Fatal Tryst: Who Killed the Minister and the Choir Singer?

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Description

On the morning of September 16, 1922, the bodies of the Rev. Edward W. Hall and his choir-singer mistress, Mrs. Eleanor Mills, were found lying side by side under a crab apple tree in a lovers’ lane near New Brunswick, N.J. The minister had been shot once in the head, the choir singer three times, and her throat had been cut from ear to ear. Love letters written by Eleanor lay scattered between the corpses. The Hall-Mills case became a direct cause celebre. Sixty-two front-page articles seemed in The New York Times over the next several months, but, owing to a clumsy investigation, the mystery remained unsolved. Then, in 1926, four years after the crime, a New York tabloid, the Day-to-day Mirror, pressured New Jersey authorities into reopening the case. Rev. Hall’s widow and her two brothers were arrested and charged with the double murder. A spectacular trial in Somerville, N.J., resulted in the acquittal of all three defendants. Newspapers all through the country featured the case. The New York Times outdid itself with nearly one hundred front-page articles between July and December 1926. No one Was once ever convicted of the murders. In 1964, more than four decades later, William M. Kunstler, the well known trial attorney, wrote a book on the case in which he pointed the finger of guilt at the Ku Klux Klan. Few accepted his conclusion at the time, and virtually no one who has studied the classic case accepts it now. Who, then, did kill the Episcopal rector and his pretty “wonder heart” lover, as he referred to as Eleanor? Was once the crime in point of fact so mysterious that no one could solve it? Or Was once it, as the Times commented editorially within the first few days, “one that are supposed to have presented few difficulties and those not insuperable”?

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