1906 - Crime

Crime

New York architect Stanford White is shot dead June 25 at age 52 at the roof garden restaurant atop the Madison Square Garden he designed in 1889. His murderer is Pittsburgh millionaire Harry Kendall Thaw, 36, whose beautiful wife, Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, was a chorus girl and White's mistress before her marriage. Thaw shoots White in the face three times at point-blank range (see 1909).

The murder of Cortland, N.Y., factory girl Grace Brown, 19, makes world headlines in July. A capsized rowboat found in Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks the morning of July 13 leads to a search. A boy of 13 spots a young woman's body in eight feet of water early in the afternoon, police arrest Chester Gillett, 22, at a nearby resort July 14, and they charge him with murder. Raised by missionary parents at Kansas City, young Gillett took a job last year as foreman at his uncle's shirtwaist factory in Cortland, where the employees included Grace Brown, daughter of a local farmer. Pregnant by Gillett, Brown wrote him pitiful letters begging him to marry her and finally threatening to go to his family with her story. Gillett has ambitions to marry a society girl whom he has met, he wrote to Brown asking her to travel with him to the Adirondacks, where he said he would marry her. He signed the register at the Glenmore Hotel "Carl Graham and wife of Albany" upon his arrival by train on the morning of July 12 and took Brown out on the lake that afternoon in a hired rowboat. Gillett will be convicted of murder and executed next year at Auburn prison (see Fiction [An American Tragedy], 1925).