Hi, hello. Hello, my dear sisters. A podcast, sister and I tell you two crime stories. I'm Donna, and I'm Kristen, and this week Kristen has a story for me.
So you ever wonder about your FBI guy, I think that he's like maybe nervous about you, because he knows that you're not murdering anyone, because he's seen all your history on nine, he knows what you're doing. But he also sees what you're doing online and knows that I think suspicious happens that you're totally fucked. Because you can see all the things we'll create. Yeah.
Well, yeah. Where you're just on weird murder, crazy murder, crazy crimes. Yeah, we're just on the news. Yeah, exactly.
So I was going to answer to you. So that's how I found this one. So this is the Hall Mills murders. I've never heard it.
No, you probably have it. It's not really well known, but it was at the time. So I got this from New York Daily News dot com, the Yale Review, New York Times dot com. It's like the pd.com, me time for the mine dot com, and all this interesting dot com and of course with the PDF.
Okay. So the crazy part is nobody's already this case anymore. At the time, it was the most well-publicized case. The only thing that ever beat it out or the next thing that beat it out was the Lindberg baby.
Holy shit. That's how big it was. Everyone used to know I was not as big as this. That's insane, okay.
And it's just kind of beat it into a period. That's so bizarre, okay. So that's so funny. I know.
Last thing you want to find when you're on a walk with your girlfriend. The man had been killed with a single bullet in the head while a woman had been shot three times. Her throat had been flashed so deeply that her head was only attached by her spinal column. And her tongue had been removed.
Oh fuck. Hey, that's it. Yeah, I know. It's not good.
You can see how the three children come outside of the School. But she was also having aHERA with a reverend, which was an open secret. Obviously, we're immediately suspicious of their respect to taxes. So Eleanor was married to James E.
Mills, who besides being the sex she was in. Francis Noel Stevens Hall, a woman seven years his senior who is the daughter of one of me runs with most prominent families. When the priest went to the mill's house, they found love letters from Edward to Eleanor in a bag sitting right behind the front door, which made them doubt Jimmy's statement that he had no idea about that he had there. It's quite complicated.
She didn't even try to hide them. She was like, here, here's love letters. He told police that he had last seen his wife on Thursday around 7 p.m. She told their daughter that she was taking a newspaper article over to the Reverend written by another of Piscopalian clergyman who happened to leave a divorce.
She came back about 15 minutes later to grab a hat in the scarf. Jimmy asked her where she was going, and she told him to follow him and find out, which he said he did not do. They're daughter said that Eleanor said she was going to the candy store to use the phone to return a call from Edward, which her daughter found odd because they usually would use a neighbor's phone to make calls instead of walking further to the candy store. When she, maybe, no, no.
When she still hadn't come home, I tend. Jimmy went up to look for her briefly, and then he came back on me when she went to bed. He woke up at 2 a.m. and went to check if she was sleeping in their daughter's room, which is where she usually slept.
And when he didn't find her there, he went to look for her at the church to see if she had had one of her paintings elsewhere. He did not find her again, so he went back home and he just went to bed. OK. I would look a little harder, but right, both times.
Mm-hmm. So there's a donation I can't plan it. But when he was asked right then called the police by the morning, he said that it wasn't unusual for her to disappear for a day or two, so he wasn't too worried. Which if she's been in the room, right?
Yeah, yeah. Francis said that Eleanor had come to the halls house that night wanting to talk to Edward about something on a medical bill that she didn't understand. She had recently had a kidney surgery that the halls had actually paid for. But Edward was out disturbing by her as a local hospital.
Then a little after seven, Francis says that Edward left to go talk to Eleanor about the medical bill, not last time she saw him. Francis and her brother, Willie, attempted to search for Edward, but they were unable to find him. The morning she called the police anonymously to acquire about any casualties. Her lawyer advised her to file a missing person's report, which she had planned to do on Saturday, but before she could, journalist came to her door to hear her door to ask her about her husband's murder.
Mm-hmm. Not cost, but journalist, because it's 1922. Right. Since it was 1922, the crime scene was not properly secured.
Oh, of course not. All sorts of curious people came to the scene and trampled over any evidence that might have been there. They also cut into cutting off the crap. Apple tree, the bodies were found under.
To the point where they're eventually letting them even any bark left on it. Oh, that's a lot of fun. Oh, my gosh. It's like, I get me fascinated by a case, but I'm just not that type of souvenir person.
I just see so much more respectful. Exactly. Like, I'm fascinated obviously. We have a podcast.
Right, talk about this shit. But I'm not going to go collecting shit for murder seats. Plus it's creepy. What the fuck do you do with that?
You just want that in your house. You just just play it and every time you have a guest over there, this is from that murder scene. Oh, yeah, here you go. It's like, rain.
Oh, no, it's creepy. It's creepy. I'm like, who the fuck are you? Why would you do that?
Okay. Well, that'd be a fact of the drawing, but the fuck do you want to say a company in your house? I know, right. It's creepy.
I don't follow you, fuck that. I got it. The one that's brought to the audience. Everyone's saying they're like, look at this.
That's around everybody that was there. And I know fingerprints weren't big that day, but still. They were still a thing. It's been come up later.
People kept coming to the scene for weeks. To the point where vendors set up around the scene to sell popcorn, hot dogs, and bags of dirt collected from around the crowd. I believe initially had nothing to tie eat or spastic to crime. A few weeks later, a woman named Jane Gibson, who lived near the crime scene, came forward with eyewitness testimony.
She had been having problems with corn thieves. So when she heard a wagon going through her field around 9 p.m. She got on her meal and she followed it. She can make out four people, two men, and two women.
She said she heard one woman say, explain to these letters. And she heard another woman's room, Henry, and don't. Also found with their bodies were a bunch of torn up love letters right in front of Edward T. Eleanor.
Or from Eleanor T. Edward T. Yeah, they're in front of her too hip. So it's like the letters that he had had, all around her, whereas the ones from him to her were still in the house.
So Jane would be dubbed the pig woman by the papers because she raised hot. And people are classy. Yeah, that's just awesome sexism. So the police had found no reason to suspect Jimmy.
One newspaper called when they called him a harmless doll that's all little hello. Which is just that's nice. So since the letters that were found around were the ones that presumably would have been Edward's house, plus Francis had both the brother and the cousin in Henry. So a grand jury spent five days hearing evidence from 67 witnesses and they declined to invite anyone.
Almost immediately after being cleared by the grand jury, Francis would appreciate to hear him. That's super like not. Nothing happens for four years. And then a piano tuner named Arthur S.
Rachel? I don't know. R-I-C-H-L. There's not enough owls in there for me.
He filed for an annulment of his ten month marriage to Louise Gazz, who had been a maid in the halls house. He said she had withheld information about the halls, about the halls mills murder from him prior to their wedding. He said his wife told Francis the night of the murders that Edward had planned to a look with Eleanor, which I don't know how he was going to look. They were both so married.
Right, exactly. Whatever. And that she was paid $5,000 to you to see grit, which in 1922, money hold shit, you're ready. The murders had been a big deal in newspapers when it all happened.
And so William Randolph heard us eager to sell more copies of his new paper than you were daily near published all of this. So everything gets reopened up. And this time after hearing the evidence, a grand jury indicted Francis Hall, her brother's William Henry Hall, and her cousin Henry Carpenter. Carpenter's lawyers got him a child separate from the other three who would be tried together.
The trial began on November 3rd, 1926. Jane Gibson, the big woman, was a prosecution star with us. Unfortunately, she was also very ill during the trial. She was brought to the courthouse from the hospital, and she gave her testimony in a hospital bed set up for her next to the jury box.
The defense under mine her credibility when you're now inconsistent in this interview, and soon as soon as the police expressed the press and her statement in court, which her story did change. Not. Also, helpful in undermining her. Jane's mother sat in the front row during her testimony, and she kept calling her a liar every time she spoke.
Oh, fuck, man. Like she just sat in the jury box going liar via she's a liar. The whole fucking time. That's crazy.
Yeah. The other main piece of evidence was, at which heart had been found probably against us. The prosecution said that had well-used fingerprint on it. However, it had been handled by pretty much every little of the initial crime scene.
And then the crime was sent on a jury to several different places. Yeah, exactly. It went to a couple different prosecutors offices, a couple different bigger protectors, and for whatever reason, it went back to the mirrors editor. Huh?
Before it finally made its way back to the courthouse with a trial. Oh, yeah, no. Yeah. And three fingerprints were forced to defend state and find a way to be a match.
After somewhere between 23 and 30 days of trial, I'm not really sure which. The jury deliberated for five hours before finding Francis and her brothers not guilty. So, subsequently, the charges against Henry Carpenter were dropped. No one else was ever charged with Edward Holland, Eleanor and Melton's murders.
So for the most part, modern detectives believe that it was Francis and her brother until the crime ball. But it did find one crazy theory that believes it was a KKK that killed them. Really? I know who sure why because they were right, but they were a daughter.
So, in this news mind, it wasn't enough to make KKK go after them. I don't fucking know. I didn't know that was a thing with the KKK. I didn't even know that I don't think it was a KKK person.
Yeah. That's a big stretch. Yeah. That is fucking bonkers.
I don't think I can. They have so many fucking reporters there. There was like 180 journalists on the crime board. Yeah, it was super well publicized.
Everybody was following this case. That's nuts. Because it's got everything you could want. Well, it's definitely right.
It's got a dull dream, it's got religion, it's got all that bullshit. You're by bringing cotton, sneaking around with a choir girl, both of them were married. And they're by bringing clearly married for money. Yeah.
Yeah. It's like how is it not them or them? I know. It's just a bunch of new cases.
I agree there's not a whole lot of evidence, but it was also 1922. There wasn't ever a whole lot of evidence. But yeah, it's just not to mean like cases like that. They're so big at the time.
Just like fade away. Do you think like the limber baby was the next big case like we should still be hearing about this? Yeah, because we still hear about the limber baby all the time. Yeah.
Oh, that's crazy. I love the historical one. Me too. Just because everybody's dead, it's about it.
I don't feel bad. Uh-huh. I just wanted something a little bit lighter after I did, you know. Oh God I don't feel uncomfortable.
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