ALICE DE JANZE SHOOTS RAYMOND DE TRAFFORD and HERSELF!

She shot him.  She did.

Alice de Janze met Raymond  de Trafford in a restaurant to say good-bye. One wonders if she knew all along that she would do so. At lunch they joked and talked - reportedly. Then they went shopping. They went into a gun shop where she said she wanted to buy a gun as a present for her husband, Frederick de Janze. She also bought herself a .38 caliber Colt revolver. Then the two of them went to the train station where they were supposed to say their last farewells.  In the ladies' room she loaded the Colt with bullets. For all the earlier friendliness, Alice later said that she had intended to kill herself. Was she cold-blooded? She got on the train and decided to kill him instead, she said. As he bent for a final kiss, she shot a bullet into Raymond de Trafford's chest and then turned the gun on herself. They were both taken to the hospital and operations were performed.  It's said that Alice always had pain in her body from the gunshot she self-administered from that point forward.

They were in France.  Alice was arrested and thrown into a jail where women who had commit crimes of passion were held.

Her lawyers called her an excellent mother and wife until she met the person responsible for the crime - Raymond!  (Please!)

It helped that Raymond de Trafford did take responsibility!

Not surprisingly, what we would call domestic violence today, was called a crime of passion and understandable then. Given six months sentence, Alice spent the whole six months out of jail as the sentence was suspended.

Her reputation as unstable would forever proceed her.

For now all she wanted was to get back to Kenya, 

In 1928 she did go back to Kenya, hosted by her friends Idina Sackville and Joss Hay, who she'd had an affair with while Idina was pregnant. The settlers were inclined to think that Raymond de Trafford had gotten what he deserved.  But what about all that Swinging. all those Open relationships? There was a hitch.  A divorced woman was not wanted in Kenya!

When I read that, I began to understand something that I had not earlier, something that might explain all the marrying. If Idina Sackville had wanted to stay in Africa she had to be married.  If Alice wanted to stay in Africa, she had to be married. Single women were not to be admitted to Kenya. Was this the real reason these women went through so many husbands?

In 1929 the President of France fully pardoned her!  It goes without saying perhaps.  Money talks!

That he lived, she lived, and she claimed to have done so as a crime of passion allowed her to get away with it.  No doubt her social status and wealth and the best lawyers also had something to do with that acquittal. 

Crime of passion or not, Alice knew how to use a gun, owned guns as did most of the European settlers who had agricultural estates in Africa. They protected themsleves from the wild life, the Big Game, they were likely to encounter just living their lives there. Many of them also went on safari's to kill big game for the challenge and for the trophies they would acquire.  In Britain and America, aristocrats went after foxes and deer and birds.  In Africa they wanted to bag a lion or an elephant or one of every animal alive.

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EVELYN NESBIT : TEENAGE MISTRESS OF ARCHITECT STANFORD WHITE and WIFE OF HARRY K. THAW - MURDER SCANDAL

 

EVELYN NESBIT

(1884–1967)

image from Wikipedia

 

Born Florence Evelyn Nesbit, originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, life was good enough until her father's death meant debt and poverty. Then her mother pushed Evelyn forward to support them both. As a beautiful girl in the Gilded Age she posed for artists around New York and was seduced by the married and famous architect Stanford White when she was a 16 year old virgin and he was 46.  (There are existing statues, posters, and other art that she posed for. Some call her "the Original Gibson Girl").

 

After being wined, dined, and taught to enjoy the finer things in life, after entertaining White's fetish, for which he had built a secret room, where she sat naked on a special red velvet swing and, well, swung,  as had other girls, Evelyn's introduction to sex was date rape with intoxication. Then, at 17, she became too old for Stanford's tastes.  It was time to move on and up.

 

She had a fling with the actor John Barrymore, and then became entwined with Pittsburgh Millionaire, Harry Kendall Thaw, who may have been unstable all along.  He took her and her mother on a tour of Europe and again she was raped.  This time it was sadistically. Had she entered into a "Fifty Shades of Grey" kind of relationship?

 

Evelyn claimed till the day she died, in 1967, that White was the only man she had ever loved.   She is quoted as saying, "The tragedy wasn’t that Stanford White died, but that I lived."

The book that is the primary reference for

this months Mistress of the Month!

Author Paula Uruburu, for her book "American Eve" 

made use of Nesbit's own memoirs, photos, and diaries,

as well as personal research, 

to bring the scandalous story of Evelyn Nesbit's life as a young woman to us. 

 

*****

White was murdered by Thaw and in public, making it not just a murder but a society scandal.  He died in 1906, while dining out at what would become Madison Square Garden, when the jealous and perhaps revengeful, Thaw shot him. This event led to a public trial and generated lots of scandalous news.  Evelyn was considered a flirt and a Gold Digger and that notoriety still sticks with her when you research around her in the present day, though it may have been another case of blaming the victim.  (Consider the more recent case of Scott Thorson, the man who was kept by Liberace starting when he was a teenager.)

 

Evelyn may have been promised reward for her testimony in the trial.  According to IMDb,"Harry Thaw's mother quickly financed propaganda, even a film, to portray her son as a protector of women's virtues, while, at the same time, the media reported on the very-married White's many other transgressions involving young women. After her son's first trial ended in a hung jury, Thaw was retried in 1908 and found insane. He was sent away to a mental institution for the criminally insane in upstate New York, from which he escaped once, and was released in 1915 with reputation untarnished -- "a homicidal hero."

Evelyn, be it that she was continually sadistically or otherwise abused by her husband or not, stuck with him for a decade. They were married from 1905-1915 and had a son, Russell Thaw, who would eventually act in some Hollywood films himself. 

 

As I write this month's Mistress of the Month post, I think about EMPOWERMENT, about CHOICE, about SOCIETAL EXPECTATIONS OF WOMEN, of how it is we (at least some of us) get to live, breath air into our lungs and claim value on this earth, survive, and even prosper, while others do not. Wouldn't it be wonderful to live in a world where no one ever gets raped, or molested, or pimped out, or sex trafficked?  Wouldn't it be wonderful if victims were no longer blamed for having become so?

 

Consider reading, here at MISTRESS MANIFESTO, about the lives of the teenage ballerinas in France in the 19th century, who often had to prostitute themselves or find a man to Keep them.  Or perhaps about the life of Dawn Schiller, the teenager who was seduced and eventually pimped out by her porn actor boyfriend,  John Holmes,

 

Then, and this may make you seriously question how young a woman is when she makes the choice to have less-than-legal sex, read here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot about the Groupies, sometimes under the age of 18 (legal adulthood), who had sex with Rock Gods.  The ones talking about it say it was their choice - even if they were 14 at the time.  I ask you to do this having personally known women who started having sex at 14 and who say that's just how they were and do not seem to regret it.  But the women I know were with boys of the same age or just a bit older, boys from high school who lived with their parents too, and the element of POWER OVER that figures in when a man is much older, or rich, or a celebrity or powerful man of business, just isn't there.

 

EVELYN NESBIT seems to have made the case for not having been seriously forever hurt by her early sexuality.  It is historically true that girls who were just 14 or 16, depending on the state, were considered ready to legally marry for quite some time in early America and many of us have ancestors who married that young. Some people think teenagehood as a transitional time in life was just a modern invention of marketers, not a link between childhood and adulthood!

 

We want to know if she survived after this well.  Read the rest of this month where you will find evidence Evelyn sure seems to have!

 

Missy

 

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