Soon after, the stone-faced and bug-eyed young man gave up all pretense of work or study and instead traveled the U.S. He was expelled for “moral turpitude,” according to Mooney. Thaw briefly enrolled at Harvard, where he hosted all-night poker games and chased a cab driver with a shotgun for allegedly shorting him change. After William died in 1889, his indulgent mother made sure her son's annual allowance was $80,000. Author Michael Macdonald Mooney writes in Evelyn Nesbit and Stanford White: Love and Death in the Gilded Age that a teacher from his boarding school described Thaw as “sullen, unreasonable, and unhappy” and “absolutely unintelligible.” In his mid-teens, he performed a prank at his school, Wooster College, where he paid a burlesque troupe visiting town to wear leggings of the school colors.īecause of his son’s temperament, Thaw’s father decided against a giving his son full control of his inheritance and instead assigned a trust to dole out $2400 a year to him in his will.

As a child, he was prone to screaming tantrums and outbursts of bodily flailing that exhausted his mother, Mary, and their household staff. The son of Pittsburgh railroad baron William Thaw, Harry K. THAW HAD A HISTORY OF MENTAL ILLNESS AND LIVED A DECADENT LIFE OF LEISURE. At the heart of the matter was the era’s concept of a woman’s honor.

Simpson-but it did introduce the public to many of the concepts that would become well-known to tabloid readers and Court TV viewers, including the insanity plea, the media circus, the sequestering of jurors, and the buying of a better judicial outcome by the rich. This led to what the newspapers dubbed “the Trial of Century.” The 20th century was young, and the media frenzy would arguably be eclipsed by other ' trials of the century'-Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, Charles Manson, O.J. Thaw walked up to the table of architect Stanford White and shot him in the head. On the balmy evening of June 25, 1906, during the performance of a musical at Madison Square Garden, railroad heir Harry K.

American Eve by Paula Uruburu