August 19, 2025 • 51 mins
In 1922, a pastor and his mistress were murdered in New Jersey. Nobody was ever convicted of the crime even though it seems clear who did it.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck And this is another edition of Stuff you Should
Know is ongoing low key true crime. Sweet.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Yeah, it's been a while, if you.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Like, I'm trying to think of the last one, but yeah,
I mean clearly it has been if I can't think
of the last one, but yeah, I like it every
once in a while. I was just kind of add
to it. And it's just this kind of thing because
they're interesting, especially if you're not looking at them like
a total gawker, you know.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Agreed.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
So we're talking today about what I hadn't heard of.
Let me ask you this before we get started. Yeah,
did you get your idea from People Magazine? No? Because
People Magazine ran an article on this very murder on
June twenty sixth, twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Oh really, Yes, Like, where did you get this idea?
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Well, I know it wasn't People, because you know, I
just I didn't read People. I'm not against it. If
I'm like, you know, waiting for the doctor or something, Well.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
You're really digging yourself into a hole. Here.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
I'll pick up a People magazine. That's fine.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
I'm wondering now if this was a listener suggestion that
I need to look up.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
I searched it and I did not really anything about it.
That's why I was like, holy cow, People magazine. He
really got it from there.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Maybe, I mean sometimes I might go so low as
to search for, you know, unsolved crimes or something.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Sure, there's nothing wrong with that. That my ideas well.
The crazy thing about this is it's I've seen it
described as like the first truly sensationalized trial of the
century in the United States, or that it was like
their first big trial of the century, something like that,
and I was definitely up there. I've seen it compare
(01:57):
with some other ones. Yeah, that came later closely on
the heels. But I never heard any of this. I've
never heard of any of these people. And yet some
other people say, hey, this might have even inspired the
Great Gatsby in some ways.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
I have a feeling that's how it came to me.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
And now I'm wondering if that was the search term
that I should have used for listener's suggestion.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Oh Great Gatsby, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't search
for that either. Well, well, I have to get to
the bottom of this, like a couple of true detectives.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Now, because you feel like we're letting someone down.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Yeah, we probably are, but we do need to get
their name. But I wonder if if this thing is
sent post June twenty six, twenty twenty five. Bet they
got it from People, Okay, because the People magazine article,
like in the headline it said that it inspired the
Great Gatsby.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
Yeah, I mean, I definitely remember. That's what drew my
attention to it. But if you're trying to root me
out as a People Magazine reader, you're going to fail.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
I'm not going to stop. I'm not going to stop
until i'm successful. So just look out, buddy, because you're
my crosschairs. Now.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Who knows.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
So let's talk about this crime. In short, there was
a reverend, well known reverend in New Brunswick, New Jersey,
home of Rutgers, and this reverend was having an affair
with one of his church members, a woman named Eleanor Mills.
The reverend's name was Edward Hall. He was about seven
years her senior from what I understand, and one night
(03:31):
or one morning, I should say, they turned up murdered,
brutally murdered, and it became, like I said, a very
sensational story, not just in New Brunswick, not just in
nearby New York, but everywhere across the country. I would guess,
probably out of the country as well. Who knows, how
(03:51):
would you find something like that out I.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
Don't know, People magazine probably, yeah, probably in People International.
So yeah, Ed Hall was in his early forties, forty
one years old at the time of his death, and
he was a pastor, like you said, at Saint John's Episcopal.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
About twenty miles from where I lived in New Jersey.
Oh yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
And his wife's name was Francis Hall. She was seven
years older than him, interestingly, because I guess his mistress,
Eleanor Mills, was seven years younger.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Anything to that, I think it's just a fluke of nature. Yeah,
I think so too. But and this is kind of
key here.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
She his wife had come from a you know, it
seems like a pretty wealthy, well to do, well connected
family in the area because he was just a pastor,
and you know, they didn't make a lot of dough.
Yet they lived in a really fancy house they had
a chauffeur, they had a staff, they had maids that
work there, which will come into play in this story.
(04:55):
And they had been married about eleven years. His miss Dress,
who was also brutally murdered. She was a homemaker, married
to a school janitor named James, who also kind of
helped take care of the church. They had a couple
of kids. She sang in the choir, and this is
also key. She acted as sort of a very close
personal assistant to the reverend, like very closely assisted him,
(05:19):
if you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Yeah, I do know what you're saying. So one other
thing about Edward Hall and his wife Francis's fortune. He apparently,
when he first got to take over the church, the
Saint John's Episcopal Church, it was a hostel takeover. He
started courting a lovely parishioner, but she didn't really have
any money. He dropped her and put his sights on
(05:42):
Francis Stevens, who would become Francis Hall his wife. And
from what I've read, there's not a lot of note,
or there wasn't a lot of note about Francis Stevens
aside from her wealth, and she was wealthy. She shared
what would be worth today a forty million dollar fortune
between herself and her two other brothers, So she was
(06:03):
definitely wealthy, and so in addition to running around on her,
he also seemed to just have been after her money.
And let's not forget he's an episcopal reverend leading an
entire church. So that to me, when I put all
those things together, I was like, I don't really like
this guy.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Yeah, yeah, fair enough. So it was not a secret
among the church. You know, it's kind of one of
those things, you know, back in nineteen twenty two where
people might it might have been pretty clear and even
probably in a modern day church that somebody was having an affair,
but you didn't really talk about that kind of thing,
and so it was basically an open secret. After you know,
(06:43):
the sermons and after Sunday would end, they would spend
a lot of time together in his study. Apparently they
would leave love notes, and that will come into playing
the story for each other with a little secret system
where they would put it in a book on his
shelf and trade notes that way. Well, do you think
it was the Great gatsty just.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
They traveled in time?
Speaker 3 (07:04):
They did the day that the news broke though, The
New York's Time, The New York Times came out and said,
and this is how they would have to put this
kind of thing back then, they said they had long
been friendly.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Right, so yeah, like you said, this is an open secret.
Apparently their spouses knew. James Mills and Francis Hall both
seemed to have known about the affair. For one, when
they turned up missing that first day. Apparently, Francis Hall
the first time she spoke to James Mill, her husband's
(07:39):
mistress's husband, James said, do you think they eloped? That
was his response when he found out that they were
both missing. And apparently, also this is important too, Francis
Hall had a informal network of spies among the congregation
who kept tabs on those two and informed her of
their doing. Essentially, so both of them knew full well
(08:02):
what was going on.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Right, they knew, but they didn't project that publicly. Publicly
they both said, like my head didn't know this was
going on. And as we'll see later in court, she
even testified that you know, her marriage was perfect and
those these supposed love notes are fake and they were
not having an affair.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
No, for sure, I think her first public response was
go wois So.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
On the day of the murder, this was Thursday, September fourteenth,
they each you know, left their respective houses, and another
couple reported to seeing them meeting up on a bridge nearby.
And then a couple of days later another couple came forward.
This woman named well woman, she was fifteen years old.
She was a young girl named Pearl Bomber. Yet she
(08:53):
was in a relationship because this was in nineteen twenty
two with a guy who was anywhere from nineteen to
twenty three who can tell. His name was Raymond Schneider.
They came upon the bodies a couple of days later
on Old Philip Swarm. This is the other side of
the Raritan River there, and this is about ten thirty
in the morning. They went to the closest house, had
(09:13):
the owner called the cops, and the cops showed up
pretty quickly.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Yeah, the bodies. They it was pretty disturbing. So they'd
been left on a path off of Derusi's Lane. This
is a dure road I think in Somerset County, and
it was a well known lover's lane. Like this is
the kind of time where you had to go out
to a lover's lane to either have an affair or
have premarital sex or both. This is where their bodies
were found, on a path off of this lover's lane. Right, Yeah,
(09:40):
a reverend Hall had been shot once through the temple
and exited the opposite temple and that was it for him.
But Eleanor Mills, his mistress, she had really been worked over.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
Right, Yeah, she was shot three times in the head
and her neck was cut so severely that she was
close to being decapitated. His shot was point blank, sort
of you know what we'd call execution style, with a
thirty two caliber pistol.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
And the bodies were posed.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
Together after that, they were under a crab apple tree,
kind of posed as cuddling lovers. Her head was placed
on his arm, not you know, separate from her body,
just laid against him, and a scarf was draped over
her cutthroat, and he had a hat, a Panama hat
kind of partially covering his space. So, you know, from
(10:34):
twenty yards away or whatever, looked like a couple just
sort of laying there, cuddling, maybe taking a nap under
a tree.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Yeah, So that's how they were found. But apparently as
Pearl and Raymond were coming upon them, they saw very
quickly that they were dead. There was one other thing
that wasn't noted at the time when the bodies were
found in nineteen twenty two, but it would be noted
when the case was reignited four years later in nineteen
twenty six, that that Eleanor mills tongue and vocal cords
(11:04):
had been cut out and removed. That had been missed
in the first autopsy, but a subsequent optopsy found that.
So this was the state that these bodies were found in.
I think also, the Reverend Hall's business card was found
propped up against his foot. I think that's the only
other thing we left out. Oh no, there's one other thing.
This is really important too. This is the clue to me.
(11:27):
You ready, Chuck, I'm ready. There were love letters that
Eleanor Mills had written to Edward Hall, the Reverend Hall,
and they had been placed all around them. So this
was a highly staged crime scene. Not just the bodies
were staged, but there were actual props involved among an
(11:48):
executed and a mutilated body left out in public, essentially
to be found almost immediately after they were killed.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Yeah, I mean the business card almost feels like, hey,
if anyone stumbles upon this, who's not from around here?
Speaker 1 (12:03):
This is who this is?
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Right? You know, yeah for sure?
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Like what else could that be?
Speaker 2 (12:09):
I don't know. I mean they're sending some sort of message.
If that's not that, there's something else that they're sending,
Like that's a that's pretty in your face, you know.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Yeah, for sure. So the bodies were found locals. You know,
word gets around a little bit, locals starts showing up.
Then once the new newspapers get a hold of it,
like you said.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Earlier, it became a big deal. And I guess this
was such a.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Sensational thing at a time where this kind of thing
didn't happen much that like people really started coming to
this town to like just see what happened. They wanted
to walk on the grounds of that road and near
that farm, and they wanted to like literally take pieces
of that tree and dig up dirt around there as
a keepsake.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Apparently, they said.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
You know, they were showing up at a rate of
a thousand cars a day. Sounds a little overblown, maybe,
mm hmm. But there were like vendors selling popcorn and
balloons and you know, the dirt they were selling for
twenty five cents a bag. It was really out of
hand very quickly.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
You don't. It reminded me of was like the circus
atmosphere that grew up when Floyd Collins was trapped in
sand Cave. Yeah, around it was around the same time,
so people were.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Just looking for something.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Yeah, pretty bored apparently. Yeah, so yeah, it was a
big deal. There was a huge problem with all of
those people showing up combined with incompetent an incompetent police investigation,
and that was that these people trod all over the
crime scene. They apparently messed with the scarf, they took
(13:40):
samples from the tree. Apparently the tree was stripped of
everything except its trunk. After everyone was done with it.
There's the guy selling the dirt. This stuff was really important, Like,
for example, the dirt was important because that's how they
would establish whether those two had been murdered in the
spot they were found in or somewhere else and transport
(14:01):
it because the blood they found trickled into the dirt,
which is a sure sign that they had had been
killed there on the on the spot. But with people
stealing dirt from that there goes all of that evidence too,
So the crime scene was completely useless. And this is
at a time when people knew, like, no, you really
need to preserve crime scenes.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Yeah, for sure, I think that's a good spot for
a break a A. All right, Well, since Josh said, ah,
we're gonna take a little break and come back with
more of this grizzly murder right after this.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
All right, so we're back.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
When we last left you, Josh was sort of detailing
the problems with the crime scene and people trotting about
and messing that up, and you mentioned something about the
police work wasn't so good. One of the issues was
and this is something it seems like it happens a lot,
if you believe TV and movies at least, is that
there were various jurisdictions kind of battling for this case.
(15:33):
They lived in Middlesex County, the old Phillips farm was
in Somerset County, like you mentioned, and initially, like you said,
they didn't even know where their murders took place. They
later found out that they were alive when they got
to the farm, so they finally found that out. But
at the beginning, you had Middlesex County in Somerset County,
both saying like, no, this is my case.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
This is my case.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
And for a while, it seems like for a pretty
great while they had two sort of separate investigations going on,
which never, at least in the movies, seems to be
a good idea.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
No, not at all. Apparently the governor had to get
involved and be like, you guys need to join forces,
and they eventually did. But I mean, this is this
happened for I don't know exactly how long, but long
enough for it to be significant enough to mention, and
this is a really important time during an investigation, the
first several hours forty eight.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
You might even say, yeah, that's what they say.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
So there was a statement that was issued that Missus
Hall issued essentially to back up a theory that had
been posed that this was a robbery. There was a
robbery gone wrong, and a woman named Sally Peters acted
as Missus Hall's spokeswoman apparently for most of this time
(16:48):
because Missus Hall didn't really want to be seen in public,
so a good friends stepped up and essentially they pointed
out that Missus Hall's husband, the Reverend Hall, he walked
around with the gold watch and in his wallet he
typically carried about fifty dollars, just like one thousand dollars today.
That's what he walked around adjusts.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
One thousand dollars of cash in their wallet.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
A guy who marries a woman for her money and
then runs around on her almost publicly. Yeah, probably so,
And that those things were missing when they were found,
So they had been robbed, right, But the question was
was that really the motive behind this murder where Eleanor
Mills's throat had been cut to the backbone and they've
been staged in some really weird ways.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Right, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
So this is the Middlesex assistant prosecutor at first, because
again they were conducting separate investigations. This guy's name was
John Chulan, and he came out and said, hey, wait
a minute. Basically, I mean he couldn't come right out
and accused her, but he was basically like, hey, there's
no information to back this up. Kind of listen to
our statements and maybe not the ones from the deceased family.
(17:57):
I'm sure he had to couch that because she was
from a wealthy family, but he basically said, hey, there's
no evidence to back this up, and we think that
and this to me is a little hinky, but he said,
if it was a robber, he wouldn't have been using
a thirty two. He would have been using a larger caliber,
which to me doesn't really make much sense.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
He would have been using a forty four magnum, the
most powerful handgun in the world. Do you feel lucky.
So there was another theory too that I hadn't heard of,
but kind of makes sense. Apparently the Klan had recently
become highly active in the area around that time, and
(18:35):
they were known for severely punishing moral transgressions like affairs.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Yeah, but not their own, no.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Of course, not so if they had come upon or
had targeted these two, because I mean, if this was
an open secret and this guy's a prominent member of
the community, they could have been a target for the
Klan to punish somebody like that. So that was a
decent theory, but it didn't really go too far, at
(19:02):
least at first.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
Yeah, for sure, And we mentioned this next one just
because it was has been mentioned, but it really also
went nowhere. But very briefly, there were apparently there were
two Italians who had showed up in New Brunswick and.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
They had revolvers.
Speaker 3 (19:18):
Like that was known that there were these two Italian
guys who no one knew and they had guns. But
that was just a very quick sort of They had
nothing to do with the kind of deal.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
For sure. That's just what you did in nineteen twenty
two when somebody turned up murdered. How many Italians came
into town?
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
So the cops were like, okay, like we can't possibly
like train our sights on on the wealthy widow and
her family. Let's see who else we can blame to
just basically make the public, let us make this go away, right. Yeah,
they were just looking for somebody to pin it on,
and they turned their attention to the two people, Pearl
(19:58):
Balmber and ra Schneider, who had run over to a
farmhouse and told a woman we just found some bodies.
Called the police. Right when they found the bodies. They
were like, that seems a little fishy. We're going to
start looking at you guys, because you're probably just providing
grown alibis who would possibly call in finding the bodies
of a murder they just committed.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
So they discovered like hey, they were also on the
farm that night, because this was remember two days later
in the morning when they called it in, but they said, hey,
they were also there that night. A couple of weeks
after that, those two and then a couple of other
friends of theirs that were also with them that night,
a guy named Clifford Hayes and a fifteen year old
(20:42):
kid named Leon Kaufman. They were all four brought in
for what sounds like a straight twenty four hours of questioning,
which is always very suspicious, you know, when you try
and get someone to their weakest point. So they signed
some weird false confession. So they wore them out questioning
for a full.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Day and night.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
And at the end of this Ray Schneider, the original
guy who reported it with his young girlfriend, signed a
statement that said, hey, around midnight that night, me and
Clifford Hayes, my buddy, came across a couple of people.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Sitting on the ground near that farmhouse.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
I thought it was my girlfriend and her father, and
I had been looking for her. I was pretty jealous,
and so Hayes shot both of them, and it sounds
like it might have been like a favor to him.
None of this really adds up, because it wasn't like
he had found her with some other guy and he
was angry and his friends like, I'll get even for you.
(21:41):
None of this really makes much sense to me at least.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Well though only thing I saw was that I saw
somewhere somebody said that they believed that Pearl was being
molested by her father. That still doesn't make sense why
she would be shot as well.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
Yeah, I mean it's all very hinky, but Raych Schneider
basically in the statement at least said we realized it
was not them. We ran away, and so my girlfriend
and this other kid, Leon Kaufman also said, yeah, you know,
parts of this are true. And Schneider did have a gun.
(22:16):
He also had a pocket knife, and so in the
end they arrested Clifford Hayes and charged him with the murderers.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
They did, and immediately the press, who was really paying
attention to this and the public who were reading these
stories were like, are you guys dumb? Like are you kidding?
This is who you've come up with? There was it
didn't take into account again, so does that mean that
Clifford Hayes, after his friend Rach Schneider ran off his
friend who he'd taken it upon himself to execute the
(22:46):
man's girlfriend and her father. Yeah, that he went over
and was like, well, I better almost cut this woman's
head off and see these bodies like this. But every
single theory is just dumb because they can't take into
account the most important clue in this whole, this whole
(23:08):
murder letters case, the love letters.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
How would this guy, Clifford Hayes have any access to
the love letters between those two from Mills to Hall?
How would they have had access to that? How would
the clan have had access to that? How would somebody
who was robbing them and the robbery went wrong, how
would they have access to that? Those are the clues
so much so that I'm quite certain that the people
(23:33):
who killed this this couple were like, oh that was
so stupid afterward, like why did they put the letters down?
They luckily got away with it, But that was to me,
that's just that's there you go, there's your answer right there.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
I mean, it's all just so fishy and ludicrous that
they arrested this kid. So the you know, those real
backlash back then, even like you said, everybody like no,
one really believed what was going on, and the story
had all these holes in it. There were a couple
of other like sort of weird details that came out
of the subplot that didn't really lend itself to solving it.
(24:11):
But the press basically uncovered some stuff that Schneider who
was dating, you know, the fifteen year old Pearl, he
was actually married Clifford Hayes, who they arrested for the murder.
Supposedly he had dated Pearl at one point. But you know, again,
none of this made any kind of sense at all.
(24:33):
Within a few days, Ray Schneider was like, oh, yeah,
you know what, that's not true. So they sentenced him
to a term in a reformatory for making false statements.
And then young Pearl was sent to the House of
the Good Shepherd for Wayward Girls in Newark, which I'm
sure was.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
Just a great place. I'm sure too sarcasm, Yeah, for sure.
And then Ray Schneider being sentenced for his false statement.
So he had a coerced state beaten out of him,
and then he gets sentenced for giving it.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Yeah, oh was he beaten.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
I'm sure he was. We're talking nineteen twenty two, and
the police are trying to get a confession over a
twenty four hour period of questioning out of this guy
who signs a false confession.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
I would say, I just want to make sure no
family members of those cops comes forward and soues you
for sure.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
But you saw as well as I did in People
magazine that they said it too.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
All right, shall we go on or shall we take
another break? Maybe go on a little more.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
Yeah, let's go on a little more.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
All right, take it away, Okay.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
So finally, the public it's just the police who are
studiously avoiding looking at Francis Hall, her two brothers, and
eventually her cousin, all of whom would be implicated in
this crime. It was just the cops and the prosecutors
who were trying not to look at them. The rest
of the public was like, I'm pretty sure we have
(25:59):
we know who did this. Why don't you start looking
at them? And eventually the public pressure about it. Couldn't
couldn't just be ignored. So the cops finally started looking
at missus Hall, and they brought it in for questioning once.
Apparently it was a very gentle line of questioning. They
were very deferential, very naturally people also started looking at
James Mills. He was the other jilted lover in this
(26:21):
In this case, he had a pretty good alibi. Apparently
either one of his hobbies or his side gig was woodworking.
He was seen around the time of the murders at
home and then for the next couple hours during the
time when these this pair was definitely murdered, So he
he had a pretty good aliby. Multiple neighbors saying, yeah
(26:42):
he was. He was at home woodworking at the time.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
Yeah, And that's in the in the TV show when
they're at the end when they were accounting how it
was done.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
This is when you see the shot of like the
buzzsall going in an empty room.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Right, it's like a mannequin rigged.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Like pushing it so it actually sounds like it's cutting.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
That's right. That's like the nineteen twenty two version of
somebody pre recording the security camera footage so that you
can't see what they're doing when they commit the crime.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
That's right. The data is somehow scrambled.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Yeah, but I'll tell you what, even that couldn't fool
Jessica Fletcher. There's at least one episode where that was used,
he was that again, I murder? She wrote, that's right.
Oh you want to hear something awful? Sure, So I
was watching Murder, she wrote on over the air antenna
to be expected. There's a lot of ads, and they're
usually pretty crummy ads. Yeah, but remember I was complaining
(27:33):
about that stupid Burger King adh. Oh yeah, well I
finally moved away from the over the air antenna viewing
and just started watching I think on Amazon.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
I love that you you joined the twenty first century.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Exactly, but the uh the For a while, I was like, great,
I left the Burger King ad behind. Nope, it very
recently popped up again on Ama.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
I haven't heard it in a while.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
I'm not gonna I'm not going to recount it for you.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Well, I'll tell you what I'm not doing is watching murder,
she wrote. If that's the trigger, yeah, it's pretty bad.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
But that's how much I like murder, she wrote, I'm
willing to suck it up. You know, Jessica bet your
solving crimes. That's pretty catchy.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Yeah yeah, all right, so where were we?
Speaker 2 (28:18):
They started looking at missus Hall. She didn't have an alibi.
It turns out.
Speaker 3 (28:22):
That's right, So they brought her in, like you said,
for some pretty gentle questioning. She said that on Friday
morning she was worried because her husband wasn't home, so
she got together with her brother Willie, and they started
looking for him. They visited the church at first to
look for him, and then later they went to her house,
(28:44):
well not her house, but the victim's house. They went
to the Mills house. Nobody was there either, and they said, yeah.
Initially they said, we went there because, you know, we
thought he might have been visiting with someone who was ill.
And then later on that story changed to, oh, no,
we went by there because we knew that the church
keys were there as well. So her story is already
(29:07):
changing out of the gate.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Yeah. And I mean, if an entire prosecutors offices office
times two, two different counties, prosecutors and police departments are
being deferential to you and not investigating you because you're wealthy,
at least have the decency to keep your story straight
to not make them look that ridiculous.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Right, Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
The upshot is this, Missus Hall's alibi is her brother Willie,
who lived with Missus Hall and Reverend Hall, and he
was a suspect too, So if your alibi is another suspect,
that's not a very good alibi. And they were also
they were also prowling around about two thirty am, and
(29:47):
no one could corroborate that they were out looking for
Reverend Hall at two thirty am, about the time the
murders took place exactly.
Speaker 3 (29:56):
So again she was still insistent that they had a
great marriage. These love letters are fake. The cops start
sniffing her other brother off the case, who doesn't live
with them.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
This guy's name was.
Speaker 3 (30:09):
Henry, and he was like, no, no, I got an alibi.
I was fishing in Lavallette. It's about fifty miles away.
There's no way I could have been there. And you
know what, I was even fishing with the mayor of Lavalette.
And the mayor stepped forward and said, correct, So.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
He's holding a briefcase with money coming out of the seams.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
So he has an alibi, like a stated alibi. I'm
not sure if that's the legal term. But I didn't
see that there was any other other like proof that
he was out fishing. But he said I was fishing,
and there was a witness with me. There were a
few witnesses, and it seems like the key witness to
this all is the woman who actually witnessed the murder,
(30:49):
as it turns out.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
Yeah, a woman named Jane Gibson who would come to
be known as the pig woman. That's just what the
press called her across the board, because she was a
pig farmer in the area of the road where the
bodies were found. Yeah, and she had cause to be
awake at two thirty am. Apparently there have been some
(31:10):
thefts of her crops, probably cops who'd come and try
to snatch her crops, and so she was awake, waiting
essentially for the thieves to come back. She said that
while she was lying in wait, she heard a sound.
She went to investigate, and that she saw Missus Hall,
her two brothers, and Missus Hall's cousin Henry another Henry
(31:32):
carrying out these murders.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Yeah, like she said, I saw this happen. But the
prosecutors are like nah, her story keeps kind of changing too,
and they all have Alibis stated Alibis. So a grand
jury convenes in November of that year, Like, what should
we do here about indicting this family? And I say
(31:55):
we tackle that question or answer rather right after another
break eh satisfaction.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
So chuck where we left off. He had said that
a grand jury had been convened, right, that's right. And
it turned out that the grand jury, I think they
took five days before they said nope, we're not going
to hand on any indictments. So it seemed that the
probably the likeliest suspects, Francis Hall, her two brothers, and
her cousin were now off the hook. And we should
(33:00):
say also one of the things about her brother that's
going to come into play. One of her brothers, Willie.
He lived at home, like we said, with the Reverend
Hall and missus Hall. And the reason why it seems
is because he was at least understood at the time,
is kind of slow, as they would put it. Sometimes
you see in modern retellings of it that he's considered
(33:22):
developmentally disabled. That does not seem to be the case.
It seems like he probably was neurodiverse in some way,
shape or form. But he was also quite sharp too.
He was known to read books on metallurgy. He was
quite sociable. He would be high functioning you would say today,
but at the time he seemed to be if this
was a group of murderers, as family murderers, he would
(33:45):
be targeted as like the weak link that you would
go after. But regardless, it didn't matter because nineteen twenty
two went out with these four let off the hook
because the grand jury didn't indict. How about that?
Speaker 1 (33:57):
That's right?
Speaker 3 (33:58):
And right out after that happened, the good missus Hall
left for Italy. So nothing at all suspicious about that.
I think you're not getting on a plane to Europe.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
I think you can make a case either way that
you know. I just wanted to get away from the
whole thing too.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
I said, plan would that have been a just a
notion liner at the time, Okay, wait to go, so
savory emails everybody.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
I'm speaking of the Martyn parlance. So in December.
Speaker 3 (34:28):
They said, basically, you know, now that all the all
the Gulkers are out of here and all the attentions
dying down, we can get down some real investigating and
figure out who did this. A year later, the New
York Times followed up on the anniversary. We're like, yeah,
so you got down the business, what'd you find out?
And they're like, oh, what.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
No progress? Whatsoever?
Speaker 3 (34:48):
It?
Speaker 2 (34:48):
Right? Yeah, So that's how it went for four more years,
and then out of nowhere, in a completely unrelated divorce case,
the husband of a woman named Louise Geist, who had
been a maid at the Hall's home during the time
of the murders. In the divorce proceedings he was assassinating
(35:08):
his ex wife seemed to be ex wife's character, saying
that she had been involved in the Hall Mills murder
and had been paid five thousand smackeroos to be to
keep quiet by Missus Hall and her brothers. Yeah, and
that she knew all about it. And somehow, I guess
that got out to the press, and William Randolph Hearst
(35:31):
Daily Mirror assigned a reporter to look back into the case,
and it just blew it right back onto the front
pages of papers across the country.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Yeah, such that the state of New Jersey could no
longer just keep ignoring this.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
So Governor A.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Harry Moore said, oh God, all right, let's reopen this case.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Exactly at this.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Point, the grand jury does come back and indict Francis Hall,
her brothers, William Henry, and her cousin Henry. They were
all four arrested. Missus Hall for her part, was released
on bail fifteen grand. A lot of dough at the time, Yeah,
still a lot of dough. I always say that the
men were held without bail, and at this point, this
(36:15):
is four years later, they don't take care of evidence
like they do now. A lot of the evidence was gone,
but they did find some new clues. There was another
adulterous couple in the church. There were probably dozens of them,
because that's just how that kind.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
Of thing goes. But this one other adulter couple.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
There was a guy named Ralph Gorsline and a woman
named Katherine Rostell, and they were on Lover's Lane that night.
A private detective came forward and said, hey, Ralph admitted
that he heard these shots and saw I think cousin.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Henry or was this brother Henry?
Speaker 2 (36:48):
That was brother Henry?
Speaker 3 (36:50):
Okay, brother Henry, who apparently swore him to secrecy. Ralph
Gorsline later came out and denied having accused brother Henry,
but he did confirm that he and his mistress, Catherine Rastell,
had heard these four gunshots, heard some low voices and
a woman screaming. And the reason that I didn't come
(37:11):
out before was because obviously I didn't want to like
have my affair busted. But in nineteen twenty six, four
years later, she had talked, his mistress had talked, so
he was like, well, I guess the cat's out of
the bag, so I'm gonna say what happened too. And
his wife said, great, let's get a divorce.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Yeah. And again he had gone to this private detective
in nineteen twenty two because his conscience had gotten to him.
But I think he was basically saying he was saying
all the stuff that he eventually said in nineteen twenty
six to get the detective to go to the cops
and say, hey, this anonymous source did this, But it
didn't pan out like that. But nineteen twenty six, they
were just uncovering stuff left and right. Remember I said
(37:49):
that they exhumed Missus Mills and did another autopsy and
that's when they found that her tongue in vocal cords
had been caught out. So like, this was a serious
investigation that was launched again in nineteen twenty six, probably
a lot more serious than the one that was carried
out in nineteen twenty two. And another clue that turned
up or another source that turned up was a guy
(38:12):
named Paul Hamborskey. He was a minister also in New Brunswick,
and he was friendly with Reverend Hall. And Paul Amborski
came forward and said, hey, I actually had a conversation
with Reverend Hall basically a month before he was murdered,
and in it he said that my wife has gotten
(38:35):
really cool lately and has turned into a different woman,
and quote, I am very much afraid that she will
do me bodily harm. And he explained it was because
of this affair, and that he had no intention of
giving up Eleanor Mills and that they would probably run
off together pretty soon. This was a month before Edward
Hall was murdered that a minister came forward and said
(38:55):
this is what he said to me.
Speaker 3 (38:57):
Yeah, and he also said that her brother Henry threatened
me because everyone knew about this affair. And so he
comes out with this very you know, sort of key evidence.
And right before the nineteen twenty six trial started, this
Paul Hamborski guy just sort of disappeared.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
He left town.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
He didn't disappear like disappeared disappear, but he left town
pretty quickly. And there was a state senator named Alexander Simpson,
who was acting as special prosecutor for the case, and
he said, this Amborski guy's loans dried up at the bank,
and the banker said, you've been a fool to get
mixed up in this hall's mill case.
Speaker 2 (39:34):
The banker was Charles Bronson.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
No, that would have been You've been the fool to
get mixed up in this hole's middle case.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Very nice. I just said that because I really want
to hear you redo it as Charles Bronson.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
It's just all dirty dealing basically, Like it's really clear.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
Yeah, I mean, this family was more than wealthy and
powerful enough to ruin a person, make sure that they
didn't have any line of income, or just make life
miserable for them to where they did want to just
get out of town before they could testify. So this
trial happens like they finally have enough evidence that a
(40:11):
grand jury this time pretty quickly handed off indictments and
so Francis and her two brothers and cousin are indicted
for murder. And right when word got out that they
were about to be tried again, all the journalists came back.
I saw an estimate that they filed twelve million plus
(40:31):
words cumulatively. It wasn't just one guy during the twenty
three day trial, that's how many words were written on this.
It was everywhere.
Speaker 3 (40:41):
Yeah, I mean just just hundreds and hundreds of people
all of a sudden in town. And the public of
course is like, hey, you know what we care the
most about is like reading these love letters, like Josh
Clark will when they say that's the key piece of evidence,
and like what was in these things? And in one
of them? And this is great? Who helped us Livia
with this? Yeah, she dug up some of these letters,
(41:04):
Darling Wonderheart. I just want to crush you for two hours.
I want to see Friday night alone by our road
where we can let out unrestrained, that universe of joy
and happiness we call ours. And he signed it DTL
for Dinah troyer Liepaba, which is German for thy true lover,
(41:25):
and Mills called him Babykins. So this is my only
joke about this is I want to see the sitcom
Wonderheart and Babykins like very soon on my television.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Do me a favorite? Will you read that quote as
Charles Bronson?
Speaker 1 (41:43):
Really sure, Darling Wonderhart, I just want to crush you
for two hours. I want to see you Friday night
alone by our road where we can let out unrestrained
that the universe of joy and happiness that we call
ours beautiful Chuck, bravo, man, little more sinisters on that.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
If it wouldn't make the levels going to the red,
I would clap loudly for you right now. So, yes,
this is the kind of humiliation that Francis Hall is enduring.
She's sitting in court because again she's on trial. People
are reading that was just one. They were reading a
bunch of different love letters in open court. And there
were more witnesses that came forward. There were like they
(42:24):
were poking holes in people's alibis from the year back.
So they brought a new witnesses to undermine the truthfulness
of their original witnesses, and so and so on and
so forth. And the maid Louise Geist, she was brought
to the stand and she said, no, my ex husband's
a big fat liar. But I'll tell you what. Willie,
who lived with the Halls and whose servant I was
(42:46):
as well, he told me the day after the murder,
but the day before the bodies were discovered that something
terrible happened last night. So Willy shouldn't have known anything
about something terrible happening last night, unless it was that
his sister had lost it solitaire, which was the one
alibi that Louise Geist could give Francis Hall for that night. Solitaire. Yeah,
(43:11):
it was her alibi.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
So was this Louise Geist was involved and probably got
paid off, and she was trying to just pin it
on Willie. This possibly neurodivergent, you know, younger brother.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
That certainly seems the case to me.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Yes, okay, I mean that's how I took it.
Speaker 2 (43:25):
That's pretty that's pretty whole scratch that her ex husband
comes up with in divorce court, you know. Yeah. So
again though, the star witness was Jane Gibson, the pig woman, right.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
Yeah, yeah, she and this is super dramatic. She came forward,
she was in late stages of cancer and they brought
her in on a stretcher into court. She's speaking in
a whisper basically like just hanging in there to get
this testimony out. So her story was after nine o'clock
on that day, her dog started barking again.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
She was worried about thieves stealing her crops.
Speaker 3 (43:59):
So she gets on her old ginny, rides out to
the field, sees people fighting under that crab apple tree.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
Here's a woman yell, don't don't, don't Henry. She hears
a shot, a gunshot, saw one of the men fall.
She flees.
Speaker 3 (44:17):
She gets the heck out of there, of course, and
then on her way out of there, like running, she
hears a woman screaming again.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Three more gunshots.
Speaker 3 (44:25):
And they were like, can you point out are those
people in the courtroom today basically, and she said yes,
and she pointed at missus Hall, her two brothers and
her cousin, and they said, oh, well, you know what,
she's the big lady, like, don't believe what she says.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
Basically, well, supposedly her own mother. Jing Gibson's own mother
was in the in the courtroom, apparently wringing her handkerchief,
watching her daughter give testimony, saying she's lying, she's lying,
so she people didn't put much stock into Jene Gibson's testimony.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Maybe she said she's dying.
Speaker 2 (44:58):
May maybe so well, this is essentially the prosecution's case.
They presented Jane Gibson again. She basically said, I saw
those four murder these two people, at least in silhouette,
and then I saw the four clearly. Then it was
time for the accused to start taking the stand. And
apparently Missus Hall was so composed during her time on
(45:21):
the stand giving testimony that the papers dubbed her the
iron widow. Yeah, and she still said, I never suspected
my husband of infidelity, and I was really nervous when
he disappeared. That's why my brother and I went out
that very night to look for him. And again, she's
in part probably saving face, but now at this point
(45:42):
she's trying to not give anyone a motive that she
might have had for killing him, which would clearly be
in such a passionate murder something like infidelity, right.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
But despite her, I think everybody kind of expected her
to be good on the stand. You remember I said
that they had kind of suppose that Willy was going
to be the weak link. The prosecutors were just chomping
at the bit to get to him. They were just
gonna work him over on the stand. And apparently Willy
held his own like nobody's business and did so well
(46:14):
on the stand that essentially he got himself and his
siblings and cousin Off. That's how well he did on
the stand. He was the one who basically got him acquitted.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
Yeah, so there it is. They got acquitted on December third,
nineteen twenty six. After that, the defendants minus brother Henry, sued.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
The Mirror for libel.
Speaker 3 (46:35):
It was settled out of court, and we don't know
how much money was exchange hands, if any. Seems like
there probably was some, and it was never brought to
trial again. It never came before a criminal court again.
Missus Hall went, you know, back to doing her things.
She's doing charity work at the church, did not you know,
aside from that, didn't really socialize. A lot died in
(46:56):
nineteen forty two, and you know, we look back now,
is like it seems fairly obvious to us what happened,
even though famous civil rights attorney William Kunstler wrote a
book in nineteen sixty four called The Minister in the
Choir Singer, where he supposes that it was the KKK,
but there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence
about that at all.
Speaker 2 (47:17):
No, he even says this is all circumstantial, and apparently
there's no account of anyone actually being murdered when they
were punished by the KKK for something like having an affair.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
So it's pretty pretty spankings.
Speaker 2 (47:29):
Yes, So what about The Great Gatsby, Chuck, We all
know that you read that article as well as I did, and.
Speaker 3 (47:37):
Right people people wonder if this was, you know, one
of the stories that inspired The Great Gatsby.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
It was in nineteen twenty two.
Speaker 3 (47:45):
I think Gatsby came out in twenty five, so before
the actual trial. But f Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda we
do know that they followed that case. They were pretty
interested in it, and there's a lot of differences, So
I mean, I think it may have just been one
of those sort of launching off points where yeah, it's like, oh,
this is a cool idea, and then just you know,
really just went with it in a fictional sense.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Yeah. Well, People magazine pointed out something that I thought
was a good connection between the two in the story,
the working class woman who's having an affair with I
can't remember his name, Gatsby's rival. Her death is essentially
like ignored because she's not upper class, she's working class. Yea,
the same thing happened to Eleanor Mills, Like her death
(48:29):
does not. Aside from the grizzly state of her body,
people did not pay much attention to that. It was
all about this wealthy woman and her wealthy husband. And
in the end, the wealthy people got to go on
with their lives while the dead working class victim is
just largely forgotten.
Speaker 1 (48:46):
Yeah for sure.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
Well that's it for the Hall Mills murder Chuck good pick,
however we got it. Also, just want to shout out
the Yale Review, Howard Harold Scheckter's article mister local History project,
Mary S. Hartman wrote a paper, and then also our
Ownlivia who helped us with this too. And since I
just rattled lot some sources, as everyone knows, I just
(49:08):
triggered listener mail.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
This is about smoking.
Speaker 3 (49:12):
We did one on the cigarette and this is from
Sue and Melbourne, Australia. Hey guys, I really just like
smoking here in Melbourne, Australia. A pack of twenty cigarettes
and that is individual second cigarettes, not twenty packs like
a pack of cigarette.
Speaker 1 (49:27):
Yeah, twenty Lucy's costs fifty eight ninety nine.
Speaker 2 (49:32):
I know I saw that, and it's just I'm still
astounded by it.
Speaker 3 (49:35):
A pack of twenty five calls sixty two ninety nine
and a carton of ten packs is four hundred and
sixty nine dollars. If a smoker smokes a pack of
twenty per day, the cost per week is three hundred
and seventy one dollars per week, or per annum close
to twenty grand. At a cup of coffee from a
shop Monday to Friday at five or day per anim
thirteen hundred bucks. Victoria has the most expensive cigarettes in
(49:58):
the world. Guys, yet there there's always a crowd of
puffing smokers outside every building. Instead of sucking filth into
the lungs, a person saves the money and overseas holiday
every year would be possible. Yes, I was a bookkeeper.
Love the show that is from Sue.
Speaker 2 (50:13):
Yeah, and you might be all there saying, well, the
Australian dollar is less than the US dollar. I just
calculated it. A four hundred and sixty nine dollars carton
of cigarettes in Australia is still a three hundred dollars
carton of cigarettes in the US. So that's amazing.
Speaker 1 (50:27):
Yeah, that's a lot of dough to actively die earlier.
Speaker 2 (50:31):
Yeah, thanks a lot. Who was that again, Sue? Thanks
a lot Sue, and if you want to be like Sue,
you can send us an email. Send it off to
stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (50:45):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck And this is another edition of Stuff you Should
Know is ongoing low key true crime. Sweet.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Yeah, it's been a while, if you.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Like, I'm trying to think of the last one, but yeah,
I mean clearly it has been if I can't think
of the last one, but yeah, I like it every
once in a while. I was just kind of add
to it. And it's just this kind of thing because
they're interesting, especially if you're not looking at them like
a total gawker, you know.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Agreed.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
So we're talking today about what I hadn't heard of.
Let me ask you this before we get started. Yeah,
did you get your idea from People Magazine? No? Because
People Magazine ran an article on this very murder on
June twenty sixth, twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Oh really, Yes, Like, where did you get this idea?
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Well, I know it wasn't People, because you know, I
just I didn't read People. I'm not against it. If
I'm like, you know, waiting for the doctor or something, Well.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
You're really digging yourself into a hole. Here.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
I'll pick up a People magazine. That's fine.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
I'm wondering now if this was a listener suggestion that
I need to look up.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
I searched it and I did not really anything about it.
That's why I was like, holy cow, People magazine. He
really got it from there.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Maybe, I mean sometimes I might go so low as
to search for, you know, unsolved crimes or something.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Sure, there's nothing wrong with that. That my ideas well.
The crazy thing about this is it's I've seen it
described as like the first truly sensationalized trial of the
century in the United States, or that it was like
their first big trial of the century, something like that,
and I was definitely up there. I've seen it compare
(01:57):
with some other ones. Yeah, that came later closely on
the heels. But I never heard any of this. I've
never heard of any of these people. And yet some
other people say, hey, this might have even inspired the
Great Gatsby in some ways.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
I have a feeling that's how it came to me.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
And now I'm wondering if that was the search term
that I should have used for listener's suggestion.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Oh Great Gatsby, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't search
for that either. Well, well, I have to get to
the bottom of this, like a couple of true detectives.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Now, because you feel like we're letting someone down.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Yeah, we probably are, but we do need to get
their name. But I wonder if if this thing is
sent post June twenty six, twenty twenty five. Bet they
got it from People, Okay, because the People magazine article,
like in the headline it said that it inspired the
Great Gatsby.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
Yeah, I mean, I definitely remember. That's what drew my
attention to it. But if you're trying to root me
out as a People Magazine reader, you're going to fail.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
I'm not going to stop. I'm not going to stop
until i'm successful. So just look out, buddy, because you're
my crosschairs. Now.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Who knows.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
So let's talk about this crime. In short, there was
a reverend, well known reverend in New Brunswick, New Jersey,
home of Rutgers, and this reverend was having an affair
with one of his church members, a woman named Eleanor Mills.
The reverend's name was Edward Hall. He was about seven
years her senior from what I understand, and one night
(03:31):
or one morning, I should say, they turned up murdered,
brutally murdered, and it became, like I said, a very
sensational story, not just in New Brunswick, not just in
nearby New York, but everywhere across the country. I would guess,
probably out of the country as well. Who knows, how
(03:51):
would you find something like that out I.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
Don't know, People magazine probably, yeah, probably in People International.
So yeah, Ed Hall was in his early forties, forty
one years old at the time of his death, and
he was a pastor, like you said, at Saint John's Episcopal.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
About twenty miles from where I lived in New Jersey.
Oh yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
And his wife's name was Francis Hall. She was seven
years older than him, interestingly, because I guess his mistress,
Eleanor Mills, was seven years younger.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Anything to that, I think it's just a fluke of nature. Yeah,
I think so too. But and this is kind of
key here.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
She his wife had come from a you know, it
seems like a pretty wealthy, well to do, well connected
family in the area because he was just a pastor,
and you know, they didn't make a lot of dough.
Yet they lived in a really fancy house they had
a chauffeur, they had a staff, they had maids that
work there, which will come into play in this story.
(04:55):
And they had been married about eleven years. His miss Dress,
who was also brutally murdered. She was a homemaker, married
to a school janitor named James, who also kind of
helped take care of the church. They had a couple
of kids. She sang in the choir, and this is
also key. She acted as sort of a very close
personal assistant to the reverend, like very closely assisted him,
(05:19):
if you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Yeah, I do know what you're saying. So one other
thing about Edward Hall and his wife Francis's fortune. He apparently,
when he first got to take over the church, the
Saint John's Episcopal Church, it was a hostel takeover. He
started courting a lovely parishioner, but she didn't really have
any money. He dropped her and put his sights on
(05:42):
Francis Stevens, who would become Francis Hall his wife. And
from what I've read, there's not a lot of note,
or there wasn't a lot of note about Francis Stevens
aside from her wealth, and she was wealthy. She shared
what would be worth today a forty million dollar fortune
between herself and her two other brothers, So she was
(06:03):
definitely wealthy, and so in addition to running around on her,
he also seemed to just have been after her money.
And let's not forget he's an episcopal reverend leading an
entire church. So that to me, when I put all
those things together, I was like, I don't really like
this guy.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Yeah, yeah, fair enough. So it was not a secret
among the church. You know, it's kind of one of
those things, you know, back in nineteen twenty two where
people might it might have been pretty clear and even
probably in a modern day church that somebody was having an affair,
but you didn't really talk about that kind of thing,
and so it was basically an open secret. After you know,
(06:43):
the sermons and after Sunday would end, they would spend
a lot of time together in his study. Apparently they
would leave love notes, and that will come into playing
the story for each other with a little secret system
where they would put it in a book on his
shelf and trade notes that way. Well, do you think
it was the Great gatsty just.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
They traveled in time?
Speaker 3 (07:04):
They did the day that the news broke though, The
New York's Time, The New York Times came out and said,
and this is how they would have to put this
kind of thing back then, they said they had long
been friendly.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Right, so yeah, like you said, this is an open secret.
Apparently their spouses knew. James Mills and Francis Hall both
seemed to have known about the affair. For one, when
they turned up missing that first day. Apparently, Francis Hall
the first time she spoke to James Mill, her husband's
(07:39):
mistress's husband, James said, do you think they eloped? That
was his response when he found out that they were
both missing. And apparently, also this is important too, Francis
Hall had a informal network of spies among the congregation
who kept tabs on those two and informed her of
their doing. Essentially, so both of them knew full well
(08:02):
what was going on.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Right, they knew, but they didn't project that publicly. Publicly
they both said, like my head didn't know this was
going on. And as we'll see later in court, she
even testified that you know, her marriage was perfect and
those these supposed love notes are fake and they were
not having an affair.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
No, for sure, I think her first public response was
go wois So.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
On the day of the murder, this was Thursday, September fourteenth,
they each you know, left their respective houses, and another
couple reported to seeing them meeting up on a bridge nearby.
And then a couple of days later another couple came forward.
This woman named well woman, she was fifteen years old.
She was a young girl named Pearl Bomber. Yet she
(08:53):
was in a relationship because this was in nineteen twenty
two with a guy who was anywhere from nineteen to
twenty three who can tell. His name was Raymond Schneider.
They came upon the bodies a couple of days later
on Old Philip Swarm. This is the other side of
the Raritan River there, and this is about ten thirty
in the morning. They went to the closest house, had
(09:13):
the owner called the cops, and the cops showed up
pretty quickly.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Yeah, the bodies. They it was pretty disturbing. So they'd
been left on a path off of Derusi's Lane. This
is a dure road I think in Somerset County, and
it was a well known lover's lane. Like this is
the kind of time where you had to go out
to a lover's lane to either have an affair or
have premarital sex or both. This is where their bodies
were found, on a path off of this lover's lane. Right, Yeah,
(09:40):
a reverend Hall had been shot once through the temple
and exited the opposite temple and that was it for him.
But Eleanor Mills, his mistress, she had really been worked over.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
Right, Yeah, she was shot three times in the head
and her neck was cut so severely that she was
close to being decapitated. His shot was point blank, sort
of you know what we'd call execution style, with a
thirty two caliber pistol.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
And the bodies were posed.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
Together after that, they were under a crab apple tree,
kind of posed as cuddling lovers. Her head was placed
on his arm, not you know, separate from her body,
just laid against him, and a scarf was draped over
her cutthroat, and he had a hat, a Panama hat
kind of partially covering his space. So, you know, from
(10:34):
twenty yards away or whatever, looked like a couple just
sort of laying there, cuddling, maybe taking a nap under
a tree.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Yeah, So that's how they were found. But apparently as
Pearl and Raymond were coming upon them, they saw very
quickly that they were dead. There was one other thing
that wasn't noted at the time when the bodies were
found in nineteen twenty two, but it would be noted
when the case was reignited four years later in nineteen
twenty six, that that Eleanor mills tongue and vocal cords
(11:04):
had been cut out and removed. That had been missed
in the first autopsy, but a subsequent optopsy found that.
So this was the state that these bodies were found in.
I think also, the Reverend Hall's business card was found
propped up against his foot. I think that's the only
other thing we left out. Oh no, there's one other thing.
This is really important too. This is the clue to me.
(11:27):
You ready, Chuck, I'm ready. There were love letters that
Eleanor Mills had written to Edward Hall, the Reverend Hall,
and they had been placed all around them. So this
was a highly staged crime scene. Not just the bodies
were staged, but there were actual props involved among an
(11:48):
executed and a mutilated body left out in public, essentially
to be found almost immediately after they were killed.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Yeah, I mean the business card almost feels like, hey,
if anyone stumbles upon this, who's not from around here?
Speaker 1 (12:03):
This is who this is?
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Right? You know, yeah for sure?
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Like what else could that be?
Speaker 2 (12:09):
I don't know. I mean they're sending some sort of message.
If that's not that, there's something else that they're sending,
Like that's a that's pretty in your face, you know.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Yeah, for sure. So the bodies were found locals. You know,
word gets around a little bit, locals starts showing up.
Then once the new newspapers get a hold of it,
like you said.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Earlier, it became a big deal. And I guess this
was such a.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Sensational thing at a time where this kind of thing
didn't happen much that like people really started coming to
this town to like just see what happened. They wanted
to walk on the grounds of that road and near
that farm, and they wanted to like literally take pieces
of that tree and dig up dirt around there as
a keepsake.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Apparently, they said.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
You know, they were showing up at a rate of
a thousand cars a day. Sounds a little overblown, maybe,
mm hmm. But there were like vendors selling popcorn and
balloons and you know, the dirt they were selling for
twenty five cents a bag. It was really out of
hand very quickly.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
You don't. It reminded me of was like the circus
atmosphere that grew up when Floyd Collins was trapped in
sand Cave. Yeah, around it was around the same time,
so people were.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Just looking for something.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Yeah, pretty bored apparently. Yeah, so yeah, it was a
big deal. There was a huge problem with all of
those people showing up combined with incompetent an incompetent police investigation,
and that was that these people trod all over the
crime scene. They apparently messed with the scarf, they took
(13:40):
samples from the tree. Apparently the tree was stripped of
everything except its trunk. After everyone was done with it.
There's the guy selling the dirt. This stuff was really important, Like,
for example, the dirt was important because that's how they
would establish whether those two had been murdered in the
spot they were found in or somewhere else and transport
(14:01):
it because the blood they found trickled into the dirt,
which is a sure sign that they had had been
killed there on the on the spot. But with people
stealing dirt from that there goes all of that evidence too,
So the crime scene was completely useless. And this is
at a time when people knew, like, no, you really
need to preserve crime scenes.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Yeah, for sure, I think that's a good spot for
a break a A. All right, Well, since Josh said, ah,
we're gonna take a little break and come back with
more of this grizzly murder right after this.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
All right, so we're back.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
When we last left you, Josh was sort of detailing
the problems with the crime scene and people trotting about
and messing that up, and you mentioned something about the
police work wasn't so good. One of the issues was
and this is something it seems like it happens a lot,
if you believe TV and movies at least, is that
there were various jurisdictions kind of battling for this case.
(15:33):
They lived in Middlesex County, the old Phillips farm was
in Somerset County, like you mentioned, and initially, like you said,
they didn't even know where their murders took place. They
later found out that they were alive when they got
to the farm, so they finally found that out. But
at the beginning, you had Middlesex County in Somerset County,
both saying like, no, this is my case.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
This is my case.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
And for a while, it seems like for a pretty
great while they had two sort of separate investigations going on,
which never, at least in the movies, seems to be
a good idea.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
No, not at all. Apparently the governor had to get
involved and be like, you guys need to join forces,
and they eventually did. But I mean, this is this
happened for I don't know exactly how long, but long
enough for it to be significant enough to mention, and
this is a really important time during an investigation, the
first several hours forty eight.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
You might even say, yeah, that's what they say.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
So there was a statement that was issued that Missus
Hall issued essentially to back up a theory that had
been posed that this was a robbery. There was a
robbery gone wrong, and a woman named Sally Peters acted
as Missus Hall's spokeswoman apparently for most of this time
(16:48):
because Missus Hall didn't really want to be seen in public,
so a good friends stepped up and essentially they pointed
out that Missus Hall's husband, the Reverend Hall, he walked
around with the gold watch and in his wallet he
typically carried about fifty dollars, just like one thousand dollars today.
That's what he walked around adjusts.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
One thousand dollars of cash in their wallet.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
A guy who marries a woman for her money and
then runs around on her almost publicly. Yeah, probably so,
And that those things were missing when they were found,
So they had been robbed, right, But the question was
was that really the motive behind this murder where Eleanor
Mills's throat had been cut to the backbone and they've
been staged in some really weird ways.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Right, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
So this is the Middlesex assistant prosecutor at first, because
again they were conducting separate investigations. This guy's name was
John Chulan, and he came out and said, hey, wait
a minute. Basically, I mean he couldn't come right out
and accused her, but he was basically like, hey, there's
no information to back this up. Kind of listen to
our statements and maybe not the ones from the deceased family.
(17:57):
I'm sure he had to couch that because she was
from a wealthy family, but he basically said, hey, there's
no evidence to back this up, and we think that
and this to me is a little hinky, but he said,
if it was a robber, he wouldn't have been using
a thirty two. He would have been using a larger caliber,
which to me doesn't really make much sense.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
He would have been using a forty four magnum, the
most powerful handgun in the world. Do you feel lucky.
So there was another theory too that I hadn't heard of,
but kind of makes sense. Apparently the Klan had recently
become highly active in the area around that time, and
(18:35):
they were known for severely punishing moral transgressions like affairs.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Yeah, but not their own, no.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Of course, not so if they had come upon or
had targeted these two, because I mean, if this was
an open secret and this guy's a prominent member of
the community, they could have been a target for the
Klan to punish somebody like that. So that was a
decent theory, but it didn't really go too far, at
(19:02):
least at first.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
Yeah, for sure, And we mentioned this next one just
because it was has been mentioned, but it really also
went nowhere. But very briefly, there were apparently there were
two Italians who had showed up in New Brunswick and.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
They had revolvers.
Speaker 3 (19:18):
Like that was known that there were these two Italian
guys who no one knew and they had guns. But
that was just a very quick sort of They had
nothing to do with the kind of deal.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
For sure. That's just what you did in nineteen twenty
two when somebody turned up murdered. How many Italians came
into town?
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
So the cops were like, okay, like we can't possibly
like train our sights on on the wealthy widow and
her family. Let's see who else we can blame to
just basically make the public, let us make this go away, right. Yeah,
they were just looking for somebody to pin it on,
and they turned their attention to the two people, Pearl
(19:58):
Balmber and ra Schneider, who had run over to a
farmhouse and told a woman we just found some bodies.
Called the police. Right when they found the bodies. They
were like, that seems a little fishy. We're going to
start looking at you guys, because you're probably just providing
grown alibis who would possibly call in finding the bodies
of a murder they just committed.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
So they discovered like hey, they were also on the
farm that night, because this was remember two days later
in the morning when they called it in, but they said, hey,
they were also there that night. A couple of weeks
after that, those two and then a couple of other
friends of theirs that were also with them that night,
a guy named Clifford Hayes and a fifteen year old
(20:42):
kid named Leon Kaufman. They were all four brought in
for what sounds like a straight twenty four hours of questioning,
which is always very suspicious, you know, when you try
and get someone to their weakest point. So they signed
some weird false confession. So they wore them out questioning
for a full.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Day and night.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
And at the end of this Ray Schneider, the original
guy who reported it with his young girlfriend, signed a
statement that said, hey, around midnight that night, me and
Clifford Hayes, my buddy, came across a couple of people.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Sitting on the ground near that farmhouse.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
I thought it was my girlfriend and her father, and
I had been looking for her. I was pretty jealous,
and so Hayes shot both of them, and it sounds
like it might have been like a favor to him.
None of this really adds up, because it wasn't like
he had found her with some other guy and he
was angry and his friends like, I'll get even for you.
(21:41):
None of this really makes much sense to me at least.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Well though only thing I saw was that I saw
somewhere somebody said that they believed that Pearl was being
molested by her father. That still doesn't make sense why
she would be shot as well.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
Yeah, I mean it's all very hinky, but Raych Schneider
basically in the statement at least said we realized it
was not them. We ran away, and so my girlfriend
and this other kid, Leon Kaufman also said, yeah, you know,
parts of this are true. And Schneider did have a gun.
(22:16):
He also had a pocket knife, and so in the
end they arrested Clifford Hayes and charged him with the murderers.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
They did, and immediately the press, who was really paying
attention to this and the public who were reading these
stories were like, are you guys dumb? Like are you kidding?
This is who you've come up with? There was it
didn't take into account again, so does that mean that
Clifford Hayes, after his friend Rach Schneider ran off his
friend who he'd taken it upon himself to execute the
(22:46):
man's girlfriend and her father. Yeah, that he went over
and was like, well, I better almost cut this woman's
head off and see these bodies like this. But every
single theory is just dumb because they can't take into
account the most important clue in this whole, this whole
(23:08):
murder letters case, the love letters.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
How would this guy, Clifford Hayes have any access to
the love letters between those two from Mills to Hall?
How would they have had access to that? How would
the clan have had access to that? How would somebody
who was robbing them and the robbery went wrong, how
would they have access to that? Those are the clues
so much so that I'm quite certain that the people
(23:33):
who killed this this couple were like, oh that was
so stupid afterward, like why did they put the letters down?
They luckily got away with it, But that was to me,
that's just that's there you go, there's your answer right there.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
I mean, it's all just so fishy and ludicrous that
they arrested this kid. So the you know, those real
backlash back then, even like you said, everybody like no,
one really believed what was going on, and the story
had all these holes in it. There were a couple
of other like sort of weird details that came out
of the subplot that didn't really lend itself to solving it.
(24:11):
But the press basically uncovered some stuff that Schneider who
was dating, you know, the fifteen year old Pearl, he
was actually married Clifford Hayes, who they arrested for the murder.
Supposedly he had dated Pearl at one point. But you know, again,
none of this made any kind of sense at all.
(24:33):
Within a few days, Ray Schneider was like, oh, yeah,
you know what, that's not true. So they sentenced him
to a term in a reformatory for making false statements.
And then young Pearl was sent to the House of
the Good Shepherd for Wayward Girls in Newark, which I'm
sure was.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
Just a great place. I'm sure too sarcasm, Yeah, for sure.
And then Ray Schneider being sentenced for his false statement.
So he had a coerced state beaten out of him,
and then he gets sentenced for giving it.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Yeah, oh was he beaten.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
I'm sure he was. We're talking nineteen twenty two, and
the police are trying to get a confession over a
twenty four hour period of questioning out of this guy
who signs a false confession.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
I would say, I just want to make sure no
family members of those cops comes forward and soues you
for sure.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
But you saw as well as I did in People
magazine that they said it too.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
All right, shall we go on or shall we take
another break? Maybe go on a little more.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
Yeah, let's go on a little more.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
All right, take it away, Okay.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
So finally, the public it's just the police who are
studiously avoiding looking at Francis Hall, her two brothers, and
eventually her cousin, all of whom would be implicated in
this crime. It was just the cops and the prosecutors
who were trying not to look at them. The rest
of the public was like, I'm pretty sure we have
(25:59):
we know who did this. Why don't you start looking
at them? And eventually the public pressure about it. Couldn't
couldn't just be ignored. So the cops finally started looking
at missus Hall, and they brought it in for questioning once.
Apparently it was a very gentle line of questioning. They
were very deferential, very naturally people also started looking at
James Mills. He was the other jilted lover in this
(26:21):
In this case, he had a pretty good alibi. Apparently
either one of his hobbies or his side gig was woodworking.
He was seen around the time of the murders at
home and then for the next couple hours during the
time when these this pair was definitely murdered, So he
he had a pretty good aliby. Multiple neighbors saying, yeah
(26:42):
he was. He was at home woodworking at the time.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
Yeah, And that's in the in the TV show when
they're at the end when they were accounting how it
was done.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
This is when you see the shot of like the
buzzsall going in an empty room.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Right, it's like a mannequin rigged.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Like pushing it so it actually sounds like it's cutting.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
That's right. That's like the nineteen twenty two version of
somebody pre recording the security camera footage so that you
can't see what they're doing when they commit the crime.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
That's right. The data is somehow scrambled.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Yeah, but I'll tell you what, even that couldn't fool
Jessica Fletcher. There's at least one episode where that was used,
he was that again, I murder? She wrote, that's right.
Oh you want to hear something awful? Sure, So I
was watching Murder, she wrote on over the air antenna
to be expected. There's a lot of ads, and they're
usually pretty crummy ads. Yeah, but remember I was complaining
(27:33):
about that stupid Burger King adh. Oh yeah, well I
finally moved away from the over the air antenna viewing
and just started watching I think on Amazon.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
I love that you you joined the twenty first century.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Exactly, but the uh the For a while, I was like, great,
I left the Burger King ad behind. Nope, it very
recently popped up again on Ama.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
I haven't heard it in a while.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
I'm not gonna I'm not going to recount it for you.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Well, I'll tell you what I'm not doing is watching murder,
she wrote. If that's the trigger, yeah, it's pretty bad.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
But that's how much I like murder, she wrote, I'm
willing to suck it up. You know, Jessica bet your
solving crimes. That's pretty catchy.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Yeah yeah, all right, so where were we?
Speaker 2 (28:18):
They started looking at missus Hall. She didn't have an alibi.
It turns out.
Speaker 3 (28:22):
That's right, So they brought her in, like you said,
for some pretty gentle questioning. She said that on Friday
morning she was worried because her husband wasn't home, so
she got together with her brother Willie, and they started
looking for him. They visited the church at first to
look for him, and then later they went to her house,
(28:44):
well not her house, but the victim's house. They went
to the Mills house. Nobody was there either, and they said, yeah.
Initially they said, we went there because, you know, we
thought he might have been visiting with someone who was ill.
And then later on that story changed to, oh, no,
we went by there because we knew that the church
keys were there as well. So her story is already
(29:07):
changing out of the gate.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Yeah. And I mean, if an entire prosecutors offices office
times two, two different counties, prosecutors and police departments are
being deferential to you and not investigating you because you're wealthy,
at least have the decency to keep your story straight
to not make them look that ridiculous.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Right, Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
The upshot is this, Missus Hall's alibi is her brother Willie,
who lived with Missus Hall and Reverend Hall, and he
was a suspect too, So if your alibi is another suspect,
that's not a very good alibi. And they were also
they were also prowling around about two thirty am, and
(29:47):
no one could corroborate that they were out looking for
Reverend Hall at two thirty am, about the time the
murders took place exactly.
Speaker 3 (29:56):
So again she was still insistent that they had a
great marriage. These love letters are fake. The cops start
sniffing her other brother off the case, who doesn't live
with them.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
This guy's name was.
Speaker 3 (30:09):
Henry, and he was like, no, no, I got an alibi.
I was fishing in Lavallette. It's about fifty miles away.
There's no way I could have been there. And you
know what, I was even fishing with the mayor of Lavalette.
And the mayor stepped forward and said, correct, So.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
He's holding a briefcase with money coming out of the seams.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
So he has an alibi, like a stated alibi. I'm
not sure if that's the legal term. But I didn't
see that there was any other other like proof that
he was out fishing. But he said I was fishing,
and there was a witness with me. There were a
few witnesses, and it seems like the key witness to
this all is the woman who actually witnessed the murder,
(30:49):
as it turns out.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
Yeah, a woman named Jane Gibson who would come to
be known as the pig woman. That's just what the
press called her across the board, because she was a
pig farmer in the area of the road where the
bodies were found. Yeah, and she had cause to be
awake at two thirty am. Apparently there have been some
(31:10):
thefts of her crops, probably cops who'd come and try
to snatch her crops, and so she was awake, waiting
essentially for the thieves to come back. She said that
while she was lying in wait, she heard a sound.
She went to investigate, and that she saw Missus Hall,
her two brothers, and Missus Hall's cousin Henry another Henry
(31:32):
carrying out these murders.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Yeah, like she said, I saw this happen. But the
prosecutors are like nah, her story keeps kind of changing too,
and they all have Alibis stated Alibis. So a grand
jury convenes in November of that year, Like, what should
we do here about indicting this family? And I say
(31:55):
we tackle that question or answer rather right after another
break eh satisfaction.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
So chuck where we left off. He had said that
a grand jury had been convened, right, that's right. And
it turned out that the grand jury, I think they
took five days before they said nope, we're not going
to hand on any indictments. So it seemed that the
probably the likeliest suspects, Francis Hall, her two brothers, and
her cousin were now off the hook. And we should
(33:00):
say also one of the things about her brother that's
going to come into play. One of her brothers, Willie.
He lived at home, like we said, with the Reverend
Hall and missus Hall. And the reason why it seems
is because he was at least understood at the time,
is kind of slow, as they would put it. Sometimes
you see in modern retellings of it that he's considered
(33:22):
developmentally disabled. That does not seem to be the case.
It seems like he probably was neurodiverse in some way,
shape or form. But he was also quite sharp too.
He was known to read books on metallurgy. He was
quite sociable. He would be high functioning you would say today,
but at the time he seemed to be if this
was a group of murderers, as family murderers, he would
(33:45):
be targeted as like the weak link that you would
go after. But regardless, it didn't matter because nineteen twenty
two went out with these four let off the hook
because the grand jury didn't indict. How about that?
Speaker 1 (33:57):
That's right?
Speaker 3 (33:58):
And right out after that happened, the good missus Hall
left for Italy. So nothing at all suspicious about that.
I think you're not getting on a plane to Europe.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
I think you can make a case either way that
you know. I just wanted to get away from the
whole thing too.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
I said, plan would that have been a just a
notion liner at the time, Okay, wait to go, so
savory emails everybody.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
I'm speaking of the Martyn parlance. So in December.
Speaker 3 (34:28):
They said, basically, you know, now that all the all
the Gulkers are out of here and all the attentions
dying down, we can get down some real investigating and
figure out who did this. A year later, the New
York Times followed up on the anniversary. We're like, yeah,
so you got down the business, what'd you find out?
And they're like, oh, what.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
No progress? Whatsoever?
Speaker 3 (34:48):
It?
Speaker 2 (34:48):
Right? Yeah, So that's how it went for four more years,
and then out of nowhere, in a completely unrelated divorce case,
the husband of a woman named Louise Geist, who had
been a maid at the Hall's home during the time
of the murders. In the divorce proceedings he was assassinating
(35:08):
his ex wife seemed to be ex wife's character, saying
that she had been involved in the Hall Mills murder
and had been paid five thousand smackeroos to be to
keep quiet by Missus Hall and her brothers. Yeah, and
that she knew all about it. And somehow, I guess
that got out to the press, and William Randolph Hearst
(35:31):
Daily Mirror assigned a reporter to look back into the case,
and it just blew it right back onto the front
pages of papers across the country.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Yeah, such that the state of New Jersey could no
longer just keep ignoring this.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
So Governor A.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Harry Moore said, oh God, all right, let's reopen this case.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Exactly at this.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Point, the grand jury does come back and indict Francis Hall,
her brothers, William Henry, and her cousin Henry. They were
all four arrested. Missus Hall for her part, was released
on bail fifteen grand. A lot of dough at the time, Yeah,
still a lot of dough. I always say that the
men were held without bail, and at this point, this
(36:15):
is four years later, they don't take care of evidence
like they do now. A lot of the evidence was gone,
but they did find some new clues. There was another
adulterous couple in the church. There were probably dozens of them,
because that's just how that kind.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
Of thing goes. But this one other adulter couple.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
There was a guy named Ralph Gorsline and a woman
named Katherine Rostell, and they were on Lover's Lane that night.
A private detective came forward and said, hey, Ralph admitted
that he heard these shots and saw I think cousin.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Henry or was this brother Henry?
Speaker 2 (36:48):
That was brother Henry?
Speaker 3 (36:50):
Okay, brother Henry, who apparently swore him to secrecy. Ralph
Gorsline later came out and denied having accused brother Henry,
but he did confirm that he and his mistress, Catherine Rastell,
had heard these four gunshots, heard some low voices and
a woman screaming. And the reason that I didn't come
(37:11):
out before was because obviously I didn't want to like
have my affair busted. But in nineteen twenty six, four
years later, she had talked, his mistress had talked, so
he was like, well, I guess the cat's out of
the bag, so I'm gonna say what happened too. And
his wife said, great, let's get a divorce.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Yeah. And again he had gone to this private detective
in nineteen twenty two because his conscience had gotten to him.
But I think he was basically saying he was saying
all the stuff that he eventually said in nineteen twenty
six to get the detective to go to the cops
and say, hey, this anonymous source did this, But it
didn't pan out like that. But nineteen twenty six, they
were just uncovering stuff left and right. Remember I said
(37:49):
that they exhumed Missus Mills and did another autopsy and
that's when they found that her tongue in vocal cords
had been caught out. So like, this was a serious
investigation that was launched again in nineteen twenty six, probably
a lot more serious than the one that was carried
out in nineteen twenty two. And another clue that turned
up or another source that turned up was a guy
(38:12):
named Paul Hamborskey. He was a minister also in New Brunswick,
and he was friendly with Reverend Hall. And Paul Amborski
came forward and said, hey, I actually had a conversation
with Reverend Hall basically a month before he was murdered,
and in it he said that my wife has gotten
(38:35):
really cool lately and has turned into a different woman,
and quote, I am very much afraid that she will
do me bodily harm. And he explained it was because
of this affair, and that he had no intention of
giving up Eleanor Mills and that they would probably run
off together pretty soon. This was a month before Edward
Hall was murdered that a minister came forward and said
(38:55):
this is what he said to me.
Speaker 3 (38:57):
Yeah, and he also said that her brother Henry threatened
me because everyone knew about this affair. And so he
comes out with this very you know, sort of key evidence.
And right before the nineteen twenty six trial started, this
Paul Hamborski guy just sort of disappeared.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
He left town.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
He didn't disappear like disappeared disappear, but he left town
pretty quickly. And there was a state senator named Alexander Simpson,
who was acting as special prosecutor for the case, and
he said, this Amborski guy's loans dried up at the bank,
and the banker said, you've been a fool to get
mixed up in this hall's mill case.
Speaker 2 (39:34):
The banker was Charles Bronson.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
No, that would have been You've been the fool to
get mixed up in this hole's middle case.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Very nice. I just said that because I really want
to hear you redo it as Charles Bronson.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
It's just all dirty dealing basically, Like it's really clear.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
Yeah, I mean, this family was more than wealthy and
powerful enough to ruin a person, make sure that they
didn't have any line of income, or just make life
miserable for them to where they did want to just
get out of town before they could testify. So this
trial happens like they finally have enough evidence that a
(40:11):
grand jury this time pretty quickly handed off indictments and
so Francis and her two brothers and cousin are indicted
for murder. And right when word got out that they
were about to be tried again, all the journalists came back.
I saw an estimate that they filed twelve million plus
(40:31):
words cumulatively. It wasn't just one guy during the twenty
three day trial, that's how many words were written on this.
It was everywhere.
Speaker 3 (40:41):
Yeah, I mean just just hundreds and hundreds of people
all of a sudden in town. And the public of
course is like, hey, you know what we care the
most about is like reading these love letters, like Josh
Clark will when they say that's the key piece of evidence,
and like what was in these things? And in one
of them? And this is great? Who helped us Livia
with this? Yeah, she dug up some of these letters,
(41:04):
Darling Wonderheart. I just want to crush you for two hours.
I want to see Friday night alone by our road
where we can let out unrestrained, that universe of joy
and happiness we call ours. And he signed it DTL
for Dinah troyer Liepaba, which is German for thy true lover,
(41:25):
and Mills called him Babykins. So this is my only
joke about this is I want to see the sitcom
Wonderheart and Babykins like very soon on my television.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Do me a favorite? Will you read that quote as
Charles Bronson?
Speaker 1 (41:43):
Really sure, Darling Wonderhart, I just want to crush you
for two hours. I want to see you Friday night
alone by our road where we can let out unrestrained
that the universe of joy and happiness that we call
ours beautiful Chuck, bravo, man, little more sinisters on that.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
If it wouldn't make the levels going to the red,
I would clap loudly for you right now. So, yes,
this is the kind of humiliation that Francis Hall is enduring.
She's sitting in court because again she's on trial. People
are reading that was just one. They were reading a
bunch of different love letters in open court. And there
were more witnesses that came forward. There were like they
(42:24):
were poking holes in people's alibis from the year back.
So they brought a new witnesses to undermine the truthfulness
of their original witnesses, and so and so on and
so forth. And the maid Louise Geist, she was brought
to the stand and she said, no, my ex husband's
a big fat liar. But I'll tell you what. Willie,
who lived with the Halls and whose servant I was
(42:46):
as well, he told me the day after the murder,
but the day before the bodies were discovered that something
terrible happened last night. So Willy shouldn't have known anything
about something terrible happening last night, unless it was that
his sister had lost it solitaire, which was the one
alibi that Louise Geist could give Francis Hall for that night. Solitaire. Yeah,
(43:11):
it was her alibi.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
So was this Louise Geist was involved and probably got
paid off, and she was trying to just pin it
on Willie. This possibly neurodivergent, you know, younger brother.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
That certainly seems the case to me.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Yes, okay, I mean that's how I took it.
Speaker 2 (43:25):
That's pretty that's pretty whole scratch that her ex husband
comes up with in divorce court, you know. Yeah. So
again though, the star witness was Jane Gibson, the pig woman, right.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
Yeah, yeah, she and this is super dramatic. She came forward,
she was in late stages of cancer and they brought
her in on a stretcher into court. She's speaking in
a whisper basically like just hanging in there to get
this testimony out. So her story was after nine o'clock
on that day, her dog started barking again.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
She was worried about thieves stealing her crops.
Speaker 3 (43:59):
So she gets on her old ginny, rides out to
the field, sees people fighting under that crab apple tree.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
Here's a woman yell, don't don't, don't Henry. She hears
a shot, a gunshot, saw one of the men fall.
She flees.
Speaker 3 (44:17):
She gets the heck out of there, of course, and
then on her way out of there, like running, she
hears a woman screaming again.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Three more gunshots.
Speaker 3 (44:25):
And they were like, can you point out are those
people in the courtroom today basically, and she said yes,
and she pointed at missus Hall, her two brothers and
her cousin, and they said, oh, well, you know what,
she's the big lady, like, don't believe what she says.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
Basically, well, supposedly her own mother. Jing Gibson's own mother
was in the in the courtroom, apparently wringing her handkerchief,
watching her daughter give testimony, saying she's lying, she's lying,
so she people didn't put much stock into Jene Gibson's testimony.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Maybe she said she's dying.
Speaker 2 (44:58):
May maybe so well, this is essentially the prosecution's case.
They presented Jane Gibson again. She basically said, I saw
those four murder these two people, at least in silhouette,
and then I saw the four clearly. Then it was
time for the accused to start taking the stand. And
apparently Missus Hall was so composed during her time on
(45:21):
the stand giving testimony that the papers dubbed her the
iron widow. Yeah, and she still said, I never suspected
my husband of infidelity, and I was really nervous when
he disappeared. That's why my brother and I went out
that very night to look for him. And again, she's
in part probably saving face, but now at this point
(45:42):
she's trying to not give anyone a motive that she
might have had for killing him, which would clearly be
in such a passionate murder something like infidelity, right.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
But despite her, I think everybody kind of expected her
to be good on the stand. You remember I said
that they had kind of suppose that Willy was going
to be the weak link. The prosecutors were just chomping
at the bit to get to him. They were just
gonna work him over on the stand. And apparently Willy
held his own like nobody's business and did so well
(46:14):
on the stand that essentially he got himself and his
siblings and cousin Off. That's how well he did on
the stand. He was the one who basically got him acquitted.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
Yeah, so there it is. They got acquitted on December third,
nineteen twenty six. After that, the defendants minus brother Henry, sued.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
The Mirror for libel.
Speaker 3 (46:35):
It was settled out of court, and we don't know
how much money was exchange hands, if any. Seems like
there probably was some, and it was never brought to
trial again. It never came before a criminal court again.
Missus Hall went, you know, back to doing her things.
She's doing charity work at the church, did not you know,
aside from that, didn't really socialize. A lot died in
(46:56):
nineteen forty two, and you know, we look back now,
is like it seems fairly obvious to us what happened,
even though famous civil rights attorney William Kunstler wrote a
book in nineteen sixty four called The Minister in the
Choir Singer, where he supposes that it was the KKK,
but there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence
about that at all.
Speaker 2 (47:17):
No, he even says this is all circumstantial, and apparently
there's no account of anyone actually being murdered when they
were punished by the KKK for something like having an affair.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
So it's pretty pretty spankings.
Speaker 2 (47:29):
Yes, So what about The Great Gatsby, Chuck, We all
know that you read that article as well as I did, and.
Speaker 3 (47:37):
Right people people wonder if this was, you know, one
of the stories that inspired The Great Gatsby.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
It was in nineteen twenty two.
Speaker 3 (47:45):
I think Gatsby came out in twenty five, so before
the actual trial. But f Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda we
do know that they followed that case. They were pretty
interested in it, and there's a lot of differences, So
I mean, I think it may have just been one
of those sort of launching off points where yeah, it's like, oh,
this is a cool idea, and then just you know,
really just went with it in a fictional sense.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Yeah. Well, People magazine pointed out something that I thought
was a good connection between the two in the story,
the working class woman who's having an affair with I
can't remember his name, Gatsby's rival. Her death is essentially
like ignored because she's not upper class, she's working class. Yea,
the same thing happened to Eleanor Mills, Like her death
(48:29):
does not. Aside from the grizzly state of her body,
people did not pay much attention to that. It was
all about this wealthy woman and her wealthy husband. And
in the end, the wealthy people got to go on
with their lives while the dead working class victim is
just largely forgotten.
Speaker 1 (48:46):
Yeah for sure.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
Well that's it for the Hall Mills murder Chuck good pick,
however we got it. Also, just want to shout out
the Yale Review, Howard Harold Scheckter's article mister local History project,
Mary S. Hartman wrote a paper, and then also our
Ownlivia who helped us with this too. And since I
just rattled lot some sources, as everyone knows, I just
(49:08):
triggered listener mail.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
This is about smoking.
Speaker 3 (49:12):
We did one on the cigarette and this is from
Sue and Melbourne, Australia. Hey guys, I really just like
smoking here in Melbourne, Australia. A pack of twenty cigarettes
and that is individual second cigarettes, not twenty packs like
a pack of cigarette.
Speaker 1 (49:27):
Yeah, twenty Lucy's costs fifty eight ninety nine.
Speaker 2 (49:32):
I know I saw that, and it's just I'm still
astounded by it.
Speaker 3 (49:35):
A pack of twenty five calls sixty two ninety nine
and a carton of ten packs is four hundred and
sixty nine dollars. If a smoker smokes a pack of
twenty per day, the cost per week is three hundred
and seventy one dollars per week, or per annum close
to twenty grand. At a cup of coffee from a
shop Monday to Friday at five or day per anim
thirteen hundred bucks. Victoria has the most expensive cigarettes in
(49:58):
the world. Guys, yet there there's always a crowd of
puffing smokers outside every building. Instead of sucking filth into
the lungs, a person saves the money and overseas holiday
every year would be possible. Yes, I was a bookkeeper.
Love the show that is from Sue.
Speaker 2 (50:13):
Yeah, and you might be all there saying, well, the
Australian dollar is less than the US dollar. I just
calculated it. A four hundred and sixty nine dollars carton
of cigarettes in Australia is still a three hundred dollars
carton of cigarettes in the US. So that's amazing.
Speaker 1 (50:27):
Yeah, that's a lot of dough to actively die earlier.
Speaker 2 (50:31):
Yeah, thanks a lot. Who was that again, Sue? Thanks
a lot Sue, and if you want to be like Sue,
you can send us an email. Send it off to
stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (50:45):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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