Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  The Thaw millions seemed to insinuate their way into most minds. This was perhaps an unclassified madness all of its own.

  Harry Thaw had to appear on the stand at all three of his habeas corpus hearings. He was plausible enough to begin with, though Jerome would eventually rattle him. Of the second hearing before Justice Mills in June 1909, the New York Times commented that many thought he would win his case, so ‘cool and collected’, ‘quick and confident’, was he for many hours when questioned by the former district attorney. Perhaps his demeanour was helped by the fact that at the local jail he was given a corridor of thirteen cells to himself; his suite was comfortably furnished and his meals sent in from the local hotel. Mother Thaw had evidently been at work for her dear son. Indeed, his treatment was so grand that the secretary of the State Prison Commission protested.

  Defending himself against Jerome’s attempt to prove him mad because he had gone to see a hypnotist in France, Harry explained to the court that he had done so because he thought White was hypnotizing his wife, and he wanted to learn more about how the procedure worked. To probe his grasp on sanity, the judge himself asked Thaw about the visible signs of his ‘exaggerated ego’ – part of the diagnoses both of manic-depressive insanity and of paranoia. Had he not sought repeatedly to correct his very expensive lawyers? Did he think he knew more than everyone? Harry struggled with the response.

  Sanity is a very difficult thing to possess, even for those with a greater grip on it than Harry K. Thaw.

  More grilling led Thaw to expose his own continuing sense of the justice of his killing Stanford White: whether this was a sign of ongoing madness, or pointed to the fact that there had never been any, was something that it was too late to posit. On a long hot afternoon, and once more confronted by the rapid fire of Jerome’s questions, Thaw finally lost his mask of composure, grew angry, tapped the floor nervously with his foot, and stumbled in his responses. His lips twitched so badly, he hid them behind a bunched handkerchief.

  His mother’s personal counsel, Clifford W. Hartridge, was appearing under subpoena. Notes and letters detailing his communication with the family had been lodged with the court. Hartridge revealed how he had been asked to pay off Mrs Merrill, the witness to Thaw’s sadistic excess. Though the court was also told Hartridge was in the process of suing Mrs William Thaw for not having paid his full expenses, that did little to detract from the light he shed on Harry’s violence.

  Thaw was called back to the stand and interrogated by Jerome as to the veracity in his opinion of the fourteen psychiatrists who deemed him insane during his trial, and the fourteen who appeared at his first habeas corpus proceedings and swore that he had been crazy when he killed White. Thaw replied that he hadn’t been insane in the way Jerome now meant: he had had a ‘brain storm’. This was a temporary mental derangement, but not evidence of a diseased mind. He disagreed with all the ‘bug doctors’ who thought the latter. He nervously intimated that some of the doctors had been misinformed or indeed led astray by Jerome’s office. The more Thaw talked, the more his paranoid delusions were again exposed.

  Finally, the judge determined: ‘He was a being who, in the eyes of several eminent alienists, was a paranoiac whose liberation from Matteawan would be a menace to the community.’

  Thaw launched an appeal against the verdict, in the hope that a new jury trial to determine his sanity would be granted. It reached the Supreme Court, which in December 1909 ruled against him. Immediately, another appeal on grounds of habeas corpus was put in train. Meanwhile, Thaw’s lawyers came up with another ruse: they declared him bankrupt in the state of Pennsylvania, and a writ of habeas corpus was issued for his appearance before the Pennsylvania State Court. But the sheriff of Westchester County, in whose custody Thaw was held, refused to obey the writ, and there was no authority to compel him.

  Back at Matteawan, Thaw had long led a campaign against his treatment by the superintendent of the hospital, claiming he was no ordinary inmate to be locked up with others and forced into a bare cell from eight at night, only to be woken at six! He complained of abuses at the asylum, and eventually with the aid of the family wealth managed to force the hospital’s existing heads out. He was probably right in complaining that inmates were not well treated, but this was hardly Harry’s overriding intent. The replacement staff were all for pleading for his returned sanity. Bribes apart, it’s not unlikely that they just wanted to get rid of him.

  Thaw’s third habeas corpus hearing didn’t take place until June 1912. By this time Evelyn was a mother. Since Harry wouldn’t recognize the paternity she claimed, she was in difficult financial straits. Luckily, she had at last made things up with her own mother, who offered to look after little Russell while she found work. It was impossible, given the scandal the murder had caused, for her yet to work at home, so she travelled to Britain where she played at the Hippodrome in London. In court, the estranged husband and wife rarely met each other’s eyes.

  Appearing before Justice Martin Keogh, Harry was even more nervous than at his prior trial and seemed lost, according to the New York Times, when Jerome questioned him about his decidedly strange letters to Evelyn. He eyed his own lawyer appealingly to come up with answers for him, and when he spoke his own, they were slow and faltering. The Matteawan assistant superintendent physician, Dr Roy D. Leak, however, testified that he thought Thaw was now a rational person. He claimed that he had complained about the previous superintendent and staff because they were mistreating him, guided as they were by Dr Flint, witness for the prosecution. They had placed Thaw in a dark room and heaped indignities on him. Dr Leak understood Thaw to be ‘constitutionally inferior’: this did not amount to insanity, though under the influence of alcohol, he might be provoked to violence.

  Ever a liberal and worried about the effectiveness of disciplinary confinement, Dr William Alanson White, too, claimed that Thaw’s insanity – which he himself had always thought temporary – had now gone: he was for all intents and purposes sane. He had examined Thaw back in 1907 and more recently several times at Matteawan. He had also read the Matteawan superintendent’s 150-page report on Thaw, then spent three hours with him. Describing this examination, Dr White recounted how he had first gone through the standard mental tests: did Thaw remember him? what was the the date? who were the people around him? Then came some arithmetic and a few general-knowledge questions – the name of the president, the capital cities of European countries. Harry counted backwards, named the months, could describe the paintings and cathedrals he had seen on his travels. White also queried him about his alleged ‘illusions’: this probably refers to his certainty that he was being followed by Stanford White’s agents. He saw Thaw again on 12 April and 3 June, and his opinion was that he was now a sane man.

  In cross-examination, however, Jerome made it difficult for White to provide evidence supporting his opinion of Harry’s present sanity. He quoted certain statements in a copy of his examination notes. These had Harry attributing conspiracy to others or labelling them paranoiac. For example, he was noted as claiming that Jerome had been bribed to keep him in Matteawan; that the judge’s secretary in the earlier hearing had told him that Matteawan’s Dr Baker – who had testified that he was still insane at the earlier trial – was a ‘coldblooded liar’ and had been bribed into saying so. Like all longer-term inmates, Harry now had a good knowledge of the institutional language of asylum and court. He was well versed in the medical and psychiatric terms that had been attributed to him; and he now projected these outwards – claiming, for instance, that Dr Flint was paranoiac. Dr White didn’t classify as insanity the fact that Thaw attributed all his own nefarious bribing acts, his own vision of the mental world, to others. It was true, though, White admitted to Jerome, that he had not talked to Thaw about certain of the women who figured in his writings. The implication was that his sadistic leanings could still present a danger.

  This hearing also presented the testimony of the venerable Allan McLane Hamilton, w
ho now took the stand for the first time since he had been hired by the Thaw family at the initial trial. He told the court that back then he had already reported to Mrs Thaw that her son suffered from chronic delirium, that he had all the signs of a person who had suffered a great shock, and that the best thing for the family and the public would be to have a commission of lunacy appointed to place him in an institution. In an altogether different tenor from some of Thaw’s other alienists, Hamilton also confessed that he was an unwilling witness and had removed himself from the scene so as to escape Thaw’s first trial; testifying, to him, meant breaching ‘the sacred nature of the relations between a physician and his client’.

  Given Hamilton’s attitude to patient confidentiality, offering opinions in court, backed by evidence from the consulting room, was a tricky matter.

  Of all the alienists, it was the ageing Dr Austin Flint – ‘the popinjay’, as he called him in his memoir – that Thaw most despised. Flint judged Thaw’s newly discovered sanity laughable. In a 1910 article in the American Journal of Insanity he had referred to the Thaw appeals as a ‘striking example of the misuse of the writ of habeas corpus’. Then, too, Evelyn and the elderly Flint had struck up a friendship, a fact that couldn’t fail to send Thaw’s ever rivalrous imagination into overdrive. At the last hearing, Evelyn had stated that he had threatened to kill her if he was released – and Flint was a firm believer in Thaw’s potential danger. ‘Under the influence of even a small amount of alcohol,’ he stated, Thaw becomes quarrelsome and dangerous in the highest degree ... These homicidal paranoiacs are especially dangerous to their supposed enemies, because they plot and scheme and murder, taking their victim unawares.’

  More importantly, perhaps, Dr Flint – whom Thaw, imagining the world and the mental state of others in his own image, also labelled a ‘paranoiac’ – had on 10 January 1912 issued a statement in which he warned the public that a deep-laid plan for the release of Thaw was being hatched. If Dr Flint did not altogether state that the family millions were implicated in the fact that new officials favourably disposed to Thaw were now in place at Matteawan, the suggestion was there. Countering this claim in his summing-up, Thaw’s advocate stated that his client’s vociferous complaints about mistreatment at the hands of the facility’s former chiefs had in fact led to considerable beneficial reforms for everyone. He may have been right, but this had little sway with the court.

  Justice Keogh’s decision came on 26 July, eighteen days after the hearing’s start: ‘Having listened to all the testimony and seriously considered it, I am of the opinion that Harry K. Thaw is still insane, and that his discharge would be dangerous to the public peace and safety.’ Thaw’s counsel, though expressing disappointment, stressed that Justice Keogh had also found Harry improved. There was hope to be had. A man who could hold his own in the horrible conditions of a place like Matteawan ‘obviously cannot be very insane’.

  A date for a further appeal, effectively a sanity review hearing, was fixed for 1913. Before that day came, certain officials of the asylum were charged with taking bribes to testify in favour of Thaw’s sanity. It was decided to delay the appeal.

  But Harry K. Thaw had had enough.

  44. The Great Escape

  Early on the morning of Sunday, 17 August 1913, Harry Thaw went out to the Matteawan exercise yard, where he was a familiar figure. That day he was earlier than usual, but the sole attendant thought nothing of it. When the milk cart arrived, Harry strolled along with him to open the gates so that the cart could come through. On the other side of the road, the attendant spied a dark limousine. Before he realized what was happening, Harry Thaw was inside the limo and being driven speedily away. By the time the police had been alerted and gave chase, Harry had been transferred to a Packard and was rushing towards the Connecticut state line at a speed witnesses said was an awesome seventy miles an hour.

  Soon he was across the Canadian border. Five men had been hired, at a price rumoured to be twenty-five thousand dollars, to abet the escape. Before Thaw could join his mother at their country home in Pennsylvania, where according to her he was headed, he was picked up in the small Canadian border village of Coaticook and taken from there to the town of Sherbrooke. Here he was cheered at the station and welcomed as a man who had escaped American persecution. In his element, Harry rode through the streets in an open carriage waving his hat to those who shouted at him, ‘Hurrah for British fair play.’

  His stay in Sherbrooke was another of his wild adventures. He loved the attention of the press. In his interviews, he assured reporters he was a sane man, ‘as sane as you or anyone else’. He had left Matteawan and come north because he knew he couldn’t get a fair deal from the state of New York. He intimated that he was saddened by Evelyn’s return to the stage, but stressed that neither she, nor Dr Flint, nor Jerome had anything to fear from him. He wanted to go back to his family and lead a quiet life.

  The state of New York demanded extradition. Thaw’s new Canadian team of lawyers refused. The federal government in Canada, however, bowed to American pressure, and on 10 September Thaw was extradited. Now a federal prisoner in the US, he nonetheless arrived in Concord, New Hampshire, to public cheers. Here he battled with the New York courts for over a year, trying to escape extradition to the state that wanted him back. In December 1914 he was finally ordered by the US Supreme Court to return to New York.

  After a six-year absence, Harry Thaw was back in the Tombs. Temporarily at least, justice had triumphed over the millions.

  In July 1915, Thaw was once more in the courts and pleading his sanity, this time before both judge and jury. Now, an expert on asylum life and on psychiatric as well as legal practice, when his entire history was again recapitulated by a new prosecutor he put up a credible performance of ‘sanity’. There was no Jerome to make him nervous. Thaw still had no remorse over the killing of Stanford White. But the dead Stanford White seemed now to bear less of his irrational and jealous animus than did Dr Flint. During a moment that almost caused a mistrial, Thaw’s advocate accused Flint of having a lip-reader with him in court, ‘who interpreted whispered conversations Thaw had had with his counsel’. ‘They have been watching some of Thaw’s jocular remarks to me and are going to say it is evidence that he is insane,’ he claimed.

  It was clear that Thaw’s lawyer had been taken in by his client’s contagious paranoid discourse. Thaw enjoyed the fuss the lip-reading accusation caused. He was also buoyed by the nightly companionship of the sheriff who, report had it, took him out to dine sumptuously and to ride the overground. The half-hearted prosecution helped him as well.

  Thaw’s Toad of Toad Hall-like antics had endeared him to everyone along his route of escape from evil institutional forces. Now they continued to entertain the court. He openly called the psychiatrists ‘bug doctors’. He stated, ‘Dr Flint has no moral sense. He is a ridiculous person and just as prepared to say what is false as what is true. You can get any opinion from Dr Flint just as easy as a bartender gets beer from a spigot.’

  Thaw was immensely pleased with this remark, and so was the crowded courtroom. Flint had made himself ridiculous in the public’s eyes by stating that Thaw had attempted to hypnotize him, just as he had once set out to hypnotize young girls. No one seemed to worry too much about the murder, let alone Harry’s track record of sadistic brutality. Like some presidential nominee, he seemed now to be on a winning ticket.

  Playing to the gallery, Thaw won the jury over, and on 16 July they declared him a sane and thus a free man. He immediately filed for divorce from Evelyn, who, pleading illness in response to her subpoena, hadn’t appeared in court. In his divorce suit Thaw named as co-respondent a newspaperman, though Evelyn was now living with her dance partner, Jack Clifford. As soon as the divorce came through, she married him. The marriage didn’t last.

  Free, Harry went home to his mother and pontificated eagerly to the ranked Pittsburgh press on what a good, charitable and churchly citizen he was now going to be. He spok
e of a campaign to rectify a legal system that had allowed a man to be committed to an asylum without a proper hearing on the question of his sanity. As that old hand Dr Hamilton had stated in court: people who aren’t insane often have doubts about their sanity; the insane never do.

  It didn’t take all that long for the old brutal Harry to make a comeback. On 9 January 1917, the papers were full of a new sadistic scandal: this time Harry had kidnapped a Kansas youth, Frederick Gump Jr, whom he had met in an ice-cream bar in California. He had recruited the young man with the promise of work back east. Gump had been urged by his ailing father and impoverished family to accept, so good were Harry’s rate of pay and his talk of a simultaneous technical education. There was even a letter confirming all this.

  So Gump travelled east. Harry had asked him to come to New York, where he was staying at the McAlpin Hotel with his servant-bodyguard. There, Harry Thaw, now a man of forty-six, held Gump against his will and proceeded to whip and abuse the boy to within an inch of his life. The next day, Gump somehow managed to escape and went to the police.

  When the police finally tracked Thaw down, he was staying in a small Pittsburgh boarding house. Here he had tried to commit suicide by slashing his wrists. They also arrested his bodyguard, in whose pockets were letters from other young boys to whom Thaw had offered jobs. This time Mother Thaw decided to draw the line herself. She told reporters she could no longer resist the facts that demonstrated her son’s insanity. She had applied to the court to have him declared insane. And although the New York State district attorney attempted to take the criminal, rather than the asylum, route to contain Harry within walls, Mrs Thaw won out. Harry was judged insane and committed to the Pennsylvania State Hospital in Philadelphia. The Gump family’s attempt to sue for damages went on for years: the case was only finally settled out of court in 1924, when Thaw had determined to petition for his freedom once more.