Trials of Passion (44 page)

After Jerome had raised objections as to the factual nature of a great many of the points in Delmas's long question, the judge told Dr Wagner to answer the question, bearing in mind the objections: Did the defendant, at the time he fired the fatal shot, know the act was wrong?

Wagner replied that in his opinion he did not.

Was Thaw's failure or incapacity to know that the act was wrong due to a defect of reason under which he was labouring at the time?

Wagner answered in the affirmative twice, the question having been posed again slightly differently.

A flustered Dr Wagner had been a less than satisfactory witness. But Dr Britton D. Evans, of the State Hospital for the Insane in Morris Plains, was unflappable. Perhaps his star performance was due to the fact that he and Jerome had belligerent history in a prior case: indeed, the district attorney had refused to shake his hand the day before, and the doctor had noted the insult out loud, declaring in full view of reporters, ‘You are no gentleman.' Evans would not allow Jerome to humiliate him.

Dr Evans had visited Thaw eight times in the Tombs, on six of those occasions with Dr Wagner. His testimony was cogent and energetic, beginning as mental-state reports do even today with a description of physical state, then behaviour, and finally moving inward to delusions and possible biological problems.

I observed that Harry K. Thaw exhibited a peculiar facial expression, a glaring of the eyes, a restlessness of the eyes, a suspicious viewing of the surroundings and me, watching every movement. I observed a nervous agitation and restlessness, such as comes from a severe brain storm, and is common in persons who have recently gone through an explosive or fulminating condition of mental unsoundness. He exhibited delusions of a personal character and exaggerated ego, and along with them, delusions of a persecutory character, in that he exhibited the fact that he felt himself of exaggerated importance, and that he was subjected to persecutions and conspiracies on the part of numerous people. These were my observations on August 4.

Asked what he meant by some of his recondite terms, for example an ‘exaggerated ego', Dr Evans replied:

It is an exhibition of an exaggerated value put upon the ability, capacity and influence of one's own self out of proportion to that which can be given to that particular person under all the conditions and
propositions presented to the observer or examiner. An analysis of the person puts him upon an ordinary even plane. He himself believes that he is clothed with power, capacities and abilities far above him and out of proportion of a normal human being under the advantages of that particular person.

On top of this narcissistic disorder, Harry suffered from ‘logorrhea', an abnormally rapid flow of words which Evans ‘noticed were not characteristic of the healthy mind'. This went along with an ‘abnormal excitement of the cerebral function, an abnormal or diseased condition of the brain, which is the organ of the mind'.

Asked to say more about what was abnormal about Thaw's ready flow of language, Dr Evans pointed to its comparative incoherence and lack of logic.

A man speaking with a diseased brain talks with words and ideas lumped one over the other in rapid succession, a flight of ideas, so that it ... tends to confuse the hearer and make him unable to grasp what the situation is, except that these rapid and successive states ... are the logical outcome of a morbid condition of the mind ... it is either a symptom or indication that the brain has undergone a recent terrible storm of an abnormal character, or is in its initial stage of disorder ... It is the twilight or the dawn of a state of mental unsoundness and mental explosion.

Evans also elaborated on what he meant by ‘delusions';

I mean by a delusion a false belief, out of which you cannot reason a person by the usual arguments – by the usual counter arguments, by the usual methods that are used to dissuade a man from an illogical position or an error of judgment. The man who has any judgment, when you place before him a logical argument and show him he is wrong, if he is a normal man, he will see his error, whether he admits it directly at once or not... [When you] dissuade an insane
man from his delusions or false beliefs, he still holds to it because it is a matter of disease engrafted upon his mind, or his brain which is an organ of the mind, and your arguments are of no avail.

On Evans's second visit with Dr Wagner, on 21 August, he observed that Thaw was ‘nervous and agitated and that he had that peculiar glaring eye which is so well recognized by persons who are familiar with conditions of that sort; that look of suspicion; watching me, watching those about him; and still the exaggerated ego.'

Perhaps not altogether unrelated to his status as millionaire son of a doting mother, Thaw was far more disposed to telling Evans what to do than to ‘submit to me as an examiner'. He continued to exhibit ‘delusions of an exaggerated ego' and ‘delusions of persecution'. These persecutions were ‘unjust and unfair and attack the most vital interests of his being, and life, and his social welfare'. Thaw had no hallucinations, which Evans glossed as ‘false sense impressions'.

On his further visits to the Tombs, there was still much nervous agitation in Harry, but it had lessened, and after that, Evans found great improvement: still less nervousness and none of the peculiar darting looks into corners of the room. Harry Thaw's ‘brain storm' had passed. The term Evans had hit upon to describe Harry's state on the night of the murder caught the journalists' and the public's attention. It stuck. The ‘brain storm of a millionaire' was to serve many a headline and echo through the culture.

Pressed further by Delmas and keeping so tightly to the rules of evidence that there was no room for Jerome to object, Evans then described the conspiracy that Harry Thaw believed to have been mounted against him by Stanford White and which he thought endangered his life, since White, he claimed, had hired the Monk Eastman gang, notorious Tenderloin criminals, to do him in. The conspiracy extended to the district attorney's office, which initially hadn't followed up his complaints about White's activities and had counselled him to let the matter drop. It now included all the lawyers on
his first defence team who had colluded with Jerome, he said, to have him declared insane.

Evans also testified that Harry had told him:

I never wanted to shoot that man; I never wanted to kill him ... but I did want through legal means to bring him to trial. I wanted to bring him before a court, that he might be brought to justice and suffer for that which he had done ... Providence took charge of the situation; this was an act of Providence. Had it been my judgment, I would have preferred for him to suffer the humiliation and all that comes from laying bare this matter of his doings before a court and before the public.

All this, Evans concluded, he as a doctor considered to be ‘a delusion ... an insane delusion'.

When Delmas called Dr Wagner back into the courtroom, Wagner proceeded to iterate Thaw's delusions of persecution. The case for his temporary insanity was now strong.

In contemporary terms, Harry Thaw might well be classified as having what the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases (ICD) 10 calls a ‘paranoid personality disorder', which may include brief psychotic episodes. It calls for at least three of the following characteristics:

American alienists of the time, like Evans and Wagner, would most likely have read Valentin Magnan's classic descriptions of paranoia, and certainly Krafft-Ebing's. Such descriptions, even to the present day, link paranoia to excessive narcissism – that self-aggrandizement and exaggerated sensitivity to slight that often involves the person in splitting off the unwanted, as a defence mechanism. Magnan, in his
Delire Chronique
(1890), had broken down ‘systematized delusion' into ‘persecutory paranoia', ‘ambitious paranoia', ‘amatory paranoia' and ‘litigious paranoia'. The amatory paranoiac is often chivalrous and idealistic, but feels persecuted by those who prevent the success of his desires, and may lose his self-control and resort to violence against his persecutors.

The death of a juror's wife resulted in a court recess over a long weekend. It was apparently an eventful one. At the Tombs, Thaw was frantic, fearing a mistrial. He shouted for Evelyn. Meanwhile the papers, which could not get enough of the case, talked up the possibility of a lunacy commission being called for: it looked to them as if the defence's ‘temporary insanity' might really be a far more permanent form of madness. In addition, there were reports that Evelyn was being cited in the divorce case of the producer of
The Wild Rose:
the play had been named after her, it was claimed. Delmas squashed the rumours. Evelyn as a victim who needed rescue was crucial to the Thaw case.

When court reconvened on Monday, 18 February. Dr Evans was called back and now questioned about Thaw's will: this allowed Delmas to have this strange document read into the court records. Evans's view, in response to Delmas's question, was that this was indeed not the will of a sane man.

37.
The Prosecution Counter-attacks

Both Evelyn and Evans had been so strong in the witness stand that the district attorney was left with his case floundering. If the jury bought the defence's ‘temporary insanity' line, they might well release Harry altogether.

Jerome flailed. He called Evelyn back to the stand and tried to discredit her. His questioning was brutal. He was attempting to prove to the jury that she had been lying all along. Her ‘confession' to Thaw had either never taken place, or it was not true to the facts. Delmas rightly objected, pointing out that Eveyln had been recounting what she remembered telling Thaw. Jerome paid no heed and sneeringly tried to blacken her character and destroy the illusion of innocence her childlike looks reinforced. He questioned her about the extent of her nudity when she had modelled, the risqué cafés she had frequented in Paris, her unchaperoned status, her late nights, her continued relations with Stanford White, a man she had described as ‘kind and fatherly' despite the fact that he had ‘wronged' her. He asked whether her operation had been an abortion. By the end, Evelyn was in tears.

But Jerome's bullying had gone too far, and it turned the court against him. One of the four or so women reporters allowed to stay in the courtroom during the confession of activities so inappropriate for chaste feminine ears, Nixola Greeley-Smith, wondered how Evelyn had been able to survive what was palpably ‘torture' inflicted in the name of the law. She recounted how all the women in the room had writhed under the sting of Jerome's questions. His ‘vivisection of a woman's soul' made it a duty to give this ‘trembling, weeping woman any support that the presence of members of her own sex might afford'. Even the Reverend Madison C. Peters concluded that it was
time to halt this ‘disgusting barbarity' being inflicted on
^£
a helpless child', who was more sinned against than sinning.

Jerome, however, persisted. Through Evelyn's mother – whom the press now uniformly deplored as ‘unnatural' – he had gained access to her teenage diary from her days at the DeMille school. This came complete with a mocking sketch of a nun. Jerome wanted to show that Evelyn was scandalously immoral, that she scoffed at her innocent schoolfriends whose ambition was to be mothers, while she herself was intent on performing on the stage.

He then asked Evelyn questions about Thaw's irrational acts. She said that he had carried a revolver ever since Christmas 1903, because he believed people were following him in order to do him harm. No, the pistol didn't frighten her, since she knew it was intended only for Stanford White. At this Jerome abruptly released her from the stand. He was getting nowhere.

The next day brought him nothing more promising. Delmas had called Evelyn back to the stand to show she wasn't implicated in any of her mother's arrangements with White concerning money for her or her brother. Jerome tried once more to impugn her honesty. Hadn't Evelyn told her brother, when she returned from Europe with Thaw, that he had treated her cruelly in order to make her confess that White had drugged her? But Evelyn stood up to him. As she said in her first memoir, she had learned how to be a confident witness by concentrating on the truth. The handwritten frontispiece of the book reads: ‘Be truthful. Even a well made lie is easily broken down under proper and persistent cross examination. A witness who deliberately and knowingly commits perjury is not only doing a wrong but is a fool.'

Frustrated by the charming and clever Evelyn, Jerome then turned his ire on Dr Evans. Once more, he tried to discredit the expert. He wanted to make Evans admit that the conditions he had attributed to Thaw – melancholia and paranoia – were permanent, not temporary; and that ‘brain storm' was a spurious invention of his own. But Evans held his ground, and the only effect repeating the term ‘brain storm' had was to embed it in the language:

My observation of him and the facts I have heard, make me positive that in his abnormal, excited condition of mind he would not be accountable for his actions when he heard the mention of Stanford White's name ... Constant brooding over the terrible story he had heard so sunk his soul to its lowest depths that he might be liable at any time to be plunged into a brain storm, and under its influences use upon his enemy a revolver which he had been carrying for selfprotection.