In short
Summary of "Stuff You Should Know" Podcast Episode: The Unsolved Murder of Hall and Mills
Episode Overview
- Title: The Unsolved Murder of Hall and Mills
- Description: Discusses the 1922 murder of a pastor and his mistress in New Jersey, which has never been solved despite clear indications of who may have committed the crime.
Main Characters
- Edward Hall: A well-known pastor at St. John's Episcopal Church, involved in an affair with his church member.
- Eleanor Mills: Hall's mistress, married to a school janitor, also murdered.
- Francis Hall: Edward’s wife, from a wealthy background, had suspicions about her husband's affair.
- James Mills: Eleanor’s husband, who is initially suspected as a jilted lover.
Key Events and Themes
- Background of the Crime:
- Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills were discovered brutally murdered on September 14, 1922.
- Their bodies were staged under a crabapple tree, suggesting a calculated execution rather than a robbery.
- The Investigation:
- Initial police investigation faced challenges, including jurisdictional disputes and a corrupted crime scene due to public tampering.
- The investigation was complicated by a lack of cooperation and errors in the initial response by law enforcement.
- Various theories emerged, including robbery and involvement of the KKK due to Hall’s affair.
- Public Reaction:
- The case garnered sensational media coverage and public interest, likened to a circus atmosphere, with thousands visiting the crime scene.
- Hall and Mills were portrayed as the center of a scandal, overshadowing the victims.
- Suspicions and Accusations:
- Francis Hall and her brothers came under scrutiny after a grand jury failed to indict them in the initial investigation.
- A second investigation arose years later, leading to renewed scrutiny of Francis Hall and her alleged accomplices.
- Trial and Acquittal:
- After a long investigation, a trial commenced in 1926. Key testimonies, including those from the "pig woman" Jane Gibson, were pivotal.
- Francis Hall and her family were acquitted after the jury found insufficient evidence linking them directly to the murders.
- Public sentiment leaned towards the Hall family being guilty, reflecting societal views on wealth and justice.
- Conclusions and Legacy:
- The case was never officially closed, and the true murderers were never identified.
- Some speculate that the case may have inspired elements of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," particularly regarding class disparities and the overlooked tragedies of the working class.
Key Takeaways
- The Hall and Mills murder remains a historical enigma, highlighting the complexities of societal norms, media influence, and the intricacies of class.
- Despite significant clues, including love letters, the investigation was marred by public hysteria and law enforcement blunders.
- The acquittal of the Hall family raises questions about justice and privilege, a theme that resonates in contemporary discussions about wealth and crime.
Final Thoughts The episode underscores the tragic loss of life overshadowed by sensationalism and the failures of the criminal justice system, leaving behind an unresolved mystery that captivates interest to this day.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
0:31on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, we always say new year, new me, but real change starts on the inside. It starts with giving your mind and your spirit the same attention you give your goals. Hey everybody, it's Michelle Williams, host of Checking In on the Black Effect Podcast Network. And on my podcast, we talk mental health, healing, growth, and everything you need to step into your next season, whole and empowered. New Year, Real You. Listen to Checking In with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:12Babes, what are you doing? What? I'm just mowing the lawn. No, it's blazing hot and dry out here. Don't you remember? Smokey Bear says... Avoid using power equipment when it's windy or dry. Where'd you learn this? Oh, it's on... SmokeyBear.com. with many other wildfire prevention tips. Right. Thanks, honey bear. Because remember, only you can prevent wildfires. Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester, and the Ad Council. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
1:52Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and this is another edition of Stuff You Should Know's ongoing low-key true crime. Sweet. Yeah, it's been a while, I feel like. I'm trying to think of the last one. Yeah, I mean, clearly it has been if I can't think of the last one, but I like it. Every once in a while, I just kind of add to it and it's just this kind of thing. Because they're interesting, especially if you're not looking at them like a total gawker, you know? Agreed. So we're talking today about one I hadn't heard of. Let me ask you this before we get started. Yeah. Did you get your idea from People Magazine?
2:31No. Because People Magazine ran an article on this very murder on June 26th, 2025. Oh, really? Yes. Like, where did you get this idea? Well, I know it wasn't People because, you know, I just, I didn't read People. I'm not against it if I'm like, you know, waiting for the doctor or something. Well, you're really digging yourself into a hole here. I'll pick up a People magazine. That's fine. I'm wondering now if this was a listener's suggestion that I need to look up. I searched it and I did not see anything about it. That's why I was like, holy cow, People magazine. He really got it from there.
3:10I don't know. Maybe, I mean, sometimes I might go so low as to search for, you know, unsolved crimes or something. I don't know. Sure. There's nothing wrong with that. That might have been. Are you looking for ideas? Well, the crazy thing about this is it's, I've seen it described as like the first truly sensationalized trial of the century in the United States. Or that it was like their first big trial of the century, something like that. And it was definitely up there. I've seen it compare with some other ones. Yeah. That came later closely on the heels. But I had never heard any of this. I've never heard of any of these people.
3:48And yet some other people say, hey, this might have even inspired the Great Gatsby in some ways. I have a feeling that's how it came to me. And now I'm wondering if that was the search term that I should have used for listener suggestion. Oh, Great Gatsby? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I didn't search for that either. We'll have to get to the bottom of this, like a couple of true detectives. Now I feel like we're letting someone down. Yeah, we probably are, but we do need to get their name. But I wonder if this thing is sent post-June 26, 2025, bet they got it from People. Okay. Because the People magazine article, like in the headline, it said that it inspired the Great Gatsby.
4:33uh yeah i mean i definitely remember that's what drew my attention to it but if you're trying to root me out as a people magazine reader you're gonna fail i'm not going to stop i'm not going to stop until i'm successful so just look out buddy because you're in my crosshairs now who knows so let's talk about this crime this in short there was a reverend uh well-known reverend in New Brunswick, New Jersey, home of Rutgers. And this reverend was having an affair with one of his church members, a woman named Eleanor Mills. The reverend's name was Edward Hall. He was about seven years her senior, from what I understand.
5:10And one night, or one morning, I should say, they turned up murdered, brutally murdered. And it became, like I said, a very sensational story, not just in New Brunswick, not just in nearby New York, but everywhere across the country. I would guess probably out of the country as well. Who knows?
5:33How would you ever find something like that out? I don't know. People Magazine probably? Yeah, probably. People International. So, yeah, Ed Hall was in his early 40s, 41 years old at the time of his death, and he was a pastor, like you said, at St. John's Episcopal, about 20 miles from where I lived in New Jersey. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's right. And his wife's name was Frances Hall. She was seven years older than him, interestingly, because I guess his mistress, Eleanor Mills, was seven years younger. Anything to that? I think it's just a fluke of nature. Yeah, I think so, too. But, and this is kind of key here, She, his wife, had come from a, you know, it seems like a pretty wealthy, well-to-do, well-connected family in the area.
6:24Because he was just a pastor and, you know, they didn't make a lot of dough, yet they lived in a really fancy house. They had a chauffeur. They had a staff. They had maids that worked there, which will come into play in this story. And they had been married about 11 years. his mistress, who was also brutally murdered, she was a homemaker married to a school janitor named James who also kind of helped take care of the church. They had a couple of kids. She sang in the choir, and this is also key, she acted as sort of a very close personal assistant to the reverend. Like, very closely assisted him, if you know what I'm saying.
7:02Yeah, I do know what you're saying. um so one other thing about edward hall and his wife francis's fortune he apparently when he first got to take over the church umst john's episcopal church it was a hostile takeover um he started courting a lovely parishioner but she didn't really have any money he dropped her and put his sights on francis stevens who would become francis hall his wife and from what i've read, there's not a lot of note or there wasn't a lot of note about Francis Stevens aside from her wealth. And she was wealthy. She shared a what would be worth today a$40 million fortune between herself and her two other brothers.
7:44So she was definitely wealthy. And so in addition to running around on her, he also seemed to just have been after her money. And let's not forget, he's an Episcopal reverend leading an entire church. So that to me, when I put all those things together, I was like, I don't really like this guy. Yeah. Yeah, fair enough. So it was not a secret among the church. You know, it was kind of one of those things, you know, back in 1922, where people might, it might've been pretty clear and even probably in a modern day church that somebody was having an affair, but you didn't really talk about that kind of thing.
8:19And so it was basically an open secret after, you know, the sermons and after Sunday would end, They would spend a lot of time together in his study. Apparently they would leave love notes and that would come into play in the story for each other with a little secret system where they would put it in a book on his shelf and trade notes that way. What book do you think it was? The Great Gatsby. They traveled in time. They did. The day that the news broke, though, the New York Times came out and said, and this is how they would have to put this kind of thing back then. They said they had long been friendly.
8:57Right. So, yeah, like you said, this is an open secret. Apparently, their spouses knew, James Mills and Francis Hall, both seem to have known about the affair. For one, when they turned up missing that first day, apparently, Francis Hall, the first time she spoke to James Mill, her husband's mistress's husband, James said, do you think they eloped? That was his response when he found out that they were both missing. And apparently also, this is important too, Francis Hall had an informal network of spies among the congregation who kept tabs on those two and informed her of their doings, essentially.
9:42So both of them knew full well what was going on. Right. They knew, but they didn't project that publicly. Publicly, they both said, like, my head didn't know this was going on, And as we'll see later in court, she even testified that, you know, her marriage was perfect and those these supposed love notes are fake and they were not having an affair. No, for sure. I think her first public response was good.
10:12So on the day of the murder, this was Thursday, September 14th. They each, you know, left their respective houses. And another couple reported seeing them meeting up on a bridge nearby. And then a couple of days later, another couple came forward. This woman named, well, woman, she was 15 years old. She was a young girl named Pearl Bomber. Yet she was in a relationship because this was in 1922 with a guy who was anywhere from 19 to 23. Who can tell? His name was Raymond Schneider. They came upon the bodies a couple of days later on Old Phillips Farm. This is the other side of the Raritan River there, and this is about 1030 in the morning.
10:53They went to the closest house, had the owner call the cops, and the cops showed up pretty quickly. Yeah, and the bodies, it was pretty disturbing. So they'd been left on a path off of DeRussy's Lane. This is a dirt road, I think, in Somerset County, and it was a well-known lover's lane. Like this is the kind of time where you had to go out to a lover's lane to either have an affair or have premarital sex or both. This is where their bodies were found on a path off of this lover's lane, right? A Reverend Hall had been shot once through the temple and exited the opposite temple. And that was it for him.
11:31But Eleanor Mills, his mistress, she had really been worked over, right? Yeah. Yeah, she was shot three times in the head, and her neck was cut so severely that she was close to being decapitated. His shot was point blank, sort of, you know, what we would call execution style with a.32 caliber pistol. And the bodies were posed together after that. They were under a crabapple tree, kind of posed as cuddling lovers. Her head was placed on his arm, not, you know, separate from her body, just laid against him. and a scarf was draped over her cutthroat and he had a hat, a Panama hat, kind of partially covering his face.
12:14So, you know, from 20 yards away or whatever, it looked like a couple just sort of laying there, cuddling, maybe taking a nap under a tree. Yeah, so that's how they were found. But apparently as Pearl and Raymond were coming upon them, they saw very quickly that they were dead. There was one other thing that wasn't noted at the time when the bodies were found in 1922, but it would be noted when the case was reignited four years later in 1926 that Eleanor Mills' tongue and vocal cords had been cut out and removed. That had been missed in the first autopsy, but a subsequent autopsy found that. So this was the state that these bodies were found in.
12:55I think also the Reverend Hall's business card was found propped up against his foot. I think that's the only other thing we left out. Oh, no, there's one other thing. This is really important, too. This is the clue to me. You ready, Chuck? I'm ready. There were love letters that Eleanor Mills had written to Edward Hall, the Reverend Hall, and they had been placed all around them. So this is a highly staged crime scene. Not just the bodies were staged, but there were actual props involved among an executed and a mutilated body left out in public, essentially. to be found almost immediately after they were killed.
13:39Yeah, I mean, the business card almost feels like, hey, if anyone stumbles upon this who's not from around here, this is who this is. That's right. You know? Yeah, for sure. Like, what else could that be? I don't know. I mean, they're sending some sort of message. If that's not, if there's something else that they're sending, like, that's pretty in your face, you know? Yeah, for sure. So the bodies were found. Locals, you know, word gets around a little bit. Locals start showing up. Then once the newspapers get a hold of it, like you said earlier, it became a big deal. And I guess this was such a sensational thing at a time where this kind of thing didn't happen much that like people really started coming to this town to like just see what happened.
14:20They wanted to walk on the grounds of that road and near that farm, and they wanted to, like, literally take pieces of that tree and dig up dirt around there as a keepsake. Apparently, they said, you know, they were showing up at a rate of 1 ,000 cars a day. Sounds a little overblown, maybe. But there were, like, vendors selling popcorn and balloons and, you know, the dirt they were selling for 25 cents a bag. It was really out of hand very quickly. You know, it reminded me of was like the circus atmosphere that grew up when Floyd Collins was trapped in Sand Cave. Yeah, for sure. It was around the same time.
14:56So people were just looking for something to do. Pretty bored, apparently. Yeah. So, yeah, it was a big deal. And there was a huge problem with all of those people showing up combined with an incompetent police investigation. And that was that these people trod all over the crime scene. Um, they apparently messed with the scarf. They took samples from the tree. Apparently the tree was stripped of everything except its trunk after everyone was done with it. There's the guy selling the dirt. Um, this stuff was really important. Like, for example, the dirt was important because that's how they would establish whether those two had been murdered in the spot they were found in or murdered somewhere else and transported.
15:43because the blood they found trickled into the dirt, which is a sure sign that they had been killed there on the spot. But with people stealing dirt from that, there goes all of that evidence, too. So the crime scene was completely useless. And this is at a time when people knew, like, no, you really need to preserve crime scenes. Yeah, for sure. I think that's a good spot for a break, eh? Eh. All right. Well, since Josh said A, we're going to take a little break and come back with more of this grisly murder right after this.
16:40New year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt. And I'm Joel. We are from the How to Money podcast, and every week we help you to spend smarter, save more, and make sense of what's going on out there. If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google doc and send me the link.
17:13Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been unimaginable without AI, and now it will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game.
17:49This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents in small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
18:32as my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP, its crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Starting January 20th.
19:26Alright, so we're back. when we last left you, Josh was sort of detailing the problems with the crime scene and people trotting about and messing that up. And you mentioned something about the police work wasn't so good. One of the issues was, and this is something, it seems like it happens a lot if you believe TV and movies, at least, is that there were various jurisdictions kind of battling for this case. They lived in Middlesex County. The old Phillips farm was in Somerset County, like you mentioned. And initially, like you said, they didn't even know where their murders took place. They later found out that they were alive when they got to the farm.
20:03So they finally found that out. But at the beginning, you had Middlesex County and Somerset County both saying, like, no, this is my case. This is my case. And for a while, it seems like for a pretty great while, they had two sort of separate investigations going on, which never, at least in the movies, seems to be a good idea. No, not at all. Apparently, the governor had to get involved and be like, you guys need to join forces. And they eventually did. But I mean, this is this happened for I don't know exactly how long, but long enough for it to be significant enough to mention. And this is a really important time during an investigation, the first several hours, 48, you might even say.
20:40Yeah, that's what they say. So there was a statement that was issued that that Mrs. Hall issued essentially to back up a theory that had been posed that this was a robbery. It was a robbery gone wrong. and a woman named Sally Peters acted as Mrs. Hall's spokeswoman, apparently, for most of this time because Mrs. Hall didn't really want to be seen in public. So her good friend stepped up and essentially they pointed out that Mrs. Hall's husband, the Reverend Hall, he walked around with a gold watch and in his wallet he typically carried about$50, which is like$1 ,000 today. That's what he walked around with.
21:23Who has$1 ,000 of cash in their wallet? A guy who marries a woman for her money and then runs around on her almost publicly? Yeah, probably so. And that those things were missing when they were found. So they had been robbed, right? But the question was, was that really the motive behind this murder where Eleanor Mills' throat had been cut to the backbone and they'd been staged in some really weird ways, right? Yeah, for sure. So this is the Middlesex assistant prosecutor at first, because, again, they were conducting separate investigations. This guy's name was John Tulin. And he came out and said, hey, wait a minute.
22:00Basically, I mean, he couldn't come right out and accuse her, but he was basically like, hey, there's no information to back this up. Kind of listen to our statements and maybe not the ones from the deceased's family. Right. I'm sure he had to couch that because she was from a wealthy family. But he basically said, hey, there's no evidence to back this up. And we think that, and this to me is a little hinky, but he said if it was a robber, he wouldn't have been using a.32. He would have been using a larger caliber, which to me doesn't really make much sense. He would have been using a.44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world.
22:35Do you feel lucky? So there was another theory, too, that I hadn't heard of, but kind of makes sense. Apparently the Klan had recently become highly active in the area around that time. And they were known for severely punishing moral transgressions like affairs. Yeah, but not their own. No, of course not. So if they had come upon or had targeted these two, because, I mean, if this was an open secret, and this guy's a prominent member of the community, They could have been a target for the Klan to punish somebody like that. So that was a decent theory, but it didn't really go too far, at least at first.
23:19Yeah, for sure. And we mentioned this next one just because it has been mentioned, but it really also went nowhere. But very briefly, apparently there were two Italians who had showed up in New Brunswick, and they had revolvers. Like, that was known that there were these two Italian guys who no one knew. and they had guns, but that was just a very quick sort of, they had nothing to do with it kind of deal. For sure. That's just what you did in 1922 when somebody turned up murdered. How many Italians came into town? Exactly. So the cops were like, okay, we can't possibly train our sights on the wealthy widow and her family.
24:02Let's see who else we can blame to just basically make the public, let us make this go away, right? Yeah. They were just looking for somebody to pin it on. And they turned their attention to the two people, Pearl Balmer and Ray Schneider, who had run over to a farmhouse and told the woman, we just found some bodies, call the police. Right. When they found the bodies, they were like, that seems a little fishy. We're going to start looking at you guys because you're probably just providing your own alibis. Who would possibly call in finding the bodies of a murder they just committed? Yeah, for sure.
24:36So they discovered, like, hey, they were also on the farm that night, because this was, remember, two days later in the morning when they called it in. But they said, hey, they were also there that night. A couple of weeks after that, those two, and then a couple of other friends of theirs that were also with them that night, a guy named Clifford Hayes and a 15-year-old kid named Leon Kaufman, They were all four brought in for what sounds like a straight 24 hours of questioning, which is always very suspicious, you know, when you try and get someone to their weakest point. So they signed some weird false confession.
25:11So they wore them out questioning for a full day and night. And at the end of this, Ray Schneider, the original guy who reported it with his young girlfriend, signed a statement that said, hey, around midnight that night, me and Clifford. Hayes, my buddy, came across a couple of people sitting on the ground near that farmhouse. I thought it was my girlfriend and her father. And I had been looking for her. I was pretty jealous. And so Hayes shot both of them. And it sounds like it might have been like a favor to him. None of this really adds up because it wasn't like he had found her with some other guy and he was angry and his friends like, I'll get even for you.
25:57None of this really makes much sense to me, at least. Well, the only thing I saw was that I saw somewhere somebody said that they believed that Pearl was being molested by her father. That still doesn't make sense why she would be shot as well. Yeah, I mean, it's all very hinky. But Ray Schneider basically, in the statement at least, said, we realized it was not them. We ran away. And so my girlfriend and this other kid, Leon Kaufman, also said, yeah, you know, parts of this are true. And Schneider did have a gun. He also had a pocket knife. And so in the end, they arrested Clifford Hayes and charged him with the murders.
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26:39They did. And immediately the press, who was really paying attention to this, and the public who were reading these stories were like, are you guys dumb? Like, are you kidding? This is who you've come up with. there was it didn't take into account again so does that mean that clippard hayes after his friend um ray schneider ran off his friend who he'd taken it upon himself to execute the man's girlfriend and her father yeah that he went over and was like well i better almost cut this woman's head off and stage these bodies like this but every single um theory is just dumb because they can't take into account the most important clue in this whole murder.
27:24Love letters? The whole case. The love letters. Yeah. How would this guy, Clifford Hayes, have any access to the love letters between those two? From Mills to Hall, how would they have had access to that? How would the Klan have had access to that? How would somebody who was robbing them and the robbery went wrong, how would they have access to that? Those are the clues, so much so that I'm quite certain that the people who killed this couple were like, oh, that was so stupid afterward. Like, why did we put the letters down? They luckily got away with it, but that was, to me, that's just, there you go.
28:02There's your answer right there. Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, it's all just so fishy and ludicrous that they arrested this kid. So, you know, there was real backlash back then even. Like you said, everybody, like no one really believed what was going on. And the story had all these holes in it. There were a couple of other sort of weird details that came out of the subplot that didn't really lend itself to solving it. But the press basically uncovered some stuff that Schneider, who was dating the 15-year-old Pearl, he was actually married. Clifford Hayes, who they arrested for the murder, supposedly he had dated Pearl at one point.
28:44But, you know, again, none of this made any kind of sense at all. Within a few days, Ray Schneider was like, oh, yeah, you know what? That's not true. So they sentenced him to a term at a reformatory for making false statements. And then Young Pearl was sent to the House of the Good Shepherd for Wayward Girls in Newark, which I'm sure was just a great place. I'm sure, too. Sarcasm. Yeah, for sure. And then Ray Schneider being sentenced for his false statement. So he had a coerced statement beaten out of him, and then he gets sentenced for giving it. Yeah. Oh, was he beaten? I'm sure he was. We're talking 1922, and the police are trying to get a confession over a 24-hour period of questioning out of this guy who signs a false confession.
29:32I would say he might have— I just want to make sure no family members of those cops comes forward and sues you. For sure. But you saw as well as I did in People magazine that they said it too. All right. Shall we go on or should we take another break? Maybe go on a little more? Let's go on a little more. All right. Take it away. OK. So finally, the public, it's just the police who are studiously avoiding looking at Francis Hall, her two brothers and eventually her cousin, all of whom would be implicated in this crime. it was just the cops and the prosecutors who were trying not to look at them.
30:11The rest of the public was like, I'm pretty sure we have, we know who did this. Why don't you start looking at them? And eventually the public pressure about it couldn't just be ignored. So the cops finally started looking at Mrs. Hall and they brought her in for questioning once. Apparently it was a very gentle line of questioning. They were very deferential. Very naturally, people also started looking at James Mills. He was the other jilted lover in this case. He had a pretty good alibi. Apparently, either one of his hobbies or his side gig was woodworking. He was seen around the time of the murders at home and then for the next couple hours during the time when this pair was definitely murdered.
30:53So he had a pretty good alibi, multiple neighbors saying, yeah, he was at home woodworking at the time. Yeah, and that's in the TV show at the end when they're recounting how it was done. This is when you see the shot of, like, the buzzsaw going in an empty room. Right. It's like a mannequin rigged. Right, like pushing it so it actually sounds like it's cutting. That's right. That's like the 1922 version of somebody pre-recording the security camera footage so that you can't see what they're doing when they commit the crime. That's right. The data's somehow scrambled. Yeah, but I'll tell you what, even that couldn't fool Jessica Fletcher.
31:31There's at least one episode where that was used. Who was that again? A Murder, She Wrote. Oh, that's right. Oh, you want to hear something awful? Sure. So I was watching Murder, She Wrote on over-the-air antenna. To be expected, there's a lot of ads, and they're usually pretty crummy ads. But remember I was complaining about that stupid Burger King ad? Oh, yeah. Well, I finally moved away from the over-the-air antenna viewing and just started watching, I think, on Amazon. I love that. You joined the 21st century. Exactly. But for a while, I was like, great, I left the Burger King ad behind. Nope.
32:09It very recently popped up again on Amazon. I haven't heard it in a while. I'm not going to recount it for you. Well, I'll tell you what I'm not doing is watching Murder, She Wrote, if that's the trigger. Yeah, it's pretty bad, but that's how much I like Murder, She Wrote. I'm willing to suck it up, you know? Jessica Fletcher solving crimes. It's tough, dude. That's pretty catchy. Yeah, yeah. All right, so where were we? They started looking at Mrs. Hall. She didn't have an alibi, it turns out. That's right. So they brought her in, like you said, for some pretty gentle questioning. She said that on Friday morning she was worried because her husband wasn't home.
32:48So she got together with her brother, Willie, and they started looking for him. They visited the church at first to look for him. And then later they went to her house, well, not her house, but the victim's house. They went to the Mills' house. Nobody was there either. And they said, yeah, initially they said, we went there because, you know, we thought he might have been visiting with someone who was ill. and then later on that story changed to, oh no, we went by there because we knew that the church keys were there as well. So her story is already changing out of the gate. Yeah, and I mean, if an entire prosecutor's office times two, two different counties, prosecutors and police departments are being deferential to you and not investigating you because you're wealthy, at least have the decency to keep your story straight, to not make them look that ridiculous, right?
33:41Yeah, agreed. The upshot is this. Mrs. Hall's alibi is her brother Willie, who lived with Mrs. Hall and Reverend Hall. And he was a suspect, too. So if your alibi is another suspect, that's not a very good alibi. And they were also they were also prowling around about 2.30 a.m. and no one could corroborate that they were out looking for Reverend Hall at 2.30 a.m. about the time the murders took place. Exactly. So, again, she was still insistent that they had a great marriage. These love letters are fake. The cops start sniffing her other brother off the case who doesn't live with him. This guy's name was Henry.
34:26And he was like, no, no, I got an alibi. I was fishing in Lavalette. It's about 50 miles away. There's no way I could have been there. And you know what? I was even fishing with the mayor of Lavalette. And the mayor stepped forward and said, correct. So he was holding a briefcase with money coming out of the seams. So he has an alibi, like a stated alibi. I'm not sure if that's the legal term, but I didn't see that there was any other like proof that he was out fishing. But he said, I was fishing and there was a witness with me. There were a few witnesses, and it seems like the key witness to this all is the woman who actually witnessed the murder, as it turns out.
35:05Yeah, a woman named Jane Gibson, who had come to be known as the pig woman. That's just what the press called her across the board because she was a pig farmer in the area of the road where the bodies were found. Yeah. And she had caused to be awake at 2.30 a.m. Apparently, there had been some thefts of her crops, probably cops who'd come and try to snatch her crops. and so she was awake waiting essentially for the the thieves to come back and she said that while she was lying in wait she heard a sound she went to uh investigate and that she saw mrs hall her two brothers and mrs hall's cousin henry another henry um carrying out these murders yeah like she said i saw this happen uh but the prosecutors are like nah her story keeps kind of changing too and they all have alibis, stated alibis.
36:02So a grand jury convenes in November of that year, like what should we do here about indicting this family? And I say we tackle that question, or answer rather, right after another break, eh? Eh.
36:27What? What? What? What? What? What? Satisfaction. New year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt. And I'm Joel. We are from the How to Money podcast, and every week we help you to spend smarter, save more, and make sense of what's going on out there. If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan?
37:11Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been unimaginable without AI, and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person?
37:45I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.
38:22Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all?
39:02NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Starting January 20th.
39:27So, Chuck, where we left off, you had said that a grand jury had been convened, right? That's right. And it turned out that the grand jury, I think they took five days before they said, no, we're not going to hand out any indictments. So it seemed that probably the likeliest suspects, Francis Hall, her two brothers, and her cousin, were now off the hook. And we should say also one of the things about her brother that's going to come into play, one of her brothers, Willie, he lived at home, like we said, with the Reverend Hall and Mrs. Hall. And the reason why, it seems, is because he was at least understood at the time as kind of slow, as they would put it.
40:09Sometimes you see in modern retellings of it that he's considered developmentally disabled. That does not seem to be the case. It seems like he probably was neurodiverse in some way, shape, or form. But he was also quite sharp, too. He was known to read books on metallurgy. He was quite sociable. He would be high-functioning, you would say today. But at the time, he seemed to be, if this was a group of murderers, his family murderers, he would be targeted as the weak link that you would go after. But regardless, it didn't matter, because 1922 went out with these four led off the hook because the grand jury didn't indict.
40:45How about that? That's right. And right after that happened, the good Mrs. Hall left for Italy. So nothing at all suspicious about that, about getting on a plane to Europe. I think you can make a case either way that, you know, she just wanted to get away from the whole thing, too. I said plane. Would that have been just an ocean liner at the time? Mm-hmm. Okay. Way to go, man. So save your emails, everybody. I'm speaking in the modern parlance. So in December, they said basically, you know, now that all the gawkers are out of here and all the attention is dying down, we can get down to some real investigating and figure out who did this.
41:27A year later, the New York Times followed up on the anniversary. We're like, yeah, so you got down to business. What did you find out? And they're like, oh, what? No progress whatsoever, right? Yeah. So that's how it went. for four more years. And then out of nowhere, in a completely unrelated divorce case, the husband of a woman named Louise Geist, who had been a maid at the Hall's home during the time of the murders, in the divorce proceedings, he was assassinating his ex-wife or soon-to-be ex-wife's character, saying that she had been involved in the Hall Mills murder and had been paid 5 ,000 smackaroos to keep quiet by Mrs.
42:12Hall and her brothers, and that she knew all about it. And somehow, I guess that got out to the press, and William Randolph Hearst's Daily Mirror assigned a reporter to look back into the case, and it just blew it right back onto the front pages of papers across the country. Yeah, such that the state of New Jersey could no longer just keep ignoring this. So Governor A. Harry Moore said, oh, God, all right, let's reopen this case. I'm too old for this, Seth. Yeah, exactly. At this point, the grand jury does come back and indict Frances Hall, her brothers, Willie and Henry, and her cousin Henry.
42:52They were all four arrested. Mrs. Hall, for her part, was released on bail, 15 grand, a lot of dough at the time. Yeah. Still a lot of dough, I always say that. Sure. And the men were held without bail. And at this point, this is four years later, they don't take care of evidence like they do now. A lot of the evidence was gone, but they did find some new clues. There was another adulterous couple in the church. There were probably dozens of them because that's just how that kind of thing goes. But this one other adulterous couple, there was a guy named Ralph Gorslein and a woman named Catherine Rostell.
43:26and they were on Lover's Lane that night. A private detective came forward and said, hey, Ralph admitted that he heard these shots and saw, I think, Cousin Henry, or was this Brother Henry? That was Brother Henry. Okay, Brother Henry, who apparently swore him to secrecy. Ralph Gorsline later came out and denied having accused Brother Henry, but he did confirm that he and his mistress, Catherine Rastel, had heard these four gunshots, heard some low voices, and a woman screaming. And the reason that I didn't come out before was because, obviously, I didn't want to, like, have my affair busted. But in 1926, four years later, she had talked.
44:10His mistress had talked. So he was like, well, I guess the cat's out of the bag, so I'm going to say what happened, too. And his wife said, great, let's get a divorce. Yeah, and again, he had gone to this private detective in 1922 because his conscience had gotten to him. I think he was basically saying, he was saying all the stuff that he eventually said in 1926 to get the detective to go to the cops and say, hey, this anonymous source did this, but it didn't pan out like that. But 1926, they were just uncovering stuff left and right. Remember I said that they exhumed Mrs. Mills and did another autopsy, and that's when they found that her tongue and vocal cords had been cut out.
44:48So this was a serious investigation that was launched again in 1926, probably a lot more serious than the one that was carried out in 1922. And another clue that turned up, or another source that turned up, was a guy named Paul Hamborski. He was a minister, also in New Brunswick, and he was friendly with Reverend Hall. And Paul Hamborski came forward and said, hey, I actually had a conversation with Reverend Hall, basically a month before he was murdered. And in it, he said that my wife has gotten really cool lately and has turned into a different woman. And quote, I am very much afraid that she will do me bodily harm.
45:31And he explained it was because of this affair and that he had no intention of giving up Eleanor Mills and that they would probably run off together pretty soon. This was a month before Edward Hall was murdered that a minister came forward and said, this is what he said to me. Yeah, and he also said that her brother Henry threatened me because everyone knew about this affair. And so he comes out with this very, you know, sort of key evidence. And right before the 1926 trial started, this Paul Hamborsky guy just sort of disappeared. He left town. He didn't disappear, like disappear, disappear, but he left town pretty quickly.
46:08And there was a state senator named Alexander Simpson who was acting as special prosecutor for the case. And he said, this Hamborski guy's loans dried up at the bank. And the banker said, you've been a fool to get mixed up in this Halls Mill case. The banker was Charles Bronson? No, that would have been, you've been a fool to get mixed up in this Halls Mill case. Very nice. I just said that because I really wanted to hear you redo it as Charles Bronson. It's just all dirty dealing, basically. Like, it's really clear. Yeah, I mean, this family was more than wealthy and powerful enough to ruin a person, make sure that they didn't have any line of income or just make life miserable for them to where they did want to just get out of town before they could testify.
46:55So this trial happens. Like, they finally have enough evidence that a grand jury, this time pretty quickly, handed off indictments. And so Frances and her two brothers and cousin are indicted for murder. And right when word got out that they were about to be tried again, all the journalists came back. I saw an estimate that they filed 12 million plus words, cumulatively, it wasn't just one guy, during the 23-day trial. That's how many words were written on this. It was everywhere. Yeah. I mean, just hundreds and hundreds of people all of a sudden in town. And the public, of course, is like, hey, you know what we care the most about is reading these love letters.
47:42Like Josh Clark will one day say that's the key piece of evidence. And like what was in these things. And one of them, and this is great. Who helped us? Livia with this? Yeah, she dug up some of these letters. Darling Wonderheart, I just want to crush you for two hours. I want to see you Friday night alone by our road where we can let out unrestrained that universe of joy and happiness we call ours. And he signed it DTL for Deine Troia Liebhaber, which is German for thy true lover, and Mills called him Babykins. So this is my only joke about this is I want to see the sitcom Wonderheart and Babykins like very soon on my television.
48:27Do me a favor. Will you read that quote as Charles Bronson? Really? Sure. Darling Wonderheart, I just want to crush you for two hours. I want to see you Friday night alone by a road where we can let out unrestrained that universe of joy and happiness that we call ours. Beautiful, Chuck. Bravo. A little more sinister somehow. If it wouldn't make the levels go into the red, I would clap loudly for you right now. So, yes, this is the kind of humiliation that Frances Hall is enduring. She's sitting in court because, again, she's on trial. People are reading. That was just one. They were reading a bunch of different love letters in open court.
49:10And there were more witnesses that came forward. They were poking holes in people's alibis from the year back. So they brought in new witnesses to undermine the truthfulness of their original witnesses. and so on and so forth. And the maid, Louise Geist, she was brought to the stand and she said, no, my ex-husband's a big fat liar. But I'll tell you what, Willie, who lived with the Halls and whose servant I was as well, he told me the day after the murder, but the day before the bodies were discovered, that something terrible happened last night. So Willie shouldn't have known anything about something terrible happening last night unless it was that his sister had lost at Solitaire, which was the one alibi that Louise Geist could give Francis Hall for that night.
50:00Solitaire was her alibi. So was this Louise Geist was involved and probably got paid off and she was trying to just pin it on Willie, this possibly neurodivergent younger brother? That certainly seems the case to me. Okay, that's how I took it. That's pretty whole scratch that her ex-husband comes up with in divorce court, you know? Yeah. So again, though, the star witness was Jane Gibson, the pig woman, right? Yeah. Yeah. And this is super dramatic. She came forward. She was in late stages of cancer. And they brought her in on a stretcher into court. She's speaking in a whisper, basically, like just hanging in there to get this testimony out.
50:41So her story was after 9 o 'clock on that day, her dog started barking. Again, she was worried about thieves stealing her crops. So she gets on her mule, Jenny, rides out to the field, sees people fighting under that crabapple tree. Here's a woman yell, don't, don't, don't, Henry! She hears a shot, a gunshot, saw one of the men fall. She flees. She gets the heck out of there, of course. and then on her way out of there, like running, she hears a woman screaming again, three more gunshots, and they were like, can you point out, are those people in the courtroom today, basically? And she said yes, and she pointed at Mrs.
51:22Hall, her two brothers, and her cousin, and they said, oh, well, you know what, she's the big lady. Like, don't believe what she says, basically. Well, supposedly her own mother, Jane Gibson's own mother, was in the courtroom, apparently wringing her handkerchief, watching her daughter give testimony saying she's lying. She's lying. So people didn't put much stock into Jane Gibson's testimony. Maybe she said she's dying. Maybe. So this is essentially the prosecution's case. They presented Jane Gibson again. She basically said, I saw those four murder these two people, at least in silhouette, and then I saw the four clearly.
52:01Then it was time for the accused to start taking the stand. and apparently Mrs. Hall was so composed during her time on the stand giving testimony that the papers dubbed her the Iron Widow. Yeah. And she still said, I never suspected my husband of infidelity and I was really nervous when he disappeared. That's why my brother and I went out that very night to look for him. And again, she's in part probably saving face, but now at this point, She's trying to not give anyone a motive that she might have had for killing him, which would clearly be, in such a passionate murder, something like infidelity, right?
52:42Yeah, for sure. But despite her, I think everybody kind of expected her to be good on the stand. And remember I said that they had kind of supposed that Willie was going to be the weak link? The prosecutors were just chomping at the bit to get to him. They were just going to work him over on the stand. And apparently Willie held his own like nobody's business and did so well on the stand that essentially he got himself and his siblings and cousin off. That's how well he did on the stand. He was the one who basically got him acquitted. Yeah. So there it is. They got acquitted on December 3rd, 1926.
53:19After that, the defendants minus brother Henry sued the mirror for libel. It was settled out of court, and we don't know how much money was exchanged hands, if any. Seems like there probably was some. And it was never brought to trial again. It never came before a criminal court again. Mrs. Hall went back to doing her thing. She's doing charity work at the church. Did not, you know, aside from that, didn't really socialize a lot. Died in 1942. And, you know, we look back now as, like, it seems fairly obvious to us what happened, even though famous civil rights attorney William Kunstler wrote a book in 1964 called The Minister and the Choir Singer, where he supposes that it was the KKK.
54:03But there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence about that at all. No. He even says this is all circumstantial. And apparently there's no account of anyone actually being murdered when they were punished by the KKK for something like having an affair. So it's pretty, pretty poor. Just spankings? Yes. So what about the great Gatsby, Chuck? We all know that you read that article as well as I did. People wonder if this was one of the stories that inspired The Great Gatsby. It was in 1922. I think Gatsby came out in 25, so before the actual trial. But F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, we do know that they followed that case.
54:44They were pretty interested in it. And there's a lot of differences. So, I mean, I think it may have just been one of those sort of launching off points where it's like, oh, this is a cool idea. And then just, you know, really just went with it in a fictional sense. Yeah. Well, People Magazine pointed out something that I thought was a good connection between the two. In the story, the working class woman who's having an affair with I can't remember his name, Gatsby's rival. Her death is essentially like ignored because she's not upper class. She's working class. The same thing happened to Eleanor Mills.
55:18Like her death does not, aside from the grisly state of her body, people did not pay much attention to that. It was all about this wealthy woman and her wealthy husband. And in the end, the wealthy people got to go on with their lives while the dead working class victim is just largely forgotten. Yeah, for sure. Well, that's it for the Hall Mills murder, Chuck. Good pick, however we got it. I also just want to shout out the Yale Review, Harold Schechter's article, Mr. Local History Project. Mary S. Hartman wrote a paper, and then also our own Livia, who helped us with this, too. And since I just rattled off some sources, as everyone knows, I just triggered listener mail.
56:01This is about smoking. We did one on the cigarette, and this is from Sue in Melbourne, Australia. Hey, guys. I really dislike smoking. Here in Melbourne, Australia, a pack of 20 cigarettes, and that is individual cigarettes, not 20 packs, like a pack of cigarettes. Yeah, 20 Lucys. Costs$58.99. I know, I saw that, and it's just, I'm still astounded by it. A pack of 25 costs$62.99, and a carton of 10 packs is$469. If a smoker smokes a pack of 20 per day, The cost per week is$371 per week or per annum, close to$20 ,000. Add a cup of coffee from a shop Monday to Friday at 5 a day per annum,$1 ,300.
56:46Victoria has the most expensive cigarettes in the world, guys. Yet there is always a crowd of puffing smokers outside every building. Instead of sucking filth into the lungs, a person saves the money. An overseas holiday every year would be possible. Yes, I was a bookkeeper. Love the show. That is from Sue. Yeah, and you might be out there saying, well, the Australian dollar is less than the U.S. dollar. I just calculated it. A$469 carton of cigarettes in Australia is still a$300 carton of cigarettes in the U.S. So that's amazing. Yeah, that's a lot of dough to actively die earlier. Yeah, thanks a lot.
57:22Who was that again? Sue. Thanks a lot, Sue. And if you want to be like Sue, you can send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
57:34Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
57:50Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. there was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff, here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, son. Time to put out this campfire.
58:24Dad, we learned about this in school. Oh, did you now? Okay. What's first? Smokey Bear said to. First, drown it with a bucket of water, then stir it with a shovel. Wow, you sound just like him. Then he said, If it's still warm, then do it again. Where can I learn all this? It's all on SmokeyBear.com with other wildfire prevention tips. Because only you can prevent wildfires. Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester, and the Ad Council. You know, we always say new year, new me, but real change starts on the inside. It starts with giving your mind and your spirit the same attention you give your goals.
59:01Hey, everybody, it's Michelle Williams, host of Checking In on the Black Effect Podcast Network. And on my podcast, we talk mental health, healing, growth and everything you need to step into your next season, whole and empowered. New year, real you. Listen to Checking In with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
From the publisher
In 1922, a pastor and his mistress were murdered in New Jersey. Nobody was ever convicted of the crime even though it seems clear who did it.
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