The Hall-Mills Murder Case

"The Trial of the Century."

It was called the trial of the century, though in fact the so-called Scopes "Monkey" Trial of 1925 has greater claim to that label. In fact, the trial of Mrs. Frances Stevens Hall for the murder of her husband and his lover was just one sensational murder trial in a decade of such sensations.

The Pastor and the Choir Member.

On the morning of 16 September 1922 a couple wandering in a lovers' lane on the outskirts of New Brunswick, New Jersey, discovered the bodies of a man and a woman carefully arranged under a crabapple tree. Both had been shot to death. The woman's throat had been cut, nearly severing her head, and her larynx and tongue had been cut out. The murder victims were identified as forty-one-year-old Rev. Edward Wheeler Hall, rector of the Church of St. John the Evangelist, the most fashionable Episcopal church in New Brunswick, and thirty-four-year-old Mrs. Eleanor Mills, a...

[The entire page is 752 words long]

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