Murder Under the Crab Apple Tree By Damon Runyon
When a friend of mine started pitching Hall-Mills murder to me as a potential episode, I was immediately enthralled by the tale of an Episcopalian rector and his tragic affair with the choir singer, but when he told me the case hinged on the eyewitness testimony of “the pig woman,” I knew this was a story for True Crime Historian.
But it gets even better. I started looking into it and discovered that the famed sportswriter Damon Runyon covered the trial with the same breezy prose he used in the short stories he wrote that inspired the musical “Guys and Dolls,” with daily dispatches drawing vivid word pictures of the trial and its participants. I felt it worthy of in depth exploration, and ended up with over four hours of story, originally released in a six episodes series released on consecutive Sundays to hear about the case and its cast of characters as told by one of America’s premier storytellers, who turns out to also be a Pioneer of True Crime.
