1. Russell William Thaw was an American airplane pilot and former childhood actor.
24 Facts About Russell Thaw
1. 2.
Russell Thaw 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.
3.
Harry Russell Thaw spent the next several years in mental institutions, before eventually being released.
4.
The Thaw family did not accept Nesbit's claims about Russell's paternity.
5.
Russell Thaw grew up in California, where his mother remarried after divorcing his father.
6.
Russell Thaw had a prominent and lucrative acting career and Thaw appeared as a child actor with his mother in six films of the silent film era, all of which have since been lost.
7.
The senior Russell Thaw was wealthy, the son of a Pittsburgh railroad and coal tycoon, with a long history of mental instability.
8.
In 1908 Harry Russell Thaw was acquitted of murder based on reason of insanity, but he spent years in mental institutions, where Nesbit visited him.
9.
Russell Thaw was treated indifferently by Harry Thaw and his family, who never accepted the boy as his biological son.
10.
Russell was born four years into a period of about seven years, following his father's killing of White, when Harry Kendall Thaw was largely confined to jails and mental institutions.
11.
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.
12.
Nesbit said that those who saw the boy believed that Harry Russell Thaw was his father due to the resemblance between them.
13.
Russell Thaw eventually gave up trying to prove Thaw's paternity in an era before it could definitively be established.
14.
Nesbit and Harry Kendall Thaw divorced in 1915, after she had moved to California with Russell.
15.
Russell Thaw worked as the chief pilot for the Guggenheim family and participated in air races and adventure excursions under their sponsorship.
16.
On December 10,1935, Russell Thaw crashed in Atlanta, Georgia, after leaving from Caldwell, New Jersey, during a planned flight to rescue the polar explorer Lincoln Ellsworth.
17.
Russell Thaw served as a pilot in the US Army Air Force during World War II.
18.
Russell Thaw worked as a test pilot for the Douglas Aircraft Company.
19.
Russell Thaw flew the Douglas F3D Skyknight, the Douglas XB-43 Jetmaster, and the XF4D-1 Skyray.
20.
Russell Thaw was the first person to fly the Douglas XF3D-1.
21.
On July 17,1936, Russell Thaw married Katherine Emily Roberts, a Beverly Hills debutante who was a graduate of Radcliffe College.
22.
Katherine Russell Thaw sued her husband for cruelty and "refusal to live with her".
23.
Katherine Russell Thaw said that her husband had left her because he said he could not support them both.
24.
Russell Thaw died in Santa Barbara, California, on May 6,1984.