The Hall-Mills Murders: Forbidden Love, The Pig Woman, and America's First Media Circus

On a Thursday evening in September 1922, a phone call placed to Reverend Edward Hall—a respected Episcopal minister—would lead to one of the most sensational "Jazz Age" scandals in American history.

Two days later, the Reverend's body was found alongside his lover, choir singer Eleanor Mills, posed beneath a crab apple tree. Their passionate love letters were torn and scattered around them like confetti, a clear message from a killer driven by jealousy.

We dive into the Halls-Mills murder case, which had everything the nation could have demanded:

• The Victims: A powerful, wealthy minister and his working-class mistress. Edward had been shot once, while Eleanor was shot three times and had her throat cut.

• The Suspects: Suspicion immediately fell on the Reverend's cold, aristocratic wife, Francis Hall, and her eccentric, strange brothers, Willie and Henry Stevens. Francis, who was determined to protect her family's reputation, had a powerful motive for humiliation and revenge.

• The Infamous Witness: At the center of the subsequent trial was Jane Gibson, nicknamed "The Pig Woman" because she lived on a nearby pig farm. She claimed to have seen the murders take place from horseback.

• The Contaminated Crime Scene: The investigation went off the rails almost immediately when police failed to secure the area. Hundreds of gawkers wandered into the field, picking up "souvenirs" and passing around Reverend Hall's calling card, utterly destroying the physical evidence.

The resulting trial in 1926 became a national obsession, leading to packed courtrooms and ushering in a new era of sensationalist "jazz journalism." Despite the public spectacle, the poor state of the evidence led to an acquittal for all three defendants.

Join us as we explore the greed, the lust, and the unanswered question of who truly killed Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills.

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TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Hey guys, and welcome to the Moms and Mysteries podcast, a True Crime podcast featuring myself, Mandy, and my dear friend Melissa. Hi, Melissa. Hi, Mandy. How are you? I am doing well. I thought there was gonna be more to that thought, but there isn't no question. Cicadas, are they crazy at your house? They are.

They are. I actually, it was funny, I noticed this morning it was early. When I was taking my walk, it was like six 30 and they were screaming so loud. I said, I made a comment. I was like, wow, the bugs are awake. I can't even believe it. I was gonna try to record in the other room today, but I was like, Nope.

If I'm even close to a window, they are so flipping loud at my house right now. Okay, so here's what I don't understand about six. Okay, here's what I don't understand. So, you know when, like every now and then they'll say like, oh, it's gonna be like the crazy cicada emergence thing, right? But like, aren't they right?

Okay. I'm confused because [00:01:00] cicadas are always here, right? No, no. I think they go underground. I think that's their whole thing. 'cause remember there was a whole thing like two, two years ago where cicadas were like mating underground or something, and then they come up and it's like a hundred years.

They've never had this many, 'cause remember they were like covering Nashville and stuff. Yeah, I never see them. I only hear them right. I guess I was just confused because I don't, I don't know. 'cause why did that, why does that happen? I never want it to happen again. Let's be clear about that. Whoa. I know, but it is weird 'cause I'm, I always thought it was crickets and then my father-in-law was like, no, that's cicadas.

Which. Call me crazy, but I call that Mandela Effect. Oh my gosh. I, I had never heard of that before I moved to your, but oh my gosh. I'm pretty sure that when we went to Nashville for Crime Con, it was either during or right after the cicada thing and like we got there and it, there wasn't bad cicadas, but people like two days after days.

Yes. They were like, you just missed them. And I'm we're like, wow. Thank goodness. Thank goodness. Yeah. Yeah. All right, so we'll get right into the story we have for you this Thursday. Uh, [00:02:00] this is a really interesting one and I'm excited to get into it. So the story began on a Thursday evening, September 14th, 1922, in kind of a state leave Victorian home in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

7:30 PM the phone rang and Louise Geist, who is a 20-year-old maid, answered and recognized the voice. On the other end, it was a woman asking for Reverend Edward Hall. So as Louise called upstairs, she overheard just enough of the reverend side of the conversation to kind of raise an eyebrow. She overheard him say yes.

That's too bad. Couldn't we make arrangements for about eight 15? Goodbye. So this sounds like an innocent enough conversation, but just two days later, that phone call became a chilling premonition because on September 16th, Reverend Hall's body was found posed under a crab apple tree next to his lover, Eleanor Mills and their love letters were scattered around them like confetti at a [00:03:00] doomed wedding.

The Halls Mill murder case was really everything anyone could have wanted in a jazz age scandal. It was a forbidden love affair, a wealthy and powerful family, as well as a media frenzy that turned a small New Jersey town into the epicenter of the nation's attention. The victims were a respected Episcopal minister and a working class choir singer, and the prime suspects.

Well, that was his cold aristocratic wife and her eccentric, possibly unstable brothers, and at the center of it all were passionate love letters, as well as a missing gold watch and a now infamous witness nicknamed the Pig Woman. Imagine if that was your name. Imagine I don't even care if my last name is Pig.

If somebody called me Pig Woman, I would lose my ever loving mind. If my last name was Pig, I would change it a hundred percent. I've known people whose last names are a hog, but it's two Gs. And I'm like, okay. Yeah. And you get used to it. Yeah. But pig, if you called me pig woman, [00:04:00] oh my gosh. People are gonna write refuse with pig woman.

I have to stop. Yeah, no, I actually, um, I went to school with a girl whose last name was Butts. B-U-T-T-S. Yeah. And that was a rough one for her growing up for sure. I can't even imagine. Yeah. So let's talk about some of the key players in this story. So we have Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall, who is 41 years old.

He was educated in Manhattan and he was married to Francis Hall. This is a woman from one of New Jersey's, wealthiest and most prominent families, which was the Stevens family. The Reverend was known as being charming and intelligent, at least on the surface. He was a really devoted minister at St. John, the Evangelist Church, but beneath his very polished exterior, Edward had been carrying on an affair for about two years with Eleanor Mills.

Eleanor was 34. She was married to the church Sexton, who was James Mills, and they were raising two children in much more modest circumstances. [00:05:00] She was described as being warm, lively, and completely in love with the reverend. And that love was not a well kept secret. Eleanor wrote Edward dozens of passionate letters, the very same letters that were eventually torn up and left, scattered around their dead bodies, almost as if someone wanted to make sure the whole world knew about their affair.

Here's the problem with doing that. Everyone's gonna know it's somebody very close to it who would be ticked off about this affair, right? That really limits the number of people that could be involved. While Francis Hall maintained a distant and respectable image, Eleanor was her total opposite. She was working class, she was emotional and deeply romantic.

And if you were Francis Hall, watching your husband fall in love with someone like Eleanor, well there was motive there for her to feel humiliated, maybe even enough motive to kill. On the night of September 14th, Edward told his wife Francis, that he was going to visit someone and would be home soon, but he never came back.[00:06:00] 

The next morning, Francis alerted the police, but it wasn't until September 16th, which was a full two days later, that a group of teenagers actually stumbled upon something truly horrific in a field near a farm in Somerset County. What they found were the bodies of Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills carefully arranged beneath a crab apple tree.

What the group saw didn't look like a simple robbery or a spontaneous crime of passion. It looked very well set up, and it almost resembled theater. Edward and Eleanor's bodies were placed side by side on the ground. Her hand was reaching toward his leg and his hand was resting near her neck. His face was covered with his hat, and between the two of them, lay these torn up love letters.

Whoever did this wanted the world to know exactly who these people were and exactly what they'd been doing. We have more to get into after a quick break to hear a word from this week's sponsors. So before the break, we introduced the shocking double murder of Reverend Edward Hall and [00:07:00] his lover, Eleanor Mills.

Their bodies had been discovered post under a crab apple tree, surrounded by their own torn up love letters. The scene was really a spectacle of a scandal pointing to a killer who wanted to send a message. With this secret affair. Now, gruesomely public suspicion immediately began to swirl around the bren's wealthy and powerful wife Francis Hall, as well as her very strange brothers.

Now, let's talk about the crime scene itself, because this was where the investigation really went off the rails almost immediately. So the bodies were found on Saturday morning, September 16th, in an area known as Zis Lane. The couple had been lying there for nearly two days. The condition of Eleanor's body made that gruesomely clear.

There were maggots that had already began to gather around the deep slash across her throat and the smell of decay hung in the air. And here's where things take a sharp turn from. Like, okay, this is a murder. Let's figure it out to, you've got to be kidding [00:08:00] me. And we've run into this before, and the problem is jurisdiction.

Steve Farm sat on the border of two counties, middles six and Somerset, and while the police from New Brunswick showed up first, the crime technically fell under Somerset's authority. I don't think about this a lot. I mean, we run into this a lot, right? Even federal cases versus local stuff like that. I think about this on cruises, how it depends on what cruise line, you know, what flag is flying.

On the ship that you're on, so like you could be under totally different rules, but this county thing, like even having a piece of property on two different county lines. Yeah. Seems very confusing and like as far as taxes go, how does that work? You pay different county taxes. I don't know. Is it where your door is?

I don't know, but it's very interesting to me that they have to like basically flip a coin to figure out who's even involved. Who, who should be taking over the case. Yeah, for sure. So while they were sorting out that whole bureaucratic mess, people. Kind of wandered around the crime scene and not just one or [00:09:00] two people were talking dozens of kind of curious, you know, looky-loos who had heard about the bodies, and they just came to really get a look at it and just be gawkers.

So people were there picking up souvenirs, which. What souvenirs are you taking? I know from a crime scene know, um, but they touched the bodies. They even passed around, uh, Reverend Hall's literal calling card. Like it was a baseball card, like it was like a collector's item, and the scene was just completely contaminated.

At that point, there wasn't even, you know, that's not even counting all the evidence that was lost due to this, this not being a secure scene. So Eleanor scarf had been tied around her neck, possibly by the killer, and several of those love letters were partially destroyed by the onlookers. The whole scene really felt staged and it felt like somebody out there was trying to send a message.

The question was, who was the message for? Was it for Francis? Was it for the community, or was this just an act of [00:10:00] personal revenge? Investigators? Couldn't really make sense of it. Eleanor had been shot three times in the head and her throat was cut, and Edward had been shot once above the ear. His gold watch was missing, which did suggest robbery, but the cash in his pockets was still there untouched.

So let's talk suspects because once the media circus hit, the public wanted a villain. And we hear this so much even in true crime cases now, we'll see people, you know, this person's missing. And immediately in the comments people are like, it's a husband, it's this person. I don't like how that brother answered questions like all this stuff where people just have this, this horrific thing has happened and people want to be able to point to someone.

And this case, of course, is no different. And all the fingers really were pointing to Francis Hall. She wasn't exactly the picture of a grieving widow at 48 years old. She was seven years older than Edward and was described by reporters as being Manish and cold. She was also fiercely private and [00:11:00] protective of her family's reputation.

And her husband's very public affair was a threat to everything she'd built her life around. The choir knew, the neighbors knew, and Eleanor had even told people she planned to marry. Edward, which is a problem because he is married to someone else in your church, right? Messy, very messy. For a woman like Francis, this was a profound humiliation, but Francis wasn't alone in the spotlight.

Her two brothers, Henry and Willie Stevens quickly became key suspects. Henry was the more conventional of the two, but it was Willie who truly captured the public fascination. Willie was eccentric and described by just about everyone as being odd. So according to witnesses, Willie's oddities included doing things like collecting butterflies, but he was also seen wandering around the hall home the morning after the murders, and he was asking the maid strange questions such as, did the Reverend come home last night?

It almost seemed as though [00:12:00] he was giddy, which is not something you would expect from someone who had just lost their brother-in-law. Then there was Jane Gibson. So Jane is the lovely woman that has been affectionately referred to as the pig woman, and Jane lived on a pig farm, which explains where she got her nickname from.

I'm so glad that that's why they named her that and not some other terrible, horrible uhhuh, mean, cruel reason. But her pig farm was near the crime scene and she claimed that she saw the murders take place. On horseback no less. She said that she was out investigating why her dogs were barking when she saw four people under the crab apple tree.

She could hear shouting, she could hear a woman crying, and then she heard gunshots. But here's the thing about Jane and her story, or rather, here's the thing about the pig woman in her story, uh, it changed a lot. And by the time the trial came around, she was rolled into the courtroom on a hospital bed wrapped in blankets, and she was delivering her testimony really in a [00:13:00] whisper and.

The whole thing just seems like something straight out of a movie, like not reality. Can you imagine somebody who's being called, the pig woman gets brought in on a hospital bed, is barely able to speak and is whispering about these terrible things she saw, and you're supposed to just be like, okay, another day on the jury.

This is very, very normal. This seems like a whole lot to take in at once. Yeah, definitely. I just cannot even imagine. I would be like, can you just call me the pig farm lady? Can you call me anything else? The pig farmer. Why? Why is this the name? Yeah. Why is this the name? The prime suspects in this murder though were the reverend's, stoic wife Francis and her peculiar brothers, Willie and Henry, and the prosecution star witness.

That's our girl, Jane Gibson. AKA. The pig woman whose dramatic and ever-changing testimony from her hospital bed made her a media sensation. But as you can imagine, also a huge liability for the case against the hall family. By the time the trial finally [00:14:00] started in November of 1926, for full years after the murders, the case had become a national obsession.

Reporters packed the Somerset County Courthouse elbow to elbow with spectators. They called it the trial of the century, which. I feel like we use that phrase too much way too often. Yeah. At the time, but now it's like every year the trial of this century, I'm like, I think it was OJ and maybe Casey Anthony.

Yes. Right. Yes. Yeah. We haven't really had any that have stood out to me more than those two in my lifetime. Exactly. The defendants were Francis Hall and her two brothers, Henry and Willie Francis arrived each day in heavy black morning clothes, and she was clutching her Bible. Willie was. Well, he was still willy.

He was wide-eyed. He was a little odd and completely unpredictable, but this trial wasn't just about facts. Like so many other trials, it was a spectacle. The prosecution leaned really hard on motive. Francis had been humiliated and she had the [00:15:00] means to plan the murder, and her brothers had the loyalty to help her carry it out.

And of course, they brought out their star witness, which was Jane Gibson, the pig woman. She was rolled into court on a gurney, wrapped in blankets with nurses on either side of her. This is. Next level courtroom drama unfolding. I guess nowadays we live in the digital age, so if someone has to testify from a, from a hospital bed, like I feel like that would be done virtually.

Like they would uhhuh be there video conferencing or they would have deposition or something. Right. You wouldn't have, um, you wouldn't be like wheeling in nurse, like a bed with nurses and everything. Yeah. I, I don't know. I don't know how that looks. Um, even to a jury, you know? I feel like, yeah. I, I'm not sure how I would feel about that.

Can I say one thing? Sure. Janie's got a gurney.

Okay. I was waiting for it. Sorry. So she did give her testimony though in a very raspy voice. She retold her [00:16:00] version of that night, and she talked about these foreshadowing figures that she saw the woman crying and then the gunfire she heard. But after the pig woman was done telling her tail, the defense was ready to speak, they argued that Jane was mentally unstable and that her memory couldn't be trusted and her story had changed too many times to even be considered.

Halfway reliable and unfortunately for the prosecution, the rest of their case just really wasn't strong enough. The crime scene had been trampled over. There was no murder weapon ever found, and the physical evidence was long gone because of all these things. The jury wasn't buying it. On December 3rd, 1926, they came back with a verdict of not guilty and all three defendants were acquitted.

That is wild to me because really, as far as even motive goes, it doesn't seem like anyone else really had a motive. Right. Although, I guess I, I do wonder about her husband. He had to have been pretty ticked about this entire affair thing, [00:17:00] but. The fact that they absolutely ruin this crime scene just goes to show how important saving it is, right?

Yes. Well, and and you hear about that and nowadays, like that's the very first thing the authorities do when they arrive on a crime scene is secure the scene. Like you have to get the scene. Cordoned off. No one's allowed to come over here. No one. Even within like the, you know, the department, like not anyone can just come over here and start moving things or touching things or getting too close to anything going on because of things like this where like you can completely contaminate the crime scene to the point where there's no hope of ever getting the proper evidence.

Yeah. To solve the crime. Also, I wonder how long they were keeping them out there. Like how long are you just keeping bodies out there if people are getting souvenirs and touching them and that's a good point. I do not understand. Mm-hmm. What was going on back then, but of course the mystery doesn't die just with the three being acquitted.

If anything, this acquittal made the case even more compelling. Who actually killed Edward and Eleanor? [00:18:00] Was it Francis and her brothers after all, or did the answer lie, varied under layers of wealth and influence and a justice system that wasn't equipped to handle a scandal this big. And of course, this case doesn't just play out in a courtroom, it played out on the front page of every newspaper in the country.

So I do believe at the time this probably was the crime of the century, right? Yes. The interesting thing about this case is that it happened right as journalism was shifting into this new era, what people were calling jazz journalism. There were newspapers that were leaning hard into sensationalism.

You're talking bold headlines, dramatic language, scandalous details, and of course the hall mills. Case gave them all the material they could have dreamed of. There's a religious leader having an affair with somebody in his congregation. There's love letters. There's a Victorian mansion, and of course there's a pig woman on horseback.

The media didn't just report on this case, of course, they really shaped it. Reporters from across the country flooded into Somerville. Courtrooms [00:19:00] were packed and there were even vendors selling food outside. And for the first time in American history, a murder trial was being consumed. The way we've now binge things like true crime documentaries.

And so even today, we still don't know what exactly happened in this murder. We have ideas, but no one's ever been convicted of this crime. Mandy, I have to ask, what do you think happened? Yeah. I think to me, I feel like sometimes the simplest answer is the right answer and right. Who would do something like this?

Let's see. It's gonna be one of the spouses, right? Like one of the angry ones who has had been embarrassed or who feels like they were betrayed. Yeah, with the love letters and stuff scattered around, like who else would even have the access to that stuff or care about it enough to make it a part of the crime scene?

You know, it has to be somebody who's angry specifically about the love letters and not just the love letters, but the actual love that was going on between these two people. Um, and the only people who would be [00:20:00] that upset and affected by it are. People who are already married to them. So I feel like it, like you were saying earlier, it really narrows down the pool of suspects quite a bit in a case like this.

Because there's, I mean, who else is gonna wanna, who else would want their, who would want someone dead if you, you know, for the, for those reasons. I mean, I mean there's, there's a lot. Yeah. Not me, I'm not speaking personally. No, I totally agree with you. But I do think, I wonder how much of the defense's argument was.

You didn't look it into anybody else. We know part of their argument was people were all over this crime scene, literally stealing baseball cards, like their baseball cards. I mean, they're really just taking things on. And it's so interesting to me to think back to this time where they are having these huge trials, um, and it's time where it's like newspaper and that's gonna be about all of your communication, right?

So it's not like we don't have 24 hour news, we don't have TikTok, we don't have all those things. So people are. People are hungry for more information [00:21:00] on this crazy story, and they're going to the courtroom and they're watching and they're taking it all in. But going to the crime scene will never. Not shock me it, I always go back to this, but when Casey Anthony was Casey Anthony and she lived in Orlando, people would drive to her parents' house and like hold signs about her being a kid killer and all this stuff and it was wild to me.

I will never. I'll never understand those boundaries. So on a crime scene, I truly can't understand. No. Um, what was going on. I mean, as someone who like, enjoys like, kind of like, I don't know, like darker things and like I like to see things like that. Like I feel like I, I wouldn't wanna go to a crime scene that was like a recently, like this just happened and I don't wanna see like the actual evidence of a crime, but like I do enjoy visiting like historical places, right?

Where like, sure, some. Someone was killed or died here, like Alcatraz or something. Right. Exactly. Now that to me is like different. I like to, I, I, I find it fascinating to actually go and visit those places and be able [00:22:00] to physically see them, because you can look at pictures of something all day long, but like, I mean, I think everyone knows that, right?

Like, you can look at a picture of the ocean all day, but it's not the same as going to the beach, you know what I'm saying? Like, it doesn't, it doesn't feel the same and like you don't have the same, uh, you know, appreciation or understanding of like what happened there, you know, unless, and, and you know, unless you visit, so, right.

In some cases I do see the fascination, but not to go. A visit, a crime scene where there's like actively a crime scene and there's like, the police are still working it and haven't even figured out what's going on yet. But something always that strikes me in these cases from these older cases, um, I'm, I don't remember exactly what year this was from, but cases from the earlier 19 hundreds or even in the 18 hundreds, murder was just such a more common thing back then.

Like I feel like. Because maybe people got away with it more like that. People weren't getting caught so much, but I feel like people's solution to a lot of things was like, I'll just kill this person like you. He like, I'm like, it's so bizarre to do you wonder how people lived past like 25? Because a lot of it, I will agree with you.

Sometimes it is just like. You know, [00:23:00] a shootout at the Okay. Corral. Just people are like, well, he stole money from me. Right. Uh, we have to kill him and his whole family. Right. Just wild stuff. Um, I totally agree. And you would think that murder would become less common now since there's so many more ways for people to be tracked.

Right. And stuff like that. But people are still gonna kill, unfortunately. Yeah. That's just gonna be, um, a thing that happens. But I think you're right. It does at least seems like it was a lot more common back then. Yeah. Um. I was also surprised that this trial took four years. Me too, too. That seems like something today that happens, but back then it seemed like, well, some of these seems like, yeah, well some of these cases we do these like vintage stories.

They'll be like, oh, the trial was November 1st and he was executed on January 2nd. And we're like, what? They hang up by lunchtime and you're like, oh my gosh. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, so that was kind of crazy in this case too. Yeah. Well that was our story for this week. Thank you guys so much for listening. We will be back next Thursday with a new story for you guys.

So we hope you guys have a great week and we will see you soon. Bye [00:24:00] bye.