Moonlight Murder on Lovers' Lane Read Online Free PDF Page A

in a converted barn near De Russey’s Lane. She told police that her dogs had started barking around 9 PM the Thursday night of the murders and she’d looked out and seen the figure of a man in her cornfield.
    Concerned that he was a thief, she had mounted Jenny, her mule, and ridden after him toward Easton Avenue. When she failed to catch him, she’d cut back across a field. At this time, Jane said, she had spotted four figures near a small tree. Then she’d heard a sharp report and seen one of them fall to the ground.
    “Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!” a woman had screamed.
    Gibson had turned her mule away, but then heard a volley of shots. She’d looked back and seen another person slump to the ground. Then she heard another woman shout, “Henry!”
    Jane said she’d tried telling this story to police after young Hayes was falsely arrested, but they’d ignored her.

    Jane Gibson
    Although reporters eagerly took down Gibson’s tale, it conflicted with facts from Edward’s autopsy report. The bullet trajectory indicated that he had been on the ground, not standing, when someone had shot him.
    Beekman said this information was too vague, but Stricker thought it was solid, and Special Prosecutor Mott backed him up. He called Gibson’s account his most valuable evidence, particularly because Gibson said she’d been close enough that she could identify the killers if she saw them again. Her account coincided with meteorological records about when the moon would have been bright enough for someone to have seen the perpetrators. The records lent her account credibility.
    More than one hundred reporters were now milling around the New Brunswick area, looking for stories. Some located Gibson and urged her to tell her tale again and again. She was happy to oblige. Each time, she added more details.
    She had noticed an open touring car parked on Easton Avenue, she said, like the one the chauffeur had described. (By now, everyone knew that the Halls owned a touring car and a sedan.) When she’d turned around and cut across a field to get to De Russey’s Lane, she’d seen two men and two women arguing.
    A car entering the lane behind her had illuminated them and Gibson saw that one of the women was wearing a long gray coat. A man with a dark mustache and bushy hair was walking with her toward the empty farmhouse.
    “How do you explain these notes?” this woman had asked.
    Then Gibson added another juicy item: After Edward was shot, she had seen Eleanor flee, but the men had caught and dragged her back, screaming and struggling, before they shot her three times.
    But that wasn’t all. Gibson had lost a moccasin as she was riding along, so around 1 AM, she had returned to look for it. As she neared the crabapple tree where she’d seen the slaughter, she heard a woman crying. It was a “big lady” with “white hair” kneeling next to a man on the ground. Reporters believed she was referring to Frances.

Chapter 14: Truth or Lies?
    Upon learning Gibson’s account, Henry Stevens gave a statement to the press that he had plenty of eyewitnesses that would affirm that he’d been at the shore that night. Whatever “Henry” had been on De Russey’s Lane on September 14, it had not been him!
    Despite Gibson’s insistence that she had told the truth, she turned out to be less credible than she’d seemed. Few people who knew her believed a word she said. She could easily have read the facts in the newspapers, they stated, and then created her version of the story, such as it was. That’s what she was like.
    Some acquaintances and neighbors contradicted her outright.
    Mrs. A. C. Fraley was among Gibson’s detractors. She ran a boarding house across from the Phillips farm on De Russey’s Lane. When she heard what the Pig Woman had said, she stated that if this account were true, she’d have heard something that night. But she hadn’t. Neither had any of her boarders.
    In fact, she’d seen Gibson right after the