The Lilliendahl killing near Hammonton

An arrest and a Hall-Mills connection

The Pleasantville Press of October 21, 1927 reported that Robert H. McCarter of Newark — who a year earlier had successfully defended Frances Noel Hall, Willie Stevens and Henry Stevens in the Hall-Mills murder trial at Somerville — had been retained as trial counsel for Mrs. Margaret Lilliendahl, then held in the Atlantic County jail at Mays Landing alongside Willis H. Beach, on a charge of murdering her husband, Dr. William Lilliendahl of Hammonton. McCarter's fee, the paper said, was guaranteed by Clarence Hodson, a New York broker and cousin of the accused; the trial was set to open November 28. The continuation of the item on page 3 also noted John J. Gregory, a private detective who had gathered evidence for the defense in the Hall-Mills case and was now, in the paper's words, "engaged in gathering evidence in support of Mrs. Lilliendahl's story that the murder was committed by two negroes whose motive was robbery."

The killing itself is not narrated in detail in either issue. The December 13 article on the trial's cost places it only as having happened "as they sat in their car in the great swamp lane," and a separate item in the October 21 issue gives the date of the murder as September 15. No more specific road, milepost or landmark appears in the reports read here, and none has been supplied from other sources. The two issues also spell the victim's name inconsistently — "Dr. A. William Lilliendahl" in most items, "Dr. William C. Lilliendahl" in others — and neither form has been checked against a vital record.

Trial, verdict, and sentence

The Pleasantville Press of December 13, 1927 reported the outcome. After the jury — five women and seven men — deliberated, both Mrs. Lilliendahl and Beach were convicted of voluntary manslaughter, not murder. Justice Luther S. Campbell, sentencing them the following Saturday, said he could not account for the jury's finding: "Now, why the jury found the degree of this crime to be manslaughter, I don't know... Anything I might say will be pure guess." For his own part, he said, "Factually and legally it is murder in the first degree," and therefore, "I cannot justify my action without exacting the maximum sentence of penal servitude, and that is the sentence I am about to impose." Both were sentenced to ten years at hard labor in the New Jersey State Prison at Trenton; a $1,000 fine that could have accompanied the sentence was remitted. Beach told reporters afterward, "I am as innocent of this crime as you are." Mrs. Lilliendahl, declining to speak to reporters directly, issued a statement through her attorneys: "I have been convicted and sentenced for a crime of which I am innocent... God knows that I am innocent — that we are both innocent." The same issue reported that she had an eight-year-old son, called "Alfy" in the article, and that she intended to begin serving her sentence at Trenton as soon as possible rather than wait through a planned Christmas visit in the county jail.

No application for a new trial was made at sentencing, and the defense's appeals for mercy were refused. The paper reported that it was "intimated" a writ of error — in effect an application to review the evidence — would be presented before Justice Campbell on January 10, 1928, and that chief counsel Robert H. McCarter said an application for a new trial could be made then or at any time in the next three years. The Atlantic County freeholders separately balked at the trial's cost: bills totalling $550 for chemical analysis of bloodstains on stockings Mrs. Lilliendahl had been wearing were laid aside as "fancy prices," while a $4,393 stenographic bill was ordered paid. The county's own expenditures were expected to reach $30,000, and the paper added that Mrs. Lilliendahl's family was estimated to have paid more than $30,000 for her defense.

What the record does not settle

No appellate opinion for a New Jersey criminal case under either the Lilliendahl or Beach name was found in a CourtListener search of published opinions, so whether the planned application for a new trial was filed, argued, or decided cannot be confirmed here. The forum lead that prompted this research also named a neighbor, Dave Amato, as an early witness at the scene; a targeted search for "Amato" alongside "Lilliendahl" in the Library of Congress newspaper database returned only a single, unrelated image-caption page, and no direct confirmation of Amato's role was located. That detail is omitted above rather than repeated on the strength of an unverified secondhand account.