🕯️ Murder, Secrets, and Gatsby’s Shadow
That’s all for this chapter of Hall & Mills. Next time, I want to show you another scandal that might just surprise you — one with its own strange literary shadow.
I want to share a story with you, one brimming with whispered secrets, heartbreaking sorrow, and the echoes of literary giants.
On September 16, 1922, New Brunswick, New Jersey, was rocked by a scandal that exploded nationwide. The double murder of Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall, a married Episcopal minister, and Eleanor Reinhardt Mills, a choir singer from his church, sparked a media frenzy — complete with the release of their love letters in their entirety. Despite being married to other people, the two had been secret lovers, according to town gossip.
It turned into a national craze. Newspapers published the letters, neighbors shared their speculations, and before long, the case evolved into a full-fledged media spectacle. But why? What made a priest and a choir singer a national news sensation?
At first glance, nothing seems out of the ordinary. But if you dig deeper, you'll uncover a tangled web of status, wealth, and betrayal. According to The New Yorker, "Hall was a prominent Episcopal minister and the husband of a wealthy wallpaper heiress with family connections to Johnson & Johnson; Mills, on the other hand, was a working-class homemaker and a soprano in the church choir — and the wife of the parish sexton."
Did You Know?
New York Times accounted, “At first, presumably seeking to shield his wife's reputation, he insisted publicly that the love letters found on their bodies and later the batch disclosed under a carpet in his flat, did not establish anything stronger than a platonic friendship.”
It was clear what was being implied: this wasn’t just about love, it was about class. The wealthy Hall family, with its connections to Johnson & Johnson money, versus Eleanor Mills, a working-class mother and singer who yearned for more. When the scandal broke, suspicion fell not on strangers but on Hall’s wife, Frances, and her brothers. Smithsonian Magazine³ recounts how the trial became one of the most sensational of the Jazz Age, with tabloid reporters swarming the courthouse. In the end, however, no convictions were ever made. Wealth and power have a way of wiping away bloodstains.
That's what really draws me in. I'm fascinated by how we think of true crime as a modern trend, something new and hip, but the obsession goes way back to 1922. And what's even more unsettling is that it might have had a hand in shaping one of the greatest novels of all time, The Great Gatsby.
As People magazine noted, the parallels are striking. Scandalous affairs, tabloid headlines, and how wealth shields the powerful while the vulnerable bear the brunt of the consequences. Doesn’t that remind you of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, walking away from the wreckage unscathed while others are left to pick up the pieces?
Now, a century after the investigation began, Joe Pompeo has taken it to a whole new level. In his book Blood & Ink, he unearths long-forgotten clues and shocking new revelations from the Hall–Mills case. The expanded paperback edition reveals even more details that change the story yet again. It’s a stark reminder that true crime has been with us all along, lurking in the shadows of gossip, headlines, and even our literature.
But Pompeo isn’t the only one pursuing this mystery. The Hall–Mills case has puzzled writers for decades, each trying to untangle the same web of love, betrayal, and privilege.
Step into the courtroom with William Kunstler’s The Hall–Mills Murder Case: The Minister and the Choir Singer. As written by the renowned defense attorney, this book transports you right into the heart of the trial. Kunstler dissects the proceedings with the precision of a seasoned lawyer, scrutinizing every alibi, motive, and contradiction. If you're after a gripping, evidence-driven account that reads like a legal thriller, this is the book for you.
Next up is Gerald Tomlinson’s Fatal Tryst. Tomlinson takes a more storytelling approach, weaving together the crime with a focus on atmosphere. His take is bold: he points to the Stevens siblings as the prime suspects. It's less like a lawyer’s case and more like a detective piecing things together late at night.
Not every retelling is packed with words. Rick Geary’s Lovers' Lane, a graphic novel in his Treasury of 20th Century Murder series, vividly tells the Hall–Mills story through illustrations. The artwork is stark, unsettling, and almost voyeuristic. Reading it feels like browsing a scrapbook of scandal, with Geary’s art conveying what words alone can’t: the eerie silence under that crabapple tree.
And then we come to the book that nudges us straight toward Fitzgerald — Sarah Churchwell’s Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby. Churchwell isn’t just telling the Hall–Mills story; she’s asking how the cultural frenzy around it might have seeped into Fitzgerald’s imagination. She draws lines between the headlines of 1922 and the themes in Gatsby: the recklessness, the affairs, the rich retreating into their money while others suffer the wreckage. It’s less about solving a crime and more about asking how real life bleeds into fiction.
Which brings me to Gatsby.
As Fitzgerald himself writes:
“They were careless people… they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness…”
Reading that line, it’s impossible not to hear echoes of Hall and Mills — and the wealthy family that got off scot-free.
More than a century has passed, and the Hall–Mills murders still haven't been solved. The crabapple tree is long gone, and the rumors of neighbors have faded away, but the story hasn't been completely forgotten. It resurfaces in the works of lawyers like Kunstler, writers like Tomlinson, artists like Geary, scholars like Churchwell, and journalists like Pompeo. Each new account offers its own take, its own theory, and its own perspective — but no one has been able to close the case.
Perhaps that’s the point. Some stories don’t wrap up with a definitive ending; they resonate. They reverberate through our courtrooms, tabloids, and even our literature. Fitzgerald introduced us to "the careless people,” but Hall and Mills revealed what carelessness looks like in human form.
That's why I can’t let this story go — not because I'm expecting to solve it, but because it feels like a reflection of America’s obsessions: with wealth, scandal, and love gone wrong. A reflection where fiction and fact intertwine, until a double murder beneath a crabapple tree and the pages of The Great Gatsby start to feel like different chapters of the same story.
📚 Sources
EBSCO Research Starters, “Hall-Mills Murder Case,” EBSCO Research Starters. Read here
Adam Gopnik, “A Sensational Murder Trial in the Newly Founded New Yorker,” The New Yorker, February 6, 2017. Read here
Mike Dash, “The Hall-Mills Murder,” Smithsonian Magazine, 2016. Read here
People, “The Shocking Double Murder That Influenced F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby Remains Unsolved a Century Later,” People, June 27, 2025. Read here
The New York Times, “Hall Case—A Year-Old, a Baffling Mystery,” September 9, 1923. Read here
Joe Pompeo, “A Sensational Murder Trial in the Newly Founded New Yorker,” The New Yorker, September 13, 2022. Read here
Joe Pompeo, “New revelations in the Hall-Mills murder mystery,” Substack, December 5, 2023. Read here
Joe Pompeo, Blood & Ink: The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder that Hooked America on True Crime, HarperCollins, 2022.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925.
William M. Kunstler, The Hall–Mills Murder Case: The Minister and the Choir Singer, Rutgers University Press, 1980.
Gerald Tomlinson, Fatal Tryst: Who Killed the Minister and the Choir Singer?, Rutgers University Press, 1992.
Rick Geary, Lovers’ Lane: The Hall–Mills Mystery, NBM Publishing, 2012.
Sarah Churchwell, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, Penguin, 2014.