David F. Paul (1920)

Disappearance and discovery

Paul, 59, was carrying $10,000 in cash and $12,500 in checks from Camden’s Broadway Trust Company to a Philadelphia bank. On October 16 two farmers hunting in a swampy part of the Burlington County pines noticed automobile tracks ending at disturbed earth between Tabernacle and Chatsworth, at a place the clipping calls Iricks Crossway. Paul’s body lay in a shallow excavation. His head had been beaten and his upper body stabbed. The cash was missing, but the checks, watch and chain, ring, and cuff links remained.

Physicians initially thought the burial recent, leaving authorities unsure when and where he had died. The investigation followed a vehicle’s tracks, a woman’s telephone tips, and the possibility that Paul was killed indoors because some garments were blood-free. His wife rejected suggestions that he had absconded; the account says he left her, a son in college, and a daughter in Clayton.

A later chronology says Frank J. James and Raymond W. Schuck confessed in November, described a killing near the Market Street ferries on October 5, and led officials to money hidden in Evergreen Cemetery. Both were indicted in Camden County; their accounts differed over Schuck’s participation.

Convictions and executions

Later records correct the OCR-damaged defendants’ names to Frank J. James and Raymond W. Schuck. James admitted taking part and testified against Schuck. Camden County juries convicted both men of first-degree murder. New Jersey’s highest court affirmed Schuck’s conviction in June 1921. Both men were executed at Trenton on August 30, 1921. The preserved condition of Paul’s body in tannery-tainted water reportedly helped detective Ellis H. Parker disprove their timeline, giving the investigation its later “Pickled Corpse” nickname.

The appeal also challenged an all-male jury

Frank J. James’s June 1921 appeal reveals a dispute absent from the robbery narrative. His lawyers objected that Camden County had selected no women for the jury pool, asserting that thousands were qualified. They also challenged the use and disclosure of his confession, the evidence placing the crime in Camden County, and the exclusion of family mental-health history offered in support of a life-imprisonment recommendation. These were arguments for reversal, not findings that the trial had committed those errors.

The Court of Errors and Appeals affirmed the conviction. The opinion thus connects the Paul prosecution with arguments over jury participation and capital sentencing as well as detective work. It prints the victim’s middle initial as “S.”, while the archive uses “F.”; a death or employment record is needed to settle that small but real identification discrepancy. State v. James, 96 N.J.L. 132 (June 20, 1921), opinion and assignments of error.