Four years ago I wrote in two magazine articles an analysis of the crime which eliminated the Stevens family as having any guilty knowledge of it, and protested against the authorities of Middlesex and Somerset Counties giving way completely in the direction of their investigations to the influence of the opinion of the herd.
But, egged by the public clamor which arose against the shocked and bereaved woman immediately after the finding of the slain bodies of the faithless husband and the faithless wife, the law’s pack would follow only one scent, and that was the trail that led to Mrs. Hall’s doorstep.
They grabbed at the obvious and, in my opinion, were led into a subtle trap when they did so, a trap into which they floundered to the immense, though, of course, necessarily hidden satisfaction of the real murderers of Hall and Eleanor Mills.
Mrs. Hall must be guilty! Who else had a motive for the murder of the couple but she and she alone? Who else could have been induced to join issue with the deceived and dishonored woman of wealth and quality but her immediate relatives? And her eldest brother, Henry, a sharpshooter, too!
All they could see — think of — was that Mrs. Hall had so obvious a motive for the deed. Certainly she had. But it seems never to have occurred to the investigators at any time that had murder come into Mrs. Hall’s mind, this was a very fact calculated to stay her hand.
As an intelligent woman contemplating such a grave crime she could not have but realized that the instant it was discovered her name would come uppermost first of all as a suspect.
This, indeed, is what the real murderers of Hall and Eleanor Mills realized. It was what they expected to happen. It was under this smoke screen they expected to escape and have escaped.
None who followed fully and closely the trial at Somerville can possibly adjudge the jury’s verdict to have been of the Scotch variety — “not proven.”
It was offered and given as a complete, hearty exoneration of Mrs. Hall, gentle, amiable Willie, clean-cut and manly, Henry Stevens and their cousin, Carpender.
Every one of the jurymen who was interviewed gave it as his conviction that the murderers of the clergyman and his light o’ love still walk free and unsuspected.
And such is mine. And probably yours, if you have made a study of the mystery and the trial which recently ended.
In view of the present aspect of the case and what may come of it, it will be interesting to revert again to the beginning of the mystery. And the blunders of investigation at its very start.
All the opaque-minded sleuths could see, would consider, was the guilt of Mrs. Hall. She was the one who obviously had the most reason to commit the crime.
They would not consider that others might be using that very obviousness of motive to blind them.
Nor could any consideration be gained when absurdities in the case they were seeking to build against Mrs. Hall and her brothers were pointed out.
There was this, for instance: They pictured Mrs. Hall, after long knowledge of her husband’s infidelity with Mrs. Mills, after long brooding over it, after coming into possession of the woman’s love letters to her husband with which to confront them as gathering her forces for murder, as following the rector and Mrs. Mills to their place of rendezvous in De Russey’s lane, and there effecting her terrible revenge.
She knew that in the nature of things she must be suspected, first of all, of the deed and that if by mischance unforeseen evidence was forthcoming that she and her brothers were in De Russey’s lane at the time and place of murder, grim, disgraceful death in the electric chair was ahead for all of them.
Yet she left, scattered to the sport of wind and rain for hours, days, blowing about the bodies of the murdered dead, the only evidence which might serve to save her!
I mean the love letters of Mrs. Mills to Hall which the assassins left scattered on the grass!
These certainly would have been Mrs. Hall’s most valuable asset in a defense of last resort — that of the “unwritten law.”
For, however, judges may frown on it, skillful lawyers have a way, many ways, of worming such a plea to the attention of the jury. A defense of insanity at the time of the commission of the crime would have amply provided it. And the emotionalism of juries where gravely wronged women come before them as murder defendants is notorious in the land.
Yet she left these invaluable letters behind when they might so easily have been returned to the rector’s desk, there to be found by the investigators of the police and claimed on her behalf by her attorneys! Yet she abandoned them to all probability of obliteration by rain from the skies or rats of the field!
Then the lightning change which had taken place in the character of Mrs. Hall — if you were to believe the detectives. A woman who for more than fifty years had led a flawless Christian life, both in prayer and practice, turns suddenly into a bloodthirsty ogre over a wrong which most persons are satisfied to settle in the divorce courts.
When Mrs. Hall protested that she had known nothing of the liason between the rector and the choir singer, was unaware of their meetings, their love letters and their plan to elope to Japan, the investigators would give her protest no credence.
Yet there was the indubitable fact that Mrs. Hall had in this while been giving the rector considerable sums of money for his private bank account.
As if, knowing of the intended flight of Hall and Mrs. Mills to distant lands, she would have placed herself in the position of financing the trip!
They said it was impossible that Mrs. Hall, as she testified at her trial, could have been unaware of the illicit romance going on between her husband and giddy Mrs. Mills.
In doing this, they deliberately turned their back on the facts of her reputation and the position of unique dignity and seclusion that her wealth had given her as regards the women of her husband’s congregation.
They could have found out that Mrs. Hall had never made herself one with any of the women cliques of the church, detested gossip in all its forms and had never permitted the parlor of the rectory to become a salon of small scandal.
It is a trite observation to point out that the person most seriously concerned in such affairs as the Hall-Mills situation is the last to hear of the matter. Especially would this apply in the case of Mrs. Hall.
Those who knew of it would not have dared go to her without absolute proof of what they charged, and this they did not possess. As rector and intensely active church-worker Hall and Mrs. Mills had been hypocritically able to throw a fine disguise over the reality of their romantic association.
The only person who had seen the man and woman in a compromising position was a servant in the Hall home, who came upon Mrs. Mills sitting on Hall’s knee in the rector’s study in the church. She swore she had kept her own counsel, had never whispered a word of it to Mrs. Hall.
Again the investigators persisted in seeing something implying guilt in every action of Mrs. Hall on the night of the disappearance of the rector and his light o’ love, when in reality every move Mrs. Hall made, every word she spoke were those of a woman who had suddenly come upon a double cause for great mental distraction — the disappearance of her husband firstly, and the fact that this disappearance was in the company of another woman.
Her husband was the rector of a church. And she knew that to report to the police the simultaneous disappearance of her husband and Mrs. Mills must have the effect of immediately bringing a crash of scandal about her ears.