The Murder of Stanford White

The case

The architect who designed Madison Square Garden died on its roof. On the hot night of June 25, 1906, Stanford White, 52, took his usual table at the open-air roof theater of the Garden for the opening of a musical comedy, Mam'zelle Champagne. Near the end of the show, Harry Kendall Thaw, the heir to a Pittsburgh railroad fortune, who had spent the evening wandering among the tables in a heavy overcoat, walked up to White and shot him three times at close range. White died where he sat. Thaw held the pistol above his head and, according to witnesses, said White had ruined his wife.

His wife was Evelyn Nesbit, a former chorus girl and one of the most photographed artists' models in New York. As a teenager in about 1901 she had become White's protégée and his lover. He was more than thirty years older, married, and paid for the apartment where she lived with her mother. Thaw had pursued Nesbit for years and married her in April 1905. He had long nursed a grudge against White, whom he blamed for his exclusion from the best New York clubs, and after Nesbit told him about the affair the grudge became an obsession. He wrote to anti-vice campaigners about White and came to believe White had hired gangsters to kill him.

Thaw was charged with first-degree murder. His family was very rich, and his mother, Mary Copley Thaw, spent heavily on lawyers, doctors and publicity. Inside the Tombs prison he ate meals sent in from Delmonico's. District Attorney William Travers Jerome saw the advantage of having Thaw declared insane without a trial, but Mrs. Thaw would not accept a finding of lifelong madness, and the defense settled instead on a claim of temporary insanity, quickly nicknamed "dementia Americana": the derangement of an American husband avenging his wife's honor.

The first trial opened on January 23, 1907, and was among the most heavily reported in American history. Its centerpiece was Nesbit's testimony that White had given her champagne and taken advantage of her when she was sixteen. The jury deliberated for more than forty hours in April and could not agree; seven jurors voted to convict and five to acquit. At a second trial in January 1908, with Martin W. Littleton leading the defense, the argument shifted to Thaw's long history of mental illness. On February 1, 1908, the jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity, and he was committed to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

Matteawan did not hold him for long in the usual sense. Thaw lived there in comfort and fought repeatedly for release. In August 1913 he walked out of the hospital and was driven to Canada, where he was arrested in Sherbrooke, Quebec, and eventually deported to the United States. After a long legal battle, a New York jury found him sane in July 1915, and he was freed.

Freedom did not last. In 1916 Thaw was charged with kidnapping and beating a 19-year-old man, Frederick Gump, in a New York hotel. He was found insane again and confined in a Philadelphia asylum until 1924. He spent his last years in Virginia and Florida, published a self-justifying memoir in 1926, and died in Miami in 1947.