The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (43 page)

“I am not at all sure whether we crossed right there at Commercial Avenue or went a little further down George Street and went diagonally across to the church. Then we stopped there and looked at the church to see whether there were any lights. There were no lights burning. Then Mrs Hall said, ‘We might as well go down and see if it could not be possible that he was at the Mills’s house.’ We went down there, down George Street until we came to Carman Street, turned down Carman Street, and got in front of the Mills’s house and stood there two or three minutes to see if there were any lights in the Mills’s apartment. There were none.” Willie then described, street by street, the return home, and ended with “I opened the front door with my latchkey. If you wish me, I will show it to you. My sister said, ‘You might as well go to bed. You can do no more good.’ With that I went upstairs to bed.” This was the story that Alexander Simpson had to shake. But before Willie was turned over to him, the witness told how he heard that his brother-in-law had been killed. “I remember I was in the parlour,” said Willie, “reading a copy of the
New
York
Times
. I heard someone coming up the steps and I glanced up and I heard my aunt, Mrs Charles J. Carpender, say, ‘Well, you might as well know it—Edward has been shot.’ “Willie’s voice was thick with emotion. He was asked what happened then. “Well,” he said, “I simply let the paper go—that way” (he let his left hand fall slowly and limply to his side) “and I put my head down, and I cried.” Mr Case asked him if he was present at, or had anything to do with, the murder of Mr Hall and Mrs Mills. “Absolutely nothing at all!” boomed Willie, coming out of his posture of sorrow, belligerently erect. The attorney for the defence turned, with a confident little bow, to Alexander Simpson. The special prosecutor sauntered over and stood in front of the witness. Willie took in his breath sharply.

Alexander Simpson, a lawyer, a state senator, slight, perky, capable of harsh tongue-lashings, given to sarcasm and innuendo, had intimated that he would “tie Willie Stevens into knots”. Word had gone around that he intended to “flay” the eccentric fellow. Hence his manner now came as a surprise. He spoke in a gentle, almost inaudible voice, and his attitude was one of solicitous friendliness. Willie, quite unexpectedly, drew first blood. Simpson asked him if he had ever earned his livelihood. “For about four or five years,” said Willie, “I was employed by Mr Siebold, a contractor.” Not having anticipated an affirmative reply, Simpson paused. Willie leaned forward and said, politely, “Do you wish his address?” He did this in good faith, but the spectators took it for what the
Times
called a “sally”, because Simpson had been in the habit of letting loose a swarm of investigators on anyone whose name was brought into the case. “No, thank you,” muttered Simpson, above a roar of laughter. The prosecutor now set about picking at Willie’s story of the night of 14 September: he tried to find out why the witness and his sister had not knocked on the Mills’s door to see if Mr Hall were there. Unfortunately for the steady drumming of questions, Willie soon broke the prosecutor up with another laugh. Simpson had occasion to mention a New Brunswick boarding house called The Bayard, and he pronounced “Bay” as it is spelled. With easy politeness, Willie corrected him. “
Bi
yard,” said Willie. “Biyard?” repeated Simpson. Willie smiled, as at an apt pupil. Simpson bowed slightly. The spectators laughed again.

Presently the witness made a slip, and Simpson pounced on it like a stooping falcon. Asked if he had not, at the scene of the murder, stood “in the light of an automobile while a woman on a mule went by,” Willie replied, “I never remember that occurrence.” Let us take up the court record from there. “Q.—You would remember if it occurred, wouldn’t you? A.—I certainly would, but I don’t remember of ever being in an automobile and the light from the automobile shone on a woman on a mule. Q.—Do you say you were not there, or you don’t remember? A.—I say positively I was not there. Q.—Why did you say you don’t
remember
? A.—Does not that cover the same thing? Q.—No, it don’t, because you might be there and not remember it. A.—Well, I will withdraw that, if I may, and say I was not there positively.” Willie assumed an air of judicial authority as he “withdrew” his previous answer, and he spoke his positive denial with sharp decision. Mr Simpson abruptly tried a new tack. “You have had a great deal of experience in life, Mr Stevens,” he said, “and have read a great deal, they say, and know a lot about human affairs. Don’t you think it sounds rather fishy when you say you got up in the middle of the night to go and look for Dr Hall and went to the house and never even knocked on the door—with your experience of human affairs and people that you met and all that sort of thing—don’t that seem rather fishy to you?” There was a loud bickering of attorneys before Willie could say anything to this. Finally Judge Parker turned to the witness and said, “Can you answer that, Mr Stevens?” “The only way I can answer it, Your Honour,” said Willie, scornfully, “is that I don’t see that it is at all ‘fishy’. “The prosecutor jumped to something else: “Dr Hall’s church was not your church, was it?” he asked. “He was not a
Doctor
, sir,” said Willie, once more the instructor. “He was the Reverend
Mister
Hall.” Simpson paused, nettled. “I am glad you corrected me on that,” he said. The courtroom laughed again.

The prosecutor now demanded that Willie repeat his story of what happened at two-thirty a.m. He hoped to establish, he intimated, that the witness had learned it “by rote.” Willie calmly went over the whole thing again, in complete detail, but no one of his sentences was the same as it had been. The prosecutor asked him to tell it a third time. The defence objected vehemently. Simpson vehemently objected to the defence’s objection. The Court: “We will let him tell it once more.” At this point Willie said, “May I say a word?” “Certainly,” said Simpson. “Say all you want.” Weighing his words carefully, speaking with slow emphasis, Willie said, “All I have to say is I was never taught, as you insinuate, by any person whatsoever. That is my best recollection from the time I started out with my sister to this present minute.” Simpson did not insist further on a third recital. He wanted to know now how Willie could establish the truth of his statement that he was in his room from eight or nine o’clock until his sister knocked on the door at two-thirty a.m. “Why,” said Willie, “if a person sees me go upstairs and does not see me come downstairs, isn’t that a conclusion that I was in my room?” The court record shows that Mr Simpson replied, “Absolutely.” “Well,” said Willie expansively, “that is all there was to it.” Nobody but the pig woman had testified to seeing Willie after he went up to his room that night. Barbara Tough, a servant who had been off during the day, testified that she got back to the Hall home about ten o’clock and noticed that Willie’s door was closed (Willie had testified that it wouldn’t stay closed unless he locked it). Louise Geist, of the annulment suit, had testified that she had not seen Willie that night after dinner. It was Willie’s story against the pig woman’s. That day in court he overshadowed her. When he stepped down from the witness chair, his shoulders were back and he was smiling broadly. Headlines in the
Times
the next day said, “Willie Stevens Remains Calm Under Cross-Examination. Witness a Great Surprise”. There was a touch of admiration, almost of partisanship, in most of the reporters’ stories. The final verdict could be read between the lines. The trial dragged on for another ten days, but on 3 December, Willie Stevens was a free man.

He was glad to get home. He stood on the porch of 23 Nichol Avenue, beaming at the house. Reporters had followed him there. He turned to them and said, solemnly, “It is 104 days since I’ve been here. And I want to get in.” They let him go. But two days later, on a Sunday, they came back and Mrs Hall received them in the drawing room. They could hear Willie in an adjoining room, talking spiritedly. He was, it came out, discussing metallurgy with the Rev. J. Mervin Pettit, who had succeeded Mr Hall as rector of the Church of St John the Evangelist.

Willie Stevens, going on seventy, no longer visits the firehouse of No.3 Engine Company. His old friends have caught only glimpses of him in the past few years, for he has been in feeble health, and spends most of his time in his room, going for a short ride now and then in his chauffeur-driven car. The passer by, glancing casually into the car, would not recognize the famous figure of the middle 1920s. Willie has lost a great deal of weight, and the familiar beaming light no longer comes easily to his eyes.

After Willie had been acquitted and sent home, he tried to pick up the old routine of life where he had left it, but people turned to stare after him in the street, and boys were forever at his heels, shouting, “Look out, Willie, Simpson is after you!” The younger children were fond of him and did not tease him, and once in a while Willie could be seen playing with them, as boisterously and whimsically as ever. The firemen say that if he encountered a ragged child he would find out where it lived, and then give one of his friends the money to buy new clothes for it. But Willie’s adventures in the streets of the town became fewer and farther apart. Sometimes months would elapse between his visits to the firehouse. When he did show up in his old haunts, he complained of headaches, and while he was still in his fifties, he spent a month in bed with a heart ailment. After that, he stayed close to home, and the firemen rarely saw him. If you should drop by the firehouse, and your interest in Willie seems friendly, they will tell you some fond stories about him.

One winter Willie took a Cook’s tour of Hawaii. When he came back, he told the firemen he had joined an organization which, for five dollars, gave its subscribers a closer view of the volcanoes than the ordinary tourist could get. Willie was crazy about the volcanoes. His trip, however, was spoiled, it came out, because someone recognized and pointed him out as the famous Willie Stevens of the Hall–Mills case. He had the Cook’s agent cancel a month’s reservation at a hotel and rearrange his schedule so that he could leave on the next ship. He is infuriated by any reference to the murders or to the trial. Some years ago a newspaper printed a paragraph about a man out West who was “a perfect double for Willie Stevens”. Someone in the firehouse showed it to Willie and he tore the paper to shreds in a rage.

Willie still spends a great deal of time reading “heavy books”—on engineering, on entomology, on botany. Those who have seen his famous room at 23 Nichol Avenue—he has a friend in to visit him once in a while—say that it is filled with books. He has no use for detective stories or the Western and adventure magazines his friends the firemen read. When he is not reading scientific tomes, he dips into the classics or what he calls the “worth-while poets”. He used to astound the firemen with his wide range of knowledge. There was the day a salesman of shaving materials dropped in at the engine-house. Finding that Willie had visited St Augustine, Florida, he mentioned an old Spanish chapel there. Willie described it and gave its history, replete with dates, and greatly impressed the caller. Another time someone mentioned a certain kind of insect which he said was found in this country. “You mean they used to be,” said Willie. “That type of insect has been extinct in this country for forty years.” It turned out that it had been, too. On still another occasion Willie fell to discussing flowers with some visitor at the firehouse and reeled off a Latin designation—
crassinae
carduaceae
, or something of the sort. Then he turned, grinning, to the listening firemen. “Zinnias to you,” he said.

Willie Stevens’s income from the trust fund established for him is said to be around forty dollars a week. His expenditures are few, now that he is no longer able to go on long trips. The firemen like especially to tell about the time that Willie went to Wyoming, and attended a rodeo. He told the ticket-seller he wanted to sit in a box and the man gave him a single ticket. Willie explained that he wanted the whole box to himself, and he planked down a ten-dollar bill for it. Then he went in and sat in the box all alone. “I had a hell of a time!” he told the firemen gleefully when he came back home.

De Russey’s Lane, which Detective David once pointed out to Willie Stevens, is now, you may have heard, entirely changed. Several years ago it was renamed Franklin Boulevard, and where the Rev. Mr Edward W. Hall and Mrs Eleanor Mills lay murdered there is now a row of neat brick and stucco houses. The famous crab apple tree under which the bodies were found disappeared the first weekend after the murders. It was hacked to pieces, roots and all, by souvenir-hunters.

(Martin Guerre, 1560)

Elliott O’Donnell

No murder as such (at least, no murder that was ever proved) but two trials and a hanging. Quite whether any actual crime was committed is also a moot point. But there was certainly a mystery in the case of Martin Guerre’s disappearance, and the mystery was never solved to anyone’s satisfaction. The setting is sixteenth-century France, making this (historically) the oldest story in the present collection. Most modern readers will know the name of Martin Guerre as the eponymous hero of the hit musical by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, the duo behind
Les Miserables
and
Miss Saigon
. This version of the story appeared in 1927. Elliott O’Donnell (1872–1965) was a stage and film actor as well as a writer. He wrote mainly about unusual phenomena and the supernatural, his first book
For Satan’s Sake
appearing in 1904. In all he wrote over sixty books, several radio plays, and hundreds of articles for newspapers and magazines.

Sometime, during the sixteenth century, there lived in the little town of Artigues, in the district of Rieux, a young couple named Guerre,
¹⁵
about whom very queer stories were told. The reason was this.