In June 1906, Harry K. Thaw shot Stanford White to death inside Madison Square Garden, last musical number of a play called Mam'zelle Champagne. Thaw fired three bullets, hitting White in the head twice, killing him instantly. Fast forward two years and Thaw was acquitted of murder by a jury of his peers. How was it possible? Was the prosecution case shoddy? Did some technicality spring the defendant? Was Thaw some major player in New York society?
None of these scenarios was true. The prosecution had an open-and-shut case, with dozens of eyewitnesses and no technical flaws, and it was White—not Thaw—who was major player in Manhattan. He was a prominent architect who had designed various institutional and religious buildings around New York, as well as many houses for the wealthy. Thaw, conversely, was a violent man and drug addict who was not well thought of among those who were acquainted with him. So why was he acquitted?
It all hinged on sex, jealousy and bribery.
Harry Thaw's wife was a beautiful actress and chorus girl named Evelyn Nesbit. She had been Stanford White’s lover years earlier, when she was barely seventeen. The relationship had occurred before Thaw met and married Nesbit, and it wasn't a secret. In fact, when he first proposed, she refused, saying she was unworthy because another man had taken her virginity. Enraged, Thaw raped and whipped her. But as powerful as his rage was, his desire was even stronger—because Evelyn Nesbit was one of the most beautiful women he or anyone else had ever seen.
So he pursued her. It took time to convince Nesbit to marry him, but over the course of several years, he overcame her resistance. It helped that he was wealthy and could spend lavishly on her when the mood took him, but he never stopped beating her. If anything, the abuse grew worse. Thaw often tied Nesbit to a bed and whipped her as she confessed in detail every sexual act she had ever engaged in with Stanford White. Nesbit later testified that she sometimes made things up, because Thaw would beat her more if she had nothing to divulge.
At some point, she claimed that White had a red velvet swing installed in one of his several apartments, and he would push her while looking up her skirts, and on one occasion made her ride the swing nude (this was the detail upon which the press and public would later fixate, and Nesbit would acquire the nickname "the girl in the red velvet swing"). Harry K. Thaw, brooded over these shocking revelations. he brooded, and fumed, and smoldered. And then, on June 25, 1906, in full public view, he walked up to Stanford White and performed what could only be called an execution.
While the source of Thaw's jealousy was now dead, he had a new problem—a looming murder trial. There was no doubt he had committed the crime. Some of Manhattan's most important people had seen him do it. But in the sexual climate of those times, he was considered by some to be the injured party. After all, his wife's virginity had been taken by another man. The trial ran from January to April of 1907, and all the sordid details of Stanford White's life were aired out in public. The jury heard about his womanizing, his threesomes, his drinking and profligate ways, and in the end they deadlocked.
A second trial was scheduled. This time, Thaw contrived a different defense. Using his mother as an intermediary, he offered Evelyn a million dollars if she would testify that White sexually abused her. How this abuse justified a public execution nobody can know without reading the trial transcripts, but the ploy worked. In January 1908, Thaw was acquitted of murder by reason of temporary insanity.
Thaw spent five years at a state mental hospital, but under benign conditions and minimal security. Eventually, a jury judged him sane and he was released from custody. Evelyn Nesbit received a divorce, but never got the money she had been promised. She went on with her life, acted in a few films, wrote two books, and became a ceramics teacher. There were marriages and drug problems and suicide attempts. She eventually ran into Thaw again, and the two became friendly, but not—according to a New York Times interview from 1926—romantic.
The White case was never forgotten, for it had all the elements crime buffs love—sex, betrayal, violence, and high society participants, the type who had been given every advantage in life but still didn't know better than to stay out of trouble. In 1955 Hollywood weighed in with a film called The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing. The title role was played by a young Joan Collins, and Evelyn Nesbit acted as technical advisor. The end result was chaste. The sex, the whippings, and all the most shocking details were omitted. But that's often the case when it comes to cinema versus true crime. What's interesting, though, is that if the movie were made again today, a hundred years after the events, it's still doubtful the entire truth could be told.
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