Criminal - Dementia Americana

Episode Date: June 1, 2018

This episode picks up where Episode 91 left off. We suggest you listen to them in order. The early 20th century's biggest murder trial, and a particular brand of "madness." Visit thisiscriminal.com to see rare photographs from Harry Thaw's trial. Cameras were not allowed in the courtroom, but Boston Globe photographer E.E. Bond snuck in a special camera, hidden in his vest and operated with a watch chain. Thanks to our friends at the Boston Public Library for allowing us to share them. For more information, check out Paula Uruburu’s book, American Eve. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey

involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. This episode picks up from our last episode, episode 91, The It Girl.

If you haven't listened to that one yet, you may want to go back and listen to them in order. This story contains references to sexual violence and may not be appropriate for everyone. Please use discretion. For a brief time, it seemed like maybe this was going to be okay. And then, of course, he starts coming into her room at night and saying, tell me again what Stanford White did to you. Tell me. And she realized that part of the reason why he married her was because he wanted to relive this experience over and over again about why he was so obsessed with him. Harry Thaw was having Stanford White followed,

and Stanford White knew he was being followed. Each man collected incriminating materials about the other. But the truth is, both men had committed rape against a minor, punishable by a minimum sentence of 10 years. If one were to come forward to accuse the other, who would potentially incriminate himself, it was a standoff. Harry Thaw encouraged Anthony Comstock and his Society for the Suppression of Vice to look closely at Stanford White's relationships with young chorus girls. Harry claimed that he personally had approached many, many mothers and warned them to keep their daughters away from Stanford White.

It was becoming clear that his obsession with bringing down Stanford White wasn't just about protecting the virginity of young girls. We continue the story with Hofstra professor Paula Yerburu. Harry wanted to be, you know, a member of the clubs that White had built and designed and was a member of, and because he had been sort of blackballed from all of them, he blamed White, you know, for that, And New York City, Manhattan, was White's town, you know. So the second best thing he could do was to marry this woman who had such an intimate relationship with White, and then he could sort of keep feeding this obsession of his, which was so, so dark and so crazy. Because Stanford White had paid to have

Evelyn's teeth fixed to make them perfect, Harry Thaw sent her back to a dentist to undo it and make them imperfect again. He made Evelyn promise that if she ever saw Stanford White, even by coincidence in passing, that she would report it to him. He told her to call him the Beast or just the Bee. Evelyn had imagined that she and Harry would travel and she'd get to see the world, but in reality, they spent most nights at home with his family in Pittsburgh, who she described as inartistic.

One year into their marriage, Harry announced that he and Evelyn would go to Europe. On June 25, 1906, they traveled from Pittsburgh to New York, where they would spend the night before boarding a ship to cross the ocean. Harry says, oh, guess what, we're going to dinner tonight and we're going to the theater. He wanted to see a musical called Mademoiselle Champagne, which was showing at Madison Square Garden, Stanford White's Madison Square Garden. They had dinner first. Harry was behaving strangely.

He was wearing a long black overcoat. He was drinking a lot and quickly. Just as they were finishing their meal, who comes walking in but Stanford White with his son? Evelyn saw him right away, but somehow Harry did not. She tried to act completely normal and keep Harry from turning around. Stanford White and his son went outside to the restaurant's terrace, and then Evelyn realized that she might get in trouble if she didn't tell Harry.

She wrote on a piece of paper, The bee was here, but has left. Harry read the note, and then he ordered champagne, She wrote on a piece of paper, the bee was here, but has left. Harry read the note, and then he ordered champagne, left a large tip, and he and Evelyn went to Madison Square Garden. When they first get there before the show starts, Evelyn looks, and much to her relief, Stanford White is not in his usual seat because he was the designer, the creator of the garden, and so he had his own special seat, but he was not there, which she was happy about because she imagined some sort of really ugly confrontation between the two of them if it ever happened. And she really didn't want that experience. So the show starts and it was extremely hot. It was ridiculously,

unseasonably hot. And Harry was wearing this big, heavy black overcoat. And Evelyn said to him, aren't you hot? And he said, no, I'm fine. I'm fine. The show was almost over, and Stanford White's table was still empty. Suddenly, the elevator doors open in the garden, which is this beautiful rooftop theater. And suddenly, who gets out of the elevator but Stanford White? Some people in the audience applauded for him as he crossed the theater and took his seat near the stage. He was there to see a young chorus girl he had been pursuing. She was new to New York,

and he described her as looking like a little peach. Evelyn asked Harry and their friends if they could leave. So Evelyn gets up, and she and the two friends and Harry ostensibly are walking towards the elevator when she turns and sees that Harry is not with her. She's trying to see where he could possibly be and Harry was, you know, a few hundred yards away. Walked up to White and point blank shoots him from about a foot away.

Three bullets, one in the teeth, one behind his left eye, and one in the shoulder, in front of 900 people. He died instantly in the building he designed and put on the map, in the middle of a song called I Could Love a Million Girls. People thought it was part of the show. Some members of the show. Some members of the orchestra were confused and continued to play their instruments. Harry reportedly said,

I did it because he ruined my wife. And a New York fireman actually stepped forward and asked him to give up the gun, which he did, and smiling, and was taken away then to the police station in the Tenderloin area. And Evelyn says, my God, Harry, what have you done? And he says, I've saved you. And I've saved the girls, you know, the young women of New York. And Harry thought he was doing some sort of, you know,

he thought he was a knight in shining armor. The New York Tribune quoted a cab driver as saying, I always thought that fellow would be killed sooner or later, but I thought it would be a father that would do it, not a husband. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Harry Thal was arrested and held without bail. The district attorney told the New York Times, I have no hesitation in saying I never knew of a more deliberate murder. Evelyn was mostly described by the papers as just very pretty.

One paper described her as looking like a baby deer. Another said her head, quote, sat on her faultless throat as a lily on its stem, and that her mouth was made of rumpled rose petals. I don't think Evelyn ever thought that Harry had the courage or whatever term you want to use to do anything that drastic with White. I think she might have worried that there was going to be some sort of, you know, ugly scene, some sort of, you know, verbal scene, but I don't think she ever thought that he would have the nerve to shoot

White, but he did. After that night, Mademoiselle Champagne was a huge hit. Not because people wanted to watch the show, which was apparently quite bad, but because they wanted to see the scene of the crime. You had Thomas Edison rushes to get a version of the murder, the rooftop murder, into the Nickelodeons, like two weeks later, you could go to the Nickelodeon and see the reenactment of this murder in this Edison film. And then the Thaw family commissions their own film. And then you had the newspapers. There were something like 28 newspapers in New York alone.

The Herald, the Journal, the Daily News, the list of newspapers goes on. And it was front page news for two years. And of course, despite the fact that Thaw was the killer and White was the victim, the face of the murder trial was Evelyn because she was going to be a witness, a star witness, and she was, you know, she was the center of it all. Harry Thaw and his mother made her testify. Their defense strategy was unusual. The lawyers wanted to argue not guilty by reason of insanity,

but the family was adamantly against that. And so they came up with a compromise. Harry's attorney described it as the, quote, species of insanity which makes every American man believe the honor of his wife is sacred. He called it Dementia Americana. For it to work, the jury had to be able to put themselves in Harry's shoes and to be disgusted by Stanford White.

For that to happen, Evelyn had to take the stand and testify that Stanford White raped her. She didn't have a choice. Mrs. Thaw controlled her finances, put a roof over her head, and warned her that if she didn't do this, Harry would die in the electric chair. Evelyn testified for several days, speaking in excruciating detail. The district attorney, William Travers Jerome, bragged to reporters that he couldn't wait to cross-examine her, that he would, quote, tear her limb from limb and exhibit the interesting remains triumphantly. He showed the jury a photo of Evelyn on a bearskin rug, wearing a kimono. He asked why she'd accepted so much money and so many gifts from Stanford White.

He asked why she attended his notoriously wild parties, if he was such a monster. The trial testimony was printed in newspapers. It was so shocking that President Roosevelt tried to have it suppressed. He said the full disgusting particulars were preventing people from concentrating at work. Keep in mind, this is still, this is 1906, 1907,

and people are not talking about sex, much less getting on the stand and talking about riding naked on a swing and riding naked on Stanford white shoulders and photo shoots and having to wake up in this mirrored bed. So all this was just incredibly, incredibly salacious. No one had ever heard anything like this before. And the Thaw strategy was, it didn't even matter if what they said, what was said was true or not. It was just the fact that Evelyn said it to Harry,

and that made him crazy. So they called it a brainstorm. Harry's mother paid several alienists, the precursors to psychiatrists, exorbitant sums of money to explain to the jury how it was possible for Harry to be perfectly sane before and after this temporary brainstorm that compelled him to defend his wife's honor. So that was their strategy, and it worked, because amazingly, even though he shot white and cold blood in front of 900-plus people with witnesses and everything else, it was a hung jury. The district attorney couldn't believe it and vowed to have a second trial, which happened

a year later. In the course of, you know, a year between that trial and the second one where they have to go with the insanity plea, it's almost like everything broke open and suddenly it's the modern world. People are, the public are not going to be fooled by this mask of the knight in shining armor or any of that old stuff. The old Victorian morality clearly is out the window. And so it was really quite amazing. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. To be continued... Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts.

Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for?

And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. In the first trial, Harry Thaw's defense attorney had created a picture of Evelyn Nesbitt

being rescued from the predatory Stanford White by her honorable and doting husband, Harry Thaw. A story about chivalry, not murder. But by the second trial, reporters had gotten their hands on all kinds of personal details. And so the narrative wasn't so simple. It was clear at that point, because of the incredible media coverage, that it was very clear that none of the people in the center of this tragedy, neither Evelyn nor White nor Thaw, was exactly what they had been initially depicted as. about their various relationships, and particularly about Harry's behavior, his defense attorneys approached Harry's mother and said, listen, unless you want your son to die in the electric chair, you're going to have to let us go with the insanity defense,

because that was what the first lawyers wanted to do. And Mrs. Motherthaw said, absolutely not. Even though insanity, she had a brother who was institutionalized, and there was some evidence of other mental problems in the family. She did not want that coming out. So too much has come out about Harry's behavior. If you don't let us go with this defense, he will go to the electric chair. And so they went with the insanity defense, and he was acquitted by reason of insanity and sent up to Matawan to the state institution for the criminally insane in upstate New York. And that's how the second trial ended. While Harry was at Matawan, he paid people to follow Evelyn. His mother helped with this,

collecting the reports about what she did and who she saw in briefing Harry. In 1910, Evelyn got pregnant. She said the pregnancy was the result of a conjugal visit she'd had with Harry. He said that wasn't true. She wrote, I'd been through flames to save the life of the man who has now repudiated me. I'm sure that the Thaw family promised her that they would take care of her, but Mother Thaw had no love for Evelyn.

In fact, she hated the fact that her son had married so beneath him, having married this chorus girl. And so once Harry is incarcerated, he's no longer in charge of his finances, Mother Thaw is, and she put Evelyn on a very short leash. In fact, according to everything that Evelyn said, she had to keep going up to Matawan to beg Harry to beg his mother to give her even just enough money to pay for the rent

for the apartment she was living in. And so she sort of stuck it out as the devoted wife, I guess you could say, for a couple of years. And then it became clear that the whole family, that she was never going to get any money, a couple of years. And then it became clear that the whole family, that this nothing, she was never going to get any money, nor were they going to give her anything to even help her to live. So Harry, in the meantime, is stuck in the insane asylum, who's ranting and raving about that he's not insane, and he's trying to figure out a way out of this. Evelyn began to testify against Harry at his sanity hearings,

saying he was too dangerous to be let out. Harry filed for divorce. He was eventually released from Matawan, and in 1917, the New York Times reported that he'd been arrested again. This time for kidnapping

and whipping a teenage boy nearly to death. Harry Thaw had groomed the boy for almost a year, writing him letters, promising him a job. And then one night, he rented a suite in a hotel in Philadelphia and all the rooms around it to make sure that no one could hear the boy shouting for help while he was beaten and whipped.

The boy managed to escape and told his parents. Harry was sent to a Pennsylvania asylum. He was released seven years later and continued to be accused of beating and whipping showgirls until he died. After their divorce, Evelyn, with her young son, tried to go back to work. She now is looking at herself and her reputation in ruins. She's known as the girl in the red velvet swing, which she still is. She decides to try to have a career in vaudeville. She was criticized for performing.

Papers reported that she was capitalizing on her fame from the murder trials. She performed in cabarets in Greenwich Village. She walked around with a pet boa constrictor named Baby. In the 30s, at the lowest point in her life, she said that the tragedy wasn't that Stanford White died, it was that I lived. But then, if you fast forward to the point where she becomes, in 1955, she's the consultant for the film version of her life, The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing with Joan Collins. Cinemascope lays bare the most scandalous true-life love drama of the century, a story unique in the annals of crime and passion so now she's sort of again resurrected and becomes the feature in life magazine and there's pictures

of her posing with the charles dana gibson image of her so um it's a really really interesting multi-faceted story and i the legacy is, it's the first really great true crime of the certainly of the 20th century. I mean, every, every decade has its crime of the century. But this was really the first modern one in terms of the media coverage in terms of the press in terms of the what the rich and the powerful were doing behind closed doors in terms of exploitation of the young girls and the just young people working, trying to work, coming into the city from the rural areas. I mean, it really covers every aspect of American culture and illuminated all the dark corners,

which sadly still exists. Nothing has changed in terms of the currencies of power that were in play then in terms of the rich and the powerful, the people with money who can pay off people and keep their secrets. And so it's just a fascinating cultural moment. In addition to the fact that Evelyn herself was really the first, to me, she was the first modern woman. Evelyn Nesbitt spent the rest of her life in California with her son and his family. And finally, after a life of being the muse for so many other artists, she became a working artist in her own right, a sculptor.

Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr, Nadia Wilson, and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Matilda Erfolino is our intern. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com, where you can learn more about Evelyn Nesbitt and Paula Yoruburu's book, American Eve. And we've got some very rare photographs from Harry Thaw's trial there, a trial that was closed to cameras, but Boston Globe photographer E.E. Bond snuck a special camera into the courtroom. No one could see it because it was hidden in his vest and operated with a watch chain. Thanks to our friends at the Boston Public Library for allowing us to share them.

You can find all of that at thisiscriminal.com. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. Special thanks to AdCirc for providing their ad-serving platform to Radiotopia. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia. From PRX. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults.

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