19061776 Club
Thaw shoots Stanford White three times on the Madison Square Garden rooftop; White is dead
The Pittsburgh heir crossed the floor during the revue and fired at close range; he tells onlookers White had ruined his wife, Evelyn Nesbit, at sixteen.
New York's gilded elite had come to Madison Square Garden on the evening of June 25, 1906, for a musical revue on the rooftop theatre — an unlikely setting for the most sensational crime of the decade. Harry Kendall Thaw, a Pittsburgh millionaire heir with a long history of erratic behavior, crossed the room and fired three shots into architect Stanford White at close range. Thaw's stated justification — that White had sexually exploited his wife, model and chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit, when she was sixteen — turned the murder into something the press could not stop printing: wealth against wealth, beauty at the center, and a jury that couldn't agree the first time…
