On September 22, 1922, Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall, an Episcopal priest in New Brunswick, was found shot dead along with his mistress, Eleanor Reinhardt Mills, a member of the church choir, in De Russey’s Lane in Franklin Township. Suspicion fell on Reverend Hall’s wife, Frances, and her brothers, but there were no indictments. The crime became popularly known as the “Hall-Mills Murders.”
Continued newspaper speculation on the Hall-Mills murders led Governor A. Harry Moore to request a new inquiry into the case in 1926. The investigation led to indictments of Frances Hall and her brothers for murder and a trial that began on November 3 and lasted thirty days. Although the accused had the motive and ability to commit the murders, the evidence to convict them, especially the erratic testimony of the “pig woman,” Jane Gibson, a pig farmer on whose property the bodies were found, and whose claim to be a witness provided a prime rationale for the indictments, was not convincing to the jury and they were acquitted.
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The case was national news, the biggest New Jersey crime story in history until the subsequent Lindbergh kidnapping. A recent book claims that it inspired a similar murder scene in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby.
