On September 16, 1922, two mushroom-picking New Jersey lovers wandered down an abandoned road and stumbled across a scene so grisly it soon became a national landmark. People from all over the country flocked to see where two dead bodies were discovered under a crabapple tree—that of the local reverend and a singer in his choir. For years, the two had been engaged in a passionate affair.
Lancaster (PA) Examiner-New Era, Oct. 20, 1922, p. 1.
Reverend Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills, both dead of gunshot wounds, had been positioned to lay in embrace, with steamy love letters scattered around them. “Oh, honey, I am fiery today. Burning, flaming love,” read a letter from Mills to the reverend. “[The Lord] is always near—in whatever we do, even in physical closeness … for we know He meant for His children to taste deeply of all things,” read another.1
It wasn’t long before these incriminating missives were splashed across newspapers and read aloud by a blushing court clerk, revealing an intensely spiritual romance. Hall and Mills seemed to believe that, far from removing them from divine grace, their bond pulled them into its orbit. They compared their romance to prayer and exchanged notes through a hymnal. And it was Mrs. Mills’ songs of worship that had entranced the minister. When Reverend Hall wrote sermons in his study at St. John the Evangelist in New Brunswick, he could hear the soprano’s voice drifting above the others into the rafters. There was “something divine about the way [she sang] hymns,” he thought.2 As she climbed octaves, the Holy Spirit came over him, and then the words poured from his pen.
The killer or killers presumably knew that Mills’ vocal talents had attracted the minister, removing her tongue and larynx after death.3
Eleanor Mills (New Brunswick Free Public Library)
Edward Hall (New Brunswick Free Public Library)
Wide-eyed Americans eagerly consumed news about the case. So did narrow-eyed religious figures, including the popular preacher Billy Sunday. The evangelist chalked the affair up to a jazz-mad generation, known for its pleasure-seeking ways. The year of the murders, dance halls, racetracks, and speakeasies abounded—sure signs that the End Times were nigh, according to Sunday.4 But what really peeved the evangelist and other like-minded authorities was the fact that the couple had laid claim to religion. It was one thing for two people to commit adultery; it was quite another for them to commit it in the name of their Christian faith—especially at a time when Protestantism was rapidly modernizing.
In 1922, American Protestants were increasingly finding traditional doctrine incompatible with the modern world. The Hall-Mills case staged theological debates between liberal “modernists” and “fundamentalists” like Billy Sunday who championed biblical literalism and conservative values. Debates like these helped spawn the political and cultural divides between the modern progressive left and religious right.
The interior of St. John the Evangelist, where the lovers met (New Brunswick Free Public Library)
Much of the tension between fundamentalists and modernists boiled down to conflicting attitudes about the trajectory of the nation. Fundamentalists generally believed that America was careening toward apocalypse as a result of immigration, anti-capitalist sentiment, women’s repudiation of Victorian prudishness, and other cultural trends. Though it was reacting to current events, this doomsday theology had roots in nineteenth-century premillennialism, which predicted cataclysmic destruction before Christ’s return and a thousand-year Golden Age. From the fundamentalist’s perspective, there was only one way to save souls from the new morality taking hold: by upholding the “fundamentals” of the faith. They held special disdain for the Darwinist theory of evolution and argued humans were moral creatures made in their creator’s image—not soulless monkeys.5
Modernists were more optimistic about the times in which they were living. They typically subscribed to postmillennialism, which predicted Christ would return after a prosperous millennium ushered in by humanity on earth. They championed progressive reforms within immigration, access to birth control, women’s voting rights, and divorce law. Thinking science could help bring about “heaven on earth,” they also embraced evolution. Under scientific influence, some even began to question the divinity and virgin birth of Christ, suggesting that these scriptural details were more allegorical than literal. What mattered most were Christ’s ethics of grace and love.
As the investigation of the New Jersey double murders unfolded, it became clear that both victims had been watching these theological debates with great interest.
On the day she died, Mills had placed on Hall’s desk a New York World editorial in which the New York minister Percy Stickney Grant argued that the Episcopal Church should revise its rule prohibiting divorce except in cases of infidelity. Grant reasoned that a marriage’s sacredness did not come from a priest, but from those involved. A union was blessed by their feeling and behavior. Hence, a marriage without two truly committed souls did not honor the Lord, and there was no reason for it to continue. This rationale surely appealed to the lovers, who had not shared a bedroom with their respective spouses for years. Mills’s daughter reported that her parents had a loveless marriage and that her father verbally abused her mother; local reporters observed that Mrs. Hall spent most of her time with a lady companion, with whom she later moved to Europe. And Grant’s article was only the latest reading material Hall and Mills had shared on the subject of spiritual marriage; their letters revealed they had co-read the British novelist Robert Keable’s controversial novels Simon Called Peter (1921) and The Mother of All Living (1922), both of which depicted a clergyman’s illicit love.6
To guard against such liberalism, traditionalists took up their pens. A few weeks after the murders, a Washington Times contributor raged against the minister’s apparent disregard for his training: “A pretty choir singer comes his way and at once … he is transformed into a faun of the pagan days.” It irked this writer that “faun and priest co-existed.” Reverend Hall was “a moral leader, officially” but “in his moments of relaxation, a pure sensualist, in no way disturbed by the incongruity of his two lives.”7
Sightseers flock to the scene of the crime, where they take souvenirs, such as the bark of the crapapple tree (New Brunswick Free Public Library)
Four years later, police charged the reverend’s widow, Frances Hall, and two of her brothers with the murders, after a Daily Mirror editor uncovered new evidence, including a divorce petition in which the claimant alleged that his wife—a former servant of Mrs. Hall—bragged about being paid $5,000 to keep quiet about her employer’s whereabouts on the night of the murders.8
Covering the trial for the International News Service, Sunday echoed the Washington Times contributor’s sentiments. He, too, marveled at the reverend’s seeming hypocrisy and implied that only the victims were to blame for the violence against them, “the wages of sin” being death. The well-known fundamentalist John Roach Straton also attended the trial to moralize against modern sexuality.9
Commentators like Sunday and Stratton refused to engage Hall and Mills’ belief that their spiritual and erotic lives were one and the same—a belief that had deep intellectual roots in Christian mysticism, in addition to reflecting the liberal theology of the day.10 This was not only because Protestantism had historically associated sex with shame, tolerating it for the sake of reproduction, but also because fundamentalists associated sexual desire with modernity, and modernity with the end of the world. To sanctify desire would be to sanction other hallmarks of modernity, such as evolution and socialism, and therefore, to abet the last-days depravity.
After a month-long trial, the defendants were acquitted. This was mostly due to the prosecution’s many blunders, which included losing key pieces of evidence and the testimony of unreliable witnesses. By the trial’s end, Americans had become deeply divided about the outcome they wished to see. This was likely, in part, because they were deeply divided between modernizing and enforcing traditional morals.
The intra-Protestant controversy that the Hall-Mills case illuminated for Americans in the 1920s prefigured the “culture wars” that exist today. As the century wore on, Sunday’s evangelical heirs, such as Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell, gained political power through the Republican Party, provoking more progressive believers and secularists to resist the consolidation of church and state. Still today, conservatives and liberals hotly contest the authority of science (especially in relation to religion), the definition of marriage, and the respective roles of humanism and religious law.
The last debate helps to explain why sex became such a fault line of contemporary politics, suggested by the intensity of debates about marriage and birth control. While scholars have tended to explain the sex divide in political, racial, and economic terms, pointing toward the ways that certain sexual norms reinforce white patriarchy and the free market, among other institutions whose merit the right and left debate, the Hall-Mills case suggests that the sex divide also stems, in part, from a theological disagreement about the nature of redemption. There are many who believe that redemption is only possible for those who strictly obey biblical law and many who believe, quite contrarily, that redemption is possible for all who embrace Christ’s persona of love.
Embedded in such disputes about marriage (and birth control) are differing opinions about whether to permit sex for pleasure, apart from procreation. Many religious and political authorities intensely distrust pleasure (especially female pleasure), while others regard it as a source of great spiritual energy. The scene of Hall and Mills’ deaths vividly reflected this chasm nearly 100 years ago. The morbid tableau was likely intended to shame the adulterers and rationalize the violence against them; but it also reminded the public of a deep human need for transcendent connection with others. It was a reminder that visions of a more beautiful life might come, not from any pulpit or text, but from the pulsating flesh of those who wish to make the world anew.
The crabapple tree under which the lovers were found (New Brunswick Free Public Library)
- Richard Sears Walling, Edward & Eleanor and the Wages of Sin: The Hall-Mills Murders of 1922 (Jersey City: Communipaw, 2019), 88–96. A good recent article on the Hall-Mills murders is Mara Bovsun, “A 90-year mystery: Who killed the pastor and the choir singer?,” New York Daily News, Sept. 6, 2012.
- Walling, Edward & Eleanor, 107.
- Bovsun, “A 90-year mystery.”
- Billy Sunday, “Amusements,” reprinted in William T. Ellis, ed., “Billy” Sunday: The Man and His Message (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co., 1914), 433–51; Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (New York: HarperCollins, 1931) 186–87.
- George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Bradley J. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 79, 162–63.
- Gerald Tomlinson, Fatal Tryst: Who Killed the Minister and the Choir Singer? (Lake Hopatcong, NJ: Home Run Press, 1999), 72; “Rebuke Given Gotham Rector,” Ogden Stanford-Examiner, Jan. 20, 1923, p. 2; Walling, Edward & Eleanor, 79, 306.
- Andre Tridon, “Psycho-analysis of the Hall-Mills Love Letters,” Washington Times, Oct. 20, 1922, p. 28.
- Bovsun, “A 90-year mystery.”
- Plainfield (NJ) Courier News, Aug. 31, 1926, p. 8; Allen, Only Yesterday, 186.
- R. Marie Griffith, Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 19. Ellen Wayland-Smith, Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table (New York: Picador, 2016), 25, 50–51. Both the Apostle Paul and the twelfth-century Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaus described the union between Christ and his followers in overtly sexual terms, while the sixteenth-century Carmelite nun Teresa of Avila wrote extensively of the throbbing ecstasy she experienced when God’s light penetrated her, leaving her “on fire with a great love” and with a pain “so great, that it made [her] moan.”
