Under the crab apple tree: the Hall-Mills case

What happened

On 14 September 1922, the bodies of the Reverend Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills, a married woman who sang in the choir at his church, were found together under a crab apple tree on an abandoned farm on the edge of New Brunswick, New Jersey. Both had been shot. Love letters the two had written each other were scattered around the bodies, torn but not destroyed, as though someone had wanted them found.

Hall and Mills had been carrying on an affair that people close to both of them already suspected. Hall was married, to Frances Hall, whose family's wealth had helped build the church he preached at. Mills was married too, to a sexton at the same church. Nobody was arrested for four years.

The case became a sensation almost immediately, less for the killings than for the letters and the setting, a scandal involving a minister, a choir singer and a love affair playing out in the tabloid press of the 1920s with an appetite for exactly this kind of story.

The evidence

A local pig farmer named Jane Gibson came forward claiming she had seen four figures near the crab apple tree on the night of the killings. She was widely known afterward by the nickname the press gave her, the Pig Woman, and her account was picked apart for years, partly because a grand jury had already found it unconvincing once before it resurfaced.

The physical evidence at the scene, the letters most of all, established the affair beyond dispute. It did not establish who fired the gun. No weapon was ever definitively tied to a single person, and the four years between the killings and any arrest meant whatever evidence existed at the scene itself had long since been picked over, weathered and argued about before a jury ever saw it.

How it's been argued over, then and since

In 1926, Frances Hall, her two brothers and a cousin were finally brought to trial for the murders. By then Jane Gibson was dying of cancer, and she gave her testimony from a hospital bed wheeled into the courtroom, pointing dramatically at the defendants when asked to identify them. Her own mother sat in the gallery through the trial reportedly murmuring that her daughter was lying, and the defence used exactly that to undercut the prosecution's central witness. All four defendants were acquitted.

No one has ever been convicted of killing Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills, and no one else has ever been charged. The case is still argued about in the true crime writing it inspired for the rest of the century, mostly over the same two questions the 1926 jury faced: whether Gibson saw what she said she saw, and whether the family had the motive and the means the prosecution needed but never quite proved. Neither question has been settled since.

Murder Mystery Party's case, Under the Crab Apple Tree, sits your table with the same letters, the same farm and the same unreliable witness the 1926 jury had to weigh, and leaves your guests to decide what a hospital-bed testimony from a dying woman is actually worth.