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On July 16, Editor Payne cracked his whip and the Mirror started galloping. A full-page wash drawing showed the bodies of the Rev. Hall and Mrs. Mills as they were found beneath the crabapple tree. The headline bleated : "HALL -MILLS MURDER MYSTERY BARED." The story insinuated that Widow Hall and her deficient brother "Willie" would be the storm centre of the new investigation.
That able trade journal, Editor & Publisher, has told of the crafty Mirror's strategy:
"The Mirror itself, purposely, Payne said, let the story die down a little on July 27 and 28. In the masthead of the paper this question was published: 'Can Members, of a Wealthy Family in New Jersey Commit a Crime and Get Away with it?'
"Mayer told Editor & Publisher it was figured that opposition papers would spot this and would surmise the Mirror was getting ready to abandon the sensational story. Reporters in New Jersey for the Mirror informed those in charge in New York that other papers began to withdraw their men when they noticed the Mirror was asking this question. The question seemed to demand an affirmative answer.
"As a matter of fact, state detectives had been in the Mirror's office during these two days examining the evidence the tabloid men had compiled. 'Well, there's nothing left to do but arrest Mrs. Hall,' they announced after they had completed their inspection. 'We'll arrest her tomorrow night.'"
Editor Payne had everything ready in the Mirror office for a story of the arrest of Mrs. Hall. He went to New Brunswick on July 28, accompanied Captain Lamb of the State troopers, who arrested Mrs. Hall and hurried her away to Somerville, N. J. Back in Manhattan newsstands groaned under the weight of thousands of Daily Mirrors, big with complete arrest news. Other city and telegraph editors bit their respective tongues, frantically bellowed for confirmation. . . .
From that day to this, the Hall-Mills murder has been bellowed in the front page headlines of the press, from the immaculate New York Times down to Bernarr Macfadden's pornoGraphic.
Because gum-chewers smack their lips loudly over this kind of thing, literate people are confronted by prodigious bales of newsprint upon the sexual and mental Aberrations of some commonplace people. In the office of the Daily Mirror, an earnest, bespectacled Puck dreams of other crusades.
Developments. In September the indictments against Mrs. Hall and her brothers were obtained. Last week the trial raged, a climax coming when the state showed that a leader of the 1922 investigations had accepted a $2,500 bribe to leave New Jersey. . . . And then there was always the Pig Woman . . . she collapsed on the witness stand . . . Prosecutor Simpson snatched her away from her physicians, took her to another hospital under guard of his own men . . . Reporters, heartthrob specialists scribbled; so did Dorothy Dix. . .
*Not excepting that last great descent of big-town journalism upon small-town litigation, the Dayton (Tenn.) "Monkey Trial" of 1925.