WITNESS WHO LIED

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22269, 23 May 1934, Page 7

WITNESS WHO LIED

WOMAN IN HARRY THAW CASE NEW YORK, May 10. You remember when Harry Thaw killed Stanford White in a shooting tragedy, the most sensational known to New York’s last generation. Evelyn Nesbitt, beautiful show girl of her time, over who White and quarrelled, provides curious sidelights on the affair in her autobiography entitled,: “ Prodigal Days: The Untold Story." She admits that she lied on the witness stand, in concealing the fact that she loved White while married to Thaw, and admits that she seduced White rather than the other way around. William Travers Jerome, the crusading district attorney who prosecuted Thaw, and fought the unwritten law theory, knew quite well, she says, that Thaw was perfectly sane, but sent him to an asylum when he himself bungled the case before the jury. Thaw, however, stayed there only one day, while allegedly serving several years. During this period he was living outside with Evelyn, who bore him a son. The triangle drama of Harry K. Thaw, dissolute American millionaire, Evelyn, daughter of a brilliant lawyer who died while she was a child, and Stanford White, American architectural genius, who became her benefactor, arid of whom Thaw was insanely jealous, has become one of the classics of crime of passion. “ Curse you, you ruined iny wife! I am going to kill you! ” shouted Thaw during the pVeraiere of a musical comedy in Madison Square Garden in 1906, and, swaying drunkenly, he fired three shots into the back of White, who was Sitting in the front row before the stage.