RECTOR’S LOVE AFFAIRS

Taranaki Daily News, 17 November 1926, Page 11

RECTOR’S LOVE AFFAIRS

DOUBLE MURDER CHARGE. New York, Nov. 3. Four years after the Rev. Dr. Edward Hall and his choir-leader, Mrs. Eleanor Mills, were murdered, the trial lias begun of his widow, Mrs. Frances Hall, and her brothers, Henry- and Willie Stevens. Mrs. Mills was the wife of a sexton, and in very poor circumstances until she became interested in the handsome rector of the fashionable church of St. John the Evangelist, of New Brunswick, New Jersey. Mrs. Hall had discovered that love letters passed between the pair, and she intercepted a telephone message on the night of the fatal tryst on September 14, 1922. She had already realised that their relations were notorious, and the prosecution’s case is based on the assumption that Mrs. Hall and her brothers shot ,the couple dead as they lay in each other’s arms under a peach tree. The woman's tongue was cut out and her body was otherwise horribly mutilated. The hearing is likely to occupy many weeks;