The Hall–Mills Murder

A rector, a choir singer, scattered love letters, and a witness called the Pig Woman.

In September 1922 a young couple walking down a lane outside New Brunswick found two bodies beneath a crab apple tree: the Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall, rector of a well-to-do Episcopal church, and Eleanor Mills, who sang in his choir and was married to the church sexton. Their love letters lay scattered around them.

The puzzle

The affair had been an open secret. The obvious suspects were the two betrayed spouses, the rector's wealthy wife Frances and Eleanor's husband James. But the investigation was a shambles from the start: the scene was trampled by sightseers, and a grand jury in 1922 declined to indict anyone.

What happened next

Four years later a New York tabloid dug up new claims, and the case was reopened. Frances Hall and two of her brothers went on trial in 1926. The star prosecution witness, a local pig farmer nicknamed the Pig Woman, said she had seen the killing from her mule; she was gravely ill by then and gave her evidence from a hospital bed carried into the courtroom.

The jury acquitted all three. No one else was ever tried, and the murders remain officially unsolved.

Why it still fascinates

It was one of the first great tabloid trials, with reporters crowding the courthouse. The case had money, scandal, a church and a cast of eccentrics, and it was never solved.