Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [253]
And it had Evelyn Nesbit Thaw—“the most exquisitely lovely human being I ever looked at—the slim, quick grace of a fawn, a head that sat on her flawless throat as a lily on its stem ... a mouth made of rumpled rose petals.”51
Since Thaw could hardly claim somebody else shot White, he had to dream up some other defense. He claimed “temporary insanity,” but the real defense was something quite different. White, he claimed, was a cad who had defiled his wife (long before Thaw met her, by the way). The trial was a carnival of scandal mixed with psychiatric mumbo jumbo. It was interrupted while a “lunacy commission,” on the prosecution’s motion, debated whether Thaw was mentally fit to stand trial. In hindsight, Thaw seems clearly deranged, and not only temporarily. But the commission said yes, he was fit; and the trial went on. It lasted three months. The jury spent forty-seven hours wrangling fruitlessly over the verdict. At a second trial, the jury found Thaw not guilty by reason of insanity. Thaw was shipped off to the State Asylum for the Criminal Insane, at Matteawan, in New York State. (In 1913, after some judicious bribery by the Thaw family, the defendant escaped from Matteawan and fled to Canada. He was extradited and returned to his asylum; in 1915, he was declared sane and released from prison.)52
The Thaw-White case gave the public a vicarious thrill: a glimpse at the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Unlike Lizzie Borden’s case, and all the other nineteenth-century cases of repressed anger and sexual frustration, this was a case of wild celebrities and their unbridled lusts. The man in the dock, and his victim, were both more or less celebrities. In other instances, the crimes were so lurid or extreme, that the criminals became celebrities. The 1924 murder of Bobby Franks, in Chicago, by Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold—the “crime of the century”—presented just such a case: two rich, brilliant young men, who killed a young boy in cold blood, just for the thrill of it. Oddly enough, this “trial” was not a trial at all. Loeb and Leopold had confessed; the sole issue was punishment. Would they live or die? Clarence Darrow, the most famous lawyer of the day, argued for the defense. There was, of course, no jury. The courtroom, where the judge sat, had room for three hundred people; the judge issued “200 pink tickets to local newsmen and correspondents for news agencies and out-of-town papers.”53 Darrow argued brilliantly that the boys were not normal; they were emotionally immature, poisoned by reading Nietzsche, prisoners of forces beyond their control.54 Whether the speech had an impact on the judge is, of course, unknown; but Leopold and Loeb did not get the death penalty; the judge sent them instead to prison for life. Loeb was stabbed to death in prison; Leopold was eventually released, a middle-aged man.
Another case that attracted swarms of reporters was the sensational Hall-Mills case of the twenties.55 It began with the discovery, in September 1922, of the bodies of a man and a woman in a field, near a crab apple tree, in the vicinity of New Brunswick, New Jersey. The man, who had been shot, was the Reverend Edward W. Hall, pastor of an Episcopal church in New Brunswick. The dead woman, whose throat had been slashed, and her tongue cut out, was Mrs. Eleanor Mills, a choir singer active in the church, and the minister’s lover.
For four years, the investigation simmered; then, in 1926, came a break. A certain Mrs. Jane Gibson, a farmer and local character (the “pig woman”) came forward and claimed she had witnessed the murder. Partly on the basis of what the “pig woman” said, the minister’s wife, Frances Hall, and two of her brothers, were put on trial for the murders. The trial was headline news, day in and day out. At the end, the defendants were acquitted. The mystery of the “minister and the choir singer