The Unsolved Murder of Hall and Mills

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

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and this is another edition of Stuff You Should Know's ongoing

low-key true crime

sweet.

Yeah, it's been a while, I feel 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, 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.

Agreed.

So, we're talking today about one 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 26th, 2025.

Oh, really?

Yes.

Like, where did you get this idea?

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

I'll pick up a people magazine.

That's fine.

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

I searched it and I did not see anything about it.

That's why I was like, holy cow, People magazine.

He really got it from there.

I don't know.

Maybe, I mean, sometimes I might go so low as to

search for, you know, unsolved crimes or something.

I don't know.

Sure.

There's nothing wrong with that.

Not that much.

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

that came later closely on the heels.

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 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.

Oh, Great Gatsby?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I didn't search for that either.

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

I feel like we're letting someone down.

Yeah, we probably are, but

we do need to get their name.

But I wonder if this thing is sent post-June 26, 2025,

bet they got it from people.

Okay.

Because the People magazine article, like in the headline, it said that it inspired the Great Gatsby.

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.

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.

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, 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.

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

Who knows?

How would you ever find something like that out?

I don't know.

People magazine, probably.

Yeah, probably.

People international.

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.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, that's right.

And his wife's name was Frances Hall.

She was seven years older than him.

Interestingly, because I guess his mistress, Eleanor Mills, was seven years younger.

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, 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 worked there, which will come into play in this story.

And they had been married about 11 years.

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.

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.

Yeah, I do know what you're saying.

So one other thing about edward hall and for his wife frances's fortune he apparently when he first got to take over the church um the st.

john's episcopal church it was a hostile takeover um he started courting uh a lovely parishioner but she didn't really have any money he dropped her and put his sights on um frances stevens who would become frances 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 Frances Stevens aside from her wealth.

And she was wealthy.

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,

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.

Yeah.

Yeah, fair enough.

So, it was not a secret among the church.

It was kind of one of those things

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.

And so it was basically an open secret

after

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 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.

What book do you think it was?

The Great Gatsby.

They traveled in time.

They did.

The day that the news broke though,

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.

Right.

So, yeah, like you said, this is an open secret.

Apparently,

their spouses knew James Mills and

Francis Hall both seem to have known about the affair.

For one, when they turned up missing that first day, apparently Frances Hall, the first time she spoke to James Mill,

her husband's 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, Frances Hall had an informal network of spies among the congregation congregation who kept tabs on those two and informed her of their doings, essentially.

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

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.

No, for sure.

I think her first public public response was,

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

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 15 years old.

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.

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.

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

Yeah, and the bodies, it was pretty disturbing.

So they've 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.

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.

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, 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 would call execution style with a.32-caliber pistol.

And the bodies were posed together after that.

They were under a crabapple tree,

kind of posed as cuddling lovers.

Her head was placed on his arm, not 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 face.

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.

Yeah, so that's how 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 1922, but it would be noted when the the case was reignited four years later in 1926

that

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.

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.

And this is really important, too.

This is the clue to me.

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 executed and a mutilated body left out in public, essentially, to be found almost immediately after they were killed.

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.

That's right.

You know?

Yeah, for sure.

Like, what else could that be?

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.

Like, that's pretty in your face, you know?

Yeah, for sure.

So the bodies were found.

Locals, you know, word gets around a little bit.

Locals start showing up.

Then once the newspapers get a hold of 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 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.

Apparently, they said, you know, they were showing up at a rate of a thousand cars a day.

Sounds a little overblown, maybe.

But there were like vendors selling popcorn and balloons and,

you know, the dirt they were selling for 25 cents a bag.

It was really out of hand very quickly.

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

Yeah.

It was around the same time.

So people were just looking for something to do.

Yeah.

Pretty bored, apparently.

Yeah.

So yeah, it was a big deal.

And there was a huge problem with all of those people showing up

combined with uh incompetent

an incompetent police investigation and that was that these people trod all over the crime scene um 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 there's the guy selling the dirt um

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 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 on the on the spot.

Um, 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.

Yeah, for sure.

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

A.

All right.

Well, since Josh said A,

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

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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

the police work wasn't so good.

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.

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 knew where the 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 and Somerset County both saying like, no, this is my case.

This is my case.

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.

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, 48, you might even say.

Yeah, that's what they say.

So

there was a statement that was issued

that

Mrs.

Hall issued, essentially to back up a theory that had been posed that this was a robbery.

It was a robbery gone wrong.

And a woman named Sally Peters acted as Mrs.

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.

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.

A jerk.

Who has $1,000 of cash in their wallet?

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' throat had been cut to the backbone and they'd been staged in some really weird ways, right?

Yeah, for sure.

So this is the Middlesex assistant prosecutor at first, because again, they were conducting separate investigations.

This guy's name was John Tulin, and he came out and said, hey, wait a minute.

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.

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

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 hanky, but he said, if it was a robber,

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.

He would have been using a 44 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 clan had recently become highly active in

the area

around that time, and they were known for severely punishing moral transgressions like affairs.

Yeah, but not their own.

No, 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 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.

Yeah, for sure.

And we mentioned this next one just because it has been mentioned, but it really also went nowhere.

But very briefly,

apparently there were two Italians who had showed up in New Brunswick and

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 that kind of deal.

For sure.

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

How many Italians came into town?

Exactly.

So the cops were like, okay,

like we can't possibly

train our sights 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 the two people uh pearl bomber and ray schneider who had um run over to a farmhouse and told a woman we just found some bodies call the police right when they found the bodies they were like that seems a little fishy we're gonna start looking at you guys because you're probably just providing your own alibis who would possibly call in uh finding the bodies of a murder they just committed Yeah, for sure.

So

they discovered like, hey, they were also on the farm that 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.

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 15-year-old kid named Leon Kaufman, 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.

So they sign some weird false confession.

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,

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

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.

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

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

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.

Yeah, I mean, it's all very hinky.

But Ray 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.

He also had a pocket knife.

And so in the end, they arrested Clifford Hayes and charged him with the murders.

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 Ray Schneider, ran off, his friend who he'd taken it upon himself to execute the man's girlfriend and her father,

that he went over and was like, well, I better almost cut this woman's head off and siege these bodies like 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 murder

case, the love letters.

Yeah.

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 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?

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

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.

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, 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.

But the press basically uncovered some stuff that Schneider, who was dating, you know, the 15-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.

Like within a few days, Ray Schneider was like, no, yeah, you know what?

That's not true.

So they sentenced him to

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.

I'm sure, too.

Sarcasm.

Yeah, for sure.

And then Ray, 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.

Yeah.

Oh, is he beaten?

I'm sure he was.

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.

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

For sure.

But you saw as well as I did in People magazine that they said it too.

All right.

Shall we go on or should we take another break?

Maybe go on a little more?

Yeah, let's go on a little more.

All right, take it away.

Okay, so finally,

the public, it's just the police who are studiously avoiding looking at Frances 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, we know who did this.

Why don't you start looking at them?

And eventually, the public pressure about it 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.

They were very deferential.

Very naturally, people also started looking at James Mills.

He was the other jilted lover

in this case.

He had a pretty good alibi.

Apparently, either one of his hobbies or his uh 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 uh this pair was definitely murdered so he his he had a pretty good alibi multiple neighbors saying yeah he was he was at home woodworking at the time Yeah, and that's in 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.

Right.

It's like a mannequin rigged to like pushing it so it actually sounds like it's cutting.

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.

That's right.

The data's somehow scrambled.

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 was that again?

On Murder She Wrote.

Oh, that's right.

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.

But remember, I was complaining about that stupid Burger King ad?

Oh, yeah.

Well,

I finally moved away from the over-the-air antenna viewing and just started watching it, I think, on Amazon.

Yeah, I love that.

You joined the 21st century.

Exactly.

But

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.

I'm not going to recount it for you.

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, but that's how much I like Murder She Wrote.

I'm willing to suck it up, you know?

Jessica Fletcher solving crimes.

Stop, dude.

That's pretty catchy.

Yeah, yeah.

All right, so where were we?

They started looking at Mrs.

Hall.

She didn't have an alibi, it turns out.

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.

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 changing out of the gate.

Yeah.

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, at least have the decency to keep your story straight, to not make them look that ridiculous, right?

Yeah, agreed.

The upshot is this: Mrs.

Hall's alibi is her brother Willie, who lived with Mrs.

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 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.

Exactly.

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.

This guy's name was Henry.

And he was like, No, no, I got an alibi.

I was fishing in La Vallette.

It's about 50 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 he-he's holding a briefcase with money coming out of the seams.

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.

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, as it turns out.

Yeah, a woman named Jane Gibson, who had 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 2.30 a.m.

Apparently,

there had been some 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 Mrs.

Hall, her two brothers, and Mrs.

Hall's cousin, Henry, another Henry,

carrying out these murders.

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 we tackle that question, or answer rather, right after another break, eh?

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So, Chuck, where we left off, you 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, no, we're not going to hand down any indictments.

So it seemed that

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

were now off the hook.

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.

And the reason why, it seems, is because he was, at least understood at the time, as kind of slow, as they would put it.

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.

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.

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.

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?

That's right.

And right after that happened,

the good Mrs.

Hall left for Italy.

So nothing at all suspicious about that.

I think you can get on a plane to Europe.

I think you can make a case either way.

That, you know, she just wanted to get away from the whole thing, too.

I said plane.

Would that have been just

an ocean liner at the time?

Okay.

Way to go, man.

So save your emails, everybody.

I'm speaking the modern parlance.

So in December,

they said, basically, you know, now that all the

gawkers are out of here and all the attention is 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.

We're like, yeah, so you got down to business.

What'd you find out?

And they're like, oh, what?

No progress whatsoever, 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

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

to keep quiet by Mrs.

Hall and her brothers, and that she knew all about it.

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.

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.

Yeah, exactly.

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.

Mrs.

Hall, for her part, was released on bail, 15 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 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 couple in the church.

There were probably dozens of them because that's just how that kind of thing goes.

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

And they were on Lubber'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?

That was Brother Henry.

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 Rastel, had heard these four gunshots, heard some low voices, and a woman screaming.

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

But in 1926, 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 going to say what happened too.

And his wife said, Great, let's get a divorce.

Yeah.

And

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

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.

But it didn't pan out like that.

But in 1926, they were just uncovering stuff left and right.

Remember, I said that they exhumed Mrs.

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

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

another clue that turned up, or another source that turned up, was a guy named Paul Hamborsky.

He was a minister also in New Brunswick, and he was friendly with Reverend Hall.

And Paul Hamborski 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 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, this is what he said to me.

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 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.

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

The banker was Charles Bronson?

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

Very nice.

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

It's just all dirty dealing, basically.

Like, it's really clear.

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 grand jury, this time pretty quickly, handed off indictments.

And so Frances 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 12 million plus words

cumulatively.

It wasn't just one guy during the 23-day trial.

That's how many words were written on this.

It was everywhere.

Yeah.

I mean, 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?

It's like reading these love letters.

Like Josh Clark will one day 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.

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 Dina Treuer Liebhabe, which is German for thy true lover.

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.

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

Really?

Sure.

Darling Wonderheart, 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 universe of joy and happiness that we call ours.

Beautiful Chuck.

Bravo.

Oh, man.

A little more sinister somehow.

If it wouldn't make the levels go into the red, I would clap loudly for you right now.

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.

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

And there were more witnesses that came forward.

There were like they were 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.

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

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.

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 younger brother?

That certainly seems the case to me.

Yes.

that's how I took it.

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?

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, she was worried about thieves stealing her crops.

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.

She hears a shot, a gunshot,

saw one of the men fall.

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.

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.

And they said, Oh, well, you know what?

She's the big lady.

Like, don't believe what she says.

Basically, supposedly, her own mother, Jane Gibson's own mother, was in the courtroom, apparently wringing her handkerchief, watching her daughter give testimony, saying, She's lying.

She's lying.

So people didn't put much stock into Jane Gibson's testimony.

Maybe she said she's dying.

Maybe.

So

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 Mrs.

Hall

was so composed

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.

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, 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?

Yeah, for sure.

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 supposed that Willie was going to be the weak link?

The prosecutors were just chomping at the bit to get to him.

They were just going to work him over on the stand.

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.

He was the one who basically got him acquitted.

Yeah, so there it is.

They got acquitted on December 3rd, 1926.

After that, the defendants minus brother Henry sued the mirror for libel.

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.

And it was never brought to trial again.

It never came before a criminal court again.

Mrs.

Hall went, you know, back to doing her thing.

She's doing charity work at the church.

Did not, you know,

aside from that, didn't really socialize a lot, died in 1942.

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

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.

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.

So it's pretty pretty

rankings.

Yes.

So what about the Great Gatsby, Chuck?

We all know that you read that

article as well as I did.

People wonder if this was

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,

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 he was like, oh, this is a cool idea.

And then just, you know, really just went with it in a fictional sense.

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 yeah the same thing happened to eleanor mills 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 this wealthy woman and her wealthy husband um 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.

Good pick.

However, we got it.

Also, just want to shout out the Yale Review, Howard Howard Harold Schecher's article, Mr.

Local History Project, Mary S.

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.

This is about smoking.

We did one on the cigarette, and this is from Sue in Melbourne, Australia.

Hey, guys, I really dislike smoking.

Here in Melbourne, Australia, a pack of 20 cigarettes, and that is individual second cigarettes not 20 packs like a pack of cigarettes yeah 20 lucies

costs 58.99.

i know i saw that and it's just i'm still astounded by it uh a pack of 25 costs 62.99 and a carton of 10 packs is 469 dollars if a smoker smokes a pack of 20 per day the cost per week is 371 per week or per annum close to 20 grand.

Add a cup of coffee from a shop Monday to Friday at 5 or 8 per annum?

$1,300.

Victoria has the most expensive cigarettes in the world, guys.

Yet there is always a crowd of puffing smokers outside every building.

Instead of sucking filth into the lungs, a person saves the money.

An overseas holiday every year would be possible.

Yes, I was a bookkeeper.

Love the show.

That is from Sue.

Yeah, and you might be out there saying, well, the Australian dollar is less than the U.S.

dollar.

I just calculated it.

A $469 carton of cigarettes in Australia is still a $300 carton of of cigarettes in the U.S.

So that's amazing.

Yeah, that's a lot of dough to actively die earlier.

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 stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

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