Hall–Mills Murders

Case background and investigation

On the morning of September 16, 1922, the bodies of the Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall, rector of the Church of St. John the Evangelist in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Eleanor Reinhardt Mills, a married member of his church choir, were discovered lying side by side beneath a crabapple tree off De Russey's Lane, a lovers' lane in Franklin Township near the New Brunswick line. Both had been shot with a .32-caliber pistol—Hall once in the head, and Mills three times. Her throat had also been cut. Torn-up love letters the couple had exchanged were scattered between the bodies, which had been carefully arranged.

The pair had been carrying on a well-known affair. Hall, 41, was married to Frances Noel Stevens Hall, a wealthy older woman from the prominent Carpender-Stevens family; Mills, 34, was married to James Mills, the church sexton. The lurid combination of sex, religion, and social prominence turned the case into one of the earliest American media sensations, drawing enormous nationwide newspaper coverage and huge crowds of curiosity seekers to the crime scene.

The initial 1922 investigation, hampered by jurisdictional confusion between Middlesex and Somerset counties and by mishandling of the scene, produced no indictments. Renewed press attention in the New York Daily Mirror four years later prompted Governor A. Harry Moore to order a new inquiry. In 1926, Frances Hall and her brothers Henry and William Stevens—along with cousin Henry Carpender, who was tried separately—were charged with the murders. A key witness, Jane Gibson, dubbed the 'Pig Woman' by the press, testified from a hospital bed that she had witnessed the killings, but her credibility was heavily challenged.

The trial opened in November 1926 at the Somerset County Courthouse in Somerville and became known as a 'trial of the century.' On December 3, 1926, the jury acquitted Frances Hall and her brothers. No one was ever convicted of the murders, and the killings of Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills remain officially unsolved more than a century later. The case is still studied for its role in the history of tabloid journalism and the American 'media circus.'