Three hundred newspaper men and women sat in a curving, triple arc of chairs facing the judge's bench, the witness stand, the jury box, of a tiny courtroom in Somerville, N. J. The air was stuffy. An angular court crier (John Bunn by name) intoned in a creaky voice, "Hear ye. . . ." The reporters' pencils moved rapidly, their eyes searched the faces of the witnesses, the defendants, the lawyers. Occasionally a truck rumbled through the street outside. In here, a certain Mrs. Frances Stevens Hall and her brothers, the Messrs. Henry and "Willie" Stevens, were on trial for the murder of a clergyman and a choir singer. All the Real INSIDE NEWS of the Hall-Mills Murder
Told by the newspaper responsible for
the investigation resulting in this
trial, the
DAILY MIRROR
So bleated a placard appearing broadcast through New York, Long Island, New Jersey. Other newspapers were not laggard. Sweet Dorothy Dix, writing for the New York Evening Post, and syndicated throughout the U. S., described Charlotte Mills, daughter of the dead singer, as "the quintessence of this hard-boiled age, when girls have no old-fashioned reverence for a mother's purity, but, on the contrary, condone mother's frailty and help her out in her little 'affairs.'"
Damon Runyon, tired 0. Henry of press syndicates, wrote about "this pleasant looking little courthouse, all white and trim" and about the "Pig Woman." Everybody focused on the Pig Woman, so-called because she once kept pigs. She was the star witness for the State. By name Jane Gibson, she used to be a circus rider. She brought to court with her a small baby (called the "mystery child" because of its obscure parentage). Erratic, obese, disheveled, suffering from a mortal organic disease, she said that she was driving her mule down a lane the night that Dr. Hall was killed. She heard shots in a field, saw flashes of light, hands groping, momentarily terrible faces. She saw a man pitch forward under a crabapple tree.
That crabapple tree no longer stands. As testimony to the public morbidity which the murder, the various hearings, the long investigations have excited throughout the U. S., souvenir hunters long since rooted it up, tore it apart, carried it away. The bodies of Dr. Hall and Mrs. Mills, his mistress, were found side by side under the crabapple tree. A bullet had killed the amorous Episcopalian. The woman's throat was cut and there were three bullets in her head.
In Somerville, dynamic Alexander Simpson, special prosecutor, with a high decisive voice and little hands, made his opening address. While he spoke, a giant telegraph switchboard with 120 "positions" distributed his words to various newspapers; more telegraph wires than have been used for any news event* except the Tunney-Dempsey fight, crackled into action. The front page of the New York Mirror was covered with a picture of Mr. Mills kneeling in sad prayerful pose beside the open grave of his wife. The New York Times wrote about the trial as spaciously as if it were a polar exploration.