Harry Thaw: Murder, Trials, and Evelyn Nesbit

Harry Thaw’s murder trial was actually two trials: the Pittsburgh millionaire shot architect Stanford White dead on a New York rooftop in June 1906, was tried for murder in 1907 to a hung jury, and at a second trial in 1908 was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The killing was driven by Thaw’s obsession with White’s earlier sexual relationship with Thaw’s teenage wife, the model Evelyn Nesbit, and the proceedings that followed were widely called the first “Trial of the Century.”¹

The Shooting on the Madison Square Garden Rooftop

On the evening of June 25, 1906, Harry and Evelyn Thaw attended the opening performance of the musical Mamzelle Champagne at the open-air rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden, a building White himself had designed. White was seated at a table near the stage. During the show, Thaw walked over and fired three shots from a revolver at point-blank range, two into White’s head and one into his shoulder. White died instantly.²

Thaw did not run. He held the pistol above his head to show he was finished shooting and told witnesses, “I did it because he ruined my wife! He had it coming to him!” Police arrested him at the scene, charged him with murder at three the next morning, and moved him to the Tombs prison in lower Manhattan.²

Why Thaw Killed Stanford White

Thaw, born in 1871, was heir to a Pittsburgh railroad fortune. His father William Thaw Sr. served as vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and left an estate estimated at $35 million; Harry personally inherited between $3 million and $5 million and became known as “Broadway’s First Playboy.”³ Under the socialite surface was a documented history of violent, erratic behavior: he had beaten women with dog whips and, in one instance, scalded a woman with boiling water in a hotel bathtub.⁴

Stanford White was a partner in the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, with the Boston Public Library, White House interiors, and Madison Square Garden to his name. Around 1901, at age 47 and married, he met Evelyn Nesbit, a 16-year-old model and showgirl. White paid her bills, advanced her Broadway career, and invited her to his private apartment atop Madison Square Garden, where he kept a red velvet swing that later became the emblem of the whole affair. Nesbit testified that White plied her with champagne until she lost consciousness and raped her; her 1934 autobiography recounted him telling her afterward, “Now you belong to me.” She remained his mistress for close to a year before White ended things and sent her to a New Jersey boarding school.⁵⁴

Thaw then courted Nesbit and grew fixated on her history with White. She resisted his proposals for nearly two years before marrying him in April 1905, reportedly because her past limited her prospects for a “respectable” match. Thaw beat and abused her during their courtship and marriage while his obsession with White intensified. He hired detectives to spy on the architect and referred to him openly as a “wholesale ravisher of young girls.”⁴²

The First Trial and the Dementia Americana Defense

The first trial opened on January 23, 1907, before Justice James Fitzgerald. District Attorney William Travers Jerome led the prosecution. The defense was ultimately headed by Delphin M. Delmas, a San Francisco criminal lawyer known as “the Napoleon of the California Bar.”⁶⁷⁸

Delmas built the defense around a concept he called “dementia Americana,” which he defined as “the species of insanity which makes every American man believe his home to be sacred.” Under that theory, Thaw was temporarily insane at the moment he pulled the trigger, driven to madness by knowledge of what White had done to Evelyn. Delmas cast him as an “avenging agent of God” acting under a higher law against a defiler of the American home.²

Evelyn Nesbit’s testimony on February 8, 1907, was the trial’s turning point. She described the champagne, the loss of consciousness, the assault, and Thaw’s anguished reaction when she later told him. Contemporary accounts said the jury “gasped at every sentence” and “shuddered at every disclosure.”²

Jerome hit back hard. He called the killing a “common, vulgar, everyday, tenderloin homicide” and asked the jury, “Will you acquit a cold-blooded, deliberate, cowardly murderer because his lying wife has a pretty girl’s face?” Accepting the dementia Americana theory, he argued, would license every man in America to carry a gun and settle personal scores.⁷

After more than 47 hours of deliberation, the jury deadlocked, seven voting to convict of first-degree murder and five for acquittal by reason of insanity. Justice Fitzgerald declared a mistrial on April 12, 1907.²

The Second Trial and the Insanity Verdict

The retrial opened on January 6, 1908, before Justice Victor J. Dowling. The defense was now led by Martin W. Littleton, a Texas-born attorney and New York Law School alumnus, and he took a very different approach.⁹ Littleton dropped the dementia Americana rhetoric and ran a conventional insanity defense, arguing that Thaw had been “absolutely insane” at the time of the killing. He put on evidence of hereditary mental instability in the Thaw family, including epileptic relatives, childhood fits of violence, and medical testimony about mania and paranoia. His closing lasted nearly five hours and was described as showing “complete disregard for the family pride of the Thaws.”¹⁰

Jerome, by one account, “did not fight as hard” the second time around. Both sides appeared to accept that an insanity verdict, which would confine Thaw rather than free him or send him to the electric chair, was a workable landing point.⁷ On February 1, 1908, the jury returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. Justice Dowling immediately ruled that Thaw’s release would be “dangerous to public safety” and ordered him committed to Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.²

How Thaw Got Out

Thaw’s lawyers began challenging the commitment immediately with a writ of habeas corpus, launching eight years of litigation that spanned three states, two countries, and eventually reached the United States Supreme Court and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.⁹

In August 1913, Thaw simply walked out. A milk wagon blocked the guards’ view of the asylum yard long enough for him to slip through the gate and into a waiting Packard driven by an accomplice. The escape had been engineered by former New York Assemblyman Richard J. Butler and financed with an estimated $20,000.¹¹¹²¹³

In June 1915, a jury in the Supreme Court of New York was convened to decide whether Thaw was sane enough to be released. After he testified for more than five hours, the jury found him sane. Two days later he walked out a free man.²

What Happened After His Release

Thaw’s freedom lasted barely two years. On Christmas Eve 1916, at the Hotel McAlpin in New York City, he allegedly lured 19-year-old Frederick Gump Jr. from California under the pretense of providing an education or a job. On Christmas Day, according to the indictment, Thaw beat the youth with a short, stocky whip until he was “almost insensible.”¹⁴

After Gump returned to Kansas City and told his family, a New York County grand jury indicted Thaw on kidnapping and two counts of assault, charges that carried a potential sentence of 55 years. Bench warrants issued, and Thaw fled, evading police in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Rather than face trial, his mother arranged to have him sent to a Pennsylvania insane asylum, where he stayed until 1924.¹⁴⁷

Thaw lived quietly through his final decades and died of coronary thrombosis on the night of February 22, 1947, at a rented home on North Bay Road in Miami Beach, Florida. He was 76. Private funeral services were held in Pittsburgh, and he was buried in the Thaw family lot at Allegheny Cemetery. His will left Evelyn Nesbit, from whom he had long been divorced, $10,000.³

Why the Case Still Matters

The Thaw case pushed hard on the insanity defense in American criminal law. The dementia Americana theory, though abandoned in the retrial, made the courts and the public argue publicly about temporary insanity, the so-called “unwritten law” allowing men to avenge their wives’ honor, and the reach of psychiatric testimony. The years of habeas corpus litigation that followed the commitment shaped questions about when a person found not guilty by reason of insanity could be released, and some of that fight reached the U.S. Supreme Court.⁹

The story has kept a foothold in popular culture. Richard Fleischer’s 1955 film The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing dramatized the affair and the murder, with Joan Collins as Nesbit, Ray Milland as White, and Farley Granger as Thaw.¹⁵ E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel Ragtime wove the case into its portrait of early twentieth-century America. More than a century later it endures as a study of what wealth, celebrity, and a determined family lawyer could do inside a courtroom.

1
Library of Congress. Chronicling America: Stanford White Murder
2
Famous Trials. The Trials of Harry Thaw
3
Allegheny Cemetery. The Thaw Family
4
PBS American Experience. The Love Triangle
5
Gotham Center for New York City History. The Girl on the Velvet Swing
6
The New York Times. Delphin M. Delmas, Noted Lawyer, Dies
7
Encyclopedia.com. Harry Thaw Trials 1907-08
8
Mental Floss. Facts About the Original Trial of the Century
9
New York Courts History. Harry Kendall Thaw Had a Problem
10
The New York Times. Littleton Pleads Insanity for Thaw
11
Library of Congress / The Sun. Thaw Escape Coverage
12
The New York Times. Thaw Put Under Doubled Guards
13
EBSCO Research Starters. Harry Kendall Thaw
14
The New York Times. Whipping of Boy Starts Hunt for Harry K. Thaw
15
Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing