DOCTOR BERNARD FINCH SERVED ELEVEN ? YEARS : LET OUT IN 1971

It's TRUE! I THINK HE GOT OFF EASY CONSIDERING....  WHAT DO YOU THINK? LEAVE A COMMENT!

image from Open Clipart Library

NEW YORK TIMES : 1971 RELEASE OF DR. BERNARD FINCH

 Aug. 18, 1971

Excerpt:  SACRAMENTO, Calif., Aug. 17 (AP) — Dr. R. 13ernard Finch was ordered released on pa role today, from a life term In the slaying of his wife. Approached about jobs in Missouri, Nebraska and Maryland. The Missouri offer was from a small rural community that wanted him to operate a small hospital and clinic.

His sweetheart at the time of the slaying Carole Tregoff, was paroled in 1969 from the same sentence.

The eight-member California Adult Authority granted the once-wealthy Finch parole in his second bid for freedom since he entered prison 10 years after three sensational trials.  he will be released December 5.

Excerpt: Henry Kerr, chairman of the Adult Authority Board, said that Finch had been approached about jobs in Missouri, Nebraska, and Maryland. The Missouri offer was from a small rural community that wanted him to operate a small hospital and clinic.

Finch's medical license was revoked in California. It can be reinstated by another state, Mr. Kerr said...

CAROL TREGOFF FREED AT AGE 32 IN MAY 1969

Center for Biographical Studies and Research, : CAROL TREGOFF FREE

Excerpt:  This week, however, she won approval, and after 10 years inside the California Institution for Women she walked to freedom Thursday—a silent woman hoping for a new' life. She will be on parole for the rest of her years. Still attractive at age 32, her hair was now' its natural brown shade, and although she put on weight when she first came to prison, she w r as more slender now than when she began her sentence. Miss Tregoff and Finch w'ere finally convicted in 1961 of murder and conspiracy after three sensational trials. The first two ended in hung juries, mostly because of the tactics of defense attorney Grant T. Cooper, the veteran criminal lawyer who later defended Sirhan R. Sirhan. Iverne R. Carter, superintendent of the prison, said Miss Tregoff will live in the Los Angeles area but had asked that her whereabouts not be revealed. “She has to get her bearings in the community,” Mrs. Carter said. “She will do nothing to call attention to herself.”

Missy here!  I guess she played her cards right, so to speak, by being a model prisoner.  Carol was very young and probably more than a little crazy when she conspired to kill her lover's wife along with him, and she feared she'd be an old woman before she got out, but she did get out, in less than ten years served. 

I was unable to find an obituary for Carole Tregoff, or any further information about her.  It is said that she lived under an alias but went back to West Covina. Well, I suspect a lot of people in that area knew of Carole and where she was, and maybe they understood, or forgave, or simply ignored her. I do wonder if she ever loved again - in a healthy way - or if she lived her life as a recluse.  However I did find one hint of Carole's life in a article published in 2017 by the author Joan Didion. It's wonderfully written as only Joan Didion could and in it she says that Carole was a nursing assistant in a prison hospital.

Here's the link : RIVITER MAGAZINE - JOAN DIDION - SOME DREAMERS OF THE GOLDEN

C 2025 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot  All Rights Including Internet and International Rights Claimed.

CAROLE TREGOFF TRIED TO HIRE A HIT MAN TO KILL DR. BERNARD FINCH'S WIFE BARBARA : TESTIMONY AT TRIAL

Excerpts Page 164-165-166-167 :  James Cody, sometimes known as Jack or John Cody, had been sentenced to an additional year of confinement after walking off the prison farm in Minnesota. In exchange for his testimony, he was granted immunity for any crimes connected with the death of Barbara Jean Finch... My notes in parenthesis. There is no doubt from this testimony at trial that Carole was a full participant in planning the murder of her rival, Mrs. Bernard Finch - Barbara.

... Cody: "She wanted me to kill Mrs. Finch."

... Cody: "I told her Dona (an intermediary) had explained everything and that I thought I should get $2000 for doing the job. She said she thought $1000 was more reasonable, and we dickered around, you know, back and forth for a little while. Anyway, with the expense money I told her I would need - to buy a weapon and a car - we finally agreed on $1400. She was going to give me $300 up front and the rest when the job was done."...

Cody: She drew out some maps on napkins. One was a map of the Finch house and the other was a map of how to get to an apartment in Hollywood that Mrs. Finch had. Carole told me, 'If Mrs. Finch is not at the West Covina residence, she would be at the Hollywood apartment.'  It was named the Hollywood Hills Motel or Hotel, or something.  Anyway, I had the address and a map of how to get there."

Cody: "She told me it should look like a robbery, and that I should take the woman's rings and jewelry. I told her I would do it in my own way. Then we decided to do it on the following weekend, the Fourth of July weekend. Carole said that Dr. Finch goes to a tennis tournament in San Diego every Fourth of July, and that he would have a good alibi.

***

My notes: Cody said that he knew he was not going to do it right away but agreed to do it for the money he needed.  He cooperatively flew to Phoenix on a plane with the plan to take a bus to LA from there and do the murder. The travel was to hide his location when the murder occurred.

Cody: "She said "I've made up my mind Jack. If you don't do it, Dr. Finch will, and if he doesn't,  I will.

Cody: "Then she gave me $330 that she had in an envelope.

My notes page 168 -169 - 170

That night Cody and Carole met again and he told her that he had done the job with a shotgun at the Hollywood apartment. She handed him the rest of the money.  As gasps were heard around the courtroom, Cody mentioned that after this Carole was happy. However, she soon questioned whether or not the man had actually murdered Barbara. He claimed Barbara's body was in the trunk of the car. When the truth - that Barbara was indeed alive - was presented to Cody, he claimed he must have killed the wrong woman, maybe a girlfriend of Barbara's. He agreed to go back and do the job right. Then Mr. Finch gave Cody more money for another gun and expenses. This implicated the doctor in full knowledge of the plan to murder. Cody claimed he admitted he had not followed through on the plan. In yet another meeting an angry Finch asked Cody again to do the deed but also said he would do it himself. Cody accepted more money again.

CODY WAS A LIAR, so how much truth could be in this testimony?

In the end both Carole Tregoff and Bernard Finch were convicted of murder. Carole would claim that she soon knew she was no longer in love with the man.

C 2025 Mistress Manifesto - BlogSpot  All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights

CAROLE'S TESTIMONY VARIED : SHE SAID IT WASN'T A "CHEAP RELATIONSHIP" and WOULDN'T ADMIT THEY HAD SEX and TRIED TO HIRE KILLERS BUT...

Subtitled  Chronical of the Finch-Tregoff Case, a Based on Fact Dramatization by James L. Jones, MD.

Bernard Finch and Carole Tregoff were to be tried separately and both were charged with murder in the first degree.

Pages 68 and 69 and 70 :

On July 29th 1959, after giving testimony in which she tried to avoid answering if she'd had sex with Bernard, Carole was arrested in the courtroom. She was not handcuffed but lead to the back of an unmarked car, charged within an hour with first degree murder.

Page 71 : "We are confident that the tow of them planned this thing together. We think they planned to tie up Mrs. Finch, inject her with a lethal dose of Seconal, and run her car over a cliff. 

Notes: Seconal among others, is barbiturate drug used for insomnia, i.e. a sleeping pill. A newer will in which Barbara Jean finch left Dr. Finch the bulk of the estate was found. (Note: She had never filed it so it was invalid.)

Meanwhile Bernard continued to say that the problem was that the Swedish nanny and Carole had simply not been in the same place - the garage - at the same time and that what they did not know was what happened between him and his wife in that garage. It was suggested that Barbara had a gun aimed at her husband at the time.

The headlines had made her a star of sorts and some people attended the trial just to see what she looked like. She claimed to have been forced to testify to incriminate herself and that she was no longer in love with Bernard. The press and the neighborhood women were sympathetic to Carole as they thought she had fallen in love and then used by Bernard.

But then two nineteen year old prostitutes in Vegas came forward to say that they knew someone who had been paid by Carole and Bernard to kill Barbara.

Excerpt page 91: (What the young prostitutes said.) "Turns out the doctor's girlfriend has been looking for somebody to 'take care of' the doctor's wife. ... She glanced at her friend quickly, then back to Powell. "We both heard Ritchie talking with a friend of his from when he worked at the Sahara.  Didn't we?"  She looked at her companion, nodding her into speaking.

"It's true," the other added, after a pause....

The girls, who wanted out of their pimp's control and to go home knew they had a deal .

Notes from pages 92 - 96 :

Forty eight days after her arrest, Carole was allowed out of jail on bail of $25,000.  A Nevada state university student told Las Vegas police he had arranged with Carole Tregoff Pappa and Dr. R, Bernard Finch, early in 1959, to hire two men to kill Mrs. Barbara Jean Finch.  There was a nationwide bulletin out for Richie Keachie and James Patrick Cody. Donald Sanford Williams also said that she had asked him if he knew any gangsters, he was an old eighbor.  Williams had introduced her to Keachie but Keachie didn't want the job.  Then Cody was asked... She offered or paid $1000,000... Cody requested immunity in exchange for his testimony.  Three men said she did.

C 2025 Mistress Manifesto - BlogSpot All Rights Reserved Including Internet and International Rights

PLANNED MURDER : MYSTERY ATTACHE CASE MURDER KIT EXPLAINED AWAY?

Incriminating evidence of a plan to murder was explained away. The plan to murder wife Barbara Finch occurred because the paid hitman took the money and didn't commit the murder. When it was discovered that Barbara was still alive, the would-be hitman, who later testified against Bernard Finch and his Mistress Carole Tregoff. first lied that he must have murdered the wrong woman, and then that he needed more money to pull it off. Carole Tregoff reportedly warned the man that if he didn't do the evil deed, Doctor Bernard Finch would do it himself...  And so, evidence of a plan, which was also cleverly "explained away" by Carole and Bernie was what was contained in a brown leather attaché case...

Excerpt page 59: (Note that seconal was a popular sleeping pill and could be used to overdose a person.)

Brown leather attaché case....

two pieces of rope, each two feet in length, an eight inch kitchen knife, a plastic sheet about two feet on a side, a half empty box of .38 caliber ammunition, an elastic bandage role, small bottle of seconal tablets, two sets of surgeon's gloves, a vial of injectable seconal, a syringe and needle, a flashlight, a brown shaving kit bag...

My notes from pages 65-66: 

Carole claimed that the flashlight was so she could see where she was walking and that the sleeping pills were for her. She said that he had asked her if she needed anything for her apartment and she said a can opener, trying to explain a hammer, screwdriver, and knife.  The rope was explained as something to tie bumpers of a boat he kept at Lido Shores. The gloves because he was blowing them and playing with them like balloons with the family dog.

She said that she had seen Barbara with a gun in her hand.

Missy here : When I read this, I thought that Dr. Finch and  his Mistress Carole had tried to think of everything, including explanations, in advance of being questioned. To me this planned murder was as cold blooded as murders could get. 

C 2025 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot  All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights

DR. BERNARD FINCH : A MAN DRIVEN BY LUST AND MONEY TURNED MURDERER

Excerpt pages 52 and 53

(The divorce attorney for Barbara Jean Finch, the murdered wife of Doctor Finch, Joseph T, Forno of Los Angeles, gave telephone interviews to several newspapers.)

***

"Dr Finch threated a number of times to take Mrs. Finch to the desert and kill her," he was quoted.  When asked about the status of the divorce action, he noted that the Finches had been scheduled to appear in conciliation court the next day to discuss their differences. "Dr. Finch had expressed a desire to reconcile with his wife. The divorce action was postponed. In the meantime, we asked for all of the community property and estimated it was worth $500,000 to $1,000.000." (Note that in 2025 dollars that is about five to eleven million dollars.)

"No fault divorce" was not to come for many years. A wife who could prove "fault," especially adultery, had a very good chance of getting virtually all of the community property.

Forno served  a restraining order on Dr. Finch. "We filed an order to show cause after he violently assaulted his wife on June 25 of this year, trying to force her into his automobile. Dr. Finch had threated his wife with a gun in the past also. She was in constant fear for her life.  This was preceded by an attempt on May 16 to strangle her at her home in West Covina." Forno continued. It was after this first assault Mrs. Finch decided to file for divorce."

Mrs. Finch had filed divorce papers, and at a June 11 hearing before Superior Court Judge Roger A. Pfaff, had requested and been granted $1,650 a month in alimony and child support. She was also given complete control of Dr. Finch's revenues from the clinic. All the revenues were deposited into her personal checking account.  Barbara Jean paid the clinic's bills with her personal checks. She also signed her husband's salary checks.

.... Interestingly, the most recent (malpractice) suit had been filed by James T. Pappa, former husband of Carole Tregoff Pappa.  Mr. Pappa filed his suit the Tuesday before the murder, claiming Cinch had negligently repaired a knee abnormality.

In my opinion, erratic driving, possibly alcoholism, unnecessary surgeries just to make money, and malpractice suits against him proved that the doctor was not necessarily rational or trustworthy and may have been driven by lust and money. However, California has been a community property state since no-fault divorce and by today's standards the Doctor's wife getting everything including future profits from his clinic would probably be considered extreme, unless perhaps he was considered incompetent.

How did 22 year old Carole Tregoff get involved in this?  Was it love?  I think OBSESSION!

C 2025 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot  All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights

CAROLE TREGOFF : MISTRESS OF SOCIETY SURGEON BERNARD FINCH and CO-CONSPIRATOR IN THE MURDER OF HIS WIFE BARBARA FINCH

The book is old and the last copy available at a major city library. I'll be using "A Murder in West Covina," as well as numerous news stories to reveal this story of love gone wrong. The murder made headlines for three years back in the day and attracted Hollywood actors claiming they were doing research for future roles.

Of course we know that not all "love triangles," which is how the murder was typified in the press at the time, end in murder or scandal. (Some people choose to be in a triad.) Because it's clear that wife Barbara Jean Finch was a victim of domestic violence at the hands of her husband the doctor, before he murdered her, it's difficult for me to think of this as a "love triangle."

As a side, I first learned about this murder when I was reading around the journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, who was featured here in April 2023, titled "Pulitzer-Prize Nominated Reporter Dorothy Kilgallen* and Pop Singer Johnnie Ray : A Flaunted Unconventional Romance In The 1950's Before She Died." Kilgallen, married with children, a popular panelist on a television game show named What's My Line, first made her name as a rare woman journalist back in the 1950's and 1960's and she was very good at that too. (Her own death was suspicious and in recent years there has been an attempt to reopen the case.) In 1960 Kilgallen covered this trial.

CAROLE ANN TREGOFF

(1937 - ?) 

After being freed from prison, in May 1969, Carole lived under an assumed name.

I was unable to find an obituary for her. 

Image from Newspapers.com

clipped by jamesdhug

Our Mistress of the Month for July 2025 here at Mistress Manifesto, is Carole Tregoff, who modeled briefly and became the Mistress of a "society surgeon" Doctor Raymond Bernard "Bernie" Finch, who murdered his wife, Barbara Jean Finch.  Finch was arrested and charged with First Degree murder. Carole was arrested and charged the same. How innocent was she?

The murder occurred on July 18, 1959 when Carole was 22 old. Barbara had been shot dead, once in the back. Carol hid in the bushes and later drove all the way to Vegas alone, perhaps in a state of shock. (Bernard was 41 and his wife, Barbara, was 36.)

Bernard and Barbara had been married six years and both had been married before. Barbara had brought one child into the marriage she'd had with her first husband, Lyle Daugherty, and had another child with the doctor. A young woman from Sweden served as the children's nanny and was important to the testimony in the case.

In an interesting twist, in 1951 there had been accusations of a "wife swap." Bernard's high school sweetheart, Frances Simpson and he had married. Next door lived Lyle Daughterly and his wife - Barbara Jean.  It was Doctor Bernard Finch who delivered Barbara, who he would eventually marry, by caesarian, of the daughter who he'd become step-father to. Eventually Frances married Lyle. The two had said they only got involved after divorces but there was publicity that turned it into a sordid "wife swapping" ordeal. 

Carole Tregoff had also been married before and was known in Vegas as Mrs. James Pappa. Oddly, in some news articles she is identified as the doctor's "assistant." The day after the murder, detectives found the red haired, light skinned beauty, living in Vegas and working at The Sands hotel and casino as a waitress. Yes really! So Vegas was home for her, not West Covina; this is not an easy commute by driving. Asked where the doctor was, she said he was at her apartment. Soon after, he was arrested. Carole lied to protect Bernard - and herself. She claimed that he had been with her in Vegas for a long weekend and gave a rather detailed account of their doings.

Carole was asked if Bernard supported her financially (i.e. if she was his Mistress) to which she answered that he had given her money but never supported her. She said that she and Bernard had intended to divorce their spouses and remarry to each other. The two had been living together in Vegas, then called "shacking up." 

In subsequent testimony, Carole's stories didn't match. She claimed that she had moved to Vegas to avoid being called into the divorce action between Bernard and Barbara that May.

It turned out she hired a hitman to murder Barbara. He took the money.  He didn't do the deed.

Soon the trial would make headlines.

C 2025 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot.  All rights including Internet and International Rights Reserved

* Re Dorothy Kilgallen : in 1960 she went to cover the trial of society surgeon Bernard Finch, accused of shooting his wife Barbara once in the back while his co-conspirator and mistress, Carole Tregoff cowered in a clump of bougainvillea. " The crime was s slapdash do-it- yourself job done after a hoodlum named Cody took payment for the hit from the lovers, lost his nerve, blew the money in Vegas and then lied to Finch about having done the murder.

You may be interested in :  

April 2023

PULITZER-PRIZE NOMINATED REPORTER DOROTHY KILGALLEN and  POP SINGER JOHNNIE RAY : A FLAUNTED UNCONVENTIONAL ROMANCE IN THE 1950's BEFORE SHE DIED

February 2017

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

AUDREY MUNSON : UNSTABLE and SPINNING CONSPIRACY THEORIES : POSSIBLY PREGNANT BY HERMAN OELRICH JR? THE SILVER MINING HEIR?

Page 189: "Ever since Girl O Dreams, Audrey's mental health had seemed to ebb and flow.  At times, she became convinced the world was out to get her, she spun incredible conspiracy theories, and lost her reason. She looked for culprits, weather secretly funded by the Kaiser, or part of some other imagined plot.  At other times, she was again her bright and charming self, childishly enthusiastic, friendly, and disarmingly funny. She seemed to lack control over her moods, and there is some suggestion that she tried to self-medicate with drugs - although her mother always vehemently denied it.  Audrey was at war with herself."

Audrey even wrote a long letter to the State Department going against Hermann Oelrichs and others, people who had deeply hurt her. The Gypsy Queen's world about Dead Sea may have been taken to mean Jewish people.  Audrey seemed to be antisemetic at a time when that was not uncommon. If she had not been secretly married to the man, perhaps she had been his Mistress and pregnant at one time.

Page 188 : Excerpt from her letter:

"You will see how pro-German Hermann Oelrichs is when he tried to frame me up with an Irish Doctor I called upon for an errand.  The Doctor had witnesses in the Anti-Room and tried to make out because I was going to England that I was about to become a mother.  I have heard this openly discussed in street-cars and one the street by women who were this mans (sic) agents." (Misspelling is hers.)

Was she actually ever pregnant?  A miscarriage? An abortion? Gave the child up for adoption in Canada?  Her mother said no.  Audrey was unsure.

Here is where I have to express that more than one woman who spoke up to defend herself or was open with her opinions, and who made an enemy or two, found themselves labeled "crazy" or mental illness was used as some sort of defense. As well, I speculate that her mother, Kittie, may have done the best thing possible for Audrey at the time because the mother-daughter duo were so poor. An institution might not be much but might provide as much as a homeless shelter might today.

But early in 1919 the Munsons were living in Long Beach, New York, in a boarding house owned by a sixty-five year old man who was on his third marriage, a Doctor Walter Keene Wilkins, and though it became convoluted and he always denied he was the murderer, Doctor Wilkins was convinced of murdering his wife with blows to her head with a hammer.  He was sentenced to die in the electric chair but committed suicide awaiting.

Page 199 : Detectives told the press they were seeking an actress as "the other woman" in a love triangle to explain why the normally amiable Dr. Wilkins hammered his wife to death.  Two days after Dr. Wilkins was arrested, the Washington Times reported: "A definite clew indicating that a pretty young woman may prove to be an important factor in the solution of the murder of Mrs. Julia Wilkins whose husband Dr. Walker K., Wilkins, who was indicted for murder in the first degree, has been found, according to Detectives working on the case.  The eternal triangle is on the verge of being revealed, these Detectives assert, and sensational disclosures which will dwarf others so far unearthed, are soon to be made."

A postcard-sized ad of Audrey in her swimsuit was the clue.

This began the infamy of Audrey Munson which would ruin her modeling career and render her unemployable.  But both Dr. Wilkins and Audrey denied they had more than passing hellos between them.

C 2024  Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot

All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights 

DOROTHY KILGALLEN : WE LEARN FROM AUTHORS LEE ISRAEL, JONNY WHITESIDE, and MARK SHAW : WAS SHE MURDERED BECAUSE OF WHAT SHE LEARNED ABOUT THE JFK ASSASSINATiON?

I love that Mark Shaw believes that Dorothy is helping the investigation of her murder from the Beyond. If you think that's hokey, well, he is also an ex defense attorney and terrific investigative reporter and is determined to get to the truth.

He too read Lee Israel's biography of Dorothy Kilgallen.  

Johnny Whiteside's book about Johnnie Ray leads us to learn about a superstar singer 70 years after his fame.  Dorothy was in love with him for many years, though their relationship had become friendship by the time she died in 1965. Ray must have suffered learning his lover and best friend had died.  He was not a suspect.

One of many books that Mark Shaw has written.  Will Dorothy get justice?  Well, he has a suspect in mind.

THREE MISTRESS MAY COMING UP!

Hello My Readers, 

May 2023 is going to be a bit different than most months here at Mistress Manifesto. 

For the first few days of the month - and then the last few - I'm going to post on two women who have been Mistress of the Month... I bet you can guess at least one of them!  The other?  That Mistress of the Month is back in the news because of a special documentary, her own project!

In between, please continue with me as we explore the Alternative Lifestyle of the famous reporter and "What's My Life" television celebrity, Dorothy Kilgallen, whose life may have been ended in murder - the modern version of poison - an overdose.  Was her husband a suspect? Had she managed to shame him with her long term love affair with bisexual pop singer Johnnie Ray? Or, perhaps was it that she was so close to the truth about who had assassinated President John F. Kennedy and someone wanted to stop the truth from coming out?  Mark Shaw, the author who wants to get justice for Dorothy, has worked hard at it.  I feel I can do my part here and, who knows, maybe YOU have information for him that can make a difference.

If you've just hit on this post, or this blog, first, we began the famous Dorothy Killgallen saga in May 2022, so you may want to go back a little to start.

As well, I encourage you to read back a few months. Perhaps you'll find the story of someone who was just like YOU!

Missy

COMING UP : AN INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST TRIES TO REOPEN A DEATH INVESTIGATION OF A HIGH POWERED WOMAN IN AN OPEN MARRIAGE

Hello My Dear Readers!

Over the next two months I'll be delving into the Open Marriage and Love Affair of a Reporter who ended up suspiciously dead. 

I was going to do what I usually do, and devote one month to this married woman, who was not a Mistress in the traditional sense, and perhaps instead Kept her husband, while being a bit of a Sugar Mama to a man who didn't need her money.  But, with luck, I was able to obtain two more juicy books that I found enhanced my understanding - and will yours - and as I bookmarked and excerpted from three books and tried to fit it all in 30 days, reasonably spaced, I realized there was no way I could be fair to my subject without giving it two months.

This story has interested me for a couple years now and I think it will interest you also.

It is also my hope that increased interest in this case will help the investigative journalist who has done so much to create interest in the first place, through intensive research, book publications, and speaking engagements, that include interviews on radio and can be found in YouTube videos, further his quest to get an investigation into her death opened.

Missy

MARGUERITE ALIBERT and ALI KAMEL FAMY BEY - ANOTHER MARRIAGE and a MURDER

In December 1920, Marguerite, a bit less than a year after her divorce from Henri Laurent, arrived back in Cairo, Egypt. She first became the mistress of a Sepphardic Jewish Italian banker named Mosseri.  But she also became the mistress of Jean d'Astoreca.  Being kept by these two men didn't stop her from meeting Ali Kamel Famy bey, who was enraptured by her as she acted uninterested.  He was an heir to a fortune inherited when he was sixteen. He was known for his hot temper and for having a good time with his money.

By 1922, when he was 21, he was feeling some pressure to marry as the male in the family.  In May of that year, Marguerite got the formal introduction she needed in society to meet him.  Soon they were living as man and wife and traveling from one resort to another.  His family was against the marriage.  But on December 26th, 1991 they were married in a Civil Ceremony.

The early days of their marriage was like a honeymoon.  She had her lawyer deal with the marriage contract in which he paid 8000 pounds, 2000 as the signing, and the rest if he died or there was a divorce.  And she was to convert to Islam, which she did rapidly after the civil ceremony, giving up her Catholicism.  But soon the couple was threatening to kill each other.

The Islam religious ceremony came to pass in February 1923.  She did not know that in Islam a woman cannot divorce a husband.  This seems to have invalidated or challenged the premarital contract.  And for all his chasing Marguerite, he had not given up going to seedy places where there were both male and female prostitutes available.  Despite ongoing travel and luxury, Marguerite got bored of this husband too.  And they were fighting openly and terribly.

Back in Paris, due to her own efforts as well as her divorce settlement with Laurent, she was worth 37,000 pounds by 1923.  There she decided to humiliate her husband by recovering her admirers.  By June 1923 she had a detective following Ali hoping that he was homosexual so she could use that information to get money from his family.

Two nights after La Bal du Grand Prix (the Grand Prix ball, the couple came to blows again and Marguerite threatened to shoot Ali.  They both owned guns - this was known publicly.  His family wanted them to separate citing that she was not an obedient Islamic wife.

In England at the Savoy hotel during the season of 1923 that began in April and provided constant entertainment, Ali cut Marguerite off financially.  On July 9th of that season he stopped her from buying more jewelry and clothing.

She said she had to have an operation.  She said he cut her off from the money to pay for it.

Shortly after 2 am after a dance at the hotel, during the worst lightening and thunderstorm, she chased him out of their suite and shot him three times.  He bled out from a head wound.
She admitted it immediately.  She said she had lost her head.  They had been arguing over their divorce but she wasn't completely out of her mind.  She claimed she had only wanted to frighten him away from abusing her.  She wept learning her husband had died - and only 23 years old too!

Within hours she was arrested.  The newspapers were carrying the story and so were the tabloids.


C 2009  Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot  All Rights Reserved

The Woman Before Wallis - Prince Edward, The Parisian Courtesan, and the Perfect Murder is the primary reference for this month's posts.

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

 

C 2017  Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot  All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights.

P.S. Use the Google Search feature embedded on the side bar to read about Scott Thorson, the ballarinas, the groupies, or any of the many Mistresses (and Mantresses) I've covered!