Stanford White

Case background and investigation

Stanford White was one of the best-known American architects of his era, a partner in the firm McKim, Mead and White. According to PBS's American Experience, his work included the second Madison Square Garden and the Washington Square Arch in New York. He was born in New York City on November 9, 1853.

On the evening of June 25, 1906, White was attending the opening of the musical Mam'zelle Champagne at the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden, a building he had designed. During the performance, Harry Kendall Thaw, heir to a Pittsburgh railroad and coal fortune, approached White's table and shot him at close range. White, who was 52, died at the scene. Thaw was arrested immediately; the shooting took place in front of a full audience.

Thaw was married to Evelyn Nesbit, a former model and chorus performer. According to PBS, Nesbit had come to New York as a teenager and had been involved with White when she was 16, several years before she married Thaw in April 1905. Thaw's defense centered on his claim that he had acted because of what White had done to Nesbit, and her testimony about her relationship with the architect became the most widely reported part of the proceedings.

The Library of Congress's guide to newspaper coverage of the case records that Thaw's first trial began on January 23, 1907, and that the jury deadlocked in April 1907. A second trial began on January 9, 1908. On February 1, 1908, the jury found Thaw not guilty by reason of insanity, and he was committed to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in New York. The case was widely described in the press as the "trial of the century."

Thaw was therefore never convicted of the killing. In August 1913 he escaped from Matteawan and crossed into Canada; he was eventually returned to New York. In 1915 a jury found him sane, and he was released from custody. He died in Florida in February 1947.

Because the identity of the person who fired the shots was never in dispute, the case is not an unsolved one. Its legal outcome, however, was a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity followed by a period of confinement in a state hospital, rather than a criminal conviction.