The Reading Warehouse

Now a milestone of unsolved true crime, the Hall-Mills case began in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1922 and lasted for over a decade. The killer has never been found, and the case continues to fascinate true-crime aficionados.

A bon vivant Episcopal minister, a not-so-virginal soprano in his choir. The wealthy wife. Her oddball brother. Their furtive maid. The snooping congregants. The bumbling detectives. And in the denouement, a trial, one of the more notable of America's Jazz Age, covered by the likes of Damon Runyon, Dorothy Dix, and James Thurber. All of it hanging on the dramatic testimony of a single, strange witness of questionable veracity, a farmer the tabloids came to call "The Pig Woman." Almost everyone in this labyrinthine mystery had at least one secret, sometimes more, and the biggest one remains almost a hundred years later.

At Audible's request, business and true crime journalist Bryan Burrough reopened the case, digging deep into records of the time. His narration in a warm Texas accent lends immediacy and intimacy to a classic New Jersey true crime, as listeners follow his reconstruction of the fateful double-murder...and the botched prosecution that became a national media circus in its day.