Harry Kendall Thaw

Based on Wikipedia: Harry Kendall Thaw

On a warm June evening in 1906, hundreds of well-dressed New Yorkers sat on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden, watching a musical comedy and enjoying the night air. Among them was Harry Kendall Thaw, heir to a Pittsburgh railroad fortune, dining with his young wife Evelyn Nesbit. At a nearby table sat Stanford White, the celebrated architect who had designed the very building they were sitting in.

What happened next would become one of the most sensational crimes in American history.

During the show's finale, Thaw rose from his seat, walked calmly toward White's table, pulled out a pistol, and shot him three times in the face at point-blank range. As White's body slumped to the floor, Thaw held his gun aloft and walked toward the exit. His wife rushed after him. "Good God, Harry, what have you done?" she reportedly cried. His answer was chilling in its simplicity: "It's all right, dear. I have probably saved your life."

The murder would expose a dark underbelly of Gilded Age New York—a world of showgirls and millionaires, of secret rooms and silenced scandals, of inherited wealth deployed to cover almost any crime. The trial that followed was called the "trial of the century," though the century was barely six years old. It would take two juries to reach a verdict, and when they did, the finding would be controversial: not guilty by reason of insanity.

But the real insanity had begun decades earlier.

A Disturbed Childhood

Harry Kendall Thaw was born on February 12, 1871, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, to one of the wealthiest families in Pittsburgh. His father, William Thaw Sr., had made a vast fortune in railroad and coal investments. His mother, Mary Sibbet Thaw, was known for violent outbursts of temper and for abusing the family's servants.

From his earliest years, Harry exhibited signs of profound psychological disturbance.

He suffered from insomnia and erupted into violent tantrums. He babbled incoherently, sometimes lapsing into baby talk that he would continue using well into adulthood. His preferred form of entertainment as a child was throwing heavy household objects at the heads of servants.

School was a disaster. He bounced from one private institution to another in Pittsburgh, never succeeding, always creating trouble. One teacher at Wooster Prep School observed that the sixteen-year-old Thaw walked with an "erratic kind of zig-zag" pattern "which seemed to involuntarily mimic his brain patterns." It was an observation that, in hindsight, seems almost prophetic.

Through family connections rather than academic merit, Thaw secured admission to the University of Pittsburgh, ostensibly to study law. He did little studying. He then used his name and social standing to transfer to Harvard College.

At Harvard, Thaw later bragged, his primary course of study was poker.

He lit cigars with hundred-dollar bills. He went on extended drinking binges. He attended cockfights and spent most of his time pursuing young women. In 1894, believing a cab driver had shortchanged him by ten cents, Thaw chased the man down a street with a shotgun. He was ultimately expelled from Harvard for what the administration termed "immoral practices," along with intimidating students and teachers. The expulsion was immediate—he was given three hours to pack.

The Making of a Playboy

Thaw's father, hoping to rein in his son's worst impulses, limited Harry's monthly allowance to $2,500. This was an enormous sum at a time when working-class laborers earned roughly $500 per year and an extravagant dinner at Delmonico's, the most famous restaurant in New York, cost about a dollar fifty. But to someone with Harry's appetites, it was never enough.

Then, in 1893, William Thaw Sr. died.

The father's will left his twenty-two-year-old son three million dollars outright—the equivalent of roughly $105 million today. More significantly, Harry's mother increased his monthly allowance to $8,000, or about $280,000 in modern currency. He would receive this monthly income for the next eighteen years. In total, Harry stood to inherit some $40 million from the family fortune.

With effectively unlimited money and no restraint, Thaw became something America hadn't quite seen before: a celebrity wastrel whose exploits were covered breathlessly in newspapers across the country. The word "playboy" reportedly entered popular usage to describe him specifically.

His mother and a team of lawyers devoted themselves to one task above all others: keeping Harry's name out of scandal. The method was simple and effective. Whenever Harry did something that might disgrace the family, money made the problem disappear.

In a London hotel room, for instance, Thaw allegedly lured a bellboy inside, stripped him naked, restrained him in a bathtub, and beat him savagely with a riding crop. The incident cost the family $5,000 in hush money—perhaps $175,000 today.

With his vast wealth and apparently inexhaustible energy, Thaw tore through Europe repeatedly, frequenting brothels where he subjected his partners to sadistic violence. In Paris in 1895, he threw a party that reportedly cost $50,000—roughly $2 million in modern terms. The guest list consisted of Thaw himself and twenty-five of the most beautiful showgirls and prostitutes he could assemble. A military band provided entertainment. At the end of the meal, each guest received a $1,000 piece of jewelry wrapped around the stem of a liqueur glass.

Yet Thaw had another side that he could deploy when it suited his purposes. He could present himself as gentle, caring, even charming. He knew how to modulate his behavior to impress those he wished to manipulate. This ability to switch personas—the classic characteristic of a skilled sociopath—would serve him well in the years ahead.

The Obsession with Stanford White

After his expulsion from Harvard, Thaw divided his time between Pittsburgh and New York City. He craved acceptance among the social elite of Manhattan, where the truly rich and powerful held court. But despite his millions, doors kept closing in his face.

He applied for membership in the city's most prestigious men's clubs: the Metropolitan Club, the Century Club, the Knickerbocker Club, the Players' Club. All rejected him. His membership in the Union League Club was revoked after he rode a horse up the steps and into the club's entrance—behavior deemed "unbefitting a gentleman."

Thaw became convinced that one man was responsible for all these humiliations: Stanford White.

White was everything Thaw wished he could be. At fifty-two, he was the most famous architect in America, a partner in the legendary firm of McKim, Mead and White. He had designed the Washington Square Arch, the Boston Public Library, and Madison Square Garden itself. He was a titan of New York society, a man who moved through the city's highest circles with ease and authority.

He was also, like Thaw, a man of ravenous appetites.

White maintained a secret apartment in Madison Square Garden, accessible by a hidden staircase. The space, known as the Tower Room, was decorated in luxurious style, with a red velvet swing on which White would place young women and push them toward the ceiling. He pursued chorus girls and artists' models with the confidence of a man who knew his power and position made him essentially untouchable. He was married with children, but this seemed not to concern him.

Thaw saw in White a kind of dark mirror image. They shared similar predilections. But White could indulge his desires without consequence, while Thaw faced rejection at every turn. The difference, in Thaw's mind, was not luck or connections but active sabotage. He became convinced that White was personally orchestrating his exclusion from New York society.

One incident deepened this paranoid obsession. Thaw had planned an elaborate party, but a showgirl whom he had publicly snubbed got her revenge by convincing all the female guests to abandon his event and go instead to White's Tower Room. The newspapers reported on the conspicuous absence of women at Thaw's gathering. He was humiliated. And he blamed White for everything.

The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing

Evelyn Nesbit was sixteen years old when she arrived in New York City in 1901. She was staggeringly beautiful—the kind of beauty that artists and photographers couldn't stop trying to capture. Within months she had become one of the most photographed women in America, her face appearing on magazine covers and in advertisements, the ideal of the "Gibson Girl" that defined the era's feminine beauty.

She worked as an artists' model and a chorus girl, performing in shows on Broadway. Stanford White, always on the lookout for beautiful young women, noticed her immediately. He befriended her mother, arranged for the family to move into an apartment he provided, positioned himself as Nesbit's benefactor.

Then, according to Nesbit's later testimony, he invited her to a private dinner. He served champagne. She lost consciousness. When she awoke, she was naked in his bed, and there was blood on the sheets.

She was sixteen. He was forty-seven.

Their relationship continued in a complicated way—Nesbit dependent on White's financial support, White apparently obsessed with her. Then Harry Thaw appeared.

Thaw had seen Nesbit in a show called The Wild Rose. He was immediately smitten. He attended something like forty performances over the course of a year, watching her from the audience night after night. Finally, through an intermediary, he arranged to meet her, introducing himself under a false name: "Mr. Munroe."

Even in their first conversation, before Nesbit knew who he really was, Thaw steered the discussion toward Stanford White. He warned her to stay away from the architect. His obsession with White was already so consuming that he couldn't help bringing it up to a teenage chorus girl he had only just met.

When Thaw later revealed his true identity—announcing with theatrical grandiosity, "I am not Munroe! I am Henry Kendall Thaw, of Pittsburgh!"—Nesbit found the whole performance bewildering and faintly ridiculous. She knew his name from newspaper coverage of his exploits. But she also recognized that he was extremely wealthy.

A European Nightmare

White and Nesbit's mother, hoping to separate the young woman from an unsuitable suitor named John Barrymore—yes, that Barrymore family—sent her to a boarding school in upstate New York in late 1902. But Thaw tracked her there too, visiting frequently with gifts and praise, charming both her mother and the headmistress.

In January 1903, Nesbit developed acute appendicitis while Thaw happened to be visiting. After an emergency appendectomy, Thaw proposed a European trip to aid her recovery. Nesbit and her mother agreed. What followed was a calculated campaign of isolation and psychological warfare.

Thaw's usual frenetic travel schedule intensified into an exhausting, relentless itinerary designed to wear down both mother and daughter. He exploited every disagreement between them, deepening rifts, manipulating tensions. Eventually he convinced Mrs. Nesbit to return alone to America, leaving her teenage daughter in Europe under his care.

He took Nesbit to Paris. He continued pressing her to marry him. She refused, but she felt she needed to explain why. Aware of Thaw's obsession with female purity, she couldn't in good conscience accept his proposal without revealing the truth about Stanford White.

What followed, according to Nesbit, was a marathon interrogation. Thaw demanded every detail of the night she lost her virginity to White. He wanted to know exactly what had happened, how it had happened, everything. The questioning went on for hours. Nesbit was tearful and hysterical. Thaw alternated between agitation and a strange, disturbing satisfaction.

In Nesbit's account, Thaw's response to her story was not to comfort her but to become even more obsessed with White's villainy. He took her on a tour of sites devoted to virgin martyrdom. In Domrémy, France—the birthplace of Joan of Arc—Thaw left an inscription in the visitor's book: "She would not have been a virgin if Stanford White had been around."

Then came Katzenstein Castle.

The castle was a forbidding Gothic structure perched near a mountaintop in Austria-Hungary. Thaw brought Nesbit there and confined the servants to one end of the building, isolating himself and Nesbit at the opposite end. According to Nesbit's later testimony, Thaw locked her in her room. For two weeks, she said, he beat her with a whip and sexually assaulted her repeatedly. When his fury was spent, he became apologetic, even cheerful, as if nothing had happened.

And yet, after all of this, Evelyn Nesbit eventually agreed to marry him.

Marriage and Madness

Why would she marry a man who had terrorized her? The answer seems to be a desperate pragmatism. Nesbit craved financial security. She convinced herself that the worst of Thaw's behavior was an aberration, that his grip on reality wasn't as tenuous as the evidence suggested.

They married on April 4, 1905. Thaw chose her wedding dress: not the traditional white gown, but a black traveling suit with brown trim.

The couple moved into the Thaw family mansion in Pittsburgh. Nesbit later described life with the Thaws as suffocatingly materialistic and intellectually vacant—a household obsessed with appearances and possessions, ruled by the sanctimonious "Mother Thaw." Harry himself seemed to transform in his mother's presence, adopting a pose of pious respectability that was utterly at odds with his private behavior.

Meanwhile, Thaw launched what he considered a crusade for moral reform. He corresponded with Anthony Comstock, the notorious anti-vice crusader who had made a career of prosecuting obscenity. Thaw fed Comstock information about Stanford White's secret apartment and his pursuit of young women. In his own mind, Thaw was a righteous warrior against corruption.

He also became convinced that Stanford White was trying to have him killed.

Thaw believed that White had hired members of the Monk Eastman Gang—a real and genuinely dangerous criminal organization on the Lower East Side—to murder him. There is no evidence this was true. But Thaw was certain of it. He started carrying a gun.

Stanford White, for his part, seemed barely aware of Thaw's existence. He considered the Pittsburgh heir a poseur and a buffoon. White's private nickname for Thaw was "the Pennsylvania pug"—a mocking reference to his soft, babyish features.

White had no idea that he was about to die.

The Night of June 25, 1906

On that evening, Thaw and Nesbit were in New York briefly before boarding a luxury liner for a European vacation. They decided to attend a musical comedy called Mamzelle Champagne at the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden—the very building Stanford White had designed.

White was also there that night, dining at a table near the stage.

The rooftop theater was an open-air venue, popular in summer, where New York's elite came to see and be seen. Hundreds of people were in attendance. The show was nearing its finale when Thaw rose from his seat.

He walked toward White's table. He pulled a pistol from his coat. Standing directly over the architect, he fired three shots into White's face.

White died instantly. He was fifty-two years old.

In the chaos that followed, Thaw held his gun above his head and walked toward the exit. A stage manager grabbed the weapon from his hand. When police arrived, Thaw reportedly said, "He ruined my wife."

The Trial of the Century

The trial that followed captivated the nation. Newspapers covered every detail, every revelation, every twist. The victim was a celebrated architect. The defendant was a millionaire heir. The key witness was one of the most famous beauties in America, the woman both men had pursued.

Evelyn Nesbit took the stand and told her story—the story of how Stanford White had given her champagne and raped her when she was sixteen years old. Her testimony was sensational. It was also strategically designed to make the jury sympathize with Thaw as an avenging husband defending his wife's honor.

The Thaw family spent enormous sums on Harry's defense. They hired the best lawyers money could buy. They orchestrated a public relations campaign to shape opinion in his favor. The strategy was simple: Stanford White was the true villain, a predator who had preyed on a young innocent girl. Harry Thaw was a hero who had delivered righteous justice.

The first trial ended with a hung jury—seven for conviction, five for acquittal.

At the second trial, Thaw's lawyers shifted to an insanity defense. They presented extensive evidence of his mental instability dating back to childhood: the tantrums, the incoherent babbling, the violent outbursts, the drug addiction, the sadistic behavior. Expert witnesses testified that Thaw had been insane when he pulled the trigger.

On February 1, 1908, the jury returned its verdict: not guilty by reason of insanity.

Thaw was committed to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in upstate New York. He would remain there for seven years.

Aftermath

The Thaw family's money continued to work on Harry's behalf even after his commitment. In 1913, he escaped from Matteawan—almost certainly with inside help—and fled to Canada. He was eventually returned to the United States and sent back to the asylum, but the family's lawyers kept fighting. In 1915, a jury declared him sane, and he was released.

His freedom did not last long. In 1917, he was arrested for kidnapping and whipping a teenage boy—echoes of the bellboy incident in London years earlier. He was again found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a Pennsylvania mental institution for another seven years.

Evelyn Nesbit divorced Thaw in 1915. She struggled financially for years, attempting comebacks on stage and in film that never quite succeeded. She fell into alcohol and drug abuse. She attempted suicide multiple times. In 1955, when a Hollywood film called The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing dramatized her story, Nesbit served as a technical consultant. She lived until 1967, dying at age eighty-two in a California nursing home, an artifact of a vanished era.

Harry Kendall Thaw died on February 22, 1947, in Miami Beach, Florida. He was seventy-six years old. His death certificate listed the cause as a heart attack. He had outlived both his victim and his fame, a forgotten relic of the Gilded Age—a time when enough money could buy almost anything, including escape from the consequences of murder.

The Larger Story

The Thaw-White affair revealed something unsettling about American society at the turn of the twentieth century. It exposed a world in which the very rich lived by different rules—where scandals could be buried with cash, where violent crimes went unpunished if the perpetrator's family had enough lawyers, where the exploitation of young women by powerful men was an open secret that polite society chose not to discuss.

Stanford White was no innocent victim. He was a middle-aged married man who had sex with a drugged sixteen-year-old girl. He maintained a secret apartment specifically for his assignations with young women. His behavior was predatory by any reasonable standard.

But Harry Thaw was not a righteous avenger. He was a violent, mentally unstable man who had tortured women, beaten servants, and used his family's fortune to escape consequences for his actions throughout his life. His murder of White was not justice but obsession finally exploding into violence.

And Evelyn Nesbit was caught between them—a teenage girl from a poor family, desperately beautiful, exploited by both men in different ways, used as a prop in the trial, and discarded when her usefulness was over.

The trial of the century was, in the end, a story about money and power and what they could buy in America. The answer, it turned out, was almost everything—including, on a June evening in 1906, the freedom to commit murder in front of hundreds of witnesses and walk away without ever serving a day in prison.