ARTICLE | Madness and murder
Eadweard Muybridge
Eadweard Muybridge looked like a mix of Walt Whitman and Zeus. He was tall and lean, with a long white beard, and bushy brows that shadowed his eyes and made him seem thoughtful and deviant. In 1871, while in his 40s, he married a woman half his age named Flora Shallcross Stone. Three years later, Muybridge found a letter his wife had written to a drama critic named Major Harry Larkyns.
Muybridge found the letter in his midwife’s home. In it was a photograph of his seven-month old son, upon which his wife had written the boy’s name as “Little Harry,” which led Muybridge to believe his son was not in fact his son.
“He stamped on the floor and exhibited the wildest excitement,” Muybridge’s midwife remembered after he found the letter. “He was haggard and pale and his eyes glassy... he trembled from head to foot and gasped for breath.”
Flora Shallcross Stone
Muybridge caught a train that afternoon north from San Francisco to Vallejo. It was night when he knocked on Larkyns’ door. As Larkyns stepped forward, Muybridge shoved a revolver at him and said, “I have brought a message from my wife, take it.”
Larkyns died from the gunshot.
The state charged Muybridge with murder for killing Larkyns. At trial, Muybridge pleaded insanity.
In closing arguments, Muybridge’s lawyer argued that “every fiber of a man's frame impels him to instant vengeance, and he will have it, if hell yawned before him the instant afterward.” The jury of mostly old and gray men seemed to agree, and the photographer was acquitted. Muybridge and his wife divorced. She died five months later of an illness. And even though he’d given his son the middle name Helios—the same he signed his photos—he abandoned the child at an orphanage. Learn more here.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic