The calling card left on a choir singer's body that police couldn't explain

The morning of September 15, 1922, a local man found two bodies beneath a crabapple tree in a secluded lane known as "Lovers' Lane" near New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall, an Episcopal minister, had been shot; his body lay with his head resting on his coat.

Nearby lay Mrs. Eleanor Reinhardt Mills, a choir singer in Hall's church, also shot, her throat cut.

On Mills's body lay a calling card from Hall's church.

Police could not explain it.

A killer had left a trace of the victim's own parish, a card that named the church where she sang and the minister who led it.

Why would anyone leave such a thing?

Why place it on her, and not on him?

And whose card was it, exactly?

That would require evidence.

The record does not establish why the calling card was placed there, or by whom.

It was simply there, an object the investigators could not fold into any story they told.

The case became a national sensation for reasons beyond the card.

Hall was a married minister.

Mills was a married mother of two, a choir singer in his church.

Their affair was illicit, and the class divide between the families was apparent — Hall's wife came from wealth; Mills did not.

But the card sat on the body, a small, stiff piece of paper that refused to mean anything clear.

It is a detail that asks a question.

It is a detail that leaves the question open.

THE TWO LIVES

Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall was the rector of St. John's Episcopal Church in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Eleanor Reinhardt Mills was a choir member in his church.

She was also a married mother of two.

Hall was married to Frances Noel Stevens Hall, who came from a wealthy family.

Two marriages, one church, one choir.

The ordinary texture of Sunday mornings — hymns, sermons, polite nods in the pews.

It is the texture of a life that had not yet collided with another.

The affair between Hall and Mills was illicit.

Both were married.

That fact would become the motive the prosecution later argued.

The class divide was noted in the case.

Frances came from money; Mills's circumstances were more modest.

The record does not detail the exact nature or duration of the affair.

It does not say when it began, or how long it had been running.

It does not say who knew, or who looked away.

The two lives ran parallel — church, choir, marriage — until they did not.

One was the man in the pulpit.

One was the voice in the congregation.

Both were bound to other people.

That binding was the scandal.

That binding was the argument the state would make years later.