The crabapple tree letters that still shadow a 1922 double murder,

The letters were not hidden.

They lay in the open, scattered near the bodies beneath the crabapple tree.

On the night of September 14, 1922, the bodies of Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall and Mrs. Eleanor Reinhardt Mills were found at a spot called "Lovers' Lane" in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Mills's throat had been slashed.

Both had been shot.

And there, on the ground, were letters from Hall to Mills.

These are the physical objects that still draw attention.

Not the bullet wounds.

Not the slashed throat.

The letters.

They were the one tangible thing left at the scene, the proof of a secret written in the dead man's own hand.

The couple, both married to other people, had been having an affair.

Hall was an Episcopal minister.

Mills was a choir singer.

That was the story the letters told before anyone spoke a word.

The case became one of the most sensational murder mysteries of the 1920s.

But on that night, the letters were simply there.

Who killed them is not established at this point.

That would require evidence.

The letters remain.

THE AFFAIR AND THE COLD CASE

The Reverend Hall was an Episcopal minister.

Mrs. Mills sang in the choir.

Police looked at them first, not at whoever had fired the shots.

The affair became the story, and the story swallowed the crime scene.

The initial investigation was marred by confusion and alleged interference.

Some evidence may have been contaminated or overlooked.

The bodies lay under the crabapple tree, and the letters lay near them, and the case stalled.

It went cold.

It stayed cold for four years.

Then, in 1926, new evidence appeared.

Letters and a witness.

What the new evidence specifically was, beyond those letters and that witness, is not detailed in the record.

That is not established.

The arrests followed anyway.

Hall's widow was charged with murder.