Moonlight Murder on Lovers' Lane (3 page)

James cooperated with the initial interrogation and suggested robbery as the motive.

When asked by the Somerset district attorney to recount his movements during the day before the murders, James told the police that at 5:45 PM on that Thursday, he was sweeping up at St. John’s. In fact, he’d been late for dinner, arriving home at 6:15. Eleanor had been there.

After dinner, James went out to the porch while his wife left the house. She said she was going to call Rev. Hall. (The Mills had no phone, so she had to go out.) She returned a few minutes later, but then prepared to leave again. He asked where she was going, and she called to him in a saucy tone to “follow me and find out.” It seemed like a challenge, but he kept working on the porch until 9:45.

Eleanor Reinhart Mills

For another half-hour, James said, he read the newspaper. He began to wonder where Eleanor was, so he went over to the church. Because he stopped to buy a soda, he arrived around 11 PM. When he failed to find her, he went home. She wasn’t there, either, so he went to bed.

However, he was unable to sleep, so around 2 AM, James got up again and went back to the church. No one was there. He pondered what his wife might have meant when she flung her parting words at him. He thought that perhaps he should have followed her.

The next morning, James had gone to work. He had not reported Eleanor missing, he said, because she’d often left home for a day or two without telling him where she was. At 8:30 AM, he went to the church.

There he ran into Frances Hall, who mentioned that her husband had not come home the night before. He asked her whether she thought that they had eloped—a strange statement from a man who had denied knowledge of an affair. James told the prosecutor that Frances had replied, “God knows. I think they are dead and can’t come home.”

Frances contacted James several more times that day—Friday—and he told her that Eleanor had not yet returned. She repeated again that they must be dead.

James mentioned that he’d noticed a page from the newspaper on the reverend’s desk, and that same page had been missing from his own paper. He wondered if his wife had left it there. It featured an article on a prominent minister’s liberal views on divorce.

When James had learned on Saturday that his wife’s body had been found with the reverend’s, he’d gone directly to the Hall residence. There he had collapsed and had to be revived.

Investigators also questioned the Mills’ daughter, Charlotte. Although she didn’t know much, she confirmed that her mother had clipped the article from the newspaper and had said she was taking it to Rev. Hall.

James and Charlotte Mills

It seemed difficult to believe that James had failed to add up the clues. He wasn’t too bright, they could see, but the specific facts that he chose to mention suggested that he was lying about having no suspicions about his wife and the reverend. It was almost as if James had collaborated with Frances on a deflective strategy.

Chapter 7: Persons of Interest

Pearl Bahmer, the girl who’d noticed the bodies and called the police, became a suspect when detectives learned that she had been acquainted with Rev. Hall but had not recognized the dead man. She’d also reported a gold watch near his body, but had withdrawn her statement when she learned there was no watch.

Two other potential suspects were Frances’ two brothers, Willie and Henry.

Willie Stevens, an excitable man, lived with Frances and might have felt protective if he knew about the affair.

Willie Stevens

Willie suffered from a mental disorder that prevented him from managing on his own, and at times he was impulsive, explosive, and somewhat reckless. Willie wore thick glasses and had a heavy walrus mustache and bulging eyes, which helped to portray him to the press as quite a character. He spent his free time at the fire station, playing cards and running errands. He wanted to be a firefighter, so they humored him.

Willie said that he’d been in his room on Thursday evening. He’d gone to bed between 8:30 and 9, but his sister had awakened him in the night. She had been worried and wanted him to go with her to the church. Like her, he said they had also walked past the Mills’ residence. Once they were home again, he’d returned to bed.

Willie admitted to police that he owned a .32-caliber revolver, which he had not shot in over 10 years. Edward Hall had owned such a pistol as well. Willie’s, it turned out, had been disabled and could not have fired the deadly shots. It was not the murder weapon, but Willie did know how to shoot. So did Henry Stevens.

Two years older than Willie, Henry rarely visited his former family home from where he lived an hour away on the Jersey shore. He was an excellent marksman, but he had an alibi. He claimed that he’d been out fishing during the estimated time of the murders. However, his relationship with Frances and his skill with a gun kept him on the suspect list.

Chapter 8: Different Stories

The next step in the investigation was to locate people who’d seen either victim before they died. The Halls’ maid remembered the call from Eleanor that evening and had seen the reverend leave the house. She’d also seen Frances playing solitaire.

Eleanor Mills

Nothing was unusual about any of this, but in the morning, Willie had told her that “something terrible happened last night, and Mrs. Hall and I have been up most of the night.” He would not elaborate, but this odd incident had occurred before they’d learned about the murders. Willie might have been echoing Frances’ concern about her missing husband rather than referring to a specific incident, but investigators thought the maid’s report cast further suspicion on Frances and Willie as co-perpetrators.

Willie’s odd statements acquired more significance when several men at the fire station mentioned his agitated manner. On Friday, before the bodies were found, he had told them, “Something big is going to pop. You’ll hear about it later.”

The detectives wanted to know what Willie had meant, but the Stevens family attorney dismissed his comments as those of a simpleton. No one took Willie seriously, he said.

John Meany, who drove the trolley from St. John’s to a stop near De Russey’s Lane, said that he had seen Eleanor board it on Thursday night. He knew her because she frequently took the trolley to that area of town. (There was speculation that the lovers had used compassionate visits to the eldercare home near De Russey’s Lane as a cover story for their secret outings.)

Meany recalled that Eleanor had been the last passenger to get off that night and he’d seen her walk toward De Russey’s Lane.

Another witness said she saw Eleanor, who had seemed quite cheerful, carrying a small parcel that evening. (As no parcel was found near the body, detectives speculated that perhaps it had been her love letters.) This same woman soon saw Edward walking fast in the same direction. However, she had noticed no one following either of them.

A night watchman for the New Jersey State College for Women, which was located near the Hall mansion, reported seeing the lights on in the Hall house all night. He’d also spotted a lone female figure enter the house at 2:30 AM, which confirmed what Frances had stated (except that the watchman had not seen Willie). A student had seen lights in the church around 1:15 AM.

Millie Opie, who lived near the Mills family, said that she’d seen Eleanor and Edward meeting at the Mills apartment nearly every afternoon. This report confirmed their affair.

Charlotte Mills, a senior in high school, admitted that her parents did not get along. Over the past two years, Eleanor had been sleeping in Charlotte’s room. Charlotte supposedly revealed to a reporter that she thought her mother had had an affair several years earlier with another man, Ralph Gorsline, who was also a member of the choir.

Ralph Gorsline

Although this comment raised another angle, no one thought to interrogate him. Gorsline gave a statement about his knowledge of Edward’s character, but had said he could offer nothing else.

On Sunday, September 17, Somerset County District Attorney Azariah Beekman said he had a solid lead. He surmised from reports of shots and screams on De Russey’s Lane that another couple having their own rendezvous had killed the two victims.

“The couple was likely killed elsewhere,” Beekman surmised, “before being dumped where they were found.”

However, this seems to have been no more than a ploy to change the jurisdiction of this political hot potato from Somerset County to the adjacent Middlesex County. Still, this added one more item to the growing “to-do” list: the murder location had to be proven.

Chapter 9: First Conjecture

Just before Eleanor’s body was removed from Sutphen’s Funeral Home in Somerville, Dr. Long cut into her abdomen. Apparently he was looking for evidence of pregnancy. He closed her up without a word and helped to transfer the deceased woman to New Brunswick.

The press was having a field day with the contents of the love letters from the scene. Eleanor had dubbed her lover “Babykins,” and he’d apparently accepted it. “Dearest, love me hard, hard, harder than ever,” he’d written in one of his own letters, “for your babykins is longing for his mother.” Each spoke lavishly of an urgent need for the other, as “liquid fire into your very soul.”