Flynn’s Weekly. Vol. 22, No. 3, March 5, 1927

The Empty Chair by Charles Somerville

The most significant factor in the Hall-Mills mystery was permitted to die, almost without a thought.

Back in May, 1910, I took a balloon trip for the New York World in company with Professor Todd, the astronomer of Amherst College, and Leo Stevens, an expert aeronaut.

We went up to make sky-high observations of Halley’s comet. When I arrived at North Adams, Massachusetts, the jumping-off place, our balloon, the Cleveland, was already half filled to its capacity of eighty thousand cubic feet of gas.

Thus, half filled, it looked big enough, but when finally it was fully inflated, the thing was enormous, a ball as big as a four-storied house. We dangled on it for twelve hours in a small basket and were steadily borne along by a fifty-mile an hour gale, landing in Hyacinth, Canada — about thirty-five miles north of Montreal — next morning.

Of course, I was as nervous as a witch all the time, yet managed not to show it to any great extent. But it was when we made our landing that I got the big shock of the trip.

For when Stevens had us down so that the basket was skipping along the surface of a wheat field he gave one hard, muscular tug at the rip-rope, uncorking the balloon, and the next instant the giant ball on which I had been floating thousands of feet in the air all night long was gone!

Just as swift as that!

A flaccid heap of rubber and silk, on the field, had been made of the gigantic balloon in one sweep of the arm, a single, hard tug at a rope!

And now this last comes to my mind as a comparison strikingly applicable to the Hall-Mills trial.

Even as I had watched the inflation of the Cleveland, the public watched in the newspaper columns the swelling and swelling of the case of the prosecution against Mrs. Hall, her two brothers and her cousin, Carpender.

Thrilling forecast on forecast of tremendously damning evidence to come when the case finally rolled up to the jury, was daily made by officials of the prosecution!

Justice insidiously held at bay by social influence and corrupt dollars, was about to break its way through to a tremendous triumph! The truth was coming out at last! “Let the chips fall where they may!”

The quiet, elderly woman who had spent a lifetime in religious devotion and the practice of Christian ethics in all her worldly affairs, was to be exposed as a cold, calculating murderess, a merciless demon of vengeance with blood of ice!

Betrayed, humiliated by a younger husband who had found a younger love, she had called on her kinsmen to aid her in a savage reprisal on the guilty.

The stain on the shield of the House of Stevens must be wiped out in blood! This is what had happened — this is what the woman had done! And this is what genial Henry Stevens, amiable, gentle, simple Willie Stevens, and sane, cool-headed Carpender had joined her in doing!

Full proof of it was to be forthcoming to a jury, and Mrs. Hall and her fellow conspirators, after four years of the successful use of dollars and duplicity, were to be thoroughly unmasked, convicted, punished with death!

And then the actual trial.

Spatterings of innuendo, cunning suggestions of guilt, hazy identifications, the befuddled evidence of Willie Stevens’s alleged finger-print on a card found at the feet of the dead clergyman under the crab-apple tree in De Russey’s lane.

The evidence of the pig woman, hysterically recited from a stretcher, telling a story of recollections of the night of the murder more vivid and detailed than she had ever told before, even though her story grew more vivid and circumstantial each following time she told it in the four years succeeding the crime.

Then Henry Stevens took the stand.

It was precisely the same as when Leo Stevens used the rip-rope on the Cleveland up in Hyacinth.

When Henry Stevens finished testifying the prosecution’s balloon was gone. All that was left of it was a jumble of evidence on which no jury could be expected to convict any one. And all that had come out of it was a lot of gas.

The alibi Henry Stevens offered — the proof that he could not have been within fifty miles of the scene of the crime on the night of its occurrence — was impeccable, flawless in its credibility.

To be sure, it was friendly testimony, the testimony of his immediate neighbors in the seashore settlement where he made his summer and autumn home. But there were five such witnesses. And each was intelligent, clearly spoken, positive. And each of indubitable probity.

Neighbors or not, these weren’t the sort of persons who could be induced to shield an assassin for love or money.

It might be suggested that liking for Henry Stevens may have caused them unconsciously to be persuaded honestly enough that the night of the blue-fishing had been Thursday, when in reality it was Wednesday or Friday night.

In the case of one such witness or even two, this might be regarded as possible. But when they came five in a row, all certain that the night they saw him, was in his company, was also the night of the murder in De Russey’s lane scores of miles away, then doubt of the truth of their testimony completely dissolved.

Moreover, there was the corroborating fact of first importance. This was the evidence of the two young women and their mother that they fixed the night positively as Thursday because on Friday the girls were scheduled to depart for college and that on Friday morning Henry Stevens came for them and their luggage and drove them to the railway depot.

There was the evidence of the station agent and the train conductor obtainable that the girls had, on this day, taken this journey, and evidence that they had been borne to the station in Henry Steven’s wagon. This was iron-bound corroboration fixing the alibi of Stevens as the genuine article.

When Henry Stevens eliminated himself as possibly being present under the crab-apple tree when the Rev. Mr. Hall and Mrs. Eleanor Mills were slain, the State’s case fell at the prosecutor’s feet.

If not Henry Stevens, who of the other defendants could have performed such amazingly accurate shooting? Not Mrs. Hall possibly. Her declaration that she had never discharged a firearm in her life had to go unchallenged.

Not Willie. The jury once having seen and listened to him, taken the gauge of the childlike, gentle amiability of him, could not be successfully asked to discern beneath this character which he had sustained all his life, a murderous devil.

Nor was there any accusation against Carpender which described him as a preeminent target driller. Simpson had gone hot after Henry to prove him the chief in the actual slaying, and suddenly found himself confronted by the complete vanishment of the leading actor from the scene!

The more one thinks of it the more sheerly amazing it becomes that the State’s sleuths appear never to have gone to work seriously to check off this alibi of Henry Stevens which from the first — four years ago — they knew he asserted to be in existence.

At any time to have thoroughly investigated this evidence that afforded Henry Stevens so complete an armor against the accusation of murder, must have warned the prosecution of the hopelessness of the task it had set itself and thus the fiasco of the Hall-Mills trial most probably would have been averted.

And what I am writing now is not in the way of taking a smack at “Little Corporal” Simpson, special prosecutor when he is down, when the promised Austerlitz he was to win for justice has turned into a Waterloo.

Four years ago I wrote in two magazine articles an analysis of the crime which eliminated the Stevens family as having any guilty knowledge of it, and protested against the authorities of Middlesex and Somerset Counties giving way completely in the direction of their investigations to the influence of the opinion of the herd.

But, egged by the public clamor which arose against the shocked and bereaved woman immediately after the finding of the slain bodies of the faithless husband and the faithless wife, the law’s pack would follow only one scent, and that was the trail that led to Mrs. Hall’s doorstep.

They grabbed at the obvious and, in my opinion, were led into a subtle trap when they did so, a trap into which they floundered to the immense, though, of course, necessarily hidden satisfaction of the real murderers of Hall and Eleanor Mills.

Mrs. Hall must be guilty! Who else had a motive for the murder of the couple but she and she alone? Who else could have been induced to join issue with the deceived and dishonored woman of wealth and quality but her immediate relatives? And her eldest brother, Henry, a sharpshooter, too!

All they could see — think of — was that Mrs. Hall had so obvious a motive for the deed. Certainly she had. But it seems never to have occurred to the investigators at any time that had murder come into Mrs. Hall’s mind, this was a very fact calculated to stay her hand.

As an intelligent woman contemplating such a grave crime she could not have but realized that the instant it was discovered her name would come uppermost first of all as a suspect.

This, indeed, is what the real murderers of Hall and Eleanor Mills realized. It was what they expected to happen. It was under this smoke screen they expected to escape and have escaped.

None who followed fully and closely the trial at Somerville can possibly adjudge the jury’s verdict to have been of the Scotch variety — “not proven.”

It was offered and given as a complete, hearty exoneration of Mrs. Hall, gentle, amiable Willie, clean-cut and manly, Henry Stevens and their cousin, Carpender.

Every one of the jurymen who was interviewed gave it as his conviction that the murderers of the clergyman and his light o’ love still walk free and unsuspected.

And such is mine. And probably yours, if you have made a study of the mystery and the trial which recently ended.

In view of the present aspect of the case and what may come of it, it will be interesting to revert again to the beginning of the mystery. And the blunders of investigation at its very start.

All the opaque-minded sleuths could see, would consider, was the guilt of Mrs. Hall. She was the one who obviously had the most reason to commit the crime.

They would not consider that others might be using that very obviousness of motive to blind them.

Nor could any consideration be gained when absurdities in the case they were seeking to build against Mrs. Hall and her brothers were pointed out.

There was this, for instance: They pictured Mrs. Hall, after long knowledge of her husband’s infidelity with Mrs. Mills, after long brooding over it, after coming into possession of the woman’s love letters to her husband with which to confront them as gathering her forces for murder, as following the rector and Mrs. Mills to their place of rendezvous in De Russey’s lane, and there effecting her terrible revenge.

She knew that in the nature of things she must be suspected, first of all, of the deed and that if by mischance unforeseen evidence was forthcoming that she and her brothers were in De Russey’s lane at the time and place of murder, grim, disgraceful death in the electric chair was ahead for all of them.

Yet she left, scattered to the sport of wind and rain for hours, days, blowing about the bodies of the murdered dead, the only evidence which might serve to save her!

I mean the love letters of Mrs. Mills to Hall which the assassins left scattered on the grass!

These certainly would have been Mrs. Hall’s most valuable asset in a defense of last resort — that of the “unwritten law.”

For, however, judges may frown on it, skillful lawyers have a way, many ways, of worming such a plea to the attention of the jury. A defense of insanity at the time of the commission of the crime would have amply provided it. And the emotionalism of juries where gravely wronged women come before them as murder defendants is notorious in the land.

Yet she left these invaluable letters behind when they might so easily have been returned to the rector’s desk, there to be found by the investigators of the police and claimed on her behalf by her attorneys! Yet she abandoned them to all probability of obliteration by rain from the skies or rats of the field!

Then the lightning change which had taken place in the character of Mrs. Hall — if you were to believe the detectives. A woman who for more than fifty years had led a flawless Christian life, both in prayer and practice, turns suddenly into a bloodthirsty ogre over a wrong which most persons are satisfied to settle in the divorce courts.

When Mrs. Hall protested that she had known nothing of the liason between the rector and the choir singer, was unaware of their meetings, their love letters and their plan to elope to Japan, the investigators would give her protest no credence.

Yet there was the indubitable fact that Mrs. Hall had in this while been giving the rector considerable sums of money for his private bank account.

As if, knowing of the intended flight of Hall and Mrs. Mills to distant lands, she would have placed herself in the position of financing the trip!

They said it was impossible that Mrs. Hall, as she testified at her trial, could have been unaware of the illicit romance going on between her husband and giddy Mrs. Mills.

In doing this, they deliberately turned their back on the facts of her reputation and the position of unique dignity and seclusion that her wealth had given her as regards the women of her husband’s congregation.

They could have found out that Mrs. Hall had never made herself one with any of the women cliques of the church, detested gossip in all its forms and had never permitted the parlor of the rectory to become a salon of small scandal.

It is a trite observation to point out that the person most seriously concerned in such affairs as the Hall-Mills situation is the last to hear of the matter. Especially would this apply in the case of Mrs. Hall.

Those who knew of it would not have dared go to her without absolute proof of what they charged, and this they did not possess. As rector and intensely active church-worker Hall and Mrs. Mills had been hypocritically able to throw a fine disguise over the reality of their romantic association.

The only person who had seen the man and woman in a compromising position was a servant in the Hall home, who came upon Mrs. Mills sitting on Hall’s knee in the rector’s study in the church. She swore she had kept her own counsel, had never whispered a word of it to Mrs. Hall.

Again the investigators persisted in seeing something implying guilt in every action of Mrs. Hall on the night of the disappearance of the rector and his light o’ love, when in reality every move Mrs. Hall made, every word she spoke were those of a woman who had suddenly come upon a double cause for great mental distraction — the disappearance of her husband firstly, and the fact that this disappearance was in the company of another woman.

Her husband was the rector of a church. And she knew that to report to the police the simultaneous disappearance of her husband and Mrs. Mills must have the effect of immediately bringing a crash of scandal about her ears.

It is a fairly good indication that she was ignorant of the true relations of the pair that she did not hand them over immediately to public censure, that she gave them the benefit of the doubt and waited hopefully through the night for an outcome of the affair that might lift the miasma in which it was beclouded.

The fact that she first made her own private search, with only her brother, Willie, as her confidant, for trace of the couple, and waited until seven o’clock the next morning before making a guarded inquiry to public sources of information, was simply that of a decent, dignified woman fearful for the safety of the man she loved and fearful that in her distraction she would bring upon him a scandal that might prove later to be an injustice.

In other words, Mrs. Hall hoped to the last that the worst wasn’t true.

But the herd refused to see that. The mob was after her. The community angel of mercy was suddenly becoming a devil, a fierce, vicious, ugly old woman who had baited a younger man with her money to marry her and had become murderously vindictive when she found him out to be faithless to their altar oaths.

It is curious and further proof of the mob madness which had determined Mrs. Hall to be guilty, that little or no attention was given at the time to Mills, the husband of the slain woman, as possibly having a hand in the crime. Although his motive was even greater then Mrs. Hall’s might have been.

For he had been cognizant of his wife’s romantic attachment, soul and intellectual affinity, for the good-looking rector. Mrs. Mills had flouted the facts in the very face of her husband. He had even seen the rector’s love letters. Was it possible that a man could be so spineless as to accept all that without reprisal?

It was Ellis Parker, county detective of Mount Holly, one of the best detectives in New Jersey, the country, for that matter, who asked the question first.

But in his quick, quiet way he soon satisfied himself that Jimmy Mills had a trustworthy alibi and had been no more concerned in the murders than Mrs. Hall. For Parker from the first declined to believe that Mrs. Hall and her brothers had plotted or executed the crime.

It is a pity that Parker wasn’t further retained, for the real murderers of Hall and Mrs. Mills would have then been in danger and might not be going free as they are to-day, smirking inwardly in their satisfaction at having so successfully hoodwinked the law by directing its investigators to the wrong scent, which the obvious, superficial aspect of the case directed toward the wronged Mrs. Hall.

It was Ellis Parker who from deductions drawn from a footprint brought to justice the slayers of old Brunen, the circus man. And it was Parker who solved the Camp Dix murder mystery six months after the United States Army Intelligence men had confessed themselves beaten.

A soldier disappeared from the field at rifle practice. Near-by woods and all surrounding country were searched and he wasn’t found. Nearly a year later his skeleton was discovered by boys who were romping in the woods.

Field animals and time had completely destroyed his flesh and clothing. All that was left were the metal insignia of his regimentals. And his leather revolver holster — empty!

There was a bullet hole in his skull, but his pistol was nowhere to be found. It was murder.

But the army sleuths put in weeks and weeks of theorizing and searching and got nowhere. Parker’s reputation for remarkable past performances caused him to be called in.

His first request for assistance was regarded as amazing by the commandant.

“I want to interview every man in this young man’s particular company,” he said. “Please get out the roll and send them to me one by one.”

As they came, Parker asked each man of his particular movements on the day of the disappearance of the murdered soldier.

One by one they gave their answers as best they could, till toward the end of the “G’s” on the alphabetically arranged roster a private named Gregory stood before him.

He questioned Gregory as he had the others, and when that young soldier left the commandant’s office, Parker turned to that gentleman and said:

“There’s your man.”

“What on earth makes you think so?” demanded the astonished officer. “He answered questions more promptly and fully than any of the others.”

“That’s just it,” said Parker. “He remembers too damn much of exactly what he did on a day more than a year and a half ago!”

And on that shrewd observation began an investigation which ended in Gregory’s confession that he had murdered the other soldier over a rivalry in love.

I think that if Parker had continued on the investigation he would have concerned himself chiefly with the one, big clew that received at the trial scarcely more than passing notice.

I do not mean the fact that the crime was committed by a marksman, expert with the pistol.

But I mean the weird and ghastly clew-offered by the cutting of Mrs. Mills’s throat from ear to ear after the woman was dead.

Mind you, here was a wound that wasn’t made to stop her outcries. Whatever outcry she may have made was all over then. She was dead. There were four bullets in her brain.

She was silenced forever when some one knelt over her corpse, threw back the helpless head and applied a knife with ghoulish savagery deeply into the flesh.

One slash from ear to windpipe wasn’t enough to slake the hatred back of the knife. The blade was sunk deeper and carried entirely across the throat. And her tongue was cut out!

This terrible wounding of the dead marks a sign of a special vengeance. It is maniacal in character. It plainly indicates a mark of reprisal put upon Mrs. Mills for a special reason.

And the New Jersey authorities should, from the first, have given it their own special attention and have pursued the avenue of investigation which it so clearly suggests.

What did that ghoulishly inflicted wound on the dead mean? What was the cause of its making? What is the significance of the special marks of vengeance — the obliterated tongue, the severed throat?

That tongue shall speak no more, deceive no more, beguile no more!

That throat shall sing no more!

There is nothing fantastic in the deduction that is more fantastic than the wound itself.

It was a thoroughly fantastic vengeance — the couple trapped at their rendezvous, slain without mercy, the woman attacked, slashed after death, the proof of their guilty love tossed between their dead bodies in letters written by the woman and doubtless robbed from the rector’s church study, for it is inconceivable that Hall went about with a bulk of these incriminating letters in his pockets.

This was not such a vengeance as the Stevens family by all its training and traditions would have taken. For had they decided on murder it would have been with the consent and dictation of their consciences that such a deed was right. It would have been an open affair.

If Mrs. Hall had felt herself justified to kill she would have publicly shot them down. If Henry Stevens had decided that the honor of his family must be avenged in blood it would have been his way also.

But what of the curious religious sects that exist? Sects that make it their business to secretly score against “sinners?”

What of the religious fanatics to be found among them? What of the men and women among them who conceived themselves secretly to be agents of the Almighty?

The existence of such is common, although they are not easy to uncover until their religious insanity takes on the last stage of open, violent dementia.

What of the illicit romance of the clergyman and the choir singer having fallen under such fanatical eyes, under an espionage directed by the frequently amazing cunning of the insane?

What of a decision being made by such conspirators that by blood atonement must the false priest and the “painted woman” pay for their transgressions? And the special marks of such atonement on the Lorelei who had lured the priest from his sanctity and trust?

That tongue shall beguile no more! The voice of the sinful must no longer be allowed to sound in the choir of the House of God!

And the knife severed the tongue and slit the throat of the dead woman in sign of it.

Here was a direction of investigation that was never followed, though the wound in the throat of the murdered woman cried out the way.