Flynn’s Weekly. Vol. 22, No. 3, March 5, 1927
The Empty Chair
by Charles Somerville
The most significant factor in the Hall-Mills mystery was permitted to die, almost without a thought.
Back in May, 1910, I took a balloon trip for the New York World in company with Professor Todd, the astronomer of Amherst College, and Leo Stevens, an expert aeronaut.
We went up to make sky-high observations of Halley’s comet. When I arrived at North Adams, Massachusetts, the jumping-off place, our balloon, the Cleveland, was already half filled to its capacity of eighty thousand cubic feet of gas.
Thus, half filled, it looked big enough, but when finally it was fully inflated, the thing was enormous, a ball as big as a four-storied house. We dangled on it for twelve hours in a small basket and were steadily borne along by a fifty-mile an hour gale, landing in Hyacinth, Canada — about thirty-five miles north of Montreal — next morning.
Of course, I was as nervous as a witch all the time, yet managed not to show it to any great extent. But it was when we made our landing that I got the big shock of the trip.
For when Stevens had us down so that the basket was skipping along the surface of a wheat field he gave one hard, muscular tug at the rip-rope, uncorking the balloon, and the next instant the giant ball on which I had been floating thousands of feet in the air all night long was gone!
Just as swift as that!
A flaccid heap of rubber and silk, on the field, had been made of the gigantic balloon in one sweep of the arm, a single, hard tug at a rope!
And now this last comes to my mind as a comparison strikingly applicable to the Hall-Mills trial.
Even as I had watched the inflation of the Cleveland, the public watched in the newspaper columns the swelling and swelling of the case of the prosecution against Mrs. Hall, her two brothers and her cousin, Carpender.
Thrilling forecast on forecast of tremendously damning evidence to come when the case finally rolled up to the jury, was daily made by officials of the prosecution!
Justice insidiously held at bay by social influence and corrupt dollars, was about to break its way through to a tremendous triumph! The truth was coming out at last! “Let the chips fall where they may!”
The quiet, elderly woman who had spent a lifetime in religious devotion and the practice of Christian ethics in all her worldly affairs, was to be exposed as a cold, calculating murderess, a merciless demon of vengeance with blood of ice!
Betrayed, humiliated by a younger husband who had found a younger love, she had called on her kinsmen to aid her in a savage reprisal on the guilty.
The stain on the shield of the House of Stevens must be wiped out in blood! This is what had happened — this is what the woman had done! And this is what genial Henry Stevens, amiable, gentle, simple Willie Stevens, and sane, cool-headed Carpender had joined her in doing!
Full proof of it was to be forthcoming to a jury, and Mrs. Hall and her fellow conspirators, after four years of the successful use of dollars and duplicity, were to be thoroughly unmasked, convicted, punished with death!
And then the actual trial.
Spatterings of innuendo, cunning suggestions of guilt, hazy identifications, the befuddled evidence of Willie Stevens’s alleged finger-print on a card found at the feet of the dead clergyman under the crab-apple tree in De Russey’s lane.
The evidence of the pig woman, hysterically recited from a stretcher, telling a story of recollections of the night of the murder more vivid and detailed than she had ever told before, even though her story grew more vivid and circumstantial each following time she told it in the four years succeeding the crime.
Then Henry Stevens took the stand.
It was precisely the same as when Leo Stevens used the rip-rope on the Cleveland up in Hyacinth.
When Henry Stevens finished testifying the prosecution’s balloon was gone. All that was left of it was a jumble of evidence on which no jury could be expected to convict any one. And all that had come out of it was a lot of gas.
The alibi Henry Stevens offered — the proof that he could not have been within fifty miles of the scene of the crime on the night of its occurrence — was impeccable, flawless in its credibility.
To be sure, it was friendly testimony, the testimony of his immediate neighbors in the seashore settlement where he made his summer and autumn home. But there were five such witnesses. And each was intelligent, clearly spoken, positive. And each of indubitable probity.
Neighbors or not, these weren’t the sort of persons who could be induced to shield an assassin for love or money.
It might be suggested that liking for Henry Stevens may have caused them unconsciously to be persuaded honestly enough that the night of the blue-fishing had been Thursday, when in reality it was Wednesday or Friday night.
In the case of one such witness or even two, this might be regarded as possible. But when they came five in a row, all certain that the night they saw him, was in his company, was also the night of the murder in De Russey’s lane scores of miles away, then doubt of the truth of their testimony completely dissolved.
Moreover, there was the corroborating fact of first importance. This was the evidence of the two young women and their mother that they fixed the night positively as Thursday because on Friday the girls were scheduled to depart for college and that on Friday morning Henry Stevens came for them and their luggage and drove them to the railway depot.
There was the evidence of the station agent and the train conductor obtainable that the girls had, on this day, taken this journey, and evidence that they had been borne to the station in Henry Steven’s wagon. This was iron-bound corroboration fixing the alibi of Stevens as the genuine article.
When Henry Stevens eliminated himself as possibly being present under the crab-apple tree when the Rev. Mr. Hall and Mrs. Eleanor Mills were slain, the State’s case fell at the prosecutor’s feet.
If not Henry Stevens, who of the other defendants could have performed such amazingly accurate shooting? Not Mrs. Hall possibly. Her declaration that she had never discharged a firearm in her life had to go unchallenged.
Not Willie. The jury once having seen and listened to him, taken the gauge of the childlike, gentle amiability of him, could not be successfully asked to discern beneath this character which he had sustained all his life, a murderous devil.
Nor was there any accusation against Carpender which described him as a preeminent target driller. Simpson had gone hot after Henry to prove him the chief in the actual slaying, and suddenly found himself confronted by the complete vanishment of the leading actor from the scene!
The more one thinks of it the more sheerly amazing it becomes that the State’s sleuths appear never to have gone to work seriously to check off this alibi of Henry Stevens which from the first — four years ago — they knew he asserted to be in existence.
At any time to have thoroughly investigated this evidence that afforded Henry Stevens so complete an armor against the accusation of murder, must have warned the prosecution of the hopelessness of the task it had set itself and thus the fiasco of the Hall-Mills trial most probably would have been averted.
And what I am writing now is not in the way of taking a smack at “Little Corporal” Simpson, special prosecutor when he is down, when the promised Austerlitz he was to win for justice has turned into a Waterloo.