Harry Kendall Thaw
Harry Kendall Thaw was the son of American businessman William Thaw Sr. Heir to a multimillion-dollar fortune, he is most notable for having shot and killed architect Stanford White in front of hundreds of witnesses at the rooftop theatre of Madison Square Garden on June 25, 1906. Thaw's trial for murder was heavily publicized and called the "trial of the century". After one hung jury, a second jury found Thaw not guilty by reason of insanity.
Thaw had harbored an obsessive hatred of White, believing he had blocked Thaw's access to the social elite of New York City. White also had a previous romantic relationship with Thaw's wife, the model and chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit, that started when she was 15 or 16. This affair allegedly began with White plying Nesbit with alcohol and then raping her while she was unconscious. In Thaw's mind, this relationship had "ruined" Nesbit.
Plagued by mental illness throughout his life, Thaw spent lavishly to fund his obsessive partying, drug addiction and sexual gratification. The Thaw family's wealth allowed them to buy the silence of anyone who threatened to reveal Thaw's licentious transgressions. However, Thaw had serious confrontations with the criminal justice system, one of which resulted in seven years of confinement in a mental institution.
Early life
Harry Thaw was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on February 12, 1871, to Pittsburgh businessman William Thaw Sr., and his second wife, Mary Sibbet Thaw. Thaw's father fathered eleven children from his two marriages. Thaw had five siblings: Edward, Josiah, Margaret and Alice Cornelia. A brother, born a year before Harry, died an accidental death in infancy, smothered by his mother's breast while he lay in her bed. Thaw's mother was known for her episodes of ungovernable temper and her abusive treatment of the family's servants.In childhood, Thaw was subject to bouts of insomnia, temper tantrums, incoherent babbling and baby talk, a form of expression which he retained in adulthood. His chosen form of amusement was hurling heavy household objects at the heads of servants. Thaw spent his childhood bouncing among private schools in Pittsburgh, never doing well and described by teachers as a troublemaker. One teacher at the Wooster Prep School described Thaw, then aged 16, as having an "erratic kind of zig-zag" walk, "which seemed to involuntarily mimic his brain patterns." Thaw was granted admission to the University of Pittsburgh, where he was to study law, though he apparently did little studying. After a few years, he used his name and social status to transfer to Harvard College.
Thaw later bragged that he had studied poker at Harvard. He reportedly lit cigars with hundred-dollar bills, went on long drinking binges, attended cockfights and spent much of his time romancing young women. In 1894, Thaw chased a cab driver down a street with a shotgun, believing he had been cheated out of ten cents change. He later claimed the shotgun was unloaded. Thaw was ultimately expelled from Harvard for "immoral practices," as well as intimidating and threatening students and teachers. His expulsion was immediate; he was given three hours to pack up and move out of the premises.
Thaw's father, in an attempt to curb his son's excesses, limited his monthly allowance to $2,500. This was a great deal of money in an era when lower-class workers earned $500 a year and a lavish dinner at Delmonico's restaurant cost $1.50. After the 1893 death of Thaw's father, who left his 22-year-old son $3 million in his will, Thaw's mother increased the monthly allowance to $8,000, enabling him to indulge his every whim. Thaw was the beneficiary of this monthly income for the next eighteen years. He was heir to a fortune estimated at some $40 million.
Early on and for years into the future, Thaw's mother and a cadre of lawyers dedicated themselves to shielding him from any public scandal that would dishonor the family name. Monetary pay-offs became the customary method of assuring silence. One notorious example occurred in Thaw's hotel room in London, where he purportedly devised a lure for an unsuspecting bellboy, whom Thaw proceeded to restrain naked in a bathtub, brutalizing him with beatings from a riding crop. Thaw paid $5,000 to keep the incident quiet.
With an enormous amount of cash at his disposal, and reserves of energy to match, Thaw repeatedly tore through Europe at a frenetic pace, frequenting bordellos where he subjected his partners to sadistic sex acts. In Paris in 1895, Thaw threw an extravagant party, reputedly costing $50,000, which drew wide publicity. The attendees were Thaw himself and twenty-five of the most beautiful showgirls and prostitutes he could assemble. A military band was hired to provide musical entertainment. At the end of the meal, each of Thaw's guests was given a $1,000 piece of jewelry wrapped around the stem of a liqueur glass, served as the dessert course.
Exhibiting the classic characteristics of a skilled, manipulative sociopath, Thaw kept the more sinister side of his personality in check when it suited his purposes. He had the ability, when required, to impress upon others that he was a gentle, caring soul. The term "playboy" entered the popular vernacular, reportedly inspired by Thaw himself.
Obsession with Stanford White
After his expulsion from Harvard, Thaw's sphere of activity alternated between Pittsburgh and New York City. In New York, he was determined to place himself amongst those privileged to occupy the summit of social prominence. His applications for membership in the city's elite men's clubs—the Metropolitan Club, the Century Club, the Knickerbocker Club and the Players' Club—were all rejected. His membership in the Union League Club was summarily revoked when he rode a horse up the steps into the club's entrance way, a "behavior unbefitting a gentleman." All of these snubs, Thaw was convinced, were directly or indirectly due to the intervention of the city's social lion, the architect Stanford White. His exclusion from clubs became part of a long line of perceived indignities heaped on Thaw, who maintained the unshakable certainty that his victimization was all orchestrated by White.Another incident furthered Thaw's paranoid obsession with White. A disgruntled showgirl whom Thaw had publicly snubbed got her revenge by sabotaging a lavish party he had planned by hijacking all the female invitees and transplanting their festivities to White's infamous Tower Room at Madison Square Garden. Thaw, stubbornly ignorant of the real cause of the chain of events, once again blamed White for single-handedly destroying his revelries. His social humiliation was completed when glaring absence of "doe-eyed girlies" was reported in the press.
The reality was that Thaw both admired and resented White's social stature. More significantly, he recognized that he and White shared a passion for similar lifestyles. White, unlike Thaw, could carry on without censure, and seemingly with impunity.
Drug use
Various sources document Thaw's drug addiction, which became habitual after his expulsion from Harvard. He reportedly injected large amounts of cocaine and morphine, occasionally mixing the two drugs into one injection. He was also known to use laudanum, and on at least one occasion he drank a full bottle in a single swallow. Thaw's drug addiction was verified by his wife, Evelyn Nesbit. In a sworn statement she made before their marriage, she said that "One day...I found a little silver box oblong in shape, about two-and-one-half inches in length, containing a hypodermic syringe... I asked Thaw what it was for, and he stated to me that he had been ill, and had to make some excuse. He said he had been compelled to take cocaine."Evelyn Nesbit
Relationship
Thaw had been in the audience of The Wild Rose, a show in which Nesbit, a popular artist's model and chorus girl about 17 years old, was a featured player. The smitten Thaw attended some forty performances over the better part of a year. Through an intermediary, he ultimately arranged a meeting with Nesbit, introducing himself as "Mr. Munroe". Even in their first personal encounter, Thaw revealed he was already extremely concerned about White suddenly bringing him up in the conversation and warning her to stay away from him. Nesbit and her mother were, at the time, living in an apartment suite arranged by White, who was acting as Nesbit's benefactor and had conducted a sexual affair with her. Nesbit found Thaw overly infatuated and recoiled from his attentions. He then visited her mother the next day and revealed his true identity to her. She was shocked, having read of his wealth and his antics in the newspapers of Pittsburgh, but she did not immediately tell her daughter about the visit. About a week later he arranged to sit near Nesbit at a restaurant, and after the dinner he announced to her with self-important bravado, "I am not Munroe...I am Henry Kendall Thaw, of Pittsburgh!" She too recognized his name from her Pittsburgh background, but she found his behavior bewildering and bordering on comical at the time.Later, White and Nesbit's mother moved Nesbit to a boarding school in upstate New York in November 1902, where both White and Thaw visited often, with Thaw bearing gifts and praise, managing to impress both Nesbit's mother and the headmistress at the school. She was partly sent there to separate her from her recent romantic relationship with John Barrymore, who at the time was an irresponsible struggling artist who both her mother and White thought unsuitable as a potential husband, although he was a member of a prominent family and had proposed to her. Not long after their affair was cut off by the intervention, Barrymore would begin his rise to fame and fortune as a major acting star in theater and film.
While staying at the boarding school, Nesbit developed acute appendicitis in January 1903 when Thaw happened to be there for a visit. Nesbit underwent an emergency appendectomy arranged with the help of White and Thaw. While she was recuperating, Thaw suggested a European trip, convincing Nesbit and her mother that it would hasten Nesbit's recovery from the surgery. However, the trip they took a few months later proved to be anything but recuperative. Thaw's usual hectic mode of travel escalated into a non-stop itinerary, calculated to weaken Nesbit's emotional resilience, compound her physical frailty, and unnerve and exhaust her mother. As tensions mounted, mother and daughter began to argue, leading to Mrs. Nesbit's insistence on returning to the U.S. Having effectively alienated Nesbit from her mother, Thaw then took her to Paris, leaving Mrs. Nesbit in London.
In Paris, Thaw continued to press Nesbit to become his wife; she again refused. Aware of Thaw's obsession with female chastity, she could not in good conscience accept his marriage proposal without revealing to him the truth of her relationship with White. What transpired next, according to Nesbit, was a marathon session of inquisition, during which time Thaw demanded every detail of the night when Nesbit lost her virginity to White. She would later testify that White had plied her with champagne and then raped her while she was unconscious. Throughout the grueling ordeal and questioning, Nesbit was tearful and hysterical; Thaw by turns was agitated and gratified by her responses. He further aggravated the wedge between mother and daughter, condemning Mrs. Nesbit as an unfit parent. Nesbit blamed the outcome of events on her own willful defiance of her mother's cautionary advice and defended her mother as naïve and unwitting.
Thaw and Nesbit continued to travel around Europe. Thaw, as guide, took Nesbit on a tour of sites devoted to the cult of virgin martyrdom. In Domrémy, France, the birthplace of Joan of Arc, Thaw left an inscription in the visitor's book, writing "she would not have been a virgin if Stanford White had been around."
Thaw took Nesbit to Katzenstein Castle in Austria-Hungary, a forbidding, gothic structure sitting near a high mountaintop. He segregated the three servants in residence—a butler, cook and maid—in one end of the castle, from himself and Nesbit in the opposite end. Nesbit later said she was locked in her room by Thaw, whose persona took on a dimension she had never before seen. Manic and violent, he allegedly beat her with a whip and sexually assaulted her over a two-week period. After his reign of terror had been expended, he was apologetic, and incongruously, after what had just transpired, was in an upbeat mood.