Criminal - Under the Crabapple Tree

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

On September 16, 1922, a reverend and a choir singer were found dead under a tree. Between their bodies was a stack of love letters. When police began investigating the murders, tabloid reporters did too, and rumors about the case began to spread quickly. We have some exciting news – Criminal is going back on tour! We can’t wait to see you. Presale tickets are available at 12 pm ET today for Criminal Plus members. If you're not a member yet, you can sign up at thisiscriminal.com/plus. We'll post news and links for general sale tickets when they're available at thisiscriminal.com/live. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, members-only merch, and more. Learn more and sign up here. Listen back through our archives at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey

involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Very soon, I get to do my favorite thing.

Go on tour and meet so many of you. This month, Criminal is coming to Austin, Tucson, Boulder, Portland, Oregon, Detroit, Madison, Northampton, and Atlanta. If you didn't get to come and see our 10-year anniversary show earlier this year, this is your last chance. You'll get to hear seven brand-new storiesyear anniversary show earlier this year, this is your last chance. You'll get to hear seven brand new stories, most of which will probably make you laugh. I'll even try to come and say hi at the merch table. Get your tickets while they last at thisiscriminal.com slash live. One September morning, a young couple went for a walk on the outskirts of New Brunswick, New Jersey. Their path took them down a little road called Darussi's Lane,

which had an infamous reputation locally as a lover's lane, a place where people went to enjoy some alone time apart from prying eyes. And they saw two people sleeping. Underneath a crabapple tree was a man wearing a buttoned-up coat with a hat over his eyes, and a woman in a blue dress with red polka dots. When the couple walked by again sometime later, they were surprised to find the same two people still under the tree in the same exact place as before.

And it becomes apparent to them that they're standing over two dead bodies. His right arm was outstretched and her head was resting on his arm. Her left hand had been placed, you know, on his thigh. Their clothing was in, you know, very neat, orderly condition. And between their bodies, there was a stack of love letters. One read, I am tired today. Want to lie with you and rest for hours.

Another read, Oh, darling, if I had an income of my own, I would be very selfish, I guess. I'd build a waiting love nest. In addition to the letters propped up against the man's foot was a business card. The name on the card was Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall. Police arrived, along with local newspaper reporters, and they discovered that Reverend Edward Hall, who was a prominent local minister,

had been shot once in the head. The woman beside him had been shot multiple times, and her throat had been cut. But it was quite a bit of time before someone showed up who actually could identify who the woman was. She was a choir singer, a young woman named Eleanor Mills, but she was someone who within the church was seen as a very close confidant of Edward Hall. But I guess most notably, this was a woman who was not his wife.

And Eleanor Mills also was married. So, you know, immediately this had all the makings of a scandal when the bodies were found. That afternoon, on September 16th, 1922, Eleanor Mills' husband, Jim Mills, was notified of his wife's death. When he went to the morgue where Eleanor's body had been taken, police showed him the love letters that had been found. Jim identified the handwriting as his wife's. But in an interview

with reporters that day said, quote, my wife was a good wife. He said that he couldn't explain why she would have been with Reverend Hall unless it was to talk over church matters. When police interviewed the reverend's wife, Frances Hall, she told them that she had no knowledge of a, quote, intimate friendship between her late husband and the woman who'd been found dead next to him. But really, you know, if you read the newspapers at the time, the amount of gossip that was flowing forth about the, you know the level of apparent intimacy between these two people left little room for doubt that there was something going on.

Within days of the murders, a man in the church choir told reporters he had spotted Reverend Hall and Eleanor Mills walking arm-in-arm in New York City. And the owner of the local pharmacy said they had been in more than once for ice cream sodas. A neighbor of the Mills family told a reporter that, in her opinion, Reverend Hall visited the Mills home far too often, and that she was afraid a scandal would erupt. She also said she had overheard a fight between Eleanor Mills and her husband about Eleanor doing too much for the church. Eleanor reportedly replied,

Well, why shouldn't I? I care more for Mr. Hall's little finger than I do for your whole body. Author, Joe Pompeo. You know, from day one, all the major New York papers were covering this. The New York Times, the Herald, the Tribune, you know, papers all over the country very quickly picked up on this, and it just became, you know, a national sensation from the get-go.

And the headlines were splashy. The headlines were splashy, but especially in, you know, what you would consider the more sort of, I guess, down-market press. And especially in the Daily News, because this was the first tabloid, officially what you would call a tabloid newspaper in America. Tabloid newspapers came to the U.S. in 1919, when the Daily News, originally called the Illustrated Daily News, was founded. It was thinner and smaller than other newspapers, and it had a lot more photos, like the long-running London tabloid, The Daily Mirror. By the time the story about Reverend Hall and Eleanor Mill's murder broke in the fall of 1922, the Daily News had grown from the nation's first tabloid into the third largest newspaper in the country. A young journalist named Phil Payne had just

been named the acting managing editor. If he did well, the position would be his permanently. For Phil Payne, I mean, this is the type of stuff you want. It's exactly what you want. I mean, this is like, you know, this is the type of stuff you want. It's exactly what you want. I mean, this is like, you know, this is like sent from God, essentially. You know, a prominent minister who had married into a rich family, cavorting with the married choir singer from his church, found murdered on a lover's lane. I mean, you couldn't make it up.

I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Reverend Edward Hall's wife, Frances Hall, was 48 years old when her husband was found dead next to another woman. She was a member of an illustrious New Brunswick family with ties to the Johnson & Johnson fortune. She reportedly inherited at least a million dollars. She and Reverend Hall lived in an upscale part of town, in what the Daily News described as a magnificent estate. She really was everything you'd expect of a woman, you know,

who was raised in the late Victorian age. All of her values were privacy and decorum and this proud family honor. And what was her marriage like with Edward? There was no accounts of marital discord between Edward and Frances, but it was also a very curious marriage. When Edward was first, you know, gaining prominence, there was a lot of young women who were drawn to him. And initially, Edward had developed some romantic attachment to a younger woman in the congregation who was a schoolteacher and about his same age at the time, around 27 or 28 years old. Frances was 35, so she's seven years older than Edward.

She, by all accounts, would have been considered a spinster or someone approaching a spinster at the time. And, you know, there was not any prospects of marriage in her future. And along comes this charismatic pastor, and suddenly there's a proposal. And I think there was some speculation that, you know, he, you know, might have been something of a gold digger. Certainly, you know, he was marrying up and they, you know, lived as husband and wife, as two prominent people in New Brunswick, for some years before his affair with Eleanor really developed. On the night that the murder was believed to have happened, one of the Reverend's neighbors had been woken up by a barking dog around 3 o'clock in the morning. When the neighbor went outside to see what was going on, he ran into a night watchman who told him that he'd seen a woman running into the Halls' house.

The woman looked like the Reverend's wife, Frances Hall. So police questioned her. And she said, you know, that was me. I had gone with my brother, Willie, and we had gone down to the church, very nervous about where Edward was, not knowing where he was in the middle of the night, and thought maybe he could be there. And she described her journey to look for her husband and said that was me. Frances told police that she thought that perhaps her husband had been robbed.

When he left their house, he was carrying quite a bit of money and an expensive gold watch and chain. When his body was found, he had just a few cents on him. She insisted again that her husband was not having an affair. There was this brief moment where, you know, really with nothing else to go on, the police tried to, you know, really with nothing else to go on, the police tried to, you know, pin the crime on this young man who was a friend of the young couple who had found the bodies. And it was just kind of this absurd, you know, for lack of any other evidence to go on,

they figured maybe they can put an end to this by railroading this young guy into a confession. And there was a woman who was reading this newspaper coverage who suddenly came forward to one of the detectives working on the case and said, you know, I know that that young man didn't do it because I was there that night. And she claimed to have been a witness to the murders. We'll be right back. they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts.

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For full safety information, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. See for yourself at BotoxCosmetic.com. On the night that Eleanor Mills and the Reverend went missing, Jane Gibson, a local farmer who raised pigs, heard a commotion outside her barn. She said she saw a wagon up the road, thought maybe someone had stolen corn from her, and hopped on her mule Jenny to follow. And, you know, got to an intersection and lost sight of the wagon,

but she claimed to have seen two people in the headlights of a car that was making a U-turn in the lane. And she thought nothing of it. The people kind of disappeared. And she's trotting back down the road on Jenny, her mule. Suddenly she claims she heard commotion.

She hears voices. It sounded like people who were arguing. There was no moon. It was very dark. But Jane Gibson told police that she saw four figures, two men and two women. She goes closer in the darkness on her mule.

She hears gunshots, first one, then another three. She hears a woman cry out, and she hears the woman scream, Oh, Henry. Frances Hall, the reverend's wife, had a brother named Henry. In her statement to police, Jane Gibson identified Frances Hall as the woman she'd heard scream the name Henry that night. And, you know, suddenly the police have someone claiming to be

something of an eyewitness to the murderers, and it just completely blew the case up. One investigator told reporters that he had doubts about Jane Gibson's ability to see well enough in the dark to identify anyone. Frances Hall's lawyer said she wasn't there that night. And Frances Hall's brother Henry had an alibi. Newspapers referred to Jane Gibson as the pig woman.

Reporters surrounded her house. And as Jane Gibson talked with them Her story about the crime and about herself began to shift At some point she actually claimed that she saw the crime And hadn't just heard the shots and heard the screaming But it also came out that she was someone who was quite theatrical. She told a story about her past and her upbringing that was quite adventurous. She had run away from home and been a bareback rider in the circus. And when reporters dug into it, they actually found that she seemed to have a much more mundane personal history than what she had told.

And there was all these just questions about her true identity and her background and the story she'd told that, you know, began to undermine her credibility, but not enough so that the prosecutors in the case diverted their attention from her. In late November of 1922, a grand jury was convened to decide whether to indict anyone for the murders of Reverend Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills. A special prosecutor called witnesses to testify over several days. The couple who had found the bodies, people who had heard gunshots, and a woman who said that Jane Gibson, the pig woman, was with her on the night of the murders and couldn't have witnessed anything. Frances Hall, the Reverend's wife, was not called to testify. In the middle of the grand jury proceedings, 76 women, including etiquette expert Emily Post, signed a letter of support that was published in the local paper.

It said that Frances Hall, quote, Around the same time, the so-called pig woman, Jane Gibson, published a poem in the newspapers called Truth Forever. It included the lines, When Jane Gibson spoke to the grand jury, she told them that she'd seen a small woman and a quite tall man in the headlights at the scene of the murder. She said that later that night, she returned to the area and saw the same woman crying over a body on the ground. She said that Frances Hall was the woman she had seen both times.

But when she was asked about the man she had seen with Francis on the night of the shooting, the man Francis allegedly called Henry, Jane Gibson hesitated and wasn't able to confidently identify who he was. After hearing all of the testimony, the grand jury deliberated for several hours before they announced that they would not bring any indictments. Several months later, Francis Hall left the country for a long trip around Europe. The tabloid editor Phil Payne succeeded in becoming managing editor at the New York Daily News during the fall of 1922. At the time, the Daily News was publishing articles about the Hall-Mills murder investigation almost every day.

They printed a comic-style sketch of the shooting and a map detailing exactly where the bodies had been found. The spot became such a popular tourist destination that vendors started selling peanuts and balloons there. The Daily News reported that the crabapple tree, next to where the bodies had been found, was stripped bare by so many people trying to take leaves and branches as souvenirs.

This was suited to the sort of atmosphere in the 1920s where people were just obsessing over sensations and trivialities and scandals and sort of going to town with all this stuff after this dark period the world had endured of war and a flu pandemic. It was this, you know, this boisterous time. There was a lot of crime in the air. This was the era of prohibition. You know, there are corrupt lot of crime in the air. This was the era of prohibition.

There are corrupt political bosses running amok. It was kind of this lawless climate. And I think that was really something that Phil Pay, so it's kind of back to ground zero. The newspapers, I would assume, still are trying to sell this story. But now't really much left to report. But, you know, the investigators were still ostensibly working on the case. And Phil Payne of the Daily News was also very much interested in still pursuing the story and trying to figure out who did this. Because, you know, if he could, that would sell a lot of newspapers and it would be great for the Daily News. And, you know, with Frances and her family out of the picture, there was some thought about should we take a closer look at Jim Mills. Jim Mills, Eleanor Mills' widower.

Jim and Eleanor Mills got married in 1905, after Eleanor got pregnant. They lived in what newspapers reported was a poor quarter of the city, and by 1922, they had two teenage children. Jim was also involved in Reverend Hall's church, maintaining the building. On the day that his wife's body was found next to Reverend Hall's, Jim Mills told reporters that the Reverendend was, quote, my best friend. But later, when their daughter found love letters from Reverend Hall to his wife at their home, he told the press,

they certainly made a sucker out of me. So Jim Mills, he and Eleanor, you know, they were known to bicker. Money was a source of turmoil in their marriage. They were sort of living hand to mouth. They had two children to feed. And, you know, Eleanor, I think, was unsatisfied with this life. She wanted something more.

And in fact, on the night that she disappeared, the night that she was murdered, she left the house as Jim was working on some woodwork on the porch, and he said, where are you going? And Eleanor's response was, follow me and find out. Jim Mills had an alibi. But investigators thought that depending on the time of the murders, it could have been possible for him to have killed his wife and Reverend Hall. As he became the focus of the investigation,

Phil Payne at the Daily News began coming up with ways to get him to confess. So Phil Payne comes up with this idea to stage a seance. Immediately this sounds absurd and laughable, but at the time, this is the early 1920s, there was this sort of renewed fervor for spiritualism. You know, Arthur Conan Doyle was traveling the country. He was a big proponent of spiritualism and the occult, and a lot of people had bought into this.

And among those people was apparently the Mills family. Eleanor Mills had gone to a spiritualist about whether Reverend Hall would divorce his wife. Jim Mills was known to believe in ghosts. Phil Payne and his Daily News colleagues, working with the police, decided that they would try to scare Jim Mills into confessing. They'd do it with the help of a young newspaper reporter who would pretend she was a medium named Madame Astra.

And they lured Jim Mills to her Manhattan apartment and, you know, decked the place out and had incense wafting. And Phil Payne and the detectives and a stenographer were hiding behind a thick velvet curtain in the apartment, listening to this fake medium, essentially, you know, bring Eleanor's spirit into the room and accuse Jim of being her murderer. But he held strong throughout what was apparently in this hours-long charade and just said, I did not kill my wife. And it sort of turned out to be a flop. Over the next few years, tabloids kept trying to keep the case going. It was a story that

sold a lot of papers. Phil Payne left the Daily News and became the managing editor of another new tabloid, William Randolph Hearst's New York Daily Mirror. And in 1926, Phil Payne and his colleagues at the Daily Mirror managed to uncover some new information that put Francis Hall back in the spotlight. You know, he basically goes straight to the attorney general and the governor and shows them what his newspaper has dug up. And, you know, from that moment forward, they're sort of operating, you know, if not in cahoots, they're sort of operating in this harmonious way where, you know, he is supplying them with information to reopen this case, and they are promising the Daily Mirror,

you know, all the big scoops that are going to come out of it. So they're sort of working separately, but also in a way hand-in-hand. The Daily Mirror claimed that a fingerprint left on the business card discovered by Reverend Hall's foot matched that of Francis Hall's brother, Willie. And they had testimony from a man who claimed that a former maid at the Hall residence had been bribed to stay quiet. Four years after Reverend Hall and Eleanor Mills were found dead, Frances Hall was arrested for murder. We'll be right back. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for?

And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. What software do you use at work? The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be. The average US company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff,

communicate, and plan for the future? In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. When Frances Hall was arrested in 1926, she told reporters, I will make those who caused my arrest suffer as I am now being made to suffer. Her trial, alongside her two brothers, Willie and Henry, began in early November. What was the trial of Frances and her brothers like? This was like if O.J. Simpson had happened in 1922. I mean, it was that level of spectacle. You had, even before the trial, you had hundreds of journalists from all over the country who descended on the small town of Somerville. That was the county seat of Somerset County,

where this trial was to take place in the Somerset County Courthouse. You had so many reporters, you know, tramping around town that all the hotels were filled up, and reporters, newspapers were renting out entire homes for their staffs to live in over the course of this trial. I mean, it really was just a media circus, and probably a type of media circus that America hadn't seen that level of up to that point.

During the trial, a prosecutor described Frances Hall as a strong, proud woman, wounded perhaps as much in her pride as in her affections. Many of the same people who had testified during the 1922 grand jury proceedings were called, but there were new additions too. Like a doctor who was called to testify about a recent autopsy that had been performed on Eleanor Mills. He told the jury that he'd discovered that Eleanor Mills's tongue, larynx, and windpipe were missing. The prosecutor asked him,

They were all organs of singing, weren't they? To which he replied, Yes. Phil Payne was also called to testify. The defense asked how he'd gotten the business card with the fingerprint and whether he was paid more when newspaper sales went up. And Jane Gibson, the pig farmer, comes back. The interesting thing about the prosecution's strategy, and again, there's a special prosecutor who's brought in to try the case,

and he just said, I just believe this woman's story. And even though she had these credibility issues, even though her story had changed and gone through all these different permutations, really the contours remained the same. And he felt this was still the most compelling piece of evidence that could be presented to a jury. Jane Gibson, by 1926, had become ill.

She's suffering from a blood infection, possibly a constellation of other ailments, maybe cancer, maybe other things. And there's a question of not only will she be well enough to testify in this trial, but will she live to testify in this trial? And that sort of creates this suspense over the first few weeks of the trial as other witnesses are coming forward of, you know, when will we hear from the famous pig woman? But eventually she says, I want to

testify. And she signs, you know, a document saying she understands the risk of being transported by ambulance. And the next morning there's this procession of her ambulance and police escorts and cars full of journalists that are following her, moving very slowly along these back roads from Jersey City to Somerville. And there's crowds along the way who realize it's the famous pig woman and they they're shouting, and they're cheering out for her. Because, you know, she had really—the newspapers had turned her into this celebrity. The whole country was following the story of Jane Gibson, the pig woman. So it was really—of all the testimonies that happened in the trial, I think hers was surely the most anticipated. And when they finally reached the courthouse, the Somerset County courthouse, she's wheeled out of the ambulance on a stretcher and carried into the courtroom

on this hospital bed, which is set up in front of the jury. And that is how she testifies, from a hospital bed with a doctor beside her and a nurse who are checking her pulse and keeping her comfortable throughout the course of her questioning. From the hospital bed at the front of the courtroom, Jane Gibson testified that as she rode her mule on the night of the murders, she saw Francis Hall and her brother Willie. She then said she heard someone saying, explain these letters. She said she saw Francis's other brother, Henry, wrestling with another man. She heard screaming and three shots and then said she saw Francis's other brother, Henry, wrestling with another man. She heard screaming and three shots, and then said she ran away. She also told the jury that she returned later

that night and saw a, quote, big white-haired woman crying, bending down, facing something. She identified that woman again as Frances Hall. The defense pointed out ways that Jane Gibson's story had changed over the years. They also questioned her about her marriage, her career, and whether she'd made money after coming forward as a witness. At the end of her testimony, as she was being lifted by police officers to be carried out of the courtroom, Jane Gibson shouted, I told the truth, so help me God, and you know it, you know it, you know it. She was pointing her finger at Frances Hall.

Both of Frances Hall's brothers denied that they had anything to do with the murders. When Frances Hall took the stand, she denied killing her husband and Eleanor Mills or having anything to do with their murders. But after several hours of cross-examination, she acknowledged for the first time that her husband must have been having an affair. After hearing all this evidence, she said,

there must have been something going on I knew nothing of. And that was a really big moment, I think, in the course of the whole investigation, because she had been so firm, and this iron facade had finally sort of cracked, where she admits what everyone else clearly saw in plain sight, that there was this affair going on. And what verdict did the jury come back with?

So as the jury was deliberating, there were, you know, unanimously, everyone sort of thought that the pig woman was full of it. But there were, however, two jury members who felt swayed by the fingerprint evidence. And they had to be convinced that by the other 10, otherwise. And ultimately, the jury came back and found a not guilty verdict for all three defendants, who were Frances Hall, her brothers Henry Stevens, and Willie Stevens. If Phil Payne hadn't gotten involved in the way that he did, do you think it would have turned out differently?

I don't know that the case would have come back at all if Phil Payne hadn't been on a quest to find big stories like this that were going to make his newspaper fly off stands. I mean, he, in my mind, single-handedly in a way brought this back to life. And what happens to Frances Hall? You know, Frances Hall finally can sort of, you know, fade back into anonymity to an extent. You know, I think that she probably, you know, realizes that she will have to live for the rest of her life with this cloud over her. But, you know, she can stop being a public figure. And she sort of, you know, was able just to

retreat to the comfort of her mansion for the rest of her days. Frances Hall and her family also filed a $1.5 million libel lawsuit against the Daily Mirror, which the paper later settled for an undisclosed sum. Frances Hall died in 1942. Why have you not told this story in the 48 years that have gone on since? I didn't want it because I know that I would be rubbed out. In 1969, a man named Julius Bolliog lay sick in the hospital.

He was 67 years old and thought that he might be dying. He picked up the phone and called the police. He was 67 years old and thought that he might be dying. He picked up the phone and called the police. He had something to confess. It was about the murders of Reverend Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills. In 1922, Julius Bolliog was living in New Brunswick. He had become friendly with Francis Hall's brother, Willie. Willie Stevens come up in front of the store where I was sitting on a bench. And I just asked him where he come from. And I says he was very nervous.

And I says, what happened, Willie? Tell me. He says, I need you back in bed. According to Julius, Willie needed him to help deliver money, $6,000, in two envelopes. He claimed it was money from Francis Hall to two small-time gangsters, who Julius knew as Ike and Freddy. This recording is from an interview he did with the radio station 1010 Winds around 1970. I went over and

I says to Ike, I got, Willie gave me, sent me over to give you these two envelopes. And Ike took both and he locked in it and he gave one to Freddy.

And Ike says, is it all right? And Freddy took an envelope like this and he says, well, we'll see. And he said to me that, if you know what's good for you, you keep your mouth shut. And his story is that they paid these hitmen to kill Edward and Eleanor. So this is the story he tells a new detective named Detective George Saloom. And Detective Saloom spends the next several months sort of re-probing the case and looking very closely at all the details he's gotten from Julius Balyag and trying to corroborate them, some of which he does. They gave him two polygraphs, which he passed. I know that's not ironclad, but it's something. They gave him a psych evaluation,

which he passed, but there was no smoking gun. There was nothing that Saloon was actually able to find that would have conclusively proven this story about Willie and the family taking out a hit. What do you think happened? There was so much smoke around Frances Hall and her family throughout the whole four years that this case unfolded that I find it hard to believe that there wasn't also some fire there. I also find Julius Balyak's story fairly compelling. You know, it's why would this man out of nowhere 47 years later come up with this fantastical tale? You know, there was nothing in it for him. And, you know, I don't know if I believe his story exactly as the way he told it,

but I do find it believable that, you know, could this wealthy family and their desire to put an end to this scandal that was bringing, you know, dishonor on their family name, you know, could they have hired some guys to stop it? Could things have maybe gotten out of hand? And I don't find that to be very unbelievable at all. Well, Frances would have been a pretty good actress, huh? She would have been a pretty good actress. And it's hard to believe that a woman who was so averse to scandal and publicity would would have willingly participated in, you know, the scandal of all scandals and subjected herself to this level of scrutiny and publicity. So, you know, she was either a very good actor or, you know, someone who got wrapped up in this thing and

just had to kind of hold it together. In 1926, one paper wrote about the mystery of Frances Hall. It is difficult to disentangle the real woman from the figure that legend makes. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sachiko, Libby Foster, Samantha Brown, Lily Clark, and Megan Kinane. Our technical director is Rob Byers.

Engineering by Russ Henry. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. Joe Pompeo's book is called Blood and Ink, the scandalous jazz age double murder that hooked America on true crime. You can find a link to Joe's book in the show notes.

And if you like the show, tell a friend or leave us a review. It means a lot. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube, where you can go back and take a listen to some of our favorite past episodes. That's at youtube.com slash criminalpodcast. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC.

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