Fact and Fiction (S5E5)

Today, we explore how the conventions of detective fiction informed--and misinformed--the investigation into the murder of Elliott Speer.

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TRANSCRIPT

This is Part 5 of a 5-part miniseries. Please be aware that it will make zero sense if you have not heard the first four installments. Also, in this episode, we will be spoiling the end of The Public School Murder by R.C. Woodthorpe. For those who would prefer not to know who done it, I’ll give you a warning before I reveal the vital details. If you skip ahead ninety seconds from that point, you’ll be golden.

The previous four episodes have followed the saga of Elliott Speer’s murder—and the related story of the trial of Thomas Elder on charges of attempted murder. Today, I’ll pull together a handful of loose threads and share some of my views on the case. We’ll consider how the popularity of the puzzle mystery colored journalism about the young headmaster’s death, how R.C. Woodthorpe’s novel might have guided the police investigation, and—most important of all—whether or not Elder got away with murder. This is The Art of Crime, and I’m your host, Gavin Whitehead. Welcome to episode 5 of Murder by the Book . . .

Fact and Fiction

The Book

The first readers of The Public School Murder praised the book for its freshness and vitality. Much of the novel’s refreshing feel derived from its setting in an elite educational institution. This was a world that the author, R.C. Woodthorpe knew well. After all, before becoming a man of letters he had made his living as an assistant headmaster. One literary critic at the time spoke for many readers when he wrote: “The murder of a headmaster is an original touch…and, above all, the atmosphere of the public school is admirably shown. If this is a first novel, it is a remarkable achievement.”

The murder of a headmaster was an unexpected occurrence in a detective story—in part, because it was an equally unexpected occurrence in real life. In 1932, it seemed almost unthinkable that gun violence would intrude upon the safe, insulted world of the boarding school. Even more shocking was the idea that the headmaster—the apex authority figure in a rigidly hierarchal institution—could be shot to death on campus, while working in the comfort of his study. Yet, in 1934, the fictional scenario that had delighted readers just two years earlier came to gruesome life on the grounds of a genteel, religiously-oriented prep school, nestled among the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts.

The revelation that the victim of this shooting had not only read The Public School Murder, but had even kept a copy in the very study where he was killed, proved genuinely chilling. The improbable plot of Woodthorpe’s novel seemed to have foretold the murder of Elliott Speer with uncanny precision. The fictional headmaster died in September, at the beginning of a new school year; so did Speer. The fictional headmaster was reading alone at night when he was shot through the window of his study; so was Speer. The fictional headmaster’s killer took the murder weapon with him; so did Speer’s. Then, there was the fact that Elliott had purchased The Public School Murder in the U.K., at a time when it was unavailable in his native country. Speer therefore owned one of the only copies of the novel that could be found in the United States. Some newspaper articles highlighted the creepiness of these accumulated coincidences, in headlines such as “ELLIOTT SPEER READ ELEMENTS OF HIS OWN TRAGEDY IN THIS BOOK” and “PIECE OF FICTION FORETELLS SPEER DEATH.”

But far more common were stories that dwelled on the sinister possibility that Elliott’s murderer had modeled his crime after Woodthorpe’s novel. It’s easy to understand why the public found this facet of the case spellbinding. Like us, they were accustomed to mystery novelists basing their plots on real-life crimes. In fact, this podcast has discussed several examples of this phenomenon. Swiss-born murderess Maria Manning provided the model for the character of Madame Hortense, a homicidal lady’s maid in Charles Dickens’ novel, Bleak House. The Jack the Ripper killings inspired Marie Belloc Lowndes to write The Lodger, a novel that Hitchcock adapted for one of his earliest films. Then, there’s the notorious case of Florence Maybrick, the Victorian housewife accused of poisoning her husband, John, an affair that gave rise to several crime novels, by authors such as Anthony Berkeley, Dorothy L. Sayers, and—more recently—Martin Edwards.

But the case of Elliott Speer turned the typical relationship between art and reality on its head, becoming a rare instance in which a fictional mystery inspired a real-life crime. More fascinating still, there is a chance that Woodthorpe’s detective story influenced the police investigation into the Mount Hermon shooting. In episode two, we mentioned that on the second day after the murder, authorities—searching for the shotgun that had killed Elliott—drained a small pond on the Mount Hermon campus. They did this even though this body of water was located far away from the murderer’s most probable route to and from Ford Cottage, where Elliott Speer was killed. When the district attorney started to talk about The Public School Murder to the press three months later, this early investigative decision assumed a different aspect. In Woodthorpe’s novel, the missing murder weapon is discovered in a small pond on campus. That investigators hunted for the shotgun that felled Speer in a similar body of water is yet another example of how fact and fiction mirror each other in this case.

Golden Age

Even if Woodthorpe’s book did not directly inform the search for the shotgun, it’s undeniable that the conventions of detective fiction served as the lens through which the police, the press, and the public viewed the mystery of Elliott’s murder. The homicide took place toward the end of the Golden Age of crime fiction—the period stretching between the two world wars, during which time the puzzle mystery rose to prominence in the publishing world. The conventions of detective fiction, in general, and the whodunnit, in particular, crop up in the very earliest stages of the Speer investigation.

On September 19, 1934, a reporter for the New York Daily News spoke with detectives working the case, under the condition of anonymity. The article that resulted from this interview was among the first to argue that Elliott was not killed by a lone-wolf religious fanatic, as many had suspected given Elliott’s liberalizing tendencies as headmaster, but rather by someone known to the murder victim. To prove this theory, the journalist pointed to the behavior of the Speer family pet dogs, Andy and Amy. Amy was a friendly black Newfoundland, and Andy was a puppy of an unknown breed. The two pooches could hardly have been more adorable, but you never would have known it based on what this reporter wrote about them. He reported, “the fierce Speer watchdogs failed to bark when the killer pointed his shotgun.” The journalist went on to describe them as “notoriously dangerous to strangers.” Because these fearsome guardians had not barked at the murderer, the journalist concludes, they must have known him. This line of argument is taken straight out of the 1892 Sherlock Holmes adventure “Silver Blaze.” Early in the story, Holmes visits the farm where Silver Blaze, a champion racehorse, was stolen under cover of night. When Police Inspector Gregson asks the consulting detective’s opinion on the case, Holmes famously speaks in riddles about the guard dog: “To the mysterious incident of the dog in the nighttime.” A puzzled Gregson responds, “The dog did nothing in the nighttime,” to which Sherlock replies, “That was the curious incident.” In other words, the fact that the dog neither barked nor chased the trespasser reveals the disappearance of Silver Blazes to have been an inside job. Forty-two years after the publication of Conan Doyle’s story, detectives working the Elliott Speer case initially came to the same conclusion, only to be led astray. It would later become clear that Andy was a big old goof, who never barked at anyone, while Amy had been pent up in the kennel on the opposite side of the house, so wouldn’t have seen or heard the murderer stalking her master.

The tropes of the Golden Age whodunnit played an especially active part in shaping the public’s perspective on the Speer slaying. The most dramatic example involves a news story that developed over the course of the inquest. In episode three, we alluded to the testimony of Mount Hermon senior Albert Larue, who went over to the Elders’ house the night of the murder to help with the dean’s political campaign for county commissioner. During the inquest, Larue stated that Elder left the house at approximately 8:20 in order to get his car headlight repaired. Journalists confected a far more sensational version of the student’s story. In so doing, they never named Larue. For example, the New York Times referred to him as “a young man” and a “short-wave radio enthusiast,” while shielding Elder’s identity behind the tag “the principal suspect.” In the Times’ enhanced version of events, Elder turned back the main campus clock and the clocks in his house by fifteen minutes. By manipulating the clock in the belltower, he hoped to sow confusion and obscure the timeline of the murder he was about to commit. By tinkering with the timepieces in his home, he aimed to create an ironclad alibi. Knowing that that alibi would be more effective if it involved someone outside his family, Elder invited Larue over. As Elder was about to leave his house, he called the student’s attention to the time, 8:20, saying, “It’s getting late…I have to go someplace.” Then Elder made his way over to Ford Cottage in order to shoot Elliott at 8:20, knowing that Larue would swear that the dean had been with him at that same exact time. However, when the student returned home, he hopped on his short-wave radio and learned that time was fifteen minutes off what he had thought it was. In this moment, he realized that the clocks in the Elder household had to have been wrong.

Anyone who has read even a handful of Golden Age whodunnits will recognize alibi-related clock tampering as one of the genre’s bread-and-butter motifs. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least three Agatha Christie plots that hinge on this trope. It's possible that Times’ story is every bit as fictional as a Christie novel. While I have been unable to get my hands on the original inquest transcripts, author Craig Walley makes no mention of this kinds of trickery in his book about the murder of Elliott Speer. So, it’s entirely possible that the anecdote is just tall tale inspired by a common plot device in the Golden-Age puzzle mystery. Or perhaps it is true that Elder—taking his cue from detective fiction— manipulated clocks to deceive potential witnesses. Even if this newspaper story was faithfully reporting “the facts”, those facts seemed compelling and newsworthy precisely because they recalled the diabolical machinations of fictional murderers. Whether accurate or not, the Times and other publications that ran this story implicitly depicted Elder as the kind of mastermind killer who would normally go head-to-head with Miss Marple or Poirot.

Some observers understood the astonishing extent to which the literary conventions of the puzzle mystery were coloring public perceptions of the Mount Hermon shooting. Bibliophile and pioneering true-crime writer Edmund Pearson wrote an entire essay on this topic, published in the New York Herald Tribune in July 1935. Pearson argued that the popularity of detective fiction had fundamentally transformed people’s understanding of crime. The craze for whodunnits, his essay maintains, has conditioned the public to believe that real-life law enforcement involves the ingenious interpretation of clues accidentally left behind by a cunning criminal. The reality, Pearson counters, is far more prosaic: “Distressing as it may be, the dreadful truth remains that most criminal mysteries are not solved by footprints, not by the discovery of a secret South American poison mixed with the victim’s lipstick, not even by a withered japonica found in the buttonhole of the dead man’s pajamas. They are solved by people going around asking: “Say, who d’ye think done this, anyway?” He goes on to suggest that—reality be damned—the public will demand intricate clueing and plot twists in news coverage of a crime, and publishers are more than happy to supply them in exchange for a handsome profit. As a result, real-life injustices become encrusted with urban legends—and thereby trivialized.

Pearson viewed the case of Elliott Speer as a vivid example of this process.

Poking fun at “armchair detectives,” he observes that, despite the endless number of “picturesque theories” generated by “astute sleuths,” the murder remained unsolved. Pearson, in a tongue-in-cheek tone, adds, “Throughout the country, I suppose, wherever anyone heard of the Speer case, people have also heard of story-book solutions. One of them was the elaborate alibi prepared by the supposed assassin, who tampered with the chapel clock and thus deceived everyone as to the time of the murder…I believe that the clock was not tampered with, and that it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. At all events, the incident in which a criminal monkeys with a clock, just before the crime, was copyrighted years ago by not less than three novelists.” Then he makes fun of the hypothesis about the silence of “the dog Amy,” tracing it back to “Silver Blaze.” In the end, the essay suggests, the kind of public that is primed to view serious crimes as intricate puzzles proved less interested in the facts of the Speer case than in the fantasy of solving it from the comfort of their kitchen table. After a quick break, we’ll take off our deerstalkers, put on our common-sense caps, take a sober look at the facts, and consider a question that has dogged me for months: did Dean Thomas Elder kill Elliott Speer?

He Done It

In the wake of the inconclusive inquest into the death of Elliott Speer, a handful of local newspaper editorials suggested that police had unfairly focused on Thomas Elder to the exclusion of other suspects. Even worse, investigators had tarred his reputation through a campaign of innuendo—without having anything to show for it on the other side. It’s hard to read such opinion pieces without asking, “Was Elder unfairly maligned—or did he get away with murder?”

Having sifted through innumerable newspaper articles, archival documents, and books, I’m inclined to say, “He done it.” Before we look at the evidence against him, though, let’s address the one factor that potentially exonerates him: the timeline in the run up to Elliott’s shooting. In his book about the case, Walley convincingly argues that even though Elder would not have had much time to commit the murder—remember, Elder left his home at around the time of the shooting, took his car in to have a headlight repaired, and then went into the office at Holbrook Hall, an administrative building. It would have been tight, but he could have pulled it off. “The drive to [Elliott’s residence] from his house would have taken only a minute or two. [Elder] fired the shot between 8:15 and 8:20, walked quickly to his car, and drove to Morgan’s Garage, a drive of only two and a half miles, arriving there before 8:30. He may have thrown the gun off the bridge into the Connecticut River or kept it in the car, planning to dispose of it later. When the headlight had been replaced, he drove back to Holbrook Hall and entered inconspicuously, waiting for the call from Ford Cottage that would tell him if he had been successful in eliminating his rival.” (Obviously, Walley thinks Elder did it.) I should add that, even though Thomas Elder was still in the process of recovering from a heart attack, several witnesses noted him moving briskly when the police arrived to Holbrook Hall the night of the murder. Later that evening, he injured his hand by tripping over a hedge at Ford Cottage, while rushing to the scene of the crime. So, while it would have taken presence of mind, near-perfect timing, and a good deal of luck, Elder certainly could have pulled off the shooting.

And that strikes me as the most likely explanation. As I weighed the evidence for and against Elder, I kept coming back to those letters he presented to Wilfred Fry, one of which was purportedly written by Elliott Speer. As we discussed in episodes 2 and 3, Elder came forward with these documents in a bid to sway the board of trustees to appoint him headmaster of Mount Hermon in the immediate aftermath of Elliott’s death. Everyone who examined the letter supposedly authored by Speer deemed it a forgery. Moreover, Elder maintained that the letters served as memoranda of a recent meeting between him and the headmaster, but no such meeting appeared in Speer’s thorough business calendar. When asked about the status and chain of custody of the documents—were they originals? Copies? If copies, who made them?—Elder changed his story multiple times.

In the end, Elder averred that he had thrown away the original letters. What remained were copies of copies of the originals—dictated to two separate hotel stenographers while Elder was out of town on business. However, Elder’s reproduction of the letter supposedly authored by Elliott was, mystifyingly, typed on Elliott’s letterhead, not Elder’s. Why was the dean running around with the headmaster’s stationary? Furthermore, as we discussed in earlier episodes, the original, signed version of the letter purportedly written by Elliott promised Elder a sweet pay raise, a generous pension, and fringe benefits normally reserved for the headmaster. As Elliott’s father observed at the inquest, who in his right mind would destroy a signed guarantee of this kind from his boss? That’s just a small sampling of the manifest lies that Elder told authorities. Rather than cataloguing every brick in this tower of bullshit, I’m going to focus instead on three implications of Elder’s failed forgery scheme.

First: During the investigation into the letters, a hotel stenographer in Springfield, Massachusetts confirmed that she had, in fact, typed one of them for Elder. Since the memos were originally dated February 18 and 19, 1934, they would have been dictated in February or March of that year. In other words, it is established fact that Elder had these dubious letters reproduced six to seven months prior to the murder of Elliott Speer. The only way any of this makes sense is if Elder anticipated that, at some point in the future, Elliott wouldn’t be around to contest the authenticity of the documents. Yet, Speer was a healthy man in his thirties, who showed no sign of kicking the bucket any time soon. Either Elder was really good at predicting the future, or he began planning the murder nearly a half year before the shooting at Ford Cottage.

Second: Only a sinister person could have forged these letters. Elder clearly forged the documents with a pragmatic purpose in mind: He wanted the trustees to choose him to succeed the murdered Elliott, whose written words would serve as a posthumous vote of confidence from the beloved headmaster. Failing that, the letters might potentially secure, at the very least, the aforementioned salary bump and pension.

There were a host of petty, emotional needs that were fulfilled by the documents. Elder took palpable delight in using the voice of Speer to denigrate his workplace adversaries, including school cashier S. Allen Norton, whose case we discussed in the previous episode. The communication supposedly authored by Elliott refers to Norton as “S.A.” One passage portrays Mount Hermon’s cashier as both a burden and a social embarrassment, one best hidden from pupils and their parents: “In the Cashier’s office I would like to keep Mr. S. A. from contact with the students as far as possible…I expect you, of course, to handle all correspondence with parents and guardians in regard to finance, just as you have been doing this year. I have already told S. A. to turn these matters over to you, which I understand he has done. I shall be glad when S. A. reaches sixty-five, when we shall certainly wish to retire him.” The letter is full of disparagements like this, and Elder obviously relished the idea of “Elliott’s” negative assessments of his enemies one day becoming public knowledge.

At the same time, Elder wrote the letters in a way that allowed him to vent his pent-up aggression toward his supervisor and rival. In his epistle, “Elliott” tells Elder that the dean is overreacting to the fact that the school’s new Bible teachers profess that Jesus was just a mortal, no different than other great men, including Gandhi. The headmaster also assures his second-in-command that it’s no big deal that the same Bible faculty are probably socialists and teach the students that there is no afterlife. The net effect of passages like these is to paint Elliott as a well-intentioned, yet dangerous, radical and Elder as the conservative voice of reason defending the school against depravity. You can almost feel his elation as he puts words in Elliott’s mouth that will prove to the Board of Trustees that they were wrong to have skipped over Elder and promote Speer to headmaster.

Simply put, the way that Elder uses language in these falsified documents reveals the depth of his animosity toward several of his colleagues at Mount Hermon, including Elliott Speer. It also paints a picture of a vengeful, brooding, and gleefully deceptive personality.

Third: the letters offer insight into possible motives for the murder. Firing old and good-for-nothing staff members is a leitmotif. It’s suggestive that, according to one witness at the inquest, Elliott entertained the idea of replacing Elder—and may have even started to make moves to do so. Had Speer indicated such plans to Elder? Similarly, the pension guarantee appears to be an echo of a heated conversation that Elder had with Elliott in real life, during which the dean and headmaster failed to agree on the dollar value of Elder’s retirement plan. The presence of this topic in the letters hints that this dispute was in the forefront of Elder’s mind as he plotted Elliott’s death, perhaps as early as February 1934.

The murder was likely motivated by a number of other factors, including a long-simmering resentment about Elliott’s reforms to the school. Then, there was the fact that this affluent, well-connected young man with an influential father exploited his social network to leapfrog the self-made, humbly born Thomas Elder into the office of headmaster. These grievances make their way into the text of the letters, in the unflattering depiction of Speer as a political and religious radical. For all these reasons, the letters do not look good for Elder.

Other evidence points in that direction, too. Though Holbrook Hall was packed on the night of the murder, nobody saw Elder there until roughly an hour after the shooting. At the inquest, Elder and his wife were contradicted by every other witness regarding the timeline of the dean’s departure from his house and his arrival at the garage to get his headlight fixed.

Another compelling argument in favor of Elder’s guilt comes from the pages of The Public School Murder. Heads up: We are about to spoil the solution to the novel, so those who want to avoid that should skip ahead ninety seconds.

During the inquest, District Attorney Bartlett could not conclusively prove that Elder had read Woodthorpe’s novel. While Holly Speer carefully recorded the titles of the books that her husband loaned friends and colleagues, she never kept track of his mysteries, viewing them as disposable entertainments. Yet, it’s a fact that Elliott brought Elder several detective stories during the dean’s convalescence following his heart attack. We know, as well, that Speer particularly enjoyed The Public School Murder. It’s the kind of story he would have likely wanted to share with his recovering co-worker. After all, the book was set in a world very similar to the one that he and Elder inhabited.

Woodthorpe’s plot supplies what is either one hell of a coincidence or another indication that it served as inspiration for Elliott’s murder. In the final chapter, the reader discovers that the killer is none other than the assistant headmaster, who is second in command at the school. In the wake of the headmaster’s shooting, the assistant headmaster takes control of the school, assuming the position of the man he murdered. As dean of Mount Hermon, Thomas Elder not only had a job analogous to assistant headmaster, but he also tried to do what Woodthorpe’s fictional murderer did by offering himself up as Elliott’s replacement. Of all the overlaps between the murder of Elliott Speer and The Public School Murder, this is perhaps the most disturbing.

Guilty, Again

The run-in with S. Allen Norton also points toward Elder’s culpability in the murder of Elliott Speer, even though his trial resulted in an acquittal. The jury in the Norton affair was faced with a daunting volume of contradictory evidence. For every fact that one party asserted was true, another party came in to suggest the opposite. Did Elder spend all night at his hotel in Keene, New Hampshire, as he had claimed? “Of course!” says the front-desk clerk, who kept watch on the staircase all evening. But here comes the chambermaid, who avows that, no—he didn’t—since only one person had slept in the Elders’ hotel bed that night. Mrs. Elder swears that her husband wasn’t sporting a long, dark coat on the day in question. Enter the gas station attendant, who remembers him wearing a long, dark coat.

The trial was ultimately a contest between the credibility of Thomas Elder and that of his accuser. On the stand, Norton came off as a sanctimonious weenie—and as a little bit of a perv. This was because Elder’s lawyer successfully made the trial about the great chin-chuck controversy of 1930, in which Norton drilled a peephole in the office wall. According to him, he did so for no other reason than to ferret out the adulterous escapades between Elder and his younger secretary, Evelyn Dill. In admitting this, Norton looked like a busybody and a creep. Worse still, his spin on these events was contradicted in several particulars by the testimony of several witnesses. At least two of these maintained under oath that Norton had admitted to fabricating allegations against Norton and Dill. If the jury believed this, they also had to contend with the idea that Norton might have a habit of lying about his adversaries to get them in trouble. Was he doing so in this case?

All signs point to no. Norton did not invent his attacker. One of Norton’s neighbors saw a man with a long dark coat and gun threaten him in his driveway. Another heard the altercation between the two men, then the sound of the getaway car speeding off down the street. Since it was a bright evening, Norton could not have misidentified the man in his driveway. But did he possibly lie about the identity of his assailant in order to get Elder in hot water? On the face of it, this idea appears ludicrous. When Elder was forced to resign from his position at Mount Hermon in 1935, he moved over 100 miles away to Alton, New Hampshire. At such a remove, Norton had no way of knowing where Elder might have been the night of the attack. For all Norton knew, Elder could have been in upstate New York at a cattle convention—or surrounded by friends and family back on his farm in Alton. Under such circumstances, why would Norton risk lying to police when his deception might end up instantly exposed? It makes no sense at all.

Moreover, the assault on Norton seems consistent with many contemporary assessments of Elder’s character. While the inquest into Elliott’s death was ongoing, the Springfield Daily Republican published an unusual item under the title “Reports [That] Suspect Shows Symptoms of Insanity.” Though unnamed, Elder is clearly the subject of this article. The piece claims that Elder has been heavily medicated in the past, in order to manage his “ungovernable temper and actions at times which were absolutely impossible to explain.” The anonymous source of these claims is described as “one who has known him for many years, a man formerly associated with a state institution for the insane.” Given the stigma attached to mental health problems in the period, it’s good to take any source’s notion of “sanity” with a grain of salt. At the same time, Elder’s volatility was noted by many of the people with whom he worked the closest. One trustee of the Northfield Schools spoke euphemistically of Elder’s “nervous temperament” in the wake of his heart attack, something that Elliott found hard to deal with. Holly Speer echoed this notion, recalling that her late husband was troubled by the dean’s “jumpy and nervous” deportment, adding “I don’t think anyone could have had a good time working with Mr. Elder in his state of health.” A biographer of Henry Cutler, the headmaster who promoted Elder to the position of dean, called the disgraced faculty member “brilliant and unstable” and his influence on the school “disruptive and discordant.” We heard other, similar sentiments from Elder’s coworkers expressed in Episode 3.

In the final analysis, the attack on Norton shared pretty much the same M.O. with the Mount Hermon shooting. In both cases, he showed up to the home of a professional rival, late at night, with a shotgun. In both cases, he lined up an alibi. In both cases, his wife came to his defense, offering testimony that was contradicted by other reliable witnesses. In both cases, he got away with it.

Conclusion: Life and Art

As we wrap up this miniseries, let’s consider two last questions: Why did the murder of Elliott Speer captivate the newspaper-reading public in the 1930s? And why has a case that once grabbed so many headlines been largely forgotten?

One compelling answer to both questions has to do with the close association between Speer’s shooting and the Golden Age whodunnit. In the essay I mentioned earlier, Edmund Pearson argues that the killing of the young headmaster “would have seemed fictitious—the opening incident of a novel, not an event in real life.” Here, he is referring to a specific genre of novel: the puzzle mystery.

If the Speer affair “seemed fictitious,” it was because people like Pearson viewed it as out of step with the sordid, indiscriminate, full-frontal violence that came to define “reality” in the 1930s. This, after all, was the decade of Bonnie & Clyde and John Dillinger; of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano; of racially motivated lynchings and riots. By contrast, the Mount Hermon shooting was an almost genteel Old-World crime, of the kind that was far more common in British whodunnits than in contemporary newspaper headlines.

Like a Golden Age crime novel, the murder of Elliott Speer was a vehicle for repackaging violent death, so it no longer seemed pervasive and impersonal. In telling the story of the Speer case as though it were a whodunnit, the media allowed fatal violence to be experienced on a smaller, more intimate scale—where it actually meant something. The public had in its hands a case in which the killer knew the victim. What is more, the murderer’s motive seemed grounded in everyday life—growing out of frustrations experienced in the middle-class working environment of the private boarding school. Last, but not least: the perpetrator appeared to go to extraordinary lengths in planning and carrying out the crime, successfully concealing his identity and befuddling police. Like the best puzzle mysteries of the period, the Mount Hermon killing almost begged to be approached as an intellectual problem, offering newspaper readers the chance to contemplate an unspeakable crime from a safe analytical distance.

Yet, these same features also help explain—at least in part—why “Elliott Speer” is not a household name today. In the public imagination, interest in the Mount Hermon shooting was inextricably tied to the popularity of the puzzle mystery, which declined in popularity after World War II. Critics of the genre derided it for its alleged artificiality—its tendency to put plot mechanics before the changing realities of twentieth-century existence. In a 1944 essay, author and historian Philip Van Storen Dern articulated this kind of dissatisfaction: “The great need of the mystery today is not novelty of apparatus but novelty of approach. The whole genre needs overhauling, a return to first principles...Mystery story writers need to know more about life and less about death—more about the way people think and feel and act, and less about how they die.” For some literary historians, this passage is an omen of the end of the Golden Age. Indeed, after World War II, puzzle mysteries were eclipsed in the U.S. by hardboiled detective fiction and the psychological thriller.

There are many reasons why one crime is remembered while another is forgotten. However, in the case of Elliott Speer, changing attitudes toward the whodunnit coincided with—and almost certainly helped extinguish— the waning memory of both his death and his life.