The Press: Under The Crabapple Tree

Three hundred newspaper men and women sat in a curving, triple arc of chairs facing the judge’s bench, the witness stand, the jury box, of a tiny courtroom in Somerville, N. J. The air was stuffy. An angular court crier (John Bunn by name) intoned in a creaky voice, “Hear ye. . . .” The reporters’ pencils moved rapidly, their eyes searched the faces of the witnesses, the defendants, the lawyers. Occasionally a truck rumbled through the street outside. In here, a certain Mrs. Frances Stevens Hall and her brothers, the Messrs. Henry and “Willie” Stevens, were on trial for the murder of a clergyman and a choir singer. All the Real INSIDE NEWS of the Hall-Mills Murder

Told by the newspaper responsible for

the investigation resulting in this

trial, the

DAILY MIRROR

So bleated a placard appearing broadcast through New York, Long Island, New Jersey. Other newspapers were not laggard. Sweet Dorothy Dix, writing for the New York Evening Post, and syndicated throughout the U. S., described Charlotte Mills, daughter of the dead singer, as “the quintessence of this hard-boiled age, when girls have no old-fashioned reverence for a mother’s purity, but, on the contrary, condone mother’s frailty and help her out in her little ‘affairs.'”

Damon Runyon, tired 0. Henry of press syndicates, wrote about “this pleasant looking little courthouse, all white and trim” and about the “Pig Woman.” Everybody focused on the Pig Woman, so-called because she once kept pigs. She was the star witness for the State. By name Jane Gibson, she used to be a circus rider. She brought to court with her a small baby (called the “mystery child” because of its obscure parentage). Erratic, obese, disheveled, suffering from a mortal organic disease, she said that she was driving her mule down a lane the night that Dr. Hall was killed. She heard shots in a field, saw flashes of light, hands groping, momentarily terrible faces. She saw a man pitch forward under a crabapple tree.

That crabapple tree no longer stands. As testimony to the public morbidity which the murder, the various hearings, the long investigations have excited throughout the U. S., souvenir hunters long since rooted it up, tore it apart, carried it away. The bodies of Dr. Hall and Mrs. Mills, his mistress, were found side by side under the crabapple tree. A bullet had killed the amorous Episcopalian. The woman’s throat was cut and there were three bullets in her head.

In Somerville, dynamic Alexander Simpson, special prosecutor, with a high decisive voice and little hands, made his opening address. While he spoke, a giant telegraph switchboard with 120 “positions” distributed his words to various newspapers; more telegraph wires than have been used for any news event* except the Tunney-Dempsey fight, crackled into action. The front page of the New York Mirror was covered with a picture of Mr. Mills kneeling in sad prayerful pose beside the open grave of his wife. The New York Times wrote about the trial as spaciously as if it were a polar exploration.

The curiosity existed because of the individuality of the various, accused people. Mrs. Hall, a thick, proud, aging, enigmatic woman whose money made possible her murdered husband’s churchly and social eminence; Willie Stevens, her grinning, giggling brother, who, older than she, looks upon her as a mother, wears heavy spectacles and a prodigious growth of mustache and hair, loves fire-engines and faced the accusation that he cut the throat of Mrs. Mills; Henry Stevens, another brother, tight-mouthed, an expert marksman, said to have fired the fatal shots. The curiosity existed also because of the ghastly disposition of the bodies, in the dismal field, under the spectre tree. Curiosity was awake because of the time that had elapsed since the murder—four years. Finally, curiosity was awake because the newspapers had been stampeded by a grimy little sheetlet bleating, “Awake, awake!”

And how did this stampede occur? That story begins with a man, a “Tabloid Ringmaster.”

Young like the sheetlets that he has built, Philip A. Payne is a managing editor at 32. Soon after the War, by working on Mr. Hearst’s Chicago Herald-Examiner and New York American, he found what “news” the gum-chewers of his country will swallow. Then, the New York Daily News, first of the tabloids, was started by the two rich, hard-boiled publishers of the Chicago Tribune, Joseph Medill Patterson, Robert R. McCormick. Mr. Payne, an earnest, bespectacled Puck, was invited to become an assistant editor. He rose to fame as the Daily News leaped upward to the highest circulation in the U. S. Last year, Publisher Hearst, who had grabbed Arthur Brisbane from the World 30 years ago, lured Philip Payne to the Daily Mirror. Many a circulation war did these snarling sheetlets wage. The Mirror once decided to help the Government popularize the $2 bill by printing the numbers of such bills and giving away $100 daily to whoever found them in circulation. Incidentally, chicle-masticators began to buy the Mirror to find lucky numbers. The News replied with the same stunt for $1 bills. Whereupon the Mirror bleated:

“We are TIRED of being imitated by the Daily News and are willing to pay $10,000 to any intellectual giant that will tell us how we can SHAME them, DISCOURAGE them, CAJOLE them, COAX them, PERSUADE them, or SCARE them into stopping their infernal chameleon-like imitations of the Daily Mirror.”

Before the Daily Mirror was born, before Philip Payne became its managing editor, there was the double murder beneath the crab-apple tree. The first investigation ended without indictments; the case was hushed up. . . .

Last December Editor Payne suddenly decided that New Brunswick had not bared its bosom of all it knew. From the Mirror staff he despatched confidential investigators. Able Reporter Herbert M. Mayer became “sick” and left the office to direct the activity from an uptown Manhattan hotel. A county detective, George Totten, was engaged to aid him.

By June they had crammed four drawers of a steel filing cabinet with evidence and were ready to “break” the story. Editor Payne took his material before Governor Harry A. Moore of New Jersey, who promised to follow up with a state investigation.

On July 16, Editor Payne cracked his whip and the Mirror started galloping. A full-page wash drawing showed the bodies of the Rev. Hall and Mrs. Mills as they were found beneath the crabapple tree. The headline bleated : “HALL -MILLS MURDER MYSTERY BARED.” The story insinuated that Widow Hall and her deficient brother “Willie” would be the storm centre of the new investigation.

That able trade journal, Editor & Publisher, has told of the crafty Mirror’s strategy:

“The Mirror itself, purposely, Payne said, let the story die down a little on July 27 and 28. In the masthead of the paper this question was published: ‘Can Members, of a Wealthy Family in New Jersey Commit a Crime and Get Away with it?’

“Mayer told Editor & Publisher it was figured that opposition papers would spot this and would surmise the Mirror was getting ready to abandon the sensational story. Reporters in New Jersey for the Mirror informed those in charge in New York that other papers began to withdraw their men when they noticed the Mirror was asking this question. The question seemed to demand an affirmative answer.

“As a matter of fact, state detectives had been in the Mirror’s office during these two days examining the evidence the tabloid men had compiled. ‘Well, there’s nothing left to do but arrest Mrs. Hall,’ they announced after they had completed their inspection. ‘We’ll arrest her tomorrow night.'”

Editor Payne had everything ready in the Mirror office for a story of the arrest of Mrs. Hall. He went to New Brunswick on July 28, accompanied Captain Lamb of the State troopers, who arrested Mrs. Hall and hurried her away to Somerville, N. J. Back in Manhattan newsstands groaned under the weight of thousands of Daily Mirrors, big with complete arrest news. Other city and telegraph editors bit their respective tongues, frantically bellowed for confirmation. . . .

From that day to this, the Hall-Mills murder has been bellowed in the front page headlines of the press, from the immaculate New York Times down to Bernarr Macfadden’s pornoGraphic.

Because gum-chewers smack their lips loudly over this kind of thing, literate people are confronted by prodigious bales of newsprint upon the sexual and mental Aberrations of some commonplace people. In the office of the Daily Mirror, an earnest, bespectacled Puck dreams of other crusades.

Developments. In September the indictments against Mrs. Hall and her brothers were obtained. Last week the trial raged, a climax coming when the state showed that a leader of the 1922 investigations had accepted a $2,500 bribe to leave New Jersey. . . . And then there was always the Pig Woman . . . she collapsed on the witness stand . . . Prosecutor Simpson snatched her away from her physicians, took her to another hospital under guard of his own men . . . Reporters, heartthrob specialists scribbled; so did Dorothy Dix. . .

*Not excepting that last great descent of big-town journalism upon small-town litigation, the Dayton (Tenn.) “Monkey Trial” of 1925.