My Fun World

Ninety years ago today, two teenage lovebirds took a morning stroll through the New Jersey countryside and walked into one of the most enduring murder mysteries in America’s history.

It would feature a bizarre cast, led by a character known as the “Pig Woman,” become fodder for a tabloid war, and bewilder crime experts for decades.

What the young couple found that morning, under a crab apple tree, were a man and woman, lying side by side, dead.

The bodies had been carefully posed, feet pointing toward the tree, the man’s hand under the woman’s neck, and her hand on his knee. A Panama hat covered the man’s head, and a scarf was wrapped around the woman’s neck.

A single bullet ended the man’s life, while the woman had been killed with three bullets in the head, and a slash, ear to ear. An autopsy later revealed that her larynx and tongue had been cut out.

A card propped up against his foot gave the man’s identity — Rev. Edward Wheeler Hall, 41, pastor of the Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist in New Brunswick.

The woman was identified as Eleanor Reinhardt Mills, 34, wife of the church janitor, Jimmy Mills, 45, and a singer in the choir.

She was also, as almost everyone in New Brunswick seemed to know, the reverend’s lover.

Steamy letters from the “glamour-girl of the choir,” as the Daily News described her, to her minister, were torn and scattered about the bodies.

Jealous rage seemed a likely motive, and suspicion fell on Mrs. Frances Stevens Hall, the reverend’s wife. She was seven years older than her husband, but what she lacked in feminine charms, she made up for with a family fortune. It was no secret that the minister had married for money.

From the start the investigation was a mess. Souvenir hunters rendered the crime scene useless by handling evidence, trampling underbrush and stripping the crab apple tree of its bark, then pulling it up by the roots.

Police had very little to go on, until Jane Gibson, a hog farmer who lived in a shack not far from the scene, came forward.

Newspapers dubbed her the “Pig Woman,” and she would become the star witness for the prosecution.

Gibson said she had heard a noise on the night of Sept. 14, and saw someone in her cornfield. Figuring it was a thief, she saddled her mule and rode in pursuit but, instead, came upon a parked car. There she heard a bitter argument between two men and two women, one with white hair, like Mrs. Hall’s.