Death Among Millionaires
The rich are different than you and me. Sometimes they get away with murder.
By Sean Elder
Harry Kendall Thaw
What was the trial of the 20th Century? Long before OJ, America was fixated on that of Harry Kendall Thaw, who shot world-renowned architect Stanford White in an open-air theater atop the White-designed Madison Square Garden in June 1906. Thaw’s guilt was never actually in doubt — there were a thousand witnesses to the shooting. But his reasons for killing White were what made headlines.
Thaw, an eccentric millionaire from Pittsburgh, was married to Evelyn Nesbit, a teenaged model whose likeness appeared on the covers of Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar. Before their marriage, Nesbit confided to Thaw that she had lost her virginity to the famously libertine White after she passed out from drinking champagne in his 24th Street studio. She awoke in a room full of mirrors, blood dripping down her leg. White tried to comfort her by saying, “You belong to me now.”
White was like the Jeffrey Epstein of his age, beloved by high society even as he made no secret of his passion for underage girls. Among the details that captured the country’s imagination was the red-velvet swing that hung his studio. Even after her rape, Nesbit entertained White there by swinging over him in various stages of undress.
Thaw had been obsessed with White even before her confession, and had a paranoid belief that the architect was preventing his rise in New York society. While his lawyers tried to present him as his wife’s avenger and savior, Thaw had a sadistic side. He whipped and raped the young woman before they were married, but his family objected to an insanity defense. Thaw’s first trial ended with a hung jury; a second had him institutionalized for seven years. Nesbit divorced him and shortly after his release, Thaw horse whipped a teenage boy and was returned to the madhouse. Nesbit became a sculptor in Los Angeles and died of natural causes in 1967.
Marguerite Alibert
A femme fatale who earned her money the old-fashioned way, working as a consort in Paris, Alibert is the star of one of history’s great rags-to-riches stories. She just happened to sleep with British royalty and kill an Egyptian prince along the way.
As a girl in rural France, Alibert was sent by her poor family to live with the nuns, who placed her as a domestic in a wealthy French home. She was pregnant at 16 and working in a bordello before she came of age. Her clientele was of the upper crust, and in 1917 she began an affair with Edward VIII, whose friends decided he needed “a full education from an experienced woman.” That course in human anatomy lasted a little over a year, but Alibert got something more valuable than the royal jewels from the exchange.
In years following her royal liaison, Alibert became renowned for seducing wealthy men all across Europe. Several marriages ended in divorce, and generous settlements from her exes, allowing Alibert to live in high Parisian style. In 1922 she wed a wealthy Egyptian “prince,” Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey and was whisked away to his palace in Cairo.
There Alibert learned that she was to convert to Islam and be but one of her husband’s wives; she was also expected to keep her face and head covered in his public. Their fights were legendary, and soon Alibert was throwing shade at her husband, accusing Fahmy of abusing her and demanding “unnatural” intercourse. (He was rumored to be gay.)
In 1923, while staying at hotel in London, Alibert shot her husband at close range with a pistol he kept under his pillow. She reiterated her claims of abuse, but the case seemed open-and-shut; she never denied killing a defenseless man. But after privately threatening to go public with a series of salacious love letters that had been sent to her years earlier by a besotted Prince Edward, Alibert was magically acquitted. She returned to Paris and lived to the ripe old age of 80. She even had small parts in movies.
Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb
The case of Leopold and Loeb haunted Americans in the 1920s not just for the nature of their crime — they kidnapped and killed a 14-year-old boy named Bobby Franks in Chicago — but for the motive. They killed him for a thrill, and because they could.
Their families were wealthy and both young men were brilliant, and gay. Leopold went to the University of Chicago at 15, Loeb at age 14. At the ages of 19 and 18, respectively, after a series of spree robberies, the couple decided to pull off “the perfect crime”: kidnapping Loeb’s cousin Franks for a ransom of $10,000.
Leopold claimed, based on his reading of Nietzsche, that Supermen like them were not constrained by conventional morality. They weren’t much in the conventional crime department, either. In their abduction of Franks they managed to suffocate the young teen; then when they disposed of the body, Leopold dropped his glasses, which were found by the police. On May 31, 1924, the two confessed to Franks’ murder.
Illinois vowed to execute the young lovers (a relationship the papers could hardly allude to), and they didn’t help their prospects by talking their crime up to the press. (“A thirst for knowledge is highly commendable,” Leopold told one reporter, “no matter what extreme pain or injury it may inflect upon others.”) State’s attorney Robert Crowe was an ambitious Republican politician who planned to make their conviction a step toward becoming mayor of Chicago.
Nationally, the crime was seen as an indictment of the Jazz Age: godless young people sinning in public. But the simple case was turned on its head by the boys’ defense lawyer. Clarence Darrow said Leopold and Loeb were mentally ill, and had been abused by governesses as children. They developed a rich fantasy life that made them believe they were invincible.
The judge spared them the death penalty but sentenced them to 99 years. Loeb was killed in prison; Leopold was freed in 1958 and spent most of his life in Puerto Rico, living in relative obscurity.
William Zantzinger
Of the real people Bob Dylan has written about, some have benefited from his attention. Rubin “Hurricane” Carter was freed after serving 20 years for a murder he didn’t commit, thanks in part to Dylan’s song about the case. But the opposite is also true; nobody wants to be on the receiving end of Bob’s righteous wrath.
William Zantzinger was a Maryland tobacco farmer, and what Time magazine called a “rural aristocrat.” He attended Sidwell Friends School and enjoyed fox hunting. On February 8, 1963, the 24-year-old Zantzinger was drinking with friends at white-tie affair called the Spinsters Ball. He was wearing a top hat and carrying a toy cane when he decided that a black waitress named Hattie Carroll was moving too slowly in bringing him his drinks. He beat her with his cane before she fled to the kitchen, complaining of feeling “deathly ill.” An ambulance was called and Carroll died the following morning of a stroke.
At his trial, Zantzinger claimed to recall little of the evening, and a panel of three judges declared that he shouldn’t be blamed too much for the woman’s precarious health. In the end he received a six-month sentence, which would have been the end of it, had not a news story of the killing caught the attention of young Dylan. It was the singer’s skill at making Carroll a character of universal sympathy that makes “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” one his best protest songs:
Hattie Carroll was a maid in the kitchen
She was fifty-one years old and gave birth to ten children
Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage
And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn’t even talk to the people at the table
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table
And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level
Zantzinger was fined later in life for collecting rent from poor black families on properties he didn’t own. He maintained his innocence over Carroll’s death, and of Dylan he said, “I should have sued him and put him in jail.” But it is the singer’s verdict that people remember.
Edward Kennedy
When Senator Edward Kennedy drove his black Oldsmobile off the Dike Bridge in Chappaquiddick on July 18, 1969, people said he killed his chance at being president. Oh, and there was a woman in the car.
Mary Jo Kopechne was a 28-year-old veteran of Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign. She and five other “boiler room girls” had been invited to Martha’s Vineyard by Kennedy operatives for a reunion of sorts. At a cookout near a cottage on the little island of Chappaquiddick, Teddy later testified, Kopechne began to feel ill and the two left together. She left both her purse and her hotel room keys at the cottage, though there was no proof of a sexual relationship between her and the 37-year-old senator.
Kennedy claimed not to have been drunk when he took a wrong turn onto the bridge, but could not adequately explain why he left Kopechne to drown in the car once he escaped. He said he dove numerous times into the “strong and murky current,” before finding his way back to the cottage. A cousin and an aide joined him at the scene of the accident and took turns diving into the water to free Kopechne.
Most damning, Kennedy did not call the local police but returned to his hotel in nearby Edgartown to make the call, many hours after the fact. Kopechne was pulled out of the water the following morning, having spent nine hours submerged. The diver who found her said it looked like she had been trying to find a pocket of air in the car.
That was the weekend of the moon landing, and the Kopechne affair was relegated to B-story status… for a while. Since then, much has been made of Kennedy’s behavior after the crash, with the supposition being that he waited until his blood was clear enough to pass a drunk test. There was also the aggressive spin put on the story by Kennedy family confidantes and handlers like Ted Sorensen, JFK’s speechwriter.
Ted Kennedy did make a run at the presidency in 1980, challenging the unpopular incumbent, Jimmy Carter. But the shadow of Chappaquiddick was too great. They tore down that bridge but tourists still come to the island just to see the place where the crash happened.
Michael Skakel
“I’m gonna get away with murder,” Michael Skakel reportedly told a fellow student at a school for troubled youths. “I’m a Kennedy.”
The mystery of Martha Moxley, the 15-year-old girl found bludgeoned to death in Greenwich, CT on Halloween 1975, is a subject that shows no signs of dying itself. This has as much to do with enmity toward the Kennedy clan as the knowledge that her killer is still walking around free.
Moxley was last seen in the company of Michael, also 15, and his brother Thomas on October 30th — what the local kids called “Mischief Night.” The Skakels were related to the Kennedys by marriage (their aunt Ethel was RFK’s widow), something they were all prone to brag about. Over the years the alibis of the brothers changed, and their father went to great lengths to protect their school and medical records. Neighbors in the wealthy neighborhood of Belle Haven remembered the boys as rich, drunk and largely unsupervised.
Police discovered Moxley’s body in her backyard near a broken golf club; her pants had been pulled down but she had not been sexually abused. Despite the weak alibis of both boys, and a live-in tutor named Kenneth Littleton, and the fact that Thomas was the last one to see her alive and Michael had a known proclivity for peeping in Moxley’s window while masturbating, no one was ever charged in the case.
At least not until Michael Smith, another Kennedy cousin, was charged with raping a woman in Palm Beach, FL in 1991. The belief that the family connection played a role in Smith’s acquittal revived interest in the Moxley case, and in 1998 a grand jury green lighted murder charges against Skakel, who had spent many of the intervening years in rehab. His newfound sobriety did not save him from being found guilty, in 2002, of murdering Martha Moxley. He was given 20 years.
In 2013, Skakel was granted a new trial and after a judge ruled that he had been ill served by his original attorney; he was released on a $1.2 million bond. Since then the Connecticut Supreme Court has ruled that there should be another trial, but in 2019, SCOTUS disagreed.
Issei Sagawa
Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter, fictional villain of The Silence of the Lambs, has a real-life counterpart in Issei Sagawa, who killed and ate parts of a woman in 1981. But Lecter was imprisoned, and authorities went to great lengths to assure that he never killed, and ate, people again. Sagawa, on the other hand, is a free man in Japan where he gives interviews and writes restaurant reviews.
Sagawa was a student at the Sorbonne in Paris when he invited a fellow scholar, a Dutch girl named Renee Hartvelt back to his apartment. He said he wanted to translate some poems with her, but the then 32-year-old Sagawa had long been obsessed with cannibalism and had chosen Hartvelt for her health and beauty. He himself was an odd, elfin man; he’d been born prematurely into an extremely wealthy family in Kobe. Though they ultimately disowned him, the Sagawa family spared no expense in his early defense.
After shooting Hartvelt in the back of the head with a hunting rifle he had purchased for just this occasion, Sagawa had sex with her corpse and then spent several days eating parts of her body, cooked and raw. Having had his fill, he chopped the body up and distributed the remains between two suitcases. He then hired a cab driver to help him take the luggage to the Bois du Boulogne. After hoisting one of the bags the hack asked, “What had you got in here, a dead body?”
Joggers discovered the corpse and the cab driver identified Sagawa. The French found him to be criminally insane and kept him in maximum security, a la Lecter, for four years, before deporting him back to Japan. At a mental institution there, Japanese doctors declared him sane and said he suffered from nothing more than a sexual perversion — the desire to eat people. Sagawa checked himself out of the hospital, adopted the handle Pang, and began to tell his story to anyone who would listen.
Today Sagawa is impoverished and in poor health but his legacy lives on. Boston punk band D-Sagawa entitled its first album I Want to Die Suffering, which is surely not how Renee Hartvelt felt.
Claus von Bulow
It was the sleeping beauty case of the decade. In 1982, a jury in Providence, RI found the Danish-born Claus von Bulow guilty of attempting to murder his wife, Martha “Sunny” von Bulow, heir to a $75 million fortune. Twice.
The first time, the jury found, he had injected her with insulin, which put her into a coma in 1979. Sunny came out of that one… only to go into a second, irreversible coma a year later. She died, a vegetable, in 2008. What made the story a national obsession was the wealth of the couple and all the trappings.
“This case has everything,” the prosecutor told the jury in an opening statement. “It has money, sex, drugs; it has Newport, New York and Europe; it has nobility; it has maids, butlers, a gardener.” Indeed, the ocean front mansion they bought in Providence had been used as Grace Kelly’s house in the 1956 film High Society.
Sunny’s kids from her previous marriage to Prince Alfred von Auersperg of Austria were suspicious of Claus, but it was the testimony of Claus’s mistress, Alexandra Isles, that proved most damning. Isles, a socialite and actress, said she pressured von Bulow to divorce his wife, but that he would lose his fortune if he did, and would be reduced to living on a measly $120,000 a year. A maid also testified that she had found insulin and hypodermic needles in Sunny’s bedroom before she was hospitalized.
In his second trial, von Bulow was represented by the then relatively unknown Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz; his best-selling book about the case, Reversal of Fortune, was made into a popular 1990 film starring Jeremy Irons as von Bulow and Glenn Close as Sunny. While Dershowitz left the innocence of his client for others to decide, the acquitted von Bulow had another measure for success.
“Now, after all this unpleasantness,” he told Dershowitz, “I always get the best table.”
Robert Durst
If you keep killing people, you might finally get caught. That’s one takeaway from the strange case of Robert Durst, the New York real estate mogul and star of HBO’s true crime documentary series The Jinx. Durst is now being tried for the murder of Susan Berman, but is believed to have killed at least two others.
Durst, 76, was a person of interest after his first wife, Kathleen McCormack Durst, disappeared in 1982. Her body was never found and her husband was never charged, but her death may have been the trigger for those that followed.
The day that Berman died in 2000, she was scheduled to talk to the police about Kathleen’s death. Berman was a strange character herself. The daughter of an infamous Las Vegas mobster, she’d been a journalist and a sort of fringe player in Hollywood, having written about growing up with the Mob.
Prosecutors believe Durst had confided to Berman about his role in his wife’s death, and that Berman had then used that as leverage. The two had met at UCLA in the sixties, and over the years he loaned her money for different ventures. And then either the money ran out or Durst became suspicious of her. While he denies shooting Berman, he did discover her body — and then panicked and ran before notifying authorities. He sent police an anonymous letter alerting them to her death, a letter police say only Berman’s killer could have written.
“What the hell did I do?” Durst was caught on an open mic, talking to himself in The Jinx. “Killed them all, of course.” Durst has since claimed his words were edited but viewers still wondered who all were the “all.” The dismembered body of Morris Black, a former neighbor of Durst’s in Galveston, TX, was found floating in the bay in 2001. Durst was captured after skipping bail and in the subsequent trial he claimed that Black was trying to shoot him when the gun went off, killing his assailant.
Yes, he dismembered him and threw him in Galveston Bay, and no he couldn’t remember what he did with the head. Durst pleaded guilty to evidence tampering and jumping bail, and then served about 18 months.
OJ Simpson
What more can possibly be said about OJ Simpson? His 1995 “trial of the century,” for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Simpson, and a waiter named Ron Goldman had the sticky ingredients of big American tragedies (money, fame, sex, race) but with the added element of wall-to-wall cable coverage. Twenty-five years later, the verdict is still a Rorschach test for the country, with many blacks and whites seeing his acquittal through different lenses.
His case also marked a turning point for how the nation, including law enforcement, saw spousal abuse. On New Year’s Day, 1989, police officers were summoned to the Simpsons’ Bel Air home to find a bloodied Nicole waiting for them. “He’s going to kill me,” she prophesied. It wasn’t the first time the cops responded to the football legend’s rages: He was known to send gifts and thank-you’s to the cops who let him slide. Though Nicole declined to press charges, the city did, and OJ was given two years probation.
His was a true come-from-nothing story. He went from the housing projects of San Francisco to become one of the greatest college running backs in history, winning the Heisman Trophy in 1968, and he led the NFL in rushing several seasons. He became a friendly face in movies and on TV, always rescuing people or running for cars, which explained the denial that first accompanied his arrest (“Not OJ, No Way!”).
He was a harbinger of our current celebrity culture, paving the way for a reality-TV star to become president. But his motivation was as old as the hills: A rich and powerful man deprived of what he wants lashes out. In the aftermath, he lies about his crimes and then buys his way out of the jam he’s in with a “dream team” of lawyers.
While he was later found responsible for murdering Nicole and Brown in a civil trial, OJ saw no jail time until he raided a hotel room full of football memorabilia in Las Vegas, brandishing a gun. The judge gave him 15 years but today he walks among us, doing pranks and using social media to comment on hit TV shows. That lady in the Tiger King, the one who may have fed her husband to her big cats? Definitely guilty, tweeted the Juice. And he should know.
Robert Blake
Robert Blake started acting when he was six years old; some say he never stopped. When he was a child actor (he was one of the Little Rascals), Blake later claimed, his parents physically and sexually abused him. His first important film role was in a movie adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, playing one of a Kansas family’s killers.
TV viewers remember him more fondly as the police detective with a cockatoo in Baretta (1975–78), who was prone to reminding crooks, “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.” In 1999, divorced from his first wife and in a state of celebrity limbo, Blake met Bonnie Lee Bakley.
Even in the small world of star fuckers and celebrity stalkers, Bakley was especially toxic. She had been married nine times and had a rep for putting her famous marks through the mill. She was dating Marlon Brando’s son Christian when she met Blake, and when she got pregnant she told both men that they were the father.
After a paternity test proved Blake the winner, the couple married in November 2000. Six months later, on May 4, 2001, Blake left his wife sitting in a car outside Vitello’s, an Italian restaurant in Studio City. He just had to run in to pick up a gun he’d left there, he explained. When he returned he found Bakley dead from a gunshot to the head.
Less than a year later, Blake was charged with murdering his wife, as well as soliciting someone to kill her. Two separate stuntmen told police that Blake tried to hire them to murder Bakley, though neither confessed to the crime. What the prosecution lacked was any forensic evidence linking Blake to the crime — it wasn’t his gun she’d been shot with — or any witnesses.
In 2005, a jury found Blake not guilty and he celebrated that night at Vitello’s, where it had all began. A later civil suit found him liable for Bakley’s death, and the judge awarded her children $30 million. Blake filed for bankruptcy soon after. The last film he acted in was directed by David Lynch.
Phil Spector
Legendary pop producer Phil Spector had been playing with guns for a long time before he shot Lana Clarkson at his home in Alhambra, CA in the early hours of February 3, 2003. He pulled pieces on Leonard Cohen, John Lennon and the Ramones, usually to make a simple point: He was in charge.
Inside the studio, maybe. The rest of the world made the paranoid “tycoon of teen” (as Tom Wolfe dubbed him) wiggy. Ronnie Spector, who married the Ronettes’ Svengali after a string of hits in the early sixties, said he made a glass coffin for her, just like Snow White’s. He liked to show it to Ronnie to remind her of his love.
Clarkson was a mostly B-movie actress working at the House of Blues in West Hollywood when Spector picked her up. She may have known his reputation (at least four other women later testified that Spector had pulled a gun on them when they tried to leave him), but thought the contact was worth the risk. Spector’s chauffeur drove the two to his Spanish-castle style mansion and waited in the car while his boss took his latest conquest inside. An hour later, he heard a gunshot and Spector came out carrying a .38 Colt Cobra and said, “I think I’ve killed someone.”
Spector was charged but stayed free on $1 million bail until a televised trial began March 19, 2007. The proceedings were marked by a change of defense lawyers (including mob mouthpiece Bruce Cutler) and an array of fascinating wigs worn the by the defendant. After six months, the judge declared a mistrial when the jury said they were hopelessly deadlocked. Despite Spector’s seeming confession, forensics hadn’t found his fingerprints on the gun. He claimed Clarkson shot herself. “She kissed the gun,” he told a reporter from Esquire.
In a retrial with the same judge but no TV cameras, a new jury returned with a guilty verdict, and Spector was sentenced to 19 years to life. Despite several appeals, he remained in a state prison near Stockton. He died of complications of Covid-19 in 2021. He was 81 years old.
