The Hall-Mills Murder

On the morning of September 16, 1922, the bodies of Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall and Eleanor Mills, the wife of the church choir director with whom Hall had been having an affair, were found beneath a crab apple tree on a rural road in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Both had been shot, and Eleanor's throat had been slashed. Love letters from their correspondence were strewn around their bodies. The crime scene suggested deliberate staging by someone who wanted the affair publicized even in death.

The investigation was immediately scandalous given Hall's prominent social position and the explicit nature of the letters scattered at the scene. Hall's wife Frances and her brothers — Willie and Henry Stevens — were the primary suspects, with motive obvious from the affair. The initial 1922 investigation produced no indictments, partly due to the influence of the Hall and Stevens families in New Jersey society. A pig farmer named Jane Gibson, who said she had witnessed the murders from her mule, named Frances Hall and her brothers as the killers but was largely disbelieved.

In 1926, a New York newspaper published new evidence allegedly showing a cover-up, and the case was reopened. Frances Hall and her brothers were indicted and tried in one of the most sensational trials of the 1920s. Jane Gibson — known as the "Pig Woman" — was brought to the stand on a stretcher as she was dying. The defense systematically attacked her credibility, and after a trial that gripped the nation, all defendants were acquitted.

The Hall-Mills murder was never solved. Frances Hall died in 1942. Willie Stevens, who was considered intellectually disabled, outlived his sister and died in 1942 as well. Henry Stevens had previously died in 1939. No one was ever convicted of the murders of Reverend Hall and Eleanor Mills. The case remains one of the most famous unsolved double murders of the Jazz Age and a landmark in the history of tabloid journalism.