The Hall-Mills Murder

The case

A courting couple walking down De Russey's Lane, a lovers' lane just outside New Brunswick, New Jersey, found them on the morning of Saturday, September 16, 1922: a man and a woman lying side by side under a crab apple tree on an abandoned farm, as if arranged. Both had been shot. The man's calling card had been propped at his feet, and torn-up love letters lay scattered between them. He was the Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall, rector of the Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist in New Brunswick. She was Eleanor Mills, who sang in his choir and was married to the church sexton.

Hall and Mills had last been seen on the evening of Thursday, September 14. The letters made plain what much of the parish already suspected: the two had been having an affair for some time, and they wrote about leaving their spouses. Hall was married to Frances Noel Stevens, seven years his senior, whose family was among the wealthiest and best connected in New Brunswick. Eleanor's husband, James Mills, was a poorly paid janitor and sexton.

The investigation began badly and got worse. The bodies lay just across the line in Somerset County, but New Brunswick police in Middlesex County arrived first, and the two counties' officials argued over jurisdiction while sightseers trampled the scene, carried off souvenirs and passed Hall's card from hand to hand. Suspicion soon settled on Mrs. Hall and her two brothers, Henry and William Stevens, and on a cousin, Henry Carpender. Willie Stevens, an eccentric man who lived with his sister, owned a .32-caliber pistol like the weapon used. But a grand jury heard the evidence in November 1922 and returned no indictments.

For four years the case stayed dormant. In 1926 the New York Daily Mirror, a tabloid looking for a sensation, revived it on the strength of claims arising from a former Hall household servant's marriage, suggesting that witnesses had been paid off. Governor A. Harry Moore appointed a special prosecutor, State Senator Alexander Simpson. Mrs. Hall was arrested that summer, and in September a grand jury indicted her, both brothers and Henry Carpender for both murders. Carpender won a separate trial.

The trial of Mrs. Hall and her brothers for the murder of Eleanor Mills opened at the Somerset County Courthouse in Somerville on November 3, 1926, before Justice Charles W. Parker. It drew hundreds of reporters and was covered in more detail than almost any American trial before it. The prosecution's case depended heavily on Jane Gibson, a farmer known in the papers as the Pig Woman, who said she had ridden her mule toward the lane that night, heard voices and shots and seen figures including, she claimed, Mrs. Hall and one of the brothers. Gibson was by then gravely ill and testified from a hospital bed carried into the courtroom. Her accounts had changed repeatedly, and the defense, led by Robert H. McCarter, attacked her credibility. Willie Stevens, expected to be a weak witness, held up well under cross-examination.

On December 3, 1926, the jury acquitted all three after deliberating for a few hours. Within days the state dropped the remaining indictments, including the one against Carpender. No one else was ever charged, and the murders remain unsolved.