My Favorite Murder, Roaring Twenties-Style
In “Blood & Ink,” Joe Pompeo explores the gory Hall-Mills case and the tabloid nation it spawned.
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By Mattie Kahn
Sept. 13, 2022
BLOOD & INK: The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder That Hooked America on True Crime, by Joe Pompeo
The newspaper publisher Joseph Medill Patterson is alleged to have ranked the subjects most popular with his 1920s readers: “(1) Love or Sex, (2) Money, (3) Murder.” The best stories — the kind that propelled his upstart New York tabloid the Daily News from local rag to the most circulated newspaper in America — involved all three.
Joe Pompeo, Vanity Fair’s senior media correspondent, cites Patterson’s formula in his comprehensive new book; he also follows it. “Blood & Ink” charts two explosive and intertwined narratives: a pair of gruesome homicides and the rise of American tabloid journalism.
He opens in September 1922, when the bodies of the charismatic Rev. Edward Hall and his congregant, the local housewife Eleanor Mills, were found dead under a crabapple tree in a field in New Jersey. Their precise arrangement proved consequential: The corpses fell on the far side of the line that separates two counties — the better-off Middlesex, where both victims lived, and Somerset, where officers opened a case.
All signs pointed to murder. The weapon was gone, the bodies had been staged, and someone had taken the time to prop Edward Hall’s own calling card on his foot. Mills, shot in the face three times, was almost unrecognizable. Investigators — fumbling from the start — waved over a pedestrian to see if he might know the deceased. That observer was the first to notice that Mills had a 16-inch, maggot-filled gash from ear to ear.
The bereaved included the victims’ respective spouses: Hall’s imperious heiress wife, Frances, and the hapless Jim Mills, whom Eleanor had treated with open contempt. Both seemed devastated and, when questioned, refused to admit the obvious — that the victims had been in the midst of a much-whispered-about affair.
The Hall-Mills murders captivated not just gossip-starved neighbors but a nation beginning to fall under the spell of its homegrown tabloids. “Blood & Ink” will delight journalism nerds: Pompeo traces how The Daily News boosted its circulation on the back of the investigation, with The Daily Mirror (promising “90 percent entertainment, 10 percent information”) and The Evening Graphic close behind. And he advances a convincing argument that hard-boiled editors — including the fascinating and doomed Phil Payne — and their relentless reporters drove the most consequential twists of the case. (The female journalists who dominated the emergent true-crime beat deserve their own book.)
The newspapers’ quest to find the murderer may have been genuinely tireless, but theirs was shock journalism — what one contemporary critic termed “a new, mongrel Fourth Estate” — with a loose-at-best adherence to reporting standards. In one memorable attempt to reveal the killer, Payne footed the bill for a staged séance in which he cast a reporter as an invented oracle named Madame Astra. In another, an annulment petition somehow went missing until a tantalizing scoop hit the presses, then reappeared soon after the morning edition.
“Blood & Ink” charts an ever-shifting roster of potential culprits; a local pig farmer named Jane Gibson became so famous for her lurid false accusations that F. Scott Fitzgerald dropped her name in an interview. The actual arrest and trial of the alleged murderers only came after a set of botched autopsies, one false confession, a dubious detention, a series of implausible witness statements and the rumored handoff of considerable sums of cash. A prosecutor left the case; a swashbuckling editor was fired.
True-crime obsessives who like their murders tied up with a bow will be disappointed by the case’s lack of closure. But Pompeo tries to make the most of his loose ends. He has done a staggering amount of research — he recounts suspects’ jailhouse packing lists — although he can’t materialize forensic evidence where there is none. When the verdict arrives in the book’s final 50 pages, it lands like a sigh. Pompeo himself refrains from offering up his own best guess on the identity of the real culprit until the bitter end, and his restraint lets readers formulate their own theories about what happened beneath the crabapple tree. And while those cogs turn, sections that focus on the press shine. It’s a testament to Pompeo’s skill that his tabloid exegesis is just as riveting as a double murder in an open field. I could read several thousand more words on the eccentric vulgarian Bernarr Macfadden, whose newspaper was so crass it was nicknamed the “PornoGraphic.”
Pompeo writes that reporters telegraphed some 11 million words from the basement of the courthouse. His own book is more economical, but still conscientiously thorough; dead ends and false starts can drag on. In a postscript, Pompeo explains how he came into a treasure trove of files related to the case, helping him to expand on previous accounts. “Pure gold,” he writes. In his evident excitement, he sometimes overindulges in these details; the slower moments of “Blood & Ink” can read like a court stenographer’s notes.
To keep up the momentum, Pompeo has an unfortunate habit of borrowing a format from his tabloid source material. Several chapters end on exaggerated cliffhangers. When Frances prepares to see visitors after her husband’s funeral: “Her ordeal had only just begun.” When Jim insists his was a cheerful marriage: “Despite his obfuscation, the truth was about to come out.”
Flourishes aside, “Blood & Ink” is an addictive whodunit and a vivid depiction of a crime that gripped a generation of newspaper readers. It refutes the notion that our taste for the salacious is some product of People magazine or the internet age. Since at least the Roaring Twenties, we have craved — and opened our wallets for — smut and scandal. And Pompeo does something hard: He delivers the goods without losing sight of the crime itself.
In his subtitle, Pompeo makes the case that the Hall-Mills murders got readers hooked on true crime. But the book leaves room for reasonable doubt: What made this particular crime, and these characters, at this historical moment, into the case that launched a genre?
There doesn’t seem to be one clear-cut reason. But the publisher William Randolph Hearst offered a clue in a telegram he sent his editor in 1926 when The Mirror first hit the half-a-million-copies mark. “Congratulations on circulation. It is wonderful,” he wrote. “Important thing for newspaper to do in making circulation is to get excited when public excited.” People, he added, will reach for the paper “which seems to express their feelings in addition to printing the facts.”
The indignation! The sense of thwarted justice! The witnesses gone viral — or as viral as a witness could go in the age of flappers and hooch. Tabloids stoked outrage as business boomed.
That didn’t solve the Hall-Mills murders, nor can Pompeo. But “Blood & Ink” does unravel some of the mysteries of our present. True crime continues to inspire a kind of blood thirst that podcast creators and Reddit thread-writers and TikTok theorists will never slake. It leaves us wanting more.
Mattie Kahn is the author of the forthcoming book “Young and Restless.”
BLOOD & INK: The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder That Hooked America on True Crime | By Joe Pompeo | 352 pp. | Illustrated | William Morrow | $32.50
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