Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Whatever their vaunted credentials, the prosecution’s position made its doctors’ task of expertise difficult. For a murder verdict, Jerome needed the accused sane. Prodded into changing his position midstream, he wanted to prove that Thaw, if not fully responsible for his actions, was not only temporarily or partially insane – but wholly so. This position was akin to the one that the first examining psychiatrist, Hamilton, had taken. The difficulty for the medics on Thaw’s defence team was that New York law – unlike the law in fourteen other states – did not recognize the ‘irresistible impulse’ test of insanity or the ‘temporary’ lack of mental responsibility, common enough in France.

  35. Experts on the Stand

  First on the stand for the defence was a Dr Charles J. Wiley of Pittsburgh, introduced as a specialist in insanity and nervous diseases. He had presumably been chosen to testify first because, unlike the other experts, he had experience of Harry outside the Tombs. He had seen him in a streetcar on the Fifth Avenue line in Pittsburgh during the summer of 1905. Harry had come aboard and peremptorily pulled up a blind, which had affected the ‘motorman’s’ vision; when the conductor had stepped forward to pull it down again, Harry had exploded ‘into a furor’, giving Wiley the impression that he was both Vague and irrational’.

  Gleason then, in one of those excessively long questions that summed up the events of the crime from entry to roof garden to murder in one long breath, asked Wiley if he could give an opinion on the sanity of this man who, immediately after killing Stanford White, muttered as explanation that ‘he ruined my wife’. Amidst a storm of interventions from Jerome, interrupted by several legal arguments, Wiley let it be known that he believed Harry Thaw was suffering from a delusion.

  In his cross-examination, Jerome proceeded to tear Wiley apart. He pointed out that Wiley’s ‘belief’ was immaterial: it was his ‘opinion as an expert’, as ‘a scientific man’, that counted. When Wiley restated his opinion that Thaw was insane on the night when he killed White, Jerome insisted that the State of New York penal code be read out to him.

  Gleason did so:

  Section 20: ‘An act which is done by a prisoner who is an idiot, imbecile or insane, is not a crime. A prisoner cannot be tried, sentenced to any punishment, or punished for a crime, while he is in a state of idiocy, imbecility, lunacy or insanity, so as to be incapable of understanding the proceedings or making his defence.’

  Section 21: ‘A prisoner is not excused from criminal liability as an idiot, imbecile, lunatic or insane person or of unsound mind, except upon proof that, at the time of committing the alleged criminal act, he was laboring under such a defect of reason as either:

  (1) not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or

  (2) not to know that the act was wrong.’

  Section 23: ‘A morbid propensity to commit prohibited acts, existing in the mind of a person who is not shown to have been incapable of knowing the wrongfulness of such acts, forms no defence to a prosecution therefor.’

  Dr Wiley persisted in his opinion, despite Jerome’s emphasis on Section 23. Grilling him on what exactly in this tricky domain of love and jealousy constituted the difference between madness and sanity, Jerome then asked: ‘Do you consider that everybody who is actuated by jealousy is of unsound mind?’

  When Wiley answered, ‘No’, Jerome continued: ‘Would the mere killing by a man who believed his wife had been wronged in itself be evidence of insanity?’

  Again Wiley replied in the negative. Pressing him further, Jerome asked what element on the night of the murder demonstrated that the defendant was insane.

  ‘The declaration [to his wife] that “I have probably saved your life”,’ Wiley stated, showed that Thaw was ‘laboring under a delusion’.

  Jerome’s tactics then shifted. To the amusement of the jury, he demonstrated that this trumpeted expert was no expert at all since he didn’t even know what Jerome himself knew and asserted were fundamental texts, tests and authorities in the field. He questioned Wiley on Romberg symptoms. Wiley couldn’t answer, though he claimed to be familiar with a book in which they figured. Jerome pushed him on Dr Hammond’s Diseases of the Nervous System, which Wiley couldn’t recall, and went on to shame him thoroughly in a basic medical exam on nerves, spleen and kidneys. After nigh on four hours of such tactics, anything Wiley might have had to say on Harry Thaw’s sanity was undermined, and the witness himself utterly humiliated. Jerome’s tactics were not unusual when it came to cross-examining a purported expert.

  The chief prosecutor was more lenient on the elderly family physician, Dr Charles F. Bingamon, who claimed that Thaw had as a child suffered from a ‘neurotic temperament’ and had bouts of St Vitus’ Dance, one lasting four weeks; but he put a quick end to the testimony of a relative of Harry’s who told the court that his father, a first cousin of Thaw’s father, had been committed to an asylum. Jerome pointed out that this collateral branch of the family had no bearing on Harry’s mental condition. Subsequent testimony about the mental state of an uncle was similarly objected to and the objection sustained by the judge.

  At the end of the first day, the defence determined that the outflanked Gleason would henceforth step down as their team leader and the acclaimed Delmas take over. Possessing the gestures and authority that had earned him his Napoleon sobriquet, he was indeed a more effective lawyer. Justice in adversarial systems has ever been affected by the brilliance of combative attorneys and their mustering of facts and emotions for jury and public. Delmas treated juries in the same way as he treated women, one reporter wrote – with the ‘flattering unction that causes a washerwoman to forget that she is not a queen’.

  36. Star Witness for the Defence

  On his second day, Delmas called Evelyn to the witness stand. Outside, some ten thousand thronged to catch a glimpse of the famous model and star witness. Inside, her clear-headed, soft spoken testimony as well as her physical charm riveted courtroom, press and jury alike.

  Delmas took her through the day of the murder, her background, her coming to New York, her meeting with Thaw. In a hushed courtroom, he guided her through the long night in which she had confessed to Thaw the full extent of her relations with Stanford White – the seduction, then sexual coercion, by the architect. Delmas’s ploy was to demonstrate that Evelyn was recounting the entire story as she had told it to Thaw, since it was this narrative that had catapulted him on his journey towards murder. The truth content of the account, which the prosecution kept wanting to test, was irrelevant. This was a story told by a child-woman to the man who was to be her husband. Its salacious details were allowed only so that judge and jury could gauge the impact its telling had had on Harry Thaw.

  Visibly, it continued to have an impact. Harry sat hunched and perspiring. He squirmed, fidgeted, and occasionally sobbed out loud. Evelyn’s palpable nervousness as she spoke in public about matters that were rarely breathed, certainly not by a young woman, electrified the court. Elere’s how she narrated her numbed state in the hours and days after she had woken in bed next to a ‘completely undressed’ Stanford White.

  Mr White came into the room and tried to quiet me. He got down on his knees beside me and picked up the ends of my dress and kissed it. I do not know how I got home. Next day he came to my home. I was quiet now and sat staring out the window. After a while he said, ‘Why don’t you look at me, child?’ I said, ‘Because I can’t.’ Then he began to talk to me. He told me that I must not be worried about what had occurred. He said that everything was all right. He said he thought I had the most beautiful hair he had ever seen. He said he would do a great many things for me. He said everybody did those things; that all people were doing these things, that that is all people were for, all they lived for. He said that I was so nice and young and slim, that he couldn’t help it and so he did it.

  Here, apparently, Evelyn gave way to the tears she had been trying not to shed and twisted her hands, only to resume her testimony. Its content cued the shift in
taste that would mark women for the rest of the new century:

  Then he told me that only very young girls were nice, and the thinner they were, the prettier they were, that nothing was so loathsome as fat, and that I must never get fat. He said the great thing in this world was not to be found out... He made me swear that I would not tell my mother, not to say one word to Mother about it, that I must not tell anyone about it, that people did not talk about these things, and did not tell about them.

  Delmas didn’t want to hand Evelyn over for cross-examination until the impact of her confession – on Thaw, let alone on the public – had been sifted by the psychiatric experts. Nor did he want any dissipation of the effect on the court of reading Thaw’s syntactically bizarre letters to Evelyn – where he sometimes refers to himself as ‘he’ – and his equally deranged will, made on the day of his marriage. Here he orders, in good paranoid fashion, that if his death is suspicious, fifty thousand dollars or more should be used in discovering and bringing to justice the guilty party (White); and he leaves funds under Comstock’s trusteeship to various young women to prosecute Stanford White.

  So on Monday 11 February, Delmas called Dr Charles G. Wagner to the stand.

  Dr Wagner, an experienced courtroom witness, was the superintendent of the State Hospital for the Insane in Binghampton, New York, which housed some 1570 people. He stated that he had visited Thaw six times in the Tombs. He was about to narrate his conversations with the defendant during these visits when Jerome objected to such material being presented as evidence.

  Wagner was nonplussed, and Delmas only retrieved his testimony by asking him a question that took sixteen minutes to put.

  His question narrated the entire history of the case from the defence point of view – including Thaw’s chequered heredity; illnesses during childhood; a meeting with Evelyn, always named as ‘the child’, and dating from when she was sixteen; his proposal in 1903, after ‘the child’s’ operation; her declining of his suit, and then the reason for it, which propelled his plunge into ‘profound grief. Then came Thaw’s learning on his return from Europe that there was a scheme afoot, ‘that the same man who had previously assaulted her ... had laid a plan ... defaming the name and character of the young man’ – viz. himself; he had then married her and subsequently learned on a visit to New York that White, or ‘B’, had been in touch; that the ‘Blackguard’ had renewed his suit. Then, on the night of 25 June 1906, after ‘the child’ had given him a note while they were in a restaurant, saying that ‘the B has been here but has gone away’, he had seen B in the Madison Square roof garden when his party was leaving, and had unloaded three shots from the pistol he only carried in New York where the B lived and where threats had been made against his life. Finally came the question, ‘What, in your opinion, was the condition of the defendant... at the time the fatal shot was fired?’

  After Jerome had raised objections as to the factual nature of a great many of the points in Delmas’s long question, the judge told Dr Wagner to answer the question, bearing in mind the objections: Did the defendant, at the time he fired the fatal shot, know the act was wrong?

  Wagner replied that in his opinion he did not.

  Was Thaw’s failure or incapacity to know that the act was wrong due to a defect of reason under which he was labouring at the time?

  Wagner answered in the affirmative twice, the question having been posed again slightly differently.

  A flustered Dr Wagner had been a less than satisfactory witness. But Dr Britton D. Evans, of the State Hospital for the Insane in Morris Plains, was unflappable. Perhaps his star performance was due to the fact that he and Jerome had belligerent history in a prior case: indeed, the district attorney had refused to shake his hand the day before, and the doctor had noted the insult out loud, declaring in full view of reporters, ‘You are no gentleman.’ Evans would not allow Jerome to humiliate him.

  Dr Evans had visited Thaw eight times in the Tombs, on six of those occasions with Dr Wagner. His testimony was cogent and energetic, beginning as mental-state reports do even today with a description of physical state, then behaviour, and finally moving inward to delusions and possible biological problems.

  I observed that Harry K. Thaw exhibited a peculiar facial expression, a glaring of the eyes, a restlessness of the eyes, a suspicious viewing of the surroundings and me, watching every movement. I observed a nervous agitation and restlessness, such as comes from a severe brain storm, and is common in persons who have recently gone through an explosive or fulminating condition of mental unsoundness. He exhibited delusions of a personal character and exaggerated ego, and along with them, delusions of a persecutory character, in that he exhibited the fact that he felt himself of exaggerated importance, and that he was subjected to persecutions and conspiracies on the part of numerous people. These were my observations on August 4.

  Asked what he meant by some of his recondite terms, for example an ‘exaggerated ego’, Dr Evans replied:

  It is an exhibition of an exaggerated value put upon the ability, capacity and influence of one’s own self out of proportion to that which can be given to that particular person under all the conditions and propositions presented to the observer or examiner. An analysis of the person puts him upon an ordinary even plane. He himself believes that he is clothed with power, capacities and abilities far above him and out of proportion of a normal human being under the advantages of that particular person.

  On top of this narcissistic disorder, Harry suffered from ‘logorrhea’, an abnormally rapid flow of words which Evans ‘noticed were not characteristic of the healthy mind’. This went along with an ‘abnormal excitement of the cerebral function, an abnormal or diseased condition of the brain, which is the organ of the mind’.

  Asked to say more about what was abnormal about Thaw’s ready flow of language, Dr Evans pointed to its comparative incoherence and lack of logic.

  A man speaking with a diseased brain talks with words and ideas lumped one over the other in rapid succession, a flight of ideas, so that it ... tends to confuse the hearer and make him unable to grasp what the situation is, except that these rapid and successive states ... are the logical outcome of a morbid condition of the mind ... it is either a symptom or indication that the brain has undergone a recent terrible storm of an abnormal character, or is in its initial stage of disorder ... It is the twilight or the dawn of a state of mental unsoundness and mental explosion.

  Evans also elaborated on what he meant by ‘delusions’;

  I mean by a delusion a false belief, out of which you cannot reason a person by the usual arguments – by the usual counter arguments, by the usual methods that are used to dissuade a man from an illogical position or an error of judgment. The man who has any judgment, when you place before him a logical argument and show him he is wrong, if he is a normal man, he will see his error, whether he admits it directly at once or not... [When you] dissuade an insane man from his delusions or false beliefs, he still holds to it because it is a matter of disease engrafted upon his mind, or his brain which is an organ of the mind, and your arguments are of no avail.

  On Evans’s second visit with Dr Wagner, on 21 August, he observed that Thaw was ‘nervous and agitated and that he had that peculiar glaring eye which is so well recognized by persons who are familiar with conditions of that sort; that look of suspicion; watching me, watching those about him; and still the exaggerated ego.’

  Perhaps not altogether unrelated to his status as millionaire son of a doting mother, Thaw was far more disposed to telling Evans what to do than to ‘submit to me as an examiner’. He continued to exhibit ‘delusions of an exaggerated ego’ and ‘delusions of persecution’. These persecutions were ‘unjust and unfair and attack the most vital interests of his being, and life, and his social welfare’. Thaw had no hallucinations, which Evans glossed as ‘false sense impressions’.

  On his further visits to the Tombs, there was still much nervous agitation in Harry, but it had lessened
, and after that, Evans found great improvement: still less nervousness and none of the peculiar darting looks into corners of the room. Harry Thaw’s ‘brain storm’ had passed. The term Evans had hit upon to describe Harry’s state on the night of the murder caught the journalists’ and the public’s attention. It stuck. The ‘brain storm of a millionaire’ was to serve many a headline and echo through the culture.

  Pressed further by Delmas and keeping so tightly to the rules of evidence that there was no room for Jerome to object, Evans then described the conspiracy that Harry Thaw believed to have been mounted against him by Stanford White and which he thought endangered his life, since White, he claimed, had hired the Monk Eastman gang, notorious Tenderloin criminals, to do him in. The conspiracy extended to the district attorney’s office, which initially hadn’t followed up his complaints about White’s activities and had counselled him to let the matter drop. It now included all the lawyers on his first defence team who had colluded with Jerome, he said, to have him declared insane.

  Evans also testified that Harry had told him:

  I never wanted to shoot that man; I never wanted to kill him ... but I did want through legal means to bring him to trial. I wanted to bring him before a court, that he might be brought to justice and suffer for that which he had done ... Providence took charge of the situation; this was an act of Providence. Had it been my judgment, I would have preferred for him to suffer the humiliation and all that comes from laying bare this matter of his doings before a court and before the public.

  All this, Evans concluded, he as a doctor considered to be ‘a delusion ... an insane delusion’.

  When Delmas called Dr Wagner back into the courtroom, Wagner proceeded to iterate Thaw’s delusions of persecution. The case for his temporary insanity was now strong.

  In contemporary terms, Harry Thaw might well be classified as having what the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD) 10 calls a ‘paranoid personality disorder’, which may include brief psychotic episodes. It calls for at least three of the following characteristics: