Thaw Murders White.

On 25 June 1906 Harry K. Thaw shot Stanford White three times with a pistol. White died almost immediately, and Thaw raised the pistol above his head and walked out of the rooftop restaurant at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Thaw rejoined his wife, Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, and two friends and volunteered to them that he had just killed White, whom he said had ruined his life.

Thaw's Mental Instability.

These facts were never in dispute. But for the next two years, during two sensational, highly publicized trials, virtually every other fact concerning Thaw, White, and Evelyn Nesbit Thaw would be bitterly disputed. Stanford White, at age fifty-four, was one of the country's leading architects; in fact, his architectural firm had designed Madison Square Garden. Harry K. Thaw, twenty years younger than White, was the son of a Pittsburgh coke and railroad magnate. With tremendous family...