The shooting of Stanford White
Stanford White, the architect who designed the building he was shot in.
The architect Stanford White was shot dead by Harry Thaw on the roof of Madison Square Garden in New York in June 1906, in front of a theatre full of people. After one hung jury, Thaw was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to an asylum.
What is not in dispute.
On the evening of 25 June 1906 Harry Kendall Thaw walked up to Stanford White's table on the Madison Square Garden roof and shot him in front of a theatre full of people.
Thaw's defence was built on White's treatment of Evelyn Nesbit, who had been a teenage model and chorus girl when White began the relationship, and who by 1906 was Thaw's wife. She gave evidence.
The first trial ended with the jury unable to agree. At the second, in 1908, Thaw was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to the state asylum at Matteawan.
Who fired the shots was never in question.
What the verdict did not answer.
Nothing about the shooting. What was contested then, and is contested now, is how the courts and the newspapers treated Evelyn Nesbit, and whose account of White's conduct towards young women was allowed to stand.
What this page is, and is not.
This case was decided in court. What is written above is the part of the record that is not in dispute. Where something is argued over, this page says it is argued over and does not pick a side. No real person is accused here of anything a court did not find, and no confession is invented for anybody.
- The Red Velvet Swing is not a reconstruction. It is an original crime set in this world, with an invented killer. Every real person at your table is innocent of the murder in the game.
- The victim is a person, not a prop. Stanford White, the architect who designed the building he was shot in.
- We publish the rules we work to. How we treat real cases sets out the six things this catalogue will not do, including the two cases that were dropped for failing them.
If you think we have crossed a line, the policy page is the standard to hold us to, and the email address is on it.
The Red Velvet Swing
This is the heaviest case in the catalogue and the content note on its page says so plainly. The game is an invented crime in that world, not a reconstruction of what White did.
Six to twelve people at your table, hosted from a TV and your guests' phones. The evidence arrives a piece at a time and nobody sees the whole of it until the last act. Read the full case file, including the content note for this one.