The trial was a farce, with Tammany connections and dislike for the people who worked at the Tribune being used fairly shamelessly to protect McFarland. He was shown by his defenders to be a defender of the home and hearth against a seducer, as Harry K. Thaw would be shown to be in his 1907 trial for the murder of Stanford White. McFarland was acquitted among cheering crowds. But his ex-wife did not return to him and spent the rest of her life as Abby Richardson, working in the theater as play reader. She died in 1900. McFarland went west. In the words of the criminal historian Edmund Pearson, it did not take him long to drink himself to death.