Round eight: older crimes and quarrels, 1861-1928 — research log (2026-09-12)

Lane C. Working alone per instructions; no other entries, search.json, index pages, topics, mysteries.html or updates/changes.json touched.

Leads checked against search.json first

Grepped search.json (374 entries) for Foulks, Raleigh, Curran, LeDuc, Godfrey, Recchia, Lilliendahl, Hanover Furnace before starting. Only hit: the existing decatur-hanover-furnace-cannonball-legend.html, which is the cannonball legend, not the Foulks case — confirmed distinct and not duplicated.

Infrastructure notes

netscape.bcls.lib.nj.us/newspapers/newjerseymirror/njmirror.phtml (POST or GET form) was directly reachable this session via Bash curl and returned genuine, detailed full-text index summaries — not a redirect to Fulton History. Used it as the primary source for three of the four published entries. WebSearch was unavailable (session budget exhausted by other lanes). loc.gov’s /collections/chronicling-america/?q=...&fo=json search did return content-matching hits when tested against known facts (e.g., the Curran/LeDuc and Lilliendahl leads below), contrary to a mid-session report from another lane; used it with 15+ second pacing and a descriptive User-Agent, no 429s encountered. Page OCR was pulled directly from tile.loc.gov ALTO XML files (not rate-limited the same way).

1. Foulks parricide, Hanover Furnace, June 28, 1861 — PUBLISHED

entry/foulks-joseph-hanover-furnace-1861.html. Source: BCLS New Jersey Mirror index, keyword “Foulks,” full-text summaries for July 4, 1861 (p.3 col.1, initial homicide report), September 26, 1861 (p.3 cols.2-3, trial calendar naming him “the Hanover Furnace Parricide,” in the middle of the Riker trial report), and October 3, 1861 (p.3 cols.1-2, full trial testimony — Samuel Rhubart, Thomas Foulks the nephew, Nathan Bishop, Dr. Aaron Read, others — verdict of murder in the second degree, and sentence of seven years, reported alongside Riker’s six-year sentence in the same “SENTENCE OF THE HOMICIDES” item). This is a complete, well-documented case; no further sourcing needed. The July 11, 1861 issue mentioned in the forum lead did not appear under this keyword search — not needed, as the three issues above already cover report, trial and verdict.

2. Walter Raleigh attempted murder, Atsion, October 1879 — PUBLISHED

entry/raleigh-walter-atsion-1879.html. The BCLS New Jersey Mirror index (keyword “Raleigh,” “Atsion,” “Shamong”) returned no 1879 hits — this event was apparently not carried in the Mirror. Found instead via loc.gov Chronicling America JSON search (q=Walter Raleigh Atsion, dates 1879): The West-Jersey Pioneer (Bridgeton, N.J.), October 23, 1879, page 2 (file 0176 of the issue), reprinting an item from the Camden Democrat: “Walter J. Raleigh, son of Maurice Raleigh, proprietor of the Atsion mills, while crazed with drink attempted to murder his father’s house keeper, Mrs. Edgar, by stabbing her,” was stopped by foreman Daniel Robinson, whom he then stabbed several times (one blow striking a rib near the heart), then tried to drown himself in shallow water before being secured. Confirmed by reading the OCR ALTO XML directly from tile.loc.gov. Checked page 3 (0177) of the same issue — the only other “Raleigh” hit there is an unrelated school recitation of “Sir Walter Raleigh’s Two Plants.” Searched loc.gov again for “Walter Raleigh” + Atsion across 1879-1880 for a follow-up/outcome: no further hits turned up. No trial or outcome record located — the entry says so plainly.

3. Dr. Martin W. Curran / Albert LeDuc horsewhipping, July 1912 — PUBLISHED

entry/curran-leduc-pine-crest-1912.html. BCLS Mirror index searches for “Curran,” “LeDuc,” “horsewhip,” “Pine Crest,” and “Apple Pie Hill” turned up nothing for 1912. Found via loc.gov Chronicling America (q=”Curran” “LeDuc”, dates 1912): The Mount Holly News (Mount Holly, Burlington Co., N.J.), July 23, 1912, page 3 (file 0121 of the issue) — read directly from tile.loc.gov OCR. Full paragraph confirms: Dr. Martin W. Curran of South Park swore a warrant against Albert LeDuc for assault and battery after being horsewhipped entering the passenger station at Harris, on the Central Railroad near Chatsworth; LeDuc held under bail by Justice Hellbron; background on the Pine Crest Sanitorium Company’s bungalow/tents at Apple Pie Hill and an earlier licensing dispute involving Curran.

Rejected/unconfirmed sub-lead: the forum’s separate claim of a 1909 Curran revolver threat at a Mrs. De Monttored’s Winslow sanitarium could not be confirmed. BCLS “sanitarium” search (16 hits) reviewed for 1909-1911 window — no Curran/Winslow match. loc.gov searches for Curran + Winslow + revolver (1909) returned no relevant NJ hits. Not included in the published entry; only the sourced 1912 horsewhipping is used.

4. Jonathan Godfrey struck by John Recchia, Chatsworth, October 1928 — NOT PUBLISHED

Could not source independently. Tried: BCLS Mirror keyword searches for “Godfrey” (58 hits, none in 1928), “Recchia” and spelling variants (Reccia, Ricchia, Rechia, Ricchio, Ricci, Recchi — all either zero hits or unrelated), “Chatsworth” (95 hits, reviewed all for 1928 — only Carranza memorial-service items). loc.gov Chronicling America search for “Recchia” + “Godfrey” (1928) returned only unrelated telephone-directory items. panewsarchive.psu.edu search for “Recchia” returned only unrelated 1990s-2000s Dallas Post (PA) items. The BCLS index’s daterange filter appears broken (a raw-SQL-looking error string is echoed back and zero results are ever returned when the date-range checkbox is used), so date-scoped searching wasn’t possible; keyword-only searches across the full corpus should still have caught the name if indexed, but did not. Dropped — no entry published.

5. Lilliendahl killing, Great Swamp Road near Hammonton, September 1927 — PUBLISHED

entry/lilliendahl-margaret-hammonton-1927.html. BCLS Mirror not used (Hammonton is Atlantic County, outside the Mirror’s Burlington County coverage). Sourced from loc.gov Chronicling America, two issues of The Pleasantville Press (Pleasantville, N.J.), read directly from tile.loc.gov OCR:

October 21, 1927, p.1 (file 0434): reports Robert H. McCarter (defense counsel in the Hall-Mills case) retained for Mrs. Margaret Lilliendahl, jailed at the Atlantic County jail, Mays Landing, on the charge of murdering her husband Dr. William Lilliendahl of Hammonton; trial set for November 28; her account claimed two unidentified men killed him for robbery; co-defendant Willis H. Beach also held; private investigator John J. Gregory (also from the Hall-Mills defense) engaged.
December 13, 1927, p.1 (file 0630): reports the verdict and sentencing — both Mrs. Lilliendahl and Willis Beach convicted of voluntary manslaughter by a jury of five women and seven men, each sentenced by Justice Luther S. Campbell to ten years at hard labor in the New Jersey State Prison, Trenton (the $1,000 fine under the statute was remitted); Beach protested his innocence to reporters; Mrs. Lilliendahl issued a statement maintaining her innocence; a writ of error / application for a new trial was said to be planned before Justice Campbell on January 10, 1928. A companion piece in the same issue places the killing “as they sat in their car in the great swamp lane,” which matches the forum lead’s “Great Swamp Road” location without independently confirming a specific milepost or the Dave Amato detail.
Not confirmed: the forum’s claim that Dave Amato was among the first on the scene and testified. Searched loc.gov for “Amato” + “Lilliendahl” specifically; the single hit returned (Washington Times, Nov. 14, 1927, p.3) is an image-caption page with no legible body text connecting the two names — likely a fuzzy/OCR-noise match, not a real citation. Not included in the entry.
Appeal outcome: searched CourtListener (case-name search for “Lilliendahl” and general search) — no New Jersey criminal appellate opinion for State v. Lilliendahl or State v. Beach turned up (only unrelated civil cases involving different Lilliendahl parties in NY/CT courts). The entry states that a review was anticipated but that no appellate record was located this session.

Not attempted / abandoned quickly

Repeated attempts at date-range-scoped BCLS searches abandoned once the tool’s daterange feature was confirmed broken (echoes malformed query, zero results every time regardless of dates entered).
WebSearch not used after the first two queries returned “budget exhausted” (shared session-wide).

Validation (root fact-check)

Independent adversarial re-check, September 12, 2026. Every cited source was reopened from scratch; nothing below rests on lane C’s own report of what it saw.

Sources confirmed to exist and to say what was claimed — all four.

Foulks. Re-ran the BCLS New Jersey Mirror index for “Foulks” and pulled the full result set. All three records are real and match the entry’s citations exactly: July 4, 1861, p. 3 col. 1 (“Local Facts and Fancies. / HOMICIDE.”); September 26, 1861, p. 3 cols. 2–3 (Riker trial report, ending “The Trial of Mark Anthony Foulks, the Hanover Furnace Parricide, is set down for Friday”); October 3, 1861, p. 3 cols. 1–2 (full testimony, jury list, verdict of murder in the second degree, and “SENTENCE OF THE HOMICIDES” — “Riker was sentenced to confinement in the State Prison, for six years—Foulks for seven”). Every quotation in the entry appears verbatim in the transcribed newspaper text. The index records for these three items are long transcriptions, not librarian prose; the single editorial insertion (a bracketed gloss “(June 28, 1861)”) was not quoted, and the entry now says so.
Raleigh. loc.gov/item/sn83032103/1879-10-23/ed-1/?fo=json returns the issue, 4 pages; page 2 is within range. Pulled the ALTO OCR for page 2 directly and read the item: the entry’s block quotation is verbatim, down to “the knife striking a rib above the heart” and “may result fatally.”
Curran. loc.gov/item/sn85035801/1912-07-23/ed-1/?fo=json returns the issue, 4 pages; page 3 is within range. Pulled page 3 OCR: the whole report is confirmed, including “You are the man I have been looking for,” Justice Hellbron, the one-fourth interest, the “Italians alleged to be patients,” and the closing line about “more or less trouble.”
Lilliendahl — the two citations lane C could not be checked on. Both exist. sn91064030 1927-10-21 and 1927-12-13 each return HTTP 200 with a 16-page issue, and the page-1 scan files are 0434 and 0630 respectively, exactly the file numbers lane C reported. ALTO OCR for both pages was read in full. The verdict, the two ten-year hard-labor sentences at Trenton, the remitted $1,000 fines, the jury of five women and seven men, Campbell’s remarks, Beach’s “I am as innocent of this crime as you are!”, Mrs. Lilliendahl’s statement, “Alfy,” and the January 10 writ of error are all present and correctly reported.

Corrections made to the entries.

foulks-joseph-hanover-furnace-1861 — date error. The entry dated the trial to Friday, October 4, 1861 and the sentencing to October 5, and explained the October 3 issue as having “described the week’s proceedings in advance of publication.” That is impossible. The Mirror was a Thursday weekly (September 26 and October 3, 1861 were both Thursdays); the October 3 issue reports the previous week. Riker’s verdict came Wednesday evening, court adjourned Thursday for the national fast day (September 26, 1861), Foulks was tried Friday and both men were sentenced at 8 a.m. Saturday. Corrected to Friday, September 27 and Saturday, September 28, 1861. The claim that the Riker verdict came “the previous evening” was likewise wrong (two days earlier) and is fixed. Also: Nathan F. Bishop is “Manager at Hanover,” not “store manager.” Sources note rewritten to state plainly that the quotations come from transcribed newspaper text rather than indexer summary.
raleigh-walter-atsion-1879 — cut an uncited assertion that Maurice Raleigh operated the Atsion cotton mill “in this period,” which no source opened here supports; replaced with a statement that everything known about the Raleighs here rests on the single reprinted paragraph. Also narrowed an overstated negative: the entry claimed no follow-up was found “in the same paper’s subsequent issues,” but only the rest of that one issue was read. The limits paragraph now says exactly what was and was not searched.
curran-leduc-pine-crest-1912 — the lede and meta description stated the horsewhipping as established fact; the paper frames it as “the doctor’s story,” so both are now attributed to Curran’s account. Cut an uncited geographic claim placing South Park “along what is now Route 532 near the Bordentown Gun Club.” Fixed a self-contradiction: the entry said the paper gave no first name for LeDuc, when it names him Albert LeDuc in the same sentence the entry itself quotes. Added two lines of genuine corroboration from Beck’s 1937 More Forgotten Towns (read here, not taken from lane G): South Park’s position on the Vincentown–Chatsworth sand roads, and a hospital “called Pine Crest on the labels of the health water bottles” on Apple Pie Hill — attributed by Beck to a Dr. William A. White, with the entry stating explicitly that nothing connects White to Curran and that Beck’s Albert B. LeDuc is not identified with the 1912 Albert LeDuc.
lilliendahl-margaret-hammonton-1927 — misattributed cost figure. The entry said the freeholders balked at “disputed bills” including “a $4,393 stenographic bill.” The stenographic bill was ordered paid; it was the $550 in chemists’ analysis bills that were laid aside as “fancy prices.” Corrected. The $30,000 family-defense figure checks out (“It has been estimated that Mrs. Lilliendahl’s family paid more than $30,000 for her defense”), but the county’s own expected $30,000 outlay is a separate figure and the two are now distinguished. Cut an unsourced geographic inference placing the killing “southwest of Hammonton along what is now Route 206”; the papers give only “the great swamp lane.” Added the September 15 murder date, which the October 21 issue supplies, and flagged that the two issues spell the victim “Dr. A. William” and “Dr. William C.” inconsistently. Corrected the citation: the Gregory/”two negroes” material is on page 3 as the continuation of the page-1 article, not on page 1, and both source lines now note the 16-page issues. Campbell’s remarks quoted more fully and the writ-of-error / three-year new-trial point separated as the paper separates them.

Nothing in this lane is recommended for removal. All four entries are supported by sources that exist and say what is claimed; the convictions and sentences in the Lilliendahl entry, the verdict and seven-year sentence in the Foulks entry, and the honest “outcome unknown” framings in the Raleigh and Curran entries are all correct as now written.