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Speaker 5: Maybe you are now listening to True Murder The most
Speaker 5: shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that
Speaker 5: have written about them Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK.
Speaker 5: Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking
Speaker 5: and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with
Speaker 5: your host, journalist and author Dan Zupanski. Good evening in
Speaker 5: nineteen oh one, Evelyn Nesbitt, a chorus girl in a
Speaker 5: musical Flora Dora, dined alone with the architect Stanford White
Speaker 5: in his townhouse on twenty fourth Street in New York. Nesbit,
Speaker 5: just sixteen years old, had recently moved to the city.
Speaker 5: White was forty seven and a principal in the prominent
Speaker 5: architectural firm McKim mead and White. As the foremost architect
Speaker 5: of his day, he was a celebrity responsible for designing
Speaker 5: countless landmark buildings in Manhattan. That evening, after drinking champagne,
Speaker 5: Nesbit lost consciouness consciousness and woke to find herself naked
Speaker 5: in bed with White. Telltale spots of blood on the
Speaker 5: bed sheets told her that White had raped her. She
Speaker 5: told no one about the rape until several years later
Speaker 5: she confided in Harry Thaw, the millionaire playboy who would
Speaker 5: later become her husband. Thaw, thirsting for revenge, shot and
Speaker 5: killed White in nineteen o six before hundreds of theatergoers
Speaker 5: during a performance in Madison Square Garden, a building that
Speaker 5: White had designed. The trial was a sensation that gripped
Speaker 5: the nation. Most Americans agreed with Thaw that he had
Speaker 5: been justified in killing White, but the district attorney expected
Speaker 5: to send to the electric chair. Evelyn Nesbitt's testimony was
Speaker 5: so explicit in shocking that Theodore Roosevelt himself called on
Speaker 5: the newspapers not to print it verbatim. The murder of
Speaker 5: White cast a long shadow. Harry Thaw later attempted suicide,
Speaker 5: and Evelyn Nesbitt struggled for many years to escape an
Speaker 5: addiction to cocaine. The Girl on the Velvet Swing, a
Speaker 5: tale of glamour, excess and danger, is an immersive, fascinating
Speaker 5: look at an American America dominated by men of outsized
Speaker 5: fortunes and by the women who were their victims. The
Speaker 5: book they were featuring this evening is The Girl on
Speaker 5: the Velvet Swing, Sex, Murder and Madness at the Dawn
Speaker 5: of the twentieth Century, with my special guest, journalist and
Speaker 5: author and historian Simon bats Welcome to the program, and
Speaker 5: thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Simon bats.
Speaker 6: Hi.
Speaker 7: Dan, it's nice to be on your program and I
Speaker 7: look forward to talking with you about the book. And
Speaker 7: you've given a great introduction and praise see you of
Speaker 7: the main events.
Speaker 8: Thank you very much for this interview. Incredible book, incredible
Speaker 8: back into history and to a time that if we
Speaker 8: think some of the things that go on in today's
Speaker 8: society and media is a surprising, I think we'll find
Speaker 8: this even more surprising. Let's get right to who Stanford
Speaker 8: White was. We mentioned that he was an architect and
Speaker 8: he designed a Madison Square garden, But tell us who
Speaker 8: Stanford White was, How old was he around this time
Speaker 8: and just at the turn of the century, and who
Speaker 8: was he in real terms?
Speaker 6: He had.
Speaker 7: Served an apprentice to an architect called Richardson, who was
Speaker 7: the most famous exponent of the Romanesque style in the
Speaker 7: United States, and White grew up in New York City,
Speaker 7: and in eighteen seventy nine he entered into a partnership
Speaker 7: with two other men, Les McKim and William Rutherford Meade,
Speaker 7: and their architectural firm, McKim Mead and White ridly catered
Speaker 7: to the wealthy not just of New York City, but
Speaker 7: the wealthy classes of the United States, and they became
Speaker 7: famous for designing very elaborate, beautiful buildings designed a largely
Speaker 7: on the style of the Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance, and
Speaker 7: the Spanish Renaissance. And in eighteen ninety White designed what
Speaker 7: many considered to be his masterpiece, which is Madison Square Garden.
Speaker 7: This is the second building in New York that had
Speaker 7: the title Madison Square Garden. There have been four in total,
Speaker 7: and the second one stood at the north east corner
Speaker 7: of twenty sixth and Madison Avenue, which is right on
Speaker 7: the corner of Madison Square. And that's how it gets
Speaker 7: its name Madison Square Garden. And Wide designed Madison Square
Speaker 7: Garden for horse shows. Horses. Nobody drove a motor car
Speaker 7: in eighteen ninety and everybody went around in a horse
Speaker 7: and buggy, and so horses were ready ubiquitous in New
Speaker 7: York City, and this was designed for The building was
Speaker 7: designed for horse horse shows, and White persuaded the backers,
Speaker 7: the financial backers of the project, and this included JP Morgan.
Speaker 7: White persuaded them to build a tower on Madison Square
Speaker 7: Garden and the tower had seven apartments and White occupied
Speaker 7: rented out the top of these apartments in the top
Speaker 7: of the tower, and Madison Square Garden, by virtue of
Speaker 7: the tower was the second tallest building in New York City.
Speaker 7: That's not saying very much by our standards, because we're
Speaker 7: talking about three hundred and something feet, but it was
Speaker 7: a very distinctive landmark, which is exactly what White wanted.
Speaker 7: He wanted this to be a cultural center. And inside
Speaker 7: the building there was a theater, a restaurant, the main
Speaker 7: auditorium where the horse shows would take place, and then
Speaker 7: on the roof, on the flat roof, which was at
Speaker 7: the base of the tower, during the summer, they would
Speaker 7: have shows, usually musical comedies, for an audience of about
Speaker 7: three hundred people. And this was something you couldn't do
Speaker 7: nowadays because there would be too much noise from the
Speaker 7: street traffic and also noise from planes and helicopters and
Speaker 7: what have you going overhead. But in those days that
Speaker 7: wasn't the case, and so you could quite recently have
Speaker 7: these musical comedies, these plays being done on the rooftop
Speaker 7: of Madison Square Garden. So it was a spectacular achievement,
Speaker 7: and White became famous on account of it, and he
Speaker 7: went on to designed many other buildings in New York
Speaker 7: City and around the United States, and the firm McKim
Speaker 7: mead and White is probably the most well known architectural
Speaker 7: firm in the history of the United States because they
Speaker 7: did such beautiful So, I mean, the original, the original
Speaker 7: Pennsylvania Station, a beautiful building before he was demolished. That
Speaker 7: building was McKim mead and White. The campus at Columbia
Speaker 7: University uptown was mckimmead and White. New York University built
Speaker 7: a campus in the Bronx that they've later abandoned, but
Speaker 7: that campus also was mckimmead and White. So Stanford White
Speaker 7: was very much a celebrity in New York, a man
Speaker 7: about town, someone who knew everybody. Everybody knew him, and
Speaker 7: he was extremely prominent in the city's various affairs.
Speaker 8: You talk about his interest in his investment in various
Speaker 8: theorical theatrical productions, and also that he had friendships with
Speaker 8: various actresses and actors. And you talk about an actress
Speaker 8: named Edna Goodrich. Well, she's a singer in the Florid
Speaker 8: Dora part of the Sex Tet. And Evelyn born Christmas
Speaker 8: Day near Pittsburgh. Her dad was a lawyer, and her
Speaker 8: mother's named Florence, and she has a brother named Howard.
Speaker 8: She's now on a Broadway stage, but she had just
Speaker 8: been working in a this department store just a couple
Speaker 8: of years before that. Tell us how she comes to
Speaker 8: be in New York City and also how they come
Speaker 8: to meet her and her mother meet Stanford White.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's a fascinating story just in itself, and the
Speaker 7: show tells you a lot about New York City and
Speaker 7: about how young girls who wanted to make the reputation
Speaker 7: would come to New York. She grew up in Pittsburgh.
Speaker 7: Her father died when she was twelve years old. The
Speaker 7: family was plunged into poverty and moved first to Philadelphia
Speaker 7: and then to New York City around nineteen hundred. I
Speaker 7: think it was December nineteen one hundred that they've moved
Speaker 7: to Philadelphia, and then in nineteen oh one they moved
Speaker 7: to New York. And I think another thing. I mean,
Speaker 7: when I'm a historian, always tries to project himself or
Speaker 7: herself back into the past.
Speaker 6: And when you do that, you.
Speaker 7: Realize that the theater was extremely important for New York City.
Speaker 7: I mean, there were theater houses everywhere. I mean, and
Speaker 7: this makes a lot of sense because when you think
Speaker 7: about it, what other forms of entertainment were there. There
Speaker 7: was no television, obviously, there was no internet, there was
Speaker 7: no radio, there was no cinema. The theatre was the
Speaker 7: main entertainment of virtually everybody, and as a consequence, it
Speaker 7: played over an outside role in New York City. And
Speaker 7: so Evelyn comes with her mother and a younger brother
Speaker 7: to New York. She's very attractive. She's only sixteen years old,
Speaker 7: fifteen when she first arrives in the city, but in
Speaker 7: nineteen oh one, she's sixteen years old. She's very attractive,
Speaker 7: as I said, and her mother introduces her as an
Speaker 7: artist's model, and she supports the family through the fee
Speaker 7: that she receives as a model.
Speaker 6: And then.
Speaker 7: Her photograph starts appearing in magazines simply as a model.
Speaker 7: She's modeling clothes and her photograph, without even really identifying her,
Speaker 7: appears in the magazines and people begin to take notice
Speaker 7: because of her looks, and a theatrical agent contacts the
Speaker 7: family and gets her a place as a chorus girl
Speaker 7: in the production of Flora Dora, which was a musical
Speaker 7: comedy playing at the Casino Theater, and Florida was famous
Speaker 7: for the Sextet, as you said, this group of six
Speaker 7: women singers and dancers, and Evelyn Nesbitt never made it
Speaker 7: to that elite group, but she was always in the
Speaker 7: chorus line. And Stanford White, who was forty seven years old,
Speaker 7: he was married, he had a son. His wife lived
Speaker 7: out on Long Island, and Stanford White kept a house
Speaker 7: also in New York City. But White saw her photograph
Speaker 7: and he knew people in the theatrical world. He had
Speaker 7: designed the Players Club, which is a club for actors
Speaker 7: and producers and theater folk on Gramercy Park, and White
Speaker 7: got an introduction through one of the Floradora singers to
Speaker 7: Evelyn Nesbit, who was then sixteen years old, and they
Speaker 7: first met in White's townhouse one of White's apartments on
Speaker 7: twenty five fourth Street, and that they had luncheon with
Speaker 7: the other woman, Edna Goodrich that you mentioned, and also
Speaker 7: one of White's friends was their Reginald Ronalds, and the
Speaker 7: four of them had lunch and then and then Ronalds
Speaker 7: went away and White had swing on the fourth floor
Speaker 7: of the building, a velvet swing. And we know all
Speaker 7: this because Evelyn wrote writes about it later in a
Speaker 7: autobiography and also testifies.
Speaker 6: In court about the swing.
Speaker 7: And it had a padded velvet seat, it had velvet
Speaker 7: cords coming down from the seething and in front of
Speaker 7: the swing, on a separate rope was a Japanese screen,
Speaker 7: a paper screen, and they spent the afternoon playing on
Speaker 7: this swing, and two women would get on one each
Speaker 7: woman in turn would get on the swing and White
Speaker 7: would push them and they would they would split the
Speaker 7: paper screen. So that was their first meeting, the first introduction,
Speaker 7: and that was sometime around the summer fall of nineteen
Speaker 7: oh one.
Speaker 8: You talk about that after this meeting and she was
Speaker 8: elated to be involved with this and rubbing elbows with
Speaker 8: celebrities and people that she admired. But you say she
Speaker 8: was surprised because she really didn't get any real attention
Speaker 8: from Stanford, but more so, she got attention from this ronalds.
Speaker 8: So to her surprise, what did Stanford do and contact
Speaker 8: her about?
Speaker 7: Well, he after this first meeting, he got in touch
Speaker 7: with Evelyn's mother, introduced himself, and Evelyn's mother was bowled
Speaker 7: over by this gentleman, this very prominent New Yorker, and
Speaker 7: came back to report to her daughter that this was
Speaker 7: a fabulous man and he took concern for her, for Evelyn,
Speaker 7: and and then one day and so they gradually got
Speaker 7: to know each other, the mother, the daughter, the architect,
Speaker 7: and Florence has but the mother still had friends back
Speaker 7: in Pittsburgh. And one day so mentioned to Stanford White
Speaker 7: that she wanted to go by to Pittsburgh for a visit,
Speaker 7: and he offered to pay her train fare and give
Speaker 7: her some money for expenses. And then she said, well,
Speaker 7: but who's going to look after my daughter? My sixteen
Speaker 7: year old daughter, very young, and and Stanford White stepped
Speaker 7: in and said, don't worry, I'll look after her. I'll
Speaker 7: make sure she doesn't get into trouble.
Speaker 6: And that's that's that's this.
Speaker 7: And then during that time when Evelyn's mother was away.
Speaker 7: Stanford White visits Evelyn every day before she goes to
Speaker 7: the theater for her performance, and one day he asks
Speaker 7: her if she wants to have her photographs taken by
Speaker 7: a well known photographer called Rudolph Eckermeier, and Evelyn agrees,
Speaker 7: and so they spend the day in the studio, and
Speaker 7: these photographs have survived and they're quite prominent on the internet.
Speaker 7: They show Evelyn reclining on a polar bear rug and
Speaker 7: she's dressed in a kimono. And while the photographs, just
Speaker 7: after the photographs the session has ended, Stamford White says
Speaker 7: that he's having a party the next night at his
Speaker 7: apartment on twenty fourth Street, and he asks Evelyn if
Speaker 7: she'd like to come, and she says she'd love to.
Speaker 7: She'd rather much rather do that than spend her her
Speaker 7: evening alone or her night alone in the apartment that
Speaker 7: she had been with her mother, And so she shows up.
Speaker 7: A floridor ends about nine o'clock and Evelyn comes down
Speaker 7: at twenty fourth Street and shows up and there's nobody
Speaker 7: there except Stamp and she's surprised, and Stanford White says,
Speaker 7: don't worry about it. My friends just didn't show up,
Speaker 7: and let's have dinner anyway. And so they have dinner,
Speaker 7: just the two of them, and then Stanford White asks
Speaker 7: Evelyn if she wants to go upstairs to see some
Speaker 7: of the paintings that he collected what he was in Europe,
Speaker 7: and that's when the famous event occurs, and Stanford White
Speaker 7: takes her into a small backroom where there's a bed
Speaker 7: and gives her this champagne. She loses consciousness almost immediately.
Speaker 7: She feels dizzy, and when she wakes up, she finds
Speaker 7: herself naked. Stanford White is lying next to her naked also,
Speaker 7: and she realizes that she's been raped while she was
Speaker 7: drugged unconscious. It's a shocking story, a shocking episode. And
Speaker 7: we know all about this. None of this is made up,
Speaker 7: none of this is imagined. But we know all about
Speaker 7: this because then Evelyn testifies her about this in court,
Speaker 7: and her testimony was reproduced verbatim by the newspapers. It
Speaker 7: was quite extraordinary because any historian who does work in
Speaker 7: that period has fourteen daily newspapers being published in New
Speaker 7: York City, fourteen alone in the city, I mean, and
Speaker 7: there are hundreds thousands of other newspapers around the country, so,
Speaker 7: and all of these newspapers were.
Speaker 6: Competing with each other.
Speaker 7: So this case, when it came to trial, got enormous coverage.
Speaker 7: The papers would literally devote three or four pages of
Speaker 7: small type to the case, and they reprinted all the
Speaker 7: testimony of verbatim, so which was very fortunate for me.
Speaker 6: Of course, yes, of.
Speaker 8: Course on us. You also say, you also include what
Speaker 8: exactly he said? Once she got up, she was screaming,
Speaker 8: and so what did he say? And she confronted him
Speaker 8: about it? So what did he have to say about it?
Speaker 7: Well, again, when people read the conversation they have in
Speaker 7: the book, they ask the question, did you make this up?
Speaker 6: And I say no.
Speaker 7: And the reason I can faithfully give you the conversation
Speaker 7: that they had is because she repeats it in the courtroom,
Speaker 7: and she says in the courtroom, and it's reproduced in
Speaker 7: the newspapers. And this testimony was so shocking that Theodore Roosevelt,
Speaker 7: the President of the United States, asked his cabinet members,
Speaker 7: what can we do about this shocking stuff that's being
Speaker 7: printed in the newspapers? Because this is nineteen hundred, right,
Speaker 7: I mean, this kind of stuff didn't appear in the newspapers.
Speaker 7: It was regarded as something that should not be printed.
Speaker 7: And so anyway, Stanford White, Evelyn wakes up, she finds
Speaker 7: out that she's been raped, and she is asking Stanford
Speaker 7: White about this. He kind of reassures her and says, no,
Speaker 7: this sort of thing. And remember Evelyn is only sixteen
Speaker 7: years old, and he reassures her, and she tells her
Speaker 7: this is the sort of thing that happens all the time.
Speaker 7: Don't worry about it. But whatever you do, don't tell anyone,
Speaker 7: and don't tell your mother.
Speaker 6: And I think what.
Speaker 7: Was when you think about when someone is sixteen, they
Speaker 7: can be very naive, unsuspecting, and also very willing to
Speaker 7: accept the authority of adults. And my interpretation of this
Speaker 7: is that's exactly what happened. I mean, And we simply
Speaker 7: have to think about what the revelations of twenty seventeen
Speaker 7: and twenty eighteen. You know, so many women, even in
Speaker 7: the present day, didn't confide to their close friends, to
Speaker 7: the relatives that they had been raped by Bill Cosby.
Speaker 7: And that's so it would have been the taboo about
Speaker 7: discussing this would have been stronger, would have been even
Speaker 7: more potent back in nineteen hundred when Evelyn Nesbit was
Speaker 7: raped by Stanford White. So it remained very much a
Speaker 7: secret until she meets this man, Harry Thor, who later
Speaker 7: becomes her husband. And that's when she first tells someone
Speaker 7: that this event has happened.
Speaker 8: Before. That happens before she meets Harry saw. You talk
Speaker 8: about the friendship, what does the friendship look like after this?
Speaker 8: And it doesn't change.
Speaker 7: And I think for a lot of people, that's something
Speaker 7: that people can't understand even nowadays, because what happened was
Speaker 7: that Evelyn and Stanford White continued to see each other socially,
Speaker 7: and she admitted in court that she would go to
Speaker 7: his apartment alone just being with him. She accepted money
Speaker 7: from him. She would send her checks every week of
Speaker 7: about twenty five dollars, which was quite a lot of
Speaker 7: money in those days. And so the relationship, whatever the
Speaker 7: relationship was after the rape, the relationship continued for approximately
Speaker 7: a year. They knew each other, continued seeing each other.
Speaker 7: I have no idea, and nobody can know whether or
Speaker 7: not it was a sexual relationship or any kind of
Speaker 7: intimacy happened between them, or if it was purely platonic.
Speaker 7: There's no way to know that, but we do know
Speaker 7: that they continued to be socially together, and also we
Speaker 7: know that White continued to send her money for about
Speaker 7: a year after this occurred.
Speaker 8: You also talk about an event where one day she
Speaker 8: notices a small black book that she'd never seen before.
Speaker 8: What does she find in that? What does she conclude
Speaker 8: from that? Eating reading that black.
Speaker 7: Yes, she finds she finds a list of He finds
Speaker 7: lists of names of women that she whose names she recognizes,
Speaker 7: who are or other actresses in various plays in New York.
Speaker 7: And one of the names was hers. And she saw
Speaker 7: that White had written in her birthday her birthday next
Speaker 7: to her name, and this was the case for several
Speaker 7: other of the actresses there. And I think that she
Speaker 7: realized when she saw this that White was carrying on
Speaker 7: the same kind of relationship with her that he had
Speaker 7: with other women. And it's very it's it's there's not
Speaker 7: many other sources because you've got to remember that this
Speaker 7: was the time when all of this was taboo. Any
Speaker 7: kind of mentional discussion of sex was taboo. It never
Speaker 7: occurred in the press or anything unless there was some
Speaker 7: kind of sensational trial. And the only other reference I've
Speaker 7: I've come across to White's behavior was in an autobiography
Speaker 7: by Diamond Jim Brady, who was a well known banker
Speaker 7: and financier, another man about town. He wrote his autobiography,
Speaker 7: and he mentioned that White would have parties where there
Speaker 7: would be young girls there. And there was actually one
Speaker 7: other reference, which is a famous case, which was in
Speaker 7: eighteen ninety five, the New York World published a long
Speaker 7: article about a dinner party that White and many other men,
Speaker 7: about twenty men had held. And it was this one
Speaker 7: of these lavish dinners with lots of champagne, and at midnight,
Speaker 7: the waiters brought in this enormous pie, laid it on
Speaker 7: the table, and in the pie there was this young
Speaker 7: girl who was about sixteen, and she was virtually naked.
Speaker 7: And the New York World thought this was a scandalous
Speaker 7: occurrence and said so and condemned the men for doing
Speaker 7: this kind of thing and for exploiting young girls. And
Speaker 7: I think the other thing that interested me about this
Speaker 7: time was that this any kind of The New York
Speaker 7: State legislature in eighteen ninety five had raised the age
Speaker 7: of consent, which amazingly enough, had been ten ten years old,
Speaker 7: raised the age of consent to eighteen, and it also
Speaker 7: very much expanded the penalty for rape, so that rape
Speaker 7: in eighteen ninety five was a twenty year prison sentence.
Speaker 7: And so Stamford White, by doing what he did, was
Speaker 7: running a great risk. But I think he calculated that
Speaker 7: the risk was not so great because the evel In Nesbit,
Speaker 7: for example, was very obscure, penniless, had no resources. She
Speaker 7: was not a member of high society. And I've never
Speaker 7: come across any evidence that White ever approached or tried
Speaker 7: to molest anybody who belonged to the social elite, the
Speaker 7: economic elite of New York society. Those people weren't appropriate
Speaker 7: victims for White. It was only the young chorus girls
Speaker 7: who had no resources, and even in Nesbitt was one
Speaker 7: of those. So I can't remember if I answered your
Speaker 7: question now, I think I might have gone off on
Speaker 7: a little bit of a tangent. But that's some of
Speaker 7: the background to this case.
Speaker 8: Now, you talk about the Flora Dora being specially successful,
Speaker 8: and a lot of theater producers wanted to emulate that,
Speaker 8: But in terms of what it meant for Evelyn Nesbit.
Speaker 8: When that show ended, what happened with her career?
Speaker 7: Yes, well, that's also an interesting question, and basically didn't
Speaker 7: go very fast. She got a role I think in
Speaker 7: she auditioned for a comedy called them Silver Slipper I
Speaker 7: think think it was. And she got a role in
Speaker 7: as a gypsy girl in one other production that lasted
Speaker 7: for about four months, and then she got her last
Speaker 7: role was in a plague called Tommy Rott, but that
Speaker 7: only played for about thirty performances. Again, it's very difficult
Speaker 7: to say with any certainty when you're one hundred and
Speaker 7: twenty years removed from the events. But my conclusion is
Speaker 7: that Evelyn was probably not a good singer. She probably
Speaker 7: wasn't a good dancer, She didn't have Her theatrical career
Speaker 7: never took off.
Speaker 3: And.
Speaker 7: It kind of fizzled out. But she was only seventeen,
Speaker 7: you know, so she was very very young. But there
Speaker 7: were other things that kind of steered her away from
Speaker 7: the theater world, and one of them was meeting John Barrymore.
Speaker 7: He was then twenty years old and the grandfather of
Speaker 7: Drew Barrymore, and the Barrymore family.
Speaker 6: Is royalty in the acting world.
Speaker 7: They've had generation after generation of famous actors, and John
Speaker 7: Barrymore when he was twenty seemed to have no future whatsoever,
Speaker 7: had no real interest in being an actor. And now
Speaker 7: we know him, of course as one of the most
Speaker 7: famous actors in the twentieth century. But when he was
Speaker 7: twenty years old, he was kind of regarded as that
Speaker 7: they're do well, someone who wasn't going to make it.
Speaker 7: But he had a brief fling with Evelyn nez Bit
Speaker 7: when Evelyn was seventeen and when Barrymore was twenty, and
Speaker 7: then she met a young man called Harry Thor who
Speaker 7: was thirty one years old.
Speaker 6: And Thor was.
Speaker 7: The eldest son of a multi millionaire who had made
Speaker 7: his fortune as a vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad
Speaker 7: and had bought thousands of acres of land in western
Speaker 7: Pennsylvania that turned out to have cold, and so this
Speaker 7: land and became enormously lucrative, and so Harry Thor, the
Speaker 7: thirty one year old he was worth his family was
Speaker 7: worth probably at least forty million dollars. And Thor himself
Speaker 7: was getting an allowance every year of eighty thousand dollars,
Speaker 7: which is the equivalent in our money of about a
Speaker 7: million dollars. So, so Harry and Evelin take up together
Speaker 7: and they they go to Europe a couple of times,
Speaker 7: first in nineteen oh three and then the next year
Speaker 7: in nineteen oh four. So Eveling really is kind of
Speaker 7: moving away from her stage career. She doesn't have many
Speaker 7: opportunities in that direction.
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Speaker 8: Now, what is her benefactor at that same time, because
Speaker 8: we've got to keep in mind that he's a benefactor
Speaker 8: to her brother, Harry, putting him in a military academy
Speaker 8: and rush to the brother and putting him up in
Speaker 8: an apartment. What exactly does he have to say about
Speaker 8: the relationship with Harry Thought? What does he have to
Speaker 8: say about Harry Well?
Speaker 7: Why it takes a kind of paternal attitude towards Evelyn,
Speaker 7: and he doesn't think it's a good idea for her
Speaker 7: to have any kind of relationship. He's kind of protective.
Speaker 7: Harry Thought was regarded as really a very eccentric character.
Speaker 7: I mean someone the story is about him. He had
Speaker 7: unlimited amounts of money and he.
Speaker 6: Would do things.
Speaker 7: For example, if he's in a restaurant and the weight
Speaker 7: it and serve him correctly, then he would do outrageous
Speaker 7: things like pull the tablecloth and all the dishes would
Speaker 7: come crashing to the floor and it cause a huge commotion.
Speaker 7: But it for Harry, it didn't matter because he would
Speaker 7: just pay whatever the damage was, hand over three thousand
Speaker 7: or four thousand dollars and you know, go somewhere else.
Speaker 7: But this kind of reputation he had, the reputation he
Speaker 7: had for drug use, these were all kind of gossip rumors,
Speaker 7: a reputation he had for abusing young girls. There was
Speaker 7: another thing that was kind of floating in the air.
Speaker 7: Harry had never been able to get into the clubs.
Speaker 7: And the clubs in those days in New York were very,
Speaker 7: very important. They were kind of social. That's where the
Speaker 7: social elite mingled, clubs like the Metropolitan Club, the Union Club,
Speaker 7: the Knickerbocker Club, and Harry Thor could never get into them.
Speaker 7: And he always believed that the reason why he was
Speaker 7: excluded was because he was blackballed by Stanford White. And
Speaker 7: so that's another part of the background going on here.
Speaker 7: The other thing to remember, of course, is that New
Speaker 7: York was a much more place than.
Speaker 6: It is nowadays.
Speaker 7: When I go out around New York, I almost never
Speaker 7: meet someone by that I know by chance, because it's
Speaker 7: such a huge place and and it's very rare that
Speaker 7: I bump into someone in the street that I know.
Speaker 7: But in those days, you've got to think about it.
Speaker 7: If you were middle class or upper class, you really
Speaker 7: wouldn't go south of fourteenth Street unless you had a
Speaker 7: job on Wall Street. You wouldn't go north of fortieth
Speaker 7: Street because there was really nothing north of fortieth Street
Speaker 7: except Central Park. And you certainly wouldn't go out to
Speaker 7: the west side or the east side because those were
Speaker 7: very dangerous areas. Those were where the docks were a
Speaker 7: tinor and population. The gangs hung out on the docks.
Speaker 7: So the area that everybody inhabited was a very kind
Speaker 7: of small area right in the center of town. So
Speaker 7: Harry Thor and Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit would bump
Speaker 7: into each other quite frequently. And I guess I could
Speaker 7: talk now about what happened in Madison Square Garden unless
Speaker 7: you have any other questions about what happened before that
Speaker 7: meeting in the garden. Should we go after the Okay, okay,
Speaker 7: let's discuss that. Yeah, okay, So, so the three of
Speaker 7: them are always bumping into each other, and one evening,
Speaker 7: Harry and Evelyn go to the theater and they go
Speaker 7: to Madison Square Garden and there's a comedy, a musical
Speaker 7: comedy called Mademoiselle Champagne playing and it's the opening night
Speaker 7: in twenty fifth of June, and they arrive a little late.
Speaker 7: They take their places, but the comedy is not so good,
Speaker 7: and Evelyn and Harry decide they want to leave early.
Speaker 6: They're going to leave early because they're rather bored by
Speaker 6: the show.
Speaker 7: And Evelyn walks towards the elevator and looks behind up
Speaker 7: for her husband. Well, actually, what I did omitted to
Speaker 7: mention that Evelyn and Harry had been married in nineteen
Speaker 7: oh five. All right, that's important part of it. And
Speaker 7: Evelyn looks behind to see where her husband is, and
Speaker 7: she sees him at the front of the field, and
Speaker 7: she sees at the same moment, she sees Stanford White
Speaker 7: sitting in the front row with his elbow on the table,
Speaker 7: looking towards the stage, and at exactly the same moment,
Speaker 7: she sees Harry standing in front of Stanford White with
Speaker 7: a gun in his hand. Stanford White sees Harry starts
Speaker 7: to get up out of his chair, but Harry fires
Speaker 7: the first shot, then a second shot, then a third shot,
Speaker 7: and had very good aid. He was firing only from
Speaker 7: a few feet away, and Stamford White dies immediately, and
Speaker 7: people around think that this is part of the play.
Speaker 7: But it's only when they see blood coming out of
Speaker 7: White's body, trickling out onto the floor that they realize
Speaker 7: it's for real. The cora's girl stops singing, they know
Speaker 7: that it's for real. The orchestra stops playing because they
Speaker 7: know it's for real. And Harry what he does is
Speaker 7: he holds the gun up in his hand, breaks the gun,
Speaker 7: and then the fireman on duty takes him and they
Speaker 7: walk back towards the back of the theater and he's
Speaker 7: put in the custody of a police sergeant who was
Speaker 7: in the theater.
Speaker 6: And that's the murder.
Speaker 7: And you've got to think of it as a sensation,
Speaker 7: which it was. It just played on and on and
Speaker 7: on because here is Stanford White, this very well known
Speaker 7: New Yorker. Here is Harry Thor, also well known millionaire
Speaker 7: young man. And here is Evelyn Nesbitt, this chorus girl
Speaker 7: who's married the millionaire. So it has all the ingredients
Speaker 7: of a sensation and plus it of course, it happens
Speaker 7: in front of hundreds of witnesses in theater in Madison
Speaker 7: Square cut in the same building that Stanford White designed.
Speaker 7: You couldn't make this stuff up. And so Harry is
Speaker 7: quick taken into custody and he spends that night in
Speaker 7: a cell in the thirtieth Street Police station.
Speaker 6: And so that's the next that's the first stage of
Speaker 6: the book.
Speaker 7: But it doesn't end there, of course, by any means.
Speaker 7: It keeps going and keeps going and keeps going. And
Speaker 7: I was kind of amazed when I studied doing the
Speaker 7: research because I never realized that the second half of
Speaker 7: this drama could be as complicated and as dramatic as
Speaker 7: it turned out to be. So that's the next stage
Speaker 7: that we can talk about.
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Speaker 8: we talked about Harry Thor shooting Stanford White in public
Speaker 8: no resistance to the arrest. What does he think right
Speaker 8: away about his chances are being convicted strangely enough, and
Speaker 8: then what is the ensuing public's take on what has happened?
Speaker 6: An excellent question.
Speaker 7: It's already right at the center of the legal defense
Speaker 7: that now Thor undertakes, first of.
Speaker 6: All, his lawyer, the first lawyer that he hires, gives
Speaker 6: him the.
Speaker 7: Advice as to go before what was known as a
Speaker 7: Commission on Lunacy. And this would this would be three
Speaker 7: experts and they could determine whether or not Harry Thor
Speaker 7: was sane or insane. And this would be a good
Speaker 7: strategy because it would avoid a trial in which the
Speaker 7: jury might decide to give you the death penalty, decide
Speaker 7: you're guilty. I mean, obviously he is. He committed the murder.
Speaker 7: There's no doubt about that. I mean, there one hundreds
Speaker 7: of witnesses and nobody denies that. And then the Commission
Speaker 7: in lunacy would say that Thor was insane, he would
Speaker 7: spend a few years in the asylum, and then presumably
Speaker 7: he'd be released once the commotion had died down. But
Speaker 7: Harry Thor tells his lawyer, No, there is just no
Speaker 7: way I am going to accept that in any case.
Speaker 7: What I'm going to do is I'm going to argue
Speaker 7: a defense that I was justified in killing White. Here
Speaker 7: is someone who raped a young girl sixteen years old,
Speaker 7: was a pedophile and a rapist. He did this to
Speaker 7: many other victims in New York. He did it with
Speaker 7: a claque of well known men. And I've done the
Speaker 7: world of great service by getting rid of Stanford White.
Speaker 7: That was Harry Thaw's attitude towards the lawyer. And so
Speaker 7: they go to trial in nineteen oh seven, I think
Speaker 7: it was February nineteen oh seven, so it's about eight
Speaker 7: months after the murder happened.
Speaker 6: And that is the claim that.
Speaker 7: Thor's lawyers present. They say, look, he killed someone who
Speaker 7: was a rapistness and the authorities knew about White's behavior,
Speaker 7: but they did nothing. All right, who is going to
Speaker 7: get rid of White? This this rapistm pedophile. But here's
Speaker 7: here's the key thing. So the justification depends upon the
Speaker 7: rape being brought out in court. But who's going to
Speaker 7: be the witness. The only witness is Evelyn Nesbitt, and
Speaker 7: she's the main witness. And so she comes in and
Speaker 7: she testify, and she describes in great detail how White
Speaker 7: lured her to the building on a false pretense, then
Speaker 7: drugged her, then raped her. And she then describes to
Speaker 7: the court all of the details about the conversations between
Speaker 7: her and White, about all these different details that were
Speaker 7: so important to the case. But the problem is that
Speaker 7: everything depends upon her testimony.
Speaker 6: There's no corroboration.
Speaker 7: Obviously, she's only twenty one years old, and she's facing
Speaker 7: a district attorney, Travis Jerome, who has enormous experience, very
Speaker 7: very clever, very smart, very cunning, and wants to get
Speaker 7: Harry Thor into the electric chair and give him the
Speaker 7: death penalty. And this and the seriousness of this is
Speaker 7: quite clear. I mean, Thor faced the death penalty and
Speaker 7: the DA was intent on getting him into the electric chair.
Speaker 7: So so Evelyn gives her testimony, the district attorney tries
Speaker 7: to to destroy her destiny, tries to show that she's
Speaker 7: actually not telling the truth. And we can go into
Speaker 7: that in detail if we have time. But basically, the
Speaker 7: jury in the first trial, it's a hung jury.
Speaker 6: They can't make up their minds.
Speaker 7: They debate. Some people want to have convict him on
Speaker 7: the murder church. Other people believe that Thor in fact
Speaker 7: is insane and doesn't deserve the death penalty. Most all
Speaker 7: of the jurors did believe Evelyn Nesbitt and thought she
Speaker 7: was a very good witness. But it's a hung jury.
Speaker 7: And now the district's attorney decides that he's going to
Speaker 7: put Harry Thor on trial the second time. So it
Speaker 7: goes to trial in nineteen o eight. And in the
Speaker 7: second trial what happens is the lawyer and it's a
Speaker 7: different lawyer, because Thor would churn through all the lawyers
Speaker 7: very very quickly, because inevitably they kind of they disappointed him.
Speaker 7: But the second lawyer then says, look, we don't have
Speaker 7: much chance with this justifiable homicide business, and we have
Speaker 7: much better chance with insanity. And the family, the Thor
Speaker 7: family agree, and so what happens now is a whole
Speaker 7: stream of witnesses come onto the witness stand and testify
Speaker 7: as to all the eccentric things that Harry Thor did
Speaker 7: right up from the very time when he was a
Speaker 7: very young infant up to the present day. And again
Speaker 7: that's an amazing thing for a historian, because now you
Speaker 7: have all this detail about Harry Thor's life, which would
Speaker 7: have not it wouldn't have been possible for me to
Speaker 7: discover that unless they all these witnesses we've come forward
Speaker 7: and described the colleges that he went to, the school life,
Speaker 7: he had, what he was like as a young infant
Speaker 7: and so on and so forth. So we're at the
Speaker 7: second trial.
Speaker 6: Again.
Speaker 7: The jury goes out to delay. They've heard all the testimony.
Speaker 7: Evelyn did testify a second time, but her testimony didn't
Speaker 7: have the same impact.
Speaker 6: And the jury deliberates for about two.
Speaker 7: Or three days and then they come back with the
Speaker 7: verdict not guilty by reason of insanity. And so the
Speaker 7: defense has worked, and Harry Thor is now on his
Speaker 7: way to the insane asylum, which was up in Mattawan.
Speaker 7: It's the Mattawan State Asylum in upstate New York. So
Speaker 7: you might say he was very lucky. His strategy worked.
Speaker 7: He got to the asylum, he didn't get into the
Speaker 7: electric chair. His defense that he paid a lot of
Speaker 7: money for worked for him, and here he is. But
Speaker 7: he's very dissatisfied. He because he thinks that he did
Speaker 7: the world of great service. And he's now in the asylum.
Speaker 7: And it's a criminal asylum, all right. It's the Mattawuan
Speaker 7: State Asylum for the criminal insane. So all around him
Speaker 7: are these murderers, these rapists, these astnists. Anyone who did
Speaker 7: a crime and has been judged to be insane is
Speaker 7: now in Madawan. State asylum. So it's actually a very
Speaker 7: uncomfortable experience for Harry Thorn. He wants to get out
Speaker 7: of there as quickly as he can.
Speaker 8: You talk about how even though he has this incredible
Speaker 8: defense team and he gets the result that he wanted,
Speaker 8: which again it was disconcerting to the state itself. Yeah,
Speaker 8: that the mother exerted influence over the head of the asylum.
Speaker 8: But first they thought that they were going to be
Speaker 8: he was going to be sent to a private sanatorium.
Speaker 8: So then when they realized he was going to the
Speaker 8: state mental hospital with all these super criminals, what does
Speaker 8: his mother try to do? This is one of the
Speaker 8: more fascinating aspects of this story. What is Mary Thaw's
Speaker 8: mother try to do?
Speaker 7: In reponse, again, you've asked a very good question. Remember
Speaker 7: she has forty at least forty million dollars at her disposal, right,
Speaker 7: and so she tries, I mean, they try many many
Speaker 7: different ways to get Harry, and Harry is the apple
Speaker 7: of her eye. I mean, you know, Harry can do
Speaker 7: her wrong in her in her view, and so she
Speaker 7: tries everything she can to get him out of the asylum.
Speaker 7: And he also wants to get out of the asylum.
Speaker 7: He's he regards it as great injustice that he's ever
Speaker 7: been sent there in the first place. And so the
Speaker 7: main strategy they.
Speaker 6: Have is to go back into court and argue.
Speaker 7: Habeas corpus and petition the courts for habeas corpus a
Speaker 7: habeas corpus hearing, And what that means is that the authority,
Speaker 7: the superintendent of the asylum, has to go to court
Speaker 7: and to justify keeping Harry Thor there.
Speaker 6: And if the lawyers for Thor can.
Speaker 7: Successfully petition for a hearing, which they are a able
Speaker 7: to do, right, they're able to get the court to say, yes,
Speaker 7: we'll have the hearing, and the superintendent has to show
Speaker 7: up and show why he's keeping thought under restriction. And
Speaker 7: this goes on for quite a while, and it's successive hearings,
Speaker 7: and there's great rumblings in the state legislature that this
Speaker 7: is just ludicrous and is tying up the courts and
Speaker 7: is wasting everybody's time. But inevitably, these petitions, these court hearings,
Speaker 7: they no judge ever gives Harry Thor his freedom and
Speaker 7: they just simply send him back to the asylum. And
Speaker 7: it's the superintendent of the asylum and the medical staff
Speaker 7: on the asylum who come into court and give all
Speaker 7: the reasons why Harry thought should not be released. And
Speaker 7: so this is kind of like the Thor family beating
Speaker 7: their head against a wall and nothing is happening. So
Speaker 7: what Mary Thor, the mother does is then try to
Speaker 7: get rid to get the superintendent of the asylum fired
Speaker 7: from his job, with the expectation that there'll be a
Speaker 7: new superintendent who will be less determined to keep Harry
Speaker 7: in the asylum. So the amazing thing is she then
Speaker 7: pays somebody to admit to do a crime. It was
Speaker 7: an active arson, and this person then goes into court
Speaker 7: and acts like he's insane and he's committed to the
Speaker 7: state asylum, the same asylum in which Harry Thori is
Speaker 7: being kept. He's perfectly sane, and he starts reporting all
Speaker 7: these incidences of abuse and violence that the asylum attendants
Speaker 7: are inflicting on the inmates, and all of this then
Speaker 7: gets into the newspapers and eventually that superintendent, whose name
Speaker 7: is Robert Lamb, he is forced to resign from his
Speaker 7: position and a new asylum superintendent is brought in, and
Speaker 7: this new superintendent, it comes to the point where whether
Speaker 7: the Thor family offer him twenty five thousand dollars to
Speaker 7: release Harry Thor.
Speaker 6: And this could be.
Speaker 7: Done quite easily by something called a certificate of recovery.
Speaker 7: All the superintendent has to do is sign this certificate
Speaker 7: and Thor would have been released. But this scheme to
Speaker 7: bribe the superintendent looks like it's on its way, it's
Speaker 7: going ahead, but in fact it's publicly revealed. And this
Speaker 7: is the only point in the book in which I
Speaker 7: don't quite know how this happened. There isn't the information
Speaker 7: in the newspapers to tell me how the scheme became public,
Speaker 7: the scheme to bribe the superintendent, But it did become public.
Speaker 7: As soon as it became public, there were then trials.
Speaker 6: One of the.
Speaker 7: Parties, the intermediary, ended up in Sing Sing prison, and
Speaker 7: it was all exposed. And so for Harry Thor, now
Speaker 7: the question we can't look. I can't spend the rest
Speaker 7: of my life in this asylum. How am I going
Speaker 7: to get out? And he has always wanted to get
Speaker 7: out in a legal way because he doesn't want to
Speaker 7: live the life of a fugitive. He wants to be
Speaker 7: able to go back to Manhattan and live the high life.
Speaker 7: So and I always ask my students for what would
Speaker 7: you do? And the only obvious thing to do now
Speaker 7: is to escape. Can't get out legally, he can't bribe
Speaker 7: the superintendent.
Speaker 6: The only fctor too is to escape.
Speaker 7: And so in nineteen thirteen, the milk delivery is being
Speaker 7: made early in the morning, seven point thirty and the cart,
Speaker 7: the milk cart comes in the back gate of the asylum,
Speaker 7: and just as it passes through the gate, Harry Thor
Speaker 7: slips out and there's a black limousine waiting for him
Speaker 7: at the bottom of the hill, and Harry Thor sprints
Speaker 7: across the grass, jumps into the limousine and it roars off,
Speaker 7: and Harry has escaped from the asylum. And the limousine
Speaker 7: now goes up to Canada, and Thor gets into Canada.
Speaker 8: Now this is on the advice of his attorneys, and
Speaker 8: he crosses from Romard into Canada. Like you say, what
Speaker 8: is Evelyn's reaction and what is the media reaction to
Speaker 8: this occurring him escaping.
Speaker 7: Evelyn's reaction is horror because the relationship doing Evelyn and
Speaker 7: Harry has really deteriorated, and it deteriorated very quickly, after
Speaker 7: he was in the asylum for different reasons. First of all,
Speaker 7: because he wanted her to move to Mattawan, and she
Speaker 7: wasn't going to do that. I mean, Madawan was just
Speaker 7: a small village. There was nothing for her to do there.
Speaker 6: I mean, what was she going to do? You know?
Speaker 7: The only thing she was going to do was visit
Speaker 7: Harry Thor every day in the asylum. And she hated
Speaker 7: going to the asylum because it was full of these
Speaker 7: men who are and women who were very dangerous.
Speaker 6: All right.
Speaker 7: It was not a pleasant experience for her. So she
Speaker 7: stays in Manhattan. The newspapers they start reporting on her
Speaker 7: movements in Manhattan, and they describe how she's been seen
Speaker 7: with these other young men. So imagine how Harry is feeling.
Speaker 7: He's stuck in the asynum and he's reading about Evelyn
Speaker 7: going out on the town.
Speaker 6: With these young men.
Speaker 7: This increases his anger and bitterness, and so they really
Speaker 7: their relationships soured very very quickly, and he became very
Speaker 7: antagonistic towards Evnn even though they were married. They were
Speaker 7: still married until nineteen sixteen or nineteen fifty, I think
Speaker 7: it was nineteen sixteen, and so she was afraid that
Speaker 7: if Harry gets out of the Asynum, He's going to
Speaker 7: come after her and kill her. The media, the press,
Speaker 7: the newspapers just follow this, you know, like nobody knows
Speaker 7: where Harry has gone to. They do eventually discover that
Speaker 7: he ends up in Canada. But this kind of this
Speaker 7: kind of reignites the whole case, I mean, and for
Speaker 7: them it's wonderful because they can sell more and more
Speaker 7: on newspapers. He's good copy, he's good publicity for them,
Speaker 7: and so they send so a whole hordes of newspapers,
Speaker 7: report reporters go up to Canada to report on Thor.
Speaker 7: And but Thor is discovered in Canada, the Canadian authorities
Speaker 7: arrest him, they hold him for possible deportation, and then
Speaker 7: Thor's lawyers and psychiatrists all troop up to Canada as well.
Speaker 7: He ended up in a small town called Sherbrook. And
Speaker 7: and for Canada, they now have a big problem on
Speaker 7: their hands because they had just passed immigration acts in
Speaker 7: nineteen oh six and nineteen ten, and this immigration the
Speaker 7: legislation was directed towards Japanese immigrants coming into Western Canada.
Speaker 7: But Thor's lawyers in Canada now say we are going
Speaker 7: to make we're going.
Speaker 6: To take this to court.
Speaker 7: Well, basically, Canada wanted to deport Thor because he had
Speaker 7: been in an asylum and part of the legislation that
Speaker 7: passed in nineteen ten could deport anyone who was insane.
Speaker 7: But Thora's lawyers said, we're going to fight this legislation
Speaker 7: in the courts and make it declared unconstitutional. And that
Speaker 7: was a big crisis for the Canadian government because you
Speaker 7: know that would ready torpedo their legislation. And so so
Speaker 7: here is Thor in his rooms in Sherbrooke. The Canadian
Speaker 7: authorities are getting ready to trying to deport him, but
Speaker 7: they fight. They have to fight the lawyers. They don't
Speaker 7: want Thor to clog up the courts. So they do
Speaker 7: what probably is the only thing they could do, and
Speaker 7: that is that they send in for very burly, strong
Speaker 7: policemen in the middle of the night, early morning and
Speaker 7: an immigration inspector and they grab Thor. They grab him
Speaker 7: out of bed, they hustle him down to a waiting car.
Speaker 7: They drive him back across the border back into the
Speaker 7: United States. They kick him out of the car and
Speaker 7: they tell him never come back to calendar again, and
Speaker 7: so there's Harry Thor in the middle of the road
Speaker 7: with no wallet, no belt, and he has no friends,
Speaker 7: nobody knows he's there. But he realizes that the next
Speaker 7: day the New York authorities are going to be hunting
Speaker 7: for him, and so he really has to get out
Speaker 7: of there, and he ends up in New Hampshire and
Speaker 7: he is extradited eventually back to New York. And that's
Speaker 7: sorts of anxious thing episode because that reaches the United
Speaker 7: States Supreme Court because the fight there is that one
Speaker 7: state can extradite someone from another state, but you can't
Speaker 7: do it on a whim. New York can't just say
Speaker 7: to another state, bring us this so and so back.
Speaker 7: You've got to have a reason for extradition. And the
Speaker 7: reason is usually an indictment, a criminal indictment. So New
Speaker 7: York indicts though on the charge of escaping from the asylum.
Speaker 7: They bring him back to New York. But now New
Speaker 7: York has to prosecute him on the charge that they
Speaker 7: indicted him on, which was escaping from the asylum, and
Speaker 7: this now has to go before a jury, and so
Speaker 7: Thor's lawyers come in. They argue the case is before
Speaker 7: a jury, public feeling is still overwhelmingly on Thor's side
Speaker 7: that he has killed this rapist of Stanford White, and
Speaker 7: so the jury decides that he is not guilty and
Speaker 7: decides also that he's he's sane, and so the judge
Speaker 7: releases him and he's now completely free man. And this
Speaker 7: happens in nineteen fifteen. He also talked about not quite
Speaker 7: end of the story, but almost the end of the story.
Speaker 8: Yes, what we what you talk about in the book
Speaker 8: was really fascinating is again the response by the media
Speaker 8: and by the public, especially when you talk about in Canada.
Speaker 8: You talk about these huge crowds to greet him and
Speaker 8: also celebrities visiting with him, so including Mayor. So maybe
Speaker 8: tell us a little bit about that incredible reaction to
Speaker 8: this case.
Speaker 7: Right, well, Thora is brought first of all in Canada,
Speaker 7: there are so crowds just turn out to applaud Thora
Speaker 7: the hero I mean, and for two reasons. First because
Speaker 7: he killed White after White raped this young girl. And
Speaker 7: the second reason is Thori is fighting against the might
Speaker 7: of New York State, and New York is seen as
Speaker 7: extremely arrogant just coming into Canada and expecting to get
Speaker 7: Thor immediately and Thor fights back, but then even when
Speaker 7: he goes into New Hampshire, the crowds just turn out,
Speaker 7: and he's regarded as this kind of hero and this
Speaker 7: legendary figure who has maintained his innocence and basically is
Speaker 7: being seen as being victimized by a New York State,
Speaker 7: unfairly victimized. And it's very interesting to think about this because,
Speaker 7: especially in the Southern States, it was regarded as the
Speaker 7: legitimate defense that you could go into court and say
Speaker 7: this man raped my wife, therefore I had the right
Speaker 7: to kill him, and that defense it didn't work in
Speaker 7: Harry Thor's case, but it did work in many cases,
Speaker 7: particularly in the Southern States in the nineteenth century. And
Speaker 7: so Thor is really kind of faded as this as
Speaker 7: this hero who's fighting against the might of New York State.
Speaker 7: And the Thor family did its part in all of
Speaker 7: this because they also pay the newspaper reporters and magazine
Speaker 7: writers to write favorable articles about Harry. Mary Thor also
Speaker 7: financed a movie which has been last it doesn't exist anymore,
Speaker 7: but that movie was about Harry Thor, a kind of
Speaker 7: dramatic movie that was really Stanford White his renamed Stanford Black.
Speaker 7: But it's all about Harry Thor. And it's even a
Speaker 7: play on Broadway that is also financed by the Thor family,
Speaker 7: and that is also about the case. But all of
Speaker 7: this is very sympathetic to Harry Thor, and so he
Speaker 7: is regarded as his hero. And when he's released in
Speaker 7: nineteen fifteen, for a time he kind of sinks into obscurity,
Speaker 7: but it's only two years later than in his own peculiarities.
Speaker 6: His own.
Speaker 7: Really abusive behavior comes to light and he abuses a
Speaker 7: young boy in New York and because of that he
Speaker 7: is finally sent to He's sent to another insane asylum,
Speaker 7: and he is only released in nineteen twenty four, and
Speaker 7: he lives out his life. I think Harry died in
Speaker 7: the nineteen forties, but of course he continues to have
Speaker 7: this enormous amount of money that his family has. His
Speaker 7: mother dies in nineteen twenty nine, and the children get
Speaker 7: the fortunes.
Speaker 8: So fascinating too. Sorry, go ahead, and.
Speaker 7: I would we also need to say what happened to Evelyn.
Speaker 7: She received nothing. I mean she when you think about it,
Speaker 7: she had testified twice on Harry's behalf, first in nineteen
Speaker 7: oh seven. Second, in nineteen oh eight, she'd revealed many
Speaker 7: details of her personal life which were really kind of
Speaker 7: shocked at the audience.
Speaker 6: Details of her theater in New York, and.
Speaker 7: She paid a heavy price, a heavy penalty, because she
Speaker 7: really struggled in poverty for quite a while. She went
Speaker 7: into vaudeville, but then she became a movie star. For
Speaker 7: about three or four years in the silent movies. She
Speaker 7: made a lot of money, but she developed a drug habit.
Speaker 7: She became addicted to morphine in nineteen nineteen and also
Speaker 7: addicted to cocaine, but she did finally break that habit.
Speaker 7: She ended up as a cabaret singer in Atlantic City
Speaker 7: and in New York City. She had had a son, Russell,
Speaker 7: in nineteen ten. She claimed that this son was Harry's child,
Speaker 7: but I found out that that could not have been
Speaker 7: the case. The father was a newspaper reporter called Jack Francis,
Speaker 7: but it was her son, Russell, who then became a
Speaker 7: test pilot for the Douglas Aircraft Corporation. He supported his
Speaker 7: mother after she ended her cabaret career, and she eventually
Speaker 7: moved to California to be with her son and his
Speaker 7: wife and children, and she lived out the rest of
Speaker 7: her days.
Speaker 6: I think she died in.
Speaker 7: Nineteen nineteen sixties, sometime in the nineteen sixties, maybe nineteen
Speaker 7: sixty one, but in the interim she also she was
Speaker 7: the consultant for a movie that was made about the case,
Speaker 7: which was titled The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing,
Speaker 7: and that starred Joan Collins and was a modestly successful movie.
Speaker 7: It's worth watching it, and it's an interesting movie. But
Speaker 7: that's really the story of lives.
Speaker 8: What we didn't mention, and which was again very fascinating
Speaker 8: and probably Stanford White was rolling in his grave, is
Speaker 8: that there was revealed in the assault on the Gump
Speaker 8: young man nineteen years old, that he had whipped him.
Speaker 8: So a lot of the allegations that Stanford White had said,
Speaker 8: and that eventually she had said to an attorney I
Speaker 8: believe named Hutton that so at least what Stanford White
Speaker 8: had said seemed to be eerily accurate.
Speaker 7: Yes, I mean, you've raised this whole sort of complicated backstory,
Speaker 7: which is fascinating in itself. But I think one of
Speaker 7: the things I want to take out of that backstory
Speaker 7: is the question that I asked myself, and I do
Speaker 7: not have any answer, and nobody can ever know. The
Speaker 7: answer is did the rape actually happened? All right, because
Speaker 7: we only know that it occurred from Evelyn's testimony in court.
Speaker 7: But she obviously had a very she she was very vulnerable.
Speaker 7: And I think in previous accounts of this case, what
Speaker 7: has annoyed me very much and still I come across
Speaker 7: this is the idea that somehow that this was a
Speaker 7: seduction by Stanford White, and that word implies a kind
Speaker 7: of consensus between Evelyn and Stanford White that they have sex,
Speaker 7: which was not the case at all. I mean, you know,
Speaker 7: she was drugged, unconscious, she was raped unconscious. I mean,
Speaker 7: that's a terrible violation. How could she possibly have encouraged this?
Speaker 4: Ah?
Speaker 7: But that's that's what some people still think. And plus,
Speaker 7: of course, she was sixteen, she was a young child,
Speaker 7: and Stanford White was forty seven. But in any case,
Speaker 7: think about she goes to trial, it goes to trial,
Speaker 7: Harry Thor goes to trial. Evelyn is twenty one years
Speaker 7: Old's still very young. Could it have been the case
Speaker 7: that Harry Thor's lawyers, very experienced men, put enormous pressure
Speaker 7: on Evelyn to testify falsely, to testify that the rape
Speaker 7: had happened, and to then make it as graphic as
Speaker 7: possible so that the jury would sympathize with her and
Speaker 7: sympathize with Harry Thor and buy this line of justifiable homicide.
Speaker 7: That's something that's possible. I mean, I can't, nobody can
Speaker 7: say one way or the other. But of course, what
Speaker 7: has happened as it's left this stain on Stanford White's reputation,
Speaker 7: and probably many more people know the name Stanford White
Speaker 7: now because of the murder rather than they know his architecture.
Speaker 7: But all the things you've taught you mentioned in your
Speaker 7: question were This other complicated backstory is that Harry thought
Speaker 7: he himself. It came out later that what he used
Speaker 7: to do was advertised young girls to go for an
Speaker 7: audition for the theater. He would then interviewed them. If
Speaker 7: he realized that they had no protector or guardian, he
Speaker 7: would then attack them and whip them and they he
Speaker 7: would then pay them off with thousands of dollars. And
Speaker 7: what this afid Davit that Evelyn supposedly signed in nineteen
Speaker 7: oh three, I think it was on some time then,
Speaker 7: was that in fact, Harry Thor had whipped her because
Speaker 7: she would not testify against Stanford White, and this would
Speaker 7: have been before the murder. So it's even as I'm
Speaker 7: describing all of this detail to you, I realized how
Speaker 7: incredibly complicated the whole business is, and how much more
Speaker 7: there is to this story than I can even tell
Speaker 7: in an hour, And it's quite quite amazing in fact.
Speaker 8: So it seems that there's a good possibility that the
Speaker 8: allegations that that Stanford made about Harry Thaw and the
Speaker 8: allegations that Harry Thaw said about Stanford in terms of
Speaker 8: luring girls, young girls up to their apartments, it seemed
Speaker 8: like they could be very possibly both guilty of exactly
Speaker 8: the same thing.
Speaker 7: Yes, that's exactly right, And how ironic is that? I mean,
Speaker 7: all right, here are these two men, both kind of
Speaker 7: both middle aged. Harry is about thirty six when he
Speaker 7: marries the evening. Stanford White is fifth fifty two when
Speaker 7: he dies. So both of them are abusing young girls, right,
Speaker 7: I mean, that's very feasible. And she, the victim, sixteen
Speaker 7: years old, is caught between the two of them, and
Speaker 7: they're both accusing White and Thor accusing each other. As
Speaker 7: the most terrible behavior. She doesn't know who to believe.
Speaker 7: She marries Harry because he provides some financial security. But
Speaker 7: it's an amazing story. And none of this, of course,
Speaker 7: would have come out in public, and nobody would ever
Speaker 7: have known about it unless there were these trials, unless
Speaker 7: the murder had occurred, if this had all somehow been
Speaker 7: hushed up, if Harry had not murdered Stanford White, then
Speaker 7: none of his behavior would have come out. And it's
Speaker 7: very telling because of course we know, I mean a
Speaker 7: year ago, eighteen months ago, we knew almost nothing of
Speaker 7: the behavior of Bill Cosby and all the other men
Speaker 7: whose his behavior has been revealed, and they I think
Speaker 7: what's quite extraordinary about the last two years is that
Speaker 7: once the dad broke right, once Harvey Weinstein was accused,
Speaker 7: all these other accusations about very upstanding people, you know,
Speaker 7: people who were honored, all of these accusations suddenly pour out,
Speaker 7: suddenly flood out, and it was like a damn broke
Speaker 7: and uh and the same thing happens with with Stanford
Speaker 7: White and Harry thought. Once the once it becomes public,
Speaker 7: all the accusations are like a dam breaking and and
Speaker 7: and it's it's sad that this couldn't and that these
Speaker 7: the these this stuff remains secret and these these acts,
Speaker 7: which are criminal acts, remain hidden for so long, and
Speaker 7: this behavior is not more easily dealt with or more
Speaker 7: openly dealt with at much earlier stage.
Speaker 8: I agree with you too. It seemed actually startling, but
Speaker 8: I guess encouraging for a lot of people. I know
Speaker 8: it's encouraging overall that people that seemed like they had,
Speaker 8: you know, a reputation that was entrenched, that these people
Speaker 8: were the first people to go, like you say, Weinstein
Speaker 8: and Matt Basy and a couple other people. It seemed
Speaker 8: like there was a consensus that, yes, that was going
Speaker 8: on for years, so these people had to be gone.
Speaker 8: But like you say, I think there was just a
Speaker 8: moment that that tide turned completely. If people were asking
Speaker 8: why did women take so long before they accused Bill Cosby,
Speaker 8: and now we're not having that conversation anymore, we seem
Speaker 8: to understand why right people take long to come forward.
Speaker 7: I think that's exactly right. I mean, when the first
Speaker 7: accusations were made about Bill Cosby, people I think I
Speaker 7: kept reading and hearing so many people saying, oh there
Speaker 7: was some these women have an agenda, they want publicity
Speaker 7: or they want money, and that was quite frequent. But
Speaker 7: then two years later, two years on, I do not
Speaker 7: hear that anymore. There's much more the public opinion, public
Speaker 7: sentiment has now shifted in a way to say, yes,
Speaker 7: we believe these women who are making these accusations, and
Speaker 7: yes they're telling the truth. And I think that's a
Speaker 7: very positive thing. That's a very positive advance just women
Speaker 7: the last two years.
Speaker 8: And I thought it was just the most fascinating thing,
Speaker 8: as well as the response by the public, especially in Canada,
Speaker 8: where they weren't aware of the other side of the
Speaker 8: story per se, and yet they just treated them like
Speaker 8: a hero. You know, we're talking one thousand, two thousand
Speaker 8: people come out to cheer this guy on and like
Speaker 8: I say, an ex mayor, former mayor coming up and
Speaker 8: shaking his hand and wanting his autograph. It is a
Speaker 8: very strange phenomena. It's almost reminded me, not exactly the same,
Speaker 8: but the oj response with people cheering oj On as
Speaker 8: he escaped in his Bronco right.
Speaker 7: And I think what's going on also is that there
Speaker 7: is a much broader I mean, when we go back,
Speaker 7: when you go back to nineteen hundred, nineteen oh six,
Speaker 7: nineteen oh seven, nineteen ten. I'm not an expert in
Speaker 7: what's going on broadly in society, but something is clearly
Speaker 7: going on right that there's huge public support for Harry Thor,
Speaker 7: who is perceived as being the person who has avenged
Speaker 7: his wife's honor. But what also was interesting is the
Speaker 7: way the state legislature passed these laws in eighteen ninety five,
Speaker 7: all right, and this, according to historians, the reason they
Speaker 7: raised the age of consent, the reason they greatly expanded
Speaker 7: the penalty for sexual crimes like rape, was because of
Speaker 7: pressure from women's groups saying make these changes. Because of course,
Speaker 7: all the members of the state legislature were men. There
Speaker 7: were no women in the state legislature. So there's this broader,
Speaker 7: much broader social change going on in New York and
Speaker 7: around the United States as whole, and also Canada that
Speaker 7: is much more sympathetic to women than it is to
Speaker 7: the men, looking at the women really as victims. And
Speaker 7: if I can just add a little kind of PostScript
Speaker 7: about this, In the nineteen fifties, people began to rediscover
Speaker 7: Stanford White as an architect, and so books began to appear.
Speaker 7: That gave the history of Stanford White as an architect
Speaker 7: and the history of McKim mead and White. Now, the
Speaker 7: authors of these books realized they had a problem because
Speaker 7: if White is a rapist and a pedophile, how do
Speaker 7: you deal with that? And I think the way they
Speaker 7: dealt with it was by describing this episode as a seduction.
Speaker 7: And what gradually happened was this kind of introduction of
Speaker 7: evel In Nesbit as somehow complicit or is even the
Speaker 7: person who was responsible for the for the rape and
Speaker 7: for the murder. Okay, And I think this happened because
Speaker 7: they wanted to rehabilitate Stanford White's reputation as an architect.
Speaker 7: And so you see, so it's so common for people
Speaker 7: to refer to this episode as a seduction. And I
Speaker 7: said to my editors, I said, look, I have not
Speaker 7: used that word in the book. I've always referred to
Speaker 7: it as a rape. And whenever any publicity is done
Speaker 7: about this, capes it should be referred to as a rape,
Speaker 7: but we shouldn't refer to it as a seduction. And
Speaker 7: so that that was I made that very clear, and
Speaker 7: I hope that comes across.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it certainly does. And I mean there is no
Speaker 8: hint of the what you say of seduction, no talk
Speaker 8: of that, so it's cleary clear, especially when you talk
Speaker 8: about she was given the glass of champagne, and as
Speaker 8: you write in the book, she was hesitant to finish it,
Speaker 8: but he urged her to finish it. And when she
Speaker 8: woke up, she was unconscious and naked.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Oh yeah, that's the definition of rape, you know. Yes,
Speaker 8: I want to thank you Simon for coming on and
Speaker 8: talking about the Girl on the Velvet Swing, sex, murder
Speaker 8: and madness at the dawn of the twentieth century. It
Speaker 8: has been an absolute pleasure. Is there a Facebook page
Speaker 8: or a website that people might take a look at
Speaker 8: and see your other work.
Speaker 7: Well, there's a very good Amazon page that the publisher
Speaker 7: Little Brown.
Speaker 6: Did, and I would.
Speaker 7: If people want to find out more about the book.
Speaker 7: There are photographs from the book on the Amazon page.
Speaker 7: There's also reviews of the book and a short synopsis
Speaker 7: in the book, and of course people can purchase the
Speaker 7: book on Amazon quite quite easily, so that would be
Speaker 7: my advice to go to that page.
Speaker 8: Absolutely, And I wanted to say too that I've forgot
Speaker 8: to mention the incredible black and white photos of Evelyn
Speaker 8: and all kinds of other people and the architecture of
Speaker 8: the time, incredible photos that are included in this book too.
Speaker 6: Thank you, thank you very much.
Speaker 8: Thank you very much, Simon, do you have a great evening,
Speaker 8: And thank you very much for this interview.
Speaker 7: Well, thank you again for the time you've given me
Speaker 7: to talk about the book. And I'm very appreciative of
Speaker 7: the of the fact that you did so much careful
Speaker 7: reading of the book beforehand.
Speaker 8: Thank you, thank you very much, it was my pleasure.
Speaker 8: Good night, good night.