was sort of like a Dickens novel. Evelyn Nesbitt came to New York with her mother and brother in nineteen hundred. She was just fifteen Simon Barts, and immediately Evelyn got employment as a model, modeling for illustrators of

magazines and newspapers, and also for artists. Nesbitt had a distinctive, effortless beauty that set her apart from the other models of her day. She had large, haunting eyes, a mysterious mona Lisa half smile, and an enchanting, angelic face. Everybody said, and now it's funny when you say it. Now she had a face to die for, which was, of course what what was going to happen? But her face was her fortune in Her face was on the Whitman sampler, and her faces on sheet music, and it was on

anything you could put a picture on. Nesbitt became an American sweetheart, perhaps the nation's first true pin up girl. One Calumness dubbed her a modern Helen. But she wanted more than that. She decided she wanted to be a chorus girl. Like all young girls who come to the city, they want to be rich, they want to be famous. She managed to get into the chorus of the most popular show and broad at the time, which was called Flora Dora. Her mother lied about her age and said

that she was eighteen when she was only sixteen. As a chorus girl, Nesbit became the object of even more men's affections. The owner of Madison Square Garden was no different. Stanford White saw her and was immediately sort of smitten with her. Unlike Nesbitt's other admirers, however, White had the means to pursue his crush. Stanford White invited her to lunch one day and gradually got to know her. And at this time Stanford White was forty seven years old

and Evelyn Nesbit was sixteen years old. White celaborate seduction of the beautiful teenager began at his Manhattan bachelor pad on West Street, and that's where she met White for the first time. And he was showing around all of the beautiful rooms and things that he had decorated. It wasn't it was not a house that was known to his wife or his family. He called it one of

his snuggeries. There were red velvet curtains and beautiful pieces of hand carved Italian furniture, fine paintings hung on the walls. After lunch, White invited Nesbit upstairs to see more of his home in art collections, including a very special room on the top floor of the building Simon Botz again, author of The Girl on the Velvet Swing. So the whole of the fourth floor is open. It's like a room that goes from the front of the building to

the back of the building. So it's a very large room, and there's a swing with a velvet padded seat with velvet ropes descending from the ceiling. Paul You're Bureau again, author of American eve He showed her this red velvet swing that was put in the room so that you could push somebody on the swing, and then the uh in Evelyn's case, he put her on the swing that afternoon and he hung a Japanese paper parasol in the ceiling, and she pushed her to see if she could break

it with her foot. And you can get all fright in about what that means, but but that was the introduction that she had to White. White lavished more money and attention on the young woman after that first encounter. It was all part of a well hound routine. Nesbitt later described it this way. On the witness stand, men like White reduced their methods to an exact science. He put her and her mother in an apartment, He sent her brother to school, He had her taking piano lessons.

He was he was what seemed like a very paternal benefactor, and you realize now that he was probably grooming her. The courtship went on for a few months, then White made his true intentions known. He was, as Nesbit put it, a benevolent vampire. I think of him more like Roman Polanski, but I think of him as somebody who had who was, who was an artist and a genius and a lover of beauty. People knew that he had an eye for

younger girls. One evening after her performance ended, Nesbit arrived at White's home for a dinner party, but to her surprise, only White was waiting for her. He was apologetic, isn't it too bad? He said that all the others have turned us down. White informed Nesbit that they would have their own party. He said to her, I want to show you another room. And she goes up this other set of stairs that she had never seen before, and there was this mirrored room with a mirrored bed and

mirrors on the ceiling. There was a small table that stood next to an enormous four poster canopied bed. There was a bottle of champagne on the table and a single glass. White poured Evelyn a glass of champagne. She sipped it, she tasted it. She didn't like the taste, but he asked her to tasted some more, and she

fell unconscious. And then she woke up later to find herself naked in bed, with Stanford White lying next to her, and Evelyn the way she describes it, as she said, I went into the room of virgin, but I did not come out one. No one knows for sure if the champagne was drugged or not. Evelyn later maintained that she had just had too much of it. Whatever the cause, the result was the same. She woke up naked in the bed next to Stanford White and screamed. Her suitor

tried to console her. He said, tenderly, don't cry, kittens, it's all over now you belong to me. The next thing she knew was that she was essentially White's mistress and was now a fixture at his party's um and got to meet everybody, from Edison to Sitting Ball to Nijinsky. She was meeting all these incredible people. She was enjoying the high life, and he was buying her furs and jewelry nes but began dating her patron and protector. But the following year she met another wealthy man, one with

his own score to settle against wit. When it's time to make a hire for your small business, naturally you want to find the best person for the job. Odds are that person is on LinkedIn. Here at ausie, where we weave each season of the thread, we depend on LinkedIn jobs to help us find the right person for our hiring needs to put top talent at our fingertips. LinkedIn jobs makes it easy to get matched with quality

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and more. For listeners of The Thread who love history, I recommend you go to Audible and pick up Bearing the Cross, David Garrow's Pulitzer Prize winning biography of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. In Season three of The Thread, about the history of non violent protests, we drew a lot from Garrow and his work on Doctor King. Audible members can choose three titles every month, one audiobook and

two Audible originals. You can't hear anywhere else. Listen on any device, any time, anywhere, at home, at the gym, on your commute, or just on the go. Audible the most inspiring minds, the most compelling stories, the best place to listen. Get started with a thirty day trial when you go to audible dot com, slash thread or text thread to five hundred five hundred. That's audible dot com slash thread or text thread to five hundred five hundred and listen for a change. Harry kay Thaw came from

a wealthy Pittsburgh family. His father had made his money in mining and railroads. He was the heir to a forty million dollar fortune um and his His father had died when Harry was eighteen, and he knew that there was something wrong with Harry, and he told his wife that Harry should be put on on a strict budget in terms of an allowance. Something was definitely wrong with the young Harry Thaw. He would giggle when he heard about someone else's misfortune. He was known as Mad Harry.

He once made the papers for chasing a man down the street with an unloaded shotgun because he believed he cheated him out of ten cents change. He went to Harvard and spent most of his time smoking and playing poker. There he was expelled on grounds of moral turpitude, but there was no need for him to get a degree because his annual allowance was eighty thousand dollars. He was basically a playboy. Saw was a tall man with a boyish appearance, a pug nose, and an often idiotic grin.

One Pittsburgh newspaper said he looked like a peeled turnip. Thaw felt that he was too big for Pittsburgh, and so he said sites on New York. But his reputation really was in advance of him, and so he never got accepted into New York society. So he never got admission to any of the clubs. And usually that would be easy for a wealthy person to do. They would accept you. But he never got accepted, and he was always black balled. Part of it undoubtedly had to do

with his personality. He had a very short fuse. He had a very angry temper. He would do things on a whim. For example, if if he was in a restaurant and he didn't like the service, he would pull the tablecloth and all the dishes and cutlery would come clattering down onto the floor. There were other incidents. Thaw drove his car through the plate glass window of a shop on Fifth Avenue after an argument with a sales clerk.

But thaws family and his fortune were always there to bail him out of trouble whatever his reckless and crazy behavior, and he really did have a lot of psychological problems. He used to talk baby talk at the age of thirty six, thought could also be quite charming. And when Evelyn Nesbit's relationship with her benefactor Stanford White finally went south, Harry Thaw was there to pick up the pieces. He

began to court Nesbit relentlessly. Thaw knew that Nesbit dated White, and he knew all about White's reputation as a womanizer, but he never heard about how White pursued her. They went on vacation together during the summer in nineteen o three, and on that occasion, Evelyn told Harry about the rape, and this was the first time she had ever told anybody about the rape. And from that moment on, Harry Thorpe became obsessed with Stanford White, and his persistent courtship

of Nesbit proved successful. He asked her to marry him several times and then she finally agreed to marry him, which she did at the age of nineteen. And I think it's a symbolic that the she wore a black dress to the wedding. The newly weds moved back to Pittsburgh and settled down for a while. Harry Thaw seemed almost well, saying Harry and Evelyn enjoyed a few months of marital bliss in their hometown, But Thaw could not keep his mind off Stanford White and what he had

done to his wife. For the last year, he had been becoming more and more obsessed with having her retail the story of how White had taken advantage of her in seduced her. Then, in the summer of nineteen o six, Harry and Evelyn stopped in New York on their way

to a European vacation. Harry proposed that they see a show at a somewhat surprising venue, Stanford White's rooftop Theater at Madison Square Garden, and Evelyn said to herself, this is really weird, because I can't believe Harry would want to be anywhere near, knowing a building that was associated with me and with White. It was an unseasonably hot day,

even for New York in June. That day, the hippopotam us in the Central Park Zoo collapsed and died from heat exhaustion, a story that would take a back page in the following day's newspaper to what was about to happen at Madison Square Garden. It's, you know, a hundred degrees. It's they're out in an outdoor rooftop theater, and Harry's wearing this heavy overcoat, which I think he did because he was concealing the gun, because he couldn't hide it very well in his texedo. Harry and Evelyn took in

the performance. A little before eleven pm, the garden's owner emerged from his private residence to join the audience. Evelyn watched Harry, who stood up at Stanford White's appearance with

a glazed look in his eyes. She suggested that her husband leave the show, and as they were going towards the exit, Harry broke away, went to the front of the theater, where Stanford White was sitting in his usual seat, and then, in front of hundreds of theater goers, pulls out his pistol and fires three shots and instantly kills Stanford White. Harry Thaw stood over his victim, and then he held the gun up and said I to anybody that was still around him, he said, I did it

because he ruined my wife. Three chorus girls fainted on the stage floor. The orchestra kept playing. Harry rejoined his wife, and a distraught Evelyn cried, oh, Harry, what have you done. He kissed her on the cheek and said, it's all right, dear, I've probably saved your life. Harry was arrested and taken down the garden's elevator. He calmly lit a cigarette when he exited the building. Up next, the criminal trial and

the love triangle that shocked America. Harry Thaw was forced to call in his family yet again to bail him out and to embrace an unprecedented but brilliant new legal defense strategy to save himself from the electric chair. Don't miss the new CBS All Access original series that will make you ask yourself, what dimension are you? Even in stream The Twilight Zone, hosted and narrated by Academy Award winner Jordan Peel in a role made famous by the

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and sound, but of mind. The Twilight Zone is now streaming exclusively on CBS All Access. New episodes every Thursday. Cross over into another dimension. Visit c S dot com slash thread t z to redeem your free trial today that CBS dot com slash thread t z to redeem your free trial of CBS All Access. Every decade has

its trial of the century. When I've talked about this as being the trial of the century, there people say, well, there was Leopold and Loebe, and there's Madson, and there's o J And I said, well, okay, but this was the first trial of the twentieth century. Just a week after the murder, Thomas Edison Studio put out a hastily made film reenactment of the crime, which audiences across the

country swarm to watch. Teddy Roosevelt, the President of the United States, worried that the trial would distract Americans from their work, and even tried to suppress the transcripts from the trial on the grounds that the sordid material would ruin public virtue. One newspaper columnist summarized it, A rich man has been killed, a rich man did the killing, and so a world sits up to hear the tale. In every red and tripping particular. It was the breaking point.

It between the old and the new in terms of the Victorian era versus now, what would become you know, modern America with the media circus and people using their money and influence to try to get around the law. New York's district attorney was determined to put Thaw in the electric chair for the murder of one of the city's most prominent citizens. Thaws family hired a team of high powered attorneys to fight back, but there was one

big obstacle. Harry Thaw. So his attorneys wanted to actually claim that he was insane when he fired the gun, but he said, to his attorney's no way, I'm perfectly saying I did. I did the act, and in fact I should have been given a medal for getting rid of this pedophile and this rapist. Well Harry, of course, Harry really was delusional because he thought after he shot White, that he was going to be hailed as the conquering hero who had saved all of the young women of

New York from from Stanford White. So thaws attorneys had to put aside the sanity defense and try something else. And so in the trial, the attorneys what they do is they come in with the defense that is dictated by Harry thorwe which is that the homicide was justifiable. They settled on what might be called an honor killing defense, based on a kind of vigilante notion that there was an unwritten law that a man had the right to

defend his wife's honor. It succeeded in many many cases, particularly in the Southern States, that if you were the husband of a woman who had been attacked, assaulted, or raped, you had the right to go and take your revenge on the the the assailant. The New York newspapers had a field day with it. But the unwritten law was essential to Thaw's defense. They even gave it a name. They called it, in Harry's case, Dementia americana, which is

one of my favorite terms. And they hired all these alienists who were, you know, the precursor to psychiatrists who come in it a thousand dollars a day to testify that Harry was suffering terribly because of this dementia Americana. Thaw's lawyers tried to refocus the case away from Thaw's own conduct and onto the sordid behavior of the man

whose conduct had prompted the crime, Stanford White. One of the first witnesses, was a cab driver who used to bring people to Madison Square Gordon, and when they asked if he was surprised about what happened, he said, no, I was just surprised that it that it was a husband that killed him. I always thought it would be a father. Shocking tales of White's prolific womanizing began to surface, and the dead man's conduct became a central part of

Harry Thaw's defense. The thing, of course, if you say it's a justifiable homicide, why is it justifiable because Stunfield White raped Evelyn? But who is going to testify that the rape happened. There's only one witness by necessity, and that's Evelyn Nesbit, And so everything depended on her testimony.

And she's only twenty one years old. And Evelyn finally decided she didn't want to see Harry go to the electric chair, so she gets up on the stand tells her story about what White did, and they were they were pushing her to say that he had drugged her and raped her, and um she went along with this story. America was gripped by Evelyn's testimony, so was the defendant. Several times Harry sat forward in his chair and gripped

the table so hard his knuckles turned red. When she finished recounting the tail of her to flowering, he broke down and cried. Thanks in part to Evelyn's convincing testimony, however, many Americans came to see Harry Thaw as a kind of moral crusader, defending women like Evelyn against monsters like Stanford White. Harry became, as Evelyn herself put it, America's pet murderer. That status, however, was not enough to get

him acquitted. Surprisingly enough, even though he went and shot a man in cold blood in front of a thousand people, it was a hung jury. In April nineteen o seven, after forty seven hours of deliberations, the jury announced it was hopelessly deadlocked. Guarding the guilt of Harry Thaw imagine if there had been a second O. J. Simpson trial, could the nation have handled another such spectacle well. In January, less than a year after the hung jury, everyone reconvened

for the second trial of Harry k Thaw. This time, Harry's counsel was not going to take anything off the table. The next lawyer convinced mother thought, if you don't allow us to do to go with the insanity plea, he will be convicted. Make no bones about it. He is going to be convicted, and he will go to the electric chair. Pleading insanity was not much of a stretch either. Harry had such a smart gesh board of illnesses it

was almost like where do you begin with this? And so they came up with the term of a brainstorm that Harry was suffering from a temporary brainstorm after Evelyn had told him one too many times about the her affair with White. But proving temporary insanity or a brainstorm was a look at matter. You know, it was unusual. This whole notion of the insanity defense was not something that was really well known in there were such a a bias against the notion of any kind of mental illness,

of any of insanity. You know, this is the age where people would be locked up away from side. There was no attempt to try to cure people of mental illnesses. At this point. Thaw and his family pulled out all the stops when it came to demonstrating thaws mental instability. Fortunately, there were plenty of witnesses willing to testify to it.

Simon Botts again, the defense was really to present witnesses from way way back, many many witnesses from all different periods of Harry Thaw's life who would testify to Thor's eccentric and irrational, apparently irrational behavior. And so you would have nursemaids who would say that when Harry was a child he was uncontrollable. You would have teachers come in from his schools who were saying that he never learned anything,

so on and so forth. But what was truly insane was the amount of money that Thaw's family spent on a team of twelve expert witnesses. It costs close to one thousand dollars a day for each of the dozen psychiatric experts. The defense desperately wanted to show that Thaw was temporarily unmoored from reality. That his unstable personality merely acted impulsively when he was confronted by his wife's mistreatment at the hands of Stanford White. The real sticking point

was whether Thaw planned White's murder. It's very difficult to know whether the murder was premeditated, and it's an important point, of course, because it was premeditated and it's intentional than Harry Thorne knows what he's doing. Thaw was obsessed with Stanford White and often had him followed by detectives. He almost certainly knew that White would be present at the show that night. He carried a gun inside a heavy

overcoat on a sweltering summer evening. But Thaw also started to leave the theater that night with Evelyn before he turned and decided to go after White. And there was no question about his motive for the murder, and that he did it in a fit of rage. This time, the jury deliberated for just twenty four hours. The jury, in fact, they agreed with the defense and they came back with a verdict that he was not guilty by res of insanity. Harry thaws acquittal on grounds of insanity

was hardly the end of his troubles. He was convinced that he would just say he had a temporary brainstorm and then he would get off. That was not the case. They put him in the in the asylum up state for the criminal insane, and it took him another six years to get out. It was a very unhappy situation, as you can imagine. Varry thought, who of course, thought he was perfectly sane and thought he had done the world a great favor by killing Statford White. Harry and

Evelyn eventually divorced after the trial. Her life and career would never be the same. She descended into alcoholism and drug abuse. She lived with a pet Boa constrictor. She went from celebrity to curiosity. For a brief period, she went into vaudeville. She was in singing in nightclubs. Um She had gotten into a morphine addiction because she had hurt herself all those years of modeling she had. She had developed problems with her neck in her back before

her death in nineteen seven. Her life became the basis for the nineteen fifty four film The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, starring a young actress named Joan Collins as Evelyn Harry Thaw continued to insist that he was never crazy long after he was released from the asylum.

He even wrote a book about it. When I discovered this transcript the original typed manuscript of his book, it has all of his notes and more Ginnale on it and scrawled across it in giant letters, he wrote, I was not insane, which I just think is just hilarious. The case of Harry Thaw was not the first celebrity love triangle to end in murder and captivate the American public with illegal to fans based on insanity. Harry Thos lawyers had a precedent to point to from nearly half

a century earlier. Next week, on the thread the murder of Barton Key, the Playboys, son of Francis Scott Key, the author of the American National Anthem, it was said that he once reportedly bragged that he only needed thirty six hours with any woman to get her to do whatever he wanted. But one of those women happened to be the wife of a very powerful and mentally unstable congressman.

People often portray Ki is a victim, but yeah, you know Key, you could kind of argue was a little bit of a scumbag too, and I think, uh that this might be one of those stories where there really are no good guys. Barton Key was shot to death in broad daylight by a sitting US congressman just yards from the White House. Yeah. I mean literally, if it was an episode of House of Cards, you wouldn't believe it, right, But it really happened. I heard him says, good, that

is rubbish. Memersla wars met us. Now now my heart is made us up of stuff. It mols beat your west. A pretty girl can't look hi way we do? Oh good? Love a million girls and never girl a twin. I would love a jarnest girl and ask you more. I would love a germ girl, a girl with golden girls? What a fact? That thing that I would love about the million girls. The Threat is produced by Robert Coolo, Sofia Perpetua and me Sean braswell. Chris Hoff engineered our show.

This episode features raw Hide performing I Could Love a Million Girls. To learn more about the Thread, visit AUSI dot com, Slash the Threat all one word, and make sure to subscribe to the thread on Apple podcast, follow us on I Heart Radio, or listen wherever you get your podcasts, check us out at ausi dot com or on Twitter and Facebook. If you love surprising, engaging stories from history, look no further than the flashback section of ausi dot com. That's o z y dot com.