The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

A SORT OF GENIUS by James Thurber

The Hall-Mills double murder of 1922 horrified and then mystified the American nation. But it was, as the Daily News in New York remarked, “a nice, clean crime”. It was also one of the first to be reported using modern transmission methods. The backstage star of the case was the world’s biggest portable electric switchboard, property of the Western Union, which could handle 20,000 words an hour. Two hundred reporters covered the trial, including sixteen correspondents from the Daily News, plus fifty photographers. Ten of these were posted in the courtroom at Somerville, New Jersey; an eleventh fell through the skylight on the day the defence called Mrs Hall. At the end of eleven days, a total of 5 million words had been telegraphed from Somerville. At the end of eighteen days the total was 9 million. By the twenty-fourth day, it was 12 million, enough to fill a shelf of novels twenty-two feet long. The American humorist James Thurber (1894-1961) was a journalist in the 1920s when the Hall-Mills case broke. By the time he composed this account, in 1936, he was a full-time writer. This elegant essay from the creator of Walter Mitty reminds us of Thurber’s extraordinary versatility, and his talents as (his widow’s words) “the analyser and the rememberer”.

On the morning of Saturday, 16 September 1922, a boy named Raymond Schneider and a girl named Pearl Bahmer, walking down a lonely lane on the outskirts of New Brunswick, New Jersey, came upon something that made them rush to the nearest house in Easton Avenue, around the corner, shouting. In that house an excited woman named Grace Edwards listened to them wide-eyed and then telephoned the police. The police came on the run and examined the young people’s discovery: the bodies of a man and a woman. They had been shot to death and the woman’s throat was cut. Leaning against one of the man’s shoes was his calling card, not as if it had fallen there but as if it had been placed there. It bore the name Rev. Edward W. Hall. He had been the rector of the Protestant Episcopal Church of St John the Evangelist in New Brunswick. The woman was identified as Mrs Eleanor R. Mills, wife of the sexton of that church. Raymond Schneider and Pearl Bahmer had stumbled upon what was to go down finally in the annals of our crime as perhaps the country’s most remarkable mystery. Nobody was ever found guilty of the murders. Before the case was officially closed, a 150 persons had had their day in court and on the front pages of the newspapers. The names of two must already have sprung to your mind: Mrs Jane Gibson, called by the avid press “the pig woman”, and William Carpender Stevens, once known to a hundred million people simply as “Willie”. The pig woman died eleven years ago, but Willie Stevens is alive. He still lives in the house that he lived in fourteen years ago with Mr and Mrs Hall, at 23 Nichol Avenue, New Brunswick.

It was from that house that the Rev. Mr Hall walked at around seven-thirty o’clock on the night of Thursday, 14 September 1922, to his peculiar doom. With the activities in that house after Mr Hall’s departure the State of New Jersey was to be vitally concerned. No. 23 Nichol Avenue was to share with De Russey’s Lane, in which the bodies were found, the morbid interest of a whole nation four years later, when the case was finally brought to trial. What actually happened in De Russey’s Lane on the night of 14 September? What actually happened at 23 Nichol Avenue the same night? For the researcher, it is a matter of an involved and voluminous court record, colourful and exciting in places, confused and repetitious in others. Two things, however, stand out as sharply now as they did on the day of their telling: the pig woman’s story of the people she saw in De Russey’s Lane that night, and Willie Stevens’s story of what went on in the house in Nichol Avenue. Willie’s story, brought out in cross-examination by a prosecutor whose name you may have forgotten (it was Alexander Simpson), lacked all the gaudy melodrama of the pig woman’s tale, but in it, and in the way he told it on the stand, was the real drama of the Hall-Mills trial. When the State failed miserably in its confident purpose of breaking Willie Stevens down, the verdict was already written on the wall. The rest of the trial was anticlimax. The jury that acquitted Willie, and his sister, Mrs Frances Stevens Hall, and his brother, Henry Stevens, was out only five hours.

A detailed recital of all the fantastic events and circumstances of the Hall-Mills case would fill a large volume. If the story is vague in your mind, it is partly because its edges, even under the harsh glare of investigation, remained curiously obscure and fuzzy. Everyone remembers, of course, that the minister was deeply involved with Mrs Mills, who sang in his choir; their affair had been for some time the gossip of their circle. He was forty-one, she was in her early thirties; Mrs Hall was nearing fifty. On 14 September, Mr Hall had dinner at home with his wife, Willie Stevens, and a little niece of Mrs Hall’s. After dinner, he said, according to his wife and his brother-in-law, that he was going to call on Mrs Mills. There was something about a payment on a doctor’s bill. Mrs Mills had had an operation and the Halls had paid for it (Mrs Hall had inherited considerable wealth from her parents). He left the house at about the same time, it came out later, that Mrs Mills left her house, and the two were found murdered, under a crab apple tree in De Russey’s Lane, on the edge of town, some forty hours later. Around the bodies were scattered love letters which the choir singer had written to the minister. No weapons were found, but there were several cartridge shells from an automatic pistol.

The investigation that followed-marked, said one New Jersey lawyer, by “bungling stupidity”-resulted in the failure of the grand jury to indict anyone. Willie Stevens was questioned for hours, and so was Mrs Hall. The pig woman told her extraordinary story of what she saw and heard in the lane that night, but she failed to impress the grand jurors. Four years went by, and the Hall-Mills case was almost forgotten by people outside of New Brunswick when, in a New Jersey court, one Arthur Riehl brought suit against his wife, the former Louise Geist, for annulment of their marriage. Louise Geist had been, at the time of the murders, a maid in the Hall household. Riehl said in the course of his testimony that his wife had told him “she knew all about the case but had been given $5,000 to hold her tongue”. This was all that Mr Philip Payne, managing editor of the DailyMirror, nosing around for a big scandal of some sort, needed. His newspaper “played up” the story until finally, under its goading, Governor Moore of New Jersey appointed Alexander Simpson special prosecutor with orders to reopen the case. Mrs Hall and Willie Stevens were arrested and so was their brother, Henry Stevens, and a cousin, Henry de la Bruyere Carpender.

At a preliminary hearing in Somerville the pig woman, with eager stridency, told her story again. About 9 o’clock on the night of 14 September, she heard a wagon going along Hamilton Road near the farm on which she raised her pigs. Thieves had been stealing her corn and she thought maybe they were at it again. So she saddled her mule, Jenny (soon to become the most famous quadruped in the country), and set off in grotesque pursuit. In the glare of an automobile’s headlights in De Russey’s Lane, she saw a woman with white hair who was wearing a tan coat, and a man with a heavy moustache, who looked like a coloured man. These figures she identified as Mrs Hall and Willie Stevens. Tying her mule to a cedar tree, she started toward the scene on foot and heard voices raised in quarrel: “Somebody said something about letters.” She now saw three persons (later on she increased this to four), and a flashlight held by one of them illumined the face of a man she identified first as Henry Carpender, later as Henry Stevens, and it “glittered on something” in the man’s hand. Suddenly there was a shot, and as she turned and ran for her mule, there were three more shots; a woman’s voice screamed, “Oh, my! Oh, my! Oh, my!” and the voice of another woman moaned, “Oh, Henry!” The pig woman rode wildly home on her mule, without investigating further. But she had lost one of her moccasins in her flight, and some three hours later, at one o’clock, she rode her mule back again to see if she could find it. This time, by the light of the moon, she saw Mrs Hall, she said, kneeling in the lane, weeping. There was no one else there. The pig woman did not see any bodies.

Mrs Jane Gibson became, because of her remarkable story, the chief witness for the State, as Willie Stevens was to become the chief witness for the defence. If he and his sister were not in De Russey’s Lane, as the pig woman had shrilly insisted, it remained for them to tell the detailed story of their whereabouts and their actions that night after Mr Hall left the house. The grand jury this time indicted all four persons implicated by the pig woman, and the trial began on 3 November 1926.

The first persons Alexander Simpson called to the stand were “surprise witnesses”. They were a Mr and Mrs John S. Dixon, who lived in North Plainfield, New Jersey, about twelve miles from New Brunswick. It soon became apparent that they were to form part of a net that Simpson was preparing to draw around Willie Stevens. They testified that at about eight-thirty on the night of the murders Willie had appeared at their house, wearing a loose-fitting suit, a derby, a wing collar with bow tie, and, across his vest, a heavy gold chain to which was attached a gold watch. He had said that his sister had let him out there from her automobile and that he was trying to find the Parker Home for the Aged, which was at Bound Brook. He stuttered and he told them that he was an epileptic. They directed him to a trolley car and he went stumbling away. When Mrs Dixon identified Willie as her visitor, she walked over to him and took his right hand and shook it vigorously, as if to wring recognition out of him. Willie stared at her, said nothing. When she returned to the stand, he grinned widely. That was one of many bizarre incidents which marked the progress of the famous murder trial. It deepened the mystery that hung about the strange figure of Willie Stevens. People could hardly wait for him to take the stand.

William Carpender Stevens had sat in court for sixteen days before he was called to the witness chair, on 23 November 1926. On that day the trial of Albert B. Fall and Edward L. Doheny, defendants in the notorious Teapot Dome scandal, opened in Washington, but the nation had eyes only for a small, crowded courtroom in Somerville, New Jersey. Willie Stevens, after all these weeks, after all these years, was to speak out in public for the first time. As the NewYorkTimes said, “He had been pictured as ‘Crazy Willie’, as a town character, as an oddity, as a butt for all manner of jokes. He had been compared inferentially to an animal, and the hint of an alien racial strain in his parentage had been thrown at him.” Moreover, it had been prophesied that Willie would “blow up” on the stand, that he would be trapped into contradictions by the “wily” and “crafty” Alexander Simpson, that he would be tricked finally into blurting out his guilt. No wonder there was no sound in the courtroom except the heavy tread of Willie Stevens’s feet as he walked briskly to the witness stand.

Willie Stevens was an ungainly, rather lumpish man, about five feet ten inches tall. Although he looked flabby, this was only because of his loose-fitting clothes and the way he wore them; despite his fifty-four years, he was a man of great physical strength. He had a large head and a face that would be hard to forget. His head was covered with a thatch of thick, bushy hair, and his heavy black eyebrows seemed always to be arched, giving him an expression of perpetual surprise. This expression was strikingly accentuated by large, prominent eyes which, seen through the thick lenses of the spectacles he always wore, seemed to bulge unnaturally. He had a heavy, drooping, walrus moustache, and his complexion was dark. His glare was sudden and fierce; his smile, which came just as quickly, lighted up his whole face and gave him the wide, beaming look of an enormously pleased child. Born in Aiken, South Carolina, Willie Stevens had been brought to New Brunswick when he was two years old. When his wealthy parents died, a comfortable trust fund was left to Willie. The other children, Frances and Henry, had inherited their money directly. Once, when Mrs Hall was asked if it was not true that Willie was “regarded as essential to be taken care of in certain things,” she replied, “In certain aspects.” The quality of Willie’s mentality, the extent of his eccentricity, were matters the prosecution strove to establish on several occasions. Dr Laurence Runyon, called by the defence to testify that Willie was not an epileptic and had never stuttered, was cross-examined by Simpson. Said the doctor, “He may not be absolutely normal mentally, but he is able to take care of himself perfectly well. He is brighter than the average person, although he has never advanced as far in school learning as some others. He reads books that are above the average and makes a good many people look like fools.” “A sort of genius, in a way, I suppose?” said Simpson. To which the doctor quietly replied, “Yes, that is just what I mean.”

There were all sorts of stories about Willie. One of them was that he had once started a fire in his back yard and then, putting on a fireman’s helmet, had doused it gleefully with a pail of water. It was known that for years he had spent most of every day at the firehouse of Engine Company No. 3 in Dennis Street, New Brunswick. He played cards with the firemen, ran errands for them, argued and joked with them, and was a general favourite. Sometimes he went out and bought a steak, or a chicken, and it was prepared and eaten in the firehouse by the firemen and Willie. In the days when the engine company had been a volunteer organization, Willie was an honorary member and always carried, in the firemen’s parades, a flag he had bought and presented to the firehouse, an elaborate banner costing sixty or seventy dollars. He had also bought the black-and-white bunting with which the front of the firehouse was draped whenever a member of the company died.

After his arrest, he had whiled away the time in his cell reading books on metallurgy. There was a story that when his sister-in-law, Mrs Henry Stevens, once twitted him on his heavy reading, he said, “Oh, that is merely the bread and butter of my literary repast.” The night before the trial opened, Willie’s chief concern was about a new blue suit that had been ordered for him and that did not fit him to his satisfaction. He had also lost a collar button, and that worried him; Mrs Henry Stevens hurried to the jail before the court convened and brought him another one, and he was happy. At the preliminary hearing weeks before, Simpson had declared with brutal directness that Willie Stevens did indeed look like a coloured man, as the pig woman had said. At this Willie had half risen from his chair and bared his teeth, as if about to leap on the prosecutor. But he had quickly subsided. Willie Stevens all through the trial had sat quietly, staring. He had been enormously interested when the pig woman, attended by a doctor and a nurse, was brought in on a stretcher to give her testimony. This was the man who now, on trial for his life, climbed into the witness chair in the courtroom at Somerville.

There was an immense stir. Justice Charles W. Parker rapped with his gavel. Mrs Hall’s face was strained and white; this was an ordeal she and her family had been dreading for weeks. Willie’s left hand gripped his chair tightly, his right hand held a yellow pencil with which he had fiddled all during the trial. He faced the roomful of eyes tensely. His own lawyer, Senator Clarence E. Case, took the witness first. Willie started badly by understating his age ten years. He said he was forty-four. “Isn’t it fifty-four?” asked Case. Willie gave the room his great, beaming smile. “Yes,” he chortled, boyishly, as if amused by his slip. The spectators smiled. It didn’t take Willie long to dispose of the Dixons, the couple who had sworn he stumbled into their house the night of the murder. He answered half a dozen questions on this point with strong emphasis, speaking slowly and clearly: he had never worn a derby, he had never had epilepsy, he had never stuttered, he had never had a gold watch and chain. Mr Case held up Willie’s old silver watch and chain for the jury to see. When he handed them back, Willie, with fine nonchalance, compared his watch with the clock on the courtroom wall, gave his sister a large, reassuring smile, and turned to his questioner with respectful attention. He described, with technical accuracy, an old revolver of his (the murders had been done with an automatic pistol, not a revolver, but a weapon of the same calibre as Willie’s). He said he used to fire off the gun on the Fourth of July; remembering these old holidays, his eyes lighted up with childish glee. From this mood he veered suddenly into indignation and anger. “When was the last time you saw the revolver?” was what set him off. “The last time I saw it was in this courthouse!” Willie almost shouted. “I think it was in October 1922, when I was taken and put through a very severe grilling by-I cannot mention every person’s name, but I remember Mr Toolan, Mr Lamb, and Detective David, and they did everything but strike me. They cursed me frightfully.” The officers had got him into an automobile “by a subterfuge,” he charged. “Mr David said he simply wanted me to go out in the country, to ask me a very few questions, that I would not be very long.” It transpired later that on this trip Willie himself had had a question to ask Detective David: would the detective, if they passed De Russey’s Lane, be kind enough to point it out to him? Willie had never seen the place, he told the detective, in his life. He said that Mr David showed him where it was.

When Willie got to the night of 14 September 1922, in his testimony his anger and indignation were gone; he was placid, attentive, and courteous. He explained quietly that he had come home for supper that night, had gone to his room afterward, and “remained in the house, leaving it at two-thirty in the morning with my sister”. Before he went to bed, he said, he had closed his door to confine to his own room the odour of tobacco smoke from his pipe. “Who objected to that?” asked Mr Case. Willie gave his sudden, beaming grin. “Everybody,” he said, and won the first of several general laughs from the courtroom. Then he told the story of what happened at two-thirty in the morning. It is necessary, for a well-rounded picture of Willie Stevens, to give it here at some length. “I was awakened by my sister knocking at my door,” said Willie, “and I immediately rose and went to the door and she said, ‘I want you to come down to the church as Edward has not come home; I am very much worried’-or words to that effect. I immediately got dressed and accompanied her down to the church. I went through the front door, followed a small path that led directly to the back of the house past the cellar door. We went directly down Redmond Street to Jones Avenue, from Jones Avenue we went to George Street; turning into George Street we went directly down to Commercial Avenue. There our movements were blocked by an immense big freight automobile. We had to wait there maybe half a minute until it went by, going toward New York.

“I am not at all sure whether we crossed right there at Commercial Avenue or went a little further down George Street and went diagonally across to the church. Then we stopped there and looked at the church to see whether there were any lights. There were no lights burning. Then Mrs Hall said, ‘We might as well go down and see if it could not be possible that he was at the Mills’s house.’ We went down there, down George Street until we came to Carman Street, turned down Carman Street, and got in front of the Mills’s house and stood there two or three minutes to see if there were any lights in the Mills’s apartment. There were none.” Willie then described, street by street, the return home, and ended with “I opened the front door with my latchkey. If you wish me, I will show it to you. My sister said, ‘You might as well go to bed. You can do no more good.’ With that I went upstairs to bed.” This was the story that Alexander Simpson had to shake. But before Willie was turned over to him, the witness told how he heard that his brother-in-law had been killed. “I remember I was in the parlour,” said Willie, “reading a copy of the NewYorkTimes. I heard someone coming up the steps and I glanced up and I heard my aunt, Mrs Charles J. Carpender, say, ‘Well, you might as well know it-Edward has been shot.’ “Willie’s voice was thick with emotion. He was asked what happened then. “Well,” he said, “I simply let the paper go-that way” (he let his left hand fall slowly and limply to his side) “and I put my head down, and I cried.” Mr Case asked him if he was present at, or had anything to do with, the murder of Mr Hall and Mrs Mills. “Absolutely nothing at all!” boomed Willie, coming out of his posture of sorrow, belligerently erect. The attorney for the defence turned, with a confident little bow, to Alexander Simpson. The special prosecutor sauntered over and stood in front of the witness. Willie took in his breath sharply.

Alexander Simpson, a lawyer, a state senator, slight, perky, capable of harsh tongue-lashings, given to sarcasm and innuendo, had intimated that he would “tie Willie Stevens into knots”. Word had gone around that he intended to “flay” the eccentric fellow. Hence his manner now came as a surprise. He spoke in a gentle, almost inaudible voice, and his attitude was one of solicitous friendliness. Willie, quite unexpectedly, drew first blood. Simpson asked him if he had ever earned his livelihood. “For about four or five years,” said Willie, “I was employed by Mr Siebold, a contractor.” Not having anticipated an affirmative reply, Simpson paused. Willie leaned forward and said, politely, “Do you wish his address?” He did this in good faith, but the spectators took it for what the Times called a “sally”, because Simpson had been in the habit of letting loose a swarm of investigators on anyone whose name was brought into the case. “No, thank you,” muttered Simpson, above a roar of laughter. The prosecutor now set about picking at Willie’s story of the night of 14 September: he tried to find out why the witness and his sister had not knocked on the Mills’s door to see if Mr Hall were there. Unfortunately for the steady drumming of questions, Willie soon broke the prosecutor up with another laugh. Simpson had occasion to mention a New Brunswick boarding house called The Bayard, and he pronounced “Bay” as it is spelled. With easy politeness, Willie corrected him. “Biyard,” said Willie. “Biyard?” repeated Simpson. Willie smiled, as at an apt pupil. Simpson bowed slightly. The spectators laughed again.

Presently the witness made a slip, and Simpson pounced on it like a stooping falcon. Asked if he had not, at the scene of the murder, stood “in the light of an automobile while a woman on a mule went by,” Willie replied, “I never remember that occurrence.” Let us take up the court record from there. “Q.-You would remember if it occurred, wouldn’t you? A.-I certainly would, but I don’t remember of ever being in an automobile and the light from the automobile shone on a woman on a mule. Q.-Do you say you were not there, or you don’t remember? A.-I say positively I was not there. Q.-Why did you say you don’t remember? A.-Does not that cover the same thing? Q.-No, it don’t, because you might be there and not remember it. A.-Well, I will withdraw that, if I may, and say I was not there positively.” Willie assumed an air of judicial authority as he “withdrew” his previous answer, and he spoke his positive denial with sharp decision. Mr Simpson abruptly tried a new tack. “You have had a great deal of experience in life, Mr Stevens,” he said, “and have read a great deal, they say, and know a lot about human affairs. Don’t you think it sounds rather fishy when you say you got up in the middle of the night to go and look for Dr Hall and went to the house and never even knocked on the door-with your experience of human affairs and people that you met and all that sort of thing-don’t that seem rather fishy to you?” There was a loud bickering of attorneys before Willie could say anything to this. Finally Judge Parker turned to the witness and said, “Can you answer that, Mr Stevens?” “The only way I can answer it, Your Honour,” said Willie, scornfully, “is that I don’t see that it is at all ‘fishy’. “The prosecutor jumped to something else: “Dr Hall’s church was not your church, was it?” he asked. “He was not a Doctor, sir,” said Willie, once more the instructor. “He was the Reverend Mister Hall.” Simpson paused, nettled. “I am glad you corrected me on that,” he said. The courtroom laughed again.

The prosecutor now demanded that Willie repeat his story of what happened at two-thirty a.m. He hoped to establish, he intimated, that the witness had learned it “by rote.” Willie calmly went over the whole thing again, in complete detail, but no one of his sentences was the same as it had been. The prosecutor asked him to tell it a third time. The defence objected vehemently. Simpson vehemently objected to the defence’s objection. The Court: “We will let him tell it once more.” At this point Willie said, “May I say a word?” “Certainly,” said Simpson. “Say all you want.” Weighing his words carefully, speaking with slow emphasis, Willie said, “All I have to say is I was never taught, as you insinuate, by any person whatsoever. That is my best recollection from the time I started out with my sister to this present minute.” Simpson did not insist further on a third recital. He wanted to know now how Willie could establish the truth of his statement that he was in his room from eight or nine o’clock until his sister knocked on the door at two-thirty a.m. “Why,” said Willie, “if a person sees me go upstairs and does not see me come downstairs, isn’t that a conclusion that I was in my room?” The court record shows that Mr Simpson replied, “Absolutely.” “Well,” said Willie expansively, “that is all there was to it.” Nobody but the pig woman had testified to seeing Willie after he went up to his room that night. Barbara Tough, a servant who had been off during the day, testified that she got back to the Hall home about ten o’clock and noticed that Willie’s door was closed (Willie had testified that it wouldn’t stay closed unless he locked it). Louise Geist, of the annulment suit, had testified that she had not seen Willie that night after dinner. It was Willie’s story against the pig woman’s. That day in court he overshadowed her. When he stepped down from the witness chair, his shoulders were back and he was smiling broadly. Headlines in the Times the next day said, “Willie Stevens Remains Calm Under Cross-Examination. Witness a Great Surprise”. There was a touch of admiration, almost of partisanship, in most of the reporters’ stories. The final verdict could be read between the lines. The trial dragged on for another ten days, but on 3 December, Willie Stevens was a free man.

He was glad to get home. He stood on the porch of 23 Nichol Avenue, beaming at the house. Reporters had followed him there. He turned to them and said, solemnly, “It is 104 days since I’ve been here. And I want to get in.” They let him go. But two days later, on a Sunday, they came back and Mrs Hall received them in the drawing room. They could hear Willie in an adjoining room, talking spiritedly. He was, it came out, discussing metallurgy with the Rev. J. Mervin Pettit, who had succeeded Mr Hall as rector of the Church of St John the Evangelist.

Willie Stevens, going on seventy, no longer visits the firehouse of No.3 Engine Company. His old friends have caught only glimpses of him in the past few years, for he has been in feeble health, and spends most of his time in his room, going for a short ride now and then in his chauffeur-driven car. The passer by, glancing casually into the car, would not recognize the famous figure of the middle 1920s. Willie has lost a great deal of weight, and the familiar beaming light no longer comes easily to his eyes.

After Willie had been acquitted and sent home, he tried to pick up the old routine of life where he had left it, but people turned to stare after him in the street, and boys were forever at his heels, shouting, “Look out, Willie, Simpson is after you!” The younger children were fond of him and did not tease him, and once in a while Willie could be seen playing with them, as boisterously and whimsically as ever. The firemen say that if he encountered a ragged child he would find out where it lived, and then give one of his friends the money to buy new clothes for it. But Willie’s adventures in the streets of the town became fewer and farther apart. Sometimes months would elapse between his visits to the firehouse. When he did show up in his old haunts, he complained of headaches, and while he was still in his fifties, he spent a month in bed with a heart ailment. After that, he stayed close to home, and the firemen rarely saw him. If you should drop by the firehouse, and your interest in Willie seems friendly, they will tell you some fond stories about him.

One winter Willie took a Cook’s tour of Hawaii. When he came back, he told the firemen he had joined an organization which, for five dollars, gave its subscribers a closer view of the volcanoes than the ordinary tourist could get. Willie was crazy about the volcanoes. His trip, however, was spoiled, it came out, because someone recognized and pointed him out as the famous Willie Stevens of the Hall-Mills case. He had the Cook’s agent cancel a month’s reservation at a hotel and rearrange his schedule so that he could leave on the next ship. He is infuriated by any reference to the murders or to the trial. Some years ago a newspaper printed a paragraph about a man out West who was “a perfect double for Willie Stevens”. Someone in the firehouse showed it to Willie and he tore the paper to shreds in a rage.

Willie still spends a great deal of time reading “heavy books”-on engineering, on entomology, on botany. Those who have seen his famous room at 23 Nichol Avenue-he has a friend in to visit him once in a while-say that it is filled with books. He has no use for detective stories or the Western and adventure magazines his friends the firemen read. When he is not reading scientific tomes, he dips into the classics or what he calls the “worth-while poets”. He used to astound the firemen with his wide range of knowledge. There was the day a salesman of shaving materials dropped in at the engine-house. Finding that Willie had visited St Augustine, Florida, he mentioned an old Spanish chapel there. Willie described it and gave its history, replete with dates, and greatly impressed the caller. Another time someone mentioned a certain kind of insect which he said was found in this country. “You mean they used to be,” said Willie. “That type of insect has been extinct in this country for forty years.” It turned out that it had been, too. On still another occasion Willie fell to discussing flowers with some visitor at the firehouse and reeled off a Latin designation-crassinaecarduaceae, or something of the sort. Then he turned, grinning, to the listening firemen. “Zinnias to you,” he said.

Willie Stevens’s income from the trust fund established for him is said to be around forty dollars a week. His expenditures are few, now that he is no longer able to go on long trips. The firemen like especially to tell about the time that Willie went to Wyoming, and attended a rodeo. He told the ticket-seller he wanted to sit in a box and the man gave him a single ticket. Willie explained that he wanted the whole box to himself, and he planked down a ten-dollar bill for it. Then he went in and sat in the box all alone. “I had a hell of a time!” he told the firemen gleefully when he came back home.

De Russey’s Lane, which Detective David once pointed out to Willie Stevens, is now, you may have heard, entirely changed. Several years ago it was renamed Franklin Boulevard, and where the Rev. Mr Edward W. Hall and Mrs Eleanor Mills lay murdered there is now a row of neat brick and stucco houses. The famous crab apple tree under which the bodies were found disappeared the first weekend after the murders. It was hacked to pieces, roots and all, by souvenir-hunters.