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Maybe you are now listening to True Murder The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zupanski. Good evening in nineteen oh one, Evelyn Nesbitt, a chorus girl in a musical Flora Dora, dined alone with the architect Stanford White
in his townhouse on twenty fourth Street in New York. Nesbit, just sixteen years old, had recently moved to the city. White was forty seven and a principal in the prominent architectural firm McKim mead and White. As the foremost architect of his day, he was a celebrity responsible for designing countless landmark buildings in Manhattan. That evening, after drinking champagne, Nesbit lost consciouness consciousness and woke to find herself naked in bed with White. Telltale spots of blood on the
bed sheets told her that White had raped her. She told no one about the rape until several years later she confided in Harry Thaw, the millionaire playboy who would later become her husband. Thaw, thirsting for revenge, shot and killed White in nineteen o six before hundreds of theatergoers during a performance in Madison Square Garden, a building that White had designed. The trial was a sensation that gripped
the nation. Most Americans agreed with Thaw that he had been justified in killing White, but the district attorney expected to send to the electric chair. Evelyn Nesbitt's testimony was so explicit in shocking that Theodore Roosevelt himself called on the newspapers not to print it verbatim. The murder of White cast a long shadow. Harry Thaw later attempted suicide, and Evelyn Nesbitt struggled for many years to escape an
addiction to cocaine. The Girl on the Velvet Swing, a tale of glamour, excess and danger, is an immersive, fascinating look at an American America dominated by men of outsized fortunes and by the women who were their victims. The book they were featuring this evening is The Girl on the Velvet Swing, Sex, Murder and Madness at the Dawn of the twentieth Century, with my special guest, journalist and author and historian Simon bats Welcome to the program, and
thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Simon bats.
Hi.
Dan, it's nice to be on your program and I look forward to talking with you about the book. And you've given a great introduction and praise see you of the main events.
Thank you very much for this interview. Incredible book, incredible back into history and to a time that if we think some of the things that go on in today's society and media is a surprising, I think we'll find this even more surprising. Let's get right to who Stanford White was. We mentioned that he was an architect and he designed a Madison Square garden, But tell us who Stanford White was, How old was he around this time and just at the turn of the century, and who was he in real terms?
He had.
Served an apprentice to an architect called Richardson, who was the most famous exponent of the Romanesque style in the United States, and White grew up in New York City, and in eighteen seventy nine he entered into a partnership with two other men, Les McKim and William Rutherford Meade, and their architectural firm, McKim Mead and White ridly catered to the wealthy not just of New York City, but the wealthy classes of the United States, and they became
famous for designing very elaborate, beautiful buildings designed a largely on the style of the Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance, and the Spanish Renaissance. And in eighteen ninety White designed what many considered to be his masterpiece, which is Madison Square Garden. This is the second building in New York that had the title Madison Square Garden. There have been four in total, and the second one stood at the north east corner of twenty sixth and Madison Avenue, which is right on
the corner of Madison Square. And that's how it gets its name Madison Square Garden. And Wide designed Madison Square Garden for horse shows. Horses. Nobody drove a motor car in eighteen ninety and everybody went around in a horse and buggy, and so horses were ready ubiquitous in New York City, and this was designed for The building was designed for horse horse shows, and White persuaded the backers, the financial backers of the project, and this included JP Morgan.
White persuaded them to build a tower on Madison Square Garden and the tower had seven apartments and White occupied rented out the top of these apartments in the top of the tower, and Madison Square Garden, by virtue of the tower was the second tallest building in New York City. That's not saying very much by our standards, because we're talking about three hundred and something feet, but it was a very distinctive landmark, which is exactly what White wanted.
He wanted this to be a cultural center. And inside the building there was a theater, a restaurant, the main auditorium where the horse shows would take place, and then on the roof, on the flat roof, which was at the base of the tower, during the summer, they would have shows, usually musical comedies, for an audience of about
three hundred people. And this was something you couldn't do nowadays because there would be too much noise from the street traffic and also noise from planes and helicopters and what have you going overhead. But in those days that wasn't the case, and so you could quite recently have these musical comedies, these plays being done on the rooftop
of Madison Square Garden. So it was a spectacular achievement, and White became famous on account of it, and he went on to designed many other buildings in New York City and around the United States, and the firm McKim mead and White is probably the most well known architectural firm in the history of the United States because they did such beautiful So, I mean, the original, the original Pennsylvania Station, a beautiful building before he was demolished. That
building was McKim mead and White. The campus at Columbia University uptown was mckimmead and White. New York University built a campus in the Bronx that they've later abandoned, but that campus also was mckimmead and White. So Stanford White was very much a celebrity in New York, a man about town, someone who knew everybody. Everybody knew him, and he was extremely prominent in the city's various affairs.
You talk about his interest in his investment in various theorical theatrical productions, and also that he had friendships with various actresses and actors. And you talk about an actress named Edna Goodrich. Well, she's a singer in the Florid Dora part of the Sex Tet. And Evelyn born Christmas Day near Pittsburgh. Her dad was a lawyer, and her mother's named Florence, and she has a brother named Howard.
She's now on a Broadway stage, but she had just been working in a this department store just a couple of years before that. Tell us how she comes to be in New York City and also how they come to meet her and her mother meet Stanford White.
Yeah, it's a fascinating story just in itself, and the show tells you a lot about New York City and about how young girls who wanted to make the reputation would come to New York. She grew up in Pittsburgh. Her father died when she was twelve years old. The family was plunged into poverty and moved first to Philadelphia and then to New York City around nineteen hundred. I think it was December nineteen one hundred that they've moved to Philadelphia, and then in nineteen oh one they moved
to New York. And I think another thing. I mean, when I'm a historian, always tries to project himself or herself back into the past.
And when you do that, you.
Realize that the theater was extremely important for New York City. I mean, there were theater houses everywhere. I mean, and this makes a lot of sense because when you think about it, what other forms of entertainment were there. There was no television, obviously, there was no internet, there was no radio, there was no cinema. The theatre was the main entertainment of virtually everybody, and as a consequence, it
played over an outside role in New York City. And so Evelyn comes with her mother and a younger brother to New York. She's very attractive. She's only sixteen years old, fifteen when she first arrives in the city, but in nineteen oh one, she's sixteen years old. She's very attractive, as I said, and her mother introduces her as an artist's model, and she supports the family through the fee that she receives as a model.
And then.
Her photograph starts appearing in magazines simply as a model.
She's modeling clothes and her photograph, without even really identifying her, appears in the magazines and people begin to take notice because of her looks, and a theatrical agent contacts the family and gets her a place as a chorus girl in the production of Flora Dora, which was a musical comedy playing at the Casino Theater, and Florida was famous for the Sextet, as you said, this group of six women singers and dancers, and Evelyn Nesbitt never made it
to that elite group, but she was always in the chorus line. And Stanford White, who was forty seven years old, he was married, he had a son. His wife lived out on Long Island, and Stanford White kept a house also in New York City. But White saw her photograph
and he knew people in the theatrical world. He had designed the Players Club, which is a club for actors and producers and theater folk on Gramercy Park, and White got an introduction through one of the Floradora singers to Evelyn Nesbit, who was then sixteen years old, and they first met in White's townhouse one of White's apartments on twenty five fourth Street, and that they had luncheon with the other woman, Edna Goodrich that you mentioned, and also
one of White's friends was their Reginald Ronalds, and the four of them had lunch and then and then Ronalds went away and White had swing on the fourth floor of the building, a velvet swing. And we know all this because Evelyn wrote writes about it later in a autobiography and also testifies.
In court about the swing.
And it had a padded velvet seat, it had velvet cords coming down from the seething and in front of the swing, on a separate rope was a Japanese screen, a paper screen, and they spent the afternoon playing on this swing, and two women would get on one each woman in turn would get on the swing and White would push them and they would they would split the paper screen. So that was their first meeting, the first introduction, and that was sometime around the summer fall of nineteen oh one.
You talk about that after this meeting and she was elated to be involved with this and rubbing elbows with celebrities and people that she admired. But you say she was surprised because she really didn't get any real attention from Stanford, but more so, she got attention from this ronalds. So to her surprise, what did Stanford do and contact her about?
Well, he after this first meeting, he got in touch with Evelyn's mother, introduced himself, and Evelyn's mother was bowled over by this gentleman, this very prominent New Yorker, and came back to report to her daughter that this was a fabulous man and he took concern for her, for Evelyn, and and then one day and so they gradually got to know each other, the mother, the daughter, the architect, and Florence has but the mother still had friends back
in Pittsburgh. And one day so mentioned to Stanford White that she wanted to go by to Pittsburgh for a visit, and he offered to pay her train fare and give her some money for expenses. And then she said, well, but who's going to look after my daughter? My sixteen year old daughter, very young, and and Stanford White stepped in and said, don't worry, I'll look after her. I'll make sure she doesn't get into trouble.
And that's that's that's this.
And then during that time when Evelyn's mother was away. Stanford White visits Evelyn every day before she goes to the theater for her performance, and one day he asks her if she wants to have her photographs taken by a well known photographer called Rudolph Eckermeier, and Evelyn agrees, and so they spend the day in the studio, and these photographs have survived and they're quite prominent on the internet. They show Evelyn reclining on a polar bear rug and
she's dressed in a kimono. And while the photographs, just after the photographs the session has ended, Stamford White says that he's having a party the next night at his apartment on twenty fourth Street, and he asks Evelyn if she'd like to come, and she says she'd love to. She'd rather much rather do that than spend her her evening alone or her night alone in the apartment that she had been with her mother, And so she shows up.
A floridor ends about nine o'clock and Evelyn comes down at twenty fourth Street and shows up and there's nobody there except Stamp and she's surprised, and Stanford White says, don't worry about it. My friends just didn't show up,
and let's have dinner anyway. And so they have dinner, just the two of them, and then Stanford White asks Evelyn if she wants to go upstairs to see some of the paintings that he collected what he was in Europe, and that's when the famous event occurs, and Stanford White takes her into a small backroom where there's a bed and gives her this champagne. She loses consciousness almost immediately. She feels dizzy, and when she wakes up, she finds
herself naked. Stanford White is lying next to her naked also, and she realizes that she's been raped while she was drugged unconscious. It's a shocking story, a shocking episode. And we know all about this. None of this is made up, none of this is imagined. But we know all about this because then Evelyn testifies her about this in court,
and her testimony was reproduced verbatim by the newspapers. It was quite extraordinary because any historian who does work in that period has fourteen daily newspapers being published in New York City, fourteen alone in the city, I mean, and there are hundreds thousands of other newspapers around the country, so, and all of these newspapers were.
Competing with each other.
So this case, when it came to trial, got enormous coverage. The papers would literally devote three or four pages of small type to the case, and they reprinted all the testimony of verbatim, so which was very fortunate for me.
Of course, yes, of.
Course on us. You also say, you also include what exactly he said? Once she got up, she was screaming, and so what did he say? And she confronted him about it? So what did he have to say about it?
Well, again, when people read the conversation they have in the book, they ask the question, did you make this up?
And I say no.
And the reason I can faithfully give you the conversation that they had is because she repeats it in the courtroom, and she says in the courtroom, and it's reproduced in the newspapers. And this testimony was so shocking that Theodore Roosevelt, the President of the United States, asked his cabinet members, what can we do about this shocking stuff that's being printed in the newspapers? Because this is nineteen hundred, right, I mean, this kind of stuff didn't appear in the newspapers.
It was regarded as something that should not be printed. And so anyway, Stanford White, Evelyn wakes up, she finds out that she's been raped, and she is asking Stanford White about this. He kind of reassures her and says, no, this sort of thing. And remember Evelyn is only sixteen years old, and he reassures her, and she tells her this is the sort of thing that happens all the time. Don't worry about it. But whatever you do, don't tell anyone, and don't tell your mother.
And I think what.
Was when you think about when someone is sixteen, they can be very naive, unsuspecting, and also very willing to accept the authority of adults. And my interpretation of this is that's exactly what happened. I mean, And we simply have to think about what the revelations of twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen. You know, so many women, even in the present day, didn't confide to their close friends, to the relatives that they had been raped by Bill Cosby.
And that's so it would have been the taboo about discussing this would have been stronger, would have been even more potent back in nineteen hundred when Evelyn Nesbit was raped by Stanford White. So it remained very much a secret until she meets this man, Harry Thor, who later becomes her husband. And that's when she first tells someone that this event has happened.
Before. That happens before she meets Harry saw. You talk about the friendship, what does the friendship look like after this? And it doesn't change.
And I think for a lot of people, that's something that people can't understand even nowadays, because what happened was that Evelyn and Stanford White continued to see each other socially, and she admitted in court that she would go to his apartment alone just being with him. She accepted money from him. She would send her checks every week of about twenty five dollars, which was quite a lot of
money in those days. And so the relationship, whatever the relationship was after the rape, the relationship continued for approximately a year. They knew each other, continued seeing each other. I have no idea, and nobody can know whether or not it was a sexual relationship or any kind of intimacy happened between them, or if it was purely platonic.
There's no way to know that, but we do know that they continued to be socially together, and also we know that White continued to send her money for about a year after this occurred.
You also talk about an event where one day she notices a small black book that she'd never seen before. What does she find in that? What does she conclude from that? Eating reading that black.
Yes, she finds she finds a list of He finds lists of names of women that she whose names she recognizes, who are or other actresses in various plays in New York. And one of the names was hers. And she saw that White had written in her birthday her birthday next to her name, and this was the case for several other of the actresses there. And I think that she realized when she saw this that White was carrying on the same kind of relationship with her that he had
with other women. And it's very it's it's there's not many other sources because you've got to remember that this was the time when all of this was taboo. Any kind of mentional discussion of sex was taboo. It never occurred in the press or anything unless there was some kind of sensational trial. And the only other reference I've I've come across to White's behavior was in an autobiography by Diamond Jim Brady, who was a well known banker
and financier, another man about town. He wrote his autobiography, and he mentioned that White would have parties where there would be young girls there. And there was actually one other reference, which is a famous case, which was in eighteen ninety five, the New York World published a long article about a dinner party that White and many other men,
about twenty men had held. And it was this one of these lavish dinners with lots of champagne, and at midnight, the waiters brought in this enormous pie, laid it on the table, and in the pie there was this young girl who was about sixteen, and she was virtually naked. And the New York World thought this was a scandalous occurrence and said so and condemned the men for doing
this kind of thing and for exploiting young girls. And I think the other thing that interested me about this time was that this any kind of The New York State legislature in eighteen ninety five had raised the age of consent, which amazingly enough, had been ten ten years old, raised the age of consent to eighteen, and it also very much expanded the penalty for rape, so that rape in eighteen ninety five was a twenty year prison sentence. And so Stamford White, by doing what he did, was
running a great risk. But I think he calculated that the risk was not so great because the evel In Nesbit, for example, was very obscure, penniless, had no resources. She was not a member of high society. And I've never come across any evidence that White ever approached or tried to molest anybody who belonged to the social elite, the economic elite of New York society. Those people weren't appropriate
victims for White. It was only the young chorus girls who had no resources, and even in Nesbitt was one of those. So I can't remember if I answered your question now, I think I might have gone off on a little bit of a tangent. But that's some of the background to this case.
Now, you talk about the Flora Dora being specially successful, and a lot of theater producers wanted to emulate that, But in terms of what it meant for Evelyn Nesbit. When that show ended, what happened with her career?
Yes, well, that's also an interesting question, and basically didn't go very fast. She got a role I think in she auditioned for a comedy called them Silver Slipper I think think it was. And she got a role in as a gypsy girl in one other production that lasted for about four months, and then she got her last role was in a plague called Tommy Rott, but that only played for about thirty performances. Again, it's very difficult to say with any certainty when you're one hundred and
twenty years removed from the events. But my conclusion is that Evelyn was probably not a good singer. She probably wasn't a good dancer, She didn't have Her theatrical career never took off.
And.
It kind of fizzled out. But she was only seventeen, you know, so she was very very young. But there were other things that kind of steered her away from the theater world, and one of them was meeting John Barrymore. He was then twenty years old and the grandfather of Drew Barrymore, and the Barrymore family.
Is royalty in the acting world.
They've had generation after generation of famous actors, and John Barrymore when he was twenty seemed to have no future whatsoever, had no real interest in being an actor. And now we know him, of course as one of the most famous actors in the twentieth century. But when he was twenty years old, he was kind of regarded as that they're do well, someone who wasn't going to make it.
But he had a brief fling with Evelyn nez Bit when Evelyn was seventeen and when Barrymore was twenty, and then she met a young man called Harry Thor who was thirty one years old.
And Thor was.
The eldest son of a multi millionaire who had made his fortune as a vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and had bought thousands of acres of land in western Pennsylvania that turned out to have cold, and so this land and became enormously lucrative, and so Harry Thor, the thirty one year old he was worth his family was
worth probably at least forty million dollars. And Thor himself was getting an allowance every year of eighty thousand dollars, which is the equivalent in our money of about a million dollars. So, so Harry and Evelin take up together and they they go to Europe a couple of times, first in nineteen oh three and then the next year in nineteen oh four. So Eveling really is kind of moving away from her stage career. She doesn't have many opportunities in that direction.
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Now, what is her benefactor at that same time, because we've got to keep in mind that he's a benefactor to her brother, Harry, putting him in a military academy and rush to the brother and putting him up in an apartment. What exactly does he have to say about the relationship with Harry Thought? What does he have to say about Harry Well?
Why it takes a kind of paternal attitude towards Evelyn, and he doesn't think it's a good idea for her to have any kind of relationship. He's kind of protective. Harry Thought was regarded as really a very eccentric character. I mean someone the story is about him. He had unlimited amounts of money and he.
Would do things.
For example, if he's in a restaurant and the weight it and serve him correctly, then he would do outrageous things like pull the tablecloth and all the dishes would come crashing to the floor and it cause a huge commotion. But it for Harry, it didn't matter because he would just pay whatever the damage was, hand over three thousand or four thousand dollars and you know, go somewhere else.
But this kind of reputation he had, the reputation he had for drug use, these were all kind of gossip rumors, a reputation he had for abusing young girls. There was another thing that was kind of floating in the air. Harry had never been able to get into the clubs. And the clubs in those days in New York were very,
very important. They were kind of social. That's where the social elite mingled, clubs like the Metropolitan Club, the Union Club, the Knickerbocker Club, and Harry Thor could never get into them. And he always believed that the reason why he was excluded was because he was blackballed by Stanford White. And so that's another part of the background going on here. The other thing to remember, of course, is that New York was a much more place than.
It is nowadays.
When I go out around New York, I almost never meet someone by that I know by chance, because it's such a huge place and and it's very rare that I bump into someone in the street that I know. But in those days, you've got to think about it. If you were middle class or upper class, you really wouldn't go south of fourteenth Street unless you had a job on Wall Street. You wouldn't go north of fortieth Street because there was really nothing north of fortieth Street
except Central Park. And you certainly wouldn't go out to the west side or the east side because those were very dangerous areas. Those were where the docks were a tinor and population. The gangs hung out on the docks. So the area that everybody inhabited was a very kind of small area right in the center of town. So Harry Thor and Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit would bump
into each other quite frequently. And I guess I could talk now about what happened in Madison Square Garden unless you have any other questions about what happened before that meeting in the garden. Should we go after the Okay, okay,
let's discuss that. Yeah, okay, So, so the three of them are always bumping into each other, and one evening, Harry and Evelyn go to the theater and they go to Madison Square Garden and there's a comedy, a musical comedy called Mademoiselle Champagne playing and it's the opening night in twenty fifth of June, and they arrive a little late. They take their places, but the comedy is not so good, and Evelyn and Harry decide they want to leave early.
They're going to leave early because they're rather bored by the show.
And Evelyn walks towards the elevator and looks behind up for her husband. Well, actually, what I did omitted to mention that Evelyn and Harry had been married in nineteen
oh five. All right, that's important part of it. And Evelyn looks behind to see where her husband is, and she sees him at the front of the field, and she sees at the same moment, she sees Stanford White sitting in the front row with his elbow on the table, looking towards the stage, and at exactly the same moment, she sees Harry standing in front of Stanford White with
a gun in his hand. Stanford White sees Harry starts to get up out of his chair, but Harry fires the first shot, then a second shot, then a third shot, and had very good aid. He was firing only from a few feet away, and Stamford White dies immediately, and people around think that this is part of the play. But it's only when they see blood coming out of White's body, trickling out onto the floor that they realize it's for real. The cora's girl stops singing, they know
that it's for real. The orchestra stops playing because they know it's for real. And Harry what he does is he holds the gun up in his hand, breaks the gun, and then the fireman on duty takes him and they walk back towards the back of the theater and he's put in the custody of a police sergeant who was in the theater.
And that's the murder.
And you've got to think of it as a sensation, which it was. It just played on and on and on because here is Stanford White, this very well known New Yorker. Here is Harry Thor, also well known millionaire young man. And here is Evelyn Nesbitt, this chorus girl who's married the millionaire. So it has all the ingredients of a sensation and plus it of course, it happens in front of hundreds of witnesses in theater in Madison Square cut in the same building that Stanford White designed.
You couldn't make this stuff up. And so Harry is quick taken into custody and he spends that night in a cell in the thirtieth Street Police station.
And so that's the next that's the first stage of the book.
But it doesn't end there, of course, by any means. It keeps going and keeps going and keeps going. And I was kind of amazed when I studied doing the research because I never realized that the second half of this drama could be as complicated and as dramatic as it turned out to be. So that's the next stage that we can talk about.
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no resistance to the arrest. What does he think right away about his chances are being convicted strangely enough, and then what is the ensuing public's take on what has happened?
An excellent question.
It's already right at the center of the legal defense that now Thor undertakes, first of.
All, his lawyer, the first lawyer that he hires, gives him the.
Advice as to go before what was known as a Commission on Lunacy. And this would this would be three experts and they could determine whether or not Harry Thor was sane or insane. And this would be a good strategy because it would avoid a trial in which the jury might decide to give you the death penalty, decide you're guilty. I mean, obviously he is. He committed the murder. There's no doubt about that. I mean, there one hundreds
of witnesses and nobody denies that. And then the Commission in lunacy would say that Thor was insane, he would spend a few years in the asylum, and then presumably he'd be released once the commotion had died down. But Harry Thor tells his lawyer, No, there is just no way I am going to accept that in any case. What I'm going to do is I'm going to argue a defense that I was justified in killing White. Here is someone who raped a young girl sixteen years old,
was a pedophile and a rapist. He did this to many other victims in New York. He did it with a claque of well known men. And I've done the world of great service by getting rid of Stanford White. That was Harry Thaw's attitude towards the lawyer. And so they go to trial in nineteen oh seven, I think it was February nineteen oh seven, so it's about eight months after the murder happened.
And that is the claim that.
Thor's lawyers present. They say, look, he killed someone who was a rapistness and the authorities knew about White's behavior, but they did nothing. All right, who is going to get rid of White? This this rapistm pedophile. But here's here's the key thing. So the justification depends upon the rape being brought out in court. But who's going to be the witness. The only witness is Evelyn Nesbitt, and
she's the main witness. And so she comes in and she testify, and she describes in great detail how White lured her to the building on a false pretense, then drugged her, then raped her. And she then describes to the court all of the details about the conversations between her and White, about all these different details that were so important to the case. But the problem is that everything depends upon her testimony.
There's no corroboration.
Obviously, she's only twenty one years old, and she's facing a district attorney, Travis Jerome, who has enormous experience, very very clever, very smart, very cunning, and wants to get Harry Thor into the electric chair and give him the death penalty. And this and the seriousness of this is quite clear. I mean, Thor faced the death penalty and the DA was intent on getting him into the electric chair.
So so Evelyn gives her testimony, the district attorney tries to to destroy her destiny, tries to show that she's actually not telling the truth. And we can go into that in detail if we have time. But basically, the jury in the first trial, it's a hung jury.
They can't make up their minds.
They debate. Some people want to have convict him on the murder church. Other people believe that Thor in fact is insane and doesn't deserve the death penalty. Most all of the jurors did believe Evelyn Nesbitt and thought she was a very good witness. But it's a hung jury. And now the district's attorney decides that he's going to put Harry Thor on trial the second time. So it
goes to trial in nineteen o eight. And in the second trial what happens is the lawyer and it's a different lawyer, because Thor would churn through all the lawyers very very quickly, because inevitably they kind of they disappointed him. But the second lawyer then says, look, we don't have much chance with this justifiable homicide business, and we have
much better chance with insanity. And the family, the Thor family agree, and so what happens now is a whole stream of witnesses come onto the witness stand and testify as to all the eccentric things that Harry Thor did right up from the very time when he was a
very young infant up to the present day. And again that's an amazing thing for a historian, because now you have all this detail about Harry Thor's life, which would have not it wouldn't have been possible for me to discover that unless they all these witnesses we've come forward and described the colleges that he went to, the school life, he had, what he was like as a young infant and so on and so forth. So we're at the second trial.
Again.
The jury goes out to delay. They've heard all the testimony. Evelyn did testify a second time, but her testimony didn't have the same impact.
And the jury deliberates for about two.
Or three days and then they come back with the verdict not guilty by reason of insanity. And so the defense has worked, and Harry Thor is now on his way to the insane asylum, which was up in Mattawan. It's the Mattawan State Asylum in upstate New York. So you might say he was very lucky. His strategy worked. He got to the asylum, he didn't get into the electric chair. His defense that he paid a lot of money for worked for him, and here he is. But
he's very dissatisfied. He because he thinks that he did the world of great service. And he's now in the asylum. And it's a criminal asylum, all right. It's the Mattawuan State Asylum for the criminal insane. So all around him are these murderers, these rapists, these astnists. Anyone who did a crime and has been judged to be insane is now in Madawan. State asylum. So it's actually a very uncomfortable experience for Harry Thorn. He wants to get out of there as quickly as he can.
You talk about how even though he has this incredible defense team and he gets the result that he wanted, which again it was disconcerting to the state itself. Yeah, that the mother exerted influence over the head of the asylum. But first they thought that they were going to be he was going to be sent to a private sanatorium. So then when they realized he was going to the state mental hospital with all these super criminals, what does his mother try to do? This is one of the
more fascinating aspects of this story. What is Mary Thaw's mother try to do?
In reponse, again, you've asked a very good question. Remember she has forty at least forty million dollars at her disposal, right, and so she tries, I mean, they try many many different ways to get Harry, and Harry is the apple of her eye. I mean, you know, Harry can do her wrong in her in her view, and so she tries everything she can to get him out of the asylum. And he also wants to get out of the asylum. He's he regards it as great injustice that he's ever
been sent there in the first place. And so the main strategy they.
Have is to go back into court and argue.
Habeas corpus and petition the courts for habeas corpus a habeas corpus hearing, And what that means is that the authority, the superintendent of the asylum, has to go to court and to justify keeping Harry Thor there.
And if the lawyers for Thor can.
Successfully petition for a hearing, which they are a able to do, right, they're able to get the court to say, yes, we'll have the hearing, and the superintendent has to show up and show why he's keeping thought under restriction. And this goes on for quite a while, and it's successive hearings, and there's great rumblings in the state legislature that this is just ludicrous and is tying up the courts and
is wasting everybody's time. But inevitably, these petitions, these court hearings, they no judge ever gives Harry Thor his freedom and they just simply send him back to the asylum. And it's the superintendent of the asylum and the medical staff on the asylum who come into court and give all the reasons why Harry thought should not be released. And so this is kind of like the Thor family beating
their head against a wall and nothing is happening. So what Mary Thor, the mother does is then try to get rid to get the superintendent of the asylum fired from his job, with the expectation that there'll be a new superintendent who will be less determined to keep Harry in the asylum. So the amazing thing is she then
pays somebody to admit to do a crime. It was an active arson, and this person then goes into court and acts like he's insane and he's committed to the state asylum, the same asylum in which Harry Thori is
being kept. He's perfectly sane, and he starts reporting all these incidences of abuse and violence that the asylum attendants are inflicting on the inmates, and all of this then gets into the newspapers and eventually that superintendent, whose name is Robert Lamb, he is forced to resign from his position and a new asylum superintendent is brought in, and this new superintendent, it comes to the point where whether the Thor family offer him twenty five thousand dollars to release Harry Thor.
And this could be.
Done quite easily by something called a certificate of recovery. All the superintendent has to do is sign this certificate and Thor would have been released. But this scheme to bribe the superintendent looks like it's on its way, it's going ahead, but in fact it's publicly revealed. And this is the only point in the book in which I
don't quite know how this happened. There isn't the information in the newspapers to tell me how the scheme became public, the scheme to bribe the superintendent, But it did become public. As soon as it became public, there were then trials.
One of the.
Parties, the intermediary, ended up in Sing Sing prison, and it was all exposed. And so for Harry Thor, now the question we can't look. I can't spend the rest of my life in this asylum. How am I going to get out? And he has always wanted to get out in a legal way because he doesn't want to live the life of a fugitive. He wants to be able to go back to Manhattan and live the high life. So and I always ask my students for what would you do? And the only obvious thing to do now
is to escape. Can't get out legally, he can't bribe the superintendent.
The only fctor too is to escape.
And so in nineteen thirteen, the milk delivery is being made early in the morning, seven point thirty and the cart, the milk cart comes in the back gate of the asylum, and just as it passes through the gate, Harry Thor slips out and there's a black limousine waiting for him at the bottom of the hill, and Harry Thor sprints across the grass, jumps into the limousine and it roars off, and Harry has escaped from the asylum. And the limousine now goes up to Canada, and Thor gets into Canada.
Now this is on the advice of his attorneys, and he crosses from Romard into Canada. Like you say, what is Evelyn's reaction and what is the media reaction to this occurring him escaping.
Evelyn's reaction is horror because the relationship doing Evelyn and Harry has really deteriorated, and it deteriorated very quickly, after he was in the asylum for different reasons. First of all, because he wanted her to move to Mattawan, and she wasn't going to do that. I mean, Madawan was just a small village. There was nothing for her to do there.
I mean, what was she going to do? You know?
The only thing she was going to do was visit Harry Thor every day in the asylum. And she hated going to the asylum because it was full of these men who are and women who were very dangerous.
All right.
It was not a pleasant experience for her. So she stays in Manhattan. The newspapers they start reporting on her movements in Manhattan, and they describe how she's been seen with these other young men. So imagine how Harry is feeling. He's stuck in the asynum and he's reading about Evelyn going out on the town.
With these young men.
This increases his anger and bitterness, and so they really their relationships soured very very quickly, and he became very antagonistic towards Evnn even though they were married. They were still married until nineteen sixteen or nineteen fifty, I think it was nineteen sixteen, and so she was afraid that if Harry gets out of the Asynum, He's going to come after her and kill her. The media, the press, the newspapers just follow this, you know, like nobody knows
where Harry has gone to. They do eventually discover that he ends up in Canada. But this kind of this kind of reignites the whole case, I mean, and for them it's wonderful because they can sell more and more on newspapers. He's good copy, he's good publicity for them, and so they send so a whole hordes of newspapers, report reporters go up to Canada to report on Thor.
And but Thor is discovered in Canada, the Canadian authorities arrest him, they hold him for possible deportation, and then Thor's lawyers and psychiatrists all troop up to Canada as well. He ended up in a small town called Sherbrook. And and for Canada, they now have a big problem on their hands because they had just passed immigration acts in nineteen oh six and nineteen ten, and this immigration the legislation was directed towards Japanese immigrants coming into Western Canada.
But Thor's lawyers in Canada now say we are going to make we're going.
To take this to court.
Well, basically, Canada wanted to deport Thor because he had been in an asylum and part of the legislation that passed in nineteen ten could deport anyone who was insane. But Thora's lawyers said, we're going to fight this legislation in the courts and make it declared unconstitutional. And that was a big crisis for the Canadian government because you know that would ready torpedo their legislation. And so so
here is Thor in his rooms in Sherbrooke. The Canadian authorities are getting ready to trying to deport him, but they fight. They have to fight the lawyers. They don't want Thor to clog up the courts. So they do what probably is the only thing they could do, and that is that they send in for very burly, strong policemen in the middle of the night, early morning and an immigration inspector and they grab Thor. They grab him out of bed, they hustle him down to a waiting car.
They drive him back across the border back into the United States. They kick him out of the car and they tell him never come back to calendar again, and so there's Harry Thor in the middle of the road with no wallet, no belt, and he has no friends, nobody knows he's there. But he realizes that the next day the New York authorities are going to be hunting for him, and so he really has to get out of there, and he ends up in New Hampshire and
he is extradited eventually back to New York. And that's sorts of anxious thing episode because that reaches the United States Supreme Court because the fight there is that one state can extradite someone from another state, but you can't do it on a whim. New York can't just say to another state, bring us this so and so back. You've got to have a reason for extradition. And the
reason is usually an indictment, a criminal indictment. So New York indicts though on the charge of escaping from the asylum. They bring him back to New York. But now New York has to prosecute him on the charge that they indicted him on, which was escaping from the asylum, and this now has to go before a jury, and so
Thor's lawyers come in. They argue the case is before a jury, public feeling is still overwhelmingly on Thor's side that he has killed this rapist of Stanford White, and so the jury decides that he is not guilty and decides also that he's he's sane, and so the judge releases him and he's now completely free man. And this happens in nineteen fifteen. He also talked about not quite end of the story, but almost the end of the story.
Yes, what we what you talk about in the book was really fascinating is again the response by the media and by the public, especially when you talk about in Canada. You talk about these huge crowds to greet him and also celebrities visiting with him, so including Mayor. So maybe tell us a little bit about that incredible reaction to this case.
Right, well, Thora is brought first of all in Canada, there are so crowds just turn out to applaud Thora the hero I mean, and for two reasons. First because
he killed White after White raped this young girl. And the second reason is Thori is fighting against the might of New York State, and New York is seen as extremely arrogant just coming into Canada and expecting to get Thor immediately and Thor fights back, but then even when he goes into New Hampshire, the crowds just turn out, and he's regarded as this kind of hero and this legendary figure who has maintained his innocence and basically is being seen as being victimized by a New York State,
unfairly victimized. And it's very interesting to think about this because, especially in the Southern States, it was regarded as the legitimate defense that you could go into court and say this man raped my wife, therefore I had the right to kill him, and that defense it didn't work in Harry Thor's case, but it did work in many cases,
particularly in the Southern States in the nineteenth century. And so Thor is really kind of faded as this as this hero who's fighting against the might of New York State. And the Thor family did its part in all of this because they also pay the newspaper reporters and magazine
writers to write favorable articles about Harry. Mary Thor also financed a movie which has been last it doesn't exist anymore, but that movie was about Harry Thor, a kind of dramatic movie that was really Stanford White his renamed Stanford Black. But it's all about Harry Thor. And it's even a play on Broadway that is also financed by the Thor family, and that is also about the case. But all of this is very sympathetic to Harry Thor, and so he
is regarded as his hero. And when he's released in nineteen fifteen, for a time he kind of sinks into obscurity, but it's only two years later than in his own peculiarities.
His own.
Really abusive behavior comes to light and he abuses a young boy in New York and because of that he is finally sent to He's sent to another insane asylum, and he is only released in nineteen twenty four, and he lives out his life. I think Harry died in the nineteen forties, but of course he continues to have this enormous amount of money that his family has. His mother dies in nineteen twenty nine, and the children get the fortunes.
So fascinating too. Sorry, go ahead, and.
I would we also need to say what happened to Evelyn. She received nothing. I mean she when you think about it, she had testified twice on Harry's behalf, first in nineteen oh seven. Second, in nineteen oh eight, she'd revealed many details of her personal life which were really kind of shocked at the audience.
Details of her theater in New York, and.
She paid a heavy price, a heavy penalty, because she really struggled in poverty for quite a while. She went into vaudeville, but then she became a movie star. For about three or four years in the silent movies. She made a lot of money, but she developed a drug habit. She became addicted to morphine in nineteen nineteen and also addicted to cocaine, but she did finally break that habit. She ended up as a cabaret singer in Atlantic City and in New York City. She had had a son, Russell,
in nineteen ten. She claimed that this son was Harry's child, but I found out that that could not have been the case. The father was a newspaper reporter called Jack Francis, but it was her son, Russell, who then became a test pilot for the Douglas Aircraft Corporation. He supported his mother after she ended her cabaret career, and she eventually moved to California to be with her son and his wife and children, and she lived out the rest of her days.
I think she died in.
Nineteen nineteen sixties, sometime in the nineteen sixties, maybe nineteen sixty one, but in the interim she also she was the consultant for a movie that was made about the case, which was titled The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, and that starred Joan Collins and was a modestly successful movie. It's worth watching it, and it's an interesting movie. But that's really the story of lives.
What we didn't mention, and which was again very fascinating and probably Stanford White was rolling in his grave, is that there was revealed in the assault on the Gump young man nineteen years old, that he had whipped him. So a lot of the allegations that Stanford White had said, and that eventually she had said to an attorney I believe named Hutton that so at least what Stanford White had said seemed to be eerily accurate.
Yes, I mean, you've raised this whole sort of complicated backstory, which is fascinating in itself. But I think one of the things I want to take out of that backstory is the question that I asked myself, and I do not have any answer, and nobody can ever know. The answer is did the rape actually happened? All right, because we only know that it occurred from Evelyn's testimony in court. But she obviously had a very she she was very vulnerable.
And I think in previous accounts of this case, what has annoyed me very much and still I come across this is the idea that somehow that this was a seduction by Stanford White, and that word implies a kind of consensus between Evelyn and Stanford White that they have sex, which was not the case at all. I mean, you know, she was drugged, unconscious, she was raped unconscious. I mean, that's a terrible violation. How could she possibly have encouraged this?
Ah?
But that's that's what some people still think. And plus, of course, she was sixteen, she was a young child, and Stanford White was forty seven. But in any case, think about she goes to trial, it goes to trial, Harry Thor goes to trial. Evelyn is twenty one years
Old's still very young. Could it have been the case that Harry Thor's lawyers, very experienced men, put enormous pressure on Evelyn to testify falsely, to testify that the rape had happened, and to then make it as graphic as possible so that the jury would sympathize with her and sympathize with Harry Thor and buy this line of justifiable homicide. That's something that's possible. I mean, I can't, nobody can
say one way or the other. But of course, what has happened as it's left this stain on Stanford White's reputation, and probably many more people know the name Stanford White now because of the murder rather than they know his architecture. But all the things you've taught you mentioned in your question were This other complicated backstory is that Harry thought he himself. It came out later that what he used to do was advertised young girls to go for an
audition for the theater. He would then interviewed them. If he realized that they had no protector or guardian, he would then attack them and whip them and they he would then pay them off with thousands of dollars. And what this afid Davit that Evelyn supposedly signed in nineteen oh three, I think it was on some time then, was that in fact, Harry Thor had whipped her because she would not testify against Stanford White, and this would
have been before the murder. So it's even as I'm describing all of this detail to you, I realized how incredibly complicated the whole business is, and how much more there is to this story than I can even tell in an hour, And it's quite quite amazing in fact.
So it seems that there's a good possibility that the allegations that that Stanford made about Harry Thaw and the allegations that Harry Thaw said about Stanford in terms of luring girls, young girls up to their apartments, it seemed like they could be very possibly both guilty of exactly the same thing.
Yes, that's exactly right, And how ironic is that? I mean, all right, here are these two men, both kind of both middle aged. Harry is about thirty six when he marries the evening. Stanford White is fifth fifty two when he dies. So both of them are abusing young girls, right, I mean, that's very feasible. And she, the victim, sixteen years old, is caught between the two of them, and they're both accusing White and Thor accusing each other. As
the most terrible behavior. She doesn't know who to believe. She marries Harry because he provides some financial security. But it's an amazing story. And none of this, of course, would have come out in public, and nobody would ever have known about it unless there were these trials, unless the murder had occurred, if this had all somehow been hushed up, if Harry had not murdered Stanford White, then
none of his behavior would have come out. And it's very telling because of course we know, I mean a year ago, eighteen months ago, we knew almost nothing of the behavior of Bill Cosby and all the other men whose his behavior has been revealed, and they I think what's quite extraordinary about the last two years is that once the dad broke right, once Harvey Weinstein was accused, all these other accusations about very upstanding people, you know,
people who were honored, all of these accusations suddenly pour out, suddenly flood out, and it was like a damn broke and uh and the same thing happens with with Stanford
White and Harry thought. Once the once it becomes public, all the accusations are like a dam breaking and and and it's it's sad that this couldn't and that these the these this stuff remains secret and these these acts, which are criminal acts, remain hidden for so long, and this behavior is not more easily dealt with or more openly dealt with at much earlier stage.
I agree with you too. It seemed actually startling, but I guess encouraging for a lot of people. I know it's encouraging overall that people that seemed like they had, you know, a reputation that was entrenched, that these people were the first people to go, like you say, Weinstein and Matt Basy and a couple other people. It seemed like there was a consensus that, yes, that was going on for years, so these people had to be gone. But like you say, I think there was just a
moment that that tide turned completely. If people were asking why did women take so long before they accused Bill Cosby, and now we're not having that conversation anymore, we seem to understand why right people take long to come forward.
I think that's exactly right. I mean, when the first accusations were made about Bill Cosby, people I think I kept reading and hearing so many people saying, oh there was some these women have an agenda, they want publicity or they want money, and that was quite frequent. But then two years later, two years on, I do not hear that anymore. There's much more the public opinion, public sentiment has now shifted in a way to say, yes, we believe these women who are making these accusations, and
yes they're telling the truth. And I think that's a very positive thing. That's a very positive advance just women the last two years.
And I thought it was just the most fascinating thing, as well as the response by the public, especially in Canada, where they weren't aware of the other side of the story per se, and yet they just treated them like a hero. You know, we're talking one thousand, two thousand people come out to cheer this guy on and like I say, an ex mayor, former mayor coming up and shaking his hand and wanting his autograph. It is a
very strange phenomena. It's almost reminded me, not exactly the same, but the oj response with people cheering oj On as he escaped in his Bronco right.
And I think what's going on also is that there is a much broader I mean, when we go back, when you go back to nineteen hundred, nineteen oh six, nineteen oh seven, nineteen ten. I'm not an expert in what's going on broadly in society, but something is clearly going on right that there's huge public support for Harry Thor, who is perceived as being the person who has avenged
his wife's honor. But what also was interesting is the way the state legislature passed these laws in eighteen ninety five, all right, and this, according to historians, the reason they raised the age of consent, the reason they greatly expanded the penalty for sexual crimes like rape, was because of pressure from women's groups saying make these changes. Because of course, all the members of the state legislature were men. There
were no women in the state legislature. So there's this broader, much broader social change going on in New York and around the United States as whole, and also Canada that is much more sympathetic to women than it is to the men, looking at the women really as victims. And if I can just add a little kind of PostScript about this, In the nineteen fifties, people began to rediscover Stanford White as an architect, and so books began to appear.
That gave the history of Stanford White as an architect and the history of McKim mead and White. Now, the authors of these books realized they had a problem because if White is a rapist and a pedophile, how do you deal with that? And I think the way they dealt with it was by describing this episode as a seduction. And what gradually happened was this kind of introduction of evel In Nesbit as somehow complicit or is even the person who was responsible for the for the rape and
for the murder. Okay, And I think this happened because they wanted to rehabilitate Stanford White's reputation as an architect. And so you see, so it's so common for people to refer to this episode as a seduction. And I said to my editors, I said, look, I have not used that word in the book. I've always referred to it as a rape. And whenever any publicity is done about this, capes it should be referred to as a rape,
but we shouldn't refer to it as a seduction. And so that that was I made that very clear, and I hope that comes across.
Yeah, it certainly does. And I mean there is no hint of the what you say of seduction, no talk of that, so it's cleary clear, especially when you talk about she was given the glass of champagne, and as you write in the book, she was hesitant to finish it, but he urged her to finish it. And when she woke up, she was unconscious and naked.
Yeah.
Oh yeah, that's the definition of rape, you know. Yes, I want to thank you Simon for coming on and talking about the Girl on the Velvet Swing, sex, murder and madness at the dawn of the twentieth century. It has been an absolute pleasure. Is there a Facebook page or a website that people might take a look at and see your other work.
Well, there's a very good Amazon page that the publisher Little Brown.
Did, and I would.
If people want to find out more about the book. There are photographs from the book on the Amazon page. There's also reviews of the book and a short synopsis in the book, and of course people can purchase the book on Amazon quite quite easily, so that would be my advice to go to that page.
Absolutely, And I wanted to say too that I've forgot to mention the incredible black and white photos of Evelyn and all kinds of other people and the architecture of the time, incredible photos that are included in this book too.
Thank you, thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Simon, do you have a great evening, And thank you very much for this interview.
Well, thank you again for the time you've given me to talk about the book. And I'm very appreciative of the of the fact that you did so much careful reading of the book beforehand.
Thank you, thank you very much, it was my pleasure. Good night, good night.