Trials of Passion (49 page)

The broad smile that came over Thaw's face, probably because he assumed he had not only been saved from the electric chair, but also granted his freedom, was soon wiped. The judge read a memorandum he had evidently prepared in advance. Since, according to the testimony on manic-depressive insanity, there seemed to be no suggested possibility of cure; since it was reasonably certain that the illness recurred, and at unforeseen times; since there was ‘danger of assaults or murders being committed by the person who is troubled or afflicted by this ailment'; and since, in the ‘depressive state of this form of the
malady, it appears from the testimony that there is danger that a person so afflicted will commit suicide', the defendant was dangerous to public safety.

The court therefore ordered that Harry K. Thaw be detained in safe custody and sent to the Matteawan State Hospital for the criminally insane in upstate New York.

Within minutes of his verdict being announced, Thaw asked his defence lawyer, Martin Littleton, to come and see him in the New York County sheriffs office, where he was being held until the journey upstate.

An exhausted Evelyn was lying on a sofa when Littleton arrived. Harry was smiling and impatient. Despite it being a Saturday afternoon, he ordered Littleton to proceed immediately to the Supreme Court to apply for a writ of habeas corpus. Littleton agreed, but he and his defence team second, Daniel O'Reilly, had already established that the court order had to be accepted for the time being.

It was O'Reilly who accompanied Thaw on the 4.39 train that would take them to Fishkill in upstate New York. Reporters teemed and the crowd cheered as Thaw got into the waiting car, where a journalist interviewed him and had him reminisce about the murder. Visibly happy at the attention, Thaw was at his joking best, though one of his jokes entailed taking back the cash fee he had paid O'Reilly while still in the sheriff's office.

Evelyn joined them on the train. At Fishkill more reporters were waiting, together with a crowd of local onlookers. Thaw's group ate and drank at the town hotel. Just after nine, the deputy sheriff indicated that it was already past lights-out time at the Matteawan Hospital. Reluctantly, but smiling for the photographers, Harry left to make the thirty-five-minute drive to what – despite his family's, and indeed at first Evelyn's, and certainly his own best efforts – would be his new home for years to come.

The Matteawan Hospital in Beacon had been established in 1892 to replace an earlier asylum at Auburn. This had housed criminals along
with ordinary inmates, and had exceeded its capacity. Purpose-built, readily reachable by train, with ‘an abundance of light and ventilation
⁵
and on a site that offered some 246 acres of ‘good tillable land, pure water and pleasant scenery between the Hudson River and the Fishkill mountains', Matteawan was intended as a model correctional asylum, at first housing some 550 inmates. There was a work programme for those who could cook, farm or make clothing or rugs; twice-daily outdoor exercise, a variety of sporting activities, weekly movies, and special entertainments for holidays. By 1889, the hospital had grown beyond its bed space, and a new prison mental hospital was built for those who had gone mad while serving their sentences.

Lore has it that with his millions, Harry could afford his own room, special food, drink and cigars, as well as evening drives with warders along a road where he became well known – or so Evelyn recounted in her memoir. According to her, the private room meant that she and Harry also engaged in occasional marital activity. So she contended, to the accumulated Thaw family rage, when a son was born in October 1910.

43.
Fighting Lunacy

In what became a precedent, replayed by many in the course of the century (including most recently in Britain in the shape of the moors murderer, Ian Brady), Harry K. Thaw battled for years with the courts against his ‘insanity' ruling. He had no intention of extending his confinement beyond the bare minimum. But the superintendent at Matteawan and the State Board of Lunacy took a different view. They publicly opposed any notion that he was now cured of his insanity. His trial lawyers seemed to agree, while DA Jerome also made it known that he would oppose any application for a writ of habeas corpus. Only Evelyn, who took a room in Fishkill, publicly stated that her husband didn't belong ‘with a group of hopelessly insane creatures'.

Three months after his institutionalization, Thaw with his mother's help had a new team of lawyers in place. Over the next seven years they would repeatedly file for habeas corpus in the hope that one of the various judges would deem Harry sane. Since his trial verdict had been ‘not guilty on grounds of insanity', once he was determined sane his liberty would be returned to him. Failing that reversal, Thaw's only possibility of obtaining his freedom was somehow to make his way outside the state of New York: insanity was not an extraditable offence within American states.

Habeas corpus (or
habeas corpus ad subjiciendum
– literally, ‘you hold the person or body subject') is an order or writ from a superior (in this case, federal) to an inferior court (state), requiring the person they are holding to be brought to the higher court in order to examine whether he or she is being legally detained. Some attribute its spirit, if not its exact fact, to Magna Carta: habeas corpus acts as a safeguard of individual liberty from dictatorial arrest without trial. The great English jurist William Blackstone states that the procedure was
codified in 1679: it allowed the subject, a member of the family or an advocate to petition for a writ of habeas corpus to be issued by a superior court, commanding the addressee (often a lower court, or a sheriff) to produce the subject before a court of law. This ‘most celebrated of English writs', as Blacks tone called it, is effectively a civil action against a jailer. In America, it tests whether the confinement of the subject is a violation of his constitutional rights.

Appealing to the Supreme Court for writs of habeas corpus, followed by hearings, is an expensive business. But the Thaw family was as ever prepared to pay (or promise to pay) anyone and everyone's expenses – except Evelyn's.

Insane, and therefore legally incompetent, Harry was no longer in charge of his own finances. This left Evelyn, whose usefulness had by now greatly diminished, at the mercy of her mother-in-law, who had long wanted her son to divorce the ‘chorus girl'. The dowager had had Evelyn followed by detectives, who kept a record of her late-night activities. Payments due to her as a wife arrived only erratically. She was ever short of funds; and her loyalty to Harry, more or less intact for the first period of his confinement, eventually reached breaking point. Not only were his moods increasingly sullen and violent, but there seemed to be diminishing hopes of any financial settlement. Following threats he had made on her life, Evelyn began to testify to his insanity and filed for an annulment of their marriage. Like so many other wives disapproved of by rich mothers-in-law, she had lost out to the family. Though rumours had it that her initial loyalty to Thaw had been bought at great expense, her own story, and indeed her return to her working career soon after Harry's incarceration, seem to prove otherwise. The Thaw family millions never made their way into Evelyn Nesbit's pockets.

At the first appeal hearing at the New York Supreme Court at White Plains in May 1908, the evidence of the Thaw trial was rehashed, and expert psychiatrists battled it out once more. The judge found Thaw was not sane, and refused to grant him his freedom. The form of
insanity from which he suffered could recur, the experts agreed. The safety of the public is better insured by his remaining in custody and under observation,' the judge stated, ‘until he has recovered or until such time as it shall be reasonably certain that there is no danger of a recurring attack of the delusion or whatever it may be.' Proving sanity in civil courts can be as difficult as proving insanity in criminal courts.

No longer the district attorney who had been elected by a landslide, William Travers Jerome, the man who had done more than anyone in New York to make the public appreciate the need ‘of a fearless and incorruptible administration of the law', was now state prosecutor. He would not or could not let Thaw, the millionaire who had murdered the great and now rarely mentioned Stanford White, go. He was adamant that Thaw should not be allowed to buy his freedom: ‘It has been said that in the end, the Thaw money would defeat the ends of justice,' he stated. ‘But wherever this case has gone, and where it has rested, it has left a trail of ignominy, disgrace, filth and scandal behind it... The state of New York will not permit justice to be defeated by the corrupt use of money if it can prevent it.'

Jerome's tactic was repeatedly to show not only that Harry was still insane, but that he was debauched and depraved and that the family as a whole was corrupt. In both the 1909 and the 1912 hearings the state called a Mrs Merrill, mentioned earlier, who in fear and trembling reported on Thaw's sadistic activities. She testified that he had kept rooms, first at 46th Street, then at 54th Street, under the name of ‘Professor Reid'. Here came young girls he had falsely advertised for, who were subjected to terrible whippings. Some two hundred of them. One day, when she came running at their screams, Mrs Merrill had found two of them - one bleeding on the floor, the other at the mercy of his blows. She claimed that Thaw's eyes were protruding from his head and he looked like a madman. She got the girls out, but was terrified Thaw would kill her. This narrative of violence apart, Jerome made it equally clear that Mrs Merrill had been sought out by the Thaw family's agents prior to earlier trials, and had been subjected to threats and bribes and kept from court.

At the June 1909 hearing, it was also shown that Evelyn had received an extra five hundred dollars in her expenses envelope just before the trial, in order to keep her sweet and on Thaw's side. Many other, hostile, witnesses had been menaced and bought off. One Thaw lawyer turned prosecution witness, because he hadn't been paid all he had been promised. If Jerome didn't directly charge the expert psychiatric witnesses with foul practice and offering diagnoses for sale, he nonetheless had them confessing to lucrative links with Thaw family friends. From sometime in 1909, Adolf Meyer – soon to head the Johns Hopkins psychiatry department and the famously progressive Phipps Clinic – acted as one of Thaw's consulting psychiatrists. According to the
New York Times
of 27 July 1912, his performance in court did little to advance his reputation, since Jerome elicited from him the damning information that he was ‘under engagement to take a position in an institution founded by friends of Harry K. Thaw'.

The Thaw millions seemed to insinuate their way into most minds. This was perhaps an unclassified madness all of its own.

Harry Thaw had to appear on the stand at all three of his habeas corpus hearings. He was plausible enough to begin with, though Jerome would eventually rattle him. Of the second hearing before Justice Mills in June 1909, the
New York Times
commented that many thought he would win his case, so ‘cool and collected', ‘quick and confident', was he for many hours when questioned by the former district attorney. Perhaps his demeanour was helped by the fact that at the local jail he was given a corridor of thirteen cells to himself; his suite was comfortably furnished and his meals sent in from the local hotel. Mother Thaw had evidently been at work for her dear son. Indeed, his treatment was so grand that the secretary of the State Prison Commission protested.

Defending himself against Jerome's attempt to prove him mad because he had gone to see a hypnotist in France, Harry explained to the court that he had done so because he thought White was hypnotizing his wife, and he wanted to learn more about how the procedure
worked. To probe his grasp on sanity, the judge himself asked Thaw about the visible signs of his ‘exaggerated ego' – part of the diagnoses both of manic-depressive insanity and of paranoia. Had he not sought repeatedly to correct his very expensive lawyers? Did he think he knew more than everyone? Harry struggled with the response.

Sanity is a very difficult thing to possess, even for those with a greater grip on it than Harry K. Thaw.

More grilling led Thaw to expose his own continuing sense of the justice of his killing Stanford White: whether this was a sign of ongoing madness, or pointed to the fact that there had never been any, was something that it was too late to posit. On a long hot afternoon, and once more confronted by the rapid fire of Jerome's questions, Thaw finally lost his mask of composure, grew angry, tapped the floor nervously with his foot, and stumbled in his responses. His lips twitched so badly, he hid them behind a bunched handkerchief.

His mother's personal counsel, Clifford W. Hartridge, was appearing under subpoena. Notes and letters detailing his communication with the family had been lodged with the court. Hartridge revealed how he had been asked to pay off Mrs Merrill, the witness to Thaw's sadistic excess. Though the court was also told Hartridge was in the process of suing Mrs William Thaw for not having paid his full expenses, that did little to detract from the light he shed on Harry's violence.

Thaw was called back to the stand and interrogated by Jerome as to the veracity in his opinion of the fourteen psychiatrists who deemed him insane during his trial, and the fourteen who appeared at his first habeas corpus proceedings and swore that he had been crazy when he killed White. Thaw replied that he hadn't been insane in the way Jerome now meant: he had had a ‘brain storm'. This was a temporary mental derangement, but not evidence of a diseased mind. He disagreed with all the ‘bug doctors' who thought the latter. He nervously intimated that some of the doctors had been misinformed or indeed led astray by Jerome's office. The more Thaw talked, the more his paranoid delusions were again exposed.