Somerville, New Jersey, November 4th, 1926.

Always, the spindle on the state's wheel of circumstantial evidence in the Hall Mills' murder case,

whirling round and round the circle of the Stevens clan, stops dead at the Popeyeed Willie Stevens.

The state splintered his alibi yesterday. Today, fingerprint experts, including the great

commissioner Joseph Faroe of New York, with an outfit like a magician's kid of tricks spread

before the startled jury, testified that Willie's

fingerprint was on Dominie Hall's card that was stuck in a tuft of grass at his feet when he was

found murdered with his sweetheart, Mrs. Eleanor Mills. The spectators in the little courtroom were

still buzzing like a far-off swarm of bees

when Senator Alexander Simpson, chief of the prosecution,

arose and notified the court that the state's chief witness,

Mrs. Jane Easton, as he called her, or Gibson, as she is better known,

the pigwoman, is dying in a Somerville hospital and asking that the court and counsel and jury go to the hospital in a body and take her testimony.

The defense objected strongly, whereas Senator Simpson remarked sarcastically,

If she is seriously ill, no wonder the defense doesn't want to go down there.

The prosecutor's inference appeared to be that the defense wouldn't be sorry

if the pigwoman passed permanently from the case,

although her story, told before the grand jury, remains a matter of record.

General McCarter, head of the so-called million-dollar defense that surrounds Mrs. Francis

Noel Stevens Hall and her brothers, Henry and the bushy-haired wild-looking Willie,

arose and made a verbal attack on the Pigwoman's character.

This woman is an absolute unreliable witness in our opinion.

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