Evelyn Nesbit

Ms. Nesbit, artists' model and chorus girl, was at the heart of what at the time was known as the Crime of the Century. Her abusive husband, Pittsburgh million-heir Harry Thaw, murdered 52-year old architect and socialite Stanford White (of the firm McKim, Mead, and White), who had taken advantage of a sixteen-year old Evelyn and subsequently become her lover a couple of years before Thaw and she married. Harry Thaw's mother quickly financed propaganda, even a film, to portray her son as a protector of women's virtues, while, at the same time, the media reported of the very-married White's many other transgressions involving young women. After his first trial ended in a hung jury, Thaw was retried in 1908 and found insane. He was sent away to a mental insitution for the criminally insane in upstate New York, from which he escaped once, and was released in 1915 with reputation untarnished -- a homicidal hero.