Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Evelyn, on this occasion, decided to petition against Harry, claiming that he had not yet recovered his sanity: if he were freed, he would dissipate the estate in which their son had an interest. But Harry won his suit and was once more at liberty.

  For a while, he displayed a little interest in an again divorced Evelyn and their, or her, son. He even helped her buy a new house in Atlantic City, and went to hear her sing at her run-down nightclub, the one that is said to have inspired Orson Welles in the making of Citizen Kane. But any hopes Evelyn might have held out of a reconciliation, or even a new marriage, were not to be. Even after his mother died in 1927, leaving him and his siblings one million each, it was too late for Harry to change his ways, as Evelyn had repeatedly hoped. She long held Mrs William Thaw responsible for at least a proportion of Harry’s ways. But mother dead or alive, Harry carried on in the same way as ever, even managing to get himself barred from entering England, where in 1928 he was listed as an ‘undesirable’.

  It is not clear what triggered Harry’s manic episodes or indeed the suicidal states that sometimes followed, but clearly, however implicated his mother might have been in his history, her death was no cure.

  Poor Evelyn. Once the child star whose charismatic beauty seduced all and sundry, she grew into a despairing woman, addicted to morphine and alcohol, who several times attempted suicide. Right or wrong, as she said in her second autobiography, Stanford White was the only man she had ever loved. ‘Stanny was lucky,’ she purportedly added in a 1960s interview. ‘He died. I lived.’

  But the little girl who had saved her family from hunger with her modelling talents was a true independent spirit and a survivor. Stanford White had perhaps also spotted that, when he set out to educate her. She played in some ten silent films, sang and danced in a variety of clubs and cabarets around the country, even for short periods running her own. The clubs may have grown more down-at-heel over the years, but she carried on, her name appearing erratically in gossip columns – once, when her pet boa constrictor escaped into Lower Manhattan. ‘He was an expert at keeping away the bill collectors,’ she quipped. She also wrote her two autobiographies, and after the First World War ran a tea room in Manhattan. She lived to see the film made of her relationship with Stanford White. The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955) earned her a Hollywood consulting credit, as well as needed funds and a revived interest in her life.

  She died in 1967 in California, a grandmother of three, at the ripe age of eighty-two, though before she could witness her re-imagining in E. L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime. She had begun life as the object of painters’ and photographers’ gaze. She had inspired films and fiction. In the last part of her life, it was she herself who became the maker – of sculpture and ceramics, those very objects she had admired in Stanford White’s houses. Her trajectory echoed women’s possibilities through the course of the twentieth century. It also elaborated some of the many forms misogyny could take.

  Harry K. Thaw, after more of the court cases he seemed to be as addicted to as the beatings he sadistically inflicted, died in Miami of a heart attack in 1947 at the age of seventy-six. He left Evelyn, the woman on whose behalf he had told himself he killed, a mere ten thousand dollars. It was the same amount he left a waitress he had had the briefest of contacts with in a Virginia coffee shop. But then the paranoid millionaire had never been accountable – and perhaps this waitress was now his idealized ‘Boofuls’.

  As for Stanford White, doubly forgotten as both man and architect for many years, in 1996 his great-granddaughter published The Architect of Desire. In retrieving his memory and his considerable achievements, his penchant for very young women aside, she discovered an autopsy report showing that at the end he had been suffering from Bright’s Disease and incipient tuberculosis: he would probably have died of natural causes within a year of his murder.

  45. Assessing the Experts

  The Thaw case, which had preoccupied the courts for nine long years and cost the state over a hundred thousand dollars and the Thaw family ten times that, continued to cast a lurid light not only on its principal players but on the whole tricky subject of the role of the psychiatric witness in the courts. Could the contradictory opinions the experts provided ever be trusted in the hard evidential atmosphere of a forensic setting?

  In January 1910, a Special Committee on the Commitment and Discharge of the Criminal Insane presented a report that damned the experts as ‘unscrupulous’. They had, ‘to the shame of the medical profession’, both sworn Harry Thaw ‘out of jail on an opinion of insanity’, and attempted at another time ‘to swear him out of the asylum by an opinion of sanity’. Their ‘favourable opinions’ could be bought by the family ‘for cash’. The result would inevitably be that the murderer would be set free to ‘direct his homicidal inclinations against some other citizen who has already fallen or may hereafter come under his displeasure’. And everything done according to the forms of law.

  If those who feared murderous madmen on the streets were worried, the psychiatrists too were nonplussed by the Thaw trials. After his involvement, William A. White grew passionate about reforming the legal tests of insanity. ‘Insanity’ was a purely legal and sociological term that bore no relation to medicine, he noted. He didn’t think the standard of ‘responsibility’ was an adequate marker for anyone. Nor did the sanity–insanity divide make any sense.

  By 1916, White and Bernard Glueck’s textbook, Studies in Forensic Psychiatry, put out by the American Institute of Criminal Law, was teaching that ‘crime is a type of abnormal conduct which expresses a failure of proper adjustment at the psychological level’. This attitude was to prevail in professional circles until the physicalist and brain explanations – which the authors of this sentence had rejected – made a comeback in the 1970s.

  In 1926 the young Karl A. Menninger, soon to become a leading player in the psychiatric and psychoanalytic field, asked White his opinion on The Credo of Psychiatrists’ concerning crime which had just been pulled together by the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on the Legal Aspects of Psychiatry.

  Some of the key points of the Credo read:

  We believe

  1. That the psychiatrist’s chief concern is with the facilitation of human life adaptations, and with understanding and evaluating the social and individual factors entering into failure in this adaptation.

  2. That crime is a designation for one kind of such adaptation failure, and hence falls definitely within the focus of psychiatry.

  3. That crime as well as other behavior and characterologic aberrances can be scientifically studied, interpreted and controlled.

  4. That this study includes a consideration of the hereditary, physical, chemical, social and psychological factors entering into the personality concerned throughout his life as well as (merely) in the specific ‘criminal’ situation. [All that remained for the twenty-first century to add to this buoyant list of scientific hopes was the term ‘neurological’.]

  5. That from the study of such data we are enabled in many cases to direct an attack upon one or more of the factors found to be active in a specific case to effect an alteration of the behavior in a propitious direction; or ... make proper provision against subsequent... injuries to society. By the same experience and laws we are enabled in still other cases to detect and endeavor to prevent the development of potential criminality.

  Part of this ambitious Credo (which came to inform aspects of the penal system in the US and was akin to eventual developments in Europe) specifically concerned the role of expert psychiatric witnesses. It is here that the malign experience of the Thaw trial is visible:

  We believe that psychiatrists should never be obliged to answer par- tisanly with ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to questions pertaining to such complex questions as commitability (‘insanity’), responsibility, punishability and curability.

  We believe that psychiatrists testifying in legal cases should be employed by the court and report to the court after opp
ortunity has been provided for a thorough psychiatric examination, with such aids as psychiatrists habitually use in clinics, offices and hospitals.

  …

  We believe the use of hypothetical questions in legal cases and the use of the words ‘insane’ and ‘insanity’ should be abandoned.

  White wholly approved the Credo. Responding to the young Menninger, he underlined the psychiatrists’ far-reaching designs:

  The idea of responsibility as related to the criminal is a fiction ... [which] nowadays only serves to precipitate a metaphysical quarrel which is never decided every time anybody commits an anti-social act, whereas if all of them were considered psychotic they would all immediately be removed from the danger of further anti-social conduct by being properly segregated and then they would come to be let out only when there was a reasonable prospect that they had changed their method of reacting sufficiently to be a social asset instead of a social liability.

  This statement has the aura of an echt Foucaldian warning: psychiatric power has a wish to control and police all behaviour; it thinks it can predict and prevent future danger, not to mention determine the boundaries of the normal.

  In mitigation of the psychiatrists, it is worth underlining that where capital punishment exists, the psychiatric model at least doesn’t equate deviance with an invitation to institutional murder – though the uses of psychiatry under a malign state in the old USSR were certainly both iniquitous and execrable. When Truman Capote, himself somewhat deviant according to the older psychiatric textbooks, wrote In Cold Blood, he was nonetheless adamantly on the side of the psychiatrists. The alternative to their assessment of the murderers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock was, after all, the electric chair.

  To White, in the first more innocent decades of the twentieth century, the views of the Credo seem the only ‘humane’ way to tackle the crime problem: lock deviants up in psychiatric institutions rather than prisons, and make psychiatric rather than legal knowledge the dominant authority. All this in the hope that the prisoner/patient can be properly rehabilitated and become a useful member of society.

  The problem in American law and with the ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ verdict is that it is almost impossible, once having been deemed insane, to prove sanity and be released from a psychiatric institution. Harry K. Thaw’s ultimate release owed a great deal to his persistence, his fame, and of course to his exceedingly deep pockets, not to mention his formidable mother. In the course of the last century and our own, the right to liberty of the ‘institutionalized’ would become a major feature within the politics of law and psychiatry.

  Coda

  ‘It is a well known phenomenon that the angel of medicine, if he has listened too long to lawyers’ arguments, too often forgets his own mission. He then folds his wings with a clatter and conducts himself in court like a reserve angel of law.’

  Robert Musil

  The exemplary trials I have detailed in the preceding pages act as a prism through which the private emotions and public attitudes of High Victorian society, the belle époque and America’s Gilded Age can be seen in the fullness of their inevitable contradictions. Like all cases, these are by their very nature unique. But the temptation to draw generalizations from them is nonetheless strong, and I would like to venture a very few.

  It seems clear to me that where a ‘criminal’ woman can be understood as conforming to her time’s ideas or ideals of femininity, juries are kinder to her and more prepared to think in terms of mitigation. In such cases, psychiatrists, too, are more likely to present arguments that allow passion to be conceived of by public and jury as a force that overwhelms reason and impinges on sanity, even legally conceived.

  Putting Marie Bière side by side with Ruth Ellis – who shot dead her lover, David Blakely, in front of a Hampstead pub on Easter Sunday, 1955 – underscores the point. The fragile Bière and her defence lawyer managed to turn her shooting into a good woman’s act of passionate justice against exploitative masculinity. In Ellis’s case, the elements of such a defence never took hold. True, her crime was greater, but class and her way of inhabiting her gender played into the proceedings as well. A brassily blonde, working-class nightclub hostess, who had resorted to abortion when pregnant with Blakely’s child, Ellis not only committed a crime, but sinned against the status quo. Never mind Blakely’s violence and boozing, he was posh – upper- class and well connected. Ellis’s class, her brazen looks and distinctly unladylike past undoubtedly played into her verdict in a Tory Britain more conventional in certain respects about women and hierarchy than their Edwardian forebears, who had accepted mitigation for Kitty Byron when the waif-like Kitty killed her upper-class lover.

  Called in to assess Ellis, psychiatrists for both defence and Crown found no evidence of insanity, even though she was clearly confused in the way Marie Biere had initially been, and all but mute. When, after the trial, the judge Mr Justice Havers wrote to the Home Secretary stating that Ellis’s was definitely a crime passionnel and recommended a reprieve, it was refused. Nor did a petition signed by some fifty thousand people help. The public outcry over Ruth Ellis’s hanging – undoubtedly in part also a recognition of the extra-legal elements that had played into the trial – eventually contributed to the abolition of the death penalty in 1964.

  Harry Thaw, it could be said, ‘got away with murder’ because of his wealth and because his crime, however mad, played into his time’s ideals of heroic masculinity riding to the rescue of dishonoured child-maidens. His brutal perversions were largely ignored and interpreted as such only by a few of the trial’s psychiatrists. It took a second trial – and further testimony concerning his sadistic acts – to convince a jury of just how dangerous Thaw was. The American prostitute and so-called ‘serial killer’ Aileen Wuornos had none of Thaw’s cultural or financial capital on her side: working-class, lesbian, her pleas that she had been defending herself against the violent aggression of (middle-class) men didn’t sway the jury, while the press preferred to think of her as a transgressive monster. Her sentence was harsher than those meted out to far more sadistic male serial killers. Bar such extreme cases, however, ‘criminal’ women are still more routinely committed to psychiatric hospitals than men and verdicts of diminished responsibility more liberally given to women. This may be a reflection of the fact that women more rarely appear before the courts in homicide cases. The ratio in the UK is 9:1.

  As for the mind doctors, many of the hopes of the 1926 ‘Credo’ that William A. White so approved have largely been realized. Since the early shaping cases described in this book, the forensic psychiatrist has become a familiar and often indispensible figure in courts of law, in carrying out assessments of mental states both behind the scenes and, as an expert witness, on the public stage of the trial itself. Indeed, in our risk-averse present, so alert to ‘dangerous individuals’, forensic psychiatry is one of the growth areas in the mental health profession: with the closing of the asylums through the 1970s and 1980s in many Western countries, high-security psychiatric establishments or correctional facilities are now the largest ‘asylums’ left. Doubling as the policeman who patrols the borders of sanity as well as chief physician to the psychotic is an uneasy role, and one that has been open to criticism from too many sides to detail here. But in our anxious age, protecting society from potentially dangerous individuals has become one of the key disciplinary tasks of the forensic psychiatrist – even though cars kill far more people than do the mad.

  On the more doctorly side, the mind medics now also engage with the courts in what has become known since 1996, particularly in the US, as therapeutic jurisprudence – a term coined by David Wexler and Bruce Winick to denote ways in which ‘the knowledge, theories and insights of the mental health and related disciplines can help shape the development of the law’. In the European social democracies such a partnership has been in place longer: Holland, Sweden, Norway and Germany have strong traditions of therapeutic jurisprudence, though its effectiveness
is ever related to the kinds of programmes (and finances) that are put in place.

  Collaborative thinking between mental health and legal professionals grew out of the family courts, where antagonistic legal procedures made victims of the children of divorcing couples. Anna Freud was a pioneer in this area. Working ‘in the best interests of the child’, she joined forces in the last decade of her life with two Yale-based American lawyers, Albert Solnit and Joseph Goldstein, to develop ideas about child custody and protection which have since fed into jurisprudence. Now, in various jurisdictions, specialized courts which recognize therapeutic issues (for both perpetrators and victims) also exist for drug offences, domestic violence and sex crimes: judges can order (or offer) treatment as part of a community or custodial sentence. The recognition that many offenders need help beyond what any prison term can offer, if their crime is not to be repeated on release, is hardly new to the twenty-first century. But via the swings and roundabouts that mark the relationship between the law and the mental health professionals, we seem – now that prisons are full to bursting – to have entered a moment when therapeutic hopes for offenders are once again high. As this book goes to press, the UK government has announced a pilot scheme which will place mental health professionals in police stations as well as courts – an attempt to cut reoffending rates by intervening early with those whose many ‘crimes’ are triggered by mental problems. Even psychoanalytically-informed therapeutic work, which demands more than short-term behavioural adjustments, is undertaken in centres such as London’s Portman Clinic.