Popular Crime

by Bill James

  XII

  At 8:30 on the evening of September 14, 1922, Eleanor Mills and the Reverend Edward Hall left their respective families in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and headed for a rendezvous in the woods. About 10:15 three or four shots were heard on the outskirts of town. No one paid much attention; it was hunting season. The bodies of Reverend Hall and Mrs. Mills were discovered on the following Saturday, September 16, lying side by side under a crab apple tree.

  Reverend Hall, 41 years old, was the pastor of the Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist in New Brunswick, a large and successful church. He had married money. In 1911 he had married Frances Stevens, a proper, sturdy woman several years his senior. She was related to the founders of Johnson & Johnson, the Band-Aid makers. The couple lived in a grand house on the finest street in town with Mrs. Hall’s brother, Willie Stevens, and several servants.

  Eleanor Mills, 32, was a member of St. John’s choir, and also was married to the sexton of the church, James Mills. A “sexton,” if you were wondering, is kind of a caretaker. A janitor and handyman.

  The murders of Hall and Mills exploded immediately into the biggest news story in the nation.

  • Within hours, the crab apple tree where the bodies had been discovered had been stripped of its bark by souvenir hunters. Within days, the tree had been completely demolished.

  • The scene where the murders occurred was mobbed by so many people that eight to ten vendors set up tents on location, selling popcorn, peanuts, candy and soft drinks to the Lookie Lous.

  • Mrs. Hall’s brother Willie, a defendant in the subsequent trial, became so famous that his peculiar looks and odd hair would be a touchstone of common reference for people of that generation. A writer of the 1920s would say that a person “looked something like Willie,” and people would know that that meant Willie Stevens, just as a 1990s writer might say that somebody “looked a little like Kato.”

  • Several years after the murders, during a quiet period in the prosecution, a rumor arose that Mrs. Hall was aboard a ship leaving for Europe. Twenty-five to 30 New York reporters stormed the port, searching the ship top to bottom for Mrs. Hall.

  The interaction of the media as a part of the story, which many commentators are convinced was invented for the O. J. Simpson trial, was far more overt in the 1920s than it is now. When the case eventually went to trial one newspaper hired Mills’ teenaged daughter to “report” on the proceedings. Several reporters were called as witnesses, and numerous items of evidentiary value, including Mrs. Mills’ love letters to Hall and a business card of Reverend Hall’s which was found next to the bodies, had either been sold or given to newspapers before the case went to trial.

  As to why the public became so obsessed with the murders of a philandering New Jersey clergyman and his paramour:

  1) Newspapers of the time often chose certain crimes, and exploited them shamelessly, and

  2) There was a “competitive panic” among newsmen that drove the selection of stories.

  Some newsmen are obsessed with what other newsmen are doing. They are afraid of “missing the story.” When one newsman broke furiously for the scene of the crime, that defined it as a major story for the next newsman. When two newspapers headlined the crime, it became crucial for a third to participate. Timing, luck, the absence of anything else to write about on that particular day—it simply happened. Within hours of the discovery of the bodies, editorial decisions were made which caused the murders of Hall and Mills to emerge as the Crime of the Century, at least until the next big case came along.

  According to Rex Stout, the investigation which followed showed “a record of sustained official ineptitude, surely never surpassed anywhere.” Police failed to secure the scene of the crime, which was ravaged by newsmen and souvenir hunters. The investigation went nowhere for several weeks, until a rural neighbor named Jane Easton or Jane Gibson came forward with a story about having witnessed the crime.

  Her story was palpably false—improbable on its face, at variance with several of the known facts, and belatedly introduced by a woman who was such a notorious liar that it proved impossible to figure out what her name actually was. Still, it was the best hoss the prosecutors had, so they rode it. The press took to calling Mrs. Gibson the Pig Woman, in part because she kept pigs, but also, wink wink, because she kind of looked like a pig. The Pig Woman alleged that, on the night of the murders, she had heard someone on her property. Since she had been troubled by thefts, she grabbed a shotgun, saddled up her mule, and set off in pursuit. She lived half a mile from the murder scene. As she drew near to the area she heard voices. Tying up her mule, she crept close. Hiding in the shadows, she saw two men and a woman—Mrs. Hall and her two brothers—murder the lovers.

  She retreated to her house but, not content with the first performance, returned to the clearing in the middle of the night. Amazingly enough, she claimed, so did Mrs. Hall. Mrs. Gibson saw her back there again about 12:30, wailing at the corpse of her departed husband. Prosecutors took the Pig Woman’s story and the rest of their “evidence” to a grand jury, which refused to indict.

  And there the case lay, for several summers. In 1926 a man named Arthur Riehl filed for annulment of his marriage. His wife had been a maid of the Halls at the time of the tragedy. Riehl alleged in his annulment petition that the girl had had a sexual relationship with the minister and had knowledge of the murders, which she had concealed from him at the time of their marriage.

  These fanciful allegations were withdrawn before they could be tested in court. It is believed that a newspaper had paid Mr. Riehl to say ridiculous things for the purpose of re-starting the story. They succeeded. The governor of New Jersey, embarrassed by years of inaction and ineptitude in the sensational case, appointed a Special Prosecutor to pursue the matter. The Special Prosecutor, Alexander Simpson, took it back to a grand jury. This grand jury went along with the game, and Mrs. Hall and her brothers were brought to trial on November 3, 1926.

  More than 100 reporters covered the trial. The Pig Woman had a stroke in the middle of the trial, and was carried in to testify from a hospital bed. There was no real evidence against the accused persons, and they were acquitted after a long and painful trial, one of the sorriest spectacles in the history of American justice.

  William Kunstler, emerging as a national figure, wrote a book about the case in 1964. His book, The Minister and the Choir Singer, became a major best seller, and re-introduced the case to another generation of Americans. The book is fairly good, although I couldn’t really explain why it sold as many copies as it did.

  Kunstler proposes a solution to the mystery, which is that the KKK did it. Kunstler was the lead attorney for the civil rights movement, personal lawyer for Martin Luther King, and his explanation is obviously a product of his own experiences, having nothing to do with the facts of the case. Kunstler argues that the KKK was responsible for a series of crimes with many elements in common with the Hall-Mills case.

  But first, “organizations” do not commit murder. To say that the KKK committed the murder, even if it was true, is not really a solution. Individuals commit murder, sometimes within organizations. And second, the “pattern crimes” that Kunstler cites have almost nothing in common with the murders of Hall and Mills. The crimes were mostly committed against black people living hundreds or thousands of miles from New Jersey. Kunstler’s theory has nothing going for it.

  The suggestion that Mrs. Hall and her relatives committed the crime ranks, if anything, even lower on a probability scale, having been tried in court and decisively defeated. The state devoted vast resources to the attempt to prove that these people committed the crime. They failed not merely to win conviction, but to discover any real evidence against those they had accused. Most of the case the state put on is so far-fetched and improbable that it should never have been introduced in court.

  So what does that leave? Essentially two possibilities. First, the murders may have been committed by a thief or thiev
es. Reverend Hall had $50 or more in cash on him; this money disappeared, as did a valuable gold watch. Kunstler dismisses the theory that the murders were committed by thieves because

  a) the bodies appeared to have been carefully arranged after death,

  b) Mrs. Mills’ throat had been slashed, apparently after she was dead, and

  c) the valuable gold watch never surfaced.

  I don’t think that the theory of a robbery/murder can be dismissed. The autopsy work, like everything else connected with the investigation, was poorly done, and I wouldn’t bet big money that Mrs. Mills’ throat was cut after she was dead. She may well have screamed (there is some evidence that she did), and a thief may have sliced her throat to shut her up, seconds before his partner shot her. It is not certain that the bodies were “arranged” at all; they may simply have fallen back, and the thieves may have pulled their arms out while searching the bodies for valuables. The gold watch was certainly stolen, but it never surfaced regardless of who took it, so I can’t see how that indicates one scenario rather than another.

  The Hall-Stevens defense team suggested during the trial that more attention should have been paid to the dead woman’s husband, James Mills. We will never know who committed the crime, but the three most obvious indicators of whom we should suspect all point to Mills, rather than the Hall family, as the more likely assailant.

  First, Reverend Hall was killed by a single bullet to the head, while Mrs. Mills’ body showed the marks of excessive and redundant violence. In a modern investigation this would direct attention to James Mills, since this is a sign of anger toward one victim, as opposed to the other.

  Second, the letters which were found scattered near the body had been written by Mrs. Mills, it is agreed, but had never been mailed. According to Kunstler, the letters “were written by Mrs. Mills to Hall while he was on vacation … during his four-week absence Eleanor assuaged her loneliness by writing letters which she never intended to mail. On the night of September 14 she had decided to deliver them to her lover.”

  That’s possible, but Hall had returned to New Brunswick a month earlier, and the couple had arranged numerous meetings since that time. The last known place where the letters were was in the Mills’ house. How did they get to the murder scene? It is equally plausible that James Mills found them in his house, boiled into a rage, committed the murders, and threw the letters over the bodies.

  Third, Edward Hall’s parting from his house was, according to all accounts, peaceful. He said he had to go see Mrs. Mills about her medical bills, in his role as her pastor, and he left. The parting of Mrs. Mills from her husband was accompanied by sharp words, overheard by a neighbor.

  “Where are you going?” asked James Mills.

  “Follow me and find out,” responded Eleanor.

  James Mills was interviewed by the police several times, and interviewed for several hours. He withstood the interrogation, and never became a prime suspect in the case, in large part because he didn’t strike anyone as a killer. Damon Runyon described James Mills as “a man bullied by his children and by all the world, a man anybody could push out of their way without protest from him, a harmless, dull little fellow.” William Kunstler dismissed him as “a man of extremely limited talents, who looked upon the world about him with dull and uncomprehending eyes, [and who] was thoroughly dominated, first by his wife and then by his daughter. It is highly likely that not only was he completely unconcerned by his wife’s romance with Hall, but that he welcomed the limited economic benefits it brought.”

  Well, let’s take a little multiple-choice test here. First question, which do you find more believable,

  a) that James Mills truly appreciated the fact that his wife was screwing the minister, because it enabled him to hold on to his piddly little job as a sexton, or

  b) that James Mills, despite his outward acceptance, seethed quietly at his wife’s infidelity?

  Second question, which is a better principle on which to build an investigation,

  a) ignore any potential suspects who seem too timid to have committed such a horrible crime, or

  b) pay close attention to the evidence of the crime scene?

  Is there some sort of law that mousy, ineffectual people don’t commit murder in New Jersey? Mrs. Hall called the police the morning after the murders to ask if there had been any reported “casualties.” The state tried to use this fact against her at her trial. But James Mills didn’t contact the police. He said that it was common for his wife to disappear for a couple of days at a time—a remarkable claim for which there is no corroboration.

  Mills initially denied knowing that his wife was involved with Mr. Hall, but a neighbor of the Millses, whose telephone they routinely borrowed because they didn’t have one, told newsmen that the affair had been the subject of frequent loud arguments between the couple, several of which she had overheard.

  Mills has an alibi, sort of. He was seen on his porch by another neighbor, about 9:00, working on some window-boxes. He was seen there again by his son, about 10:30.

  The neighbor, however, means almost nothing, because that’s 75 minutes before the crime, and he was only a twenty-minute walk from the scene of the crime. The event she witnessed—Mills on his front porch, working on a window-box—didn’t become significant until at least two days later, and the event itself is so trivial that it would normally be difficult to say for sure whether such a thing happened on Wednesday or Thursday or a week ago last Tuesday.

  That leaves Mills’ presence on the porch depending on the story of Mills’ son, who was

  a) a relative, and

  b) twelve years old at the time.

  Danny Mills was visiting his aunt on the evening of the murders, and recalled that he got home about 10:30. But who knows whether it was really at 10:30 or 10:45 or 11:00? The time of the crime, for that matter, is not tightly fixed. Although shots were heard in that area about 10:15, the couple may well have been murdered later in the night. For all practical purposes, James Mills doesn’t have an alibi.

  Mills doesn’t have an alibi, but the state also doesn’t have a case. Everything followed from the failure to secure the crime scene, but some crimes are destined never to be solved. Even if the police hadn’t made a terrible mess of it, there’s no guarantee they would ever have found the culprit.

  Roy and Ray D’Autremont were twins, born in 1900 in Oregon. Ray was sent to prison in his teens for some sort of labor union violence. When he first got out, Roy and Ray went to Chicago to try to get in on the bootlegging which was making power brokers of common thugs. Finding themselves unwelcome and unable to horn in on the action, they slunk back to Oregon and enlisted their younger brother in the implementation of a clever plan that Ray had worked out while he was in prison. It is often described as the last great train robbery of the American West.

  There was a tunnel on a mountain near where they had lived as children, near Ashland, Oregon. The trains labored slowly up the side of the mountain, and then were required to test their brakes before the downgrade. The plan was to board the train on the brake-stop, then to force it to a more permanent stop by setting off dynamite in the tunnel in front of it. The rumor was that the train carried $500,000 in gold.

  What the twin masterminds had failed to consider was that when you set off a lot of dynamite in a tunnel, you have so much dust and debris flying around that you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Also, you can’t get the train out of the tunnel. Also, there apparently wasn’t any gold; apart from those things it was a very clever plan. They panicked, killed the four men who were the crew of the train, and escaped without a penny.

  The blast from the dynamite was heard miles away—yet another attribute of their plan that the criminal geniuses had failed to anticipate. A railroad crew thought that the engine had exploded, and a rescue crew rushed to the scene, where they discovered the bodies of the crewmen and various items left behind by the overplanned robbery—a revolver, a battery-powered deto
nator, a pair of burlap shoe covers soaked in creosote that had apparently been intended to prevent dogs from tracking their scent, and a neatly folded pair of overalls that someone had apparently intended to escape in.

  Months passed. Local and state police, unable to do anything with the clues, finally sent the overalls to a man named Edward Heinrich, who was in charge of the forensic laboratory in Berkeley, California. Heinrich, in a landmark of forensic research, reported to the astonished locals that the overalls belonged to a left-handed lumberjack in his early twenties, about 5'10'', 165 pounds, light brown hair, very meticulous in his personal habits—left-handed, because of the wear and tear patterns in the pockets and the way the overalls had been buttoned; a lumberjack, because the overalls were embedded with tiny fragments of wood and because the grease found in the left-hand pocket turned out to be the natural residue of fir trees; 5'10'', 165 pounds because the overalls would fit a man of that size; light brown hair because of hairs found on the overalls; early twenties because of the condition of the hair; and careful in his appearance because of fingernail clippings found trapped in the seams.

  He also reported that the man rolled his own cigarettes, and there was a scrap of paper found in a pocket. It was squashed up and had been washed blank and didn’t appear to be useful, but when Heinrich stained it with iodine and put it under exactly the right spectrum of light, it turned out to be a mail receipt for a package that had been delivered to a Roy D’Autremont of Eugene, Oregon.