Then he graduated from Columbia Law School, was admitted to the bar, and practiced in New York City.
[6] Thaw was the mentally unstable heir of a railroad baron, and he had killed a renowned architect, Stanford White, who had previously sexually assaulted Thaw's wife, Evelyn Nesbit, who was a famous fashion model and chorus girl.
In a contemporaneous report, the New York Times could only identify one specific previous case in which this had occurred.
After a second trial in 1908 (under a different judge) ended with verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity and Thaw was incarcerated in a state hospital for the criminally insane but continued to pursue legal challenges to his incarceration, Fitzgerald suffered a nervous breakdown in 1911 that was attributed to the strain of the trial.
[1] Fitzgerald died on December 17, 1922, at his home at 34 Hamilton Terrace, in Manhattan of heart disease[1] and was buried at the Calvary Cemetery in Queens.