Education: Second Mystery

Near the old Northfield, Mass, summer home of Evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody is Mount Hermon School, which he founded for serious boys willing to work in the fields to win a plain, pious education. Three years ago Mount Hermon’s half century of Christian calm was rudely shattered by a murderous charge ofbuckshot, fired through his study window at youthful Headmaster Elliott Speer (TIME, Sept. 24, 1934). For that shotgun murder no one has ever been brought to trial. But last week another gun and two oldassociates of Elliott Speer once more surrounded quiet Mount Hermon with an incongruous criminological atmosphere, provided it with a second mystery. In Superior Court at nearby Greenfield, Mount Hermon’s retired Dean Thomas Edwin Elder, 55, was on trial for assault by gun on Mount Hermon’s retired cashier Stephen Allen Norton, 66.

To a jury of twelve of his neighbors old Mr. Norton, solid and bushy-browed, told the same story he told to the Greenfield police hurriedly summoned to his house on the night of May 25. He was just leaving his garage after driving his wife home from a church meeting when a man in a long coat appeared in the doorway, pointed a gun at him and said in a clear voice: “Norton, I want to talk to you.” Mr. Norton ducked into his house and the man disappeared. But he had recognized a face and voice he had worked with for 22 years. “That man,” said Mr. Norton, “was Thomas Edwin Elder.”

Old Mr. Elder told the same story he had told when police arrested him the next; morning at his poultry farm at Alton, N. H., where he retired after the Speer inquest in 1934. He had spent the night of May 25 with his wife at the Eagle Hotel in Keene, N. H., 30 mi. from Greenfield. He had not worn a long coat that night and did not own one. District Attorney David Keedy called a Keene filling station proprietor to testify that Mr. Elder, wearing a coat “down to his calves,” had bought eight gallons of gasoline from him at seven o’clock that night. He introduced an Eagle Hotel chambermaid who expressed her opinion that half of the Elders’ double bed had not been slept in. But Defendant Elder would not change a jot of his story.

Dragged to the stand to revive an even more ancient scandal was Dr. Henry Franklin Cutler, Elliott Speer’s 75-year-old predecessor. During Dr. Cutler’s regime Cashier Norton was on such precarious terms with Dean Elder that he bored a hole in his office wall to spy on the dean and his red-haired secretary, Evelyn Dill. When Mr. Norton reported to Headmaster Cutler that he had seen the pair kissing and embracing, the headmaster had attempted to straighten things out by holding a “harmony” prayermeeting in his office. At the time, Dr. Cutler painfully recalled, Dean Elder had wanted to thrash Cashier Norton as a “peeping Tom,” Last week Defendant Elder told the court that Accuser Norton haa always been a “Jekyll and Hyde character,” prone to bursts of hysterical repentance. Accuser Norton, asked whether he bore “enmity” toward the defendant, answered reflectively: “I don’t like that word ‘enmity.’ It doesn’t describe the feeling between us.”

Reduced to deciding which old man to believe, the jury decided in favor of Defendant Elder. Out six hours, they acquitted him both of assault with intent to frighten (maximum of two years in jail) and assault with intent to murder (maximum of ten years in prison). But in the Berkshires no one thought that the second Mount Hermon mystery had been settled any more satisfactorily than the first.