"Dementia Americana": Mark Twain, "Wapping Alice," and the Harry K. Thaw Trial

Abstract

Early in 1907 one of the twentieth century's most notorious murder cases was making headlines in America and abroad with revelations of bizarre sex, violent jealousy, and hereditary insanity in the demimonde of New York's high society. On the evening of 25 June 1906, following the opening performance of Mamzelle Champagne, the Pittsburgh millionaire Harry K. Thaw shot the well-known architect Stanford White in full view of the diners at the Madison Square Roof Garden-the building itself one of White's most acclaimed designs. Thaw, charged with first-degree murder and on trial for his life, pleaded not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. The defense argued that Thaw's long history of mental instability was aggravated by his wife Evelyn Nesbit Thaw's story of how, as a sixteen-year-old virgin, she had been drugged and seduced by the much older Stanford White. Even though the alleged ruin of Thaw's wife took place some (unspecified) time before her marriage and years before the murder, still the defense claimed that after Thaw proposed to Evelyn Nesbit in June 1903 in Paris (the first of two premarital and, it was noted, unchaperoned trips the couple took to Europe) and heard her story of seduction, his mental condition gradually deteriorated until three years later his delusions culminated in what he believed was an act of divine