I used to teach at Rutgers University, which lies not far from where this all occurred. I had friends who lived in the now-developed area where the crabapple tree once stood. I’ve gone over to look at the area, but nothing there now looks like it did back in 1922. Nevertheless, this double homicide still haunts the place. The evidence is still brought out and displayed during presentations.
When police arrived, they realized from a business card posed against the male victim’s foot that he was a local Episcopal minister, Edward Hall. He’d been shot once. The woman, not his wife, had three wounds. A brown silk scarf, soaked in blood, lay loosely around her throat. Despite a chill in the air, the maggots had already gotten to her. Nearby were a .32 caliber cartridge case and a piece of iron pipe. Lying between the bodies were pieces of torn paper, which seemed to be handwritten letters.
The bodies had been in this place for a day and a half. A superficial autopsy found that the woman’s throat had been sliced open. She was soon identified as Eleanor R. Mills, 34, a choir singer in Hall’s church. She was married to James Mills, a school janitor. Most people who knew them suspected they were having an affair.
Frances Stevens Hall, a wealthy woman seven years older than her husband, claimed that she had known nothing about this. She trusted her husband. However, on the evening of the murder, Edward had told her he was going to visit Eleanor about a medical bill. He never came back. Thus, Frances went looking for him at the church. So she, along with her brother, Willie, had been out that night. When she learned that Edward had been murdered, she speculated that perhaps it had been a robbery.
Eleanor’s husband, James, also said he was unaware of any affair. He reported that Eleanor had gone out on the night she disappeared. The next morning, without reporting her missing, James had gone to work. He’d looked for her the night before, but hadn’t seemed unduly alarmed by her absence.
Two additional people who became early suspects were Frances’ brothers. Willie was impulsive, explosive, and reckless. He owned a .32-caliber revolver, but it had not been used in a while. The older brother, Henry Stevens, 52, was a former exhibition shooter. However, he lived over an hour away and had an alibi, despite a bloodstained handkerchief at the scene that bore his initials. Someone else found a package of love letters from Edward to Eleanor, along with Edward’s diary. These two had been engaged in a torrid affair. They’d apparently plotted to run off together on the very night they were murdered. The plot thickens.
Even more bizarre, a strange character who lived near the murder scene emerged. Jane Gibson, who raised hogs, told police that around 9:00 on Thursday night, she’d spotted a man in her cornfield, so she’d chased him. She’d then seen two men and two women near a small tree. She heard a loud noise, someone went down, and a woman screamed, “Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!” A volley of gunshots followed. Someone else fell to the ground. A woman shouted a name, “Henry!” Jane saw a woman in a long gray coat next to a man with a dark mustache and bushy hair. She added more elements the more she told her story, so it was difficult to know what to believe from her, especially when others who lived nearby contradicted her.
DESPITE SUSPECTS, THE CASE WENT COLD. Nothing much happened for four long years. A few revelations were forthcoming as people changed circumstances, but nothing emerged by way of hard evidence.
Detectives dug up a brief interview with a man who’d been peripheral in 1922, St. John’s vestryman Ralph Gorsline, who’d had a thing for Eleanor. One investigator thought that Gorsline had discovered Eleanor’s love letters to Hall and had shown them to Frances and her cousin, Henry Carpender. He might have even driven them to De Russey’s Lane that night, as he had the kind of car that had been spotted in the area. Under questioning, Gorsline admitted being there with a young woman who was not his wife. It was a Lovers’ Lane, after all. He’d heard some things, but wasn’t sure exactly what.
On July 28, the police arrested Frances Hall. Shortly thereafter, Jim Mills admitted that he had known about the affair and had threatened Eleanor with a divorce. The defense team planned to throw suspicion on him. Arrest warrants were issued for Willie Stevens, Henry Stevens, and Henry Carpender. A grand jury indicted them all. The case became a media sensation, in part because Frances Hall and her brothers were upper class citizens with a lot to lose. Debates arose as to whether they were guilty.
The trial itself, which took place in 1926, was bizarre. The victims’ bodies were exhumed and new autopsies performed. There was a shocking revelation. Eleanor’s tongue and larynx had been cut out. Strangely enough, the original pathologist had not seen this.
The evidence against the defendants included Willie's fingerprint on Edward’s business card; Frances’ anonymous call on the night of the murders to inquire about “casualties”; a brown coat of hers that had been dyed black right after the murders; and the fact that one of Frances’ private detectives had tried bribing a key witness. In addition, Edward’s affair had humiliated her.
There were many witnesses, but the most spectacular was “Pig Woman,” Jane Gibson. She was in poor health, so they carried her into the courtroom on a stretcher. Her mother called her a liar in front of the whole court, and Gibson seemed oblivious to the fact that her third story was quite different from her first two. For a star witness, she wasn’t very credible. She now claimed that she had seen Frances Hall, Willie Stevens, and Henry Stevens on De Russey’s Lane by the crabapple tree. She’d seen them wrestling with another man over a gun.
However, there were numerous inconsistencies in the case. In fact, the defense attorneys revealed that the first time Jane Gibson had seen the defendants, she was unable to identify them.
The jury took three separate votes before they reached a verdict, acquitting all three defendants. No one else was ever tried for this crime, and it remains one of New Jersey’s most famous cold cases. Amateur sleuths have offered new theories, implicating other people, but thus far, no law enforcement agency has officially reopened an investigation.
The Highs and Lows of a Super Sleuth
CAMDEN HAS ALWAYS BEEN A ROUGH TOWN. In 1920, sixty-year-old David Paul was on his way to deliver a satchel of money from his employer to a company in Philadelphia. He disappeared. People searched, but it was over a week before hunters found Paul’s body. It lay near a stream, buried in a shallow grave. He'd been beaten and shot. The money was gone.
However, there were some odd features to this murder. Paul had been missing for nine days, but the medical examiner thought it was clear from the condition of his body that he’d been killed no more than 48 hours earlier. The ground was dry, but Paul’s clothing was wet. Still, searchers found no physical evidence in the area to assist with leads, aside from some tire tread impressions.
Some believed that Paul had decided to take the money, but had been killed in the process. Perhaps he’d had accomplices. Others thought he’d been followed and kidnapped. In either case, the satchel of money had disappeared. Where Paul had been for the past nine days was anyone’s guess.
Ellis Howard Parker, a persistent investigator, was the chief detective. Believing that the medical examiner’s estimate of time-since-death might be flawed, he returned to the crime scene to examine it more thoroughly. He picked up a pair of glasses that other officers had missed. These he traced to Paul's neighbor, Frank James, who appeared to be in cahoots with another man, Raymond Schuck. Parker learned that these two were seen together spending large sums of money. However, both had unshakeable alibis for the estimated time of Paul's murder.
Not prepared to concede defeat, Parker looked at several tanning factories along the river, which dumped preservative into the water. He tested the water and found a high content of tannic acid. Now the mystery of the body made sense. If Paul had been submerged in this tainted water, the preservative would have retarded decomposition and foiled the medical examiner's method for determining the time of death.
Parker returned to confront James, who broke down and confessed that he and Sc
huck had dumped the body in the water but had later retrieved and buried it. Thanks to Parker’s persistence, both were convicted and sentenced to death.
In a 1938 publication, reporter Fred Allhoff reviewed Parker’s career as the chief detective of Burlington County for forty-four years. He received many accolades for his success rate as he investigated over 300 crimes (successful convictions in all but 12). He was a “closer.” He could almost always get a confession. He soon became a mentor to many other officers.
Yet inexplicably, he blew it. Apparently, he over-estimated his prowess as a detective. Or, perhaps, no one knew just how unscrupulous he could be. The kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. was apparently too good for him to pass up. Already famous, he apparently wanted more.
THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL OF PARKER’S otherwise illustrious career began in Hopewell on a cold March evening in 1932. The famous aviator Charles Lindbergh was in the process of building a luxury home in the hill there. Charles and his wife, Anne, were preparing for the night. They typically returned on Mondays to Anne’s parents’ home, but they’d remained in Hopewell through Tuesday on this particular week because their baby, twenty-month-old Charles Lindbergh, Jr., was suffering from a head cold.
It was a windy night. Lindbergh settled in the study with a book. He heard a loud crack, like a box falling, but he attributed it to the wind. Then the baby’s nurse asked him if he had the baby. He didn’t. But the crib was empty. Anne didn’t have the baby, either. Lindbergh discovered a note on the windowsill that told him that his son had been kidnapped.
During those years of the Great Depression, kidnapping for ransom was common. Over the past three years, over 2500 such incidents had occurred around the country, terrorizing America’s wealthy.
Lindbergh called local law enforcement. Hopewell police searched the house and grounds, finding a carpenter's chisel near foot impressions from a ladder that had been used to access the nursery window. Less than a hundred feet away, a wooden extension ladder lay on the ground in three sections, one of which was split, as if someone’s weight on a rung had been too great. Near a small dirt road, police found tire tracks, but no one thought to measure their width or make a cast. The same neglect was exercised on a footprint located in the wet ground below the nursery window. One officer compared his own size nine shoe and found the print to be larger. In short, the scene was poorly handled.
The note from the windowsill had a threatening message:
“Dear Sir!
Have 50000$ redy with 25 000 $ in 20 $ bills 1.5000 $ in 10$ bills and 10000$ in 5 $ bills. After 2-4 days we will inform you were to deliver the Mony.
We warn you for making anyding public or for notify the Police the child is in gut care.
Indication for all letters are singnature and 3 holes.”
At the bottom right-hand corner was the distinctive signature: two interlocked, penny-sized, blue circles. The overlapped area had been colored red, and three small holes were punched into the design.
An FBI Report (#62-3057) describes the crime scene as such: the kidnapper would have had a very difficult time getting through the window, as the ladder with three sections was too long and the ladder with two sections was two feet too short, and placed to the right. The kidnapper would have had to hoist himself into the window with his left hand. A large man could not have done it without a lot of noise and disturbance.
The New Jsersy State Police did experiments with a ladder made of the same materials and they determined that it could not hold over 155 pounds. The kidnapper also faced the problem of getting out of the window with a child and finding a ladder placed awkwardly and two feet down. It was concluded that at least two persons would have had to perform the feat, one to go in and hand the child out the window to the other.)
The fact that the dog had been placed in another part of the house that evening brought suspicion on the domestic servants; they’d been aware that the Lindberghs had changed their plans to return to New Jersey at the last minute. Yet some investigators believed it could easily be the job of an outsider. Whoever had brought the chisel had not known that the window shutter could not be locked.
On March 5, a second letter with the same interlocking signature scolded Lindbergh for involving the police, and increased the ransom to $70,000. In all, fourteen such notes would be received, always signed with the same symbol. One note agreed on a go-between, a professor named John F. Condon, and another gave instructions for the type of box that must be made for delivering the money.
Condon met their representative, but before offering money he insisted on a token of proof, and soon the baby's pajamas arrived, with a note that Lindbergh would soon learn where to find his son.
The IRS offered an idea: put the ransom money into gold certificates, because the government would be recalling them. When the kidnapper spent them, they could be traced. On March 31, Condon handed over the money, but he received only another note: the baby was on a boat at Horse Neck Beach. Lindbergh got into his plane to search for this elusive boat. He failed.
Then on May 12, 1932, a truck driver stopped on Princeton-Hopewell Road and walked a short ways into the woods to relieve himself. He spotted what turned out to be the baby’s remains. The cause of death was a massive fracture of the skull. Once this discovery made the news, the kidnappers ceased all communication.
From time to time, as ransom bills turned up, they were examined for trace evidence. Most had been folded in a certain manner, and New York’s toxicology lab found particles of glycerine and emery. Many bills had lipstick or mascara marks, and a few had traces of blond, red, and brunette hair. The bills also bore a musty odor, as if they’d been stored.
On September 15, 1934, a gas station manager called in the license plate for a man who had used a gold certificate. The car belonged to Bruno Richard Hauptmann, and a search of his wallet turned up another gold certificate. Yet Hauptmann maintained that a man named Isador Fisch had given him the money before departing for Germany, where he’d died. Since Fisch owed him money, Hauptmann had spent the money entrusted to him.
No one believed him and he was arrested. During interrogation, Hauptmann was instructed to provide samples of his handwriting, as well as to copy the ransom notes as closely as possible. The police unearthed a large cache of ransom money hidden in Hauptmann’s garage.
Hauptmann had learned about the new polygraph device and begged to be tested to prove his innocence, but a federal appeals court had already banned the results of systolic blood pressure deception tests from the courtroom.
Hauptmann’s trial opened on January 2, 1935 in Flemington, New Jersey. The New Jersey Attorney General, David T. Wilentz, led the prosecution. The New York Journal paid for defense attorney, Edward J. Reilly in exchange for rights to his story. Reilly spent only thirty-eight minutes with Hauptmann and had publicly stated that he thought Hauptmann was guilty.
After twenty-nine court sessions, 162 witnesses, and 381 exhibits, the case was given to the jury on Wednesday, February 13, 1935. Eleven and a half hours later, the jurors returned a unanimous vote of guilty. Hauptmann was sentenced to be executed.
LET US RETURN TO ELLIS PARKER. As a close friend of the governor of New Jersey, Harold Hoffman, Ellis had persuaded Hoffman to investigate the case himself. Parker was certain that someone else was the culprit and he wanted to clear Hauptman. However, Hoffman failed to prove anything and he ultimately ruined his political career.
In a bizarre twist, Parker’s man was Paul Wendel, a disbarred lawyer and pharmacist who had also been Parker’s friend. In fact, Wendel had been investigating the kidnapping on Parker’s behalf via his supposed connections in the criminal underworld. He was working on the identity of “Cemetery John,” a man who’d grabbed the ransom money.
Parker concluded that Wendel himself was the kidnapper. Parker biographer John Reisinger agues that Parker wanted so badly to reinforce his reputation for being America’s top detective that he believed that he alone should solve America’s t
op mystery, the Lindbergh kidnapping. Since Hauptman had already been convicted, Parker had to come up with an alternative, and prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Thus, he’d developed an extreme case of tunnel vision: He seemingly believed that only he knew the real identity of the kidnapper and killer of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. Once he locked on to Wendel, there was no end to the things he might do to obtain proof – even unscrupulous and criminal acts. (He secretly visited Hauptmann in prison, possibly to get information.)
With pressure mounting as Hauptman’s execution date closed in, Parker knew he needed to extract a confession. If he could just get Wendell in the same room, he believed, he could make him talk. He employed three small-time criminals for help. From a room at the Hotel Martinique, they watched Wendel’s activities at the Hotel Stanford on 32nd Street in Manhattan. Parker knew that he couldn’t get Wendel to New Jersey, due to warrants for his arrest for passing bad checks, and Parker could not arrest him while he was in New York. He had to wait until Wendel was desperate enough to come on his own accord, seeking help from his “friend,” Ellis Parker.
With his son, Parker went to New York to coach his team behind the scenes. On a cold February 14, 1936, they pretended to be cops, including fake mustaches and toy guns. They grabbed Wendel outside his hotel and, at “gunpoint,” took him to a pre-arranged house in Brooklyn. They tied him to a chair and left him for several days, telling him was a suspect in the kidnapping and insisting that he confess. When he refused, they hit him with a rubber hose, stretched him into uncomfortable positions, and used cigarettes and a hot light bulb to burn him.
Parker would have known that the use of force would undermine any confession. He’d supposedly never resorted to it before. (Ironically, while this was going on, the U. S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in Brown v. Mississippi that “convictions of murder which rest solely upon confessions shown to have been extorted by officers of the State by torture of the accused are void under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”)
Shadows of Death (True Crime Box Set) Page 2