Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking that they change laws, change society, or even earn the label crime of the century.But the stories that made headlines in decades past aren't necessarily remembered today.
I'm Amber Hunt, a journalist and author.And in each episode of this show, I'll examine a case that's maybe lesser known today, but was huge when it happened. This is Crimes of the Centuries.
The little crabapple tree under which the dead lovers had been found was now stripped bare.Not a leaf remained.It had all been snatched by souvenir hunters looking for a small piece of one of the biggest puzzles in the new century.
and was certainly the biggest in these parts, heck in most parts, because this was 1922 and this double murder jumped to the top of the public interest scale, driven as much by the shocking homicides as by the resultant newspaper war it spawned.
The prize for the papers was better circulation and must read status based almost entirely on the amount of titillation and scandal at Kaddish.
complete with high concept graphics, maps, confessions, illustrations, chicanery, and newfangled forensics, the coverage created a deep desire for more information.Even the sorted kind all the time.Well, come on, especially the sorted kind.
At its most basic, the case was the wanton murder of two people by person or persons unknown.It became, as author Joe Pompeo vividly notes in the subtitle of his 2022 book, Blood and Ink, the jazz age spectacle that hooked America on true crime.
The murders were, in fact, news of the sincerest variety, the kind that interests people because it tells them about the people who live among them and about the foibles of, well, living with or without necessary regard for others.
And crime is news because criminal behavior is, after all, defined as aberrant. Do we know who among us is capable of taking lives?Do we know what could drive us to do the same?Do we understand the human condition enough?Do we understand ourselves?
That this crime was covered as fully by traditional newspapers with decidedly higher ethical standards surely says something about those who thought the tabloid coverage unseemly.
The New York Times, in fact, devoted more time and space to this crime and its subsequent trial than they had on any other up to that date.
Later, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, which took place in a nearby New Jersey county, would eclipse it in terms of horror and interest.
But this is among the first crimes where prestigious editors saw that America could not look away when humans behaved badly and the tiniest morsel of delectable detail was up for dissection because those sold newspapers, baby.
Everyone wanted in, including some of the most esteemed reporters of the day, like Damon Runyon, H.L.Mencken, Edna Ferber, and advice columnist and sometime cop reporter Dorothy Dix.
They all took the train to New Jersey to ferret out, even write poetically about, this tawdry crime.But back to the crabapple tree.
It was planted on the now-abandoned Phillips Farm, very near where many people used to walk or drive to engage in some extracurricular smooching, and likely more.A kind of lover's hotspot, easy to get to, hard to be seen.
The rundown and empty farmhouse on the property, a possible spot as well for some illicit monkey shines.Not everybody had a Chevy with a big back seat, after all. Anyway, it was here that two bodies, one belonging to Reverend Edward Hall of St.
John the Evangelist Church of New Brunswick, New Jersey, and the other to Mrs. Eleanor Mills, his choir leader, lay for almost 40 hours before anyone reported finding them.
They had only been missed by their families, who had been a little timid in asking around about their absence.People talk, you know.
It was in this tree-studded field where Ray Schneider and Pearl Balmer, a 23-year-old married man and a 15-year-old girl, had told the police they had been out mushrooming when they came upon the bodies and notified the authorities about what they'd found.
It was here where the crab apples lay quiet witness to a horrific double killing that the couple had been placed ever so perfectly to suggest what really?Disdain?Disgust?Jealousy?Regret?Rage?Hard to say it, but it was this, what should we call it?
Styling?That told police this case was not going to be easy and it wasn't going to stay quiet.
While the cold-blooded murder was enough to make headlines all over the region, it was the odd arrangement of the murder scene that tantalized the public.
The bodies of the deceased were placed side by side, both on their back, with Mrs. Mills on the left.
This is from a YouTube documentary by The Mickey Shuffle.Sounds like a weird source, but the info checks out.
The guilty party chose to place her left arm at Mr. Hall's hip, while his arm was made to touch her neck.A hat was used to cover Mr. Hall's face and deadly head wound, and his personal business card was placed at his feet.
Maybe the most curious detail of the site was the tattered pieces of the couple's love letters sprinkled about the scene.
Reverend Hall's outstretched arm, in fact, cradled what was left of Mrs. Hill's head.Her throat had been slit so completely that she had almost been decapitated.Her legs had been crossed primly at the ankles.
She had a bullet hole high in the middle of her forehead and, because of the gunpowder burns that ringed the wound, it was determined to be the result of a gun being placed very close to her skin when the shot was fired.
Her face was almost indistinguishable.He had a bullet hole above one temple that made a quick exit near the other ear.Quite efficient. No gun was nearby.This had no sign of a murder-suicide.Too neat.He had been rather expensively attired.
She had been decidedly less so. Maybe that was part of the allure of the story when it reached the world at large.
Two married people, though not to each other, have been stepping out, defying convention as well as their place in the established class system that existed in this metropolitan New York suburb situated in the northern reaches of New Jersey.
Reverend Edward Hall was married to Frances Stevens Hall, one of the richest women around, a veritable rock of stability in the area, an heiress of some note, though pinning down her actual net worth proved a little tricky.
Let's just say she had old money and some tie to the Johnson & Johnson family cash. She came off as belonging in the last century and adrift, perhaps, in the new one.
Edward and Frances had been married ten years and lived in a finely appointed Victorian home in New Brunswick, New Jersey, a home which is now part of Rutgers University.
Back then it was run by loyal staff who knew pretty much everything that had happened in that house. Eleanor Mills was married to Jim Mills, had been for 17 years, and was considered the smarter, more resourceful, and more outgoing of the two.
Neither had finished high school. They had a 16-year-old daughter, Charlotte, who was born less than the requisite nine months after the marriage.
Not the biggest scandal around, but went far in explaining why they had rushed the wedding and maybe why Eleanor never seemed particularly happy with the situation or her husband or her life.But she made do.
Gifted with a lovely soprano voice, Eleanor's hopes rose a bit when she joined St.John's and was soon mingling with her bettors, finding some purpose in her work there, which consumed a lot of her time.Much of it spent with the Reverend.Wink.
Just when the preacher and the choir singer decided they were meant for different lives, as in one with each other, is impossible to pin down.
Suffice it to say that when they were found together under the crab apple, people may have been shocked by their demise, but not that they were found together.Some like Francis would pretend to be shocked.
That is to do otherwise would be unseemly though.Like I said, people talk. Reporters from the local newspapers had been on site with the police almost from the minute they came upon the scene.
They rushed back quickly that Saturday to carry the news to their limited subscribers.But it's hard to keep a good story down.
You could get most of the sensational news from radio too.There was the Hall Mills case, complete with a pig woman.It was a key witness in a murder mystery that had everybody baffled.
Mrs. Hall's husband, a preacher, had been killed in a Jersey back road, and so had the wife of James Mills.No one ever figured out why.
By late Sunday afternoon and with New York newspapers glomming on to basic details to whet the appetite of a larger audience, even the bark of the crabapple tree had been shredded by those who had taken the Sunday drive out to New Jersey to the Phillips farm to see where the dead had been gunned down.
If there had been any evidence to find after the initial look-see, it was gone now, trampled by the hordes who felt certain a piece of the tainted landscape would look good in the scrapbook back home. Crimes of the Centuries is sponsored by iHerb.
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At the turn of the 20th century, American newspapers were having some of their healthiest and most competitive days.
In New York alone, there were 15 newspapers, and the most influential and most prominent were run by newspapermen whose names still bring equal parts fear and admiration to those who report news for a living.
Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World, William Randolph Hearst of the New York American, and Adolph Ochs of the still-thriving New York Times.
There was even the son of Joseph Medill running the show over at the New York Daily News, considered by many to be the first true tabloid.
A tabloid, in practical terms, is a newspaper that was half the size of what was then the much more common broadsheet size, likely the size of what landed on your grandparents' or parents' doorstep for most of the last century.
Tabloids were basically half that, with the fold at the left side to be open like a book.More convenient, you know, for reading while commuting to work on a train or a bus or a subway.
Without much competition for eyeballs, something as juicy as the murder of two illicit lovers in New Jersey caught the attention of anyone with a pencil.Anne Smith of the Franklin Township Public Library about the case.It was lurid.
It was scandalous.It was unusual for its time.The police made lots of mistakes.
The female journalists known in New York as the Sob Sisters, who pioneered a trail of hard bitten and feisty women reporters, got tapped to be front and center in the reporting.Petty times, but also rowdy and ethically challenged.
All I'm saying is that while the century wasn't yet a quarter done, the newspapers thought they had the crime of the century on their hands because, really, this one had sex and money and privilege and ineptitude and witnesses only a novelist could have dreamed up.
It also had legs.Long, long legs.In fact, it played out over the next five years.Like I said, print gold.And why shouldn't it be?An unsolved murder with jilted lovers and a lurid affair.
It's right here in Franklin.I mean, it captures the imagination.
That's Virginia Keating, also of the Public Library, talking to Positively New Jersey. The whole thing started on Thursday night, September 14th, around 730, when Edward Hall was called to the phone by his maid, Louise Geist.
Soon enough, he told his wife that he was going out on a call, something that he regularly did when parishioners needed his help or guidance or something equally pressing.
He did not return home and in the morning, his worried wife made a few discreet calls to police and hospitals, but made no mention that her husband was missing.No need to arouse suspicion.If he was late, he would usually call, but maybe he forgot.
It was worrisome.Both Jim Mills and Frances Hall had made separate trips to the church sometime that night to look for their respective spouses.At some point, Frances even went to the Mills' home to see if Jim knew anything.
In a conversation that Frances would say never occurred, Jim told police that he had asked Frances if she suspected an elopement.Frances, he said, had replied, quote, it must be foul play or they would be home, end quote.
Neither spouse showed up on Friday night either. Jim Mills didn't really worry all that much.Eleanor had told him she was going out Thursday night.He had asked where she had responded.Follow me and find out.It was not a teasing gesture.
It was a sarcastic one.They weren't much interested in each other's lives anymore.She had, he knew, spent a lot of time at church doing all kinds of charitable things, things that Reverend Hall needed done.
If anyone even blithely suggested she was cheating, he would not hear of it.
By Saturday afternoon, almost 40 hours after they had both stepped out of their front doors, the secret life of Reverend Hall and Mrs. Mills went public and in the very worst way.
The letters found between the two dead bodies had been love letters Eleanor had written Edward.The content was steamy by 1922 standards.The crime scene was beset by some early jurisdictional issues.
Both victims had been residents of Middlesex County, but the crab apple tree laid just across the county line in Somerset County and the little village of Franklin Township, which begged the question, who was in charge and of what?
Both counties went to work. The Reverend Hall was soon found to have tucked away $40,000, or about a quarter of a million in today's money, in a safety deposit box.One fourth of that came to him when Francis's mother died.
The origin of the rest was a mystery, as was the question of what he was going to do with this squirreled away cash. I don't know a lot, but that didn't look good for Frances's prospects for a lengthy happily ever after with Edward.
Frances, who was later ravaged by the press for her supposedly manly looks and conservative, frigid demeanor, was comforted by her brother, Willie, who lived with a couple in that Victorian house in New Brunswick.
Willie was a middle-aged man and a bit of an odd duck. perhaps a little intellectually challenged or just socially inept, maybe autistic, though that wasn't in the medical vernacular yet.
It was a man known to be childlike as he spent a lot of time watching firefighters around the local fire station, walking in the woods and getting his feet sandy in the winter in Florida.
None of this was a problem for him though, because he was well taken care of by his family. Frances had others to lean on as well, influential and wealthy brothers, a cadre of family lawyers, many moneyed friends.The Mills only had each other.
Though Frances Hall had reached out to the family, it was suspected that she had paid for Eleanor's casket and the flowers that adorned it.She also sent a note to Charlotte early on saying not to worry, she would be taken care of.Odd, but generous.
She had been Charlotte's Sunday school teacher, after all.There was no need for ugliness now.Pretty quick, though, the suspicion began to fall on those who had a motive.
on Mrs. Hall and Mr. Mills, the dead couple's spouses, though no real evidence existed to implicate them.
Investigators first turned their attention to Rev.Hall's wife, Frances, who witnesses said was seen entering her home between 2 and 3 a.m., just hours after authorities believed the murders were committed.
Frances explained this by claiming she went to the church in the middle of the night after becoming worried at her husband's absence.
Mr. Mills reported he had gone out to buy a soda on that Thursday night, but he hadn't had the time to get to the crab apple tree and back without setting a land speed record.His daughter said he was home in bed by 1015.
Investigators then looked at who might have wanted to avenge those most hurt by the affair. Francis's brother was Henry Stevens, a wealthy man who had been in the arms business.Not unsurprising, he was also a very good marksman.
But his alibi, he was at a beach and fishing party some 50 miles away, seemed to be airtight. The lawmen did wonder if the bodies had been killed elsewhere and brought to the Crabapple Tree for staging.
They even had a laboratory figure out how much blood had been spilled in the soil under the bodies, which seems mighty impressive police work until you realize they had not exactly shined as forensic trailblazers early on when they allowed unrestricted access to the crime scene.
The work on the dead pair had also been cursory at best. They did have that business card though.And with the world just opening up to the possibilities of fingerprint analysis, they held onto it just in case.
Coming up with no good suspects, it was decided to write the forensic ship.In late September, investigators dug up the bodies for a better look.
What they found of importance, Edward had cuts on his hand, meaning he likely put up a bit of a fight before being overwhelmed.
Eleanor had been shot three times, not just the ones in the forehead, adding bullet wounds through her cheek and another to her upper lip.Her neck had been so severely cut that only four inches of skin remained connecting her head to her body.
That looked particularly important. Eleanor, perhaps, was the real target here, but of what?Frances spent those first weeks holed up in her home, talking only to her family and her lawyers.So newspaper reporters clung to those who would talk.
Charlotte Mills was ready for a closeup.
Seeming to take the place as the head of the family in lieu of her less than enthusiastic father, the teenaged Charlotte stepped to the plate and pointed the finger at the Hall family, who through benefit of their wealth and position, she guessed would get away with it.
The newspapers lapped that up.Then she shifted into a higher gear, writing a letter to the governor of New Jersey.It read quote, Dear Governor, I am Charlotte Mills of New Brunswick.
My mother, as you know, was murdered two weeks ago and it seems to me that the investigation is not bringing results.I have received letters from strangers saying that the political gang is running things.Can that be true?
As we have no means whatsoever to get legal help, is there not some way, dear Governor, to help me find the murderer of my mother? Sincerely, Charlotte Mills."
The letter was reprinted in the papers, which many believed had a hand in prompting this little sideshow to give the story some new material to work with.Then Charlotte showed up at the governor's mansion to see the governor, who was out.
But when he returned, he sent a reply that indicated that, quote, the shocked conscience of the state of New Jersey will not be satisfied until the murderer or murderers of your mother are apprehended, end quote.
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Go to H-I-Y-A-H-E-A-L-T-H dot com slash C-O-T-C and get your kids the full body nourishment they need to grow into healthy adults. After writing Charlotte Mills, New Jersey's governor quickly made good on his promise to advance her mother's case.
He called for the prosecution from both counties involved.The crime's inter-jurisdictional rivalry credited a lot of buck passing and told them to get this thing solved.
By now, because each of the New York newspapers had ties back to a news syndicate that transmitted their best stories across the country, everyone in America was following the day-to-day doings in the case.And there had been some.
For starters, the mushrooming couple, Ray Schneider and Pearl Balmer, remember the ones who had found the bodies, had not been entirely truthful, it seems.
And their stories about when they met up and when they parted and who they saw on the way there had changed a few times during the ensuing weeks.
Some of the suspicion started because police thought maybe the two do-gooders had taken the gold watch that was missing from Reverend Hall's effects.
But then they talked to two of the men who Schneider had said he'd been with part of the night, Leanne Kaufman and Clifford Hayes.
Now we've covered some cases from this era before on crimes of the centuries, but if you're a newcomer, know that interrogations of this time period were not what we would allow today.
At least not if we want the subsequent statements to be admitted into court.Beatings and coerced confessions were not uncommon.
Keep that in mind as I tell you that after a couple of hours of rigorous questioning and a delay of a week, then more intensive questioning, a new story was being told of that night.
One in which Pearl was being escorted through the fields by her belligerent and abusive father, Nick, with Schneider swooping in in an effort to defend her honor and her safety.
Somehow this meant that pal Clifford Hayes, in some kind of we're all in this together move, launched a murderous frenzy and shot both Pearl and her father.But wait, no huge mistake.It turned out it wasn't them he had gunned down.
It was Reverend Hall and Mrs. Mills.What?Yeah, I'm with you. Anyway, Hayes was arrested and charged with murder, but honestly, no one was buying this twisted story.
Not the papers, not the town, not Pearl, not Charlotte or her father, not the Halls, who were just frankly mystified by the sheer dumbness of it all. It was good for thousands of inches of copy, though hardly defensible as truth.
It fell apart quickly when it was realized that Ray Schneider under withering interrogation had ratted out his friend for a crime.Neither of them had any part in.A judge released Hayes.Schneider was sentenced to two years in prison for perjury.
Pearl was sent to a reform school for wayward girls. It's hard to believe, but counting on the witnesses in the case was about to get even more complicated.
The story of the wrongly accused Clifford Hayes prompted someone who claimed to have seen it all come forward to tell what she knew about that night.
Her name was Jane Gibson, and she claimed she'd been born in Kentucky, joined the circus after she ran away from home and had traveled the world.
She was a widow of a clergyman, she said, and now she was a pig farmer who believed someone was routinely stealing her corn.
On that fateful night, she said she heard her dog bark, and she got on her favorite mule, Jenny, to catch the thief red-handed. She didn't find a thief, but heard voices and followed them.That's when she saw two men and two women in a loud argument.
Men heard four shots and saw two people fall to the ground.Mrs. Mills' screams, she said, haunted her still.Jane Gibson was huge news.And in the following days, the stories she told got more detailed and more different in every version.
One had Edward being shot and Eleanor hiding.Another had Gibson leaving the death scene quietly only to return because she'd lost a moccasin.And that's when she saw the gray coated woman weeping over the dead man's body.
Another had that woman yelling out, Oh Henry, just before Edward was gunned down.
The journalism gods had dropped this colorful woman on the scene to bring it all together and solve this terrible crime, all while providing enormously entertaining copy that just sung of old values and good, hardworking people doing the right thing, even though their inclination was to mind their own business.
Well, yes and no.Turns out reporters of the day did actually do some vetting of Jane's story.
They found her sister who said Jane had been born in New York and had left home early only to return to open a chicken and candy stand and the sister said she didn't know anything about the circus or Kentucky.
They also found that Jane Gibson's husband was actually named William Easton and he was alive and well.
They had a son, also named William, though Jane said it was her sister, Jessie Mae's son, and that the sister was the wife of Easton, which didn't explain why Jane sometimes signed legal documents with the name Jane Easton, which was confusing to say the least.
But she hung tight to the narrative that she had witnessed the killings.
Pretending she did not enjoy the attention, Gibson nevertheless charged reporters for interviews and four photographs they took of her and of Jenny, the mule who had been her companion that awful night.
Somehow, Gibson's mule ride became solid fact in the eyes of many, too willing to make the leap that the Henry of, oh, Henry, was, in fact, Frances yelling out to Henry, her brother.
Never mind that no one in the family called him Henry, he had always been Harry, and he had ten people attest to his whereabouts that night, a good hour away from the crime scene. No matter.
Jane Gibson said she saw Francis Hall confront her husband and watch as the man she was with killed him.More or less. Mrs. Hall, in turn, allowed reporters to come into her home so she could emphatically refute such a ridiculous scenario.
He was true to me, she said.This, despite the fact that just days earlier, a young attorney named Florence North convinced Charlotte Mills to give her the letters that Edward Hall had written to her mother.
Apparently they corresponded regularly, especially when Edward was away on vacation with Francis. North then sold the letters to the New York American, which was more than happy to print them in all their full floored glory.
Quote, fling your arms now to the wide heavens for the heaven of heavens cannot contain the vast infinite love that pours more and more out of my heart towards you, your most wonderful lover.We most wonderful lovers.End quote.
Mrs. Hall ignored the existence of the letters.The witnesses now were coming out of the woodwork.
A friend of Edward's, also a minister, claimed that Edward had told him he was leaving the church for Eleanor, that they were running away to Reno to get a divorce, and Francis knew of the affair.
Prosecutors were also busy talking to two of Hall's parishioners, Ralph Gorslein and Minnie Clark, who seemed to have known about the affair and were busy spilling church gossip.
Then a woman named Nellie Lowe Russell wrote Francis a letter saying she knew for a fact that Jane Gibson was not where she said she was that Thursday night.That she was with Jane that night as Jane had found Russell's dog and returned it to her.
And they chatted well past the 10 o'clock hour when the murder had likely occurred.Gibson responded by saying Russell had the wrong date for finding the dog and that she had proof since she wrote it in her calendar.
It was now that the prosecutors, Will Bermot and Azaria Beekman, thought they had it figured out.
They were ready to convene a grand jury to indict Frances Hall and her brother, Henry Stevens, and her cousin, Henry Carpenter, for the murder of Mr. Hall and Mrs. Mills.
A grand jury was convened and they found, surprise, surprise, no action was needed at this time. Months wore on.
During that time, the New York Daily News even had a reporter dress up as a clairvoyant to try to trick Jim Mills into confessing during a seance with his dead wife.
Mills, not a bright man, did not recognize the ploy, but he stuck with his story throughout the charade.He didn't do it.He didn't know who did.Mrs. Hall went to Italy to escape the chaos. Four years passed, and then a bombshell.
The bombshell, which reopened the Hall-Mills murder investigation, was the result of something arranged by one of the newspaper's editors.They had wrangled Arthur Real, a deputy sheriff, into romancing, then marrying Louise Geist, the Hall's maid.
Did you get all that?A newspaper editor convinced the deputy sheriff into romancing and then marrying the maid who worked at the pastor's house.
Riel then told the newspaper that Geist, when drinking, had confessed her part in the crime, that she knew Mrs. Hall had listened in on the phone conversation between the Reverend and Mrs. Mills and knew where they were going and left the house after them.
He had made his statements on court record.Geist called it hogwash.It was all contrived, she said, to get even with her for her decision to exit the marriage. Somebody in Somerset County did not think of it as rubbish at all.
Out of years of calm, a dust storm of new interviews ensued with the governor again lending his services to the prosecutorial team.On July 27th, 1926, Francis Hall was arrested.
On August 27th, the Daily Mirror reported that the fingerprint on the Reverend's business card belonged to Willie Stevens, Frances' live-in brother.
Like Jane Gibson had pointed out Frances' cousin, Henry Carpenter, as the man she saw that night by the Crabapple.And soon, they were all arrested for the plot to kill the cheating husband. The Stevens-Carpenter Halls were not without resources.
And what became known as the billion-dollar defense team, seven of the most highly influential and dramatically successful attorneys in the state were assembled to defend them.
The combined trial of Francis, Henry, and Willie took place in the Somerset County Courthouse, which had room for 300 onlookers.200 of them were reporters. This is Pompeo, the author, reading an excerpt from Runyon's reporting.
The spectacle had taken on some of the aspects of a big sports event.It wasn't merely a metaphor.
A telegraph switchboard used two months earlier during the world heavyweight fight between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney had been installed in the courthouse basement with a staff of 28 operators at the ready.
Four stenographers were on hand to record every word of the proceedings, hourly transcripts of which would be churned out by a bevy of mimeograph machines.
It was estimated that more than 300,000 words a day were filed for use on the pages of the nation's newspapers that had weighted every word.The trial began November 3, 1926.It lasted five weeks and included a whopping 157 witnesses.
The prosecutors were convinced they had a strong case.They staked a lot of hope on the fingerprint, which they claimed had what experts said was five matching points with the one provided by Willie Stevens.But it was such a new technology.
The FBI had only created a division for such a thing three years earlier that the defense had little trouble creating doubt as to its veracity.
Then Jane Gibson, who had told reporters she was going to be the Babe Ruth of the trial, was called to testify.She was close to dying of cancer.She appeared in court while in a hospital bed, attended to by both a doctor and a nurse.
Because of that, it remains one of the most dramatic testimonies in American history. But the defense team was not here to play nice with the dying woman.
Her testimony became tangled and twisted, and the billion-dollar team tore her apart limb by limb.They even put her mother on the stand to say Jane was a prodigious liar, had been all her life.
The only hope prosecutors had left was to have the hapless Willie Stevens take the stand.Everyone knew he was incapable of complicated thought, that he was socially and psychologically ill-prepared for what the prosecutors had planned for him.
As author Pompeo explained in a speech to Somerset County Library patrons.
He performed perfectly and stood by that he had nothing to do with the murders.And he recounted the story of his and his sister Frances's movements on the murder night.The press kind of ate it up.
Frances Hall then took the stand and was as cool as a cucumber, calmly but firmly denying everything the prosecution lobbed her way. The jury got the case.Five hours later, they came back with verdicts for all three.Not guilty.
The charges against Henry Carpenter, who was awaiting his own trial, were then dropped.
In February of the following year, Francis Hall, Willie Stevens, and Henry Carpenter filed a $1.5 million libel suit against William Randolph Hearst, Daily Mirror, the worst offender of the lot.
It was later settled for an undisclosed sum said to be the largest ever for such a case in the U.S.at the time.
In a strange development, in 1969, after all the defendants and most of the main players had passed away, including Charlotte, a man named Julius Bolog, who believed he was dying, decided to clear his conscience.
He called the New Brunswick Police Department and told them a story about meeting Willie Stevens in 1921 at the home of a friend.
Willie said that Reverend Stevens was his legal guardian and that he was a stingy guy who didn't let Willie have what he considered to be his own money.He was given $25 a week to live on, which he thought was grossly unfair.
And he knew about what the Reverend and Eleanor Mills were up to.Then he told the rest, adding that if Reverend Hull had only given him $100 a week, this would never have happened.
After 47 years of silence, Julius Bulliog has told his story.He says that a day or two following the murders of Reverend Edward Hall and Mrs. Eleanor Mills, he carried two envelopes.
each containing $3,000 in cash from the minister's wife to two New Brunswick hoodlums.One he identifies as Ike Gutman, the second he knew only as Freddy.
The widow and her two brothers were found innocent of murder charges in a 1926 trial, but some police officials feel the trial might have had a different outcome if Bolyog had spoken out then.
The case is still considered unsolved. To research this case, journalist Amy Wilson read Joe Pompeo's Blood and Ink, the scandalous jazz-age double murder that hooked America on true crime.
She read quite a few of the newspaper stories from the murder and subsequent trial.She found that the Somerset County, New Jersey Library has quite the collection of artifacts, documents, and public events connected to the crime.
If you wish to see some of those yourself, she's told there's a permanent exhibit there, which has the couple's letters, the hat that covered Edward's dead face, and more.
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Unless noted in the citations, this case was researched and written by me, Amber Hunt, and produced by Amanda Rassman and Henry Lavoie.Original music is by Bruce Hunt, Andrew Higley, and occasionally by my son, Hunt van Ben Scoten.
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