Trials of the Century: A Decade-by-Decade Look at Ten of America's Most Sensational Crimes
340
Trials of the Century: A Decade-by-Decade Look at Ten of America's Most Sensational Crimes
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781633881969 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Prometheus Books |
| Publication date: | 07/26/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 340 |
| Sales rank: | 156 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Aryn Z. Phillips holds undergraduate degrees in history and international relations from Emory University and a Masters degree (MPH) from Harvard, where she focused on social and behavioral sciences. She is currently pursuing her PhD in public health at the University of California at Berkeley.
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Trials of the Century
A Decade-by-Decade Look at Ten of America's Most Sensational Crimes
By Mark J. Phillips, Aryn Z. Phillips
Prometheus Books
Copyright © 2016 Mark J. Phillips and Aryn Z. PhillipsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63388-196-9
CHAPTER 1
1900–1910: "He Deserved It" — The Case of Harry Kendall Thaw
The turn of the twentieth century represented the crest of what has become known as the "Gilded Age" in America. The country was rapidly industrializing and the economy rising faster than ever before. It was the era of railroads, oil, and high finance, of Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. There seemed to be no limit to the amount of money a person could acquire, or to what he could spend it on. The Gilded Age elite lived lives of conspicuous consumption and extravagance, full of high culture, sumptuous parties, easy leisure pursuits, and overindulgence. New York was the center of this world. Leonard Jerome, a financier, once threw a party at Delmonico's at which every woman in attendance was gifted a gold bracelet. Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, whose husband was the president of the Illinois Central Railroad, once threw a dinner party for her dog, which attended wearing a $15,000 diamond collar.
But "gilded" literally means to be covered only with a thin layer of gold. Not everyone had such massive personal fortunes and such sparkling leisurely lives. The majority of families in America lived on less than $1,200 a year, and sweatshops and tenements were sprouting up in every city in the country. Most people simply could not relate to the lifestyles of the elite, and they were partially enchanted, partially disgusted, but always fascinated with them.
On June 25, 1906, Harry Kendall Thaw, the millionaire of Pittsburgh, and his young, breathtakingly beautiful wife, Evelyn Nesbit, attended a performance of Mamzelle Champagne at the Roof Garden Theatre of Madison Square Garden. Also in attendance was the much-acclaimed architect Stanford White, seated at a table in the front row. In the middle of the chorus's rendition of "I Could Love a Million Girls," Thaw calmly approached White's table, pulled a revolver from an overcoat pocket, and fired three shots into his head, killing him instantly. "He deserved it," Thaw explained, "he ruined my wife and then deserted the girl."
With these three gunshots, Harry Thaw launched not only a lengthy murder trial but also a media spectacle and nationwide obsession, the pop culture legacies of which have lasted for decades. His public prosecution, coinciding with the explosion of newspaper readership, was the beginning of a century of American fascination with media-driven murder trials, sex, celebrity, and publicity.
The complicated story of this crime began five years earlier in the summer of 1901, when young Evelyn Nesbit, a bit player in the popular Broadway show Florodora, first met the famed Stanford White. Evelyn was then sixteen and White forty-eight. Evelyn was born in 1884 in Tarentum, Pennsylvania. Her father died when she was eight years old, and her mother, tasked with the care of two children, struggled to make ends meet. She shuttled Evelyn and her younger brother, Howard, around Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, opening and closing a sequence of unsuccessful boarding houses and trying other odd jobs, including dressmaking. At age fourteen, Evelyn quit school and worked as a stock girl to help support the family.
About this time, Evelyn met John Storm, a well-known artist in Philadelphia. He was immediately taken with her beauty, for even as a young girl Evelyn was admired for her stunning good looks. She had smooth olive skin, large, heavy-lidded dark eyes, and her thick copper-colored hair fell in long curls. Storm began using her as a model for his work. He introduced her to a variety of industry professionals, and she began appearing in books, magazines, and newspaper advertisements. Hoping to capitalize on that modest success, the Nesbits moved to New York City in 1901, where Evelyn continued to model for artists and photographers, including Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the Gibson Girl. Evelyn gained substantial publicity and was finally cast as a "Spanish dancer" in Florodora. Since she was only sixteen, the other cast members called her "the baby" or "the kid."
As for Stanford White, he was even then one of America's visionary architects. A partner in the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White in New York City, alone he is responsible for the arch on Washington Square, the Player's Club, the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, said by some to be the most beautiful church in America, and, somewhat ironically, Madison Square Garden, where he would later die at the hands of Thaw. White designed university buildings throughout the country, residences for the Astors, the Vanderbilts, and other Gilded Age elite, and even Pullman cars and yachts. He has been called New York City's "leading designer, decorator, stylist and chief arbiter of taste." White was born in 1853 and, despite an early desire to be a painter, entered into an architecture apprenticeship in 1870. He married Bessie Smith in 1884 and had one son. The family lived in Long Island, but Stanford spent much of his time in the city, where he lived an alternate life with an infamous reputation for living extravagantly, throwing lavish parties, and having tumultuous affairs, particularly with young girls in show business. He kept an opulently decorated apartment on Twenty-Fourth Street that housed in one room a silk-sheeted mirrored canopy bed, and in another a plush red velvet swing that hung from the ceiling. He was tall in stature and had red hair and a distinctively large mustache. He has been described as a libertine and a bon vivant, having drawn crowds to him with his passionate and exuberant disposition.
In the summer of 1901, Emma Goodrich, a fellow chorus girl in Florodora, brought Evelyn to an intimate lunch party at White's apartment. Clearly smitten with her, White spent the next few months inviting Evelyn to lunches at his apartment and sending her expensive gifts. He met Mrs. Nesbit, who seemed to approve of him despite his reputation and allowed young Evelyn to spend a considerable amount of time with him. White fawned over the beautiful, young Evelyn. He paid for her dental work, arranged for her brother, Howard, to be admitted to Chester Military Academy in Philadelphia, and, when Mrs. Nesbit expressed a desire to visit Howard, offered to look after Evelyn while she was away.
One night while Mrs. Nesbit was in Philadelphia, White invited Evelyn to a dinner at his apartment. Assuming it would be a small party, Evelyn was surprised to find that she was the only guest. They ate and drank champagne. White showed her around his lavish apartment, and, before the night was over, he seduced her. In the trial that was to follow, Evelyn would claim that he had gotten her drunk on champagne and taken advantage of her, that she only knew what transpired when she awoke naked in his bed. However, in her memoir, she claims to have been "head over heels in love with him" and remembers on this night feeling that "this, then, was what love meant."
This tryst set off what would become an extended and not-so-secretive affair between White and Evelyn. After nearly every Florodora show, Evelyn would meet White and his friends for supper and stay late at his apartment, where he showered her with expensive jewelry and pushed her on the red velvet swing, Evelyn often wearing nothing but his jewelry. She accompanied him to parties at his studio in the tower above Madison Square Garden and often spent the night there, curled up on fur rugs while he worked on his designs. White moved Evelyn and her mother from their boarding house to an opulently decorated apartment in the Wellington Hotel, opened accounts for them at the New Amsterdam Bank and the Mercantile Trust Company, paid their bills, and gave them a twenty-five-dollar weekly allowance.
However, by 1902, Evelyn had rocketed to stardom and become a widely recognized celebrity. She had the lead role in a new musical called The Wild Rose, for which avid fans reportedly threw at her feet flowers with fifty-dollar bills wrapped around the stems. She was said to be one of the most beautiful women of the day, and she had countless male admirers.
One of these admirers was Harry Kendall Thaw. Dark-haired and of average build with wide, saucer-like eyes and a youthful face, Thaw, born in Pittsburgh in 1871, was the son of a wealthy railroad family. Even in the context of New York society he was rich beyond imagination. He purportedly lit his cigars with one-hundred-dollar bills. However, he had a reputation for being eccentric, even unstable. He was known not only for his gambling, drinking, and bar fighting, but also for wild and often violent outbursts. He was rumored to have beaten women with riding crops and burned them with scalding water. He once drove his car through the front window of a shop because a saleswoman had been rude to him.
In January 1902, Thaw began sending flowers to Evelyn backstage under the pseudonym "Mr. Monroe." He bribed a chorus girl in the show to persuade Evelyn to meet him for tea, and it was only at this meeting that she learned of Thaw's true identity. Unimpressed, she claimed that she "like[d] him even less than [she did] his reputation." But Thaw was smitten. He continued to call on her at her hotel and send flowers and gifts.
In late 1902, Evelyn, still only seventeen, left the stage and went away to the DeMille School in New Jersey. White paid for her tuition. She had been carrying on with another man, John Barrymore, a twenty-two-year-old cartoonist and the brother of acclaimed actress Ethel Barrymore, and both White and Mrs. Thaw thought she could benefit from some time outside New York. Although White had been the one to introduce Barrymore and Evelyn, both he and Mrs. Nesbit disapproved of the relationship. It is also possible that Evelyn was pregnant and that she was sent away to hide this fact from New York society and the show business industry.
While she was away, Thaw made an effort to befriend Mrs. Nesbit. Accordingly, when Evelyn was hospitalized in April of 1903 with appendicitis, or what may have been pregnancy complications, Mrs. Nesbit phoned both White and Thaw, and it was Thaw who drove her out to New Jersey to be with her daughter. White, however, arranged for Evelyn to be moved to a sanatorium in New York, and he and Thaw, although never at the same time, visited her throughout her recovery. Thaw was so compassionate and generous during Evelyn's convalescence that she tempered her earlier distaste of him, and when her doctor suggested a relaxing trip out of the city and Thaw offered to take Evelyn and her mother to Europe, she accepted.
The trio set sail for Paris and spent months traveling around Europe. Thaw's behavior during this trip was, at best, eccentric and, at worst, violent and dangerous. He pampered Evelyn and Mrs. Nesbit with the best food and clothes and entertainment but exhibited unpredictable fits of rage and jealousy, often in public places.
While the party was in London, Mrs. Nesbit decided she was ready to return to New York. She begged her daughter to come with her, but she refused. As Evelyn and Thaw continued their travels, she experienced an even darker side of his personality. The terrible rumors about him, she realized, were indeed true. He rented an isolated castle in Austria called the Schloss Katzenstein for the two of them and, while there, repeatedly choked her and beat her with a rattan cane and a dog whip until she was unable to get out of bed. She also became privy to his cocaine addiction.
Thaw asked Evelyn to marry him several times during their travels, and each time she refused, giving a variety of reasons and excuses. On one such occasion, she told him that she previously had an affair, and could not marry him and bring the accompanying shame to him and his family. He begged her for the details, and one evening she finally relented and told him of her relationship with White. Thaw was distraught and called White "a filthy beast" for defiling a sixteen-year-old girl.
Thaw had long despised White. His hatred had begun years before, when he had been engaged to another Florodora girl, Frances Belmont. He had planned a party for Frances and her friends, but happened upon her in a restaurant the day before and pretended not to recognize her. Insulted, Frances stood Thaw up the night of the party and instead took her friends to dinner at White's apartment. When an article about the party was published in the papers the next day, Thaw was humiliated. He had passionately hated White ever since.
Evelyn's confession to Thaw was a turning point in their relationship. So when the two finally returned to New York, Evelyn broke off the relationship and ran to White, telling him everything. Although he expressed a concern for her and made arrangements for her to speak with an attorney for a lawsuit against Thaw (which was never filed), White was clearly no longer romantically interested in her. She received occasional invitations to lunches and dinners, but their love affair was over.
Meanwhile, Thaw launched an apology campaign, sending notes, telegrams, flowers, and begging Evelyn to see him. She refused for months, but when she failed to receive an invitation to White's 1904 Christmas party, she accepted one from Thaw, and the two met for dinner at Rector's, the same place where a year before he had revealed himself as the mysterious "Mr. Monroe."
Their relationship was rekindled. Thaw and Evelyn began seeing each other regularly again, and, after some coaxing from Thaw's mother, they were married in Pittsburgh on April 5, 1905. But Thaw was still prone to erratic behavior. He continued to have episodes of wild anger. He was consumed by jealousy and had Evelyn followed by private detectives.
Thaw also now openly expressed his hatred for White. His marriage to Evelyn did nothing to ease the intensity of his anger toward the architect. In fact, it took on a new ferocity. His private detectives now followed White in the hopes of catching him in affairs with other young women. Thaw took to carrying a revolver with him and threatened to kill White on multiple occasions. One day, he pointed the gun at Evelyn and told her that if she ever called White by name again he would kill her, and that she must from that moment on only refer to him as "the Beast."
Thaw's uncontrollable obsession with White crested on June 25, 1906. Although they lived in Pittsburgh, Thaw and Evelyn spent a considerable amount of time in New York City. They were in the city in June 1906 and were planning on spending an evening at the Roof Garden Theatre of Madison Square Garden, where the new show Mamzelle Champagne was playing. Before the final number was over, Thaw approached White at his front row table and fired three shots into his head. He then emptied the rest of the chamber into the air.
Amid the panicked and scrambling patrons, Thaw remained calm and did not resist arrest. Fireman Paul Brundi took his revolver, and Officer Debes of the Tenderloin District Command placed him under arrest, to which Thaw's only response was "Alright." When Evelyn later asked why he had done it, he simply replied, "It's all right, dear. It's all right. I have probably saved your life." He later wrote in his autobiography that killing Stanford White "made New York safer for other girls" and brought Evelyn, for the first time, "a hope for ... a cheerfulness [she] had never known."
Denied bail, Thaw was taken to cell 220, Murderers' Row, at the Tombs prison, the notorious detention complex at 125 White Street in lower Manhattan, to await his trial. Imprisonment for Thaw, however, did not mean a significant decrease in his standard of living; it was common knowledge that he sent out for pork chops, ice cream, and other delicacies for dinner. In the meantime, trial preparations began. Thaw's mother, recently returned from Europe, organized his defense. She hired a team of five lawyers led by Delphin Michael Delmas. The son of a French escargot importer, sixty-three-year-old Delmas studied law at Yale University and served as the district attorney of Santa Clara County in California, where he was often called "the Napoleon of the Western Bar" before going into private practice. Since thousands had witnessed the crime, there was no denying Thaw's complicity. Instead, Delmas set out to prove that Thaw was not guilty by reason of insanity. He claimed that, although sane now, Thaw was not responsible for the murder because he had been driven to a temporary form of dementia by White's behavior. New York district attorney William Travers Jerome, the prosecuting attorney and a cousin of Winston Churchill, maintained that Thaw was perfectly sane and that the murder was premeditated.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Trials of the Century by Mark J. Phillips, Aryn Z. Phillips. Copyright © 2016 Mark J. Phillips and Aryn Z. Phillips. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
1900s—Railroad millionaire Harry K. Thaw kills architect Stanford White in 1906. The trial focuses on whether Thaw was driven insane by White's seduction of Thaw's glamorous young wife, Evelyn Nesbit.1910s—In Atlanta, Georgia, factory superintendent Leo Frank--a Jew from New York--is falsely accused of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan's murder and eventually lynched by a rabidly anti-Semitic mob.
1920s—Movie star "Fatty" Arbuckle is tried three times for the death of actress Virginia Rappe during a wild party hosted by Arbuckle in a San Francisco hotel. Though finally acquitted, his career is ruined by the negative publicity.
1930s—Who kidnapped and killed the baby of world-famous aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife? Though petty criminal Bruno Hauptmann was convicted, questions linger to this day about the identity of the real culprit.
1940s—The murder of New York socialite Patricia Burton Lonergan generates an incredible media frenzy, with more reporters present on the first day of the trial than are assigned to cover the allied invasion of Italy.
1950s—Sam Sheppard, a respected physician in Bay Village, Ohio, is accused of the murder of his wife, sparking intense media coverage and eventually the TV series The Fugitive.
1960s—The heinous murder of student nurses by drifter Richard Speck and the subsequent manhunt, arrest, and trial shocks the nation and receives blanket media coverage.
1970s—Charles Manson's murder of pregnant Hollywood starlet Sharon Tate and friends evokes both horror and fascination, stoked by unprecedented television coverage.
1980s—The murder of the Scarsdale Diet guru, Dr. Herman Tarnower, by an elite prep-school headmistress, Mrs. Jean Harris, triggers a storm of press coverage revealing a vicious love triangle.
1990s—The trial of football star and celebrity O.J. Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman creates a media circus like no other, amplified by the new prevalence of 24-hour cable news.
2000s—The trial of Casey Anthony for the 2008 murder of her missing two-year-old demonstrates, among other things, the power of new online media to create a vast Internet echo chamber.
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