Women who Kill

5. Let That Be a Lesson

5 letthatbealesson 273 1 The Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall was found on September 16, 1922, lying on his back under a crab apple tree in DeRussey’s Lane on the outskirts of New Brunswick, New Jersey. He was stretched out in apparent comfort with his Panama hat over his face and his calling card propped against his foot. On his right lay Eleanor Mills, with her head resting on the minister’s right hand, and her hand in turn resting on his knee. The Reverend Mr. Hall had been shot once through the head and Mrs. Mills three times; her throat had been cut so deeply that her head was almost detached. Word of the double murder spread quickly in New Brunswick, for the victims were highly respectable citizens, though lately linked scandalously together. The Reverend Edward Hall was minister of the fashionable Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist, and Eleanor Mills was the leading singer in the church choir. Hall’s wife, the former Frances Noel Stevens, was the only daughter of one of New Brunswick’s wealthiest families, and James Mills, Eleanor’s husband, though he hadn’t amounted to much, was sexton of the Reverend Mr. Hall’s church. In the next four years everyone in America would come to know all about Edward Wheeler Hall and Eleanor Mills. Their names and faces became as familiar as those of Clara Bow or Charles Lindbergh. Every bit of the prolonged investigation was reported in the papers—then the proceedings before the grand jury that failed to indict anyone, and finally, almost four years later on the basis of new evidence unearthed by the tabloid New York Mirror, the arrest, trial, and acquittal of Mrs. Frances Stevens Hall and her two brothers, charged with the murder of her husband and his mistress. To keep on top of the case eight daily newspapers rented houses in New Brunswick for their staffs of reporters and photographers. The world’s largest portable telegraph switchboard—formerly used at the Dempsey-Tunney fight—was set up at press headquarters. Before it was all over, more words had been written about the Hall-Mills case than about any other single topic in the history of the world—enough words to fill nine volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Everyone wrote about the case, reporters and novices alike: Damon Runyon, Louella Parsons, Dorothy Dix, Billy Sunday, and even Charlotte Mills, the teenaged daugh- 274 ter of one of the victims. In the papers America could read every intimate detail of the Hall-Mills affair, including the letters the philandering minister had sent to his choir singer: “Dear, dear, darling heart of mine: . . . I wanted to get away to dreamland, Heavenland. Can I meet you tomorrow , our road, at two p.m.? . . . Dearest, love me hard, harder than ever, for your babykins is longing for his mother.” The whole sordid business was exposed: secret notes hidden in the minister’s bookshelf, groping sexual encounters in the darkened church, torrid letters from babykins. And the newspaper-buying public couldn’t get enough. According to Bruce Bliven, writing in the New Republic, that intense public curiosity grew as the case stripped the wraps off one “fairly typical respectable American town.” As witness after witness came forward, they fleshed out a picture not only of the errant couple but of New Brunswick as well. On the night that Hall and Mills were murdered, Bliven wrote with some exaggeration, half the townspeople were in rustic DeRussey’s Lane, and all of them were up to no good: theft, assault, incest, adultery, murder. The idyllic country lane came to seem as sinister as any urban alley. And the reading public believed that “there are ten thousand DeRussey’s Lanes” and that “the pathetic missives between the enamored cleric and his love could be duplicated in every mail sack. . . .” Social scientists who began earnestly surveying American sexual behavior in the twenties confirmed that the Reverend Mr. Hall was not alone in his hypocrisy. From all accounts, the disillusioned hangover of World War I stimulated sexual activity already on the rise at the end of the nineteenth century. Apparently more and more upstanding citizens, including a good many preachers and devout parishioners, were slipping over the back fence, both before and after marriage. What made the Reverend Mr. Hall and Mrs. Mills so endlessly fascinating, then, was their very ordinariness and banality...