Early Cases of Pleading Not Guilty By Reason of Insanity
Harry ThawPleading not guilty by reason of insanity was a novel defense in 1906, yet there were two prominent defendants in the United States at the time who made such pleas: the young man who killed Edmund Creffield in Seattle and Harry Thaw who killed Stanford White in New York on the day the Creffield murder trial began.

 
Because of the similarities between the murders and the motives, the Thaw/White case in New York also had an effect on the Creffield murder trial.

 
Both cases made headlines across the nation but Thaw and White's story stayed in the news longer. That's because Harry Thaw was the son of a Pittsburgh railroad and coke magnate and his victim, Stanford White, was at the time America's most distinguished architect. It was sort of the the O. J. Simpson trial of the day.

 
This may also be a partial explanation for why little before has been written about Creffield's murder. Even though Creffield's story has many of the the same elements as White's and Thaw's--sex, insanity, murder, and sensational court trials--Creffield's story was overshadowed and eventually forgotten.
 
Since the Thaw/White case had an effect on Creffield's case, it was written about in Chapter Twenty-One of the book, Holy Roller's: Murder and Madness in Oregon's Love Cult.
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