Evelyn Nesbit (1884-1967) had a difficult childhood,as her father died when she was eight years old,leaving the family in poverty.When Evelyn Nesbit reached adolescence,she began to support her mother and younger brother by working as an artist's model.She moved to NWC with her mother at the age of 16 and secured more prestigious modeling jobs and work on Broadway as a chorus girl.She became caught up in one of the era's most infamous murder cases.The crime,in which Nesbit's husband,Harry Kendall Thaw,shot her former lover,millionaire Stanford White,in public,added notoriety to Nesbit's beauty.With the 1906 murder Evelyn Nesbit became known as "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing."The shocking story and the lurid details which emerged from Thaw's trial became a modern morality tale which informed the consciousnesses of early Twentieth Century America.Nesbit,Thaw and White enacted an archetypical tragedy of sex and violent death on a dark,urban stage.