by Simon Baatz
“But I’m still married to him, still married to him. These people already hate me, and if I answer he will hate me always. I don’t want to answer. I’d rather not. Is there no way out of it?”
“You must answer.”
She had no choice; she could not evade the question. Evelyn, now resigned to her fate, turned to face the deputy attorney general with a defiant expression on her face, resolute in her determination not to acknowledge the hostile looks of Harry Thaw’s mother and sisters.
“Yes, he did,” Evelyn testified, finally. “He said: ‘When I get out of here, I suppose I shall have to kill you, next.’”21
Harry Thaw, speaking afterward to a reporter from the New York World, denied that he had threatened Evelyn. His attorneys, Thaw claimed, would show that Evelyn had written to him affectionately long after her visit to the asylum. He had continued to support his wife, providing her with a generous allowance, but it was never enough, and Evelyn constantly clamored for more money.
“That was always the cry,” Thaw complained ruefully, “more money; more money! If we gave her a million to-morrow she’d be back for more in a week.” Evelyn had no self-restraint, no ability to temper her extravagance; she often purchased the most fanciful items on a whim. “Evelyn will be taken care of,” Thaw promised. “She will receive regularly her $70 every week and her $200 every month, no matter what happens. She cannot say she has been abandoned or thrown on her own resources.”22
Other witnesses testified during the hearing, some for the state, some for Harry Thaw, some to say that Thaw was still insane, others to claim that he was rational. The psychiatrists repeated their testimony, explaining to the court how the available evidence supported their various diagnoses. Travers Jerome played his customary role, cross-examining the witnesses and reading into the record the transcript of the testimony given at the second trial, testimony that Thaw had been irrational almost since birth.23
It had all become so painfully familiar to those observers who had followed the twists and turns of the Thaw saga over the previous three years. The same evidence had been presented so many times. Was there anything that had not already been said so often before?
There was nothing to indicate, on the morning of July 28, that the testimony that day would be any different. The attorneys for the state chatted together, waiting for the judge to take his place on the bench; Harry Thaw, on the other side of the aisle, whispered some remarks to his lawyer, Charles Morschauser, turning occasionally to say a few words to his mother, Mary, and his sisters, Margaret and Alice; and the spectators, scattered haphazardly around the half-empty courtroom, waited in drowsy expectation. It promised to be another hot July day, sticky with humidity, and the bailiffs had opened the windows wide to allow a faint breeze to blow across the room.
The first witness appeared, taking the oath before sitting in the high-backed chair at the front of the courtroom, and the New York reporters exchanged quizzical glances, as if to demand her identity. She was between forty and forty-five years old, a short, stocky woman, her raven-black hair tucked unobtrusively beneath her bonnet, her coal-black eyes darting nervously around the courtroom. She had been attractive twenty years before, but she was now obese; her round face had a fleshy appearance, and her flabby cheeks quivered slightly as she spoke. She wore a dark-blue skirt and a blue jacket; there was a white handkerchief in her left hand, gripped tightly between her pudgy fingers; and her jewelry—silver bracelets on each wrist, diamond rings on her fingers—sparkled in the morning sunlight.
Harry Thaw stared in amazement at her unexpected appearance. His face flushed crimson red, and he quickly bowed his head, looking neither right nor left, his gaze fixed on the documents lying before him on the defense table. His attorney whispered in his ear, asking him to identify the witness, but Thaw remained mute, struck dumb with embarrassment.
Few spectators noticed that Jerome had quietly taken a leather satchel from a chair by his side. He removed a whip from the satchel, placing it on the table in front of him, before returning the empty satchel to the chair. The district attorney remained motionless, looking down at the whip for a few seconds before speaking to his witness.
“Do you know Harry K. Thaw?” Jerome asked, his rasping voice suddenly breaking the silence of the courtroom.
“I certainly do,” Susan Merrill replied cheerfully. She smiled as she looked across the room at Thaw, almost as if she were expecting him to acknowledge her presence, but Thaw continued to stare down at the documents before him.
“Tell us how you came to know him,” Jerome continued.
“When I took a place of my own, at No. 241 West Forty-third street, he engaged rooms from me.”
“For what did he say he wanted the rooms?”
“He said he wanted them for the theatrical business. That was in the fall of 1903. He said he was in the business of engaging and placing young ladies from all over the country on the stage. He came there mostly in the daytime to meet the young ladies who called for him.” The girls, Merrill continued, had come to the house in expectation of an audition for a position in the theater; but Thaw had straightaway taken each girl to an upstairs room at the rear of the building.
“Now, Mrs. Merrill.” Jerome seemed suddenly solemn, as if to impress upon his witness the gravity of the occasion. “Did you ever notice any unusual occurrences in those rooms which Mr. Thaw rented from you?”
Susan Merrill hesitated, turning in her chair to face the judge. “Must I tell everything?” she appealed.
“Yes,” Isaac Mills replied abruptly, “everything.”
“I did see many unusual things there; many very strange things. Mr. Thaw had a great many visitors, a great many. Most of them were young women, very young girls, not over fifteen or sixteen years old, many of them, though some were older.
“There is one incident I recall very well. A very young girl had gone up to Mr. Thaw’s rooms and soon I heard a great hollering from there. I rushed up and went through the parlor into the bedroom and found he had been beating her. She had great welts on her limbs and neck and was crying out that he was trying to murder her.”
“What was his position when you entered the room?”
“Why, he was bending over her with a whip in the act of striking her. He put down the whip when he saw me and went out.”
“Is this the whip?” Jerome asked. He showed her the whip, allowing her to take it in her hands. It was a sidesaddle horsewhip, about three feet long, with a whalebone stock and an ivory grip inlaid with gold filigree.
“Yes, that is the whip,” she replied. “At least that’s one of his whips. He had three or four different kinds.
“I heard the screaming and found him just in the act of striking her with the whip. When I went in there was a lot of fussing and she cried a lot, and then when he was gone I saw the whip on the table.”
She had comforted the girl before returning downstairs. Thaw was still in the house, standing in the parlor, smoking a cigar, listening as the girl upstairs continued to cry and sob. Merrill had ordered Thaw to leave her house, berating him, demanding to know why he had beaten the girl. He had answered her defiantly, explaining that the girl had been truculent in her manner, saying that he had tried to teach her how to behave.
Thaw called again at the house a few days later, offering to pay compensation to the girl for her injuries and promising that the episode would not recur. Susan Merrill, according to her testimony, relented, allowing Thaw again to have rooms in the house; but she caught Thaw a second time in the act of striking a young girl.
“The very same thing,” Merrill said, “happened again in a day or two, over and over again.”
“How often,” Jerome asked, “did you actually see him strike girls with a whip?”
“Well, three different girls on different occasions.”
“What did he ever tell you about his reasons for whipping these girls?”
“He answered me that they’d been bad girls, that they we
ren’t smart and he’d had to beat them to teach them something…. He would say he couldn’t make the girls learn stage work properly without he got angry with them and whipped them.”24
Thaw returned to the house many times, each time attacking some unsuspecting victim. Merrill remonstrated with Thaw, and he would invariably express regret, promising each time that he would never again attack anyone.
Travers Jerome seemed content to end his direct examination, indicating to the judge that he had no further questions. Susan Merrill, despite her initial anxiety, had been an excellent witness, providing detailed descriptions of Thaw’s behavior at her house. Thaw had always dismissed the gossip that he whipped young girls as malicious invention, fabricated for the purpose of blackmail, but now, for the first time, a witness had testified under oath that she had seen Thaw in the act of striking a girl. Thaw’s attorneys did their best to discredit her testimony on cross-examination, attempting to expose contradictions in her account, but Jerome had taken them by surprise and there was little they could do.
Charles Morschauser reminded Merrill that she claimed to have been horrified by Thaw’s violent behavior—yet she had permitted him to return to her house many times. Why had she allowed Thaw to rent rooms when she had repeatedly witnessed his attacks on the girls?
“Why did you keep him with all these scenes going?”
“He always promised to be good,” Merrill replied. She glanced angrily at Thaw as she explained that he had threatened her if she ever reported him to the authorities. “If you want to know, he told me he’d kill me.”
Thaw had paid the girls for their silence, bringing Merrill thousands of dollars to distribute to his victims. After his arrest in 1906, while he was in the Tombs, he had fretted that the girls would testify against him. Thaw’s lawyers at the time, Russell Peabody and Clifford Hartridge, had often come to her house to give her money for the girls.
“It went for their expenses and to keep them silent,” she added.
“How much?” Morschauser demanded.
“Oh, it was vast sums, vast sums of money,” Merrill replied airily, giving a sweeping motion with her hand as if to indicate the sacks of money that Thaw had provided. “It was always cash, always cash; money, money, money.” She looked around the courtroom and her gaze fell on Mary Thaw, sitting bolt upright, her face pale, her lips pursed with anger; and Susan Merrill, contemplating that the matriarch had unknowingly provided the money for her son, gave a short, sardonic laugh.
One girl, she remembered, had received $7,000 for her trouble. There had been many girls, perhaps as many as two hundred in the years since Thaw first rented rooms from her, and all of them had received similar sums.
“Any receipts?”
“No, indeed.” Merrill smiled. “No receipt asked or needed, one way or the other.”
“Recall any other sums you paid out?”
“Yes, there was two little girls that came from Atlanta, Ga., to see Thaw. I gave them $3000 or $4000. These two were very young girls, I recall.”25
The hearing lasted almost two more weeks, until August 8, but no other witness could compete for dramatic effect with Susan Merrill. Harry Thaw issued a statement to the press denouncing her testimony as perjury, saying that such stories were attempts to extort money from his family, but his lawyers were unable to produce any evidence that Susan Merrill had ever attempted to blackmail Thaw.
Merrill’s testimony served not only to blacken Thaw’s character but also to remind the reporters that Jerome had previously introduced an affidavit, allegedly signed by Evelyn Nesbit, stating that Thaw had whipped her to coerce her to testify that Stanford White had raped her. Evelyn had denied that she signed the affidavit; but could she have been lying on the witness stand to save her husband from the electric chair? Was her subsequent account, that White had drugged and raped her, false, an elaborate fiction invented to protect Harry Thaw?
Amos Baker, the chief physician at Matteawan, testified on Tuesday, August 3, saying that he had observed Thaw carefully during his confinement, taking detailed notes on his deportment and behavior since he had first arrived at the asylum. Thaw had often appeared restless and uneasy; his memory was defective, his intelligence below normal, and his judgment faulty; he was careless about his appearance, leaving his shoes unlaced and his hair unkempt; and he had gained weight, as much as fifteen pounds, since his committal. Thaw habitually responded to requests from the medical staff with insolence, refusing to submit to any physical examinations, and he frequently upbraided the other patients, calling them idiots and donkeys.26
Isaac Mills scribbled notes as Baker continued to talk, only occasionally glancing at the witness. Baker, having concluded his testimony, was about to step away but the judge stopped him, indicating that he wished to ask him some questions.
“I consider you a very important witness,” Mills began. “You are a public official, charged with the administration of public affairs in a just and equitable manner…. You have had full charge and care of Harry K. Thaw, is not that so?”
“Yes, sir; I have,” Baker replied.
“Do you take the position after your observation of Mr. Thaw,” Mills said, leaning forward slightly, adjusting his eyeglasses as he spoke, “that he is insane or that he is not?”
Thaw had been at Matteawan nearly seventeen months, Baker replied, but there had been no improvement in his condition. “My position is that this man is insane.”
“Do you consider that his enlargement would be a menace to the public peace and safety?”
“Yes, sir; I do.”
“Thank you. That is all.”27
The evidence, Isaac Mills announced in his verdict on August 12, 1909, led inexorably to the conclusion that Harry Thaw was insane. Susan Merrill’s testimony, that Thaw had used her apartments to violently assault young girls, was credible. Thaw’s accusations against Stanford White, the judge declared, were delusions that existed only in his imagination, delusions that he had employed to justify the murder of the architect. Baker, moreover, had been emphatic in his warning that Thaw would again commit acts of violence if he were released.
“The Court is disposed to pay great respect to the opinion of the hospital authorities,” Mills read in his decision, denying the writ of habeas corpus. “All such authorities are public officers, with no conceivable motive except to do their duty…. Dr. Baker has been entirely frank and sincere in his conduct and testimony…. He is clearly of the opinion that the prisoner is now insane to the degree that his discharge would be dangerous. The enlargement of Harry K. Thaw,” Mills concluded, “would be dangerous to the public peace and safety and therefore cannot be permitted…. The writ therefore must be dismissed upon the merits.”28
It was a bitterly disappointing verdict. Mary Thaw had expected to win her son’s freedom, but the hospital administration had opposed the writ. The superintendent, Robert Lamb, had sent his chief medical officer, Amos Baker, to testify that Thaw would be a danger to the public, and Baker had provided a wealth of detail to convince the judge that Thaw was insane. Lamb had refused to sign a certificate of recovery, and he appeared resolute in his determination to keep Harry Thaw at Matteawan.
It was necessary, Mary Thaw now realized, to somehow remove Lamb from his position as asylum superintendent, to replace him with someone more malleable, someone who would listen to her entreaties; but how could she accomplish such a seemingly impossible task?
The firemen arrived shortly after midnight on January 13, 1910, a few minutes after receiving the alarm, and quickly extinguished the flames. The fire had spread from a ground-floor apartment to the second story, but there had been remarkably little damage to the structure, an apartment house at 248 Seventh Avenue in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. There had been no injuries and there was no obvious cause for the blaze; the fire marshal, Thomas Patrick Brophy, wrote in his report later that night that the fire had started in a coal bin at the front of the house.
The fire, a minor epis
ode in the daily rhythm of the city, was soon forgotten until, five weeks later, on February 22, an unemployed copywriter, Norman Lees, entered police headquarters on State Street, saying that he had set the blaze that night. His conscience had been bothering him, Lees claimed, and he needed to make a full confession.
No one at the police station knew anything about a fire on Seventh Avenue, but Lees, thirty-seven years old, a recent immigrant from Britain, seemed strangely insistent that he had set it and appeared almost relieved when the desk sergeant eventually arrested him. Later that year Lees appeared in court on a charge of arson in the first degree, and his lawyer, saying that Lees was irrational, asked the jury to accept a plea of not guilty on the grounds of insanity. Lees, disheveled and unkempt, frequently muttering to himself, often staring vacantly into space, seemed unable to recognize the gravity of his situation, and the magistrate, James Tighe, committed Lees to the Matteawan asylum.29
Lees remained at Matteawan for five months, winning his freedom in August 1910 on a writ of habeas corpus. He met with Mary Thaw a few days after his release, telling her that the scheme had worked as she had anticipated. He had had access to many inmates, even those in the women’s wards; he had closely observed the attendants and their interactions with the patients; and he had kept detailed notes on every aspect of daily life in the asylum. There was enough material in his notes, Lees claimed, to condemn Robert Lamb as a superintendent who tolerated violence and abuse against the patients in his care.
Later that year several inmates, all claiming to be sane, applied for writs of habeas corpus. Norman Lees was their sponsor, arranging for lawyers to represent each patient, contacting relatives, making sure that the newspapers had sufficient information to report on each case.
Dora Schwam, an orphan, had first come into the care of the state after the death of her mother in 1906. The authorities had sent Schwam, then thirteen, to a reformatory, the Training School for Girls, but she had been a disruptive presence, swearing and cursing at the teachers, fighting with the other girls, even attempting on one occasion to escape. She had remained at the reformatory until February 1910, when the principal of the school arranged her transfer to the Matteawan State Hospital. It was a puzzling decision: Dora Schwam had committed no crime, and there was no evidence that she was insane, yet she now languished in a hospital for the criminal insane.
