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Slideshow Photos:
The Mount Hermon School for Boys,
Lizzie Borden
by Vic Head
Written in 1996
On August 4, 1892, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Jackson Borden were brutally hacked to death in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. It was widely assumed that both murders were committed by only one assailant using an axe or hatchet. Forty-two years later on September 14, 1934 the Rev. Elliott Speer, headmaster of Mount Hermon School for Boys on the west bank of the Connecticut River near Greenfield, Massachusetts, was slain with a 12-gauge shotgun.
Three violent deaths, two mysteries. As I write this in May, 1996, both are still listed as unsolved, with final official court records in Fall River and in Greenfield asserting the crimes to have been committed by person or persons unknown.
Both crimes have elements close to me and my family, though I might never have thought of writing this account had it not been for an Elderhostel which my wife Flo and I attended at Colby-Sawyer College in western New Hampshire in the summer of 1995. One of the courses was on New England poetry from colonial days to the mid-twentieth century, and I persuaded the teacher to give me ten minutes of his class time on the last day to talk about Zuella Sterling. According to a plaque hung in the New Hampshire Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair, she was the then Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. Before reading some of her poems I sketched her origins. Her father Arthur Borden of Fall River and her mother Lucie Page had met here at Colby-Sawyer College in 1875 when it was known as New London Academy. They graduated with the class of 1879 and were duly married. My mother, maiden name Marguerite Borden, who years later was to assume the pseudonym Zuella Sterling, was born to them in 1886. This was perfect timing for her to arrive in first grade in a one-room schoolhouse in New Hampshire in 1892, and you can just imagine a group of kids scattered through eight grades surrounding the little Borden girl and giving out with the sing-song:
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks
And when she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.
Of course it is well known by careful students of the case that Lizzie was innocent.
Marie Severin, one of the Elderhostlers, challenged me after class. Everyone the world over knows that Lizzie was guilty. There are books—stage play—movie—even a ballet accepting the legend as fact. So I agreed to send Marie my information. Marie had for some years been an illustrator for Marvel Comics including one based on the TV series “X-Men.” Earlier in her career, her then boss at E. C. Publications had assigned her to research Lizzie, but his interest was not in facts but gore. (The “E.C. Horror” publication was shut down by Senator Kefauver’s Comics Code Committee, Marie tells me; and its publisher resurfaced as the founder and publisher of MAD Magazine.)
Perhaps the most flagrant recent misuse of the Lizzie legend showed up in one of the TV series, Father Dowling Mysteries. Borrowing from Stephen Vincent Benet’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster” in which prosecutor Satan produces his own jury by calling on the souls of the damned, Father Dowling confronted a jury of Satan’s selection including besides the damned souls of Al Capone, Dillinger, etc., that of Lizzie Borden.
As so often happens, the investigators in Fall River picked on a single suspect from the start. By contrast, in the Speer case many tenuous leads were followed and abandoned. Five days after the murder of the Reverend Elliott Speer by a shotgun blast through his study window, the fall term began, and I was among some 500 boys returning to the Mount Hermon campus. The major newspapers were extremely circumspect in avoiding the name of the principal suspect as the investigation built up toward the December 1934 inquest. However, it was common knowledge among the students that suspicion was centering on the dean of the school, Thomas E. Elder Sr. Were I not just as sure of his innocence as I am of Lizzie Borden’s, I might find it necessary to be equally circumspect.
Lizzie Borden was subpoenaed for a grand jury, jailed, and subjected to a lengthy and sensational trial, but the trial jury brought in a verdict of NOT GUILTY after less than two hours of deliberation, so flimsy was the prosecution’s case. As for Dean Thomas E. Elder, Sr., there was never a trial, nor grand jury, and neither he nor any other was arrested after a ten day inquest.
In both mysteries, no murder weapon was ever identified. In both cases, decades after each event, men with literary careers saw opportunity for best sellers by writing books purporting to demonstrate after much supposed arduous research the guilt of those whom the law had released from culpability.
When Mother Zuella and I came east in 1929 to take care of my aging Grandmother Borden, there was a great deal of frustration over new publications, by a well-known man of literature, one Edmond Pearson. His 1924 book, “Studies in Murder” hinted broadly that Lizzie was probably guilty. When Lizzie died in 1927, Pearson became even bolder in both books and magazine articles, and it was ten years later, by which time my grandmother was also dead, that Pearson published his “Trial of Lizzie Borden.” This has become the accepted “definitive” history, claiming to demonstrate the astonishing stupidity of the Lizzie Borden jury in acquitting after the prosecution had proved guilt beyond all reasonable doubt.
There were some fifty Borden families in Fall River, and it is likely that the Bordentown, N. J. family, the “Elsie, the Cow” Bordens, and a host of others including my grandmother and Mother Zuella had read and been horrified by one or more of Pearson’s writings. They were shocked, not by the bloody story, but by the sudden accusations appearing decades after big city newspapers—indeed practically all papers except the prejudiced Fall River Globe—had duly reported trial proceedings and agreed with the jury finding of NOT GUILTY.
Lizzie (her actual birth certificate name) was thirty-two at the time of the murders of Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Jackson Borden, and sixty-four at the time of Pearson’s first literary attack. His “Trial” book, full of incomplete quotations, innuendos, and gross omissions of all pertinent refutations of prosecution witnesses, did not appear until forty-five years after the Borden murders.
Were libel laws more lax in the 1930s than more recently? I am not aware that any suit was ever brought against Pearson. Perhaps it just didn’t matter that much to the many Fall River Borden families or their descendents. It was not until 1961 that a non-relative, Edward D. Radin, finally came to Lizzie’s rescue. Radin, described by the New York Times as “the soundest crime expert of our generation,” published his book, “Lizzie Borden—The Untold Story” in 1961 (first printing by Dell, 1962). As of that date he had covered several hundred murder cases and trials as a reporter, and was the only writer to have received two “Edgars” from Mystery Writers of America for distinguished fact-crime writing.
In the case of the 1934 murder of the Rev. Elliott Speer, as in that of the Bordens, decades were to pass before a literary effort was made to expose the “real” criminal. The author was, once again, a well-known man of letters, an historian by the name of Burnham Carter. He had been retained by the now co-ed Northfield Mount Hermon School, the merger of two Moody Schools, to write the history of both. Learning of the murder, he conducted his own investigation and concluded in a manuscript entitled, “The Devil’s Chapel” that so-and-so was undoubtedly guilty. Publishers turned him down for fear of libel action. Eventually, Carter shortened his manuscript, expunged the name of the man he accused, and published his findings in the October 1977 issue of Yankee. No one reading it who remembered the circumstances of 1934 could fail to recognize that Carter’s unnamed accused was the former Dean Thomas E. Elder Sr. For his Yankee article Carter chose the title “The Study of a Murder.” How startingly like Pearson’s “Studies in Murder” fifty-three years earlier.
I probably knew Dean Elder as well as any member of my class. He was perhaps the kind of man that some would find hard to like, because of a speech impediment that gave his voice the sound of a cracked yodel. He wore several hats, one as dean of Mount Hermon, another as president of the New England Cattlemen’s Association, and it was through his combined executive ability and his fatherly kindness that he had gained stature in spite of his speech defect. His position as dean was well justified.
In discussing some reporting in Fall River in 1892 and 1893, Radin says “…the Globe seldom let facts get in the way of a good story.” This might well have been said of Pearson, and perhaps of Carter, as we shall see.
In the fall of 1931, partly because of my illnesses and partly due to dire financial straits during the Great Depression, I was late in starting high school. Mother Zuella took me to visit Dean Thomas E. Elder Sr. two weeks after the fall term had started at Mount Hermon School for Boys. She persuaded him to enroll me with much financial assistance. For lack of more dormitory space Dean Elder arranged to have a cot crowded into what was normally a single room in South Crossley Hall with an upperclassman, William R. Batty Jr. What contrast! I was the smallest boy in the school and a country-bred child, while Bill was a giant, a champion on the wrestling team, and to me very much a father figure resembling as he did my recollections of my own father. He somehow put up with this arrangement for several weeks until living quarters were arranged for me and several other late-comers to the class of 1935 in an attic-like part of Cottage 1. But illnesses which had haunted my childhood came again with a vengeance and I spent from November until late spring of 1932 in the school infirmary known as Dwight’s Home. I caught everything that came into the infirmary, winding up with whooping cough that kept me whooping into the summer and set me back to become a member of the class of ’36.
Dean Elder came to my rescue a couple of years later. I used to weed the vegetable garden of Prof. Grove Deming, Ancient History teacher, for ten cents an hour. He had lost a leg—perhaps in “The” World War, and he would leave his wooden leg at one end of a carrot row, lie down and start weeding as we worked toward each other. Inevitably his son Grove Deming Jr. and I became fast friends. During Christmas vacation when I had no money to go home I would shovel gravel to earn a little money, and spend weekend afternoons at Grove’s house playing with his electric trains. Sometimes we would bicycle together to Greenfield on the back road that went past the one-room schoolhouse of the township of Gill.
There came a time when twenty-some dollars of Sunday school money was missing from the Deming household, and I was the “logical” suspect, having frequent access and being the poorest kid. Very quietly one day Dean Elder picked me up in his car and drove me over the back roads of the campus. Stopping in an out-of-the-way spot he asked me to turn my pockets inside out, and all I could produce was a handkerchief, a jackknife, and a chunk of sweet birch wood I was carving into a bowl for my Indian peace-pipe. Dean Elder was mildly amused, and then told me about the seeming theft and drove me back to where he had picked me up. Some weeks later he called me to a conference where he assured me no one suspected me, that the brief period of suspicion had been very adroitly kept quiet, and that the money had been found.
Besides being kind, he had a great sense of humor, as when he went on to say in his yodeling voice, “You wouldn’t have known what to do with that much money anyway,” and with a twinkle in his eye, “don’t get caught smoking tobacco in that pipe of yours.”
Some may say that I come to Dean Elder’s defense because I had so many reasons to admire him and be grateful to him. To this I can only reply that there was never any more reason to suspect him of murder than there had been to suspect me of petty theft. If circumstance and opportunity prove guilt, then who in the world could escape?
Coming from a county background and a one-room schoolhouse must have made me seem strange to more sophisticated students and teachers with more urban backgrounds. I was more comfortable with those students who were the sons of faculty or other school employees who lived on campus in family homes than with the more grown-up students, star athletes, etc. who lived in the dorms and almost universally complained about the food—to me the best I had ever eaten. So it came about that my circle of friends included not only Grove Deming Jr. but also David Stevens who later became my roommate, the son of Laura Stevens, the telephone operator; Milton Wilde, son of the school baker whose home was on a gravel road well back in the woods; Clifford Chambers and Ralph Perry who were not day students but who came from one-room schoolhouses in Vermont, and of course Thomas E. “Tommy” Elder Jr. and several others who had finished grade school in the little schoolhouse in Gill. We all loved the outdoors, skiing, fishing the two trout streams that ran through the campus, or playing Indians.
Some of us called ourselves the Howling Coyote Tribe—three syllables, please, as in Spanish, Co-yo-tay. We knew that campus—all five square miles of it. So when Burnham Carter argues that the murderer of Headmaster Elliott Speer must have lived on campus, his reasoning won’t hold water. Carter claims that he or she could not have escaped as a stranger on either of the only two roads into the campus, but he ignores the several miles of campus boundary—Connecticut River bank, unfenced miles beside many outside roads, or single-strand fences separating Hermon’s woods from the woodlots of adjacent farms. Carter probably never heard of “scrouging,” our word for leaving the campus without permission, or of any number of rebellious students who often went scrouging and got away with it.
The Howling Coyotes were never scrougers except once, as we shall see, but within the legitimate campus boundaries this self-styled Indian tribe probably knew more detail of the terrain than any of our more sophisticated fellow students. Ah, Shadow Lake! On the eastern shore was the ice house among large evergreens where in midwinter some students on work-hour would store great blocks of ice deep in sawdust for later use in Demi’s kitchen in West Hall. The ice was sawed from the lake and towed on skids with two-man tongs to this ice house. Come spring, of a Sunday afternoon, we would fashion a crude raft of the ice skids and pole ourselves all over Shadow Lake, carefully returning the skids later. Getting into May, how we thrilled to the ocean of pink lady’s slippers along that east shore. Around to the south stood a grove of large hemlocks which we climbed, chasing each other with carved wooden “dirks” which sometimes drew a little blood in our poorly choreographed fights—just accidental scratches which kids could ignore.
Far to the west an intricate net of foot-paths bordered by blackberry patches covered land near “The Spring” where, flopped on the bank of a small brook with pad and pencil, I wrote most of the once-a-week themes required for English courses for all four years. Beloved English teacher Tommy Donovan regularly gave me D grades as required for four or more errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation, but he always encouraged me on the basis of content. The sloppy writing of today not only in newspapers but more dangerously in engineering texts suggests that few English classes continue such much needed discipline.
It was just below a mini-waterfall near the spring where I caught my first trout with much advice from Clifford Chambers and Ralph Perry. The wild excitement I will never forget, nor the blushing embarrassment that followed when I asked Demi the school chef to cook this tiny trout for me. He personally brought it to me at breakfast to the snickers of many students among the 500 at West Hall. Thereafter I gave all my catches to Laura Stevens.
Another favorite hangout of the Howling Coyotes was the bank of the Connecticut River where under tall hardwood trees grew ferns rather taller than we. In a fraction of a second you could pull one out, strip the fronds, and throw this improvised spear at a tree. Sometimes it was at each other, until one eye narrowly escaped injury.
But the role we were to play after the murder had its start in the fall of 1933 when our enthusiastic biology professor Gordon Pyper got me started on a project collecting the beautiful night moths that would fly to many campus lights, and especially those on the wall of the powerhouse. My very young and understanding dorm master Bill Morrow would give me permission to go out moth hunting for an hour or so after official “lights out” time of 10:15. Sometimes our cross-country star and night watchman Art Oldershaw would wake me at two or three a.m. when he saw a Luna or a Giant Cecropia flapping outside a window screen. The moths reacted to chloroform so violently that their wings were reduced to tatters. My mother was able to buy potassium cyanide with no red tape in those days and seal it with plaster of paris and blotting paper in a pint jar which I kept tightly closed in the back of my closet until I graduated. Moths never beat their wings at all in the cyanide jar.
It was only last year, November of 1995, that I finally “confessed all” to Bill Morrow, and he has urged me to write this up. Besides playing Indians, I was a great admirer of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. With the freedom afforded by moth hunting it was not long before I and my cyanide jar and butterfly net were making late night rounds to the homes of day students who lived in family homes on campus. I would toss pebbles against upstairs bedroom windows and wait up to five minutes for each Howling Coyote to show or not show. We would go to the powerhouse and other likely moth spots, and then down by the lake, adding the thrill of “under cover of darkness” to our Indian war parties, then across the woods to Wilde’s house and on to Elder’s and Demming’s and so on.
There was and still is a traditional tug-of-war called the “rope pull” with a rope three inches thick. The senior class would take the east side of the lake, leaving the hopeless terrain on the west for the juniors. The seniors always pulled the juniors through the lake. White shirts and white ducks were mandatory dress. In the fall of 1934 Shadow Lake was drained as one of many measures to find the 12-gauge shotgun used in the murder. Without lake water, we of the class of 1936 were unceremoniously dragged through lake bottom ooze a foot or two deep, white ducks and all.
But as winter approached it came to be known that suspicion was being directed toward the father of one of the Howling Coyotes. If finding the shotgun could hopefully help find a guilty person, it could just as surely exonerate, and so there came a night when we dispensed with pebble tossing and met by pre-arrangement near the powerhouse. Some students and many of Franklin Roosevelt’s CCC boys had searched campus woods and nearby farms, but not, we supposed, King Philip’s Hill across the main highway from the campus. “But that’ll be scrouging!” Well, for a good cause, so be it. We had two flashlights, but some of us still managed to fall into the trenches which the Wampanoag Chief known as Philip had dug as fortifications during “King Philip’s War” in the mid sixteen hundreds. The hilltop was covered with a growth of evergreens with characteristic dead twigs that choked our progress and sometimes drew blood. But what a trivial event it was that finally stopped us. Somebody stepped on a fallen twig, and there in the inky blackness it went off like a pistol shot as it broke. We hightailed it back to campus and our beds. In retrospect it occurs to me that our ability to conduct this foray undetected at a time when the inquest was approaching serves to nullify Burnham Carter’s contention that the murderer had to be someone who lived on campus.
Edward Radin’s book, “Lizzie Borden—The Untold Story” is such a thriller that it should be left for you to read, except to pick just a couple of the many instances that show up Edmond Pearson’s book, “Trial of Lizzie Borden,” for what it was.
Lizzie claimed to have been in the barn looking for equipment for a planned fishing expedition, but the prosecution hammered away to prove this could not be. The defense brought on three witnesses: Lubinsky, an ice-cream peddler; Gardner, a stable owner; and Newhall, a traveling salesman.
The first had seen a woman coming from the barn at a time and in clothing that would have corroborated Lizzie, while the other two testified to the hue and cry over the discovery of one of the murders almost instantly after Lubinsky had passed the house. These two precisely fixed the time when Lubinsky saw the woman leave the barn. Without their testimony, Lubinsky’s would not help, but Pearson only pointed out that Lubinsky spoke English with difficulty and went on: “Mr. Lubinsky was followed on the witness stand by Garner and Newhall. Mr. Gardner, the stableman where Lubinsky kept his horse, testified as to the ice-cream salesman’s movements.” This told Pearson’s readers, “exactly nothing about Gardner’s corroborating testimony. Newhall was mentioned by name and that was all.”
Pearson really made much of the claim that the dress Lizzie was, she said, wearing that morning was a silk dress. What utter nonsense! What woman in her right mind would wear a silk dress to do housework or to go to a dusty hayloft in the barn? The pertinent testimony was given in the inquest records rather than the trial minutes.
DA: The India silk?
Lizzie: No, it is not an India silk, it is silk and linen; some call it Bengaline silk.
DA: Something like that dress there? (Pongee)
Lizzie: No, it was not like that.
Radin explains that in the 1890’s a cotton, wool, etc., fabric in which a sheen has been achieved by weaving in a few stands of silk to produce inexpensive garments such as Lizzie wore, was called bengaline silk. Yet Pearson condemns Lizzie as a liar for claiming that “a silk dress” was what she was wearing.
Andrew Jackson Borden had been a mortician for a time, who ventured into real estate, etc. and eventually became a trustee in several banks and corporations, with a reputation as a skinflint at home and otherwise, though a splendid success story. The Fall River Globe was apparently a sensation-oriented news outlet reporting some truths, some half-truths, and some completely unverified falsehoods; early predicting Lizzie’s conviction. Pearson quoted the Globe while mentioning but not quoting accounts of large city newspapers, leaving readers with the false impression that their accounts agreed with the Globe. Fall River was largely a mill town, and workers had no love for persons with success stories, and during Lizzie’s ordeal the Globe doubled its circulation. Perhaps the ultimate unforgivable sin came when a prosecution witness damned Lizzie by giving deliberately perjured testimony which Pearson quoted as fact, omitting the defense witnesses who blasted the perjury into a cocked hat! But again, I urge you, read Radin’s book, which not only clears Lizzie as the defense had, but pointed to several likely suspects who were never investigated by the local authorities.
In sharp contrast to Pearson’s scorn for the jury, Radin gives us three glimpses at the prevailing attitude held by attorneys and the most reliable reports of the time. First was the willingness of George D. Robinson, a three-term governor of Massachusetts, to join the defense team. Second, Radin quotes one of the dispatches of New York Sun correspondent Julian Ralph while the trial was still in progress, “Surprise at the weakness of the case against Miss Borden grew steadily to amazement that upon such slender evidence the life of a man or woman could have been deliberately attempted by means of judicial procedure.” Third, the prosecutor was astonishingly candid, though he did conduct the prosecution with more than adequate vigor. Months before the trial began he wrote a letter to the Attorney General of Massachusetts which reads in part, “The case has proceeded so far, and an indictment has been found by the Grand Inquest of the county, that it does not seem to me that we ought to take the responsibility of discharging her without trial, even though there is every reasonable expectation of a verdict of Not Guilty.”
As headmaster of Mount Hermon, Rev. Elliott Speer was loved by the students and by most if not all of the faculty and staff. He certainly brought revolutionary changes in his two years. His murder on September 14, 1934 created a nationwide sensation, and was front-page news in the New York Times until the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby pushed it into inside pages. All told, it was carried for 11 consecutive days, and intermittently until the headline “Speer’s Slayer Declared Unknown” appeared on page 16 on January 10, 1935. On August 30, 1935, a hue and cry was raised over a 12-gauge shotgun found in a small river in New Hampshire, which led nowhere. On September 5, 1935, a $5,000 reward was announced, and on September 8th the possible use of a newly developed electromagnet for underwater use was talked about as another approach for a possible renewal of a search for the murder gun. But the papers were extremely circumspect where the name of the one person picked on as a possible suspect was concerned. The closest any newspaper came to using his name was the November 6, 1935 issue of the Springfield Republican which mentioned the ten new electrical devices for discovering buried metal, and stated, “It was learned that operations were close to the rear of the faculty house once occupied by Dean Thomas E. Elder and others. The dean resigned a few months after the murder…….”
You really should read Burnham Carter’s story in Yankee. Fact or fiction, it is a great story of his tireless and nearly frustrated effort to locate the many volumes of transcripts of the December 1934 inquest, many trips between Greenfield and Boston, at last getting all but three. These three were finally given him in a battered old paper bag, but only after he gained the approval of an insane woman who usually appeared in various states of undress and had recently created a traffic jam by standing nude in the middle of a Massachusetts superhighway, and on another occasion had brought false charges of rape, and eventually had her telephone removed because of incessant nuisance calls at all hours of the night. As I say, it’s a great story, even to the thrill of discovery as he at last could read the documents he found so important. Later the woman handed him a packet of letters between the suspect and his lawyer, who it seems had been this poor woman’s second husband. I must say that Carter drags out his suspense story as well as many detective fiction writers, and then gives, in my opinion, utterly trivial reasons for his verdict. First, in an inquest transcript, a typewritten unsigned letter was described as having been turned over to the police by the chairman of the school’s board of trustees, purporting to have been in the suspect’s possession and to have been written by Elliott Speer, recommending a salary increase and saying, “there is not a single phase of the work that you cannot do as well as I.” Carter describes how the police tied the suspect up in knots so to speak over the origin—original or copy? A long-hand version? Etc. etc. I dare say the transcript was a very muddled version of the police interrogation of a man who was naturally nervous under the circumstances and who, even when most relaxed, suffered from a speech defect of which Carter knew nothing.
Regardless of the true source, Carter writes, “The police were convinced the letter was a forgery, but that didn’t prove the suspect was a murderer.” In the final dramatic clinching of his case Carter produces nothing better than one of the letters the insane woman handed him in which the suspect’s lawyer wrote the suspect, “If you’re ever put on trial you will be convicted.” Carter says this was “the one piece of evidence I was looking for.” Since no sensible lawyer for a suspect would ever put such an opinion in writing, and since it gives not one iota of evidence of guilt, I can only say that Carter appears to have been altogether too easily satisfied. His mystery woman, he tells us, talked in matter of fact tones of planning suicide, and she actually died some months later.
In the two years before I graduated from Mount Hermon, there was one convincing theory that was and is widely accepted. Elliott Speer had expanded social contacts between the two schools including an occasional dance (where I learned all I know, the box step). He had introduced athletic competition with other schools, and other liberalizations from the almost cloistered regulations dating back to the founding of the school by Dwight L. Moody 53 years earlier. There were thousands of graduates and dozens of faculty and staff over these five decades, some few of whom might have regarded any liberalization as “the work of the devil.” Any one from any part of the world might have felt in a fit of mental instability that he would be doing the work of God by putting a stop to it, even by resorting to murder.
In the local papers two years after the Speer murder, when Thomas E. Elder Sr. was hounded for new statements, numerous headlines appeared such as “Sleuths in Speer Case Sensation-Seekers, Innocent Suffer, Former Dean Elder Says.”
Elder moved to a New Hampshire town and returned to his early career as a farmer, and was elected to local office in his township, where rumor that he might have been involved in murder was largely pooh-poohed. His sense of humor never failed him. He let it be known that he had sealed a letter to be opened only upon his death, and when death came there were those who expected a confession to be discovered at last. Imagine their disappointment when the mystery letter turned out to be nothing more than instructions that his body should be cremated.
When Grand Ol’ Oprey star Minnie Pearl died in May, 1996, she was given a TV tribute in which her father is quoted as having expressed what certainly might have been an appropriate slogan for the Fall River Globe of the 1890’s, for Edmond Pearson, and perhaps for Burnham Carter:
“Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story.”
Many thanks for aid in the preparation of this account from 1) Linda Batty, archivist of Dolben Library at Northfield Mount Hermon who, it turns out, is the daughter-in-law of my first Hermon roommate, William R. Batty Jr.; 2) My former dorm master, Bill Morrow, who turned 91 in 1996; 3) Personnel of the Montgomery County (PA) Library who provided many news items on the Speer case from the New York Times.
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