The Unsolved Murder of Hall and Mills

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.

Speaker 6 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 7 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 7 Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenix, explores people discovering strength in the most unexpected places.

Speaker 14 Listen to untold stories on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 15 Experience the beloved Harry Potter stories like you've never heard them before on Audible.

Speaker 15 Harry Potter, the full cast audio editions, presents the iconic series as a truly spellbinding listening event for the whole family, with a spectacular A-list cast, including Hugh Laurie as Albus Dumbledore, Matthew McFaddy and as Voldemort, and many more.

Speaker 15 The first story in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Sorcerer's Stone, is available now with new audiobooks in the series releasing every month thereafter.

Speaker 15 It's Harry Potter like you've never heard it before. Listen on Audible.
Go to audible.com/slash hb1 and start listening today.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 15 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and this is another edition of Stuff You You Should Know's ongoing low-key true crime sweet.

Speaker 16 Yeah, it's been a while, if you like.

Speaker 15 I'm trying to think of the last one. Yeah, I mean, clearly it has been if I can't think of the last one, but I like it.

Speaker 15 Every once in a while, we 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 16 Agreed.

Speaker 15 So we're talking today about one I hadn't heard of. Let me ask you this before we get started.
Yeah.

Speaker 15 Did you get your idea from People magazine?

Speaker 15 No.

Speaker 15 Because People magazine ran an article on this very murder on June 26th, 2025. Oh, really? Yes.
Like, where did you get this idea?

Speaker 16 Well, I know it wasn't people because, you know, I just, I didn't read people.

Speaker 16 I'm not against it if I'm like, you know. waiting for the doctor or something.

Speaker 15 Well, you're really digging yourself into a hole here.

Speaker 16 I'll pick up a people magazine. That's fine.

Speaker 16 I'm wondering now if this was a listener suggestion that I need to look up.

Speaker 15 I searched it and I did not really see anything about it. That's why I was like, holy cow, people magazine.
He really got it from there.

Speaker 16 I don't know. Maybe, I mean, sometimes I might go so low as to

Speaker 16 search for, you know, unsolved crimes or something. I don't know.
Sure.

Speaker 15 There's nothing wrong with that. Not much.

Speaker 15 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 it was definitely up there I've seen it compare with some other ones yeah that came later closely on the heels

Speaker 15 but I had 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 I

Speaker 16 have a feeling that's how it came to me and now I'm wondering if that was the search term that I should have used for listener suggestion.

Speaker 15 Oh, Great Gatsby? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I didn't search for that either.

Speaker 15 We'll have to get to the bottom of this, like a couple of true detectives.

Speaker 16 I feel like we're letting someone down.

Speaker 15 Yeah, we probably are, but

Speaker 15 we do need to get their name. But I wonder if this thing is sent post-June 26, 2025,

Speaker 15 bet they got it from people.

Speaker 15 Okay. Because the People magazine article, like in the headline, it said that it inspired the great Catsby.

Speaker 16 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 15 I'm not going to stop. I'm not going to stop until I'm successful.
So just look out, buddy, because you're in my crosshairs now. Who knows? So let's talk about this crime.

Speaker 15 In short, there was a Reverend, well-known Reverend in New Brunswick, New Jersey, home of Rutgers.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And one night, or one morning, I should say, they turned up murdered, brutally murdered.

Speaker 15 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. And I would guess probably out of the country as well.

Speaker 16 Who knows?

Speaker 15 How would you ever find something like that out? I don't know. People magazine, probably.
Yeah, probably.

Speaker 16 People international.

Speaker 16 So, yeah, Ed Hall was in his early 40s, 41 years old at the time of his death, and he was a pastor, like you said, at St. John's Episcopal, about 20 miles from where I lived in New Jersey.

Speaker 15 Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 16 And his wife's name was Frances Hall. She was seven years older than him,

Speaker 16 interestingly, because I guess his mistress, Eleanor Mills, was seven years younger.

Speaker 15 Anything to that?

Speaker 15 I think it's just a fluke of nature.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I think so too. But, and this is kind of key here, she, his wife had come from a, you know, it seems like a pretty wealthy, well-to-do, well-connected family in the area

Speaker 16 because he was just a pastor and,

Speaker 16 you know, they they didn't make a lot of dough, yet they lived in a really fancy house. They had a chauffeur.
They had a staff.

Speaker 16 They had maids that worked there, which will come into play in this story. And they had been married about 11 years.

Speaker 16 His mistress, 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.

Speaker 16 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, if you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I do know what you're saying.

Speaker 15 So, one other thing about Edward Hall and his wife Frances' fortune, he apparently, when he first got to take over the church, the St. John's Episcopal Church, it was a hostile takeover.

Speaker 15 He started courting a lovely parishioner, but she didn't really have any money. He dropped her and put his sights on Frances Stevens, who would become Frances Hall as wife.

Speaker 15 And from what I've read, there's not a lot

Speaker 15 of note, or there wasn't a lot of note about Frances Stevens aside from her wealth. And she was wealthy.

Speaker 15 She shared what would be worth today a $40 million fortune between herself and her two other brothers. So she was definitely wealthy.
And so in addition to running around on her,

Speaker 15 he also seemed to just have been after her money. And let's not forget, he's an Episcopal Reverend leading an entire church.

Speaker 15 So that to me, when I put all those things together, I was like, I don't really like this guy.

Speaker 16 Yeah, fair enough.

Speaker 16 So, it was not a secret among the church.

Speaker 16 You know, it was kind of one of those things, you know, back in 1922 where people might, it might have been pretty clear, and even probably in a modern-day church, that somebody was having a fair, but you didn't really talk about that kind of thing.

Speaker 16 And so, it was basically an open secret

Speaker 16 after,

Speaker 16 you know, the sermons and after Sunday would end. They would spend a lot lot of time together in his study.

Speaker 16 Apparently they would leave love notes and that will come into play in 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.

Speaker 15 What book do you think it was?

Speaker 16 The Great Gatsby.

Speaker 15 They traveled in time.

Speaker 16 They did.

Speaker 16 The day that the news broke, though,

Speaker 16 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 15 Right. so yeah like you said this is an open secret apparently their their spouses knew james mills and um frances hall both seem to have known about the affair for one

Speaker 15 when they turned up missing that first day apparently frances hall the first time she spoke to james mill his her husband's mistress's husband James said, do you think they eloped?

Speaker 15 That was his response when he found out that they were both missing.

Speaker 15 And apparently also, this is important too, Frances Hall had a informal network of spies among the congregation who kept tabs on those two and informed her of their doings, essentially.

Speaker 15 So both of them knew full well what was going on.

Speaker 16 Right. They knew, but they didn't project that publicly.
Publicly, they both said, like, my head didn't know this was going on.

Speaker 16 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 15 No, for sure. I think her first public response was,

Speaker 16 so on the day of the murder, this was Thursday, September 14th,

Speaker 16 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,

Speaker 16 another couple came forward.

Speaker 16 This woman named, well, woman, she was 15 years old.

Speaker 16 She was a young girl named Pearl Bommer, yet she was in a relationship because this was in 1922 with a guy who was anywhere from 19 to 23, who can tell. His name was Raymond Schneider.

Speaker 16 They came upon the bodies a couple of days later on Old Phillips Farm. This is the other side of the Raritan River there.
And this is about 10.30 in the morning.

Speaker 16 They went to the closest house, had the owner call the cops, and the cops showed up pretty quickly.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and the bodies, it was pretty disturbing. So they'd been left on a path off of DeRussi's Lane.
This is a dirt road, I think, in Somerset County, and it was a well-known lover's lane.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 This is where their bodies were found on a path off of this lover's lane, right? Yeah. A Reverend Hall had been shot once through the temple and exited the opposite temple.

Speaker 15 And that was it for him. But Eleanor Mills, his mistress, she had really been worked over, right?

Speaker 16 Yeah,

Speaker 16 she was shot three times in the head and her neck was cut so severely that she was close to being decapitated.

Speaker 16 His shot was point blank, sort of, you know, what we would call execution style with a.32 caliber pistol.

Speaker 16 And the bodies were posed together after that. They were under a crabapple tree,

Speaker 16 kind of posed as cuddling lovers.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 And he had a hat, a Panama hat, kind of partially covering his face.

Speaker 16 So, you know, from 20 yards away or whatever, it looked like a couple just sort of laying there, cuddling, maybe taking a nap under a tree.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 There was one other thing that wasn't noted at the time when the bodies were found in 1922 but it would be noted when the case was reignited four years later in 1926

Speaker 15 that

Speaker 15 Eleanor Mills tongue and vocal cords had been cut out and removed. That had been missed in the first autopsy, but a subsequent autopsy found that.

Speaker 15 So this was the state that these bodies were found in. I think also

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 This is the clue to me. You ready, Chuck?

Speaker 16 I'm ready.

Speaker 15 There were love letters that Eleanor Mills had written to Edward Hall, the Reverend Hall, and they had been placed all around them.

Speaker 15 So this was a highly staged crime scene.

Speaker 15 Not just the bodies were staged, but there were actual props involved among an executed and a mutilated body left out in public, essentially, to be found almost immediately after they were killed.

Speaker 16 Yeah. I mean, the business card almost feels like, hey, if anyone stumbles upon this who's not from around here, this is who this is.

Speaker 15 That's right. You know? Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 16 Like, what else could that be?

Speaker 15 I don't know. I mean, they're sending some sort of message.
If that's not it, there's something else that they're sending.

Speaker 16 Like, that's pretty in your face, you know yeah for sure so the bodies were found uh locals you know word gets around a little bit locals start showing up then once the new newspapers get a hold of it like you said earlier it became a big deal and I guess this was such a 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 the grounds of that road and near that farm and they wanted to uh like literally take pieces of that tree and dig dig up dirt around there as a keepsake.

Speaker 16 Apparently they said, you know, they were showing up at a rate of a thousand cars a day. Sounds a little overblown, maybe.

Speaker 16 But there were like vendors selling popcorn and balloons and,

Speaker 16 you know, the dirt they were selling for 25 cents a bag. It was really out of hand very quickly.

Speaker 15 You know what it reminded me of was like the circus atmosphere that grew up when Floyd Collins was trapped in Sand Cave. Yeah.

Speaker 15 It was around the same time. So people were just looking for something to to see.

Speaker 15 Pretty bored, apparently. Yeah.

Speaker 15 So yeah, it was a big deal. And there was a huge problem with all of those people showing up

Speaker 15 combined with

Speaker 15 an incompetent police investigation. And that was that these people trod all over the crime scene.

Speaker 15 They apparently messed with the scarf. They took samples from the tree.
Apparently, the tree was stripped of everything except its trunk after everyone was done with it.

Speaker 15 There's the guy selling the dirt.

Speaker 15 This stuff was really important.

Speaker 15 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 murdered somewhere else and transported because the blood they found trickled into the dirt, which is a sure sign that they had been killed there

Speaker 15 on the spot.

Speaker 15 But with people stealing dirt from that, there goes all of that evidence, too. So the crime scene was completely useless.

Speaker 15 And this is at a time when people knew like, no, you really need to preserve crime scenes.

Speaker 16 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 16 I think that's a good spot for a break, eh?

Speaker 15 Hey.

Speaker 16 All right. Well, since Josh said A,

Speaker 16 we're going to take a little break and come back with more of this grisly murder right after this.

Speaker 17 Attention, parents and grandparents.

Speaker 19 If you're looking for a gift that's more than just a toy, give them something that inspires confidence and adventure all year long.

Speaker 22 Give them a Guardian bike, the easiest, safest, and number one kids' bike on the market.

Speaker 12 Yeah, with USA-made kids-specific frames and patented safety technology, kids are learning to ride in just one day with no training wheels needed.

Speaker 27 It's why Guardian is America's favorite kids' bike and the New York Times and Wirecutters' top pick three years in a row.

Speaker 28 That's right.

Speaker 29 My daughter has a Guardian bike, and she loves it, and that thing was really easy to put together.

Speaker 18 And get this, this holiday season, Guardian is offering their biggest deal of the year, over 40% in savings on all bikes, plus $100 in free accessories.

Speaker 23 Guardian bikes have become one of the most sought-after gifts of the season, and inventory is going fast, so don't wait. Join over a half a million families who've discovered the magic of Guardian.

Speaker 32 Visit guardianbikes.com to shop now.

Speaker 6 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 7 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 33 That's right.

Speaker 33 And in the latest season of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby studio production in partnership with Argenix, host Martine Hackett explores what it means to reclaim your identity, discover resilience, and cultivate self-advocacy.

Speaker 7 From the frustration of misdiagnosis to the small victories that fuel hope, every story told is meant to unite, uplift, and empower.

Speaker 7 And that inspires us all to take one step closer to being a better advocate and seeing life from a different point of view.

Speaker 34 So if you or a loved one are living with an autoimmune condition, find inspiration along your path.

Speaker 21 Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 There's nothing like sinking into luxury. Anibay sofas combine ultimate comfort and design at an affordable price.

Speaker 1 Anibay has designed the only fully machine washable sofa from top to bottom. The stain-resistant performance fabric slip covers and cloud-like frame duvet can go straight into your wash.

Speaker 1 Perfect for anyone with kids, pets, or anyone who loves an easy-to-clean, spotless sofa. With a modular design and changeable slip covers, you can customize your sofa to fit any space and style.

Speaker 1 Whether you need a single chair, love seat, or a luxuriously large sectional, Annabe has you covered. Visit washable sofas.com to upgrade your home.

Speaker 1 Sofas start at just $699 and right now, get early access to Black Friday savings, savings, up to 60% off store-wide, with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Shop now at washable sofas.com.

Speaker 15 Add a little

Speaker 1 to your life. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 16 All right, so we're back. 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

Speaker 16 the police work wasn't so good.

Speaker 16 One of the issues was, and this is something that 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.

Speaker 16 They lived in Middlesex County.

Speaker 16 The old Phillips farm was in Somerset County, like you mentioned.

Speaker 16 And initially, like you said, they didn't even knew where the murders took place.

Speaker 16 They later found out that they were alive when they got to the farm. So they finally found that out.

Speaker 16 But at the beginning, you had Middlesex County and Somerset County both saying, like, no, this is my case. This is my case.

Speaker 16 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 15 No, not at all. Apparently, the governor had to get involved and be like, you guys need to join forces.
And they eventually did.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And this is a really important time during an investigation, the first several hours, 48, you might even say. Yeah, that's what they say.
So

Speaker 15 there was a statement that was issued

Speaker 15 that

Speaker 15 Mrs. Hall issued, essentially to back up a theory that had been posed that this was a robbery.
That was a robbery gone wrong. And a woman named Sally Peters acted as Mrs.

Speaker 15 Hall's spokeswoman, apparently, for most of this time, because Mrs. Hall didn't really want to be seen in public.
So her good friend stepped up and essentially they pointed out that Mrs.

Speaker 15 Hall's husband, the Reverend Hall, he walked around with a gold watch and in his wallet, he typically carried about $50, which is like $1,000 today. That's what he walked around with.

Speaker 16 A jerk. Who has $1,000 of cash in their wallet?

Speaker 15 A guy who marries a woman for her money and then runs around on her almost publicly.

Speaker 15 Yeah, probably 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 um eleanor mills's throat had been cut to the backbone and they'd been staged in some really weird ways right

Speaker 16 yeah for sure so uh this is the middlesex uh assistant prosecutor at first because again they were conducting separate investigations This guy's name was John Toulin, and he came out and said, hey, wait a minute.

Speaker 16 Basically, I mean, he couldn't come right out and accuse her, but he was basically like, hey, there's no information to back this up.

Speaker 16 Kind of listen to our statements and maybe not the ones from the deceased's family.

Speaker 16 I'm sure he had to couch that because she was from a wealthy family, but he basically said, hey,

Speaker 16 there's no evidence to back this up. And

Speaker 16 we think that, and this to me is a little hinky, but he said, if it was a robber,

Speaker 16 he wouldn't have been using a.32. He would have been using a larger caliber, which to me doesn't really make much sense.

Speaker 15 He would have been using a 44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world. Do you feel lucky?

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 the area

Speaker 15 around that time, and they were known for severely punishing moral transgressions like affairs. Yeah, but not their own.
No, of course not.

Speaker 15 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,

Speaker 15 they could have been a target for the clan to punish somebody like that. So that was a decent theory, but it didn't really go too far, at least at first.

Speaker 16 Yeah, for sure. And we mentioned this next one just because it has been mentioned, but it really also went nowhere.
But very briefly,

Speaker 16 apparently there were two Italians who had showed up in New

Speaker 16 and

Speaker 16 they had revolvers. 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 16 For sure.

Speaker 15 That's just what you did in 1922 when somebody turned up murder.

Speaker 15 How many Italians came into town?

Speaker 16 Exactly.

Speaker 15 So the cops were like, okay.

Speaker 15 like we can't possibly like train our sights on

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 15 Yeah, they were just looking for somebody to pin it on, and they turned their attention to the two people, Pearl Bommer, and Ray Schneider, who had run over to a farmhouse and told the woman we just found some bodies, call the police.

Speaker 15 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 your own alibis.

Speaker 15 Who would possibly call in finding the bodies of a murder they just committed?

Speaker 16 Yeah, for sure. So

Speaker 16 they discovered like, hey, they were also on the farm that night because this was, remember, two days later in the morning when they, when they called it in, but they said, hey, they were also there that night.

Speaker 16 A couple of weeks after that,

Speaker 16 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 15-year-old kid named Leon Kaufman.

Speaker 16 They were all four brought in for what sounds like a straight 24 hours of questioning, which is always very suspicious, you know, when you try and get someone to their weakest point.

Speaker 16 So they sign some weird false confession.

Speaker 16 So they wore them out questioning for a full day and night. And at the end of this, Ray Schneider, the original guy who reported it with his young girlfriend,

Speaker 16 signed a statement that said, hey, around midnight that night,

Speaker 16 me and Clifford Hayes, my buddy, came across a couple of people sitting on the ground near that farmhouse. I thought it was my girlfriend and her father, and I had been looking for her.

Speaker 16 I was pretty jealous, and so Hayes shot both of them.

Speaker 16 And it sounds like it might have been like a favor to him.

Speaker 16 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 friend's like, I'll get even for you.

Speaker 16 None of this really makes much sense to me, at least.

Speaker 15 Well, the 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 16 Yeah, I mean, it's all very hinky. But Ray Schneider basically,

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 And Schneider did have a gun.

Speaker 16 He also had a pocket knife. And so in the end, they arrested Clifford Hayes and charged him with the murders.

Speaker 15 They did.

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 15 Like, are you kidding? This is who you've come up with.

Speaker 15 There was, it didn't take into account, again, so does that mean that Clifford Hayes, after his friend Ray Schneider, ran off, his friend who he'd taken it upon himself to execute the man's girlfriend and her father.

Speaker 15 Yeah. That he went over and was like, Well, I better almost cut this woman's head off and siege these bodies like this.
But every single

Speaker 15 theory

Speaker 15 is just dumb

Speaker 15 because they can't take into account the most important clue in this whole

Speaker 15 murder

Speaker 15 case. The love letters.
Yeah.

Speaker 15 How would this guy, Clifford Hayes, have any access to the love letters between those two from Mills to Hall?

Speaker 15 How would they have had access to that? How would the Klan have had access to that? How would somebody who was robbing them and the robbery went wrong, how would they have access to that?

Speaker 15 Those are the clues, so much so that I'm quite certain that the people who killed

Speaker 15 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, there you go.

Speaker 15 There's your answer right there.

Speaker 16 Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, it's all just so fishy and ludicrous that they arrested this kid.
So the, you know, there was real backlash back then even.

Speaker 16 Like you said, everybody, like no one really believed what was going on. And the story had all these holes in it.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 But the press basically uncovered some stuff that Schneider, Schneider, who was dating the 15-year-old Pearl,

Speaker 16 he was actually married. Clifford Hayes, who they arrested for the murder, supposedly he had dated Pearl at one point.

Speaker 16 But

Speaker 16 again, none of this made any kind of sense at all. Within a few days, Ray Schneider was like, no, yeah, you know what? That's not true.
So they sentenced him to

Speaker 16 a term at 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 just a great place.

Speaker 15 I'm sure too.

Speaker 16 Sarcasm.

Speaker 15 Yeah, for sure. And then Ray Schneider being sentenced for his false statement.
So he had a coerced statement beaten out of him. And then he gets sentenced for giving it.

Speaker 15 Yeah. Oh, is he beaten? I'm sure he was.

Speaker 15 We're talking 1922, and the police are trying to get a confession over a 24-hour period of questioning out of this guy who signs a false confession, I would say he might.

Speaker 16 I just want to make sure no family members of those cops comes forward and sues you.

Speaker 15 For sure, but you saw as well as I did in People magazine that they said it too.

Speaker 16 All right. Shall we go on or should we take another break? Maybe go on a little more?

Speaker 15 Yeah, let's go on a little more.

Speaker 16 All right, take it away.

Speaker 15 Okay, so finally,

Speaker 15 the public, it's just the police who are studiously avoiding looking at Frances Hall,

Speaker 15 her two brothers, and eventually her cousin,

Speaker 15 all of whom would be implicated in this crime.

Speaker 15 It was just the cops and the prosecutors who were trying not to look at them. The rest of the public was like,

Speaker 15 I'm pretty sure we have, we know who did this. Why don't you start looking at them? And eventually, the public pressure about it

Speaker 15 couldn't just be ignored. So the cops finally started looking at Mrs.
Hall and they brought her in for questioning once. Apparently, it was a very gentle line of questioning.

Speaker 15 They were very deferential.

Speaker 15 Very naturally, people also started looking at James Mills. He was the other jilted lover

Speaker 15 in this case. He had a pretty good alibi.
Apparently, either one of his hobbies or his side gig was woodworking.

Speaker 15 He was seen around the time of the murders at home, and then for the next couple hours during the time when this pair was definitely murdered. So

Speaker 15 he had a pretty good alibi, multiple neighbors saying, yeah, he was at home woodworking at the time.

Speaker 16 Yeah, and that's in

Speaker 16 the TV show when they're, at the end, when they're recounting how it was done, this is when you see the shot of like the buzzsaw going in an empty room.

Speaker 15 Right.

Speaker 15 It's like a mannequin rigged to.

Speaker 16 Like pushing it so it actually sounds like it's cutting.

Speaker 15 That's right. That's like the 1922 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 16 That's right. The data's somehow scrambled.

Speaker 15 Yeah, but I'll tell you what, even that couldn't fool Jessica Fletcher. There's at least one episode where that was used.
Who's that again? On Murder She Wrote.

Speaker 16 Oh, that's right.

Speaker 15 Oh, you want to hear something awful? Sure. So I was watching Murder She Wrote on Over-the-Air Antenna.
It's to be expected. There's a lot of ads, and they're usually pretty crummy ads.

Speaker 15 But remember, I was complaining about that stupid Burger King ad.

Speaker 15 Oh, yeah. Well, I finally moved away from the over-the-air antenna viewing and just started watching, I think, on Amazon.
Yeah, I love that.

Speaker 16 You joined the 21st century.

Speaker 15 Exactly.

Speaker 15 But

Speaker 15 for a while, I was like, great, I left the Burger King ad behind. Nope.
It very recently popped up again on Amazon. I haven't heard it in a while.

Speaker 15 I'm not going to recount it for you.

Speaker 16 Well, I'll tell you what I'm not doing is watching Murder She Wrote if that's the trigger.

Speaker 15 Yeah, it's pretty bad, but that's how much I like Murder She Wrote. I'm willing to suck it up, you know? Jessica Fletcher solving crimes.

Speaker 15 Stop, dude. That's pretty catchy.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 16 All right, so where were we?

Speaker 15 They started looking at Mrs. Hall.
She didn't have an alibi, it turns out.

Speaker 16 That's right. So they brought her in, like you said, for some pretty gentle questioning.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 They visited the church at first to look for him. And then later they went to her house.
Well, not her house, but the victim's house. They went to the Mills' house.
Nobody was there either.

Speaker 16 And they said,

Speaker 16 yeah, initially they said, we went there because, you know, we thought he might have been visiting with someone who was ill.

Speaker 16 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 changing out of the gate.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 15 And I mean, if an entire prosecutor's offices, office times two, two different counties, prosecutors and police departments are being deferential to you and not investigating you because you're wealthy.

Speaker 15 At least have the decency to keep your story straight, to not make them look that ridiculous, right? Yeah, I agreed. The upshot is this.
Mrs.

Speaker 15 Hall's alibi is her brother Willie, who lived with Mrs. Hall and Reverend Hall.

Speaker 15 And he was a suspect, too. So if your alibi is another suspect, that's not a very good alibi.
And

Speaker 15 they were also prowling around about 2.30 a.m. and no one could corroborate that they were out looking for Reverend Hall at 2.30 a.m.
about the time the murders took place.

Speaker 16 Exactly. So again, she was still insistent that they had a great marriage.
These love letters are fake. The cops start sniffing

Speaker 16 her other brother off the case, who doesn't live with them. This guy's name was Henry.

Speaker 16 And he was like, no, no, I got an alibi. I was fishing in Lavalette.
It's about 50 miles away. There's no way I could have been there.
And you know what?

Speaker 16 I was even fishing with the mayor of La Vallette. And the mayor stepped forward and said,

Speaker 16 correct.

Speaker 15 So he's holding a briefcase with money coming out of the seams.

Speaker 16 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 like proof that he was out fishing.

Speaker 16 But he said, I was fishing and there was a witness with me.

Speaker 16 There were a few witnesses, and it seems like the key witness to this all is the woman who actually witnessed the murder, as it turns out.

Speaker 15 Yeah, a woman named Jane Gibson, who had come to be known as the pig woman.

Speaker 15 That's just what the press call her across the board, because she was a pig farmer in the area of the road where the bodies were found. Yeah.

Speaker 15 And she had cause to be awake at 2.30 a.m. Apparently,

Speaker 15 There had been some thefts of her crops, probably cops who'd come and try to snatch her crops.

Speaker 15 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 Mrs.

Speaker 15 Hall, her two brothers, and Mrs. Hall's cousin, Henry, another Henry, carrying out these murders.

Speaker 16 Yeah, like she said, I saw this happen.

Speaker 16 But the prosecutors are like, nah, her story keeps kind of changing too.

Speaker 16 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 we tackle that question or answer rather right after another break eh

Speaker 17 Attention, parents and grandparents.

Speaker 19 If you're looking for a gift that's more than just a toy, give them something that inspires confidence and adventure all year long.

Speaker 22 Give them a Guardian bike, the easiest, safest, and number one kids bike on the market.

Speaker 12 Yeah, with USA-made kids-specific frames and patented safety technology, kids are learning to ride in just one day with no training wheels needed.

Speaker 27 It's why Guardian is America's favorite kids' bike and the New York Times and Wirecutter's top pick three years in a row.

Speaker 28 That's right.

Speaker 29 My daughter has a Guardian bike and she loves it, and that thing was really easy to put together.

Speaker 20 And get this: this holiday season, Guardian is offering their biggest deal of the year: over 40% in savings on all bikes, plus $100 in free accessories.

Speaker 23 Guardian bikes have become one of the most sought-after gifts of the season, and inventory is going fast, so don't wait. Join over a half a million families who've discovered the magic of Guardian.

Speaker 32 Visit guardianbikes.com to shop now.

Speaker 6 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 7 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 33 That's right.

Speaker 33 And in the latest season of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby studio production in partnership with Argenix, host Martine Hackett explores what it means to reclaim your identity, discover resilience, and cultivate self-advocacy.

Speaker 4 From the frustration of misdiagnosis to the small victories that fuel hope, every story told is meant to unite, uplift, and empower.

Speaker 7 And that inspires us all to take one step closer to being a better advocate and seeing life from a different point of view.

Speaker 34 So if you or a loved one are living with an autoimmune condition, find inspiration along your path.

Speaker 35 Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 Time for a sofa upgrade? Introducing Anibay sofas, where designer style meets budget-friendly prices. Every Anibay sofa is modular, allowing you to rearrange your space effortlessly.

Speaker 1 Perfect for both small and large spaces, Anibay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out. Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and and stain resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy.

Speaker 1 Liquid simply slide right off. Designed for custom comfort, our high-resilience foam lets you choose between a sink-in feel or a supportive memory foam blend.

Speaker 1 Plus, our pet-friendly stain-resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years. Don't compromise quality for price.
Visit washable sofas.com to upgrade your living space today.

Speaker 1 Sofas start at just $699 with no risk returns and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get early access to Black Friday now.
The biggest sale of the year can save you up to 60% off.

Speaker 1 Plus free shipping and free returns. Shop now at washable sofas.com.
Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 15 So Chuck, where we left off, you had said that a grand jury had been convened, right? That's right.

Speaker 15 And it turned out that the grand jury, I think they took five days before they said, no, we're not going to hand down any indictments. So it seemed that the

Speaker 15 probably the likeliest suspects, Frances Hall, her two brothers, and her cousin,

Speaker 15 were now off the hook.

Speaker 15 And we should 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 Mrs. Hall.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Sometimes you see in modern retellings of it that he's considered developmentally disabled. That does not seem to be the case.
It seems like he probably was neurodiverse in some way, shape, or form.

Speaker 15 But he was also quite sharp, too. He was known to read books on like metallurgy.
He was quite sociable. He would be high functioning, you would say today.

Speaker 15 But at the time, he seemed to be, if this was a group of murderers, his family murderers, he would be targeted as like the weak link that you would go after.

Speaker 15 But regardless, it didn't matter because 1922 went out with these four let off the hook because the grand jury didn't indict. How about that?

Speaker 16 That's right.

Speaker 15 And right after that happened,

Speaker 16 the good Mrs. Hall left for Italy.
So nothing at all suspicious about that.

Speaker 16 About getting on a plane to Europe.

Speaker 15 I think you can make a case either way. That, you know, he just wanted to get away from the whole thing too.

Speaker 16 I said plane. Would that have been just

Speaker 16 an ocean liner at the time?

Speaker 16 Okay. Way to go, man.
So save your emails, everybody.

Speaker 16 I'm speaking in the modern parlance.

Speaker 16 So in December,

Speaker 16 they said, basically,

Speaker 16 now that all the

Speaker 16 gawkers are out of here and all the attention's dying down, we can get down to some real investigating and figure out who did this. A year later, the New York Times followed up on the anniversary.

Speaker 16 We're like, yeah, so you got down to business. What'd you find out?

Speaker 15 And they're like, oh, what?

Speaker 15 No progress whatsoever, right? Yeah.

Speaker 15 So that's how it went

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 In the divorce proceedings, he was assassinating

Speaker 15 his ex-wife, or soon-to-be ex-wife's character, saying that she had been involved in the Hall Mills murder and had been paid 5,000 smackaroos

Speaker 15 to keep quiet by Mrs. Hall and her brothers, and that she knew all about it.

Speaker 15 And somehow, I guess that got out to the press, and William Randolph Hearst's 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 16 Yeah, such that the state of New Jersey could no longer just keep ignoring this. So Governor A.
Harry Moore said, oh, God, all right, let's reopen this case.

Speaker 15 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 16 At this point, the grand jury does come back and indict Frances Hall, her brothers Willie and Henry, and her cousin Henry. They were all four arrested.

Speaker 16 Mrs. Hall, for her part, was released on bail, 15 grand, a lot of dough at the time.
Yeah.

Speaker 16 Still a lot of dough. I always say that.

Speaker 16 The men were held without without bail. And at this point, this is four years later.
They don't take care of evidence like they do now.

Speaker 16 A lot of the evidence was gone, but they did find some new clues.

Speaker 16 There was another adulterous couple in the church. There were probably dozens of them because that's just how that kind of thing goes.

Speaker 16 But this one other adulterous couple, there was a guy named Ralph Gorsline and a woman named Catherine Rostell.

Speaker 16 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 Henry, or was this brother Henry?

Speaker 15 That was brother Henry. Okay, brother Henry,

Speaker 16 who apparently swore him to secrecy.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 And the reason that I didn't come out before was because, obviously, I didn't want to like have my affair busted.

Speaker 16 But in 1926, four years later,

Speaker 16 she had talked, his mistress had talked. So he was like, well, I guess the cat's out of the bag.
So I'm going to say what happened too. And his wife said, great, let's get a divorce.

Speaker 15 Yeah. And again, he had gone to this private detective in 1922 because his conscience had gotten to him.

Speaker 15 I think he was basically saying, he was saying all the stuff that he eventually said in 1926 to get the detective to go to the cops and say, hey, this anonymous source did this.

Speaker 15 but it didn't pan out like that.

Speaker 15 But in 1926, they were just uncovering stuff left and right. Remember, I said that they exhumed Mrs.

Speaker 15 Mills and did another autopsy, and that's when they found that her tongue and vocal cords had been cut out.

Speaker 15 So, like, this was a serious investigation that was launched again in 1926, probably a lot more serious than the one that was carried out in 1922. And

Speaker 15 another clue that turned up, or another source that turned up, was a guy named Paul Hamborski. He was a minister also in New Brunswick and he was friendly with Reverend Hall.

Speaker 15 And Paul Amborsky came forward and said,

Speaker 15 Hey,

Speaker 15 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 really cool lately and has turned into a different woman.

Speaker 15 And quote, I am very much afraid that she will do me bodily harm.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 This was a month before Edward Hall was murdered that a minister came forward and said, this is what he said to me.

Speaker 16 Yeah, and he also said that her brother Henry threatened me because everyone knew about this affair.

Speaker 16 And so he comes out with this very, you know, sort of key evidence. And right before the

Speaker 16 1926 trial started, this Paul Hamborsky guy just sort of disappeared. He left town.
He didn't disappear, like disappear, disappear, but he left town pretty quickly.

Speaker 16 And there was a state senator named Alexander Simpson who was acting as special prosecutor for the case. And he said, this Hamborsky guy's loans dried up at the bank.

Speaker 16 And the banker said, you've been a fool to get mixed up in this Hall's Mill case.

Speaker 15 The banker was Charles Bronson?

Speaker 16 No, that would have been, you've been the fool to get mixed up in this Hall's Mill case.

Speaker 15 Very nice.

Speaker 15 I just said that because I really wanted to hear you redo it as Charles Bronson.

Speaker 16 It's just all dirty dealing, basically. Like, it's really clear.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So

Speaker 15 this trial happens. Like, they finally have enough evidence that a grand jury, this time pretty quickly, handed off indictments.
And so Frances and her two brothers and cousin are indicted for murder.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 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 12 million plus words

Speaker 15 cumulatively. It wasn't just one guy during the 23-day trial.
That's how many words were written on this. It was everywhere.

Speaker 16 Yeah. I mean, just hundreds and hundreds of people all of a sudden in town.
And

Speaker 16 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 one day say that's the key piece of evidence.

Speaker 16 And like what was in these things? And one of them, and this is great. Who helped us, Livia with this?

Speaker 16 Yeah, she dug up some of these letters. Darling Wonderheart, I just want to crush you for two hours.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 And he signed it DTL for Dinatreuer Liebhabe, which is German for thy true lover. And Mills called him Babykins.

Speaker 15 So

Speaker 16 this is my only joke about this, is I want to see the sitcom Wonderheart and Babykins very soon on my television.

Speaker 15 Do me a favor, will you read that quote as Charles Bronson?

Speaker 15 Really? Sure.

Speaker 16 Darling Wonderheart, I just want to crush you for two hours.

Speaker 16 I want to see you Friday night alone by a road where we can let out unrestrained that universe of joy and happiness that we call ours.

Speaker 15 Beautiful Chuck. Bravo.

Speaker 15 A little more sinister somehow. If it wouldn't make the levels go into the red, I would clap loudly for you right now.

Speaker 15 So, yes, this is the kind of humiliation that Frances Hall is enduring. She's sitting in court because, again, she's on trial.
People are reading. That was just one.

Speaker 15 They were reading a bunch of different love letters in open court.

Speaker 15 And there were more witnesses that came forward.

Speaker 15 They were poking holes in people's alibis from the year back. So they brought in new witnesses to undermine the truthfulness of their original witnesses and so on and so forth.

Speaker 15 And the maid, Louise Geist, she was brought to the stand and she said, no, my ex-husband's a big fat liar. But

Speaker 15 I'll tell you what, Willie, who who lived with the Halls and whose servant I was as well,

Speaker 15 he told me the day after the murder, but the day before the bodies were discovered, that something terrible happened last night.

Speaker 15 So Willie shouldn't have known anything about something terrible happening last night,

Speaker 15 unless it was that his sister had lost at Solitaire, which was the one alibi that Louise Geist could give Francis Hall for that night. Solitaire was her alibi.

Speaker 16 So was this this Louise Geiser 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 15 That certainly seems the case to me. Yes.

Speaker 16 Okay. That's how I took it.

Speaker 15 That's pretty, that's pretty whole scratch that her ex-husband comes up with in divorce court, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 15 So again, though, the star witness was Jane Gibson, the pig woman, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 Again, she was worried about thieves stealing her crops.

Speaker 16 So she gets on her mule, Jenny, rides out to the field, sees people fighting under that crab apple tree, hears a woman yell, Don't, don't, don't, Henry.

Speaker 16 She hears a shot, a gunshot,

Speaker 16 saw one of the men fall.

Speaker 16 She flees. 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, three more gunshots.

Speaker 16 And they were like, can you point out, are those people in the courtroom today, basically? And she said, yes. And she pointed at Mrs.
Hall, her two brothers, and her cousin.

Speaker 16 And they said, oh, well, you know what? She's the big lady. Like, don't believe what she says.

Speaker 15 Basically.

Speaker 15 Well, supposedly, her own mother, Jane 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 jane gibson's um testimony maybe she said she's dying

Speaker 15 maybe

Speaker 15 so this is the 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 uh apparently mrs hall

Speaker 15 was so composed on during her time on the stand giving testimony that the papers dubbed her the iron widow yeah and she still said i never suspected my husband of infidelity um and i was really nervous when he disappeared that's why my brother and i went out that very night to look for him um and again she's in part probably saving face but now at this point she's trying to not give give anyone a motive that she might have had for killing him, which would clearly be in such a passionate murder,

Speaker 15 something like infidelity, right?

Speaker 15 Yeah, for sure. But despite her, I think everybody kind of expected her to be good on the stand.
And remember, I said that they had kind of supposed that Willie was going to be the weak link.

Speaker 15 The prosecutors were just chomping at the bit. to get to him.
They were just going to work him over on the stand.

Speaker 15 And apparently Willie held his own, like, nobody's business and did so well on the stand that essentially he got himself and his siblings and cousin off. That's how well he did on the stand.

Speaker 15 He was the one who basically got him acquitted.

Speaker 16 Yeah, so there it is. They got acquitted on December 3rd, 1926.
After that, the defendants minus brother Henry sued the mirror for libel.

Speaker 16 It was settled out of court, and we don't know how much money was exchanged hands, if any. Seems like there probably was some.

Speaker 16 And it was never brought to trial again. It never came before a criminal court again.

Speaker 16 Mrs. Hall went, you know, back to doing her thing.
She's doing charity work at the church.

Speaker 16 Did not, you know,

Speaker 16 aside from that, didn't really socialize a lot. Died in 1942.

Speaker 16 And, you know, we look back now as like it seems fairly obvious to us what happened, even though

Speaker 16 famous civil rights attorney William Kunstler wrote a book in 1964 called The Minister and 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 15 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 15 So it's pretty, pretty cool.

Speaker 15 Yes.

Speaker 15 So what about the Great Gatsby, Chuck? We all know that you read that article as well as I did.

Speaker 16 People wonder if this was

Speaker 16 one of the stories that inspired the Great Gatsby. It was in 1922.
I think Gatsby came out in 25, so before the actual trial. But F.
Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda,

Speaker 16 we do know that they followed that case. They were pretty interested in it.
And there's a lot of differences.

Speaker 16 So, I mean, I think it may have just been one of those sort of launching off points where he was like, oh, this is a cool idea. And then just, you know, really just went with it in a fictional sense.

Speaker 15 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,

Speaker 15 Gatsby's rival,

Speaker 15 her death is essentially like ignored because she's not upper class. She's working class.
The same thing happened to Eleanor Mills.

Speaker 15 Like her death does not, aside from the grisly state of her body, people did not pay much attention to that. It was all about this wealthy woman and her wealthy husband.

Speaker 15 And in the end, the wealthy people got to go on with their lives while the dead working class victim is just largely forgotten. Yeah, for sure.
Well, that's it for the Hall Mills murder, Chuck.

Speaker 15 Good pick, however, we got it. Also, just want to shout out the Yale Review, Howard Harold Schechter's article, Mr.
Local History Project, Mary S.

Speaker 15 Hartman wrote a paper, and then also our own Livia, who helped us with this too. And since I just rattled off some sources, as everyone knows, I just triggered listener mail.

Speaker 16 This is about smoking. We did one on cigarette and this is from Sue in Melbourne, Australia.
Hey guys, I really dislike smoking.

Speaker 16 Here in Melbourne, Australia, a pack of 20 cigarettes, and that is individual second cigarettes, not 20 packs, like a pack of cigarettes.

Speaker 15 Yeah, 20 Lucy's.

Speaker 16 Costs $58.99.

Speaker 15 I know, I saw that, and it's just, I'm still astounded by it.

Speaker 16 A pack of 25 costs $62.99 and a carton of 10 packs is $469.

Speaker 16 If a smoker smokes a pack of 20 per day, the cost per week is $371 per week or per annum, close to $20,000. Add a cup of coffee from a shop Monday to Friday at five or day, per annum? $1,300.

Speaker 16 Victoria has the most expensive cigarettes in the world, guys. Yet there is always a crowd of puffing smokers outside every building.

Speaker 16 Instead of sucking filth into the lungs, a person saves the money. An overseas holiday every year would be possible.

Speaker 16 Yes, I was a bookkeeper. Love the show.
That is from Sue.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and you might be out there saying, well, the Australian dollar is less than the US dollar. I just calculated it.

Speaker 15 A $469 carton of cigarettes in Australia is still a $300 carton of cigarettes in the US. So that's amazing.
Yeah, that's a lot of dough to actively die earlier. Yeah.
Thanks a lot. Who was that again?

Speaker 16 Sue.

Speaker 15 Thanks a lot, Sue. And if you want to be like Sue, you can send us an email.
Send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Speaker 17 Attention, parents and grandparents.

Speaker 19 If you're looking for a gift that's more than just a toy, give them something that inspires confidence and adventure all year long.

Speaker 22 Give them a Guardian bike, the easiest, safest, and and number one kids bike on the market.

Speaker 12 Yeah, with USA-made kids-specific frames and patented safety technology, kids are learning to ride in just one day with no training wheels needed.

Speaker 27 It's why Guardian is America's favorite kids' bike and the New York Times and Wirecutters top pick three years in a row.

Speaker 28 That's right.

Speaker 29 My daughter has a Guardian bike and she loves it, and that thing was really easy to put together.

Speaker 18 And get this, this holiday season, Guardian is offering their biggest deal of the year, over 40% in savings on all bikes plus $100 in free accessories.

Speaker 23 Guardian bikes have become one of the most sought-after gifts of the season, and inventory is going fast, so don't wait. Join over a half a million families who've discovered the magic of Guardian.

Speaker 32 Visit guardianbikes.com to shop now.

Speaker 6 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 7 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 13 Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio Production, and Partnership with Argenix explores people discovering strength in the most unexpected places.

Speaker 14 Listen to Untold Stories on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 15 Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One Bank Guy.

Speaker 12 It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too.

Speaker 15 Thanks, Capital One Bank Guy. What's in your wallet?

Speaker 12 Terms apply.

Speaker 15 See Capital One.com/slash bank. Capital One NA, member F D I C.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.