Who Killed Stanford White?
The killing of the architect Stanford White, on 25 June 1906, in Madison Square Garden, was without question the paramount scandal of the Gilded Age. The subsequent murder trial, dubbed the “trial of the century,” represented the very first time in the history of American jurisprudence when the temporary insanity plea, also known as the MacNaughton Law, was used as a defense. The killer of Stanford White, Harry Kendall Thaw, was an emotionally unbalanced multi-millionaire, whose father made a fortune working for John D. Rockefeller.
