Evelyn Nesbit - Biography

Ms. Nesbit, artists' model and chorus girl, was at the heart of what at the time was known as the Crime of the Century. Her abusive husband, Pittsburgh million-heir Harry Thaw, murdered 52-year old architect and socialite Stanford White (of the firm McKim, Mead, and White), who had taken advantage of a sixteen-year old Evelyn and subsequently become her lover a couple of years before Thaw and she married. Harry Thaw's mother quickly financed propaganda, even a film, to portray her son as a protector of women's virtues, while, at the same time, the media reported of the very-married White's many other transgressions involving young women. After his first trial ended in a hung jury, Thaw was retried in 1908 and found insane. He was sent away to a mental insitution for the criminally insane in upstate New York, from which he escaped once, and was released in 1915 with reputation untarnished -- a homicidal hero.