The Murder of Stanford White

Stanford White — the most celebrated American architect of the Gilded Age, co-founder of the influential firm McKim, Mead & White, and designer of landmark buildings including Madison Square Garden and the Washington Square Arch — was shot dead on June 25, 1906, at the open-air rooftop theater atop the very building he had designed: Madison Square Garden in New York City. The killer was Harry Kendall Thaw, a wealthy and mentally unstable Pittsburgh heir who walked up to White during a musical performance, drew a pistol, and shot him three times in the face at point-blank range. Thaw then reportedly said, "He ruined my wife." The woman in question was Evelyn Nesbit, a beautiful chorus girl and artist's model who had been White's teenage mistress before marrying Thaw.

Nesbit's history was the explosive centerpiece of what became known as "the Trial of the Century" — a designation later applied to numerous other cases but first earned here. At trial, Thaw's defense argued that he had acted in a "temporary fit of insanity" upon learning the full details of White's earlier sexual relationship with Nesbit, which Nesbit testified had begun when she was sixteen and included drugging and assault. Thaw's extremely wealthy mother spent a fortune on his defense and mounted an elaborate public relations campaign portraying White as a predator and Thaw as an avenging defender of womanhood.

The first trial ended in a hung jury. The second trial, in 1908, resulted in Thaw being found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to an asylum for the criminally insane in Matteawan, New York. He escaped in 1913, was caught in Canada, extradited, and eventually declared sane and released in 1915 — nine years after killing White, having served no prison time. He was subsequently tried on criminal charges in a separate assault case and was again found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Stanford White's reputation was damaged by the revelations of his private life, though architectural scholars have worked to restore appreciation for his extraordinary body of work. The case became one of the most famous in American legal history, a perfect encapsulation of Gilded Age excess, the sexual double standards applied to men and women, the power of wealth to manipulate criminal proceedings, and the lurid fascination of the American press with celebrity scandal. E.L. Doctorow dramatized the case in his 1975 novel "Ragtime," which brought it to new audiences a century later.