I have lived in New Jersey for well over half my life, but I spent the first several decades in a kind of residential denial. I lived there, but I could not face up to being from there on account of certain dumb prejudices about turnpike exits, oil refineries, and Atlantic City casinos. I longed for the rural wilds of my rapidly mythologizing youth. Very gradually, though, I have come to appreciate that New Jersey is one of the really interesting places on earth both in terms of its geology and its human ecology; and there are few places in the Ozarks more gorgeously placed deep in the sticks than my son’s old farm thirty miles away in Hunterdon County.
Just at the moment I am focusing on crime in New Jersey, especially murder. I don’t know that there is measurably more of it here than most places, but from the historical point of view it seems to me more interesting and pace-setting. Not too many actual murders become the stuff of compelling literature after Shakespeare’s time, but one can think of Dreiser’s great American Tragedy or Meyer Levin’s barely fictional Compulsion before getting to masterworks of non-fiction like Capote’s In Cold Blood or Joan Didion on the Manson clan. But in the recent Library of America anthology,* True Crime, the top homicidal century, the twentieth, is represented by no fewer than three all-time greats from central New Jersey alone. Each of them received prophetically sensational news coverage. I don’t know that this essay will be the first in a series, but let me begin with Hall-Mills. Hall-Mills was not a piece of mind-dulling tax legislation, but a sizzling scandal and tabloid bonanza. It may not have been “the greatest story since the Resurrection,” Mencken’s memorable characterization of the Lindbergh kidnapping case for which Hall-Mills was the journalistic warm-up, but at the time it was the hottest thing to hit central Jersey since Granny got her titty caught in the wringer.
There are several Episcopal churches in New Brunswick. One is large and ancient. It was one of the official venues from which the Declaration of Independence was publicly proclaimed, and its churchyard preserves the remains of Revolutionary War heroes. I know this church well, as my wife was its rector for a decade in the 1990s. Another, St. John the Evangelist, dates from the Civil War and still holds on, though greatly reduced in size and entirely without the social glitz it appears to have commanded in the Roaring Twenties, when its rector, the Rev. Edward W. Hall, cut quite a figure in the old Dutch town. Hall was married to a wealthy heiress of the old aristocracy, and in this instance figure-cutting included a red-hot and insufficiently concealed affair with a woman named Eleanor Mills, choir member and wife of the church sexton.
In September, 1922, a young man and his teen-aged girlfriend strolling along a secluded country lane west of town, came upon two corpses under a crabapple tree, eventually identified as the remains of the scandalous lovers just mentioned. Both had been shot through the head, the woman three times. Eleanor Mills had also had her throat slit and her tongue excised, though in Keystone Cops fashion the authorities failed to notice the lacuna! The utter brutality of the murders had been superficially disguised by the arrangement of the bodies in positions of restful, mild intimacy. The police thought that the pages of love letters decorating the carnage possibly offered a significant clue as to motive. New Brunswick, whose police were first called to the scene, is in Middlesex County. But the horror site, by presumption also the murder site, was in Franklin Township, Somerset County. While the Jersey authorities puzzled over jurisdictional issues incomprehensible since the time of James II, the hastily informed populations of two counties gawked and trampled about the grim tableau gathering souvenir crabapple leaves and bloody shards of love letter and befouling the crime scene beyond forensic redemption. It’s not the crime. It’s not the cover-up. It’s the constabulary incompetence.
The unusual suspects
Nobody was convicted of the killings, and nobody absolutely knows for sure who dunnit. One intriguing recent theory is that it was the Ku Klux Klan, vigilant guardians of public morality. But…come on. About the only theory at the time, and certainly the most probable one still, was that it was the work of or on behalf of the wronged blueblood wife, Frances and/or her peculiar relatives, two brothers--Henry Stevens and William (‘Willie”) Stevens and their cousin Henry de la Bruyere Carpender. Ordinarily it would be obvious that anybody named Henry de la Bruyere Carpender had to have done it, or something worse; but he was never actually tried, and this time you would be safer putting your money on Willie Stevens, who in addition to being a most peculiar man who lived in a foggy thicket somewhere along the spectrum, boasted credentials as an ace pistolier. His chief, if not only regular employment, voluntary of course, was hanging out and schmoozing with the guys at the firehouse. He seems to have been a man who covered some serious inner darkness with the outward eccentricity of a trust fund simpleton.
Sensational court trials almost naturally take on a theatrical cast, especially those dubbed by the press “the trial of the century,” of which there are seldom fewer than three per decade. And hot pants in high places has ever been a guaranteed sell with the American people. Midwifed by the press, the Hall-Mills trial, featuring the three aforementioned Stevens siblings, finally took place in 1926, There are fascinating legal and evidentiary aspects of the case--the sadistic misogyny suggested in the overkill of Eleanor Mills, for example. Just now my two principal interests in it are somewhat eccentric. The first has to do with the dramatic suburbanization of New Jersey in the middle of the last century. Before World War II the murder site, a modest walk from central New Brunswick, was such rural and untraveled farmland that the bodies lay in place for the better part of two days before being discovered. The old lovers’ lane is now overwhelmed with McMansions, fast food joints, and a heavily traveled highway. I have seen a good deal of this happen while living here. The second concerns a recurrent pattern of theatrical type-casting.
All mysteries mystify, but many famous American murder cases in their dramaturgy strangely feature, in addition to the principals (beleaguered or defiant defendants, celebrity lawyers), what might be called a designated Best Supporting Actor. Surely you will remember Kato Kaelen from the O. J. Simpson trial? He became, quite literally, a household name, more familiar to most Americans than the names of their political representatives. Where do the Kato Kaeilins of the legal world come from? They are not in the pages of Blackstone. The Kato Kaelen of Hall-Mills was the pig farmer through whose land the death-lane cut its path. She had a name (Jane Gibson), but she lives in history as the Pig Lady. The Pig Lady was eccentric and seriously ill. By the time of the trial she had to be brought to the courtroom on a pallet. Over two long investigations she provided the police with a great deal of testimony, contradictory and incoherent, but colorful and captivating. With so much available, the prosecutors chose the best and forgot the rest. Her tale was this: During a nocturnal mule-ride along her lonely lane in pursuit of “wagon noises” and suspected thieves, she had come upon the murder scene, illuminated by automobile lights, as the crime was happening, was about to happen, or had just happened. Yes, she could identify the defendants, but she had hurried her steed along home when she realized trouble was brewing, or perhaps was already poured out in its second cup. While she testified from her prone position her mother, a demented crone, sat prominently in the courtroom muttering “She’s lying…lying.”
Testimony of the Pig Lady
Wily Willie Stevens hardly batted an eye at this testimony, coolly treating it with the scorn with which he so obviously wanted it be be viewed. Willie Stevens is perhaps the most remarkable member of this varied dramatis personae. In 1937 he was the subject of a fascinating New Yorker essay by James Thurber, “A Sort of Genius,” that recaptured my own interest in the case when I read it last week. This was not at all Thurber’s normal line of work. He was one of America’s great humorists, not a crime reporter, but here we find him strangely serious, though not a little sardonic. He doesn’t say it in so many words, but it’s pretty clear that he thinks that Willie Stevens, so expert in convincing others of his own simple-mindedness, was indeed a genius—a homicidal one.
*True Crime: An American Anthology (350 Years of Brilliant Writing About Dark Deeds), ed. Harold Schechter (Library of America. 2008), 788 pages. Thurber’s essay, “A Sort of Genius,” is at pp. 382-406.
