The red velvet swing: Stanford White and Harry Thaw

What happened

On the night of 25 June 1906, the architect Stanford White was shot dead on the rooftop theatre of Madison Square Garden, a building he had designed himself, during a performance in full view of the audience. His killer was Harry Kendall Thaw, a Pittsburgh millionaire, who walked between the tables, drew a pistol and shot White through the head, then made no attempt to leave.

At the centre of it was Thaw's wife, Evelyn Nesbit, a young chorus girl and artist's model White had known years before her marriage to Thaw. White kept a red velvet swing in a private apartment where he entertained young women from the theatre world, and Nesbit had posed on it before she and Thaw ever met. The swing itself became one of the most talked-about details of the entire case once the press got hold of it.

Nesbit later testified that her first encounter with White, when she was sixteen and years before Thaw, had ended with him drugging and assaulting her. That testimony became central to what came next, and to how Thaw's legal team framed the shooting to a jury.

The evidence

The shooting itself was never in dispute. It happened in front of a rooftop full of witnesses, and Thaw did not run. The entire case turned instead on why, and on whether Thaw could be held criminally responsible for it.

Thaw's defence built its case around Nesbit's account of what White had done to her at sixteen, presenting the killing as an act carried out in defence of his wife's honour, a strategy the press of the time called the unwritten law. Whether Nesbit's testimony reflected exactly what she remembered, or what Thaw's mother and lawyers needed a jury to hear, has been argued ever since; she gave the account under enormous pressure from a family with every reason to shape it. What is not disputed is that White had a documented pattern of relationships with very young women in the theatre world, and that Nesbit's story, however it was arrived at, was consistent with accounts other women gave about him.

How it's been argued over, then and since

Thaw's first trial, in 1907, ended in a hung jury. His second, concluding on 1 February 1908, found him not guilty by reason of insanity, and he was committed to an asylum rather than convicted of murder in any ordinary sense. This is one of only three of our eight real cases with an actual verdict, but it is not a clean one: a deadlocked jury, then an insanity finding, is a different kind of ending than a conviction, and the case has never quite settled into the shape people expect a solved murder to have.

The press at the time called it the trial of the century, a title that got recycled for plenty of trials afterward but stuck hardest to this one. Nesbit outlived both men by decades and remained a public figure for the rest of her life, her name permanently attached to the case and to the swing, which has since given its title to at least one film about her. What the public settled on was rarely the courtroom's actual finding: most retellings remember White as simply a victim and Thaw as simply a jealous husband, which flattens both a documented predator and a killing that a jury never called sane.

Murder Mystery Party's case, The Red Velvet Swing, puts your table on that rooftop the night the shot was fired, working through the same triangle and the same contested testimony that decided whether Thaw's act was murder or something the law was willing to call madness instead.