THE REAL HARRY THAW.

Dominion, Volume 7, Issue 1874, 7 October 1913, Page 7

THE REAL HARRY THAW.

— $ ; MUSICIAN, ALPINIST & ARTIST. INTERVIEW WITH HIS FORMER LAWYER. Mr. Martin Littloton, the New York lawyer who defended the escaped millionaire Thaw at Ihis second trial aud 6ecurcd a verdict £f acquittal of tho chargo of murderitag the architect Stanford White, was in London at tho end of August. In a conversation with a representative of the "Daily Mail" he said:— "Tha recent developments in tho Thaw case do not in any way concern me professionally, as I ceased.to act for Thaw immediately after his acquittal. He 'belongs undoubtedly to an abnormal type of man. Ho just missed being a strong man, and missing it, Heaven only knows what he hit. He reasons accurately enough when he begins to reason, but no, one can tell where ho is going to begin, whether at the right or tho wrong point. His conclusions are usually logical, and his premises anything lie pleases. The trouble with him is that he can't stop thinking; ho suffers from a press of ideas the proportionate value of which he is incapable of judging. "The world laughed a great deal at the alienist who described his disorder as a brain-storm, but in my experience of him that is precisely what .it is. His' mind is in a perpetual tumult, whioh at its highest, point sweeps him along before it.. 1 don't like the term ' brain-storm,' and never used it myself at the trial. It has no standing ,in science and its employment really ~did_Thaw.au injustice-by creating suspicion as to whether ho had anything tho matter with him at all; but as a colloquial oxpression it suggests as well as any other tho peculiar way in which his mental disturbance manifests itself. "I remember that during his trial ho was obsessed with tho idoa that reading Bernard Shaw's works was having a bad influence on his wife, and he worried about it more than anout anything else connected with the case, except the amount of attention, that the newspapers gave it.' His egotism is something appalling, but it has tho virtue of saving him from melancholia and giving him the comfortable assurance that whatever ho does is right. _ Ho has a morbid dread of ever beSg ignored an 3 would rather be pursued, by all tha prison and asylum authorities on the American continent than bo overlooked. "The keenest disappointment which he suffered during his trial was when the New -York papers ceased for one morning to givo thb whole of their front page to a report of the case. And the curious thing is that he has quite persuaded himself that the more he is exploited and talked about tho bettor for the morals of the world. He really thought that in killing Stanford White he was acting tho part of a modern St. George, so muoh so that he insisted on Eia counsel in tho first trial drawing public attention to the resemblance. It was not personal revenge or "the unwritten law" or anything of that sort that made him kill White, but the conviction that there was no other way in which he could champion the cause of injured women. Greek History Student. "That illustrates, his astounding faculty for viewing himself and others in a distorted perspective; but ono ought .nover to forget that his whole life from infancy lias simply been a treadmill of unhappiness and distraction. People seem to have the impression that he is a drunken degenerate. That is absolutely not so. He has studied art and music, ho will talk for hours about tho barbarian conquest of Rome, ho has climbed all the biggest mountains in Europe except the Matterhorn, he has a vory Bound knowledge of Grecian history,_ and used to be a great connoisseur in tapestries, furniture, and so on. He is six feet tall, good looking, with a strong, earnest '.' face, rather large deep brown eyes that I dilate into a fixed stare under tho pressure of excitement, a courtly manner, and is very fond of recalling all the notabilities he has met and known. "He has probably solved more of the bridge problems sot by the 'New York Sun' than any man in America. He is an incessant reader, a good talker on general subjects ; and a man in whoso company you might spend many hours without noticing anytning strange except that ho is apt to talk and worry excessively over unimportant details. Personally, I do not think tnat tho question of his sanity will ever be dispassionately settled in the_ State of New York, and I bolieve it would bo an excellent thing if Thaw and tho State Government could agree to an inquiry into his condition from which all tho alienists who have hitherto expressed themselveß on the subject would bo "If. I were asked on oath whether I considered it safo for Thaw to be at large I should say that nothing short of the provocations he endured before the killing of Stanford White would make him a danger to anyone., You wilt understand,- of course, that in talking thus freely about Thaw I have recalled many matters that, though not mentioned at the time, were relevant to tho prosecution of this case.