He served during World War II in the United States Army Air Force, and later became a test pilot for the Douglas Aircraft Company in California.

Their lives had received sensational attention after his father fatally shot architect Stanford White in 1906 in front of a large crowd.

The senior Thaw was wealthy, the son of a Pittsburgh railroad and coal tycoon, with a long history of mental instability.

In 1906 at Madison Square Garden in front of hundreds of witnesses, he shot and killed architect Stanford White, who had drugged and raped Nesbit when she was 16 years old.

In 1908 Harry Thaw was acquitted of murder based on reason of insanity, but he spent years in mental institutions, where Nesbit visited him.

Nesbit had testified that Russell had been conceived by Harry Thaw during her conjugal visits to her husband at the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

[5] Flying a Northrop Gamma with a Wright Cyclone engine, he came in third in the 1935 race from Los Angeles to Cleveland, ahead of Amelia Earhart in fifth place.

[citation needed] On December 10, 1935, Thaw crashed in Atlanta, Georgia, after leaving from Caldwell, New Jersey, during a planned flight to rescue the polar explorer Lincoln Ellsworth.

[7] On July 17, 1936, Thaw married Katherine Emily Roberts, a Beverly Hills debutante who was a graduate of Radcliffe College.