Trials of Passion (43 page)

At the time that he attended the Thaw trial, White was professor of nervous and mental diseases at Georgetown University and also held a chair at George Washington University, all the while acting as superintendent of the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington. His much reprinted
Outlines of Psychiatry
, published in the year of the trial, became a classic of the field, influencing a generation of practitioners. So, too, did the text he co-authored with his colleague Ely Jelliffe,
Diseases of the Nervous System
(1915). Ely Jelliffe was an energetic impresario and publisher, who for forty years edited the influential
Journal of Mental and Nervous Diseases.

At the time of the trial Graeme M. Hammond was the best-known of these many neurologists and alienists, though perhaps as much for his sporting as for his medical feats. His father, William, had been the US army's Surgeon General during the Civil War and as a boy, Hammond had accompanied Lincoln on visits to the Front. Later, during the Great War, Graeme Hammond worked with soldiers suffering from shell shock.

The prosecution's experts were scarcely less illustrious. Carlos F. MacDonald, who had seen Thaw just after his arrest, was Bellevue Hospital's emeritus professor of mental diseases and medical jurisprudence. Just six years before, in 1901, he had served the defence team working for Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist assassin of President William McKinley – ‘the president of money kings and trust magnates', as Emma Goldman called him. Czolgosz had refused to speak either to MacDonald or indeed to his defence lawyers, and the attempt to plead insanity in his case failed utterly. MacDonald determined him sane – appropriately, since it's said Czolgosz's last words, before he was electrocuted, reiterated his political beliefs: ‘I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people – the good working people.' Dr MacDonald had also served as consultant to several hospitals and had headed the New York State Commission in Lunacy, set up in 1899 to improve the treatment of the mad in the state of New York. He was to become president of the APA in 1913.

On the witness stand at Thaw's trial, it was two other physicians who would dominate expert witness for the prosecution. Austin Flint (1836-1915), an expert in physiology, was an eminent and much published medic who had worked on the liver and the nervous system, though not all that much in the field of insanity. The younger man, William Hirsch, was a consultant at the Manhattan State Hospital and had links with Cornell University Medical School, where both men had been professors. Hirsch is also listed in the 1906 records of the American Medico-Legal Association, to which he belonged, as ‘Neurologist to the German Poliklinik', a pioneering outpatients' facility.

In an 1896 issue
of Popular Science Monthly,
Hirsch argues against the scaremongers who see in the rise of statistics on mental degeneration proof of ‘Epidemics of Hysteria' and neurasthenia. We just count better than we used to, he argues; plus more people, and in particular women, come more often to doctors. On the way Hirsch shows himself to be well acquainted with continental literature on the subject. In 1912, he published a book called
Religion and Civilization.
This sets out to argue that from the vantage point of science, delusion is at the heart of monotheism, while paranoia with its persecutory cast and its delusions of grandeur could explain many of the characters in the Old and New Testaments. Apart from their delusions, Hirsch points out, paranoiacs ‘may appear perfectly normal', and only some suffer from hallucinations – that is, perceive the products of their morbid imaginations with their senses.

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:

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?'