Fanny Newcomb And the Irish Channel Ripper by Ana Brazil

I went to Wikipedia for details about Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, and Harry K. Thaw, and she witnessed the crime that launched the “Trial of the Century”-on June 25, 1906, her husband shot her rapist to death on the rooftop of New York City’s Madison Square Garden. I knew the bones of Evelyn’s story-she worked as a teenage model and chorus girl to support her mother and younger brother, she was raped by New York architect Stanford White, she married the brutal and off-balanced millionaire Harry K. Holmes aside, I returned to Miss Evelyn Nesbit. But characters, crimes, and motivations just didn’t click in my head, and I couldn’t make that story work. In the final paragraph, she would heroically clamber out of the “Murder Castle” hotel. I wanted to explore how Holmes preyed upon his female victims and then I wanted to show how one of those exploited women got the better of him. During the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, he owned the “Murder Castle” hotel where women and men could check in, but-as the newspapers reported-they could never leave.

Doctorow’s Ragtime or the movie or Broadway musical based on his novel.īut although Evelyn was clearly a victim of sexual and emotional abuse by multiple wealthy and powerful men, she wasn’t my first choice for a historical Me Too-themed short story.

You might also remember Evelyn from her saucy escapades in E. She was the star defense witness in the 1907 “Trial of the Century”, where her exploitation as “the girl on the red velvet swing” was publicly revealed. Artist Charles Dana Gibson used young Evelyn as the model for one of his most-famous Gibson Girl illustrations. You probably know something about Evelyn. When I-an author of American historical crime fiction-wanted to write a Me Too-themed short story, a story about crimes against women, retribution, and even, possibly, healing, Miss Evelyn Nesbit was the obvious choice.

Fanny Newcomb And the Irish Channel Ripper by Ana Brazil