A Pastor and His Rumored Mistress Were Found Dead Under a Tree in 1922—Who Killed Them?

On September 16, 1922, a young couple taking a walk just outside of New Brunswick, N.J., came upon what appeared to be a peaceful scene. A well-dressed man and woman were lying on their backs beneath a crabapple tree, apparently asleep. The man had a hat pulled over his eyes, while the woman rested her head on his outstretched arm. 

But when the strolling couple took a closer look, they realized the pair wasn’t sleeping at all—they were dead. The man had been shot once in the head with a .32-caliber automatic pistol. The woman had been shot three times and her throat had been cut. Love letters lay scattered between the two bodies, and a calling card rested against the man’s foot.

The bodies were identified as Rev. Edward Hall, a 41-year-old pastor at New Brunswick’s St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church, and Eleanor Mills, a 34-year-old member of his church choir. Both were married to other people but were rumored to have been having an affair.

What followed was one of the most sensational murder cases the nation had ever seen, captivating the public and the press with its lurid details, marital scandal and tantalizing mystery. The timing was perfect for the burgeoning American tabloid press, which helped turn the murders into a national obsession.

“This was like if O.J. Simpson had happened in 1922,” Joe Pompeo, the author of BLOOD & INK: The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder That Hooked America on True Crime, told the Criminal podcast. “It really was just a media circus and probably a type of media circus that America hadn’t seen that level of until that point.”

Investigators initially assumed the murders would be easy to solve. However, the case dragged on for weeks—until mid-October when a pig farmer named Jane Gibson came forward as an eyewitness. Nicknamed the “Pig Woman,” Gibson pointed the finger at Frances Hall, the reverend’s 48-year-old wife, as well as her brothers, Willie Stevens and Henry Stevens, and a cousin named Henry Carpender.

Frances was a member of a wealthy and socially prominent family with connections to the Johnson & Johnson fortune. As a woman raised in the late Victorian age, when privacy and decorum were paramount, she was mortified by the public spectacle—and insisted that she had the “utmost trust and confidence” in her husband. 

“I know of nothing wrong that he had ever done,” she told the The New York Times.

A grand jury was convened in late November 1922 to consider whether to indict anyone. But after five days of testimony from 67 witnesses, they declined to bring charges. Frances headed off to Europe, and the attention surrounding the case largely fizzled out.

Four years later, however, the case was thrust back into the spotlight when William Randolph Hearst’s New York Daily Mirror began reporting on new evidence that seemed to implicate Frances and her relatives. The revelations prompted New Jersey’s governor to reopen the case and, in July 1926, Frances, her brothers and her cousin were arrested. All four insisted they were innocent and pleaded not guilty. 

Their three-week trial began in November 1926 with reporters from across the nation streaming into Somerville, N.J., the small town where the highly anticipated proceedings took place. 

The trial was the culmination of a media frenzy that had been building for years, fueled in part by the American public’s appetite for sensational crime. The country was emerging from World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic and entering the turbulent years of Prohibition, a period of profound social and cultural change.

“Society was exhausted, and this case energized the public,” Kajsa Piatt, co-host of the Crime, Cocktails and BS podcast, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “This case had wealth, sex, religion and a crime of passion all in one, which has always been an irresistible combination for the public.”

The trial was rife with drama, as jurors heard intimate letters between the reverend and his lover, watched Frances endure questioning and listened to testimony from the “Pig Woman,” who, by that point, was terminally ill with cancer and testified from an iron hospital bed.

In the end, jurors acquitted Frances and her relatives. The family later filed $1.5 million libel lawsuits against Hearst and his publications, which was ultimately settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. Frances died in 1942 at the age of 68. 

In 1969, a man named Julius Bolyog came forward and said Willie Stevens had asked him to deliver $6,000 from Frances to two hitmen who’d been hired to kill the reverend and his mistress. Investigators looked into the accusations, but were unable to substantiate his claims. The case remains unsolved.

The Hall-Mills murders may have faded into history, but they have hardly been forgotten. The case continues to attract true-crime devotees more than a century later, inspiring books, performances and even walking tours of the New Brunswick sites connected to the crime. As Harold Schechter, a true crime historian and professor emeritus at Queens College, wrote for the Yale Review in 2019, it remains “one of the country’s most notorious unsolved murders.”

Will it ever be solved? At this point, it’s highly unlikely, Kevin Hale, a retired police chief who now serves as chair of the criminal justice program at Post University, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. 

“Someone born at the time of this double murder would now be 104 years old,” he says. “Anyone with direct knowledge of this case and the media circus surrounding it is long gone.”

The case could probably only be solved if someone came forward with an admission of guilt, such as a diary entry, he adds. So far, though, there’s no indication that anything like that exists.

“At this point,” he says, “there is very little hope that it will ever be solved.”