Trials of Passion (48 page)

Mrs Thaw stood down without cross-examination because Jerome had permission from Littleton to read before the court her affidavit for the
first
trial. This stated that there ‘were no family secrets to be hidden' and that there had been no sign of insanity or epilepsy for four generations in Harry K. Thaw's direct line of descent. Evidently, definitions as well as declarations of madness were a moveable feast.

It is tempting to speculate, however, on the key to Harry's character that Mrs Thaw's new trial narrative provides. Her stress here on her suffering nervous system, on Harry as a swift replacement child after the death of her firstborn, on his succession of early illnesses, finds parallels in the troubled infancy of other ‘deviant' subjects. The presence of a dead and much mourned baby between mother and Harry may well have contributed to his ever shaky sense of himself. Beneath the image of scion of the millionaire family, there often seems to be little more than a small boy thrashing about in a world he can't quite make sense of. His compulsive and perverse beating of young boys, the forbidden pleasure he takes in it, may well signal a wish to eradicate the ghost infant who had preceded him in his nervous mother's affections.

More witnesses followed, to testify to Harry's insanity. At Claridges in 1899, he had been in so excited a state that a Dr Wells diagnosed subacute mania and had him transferred to a nursing home, where for six days he made preposterous demands. A physician from Paris's Hotel d'Orsay stated that he had attempted suicide by swallowing poison when there with Evelyn Nesbit. A British doctor, in Rome, had diagnosed a case of mild mania.

The vice crusader Anthony Comstock had not been well enough to testify at Thaw's first trial, but this time he appeared. He recounted Harry's coming to his office and detailing the vicious sex life of Stanford White. He had also told Comstock he was being shadowed. Perhaps only this last accounted for the personal blow for Harry from the Comstock he admired: ‘I thought his mind was unbalanced.'

It was Evelyn's testimony that once more drew vast crowds to the courthouse, as well as legions of journalists. It also drew Prosecutor Jerome's most heated cross-examination. The papers, this time, were less sympathetic to Eveyln. She appeared too composed, too strong, no longer the little girl but the contained, confident woman. The press on the whole didn't approve. The
New York Times
stated that
^c
she was flushed of face, but the flush was the mantling of the cheeks of a woman angry at heart and not the flush that comes with a sense of shame'. The first time, the paper reported, she lisped in constant suggestion of childish innocence'. The details were given ‘with a calmness and poise that made them all the more thrilling and horrible'. This time round there was no lisp, the cynical
Times
underscored: ‘she was no longer in the role of a child', even if her attire showed that ‘her feminine heart was still attached to the juvenile in the matter of make-up'.

Perhaps Evelyn really had grown up; perhaps too, she had had her fill of the Thaw family and its mean millionaire ways.

Littleton, intent on proving Harry insane, not a jealous man who had rescued his wife from dishonour, quickly took Evelyn through her testimony. The effect, according to the
Times,
which nonetheless carried the trial on its front page for the first time since its second round had started, was that ‘where women in the courtroom – newspaper women accustomed to the sensational – had bowed their heads and gasped a year ago, they maintained a stolid indifference this time'. Evelyn shed no tears and didn't collapse, and her sexual congress with Stanford White in this current rendition seemed less important than the details of the furnishings in his apartments.

Evelyn stood her ground remarkably well against Jerome's
haranguing objections – so marked that in his summing-up Littleton complained of his attitude of ‘unofficial antipathy' towards her, as if his entire case rested on Evelyn's morality, not on Thaw's sanity. Evelyn herself, in this trial, emphasized the signs of Thaw's madness and the fact that everyone had told her ‘Harry was crazy'. Harry's attempted suicide by overdosing on laudanum in the Hotel d'Orsay was now narrated in detail; as well as a plan that they commit joint suicide at the Waldorf – on the very day when he had made those seventy-five telephone calls.

Jerome's cross-examination began promptly at three, and was intended totally to subvert any possibility of the jury trusting in Evelyn's honesty, or indeed innocence. She was, he set out to prove, a hardened money-grabbing schemer already immersed in vice, whose account of why she had initially refused to marry Harry and what she had told him so as to tip him over the edge was a pack of lies. According to the
New York Times
, he ‘hammered mercilessly on the question of the witness's conception of what was moral in the matter of the relation of the sexes, and quoted from her former testimony that illicit love was ‘indelicate and vulgar'. But Evelyn, the tiny twenty-three-year-old with little education, came back at him with such cool that the
Times
felt impelled to express its admiration: ‘So clear in mind was the witness', so ‘quick of wit', that she declared she knew ‘instinctively that it was not right to marry Harry Thaw'.

Why had she not told the court of Harry's suicide attempt the first time round? Jerome quizzed. ‘Because Mr Delmas said it would make Harry out to be too crazy.' And when Jerome queried her about Barrymore, Thaw's courtship, White's money, the Hummel affidavit, she answered it all with ‘dauntless courage' and a straightforward veracity that turned Jerome's harshness to her favour.

This was Evelyn's finest performance. Perhaps the sheer crush of the public who had pushed or begged their way into the court – bearing personal letters to court officers or pleading varieties of personal reasons to be allowed admittance – had brought her star talents to the forefront. But then, as she admitted in her memoir, she had by
this time learned how to be a witness – and Jerome no longer had the power to frighten her with his bullying tactics. During the recess, according to the
New York Times
, ‘the corridors of the Criminal Court Building on the first floor were overrun by the curious, and many women and boys fought and scrambled for a chance to get a glimpse of the wife of the prisoner'.

42.
Manic-depressive Insanity

Having had more time with Thaw, and perhaps more time to make good their earlier classificatory vagaries, the three defence expert witnesses, Drs Evans, Wagner and Jelliffe, had arrived at a uniform diagnosis for this second trial. They now determined that Thaw suffered from manic-depressive insanity. According to Dr Wagner, this entailed phases of both mania and melancholy in the patient. ‘Suicidal attempts often mark these cases,' he stated, ‘and such habits as the writing of incomplete letters, quick irregular habits of speech, nervousness and restlessness are all characteristic.'

With dark irony, Jerome stated that this ‘manic-depressive insanity' was a new one for him. He had heard of other kinds, but hadn't had time to specialize in that branch, much as he would have liked to. His comment underlined how many different kinds of insanity had already been attributed to the defendant. The doctors were being inordinately inventive on behalf of their client.

In fact, manic-depressive psychosis had recently entered the psychiatric literature, and was soon to acquire a great deal of renown, since it seemed to make sense of a whole series of symptoms and solve certain puzzles. It was the famous German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, who in 1899 had taken the earlier classification of ‘circular insanity', amplified the details, and called the new illness ‘manic-depressive psychosis'. For the sixth and definitive edition of his
Textbook
–which served as an early model for the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, the current bible of the American psychiatric profession – Kraepelin systemized its various characteristics in a copious depiction of what he considered to be an affective, or mood-based, illness.

Kraepelin was well known in the United States. The Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer (1866–1950), for example, was influenced
both by him and – oddly, since in Europe the two were deeply opposed – by Freud. Meyer introduced a Kraepelinian system of detailed history-keeping at the New York Psychiatric Institute, where he began working in 1902. He would become one of Thaw's doctors around 1909. Many other medics travelled to Heidelberg, where Kraepelin worked until 1904, and then to Munich to learn from the great classifier, whose punctiliously kept patient records provided the evidence for generalizing diagnoses.

In a volume that contained his writings on manic-depressive insanity and paranoia, Kraepelin listed many features that Harry K. Thaw shared with his own patients. Amongst these were ‘tattered thoughts', ‘so many thoughts in my head that I can't work', ‘interpolated thoughts' which prevented consistent thinking as well as producing diffuseness in speech, heightened distractibility, rolling of the eyes and speedy, repetitive movement.

Kraepelin's patients were also subject to frequent delusions. In their manic state, like Harry's these might take on a paranoid flavour. They were surrounded by spies or being followed by detectives, despised by their neighbours, mocked, no longer greeted. They found allusions to themselves in the newspapers. They found poison in their coffee or in the washing water. They felt themselves hypnotized or magnetized by another. They spoke of the existence of a conspiracy against them. They experienced delusions of greatness, thought themselves of aristocratic origin and nurtured messianic projects. Some thought they were possessed, like Rockefeller, of vast sums of money, and spent it accordingly. In Harry's case, of course, he did more or less possess vast sums, so his spending didn't attract the police in the first instance. Bouts of fury as well as a marked sexual excitability were all symptomatic; and in the manic state, Kraepelin notes of these patients, they ‘commit all possible acts of debauchery' and never show signs of fatigue. Evelyn's description of Harry in their remote Schloss comes to mind. In the depressive part of the cycle, when the patients are ‘stuporous' and delusion is more difficult to determine, what Kraepelin calls ‘delusional suicide' is often attempted.

It's hardly surprising that District Attorney Jerome had a little trouble with this latest of the defence's diagnostic moves. The pioneering George Robertson, Edinburgh's first professor of psychiatry and editor of the translation of Kraepelin's monograph on manic-depressive insanity, published in 1920, stated in his preface that ‘as true Paranoia has also some affinities to some varieties of Mania, all these forms of insanity seem to merge into one another at their so-called boundaries or limits'. At the various hearings that followed upon Thaw's second trial, paranoia and manic-depressive insanity were often referred to as if they were more or less the same. Perhaps, in this second trial, the defence had agreed on ‘manic-depressive insanity' because it was a diagnosis that could allow improvement. Given that Thaw was far less overtly agitated and visibly deranged at this trial, and indeed somewhat ‘stuporous' or ‘depressed', the current strategy could be said to fit more of the facts. But since the nature of manic- depressive insanity was that it was cyclical and would most probably recur, it also left the court free to make the judgement that it ultimately did.

Jerome didn't bother to call any of his own expert witnesses. Instead, in his summing-up he once more ridiculed the defence's attribution of insanity to Thaw. A good spanking in childhood would have done far more for his fits of temper than the best medical treatment: his teachers hadn't dreamt of thinking young Thaw insane until his mother had suggested it. Nor was there any report of insanity during the seventeen years between childhood and his meeting Evelyn Nesbit. Lawyers, bankers, drinking partners – none were called to testify to any madness on Thaw's part. As for the night of the murder, a man who knew how to grab his coat and go out with his wife, who knew enough to take his revolver with him, who dined and paid for dinner, who could tell a policeman that he had shot Stanford White and ask ‘Is he dead?', who could discriminate between two brands of cigar at the police station ... was not in Jerome's book an insane man.

Then, too, there was the time factor to consider: a period of three
years had elapsed between Thaw hearing Evelyn's narrative about White, and the murder: time enough to go gallivanting around Europe and get married. There was certainly no ground here for the defence's initial ‘brain storm' theory of insanity. Finally, what kind of honourable man is it who shoots the man who purportedly once dishonoured his wife, and then lets the story of his wife's shame be told in open court, lets it go into the records and be spread far and wide by the newspapers – all to save his own miserable life? Perhaps Thaw could have been forgiven if he had ‘killed quick'.

In his directions to the jury, Justice Dowling reminded them of the strictures of the M'Naghten rules: ‘The doctrine that a criminal act may be excused upon the notion of an irresistible impulse to commit it, when the offender has the ability to discover his moral and legal duty in respect to it, has no place in the law. But it is a defense if his mind is in such an unsound state that reason and judgment are overwhelmed, and he acted from an uncontrollable impulse and as an involuntary agent.' Justice Dowling was very careful to underline that ‘Heat of passion and feeling produced by motives of anger, hatred or revenge, are not insanity. The law holds the doer of the act under such conditions responsible for the crime, because a large share of homicides committed are occasioned by just such motives as these.'

The jury retired at 11.45 on the morning of Friday 1 February and only reached their verdict on the Saturday afternoon. They determined that Harry K. Thaw was not guilty ‘on the ground of his insanity at the time of the commission of the act'.