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Hi, listeners. Before we dive into today's episode of Murder True Crime Stories, I want to take a brief moment to tell you about a show from Crime House's sister studio, Rewind, that I know you'll love. It's called Government that Doesn't Suck, hosted by Professors Lindsey Cormack and Greg Jackson from History that Doesn't Suck. Ever wonder how the weather forecast on your phone is so accurate? Or how your mail still gets across the country for less than a dollar? Or who actually built the highway you drove on this morning? Each episode tells the surprising story of an American institution that you'll never look at the same way again. Listen to and follow Government that Doesn't Suck every other Monday on Apple podcasts and Spotify, or watch video episodes on YouTube. This is crime house. Some stories belong to the people who live them. But the really big stories get picked up and carried away. They become things the whole country argues about over dinner. Strangers in cities a thousand miles away feel like they own a piece of it. And the actual people at the center, the ones who lost everything, get smaller and smaller until they're almost invisible. In September 1922, the bodies of a minister and a choir singer turned up in a field in New Jersey. They'd been posed like a couple, with their torn up letters scattered around their bodies. Within hours, the story belonged to the entire nation. Crowds flooded the crime scene. Reporters swarmed the town. Within weeks, vendors were setting up stalls right next to where the bodies had been found, selling popcorn, peanuts, and souvenirs to the tourists. Everyone wanted a piece of it. And four years later, when the case finally went to trial, the country still wouldn't let it go. It would become one of the most sensational criminal trials in American history. And by the end of it, the actual victims would almost be forgotten. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon. And we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is True Crime Stories, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review and follow the show and for early ad free access to every episode. Subscribe to Crime House. Plus you'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content. To join go to crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Stories show page on Apple Podcasts. This is the second of two episodes on the murders of Edward hall and Eleanor Mills, an Episcopal priest and a singer in his church choir. They were killed in New Jersey in 1922, and almost right away their deaths became a nationwide obsession. Last time I introduced you to Edward and Eleanor, they were two people stuck in unhappy marriages who found something in each other that they couldn't find anywhere else. The whole congregation knew about their affair, but nobody ever confronted them about it. Then on September 14, 1922, somebody murdered Eleanor and Edward and left their love letters scattered around their bodies for everyone to see. Today, I'll walk you through what happened next, the bungled investigation, the years the case went cold, and the tabloid scandal that finally dragged it back into the headlines. Four years after the killings, three of the main suspects would stand trial in one of the most sensational courtroom dramas in American history. And almost half a century later, a man would make a deathbed confession that changed everything. All that and more coming up.
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On the morning of September 16, 1922, two locals stumbled onto the bodies of 41 year old Edward hall and 34 year old Eleanor Mills under a crab apple tree just outside New Brunswick, New Jersey. The couple who'd found them, 23 year old Raymond Schneider and his underage girlfriend, 15 year old Pearl Ballmer, ran back toward town and flagged down the first person they could find. Half an hour later, around 11 in the morning, two New Brunswick officers named Edward Garrigan and James Curran arrived at the scene. What they saw didn't look right. Edward was on his back, his hat covering his face. Eleanor was tucked up against him, her head on his arm, her hand on his knee, her legs crossed at the ankle. To Officer Garrigan, the whole thing looked a little too perfect. Less like a crime scene and more like a tableau, the way a painter might pose two figures for a portrait. But Garrigan and Curran didn't want to get any closer and disturb anything. And there was another problem. Raymond Schneider had given a pretty vague, vague description of where the bodies were when he'd called the station. The officers had assumed they'd be in New Brunswick, in Middlesex County. They weren't. They were just over the border in Somerset. And that meant the New Brunswick police didn't have jurisdiction. So before they did anything else, they called the station, and the Somerset authorities sent a detective. George Totten was Somerset's chief detective and had been on the force for 28 years. He arrived on the scene about an hour after the bodies had been found. Totten took one look at the staging and came to the same conclusion as Garrigan. Whoever had done this had taken time afterward to arrange the bodies. There were no signs of a struggle, but the love letters scattered around the bodies certainly suggested a. A motive. And then Totten spotted something else. A piece of evidence so blatant it couldn't even be called a clue. It was practically a message. Someone had placed a professional calling card up against the man's foot. The kind of card a clergyman would hand out at parish events. Printed on crisp paper and bold gothic lettering and positioned with deliberate care, the card read, Reverend Edward Hall. Whoever had killed him hadn't just wanted him dead. They'd wanted to make absolutely sure everyone knew exactly who he was. That left one question. Who was the woman with him? The calling card suggested Edward had been the primary target. And yet the woman's wounds were much worse. Edward had one bullet wound in the head. The woman had three. And when officials pulled back the brown scarf around her neck, they realized her throat had been slit so deeply she was nearly decapitated. It was brutal, and yet the scene around them was completely peaceful. Birdsong, late summer sun, a quiet field. Totten couldn't tell whether the victims had been killed under the crab apple tree or somewhere else and move there. But he knew one thing for certain. There was no gun anywhere at the scene. This wasn't a suicide pact. This was murder. Totten wasn't the only one at the scene paying close attention. A local reporter named Albert Cardinal was also there. He'd been allowed to walk around as long as he didn't touch anything. As he wandered the field, he spotted the calling card at Edwards Foot and read the name printed on it. Cardinal recognized it immediately. Reverend Edward hall was one of the most well known priests in the area. And Cardinal knew this was going to be front page news. He left the scene and rushed back to the newsroom to get the story to print. By early afternoon, word had spread through both counties and the crime scene turned into a madhouse. Townspeople started showing up to see the horror for themselves. And not just a few people. Droves. As one onlooker put it, you could not believe it possible in a place as isolated as that that people could come in such numbers. And they weren't respectful either. Some walked right up to the victims and stared. Others reached down and picked up Edward's hat off his face. People started stripping pieces of bark from the crabapple tree to take home as souvenirs. The authorities seemingly had no control over it. Either they didn't have the manpower or they just didn't care. The bodies were left out in the open for hours while strangers wandered through. By the time the medical examiner got to them, the crime scene had been picked over, walked through, and pawed at by what felt like half the county. And the police still hadn't even identified the woman who'd been found with Edward. That part got easier when another reporter named Frank Diner showed up. He said he could identify the woman. Diner lived near the Halls, and he'd heard the rumors that Edward had been having an affair with a choir singer at his church. Tauten wanted to know what he was working with, so he brought Diner over to the bodies. The reporter took one look and confirmed it. The woman under the crabapple tree was Eleanor Mills. Eleanor had been missing for 36 hours at that point, but her husband, Jim Mills, hadn't been worried enough to call the police. He'd last seen her on the evening of Thursday, September 14, on the same night Edward had been last seen by Frances. That evening Jim had been sitting on the back porch porch working on some window box planters that Frances hall had commissioned. Eleanor had been chatting with their 16 year old daughter Charlotte out front. Then Eleanor went inside, grabbed a hat and walked out the back past Jim. He asked her where she was going. Eleanor snapped back at him, Follow me and find out. That was the kind of exchange Eleanor and Jim had a lot of in the those days. They didn't have a great marriage. It wasn't violent as far as anyone knows. It just wasn't happy. They were constantly fighting. Needless to say, Jim didn't follow her and he didn't find out. But by Saturday afternoon, even Jim had started to worry. He had no idea about the chaos in Somerset County. When he walked over to Eleanor's sister's house, he told Augusta Tennison he hadn't seen Eleanor since Thursday. Augusta hadn't heard from her either, which was strange, but she didn't know what else to say. Surely Eleanor would turn up soon. Jim shrugged in agreement and started walking home. He hadn't gotten very far when a young neighborhood girl came running after him. Augusta Nielsen him back at the house. Jim rushed back. When he got there, Augusta told Him. A neighbor had just called Reverend hall, and an unidentified woman had been found dead near the Phillips farm. Jim's stomach sank. He'd seen Eleanor leave the house Thursday night. He'd watched her walk out the back door and refused to tell him where she was going. He had a feeling he knew exactly who the unidentified woman was. He raced home, hoping to get to Charlotte before anyone else broke the news to her. But he was too late. By the time he got back, his daughter was already in the arms of a neighbor, sobbing. Someone had told her what Jim had already suspected. Her mom was dead. Authorities called Jim down to the morgue to identify Eleanor's body. He looked down at the woman he'd been married to for 16 years and confirmed it was her. But he didn't have much time to process what he was seeing because Detective Totten was waiting for him. He showed Jim the love letters that had been found at the scene.
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Jim.
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And asked if they were in Eleanor's handwriting. Jim said yes. And then Totten started a preliminary interrogation. As the husband of a dead woman who had apparently been having an affair, Jim was of course, a suspect. But he had no intention of playing that part. Later that afternoon, Jim spoke to the press. He said Edward hall was his best friend, that the reverend had taken care of him like a father, that he was the kindest man Jim knew, and the only reason Edward and Eleanor would ever be together would be to discuss church matters. There was no reason to believe anything else. It was a strange thing to say. Jim had just been shown the love letters Eleanor had written to to Edward. Letters that obviously weren't about church matters. There was almost no way he hadn't known about the affair. On some level, even if he hadn't known the details, the entire congregation had. He must have heard the talk. It looked like Jim was trying to save face. But no matter how hard he tried, the story couldn't be contained. Look, we all hit points in life where anxiety, depression, or ADHD feel like a lot more than just a rough patch. I have been there. And honestly, sometimes standard self help tools or talk therapy aren't the total answer. We need a little more. If you need a deeper level of care, Talk Iatry connects you with real virtual psychiatry. This isn't a therapy app. It's a 100% online psychiatry practice providing comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses, and ongoing medication management for conditions like adhd, anxiety, and more. You're actually seeing a medical provider who takes the time to understand what you're going through and build a personalized treatment plan. Plus they accept major insurers, meaning you can use your existing insurance instead of paying massive out of network costs. Getting started is incredibly simple. You just complete a short online assessment, get matched with clinicians who fit your specific needs, and schedule your first virtual visit in days rather than months. Head to tokyetry.com mtcs to complete the short assessment and get matched with an in network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. That's talkiotry.com MTCs to get matched in minutes.
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Ten years after Troy, Odysseus is still lost. War hero, liar, survivor, and the man at the heart of one of history's greatest stories. I'm Tristan Hughes, and all of this month on the Ancients, I'm going to be sailing through Homer's treacherous world of monsters, witchcraft and tempestuous gods, exploring the real archaeology and history beneath the myths. From Troy to Ithaca, this is Odysseus like you've never heard him before. Join us on the Ancients from History hit. Listen now and subscribe on your favorite podcast player.
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Evening. Buyer's remorse Buy a new car. I'll be moving in. Let's get started.
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Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana.
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A
You what?
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Yeah, great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it.
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So there's no.
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No, no Buyer's remorse. More like buyers rejoice.
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I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it.
- [21:12]
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Buyers rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana. Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven day return policy at Carvana.com.
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By the afternoon of September 16, 19, authorities had identified the two victims under the crabapple tree as Edward hall and Eleanor Mills. At least one source had filled them in on the not so secret affair. That information, paired with the scattered love letters at the scene, told Detective George Totten that he was dealing with a homicide. Given the nature of Edward and Eleanor's relationship, suspicion immediately fell on their spouses. Jim Mills was already on the radar, but as we just heard, he'd already told the press, there was nothing between Eleanor and Edward at all. Either Jim genuinely hadn't known, or more likely, he was working hard to keep up appearances. Edward's wife, Frances hall, denied any knowledge of an affair, too. Frances had learned of her husband's death through her relatives who'd gone to the crime scene to see for themselves. When they came back and gave her the news, she broke down in tears. Then after she'd cried it out, she went right back to being her usual Calm, collected self. As visitors started showing up to pay their respects, she welcomed them into the house, composed, polite, perfectly in control. Two days after the murders, the authorities sat down to question Frances, and they went easy on her kid gloves. Easy. A high society widow in the 1920s didn't get treated like an ordinary suspect. Meanwhile, authorities were conducting an official autopsy. The medical examiner determined that Edward had been shot point blank with a.32 caliber pistol. The bullet had entered his head near the right ear and exited the back left side. Elenor had been shot three times in the head. Once straight through the forehead, once through the right cheek, and once through the right temple. And her throat had been cut so deeply, as we said before, she was nearly decapitated. But if Edward had been the primary target, then why was Eleanor mutilated so much worse than he was? Whatever the answer was, the question would have to wait. For now, there were two bodies to bury. Edward was laid to rest on September 18, two days after he was found. Jim Mills didn't attend. Eleanor's funeral was the next day. Frances hall didn't attend hers either, although she did send a wreath of dahlias to place on Eleanor's casket. Over the next two weeks, county prosecutors in Somerset and Middlesex, where New Brunswick was, dug into the case. They started interviewing potential witnesses for a grand jury, scraping up whatever they could find. But the two offices weren't working together. If anything, they were competing, each one trying to scoop the other on information. It made the investigation messy, and it made narrowing in on one suspect almost impossible. Jim Mills had been the prime suspect early on, but he had an alibi. Neighbors said they'd seen him within an hour of the killings, and they'd heard him doing woodwork right through the time the murders had to have happened. That left Frances Hall. None of the detectives thought she'd done the killing herself, but she had two brothers, Willie and Henry Stevens, who might have done it for her. Still, the prosecutors hesitated. The Stevens family was wealthy and influential. Accusing any of them would set off a firestorm. But pretty soon, the prosecutors didn't have much choice. Two weeks went by with no real leads, and the New Jersey governor stepped in. He pushed the two counties to stop competing and start working together. They listened, and finally, they actually did something. In early October, they brought Willie Stevens in for questioning. They didn't even let him tell his sister where he was going. When Frances figured out what had happened, she worried she might be next. Her lawyer asked the prosecutors if he should prepare her for that. The prosecutors assured him they would Never pull a woman out of her home like that. Frances didn't have to worry. That courtesy didn't extend to anyone else. In addition to Willie, the authorities circled back to Raymond Schneider and Pearl Bomber, the young couple who had found the bodies. They were both interrogated hard. Eventually, Raymond cracked and gave the police a story. He said that on the night of the murders, he and his friend, a 21 year old named Clifford Hayes, had been out walking when they spotted Pearl with her stepfather. Raymond believed Pearl's stepfather was abusing her and wanted to fight him. So he and Clifford followed them into Bucklew Park. They lost the pair for a while. Then they stumbled onto a couple under a crab apple tree. According to Raymond, Clifford pulled out a gun and shot them both, assuming in the dark that the man was Pearl's stepfather. Raymond only realized that Clifford had killed the wrong people after the fact. It was on its face, an unbelievable story. For starters, if Clifford had shot the man thinking he was Pearl's stepfather, who did Clifford think the woman next to him was? Was she supposed to be Pearl? Was Clifford somehow fine with killing her too? Raymond didn't have an answer for any of that, and yet the police acted on the story anyway. On October 9, they arrested and charged Clifford Hayes with the murders. Townspeople pointed out right away that it made no sense. If Clifford was a stranger who'd shot the wrong man, why scatter love letters around the bodies? Why slash Eleanor's throat? The crime had been too specific, too personal to be a case of mistaken identity. But the prosecutors were under enormous pressure to name a suspect. And they'd been getting nowhere for weeks. As far as the Somerset prosecutor was concerned, Clifford Hays was perfect. He was a poor, working class kid from New Brunswick, which sits in Middlesex county, not Somerset. If he were the killer, the case would close and the killer wouldn't even be one of their own. It was all political, and it might have held up if it weren't for one eccentric woman. After Clifford's arrest, a woman named Jane Gibson came forward to say that the authorities had it completely wrong. Jane owned some of the fields near the crab apple tree. On the night of the murder. She said she'd been out on her mule, Jenny, hoping to catch a few thieves who'd been stealing her corn. That was when she saw four people walking through the field. Frances hall, her two brothers, Willie and Henry, and one of her cousins. Jane hid in the grass, and then she heard the gunshots. Jane said she came forward because she couldn't let an innocent man suffer. She knew Clifford wasn't guilty. And it turned out Raymond was in the same boat. A couple of days after Clifford was arrested and Jane came forward, Raymond admitted that his entire story was made up. He'd given Clifford up to the police because he believed Clifford had pointed the finger at him first. Without Raymond's story, Clifford was released and the prosecutors were back to square one. But despite Jane's testimony, they didn't follow up on Frances and her brothers. Frances and the Stevens brothers had a clear motive, no alibis, and Henry was reportedly an excellent marksman. An eyewitness had placed them at the scene of the crime. It was more than enough to bring them in. But maybe the police just didn't to want want to. Meanwhile, Eleanor and Jim's 16 year old daughter Charlotte found a diary of Edwards and some letters among her mother's things. She sold them to a New York paper for some extra cash that only poured gasoline on the coverage. Readers couldn't get enough. The crime scene itself had turned into a tourist attraction. The bodies were gone, but the curiosity was just getting started. On weekends, vendors set up stalls and sold popcorn, peanuts, soft drinks and balloons. Thousands of cars reportedly came through per day. Within a few weeks, the crabapple tree had been completely stripped of its bark and branches by people who wanted a piece of the story. Once the tree was picked clean, one enterprising vendor started selling bags of dirt from the scene for 25 cents apiece. By late October, things had gotten so out of hand that a state Supreme Court judge stepped in. Given how badly the county prosecutors had bungled the investigation, the judge handed the case over to to the state Attorney General's office. That's when things finally started moving. Unlike the Somerset prosecutor, the newly appointed special prosecutor took Jane Gibson's testimony seriously. Sure, Jane was a little odd, and yes, her story shifted slightly each time she told it. But by then, enough other people had backed up parts of it that her account was couldn't be dismissed outright. In late November, a grand jury in Somerset met for five days. 67 witnesses took the stand. It looked for a moment like the case might actually go the distance. But in the end, the jury decided there wasn't enough evidence. Especially not to indict someone of Francis Hall's social standing. As soon as it was over, Frances set sail for Europe. Guilty or not, she had to get out of New Brunswick. The whispered rumors in the side eyes had become too much. A year after the murders, the case had gone cold. Detectives kept hoping something would break it open again. But for the moment, they were at a dead end. Frances was still in Europe. Her brother Willie was still living in her Victorian mansion. Jim stayed in New Brunswick. He said certain authorities still suspected him despite the alibi. But he swore up and down that he had nothing to do with the killings. He said that all he wanted was to see the real killer caught. He'd be waiting another four years just to see the case come back at all. Tyler reddick here from 2311 Racing and Bubba Wallace. You know what's the worst part of a race? A rain delay. Sitting around waiting for the track to dry is dull. But instead of waiting, we hang out with Chumba Casino. Social casino, slots, bingo, solitaire. Plenty of fun to keep us entertained. So why let a rain delay slow you down? Play now@chumbacasino.com let's Chumba sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary. VGW Fort Worth prohibited by law 21 terms and conditions apply.
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After the first grand jury declined to indict Frances hall and her brothers In November of 1922, the the case went quiet, the suspects scattered, and life moved on. That is, until four years later, when new information surfaced. Thanks to another relationship that was on the rocks. Louise Geist had been a maid in the hall household. She was the one who'd answered the phone on the night of September 14th, presumably the call from Eleanor asking for Edward. In 1926, four years after the murders, Luis husband filed for an annulment of their marriage. The reason he gave was shocking. He said Louise had been hiding what she knew about the Hall Mills case. According to her husband, on the day of the murders, Louise had told Frances that Edward was planning to elope with Eleanor. And then that night, Frances and her brother Willie had driven Louise out to Lovers Lane to intercept the couple. Louise's husband alleges that Frances and Willie had paid Louise $5,000 to keep her mouth shut. Louise's husband didn't stop at filing for annulment. He went to the press. When the New York Daily Mirror tabloid got their hands on the story, they ran it on the front page on July 16. The headline read, Hall Mills Murder Mystery Bared. For the next week, the tabloid Kept feeding the public new headlines, each more sensational than the last. Hall's bribery revealed. Mrs. Hall's spies held town in terror. How hidden hand balked. Hall murdered justice. It was all a play for circulation. The paper's owner, William Randolph Hearst, saw an opportunity to drum up an exclusive scandal. And his team ran with worked. Sales went through the roof. The public outcry got so loud that the New Jersey governor stepped in again. He declared that Somerset authorities had to reopen the case. By then, Frances had returned from Europe to New Brunswick. Authorities arrested her in the middle of the night along with her two brothers and a cousin. This time around, the grand jury came back with a different answer. Frances, her brothers and her cousin were all indicted. They'd be going to court. The cousin was eventually tried separately. While Frances and her brothers faced the music together. Frances was released on bail. Her brothers and cousin weren't so lucky. They stayed behind bars for the months leading up to the trial. The trial was set for November 1926 at the Somerset County Courthouse in Somerville, New Jersey. But the new Somerset prosecutor had an uphill battle. Before he even set foot in the courthouse, a lot of the original evidence had somehow gone missing. Autopsy reports, grand jury testimony, all of turned out. The grand jury testimony had been taken by the previous prosecutor's brother who was trying to sell it to a newspaper. Still, the trial moved forward. Starting on November 3, hundreds of reporters crammed into the courthouse, representing every outlet from the smallest tabloids to the New York Times. Over the nearly month long trial, those reporters would collectively file more than 12 million words of coverage. And there was no shortage of material. The prosecution laid out the allegations that Frances had gone out to Lovers Lane with her brothers to catch Edward and Eleanor in the act. Edward's love letters were read out loud in court. Throughout her questioning, Frances maintained such a stoic demeanor that the press started calling her the Iron Widow. And then there was Jane Gibson, the woman who had first put Frances at the scene of the crime. The press called her the Pig Woman because she raised hogs on her land. Jane's testimony was a spectacle in itself. She was dying of cancer and was so sick that she had to be carried into the courthouse on a stretcher and laid out on a hospital bed facing the jury. She had two nurses and a doctor at her side as she gave her account. And then from that hospital bed, she walked the jury through what she said she'd heard the night of the murders. She said she'd been out on her mule near the Crabapple tree when she heard a woman shout, explain these letters. A flashlight beam came on, and in its sweep she saw Willie and Henry Stevens. Then a gunshot. One of the figures fell. A woman screamed, don't. Don't. Don't. Followed by more shots. And then, after it was over, a single name called out into the dark. Henry. The implication couldn't have been clearer. A woman in that field had screamed, henry Stevens name. As the shooting ended, the prosecution couldn't have asked for a clear thread back to Frances brother. It was gripping. But there were people who doubted Jane, including, most memorably, her own mother, who sat in the front row of the gallery muttering under her breath that her daughter was a liar. Still, there was plenty to back Jane up. The prosecution called a man named Ralph Gorslin, who'd been out at Lovers Lane on the night of the murders with his own mistress. He'd heard the gunshots. He denied the story back in 1922 because he hadn't wanted to expose his affair. And according to a private detective, Ralph had run into Henry Stevens, Francis brother, in the area that night. Henry had told him to leave, then circled back later and made him swear never to repeat what he'd seen. Another witness testified that she'd seen Henry Stevens in New Brunswick the day after the murders, even though he'd said he was at home in Lavalette, New Jersey, about 50 miles away. Another witness claimed Willie Stevens had told them the day after the murders, but before the bodies were found, that something terrible had happened. And several witnesses testified that Frances had known about her husband's affair all along, that she'd been keeping tabs on Edward and Eleanor for the entire summer leading up to the killings. And then the prosecution played its strongest card. A piece of physical evidence. Joseph Foro, the retired deputy police commissioner of the New York Police Department and one of the most respected fingerprint experts in the country, took the stand. He told the jury that a latent fingerprint on Edward Hall's calling card, the same card someone had placed at the reverend's foot the night he was killed, matched Willie Stevens thumb. If it was true, it wasn't circumstantial anymore. It was Willie Stevens hand on a card that had been carefully positioned at a dead man's body, and it tied the Stevens family directly to the scene of the crime. It seemed like an overwhelming amount of evidence, but the defense was able to chip away at almost almost all of it. Jane Gibson might have been the prosecution's star witness, but the defense tore her credibility apart on cross examination. They asked about her marital history, her previous husband's, Jane was vague and evasive, which did not look good. One juror admitted afterward that he wouldn't have convicted anyone on her word, no matter how long they'd kept him there. The defense presented Frances and her brothers as upstanding, respected citizens. Frances lawyer argued that they were law abiding, churchgoing Christians who had never broken the law before, so why would they suddenly start now? They also brought in their own fingerprint experts to dispute Joseph Farrow's match on the calling card. Fingerprint analysis was still a relatively new science in 1926, and the Defense argued the print wasn't conclusively Willie's at all. The jury wasn't sure who to believe. But the biggest blow to the prosecution didn't come from the defense's lawyers. It came from one of the defendants himself. Willie Stevens was widely known around New Brunswick as Nutty Willie. That was the era's word for it. Today, some researchers have speculated that Willie was somewhere on the autism spectrum, though he was never formally evaluated. He lived with Francis, spent most of his time at the local firehouse where the firemen adored him and was generally written off by everyone else as the odd one in the family. Both sides of the trial assumed he'd fall apart on crime cross examination. He didn't. The prosecutor pressed him on how he could prove he'd been in his room on the night of the murders. The whole defense rested on the idea that Willie had been home in his bedroom when the killings happened. So how could he prove it? Willie said, if a person sees me go upstairs, isn't that a conclusion? That I was in my room? The galleries started laughing. The prosecutor lost his footing and never quite got it back. Afterward, he publicly called Willie a sort of genius. It was the moment the prosecution's case started to fall apart. The defense even floated other suspects of their own. Maybe Jane Gibson herself was the killer. Or maybe Jim Mills was. Alibi or no alibi. In the end, the defense won. After 87 prosecution witnesses and 70 defense witnesses had taken the stand over nearly a month of testimony. The jury deliberated for just five hours. They didn't believe the pig woman, they didn't believe the fingerprint match, and they didn't believe Ralph Gorstland or any of the witnesses who'd placed the Stevens family near the scene of the crime. They acquitted Frances and both her brothers the next morning. The remaining charges, including those for Edwards killing, were dismissed by the state. The cousin, Henry Carpender, was never tried. After the trial, Frances hall and her brother sued the Daily Mirror for libel and the same paper had forced the case back into court. All the suits were settled quietly out of court. Frances went back to her Victorian mansion on Nicoll Avenue. Her brothers walked free for the first time in months. And the case that had obsessed the country for four years was, in legal terms, over. Frances would live another 16 years. She died quietly in the same Victorian mansion in 1942. As far as anyone could tell, she never spoke publicly about the case again. The Hall Mills trial was one of the most sensational, highly reported trials in American history. It would only be surpassed a few years later by the Lindbergh kidnapping case in the 1930s. After that, when people talked about the great unsolved crimes of the 1920s, Home Mills started to fall out of the conversation. In the decades since the trial, writers and journalists have offered their own theories. Some believe Jim Mills did it out of jealousy. One thinks the Ku Klux Klan was involved. But most think the prosecution had it right and that Frances hall and her brothers got away with murder. And then, in 1969, a new witness came forward. 67 year old Julius Boyog was a Hungarian immigrant who was dying of heart disease. He figured this was as good a time as any to come clean about a secret he'd been carrying for 48 years. Boyog told a patrolman and then a news station that back in the early 1920s, he'd been friends with Willie Stevens. He said Willie had disliked his brother in law, Edward. Edward controlled Willie's inheritance through a trust fund and only gave him $25 a week. Willie thought that wasn't nearly enough. According to Boyag, Willie had once said he hoped to take care of Edward and that he wanted to be introduced to some men who might be able to help with that. Boyag said he refused to make any introductions. Then, six months later, the day after the murders, but before the bodies had been found, Willie came to Boyag and said he needed his help with something. According to Boyag, Willie led him down to George street, where Francis was waiting in a parked car with another man. Willie asked Boyag to take some envelopes from Francis and hand them off to two young men standing in an alleyway. Boyag did it. The envelopes turned out to be full of cash, which made Boyag unwittingly an accomplice to something he didn't yet understand. Only then, after the handoff, did Willie tell him Edward and Eleanor were dead. Willie said the two men they just paid off had forced the couple into a car killed them and dumped their bodies in Lovers Lane. That last part couldn't have been true. Later testimony and forensic evidence prove that Edward and Eleanor had had gone to the crabapple tree on their own and that they'd been killed there. So someone in this chain was lying. Either Boyag or Willie or someone had lied to them. None of Boyag's account was ever independently verified, but it pointed back at Frances hall. And even though two grand juries had cleared her and a trial had appealed acquitted her, the suspicion that she'd had her husband and his lover killed never quite went away. To this day, the murders of Edward hall and Eleanor Mills have never been solved. Everything that came after their deaths, the bungled investigation, the souvenir hunters, the tabloids, the trial, the acquittal, the deathbed confession, almost half a century later, none of it really belonged to them. The story stopped being theirs the moment two strangers found their bodies under that crabapple tree. It became everyone else's. The prosecutors, the reporters, the juries, the whole countries. And the two people at the actual center of it. The ones who had once filled notebooks with letters to each other, who had risked everything to spend a few stolen hours together, got smaller and smaller until they were almost invisible. Edward hall and Eleanor Mills were two messy people in love. They were both cheating on their spouses. Whether they'd have left their marriages for each other, we'll never know, because their killer didn't give them the chance. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy and this is True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of a new murder and all the people it affected. True Crime Stories is a Crime Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Murder True Crime Stories listening experience, subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get both parts of every story dropped on Tuesday completely ad free. No waiting for part two plus ad free and early access to every show across Crime House and bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page will be back on Friday. True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a Crime House Original Powered by Pave Studios this episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benidon, Natalie Pertofsky, Alyssa Fox, Terrell Wells, Cassidy Dillon, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Listening.