As they walked further down the hall, Miller filled Grace in on the particulars of the case. The defendant was a man named Charles Stielow. He and his brother-in-law, Nelson Green, had been convicted of murdering their neighbor Charles Phelps and his housekeeper, Margaret Wolcott, in upstate Orleans County. The crime occurred in March 1915. There were no witnesses, but Stielow had given a full, signed confession.
Miller stopped in the hallway with an outstretched hand. Grace approached the cell on their right. Inside, there was a cot and a shelf. Grace could only see a glint of a mirror. It was being blocked by a gigantic form of a man, standing with his back to her. He was wearing the dark wool suit that was the uniform of every inmate at Sing Sing. His sleeves and pants looked short. His back was massive and strong.
Even from outside the cell, Grace barely came up to the man’s chest. So when he turned around, she was surprised to see a shy, chubby face with two, close-set eyes. His mouth was half-disguised by a soft mustache. His hair was thick and curly. Grace looked at him more closely. The skin of this man was whiter than any she had ever seen. Grace introduced herself and spoke with him politely about his case. Charlie Stielow murmured his answers short and to the point. Grace spied some papers and letters on his shelf. She asked very nicely if she might look at some of them. She did so very quickly. All the while, the giant clutched a crusty German Bible. There was one letter in particular that Grace asked if she might borrow. Charlie agreed by nodding. Grace told the man in a stern tone that she could make no promises whatsoever. He nodded once more.
Once out of the corridor, Miller asked Grace what her first impressions were. Grace calmly asked why she had been asked to meet this man. Miller said there were questions about how Stielow’s confession was procured. Grace nodded and showed Miller the paper she had taken. It was a handwritten note. Miller recognized it as written by Stielow’s eleven-year-old daughter. The letter read:
God knows, as well as we do, father, that you are innocent. He knows, as we do, that you didn’t go out of the house that night.
Miller looked to Grace to see what her impressions were. She looked like she was still listening to the words in the air.
When she got back to New York City, Grace started making inquiries into Stielow’s case. She took the train to Albion and checked out the record of Stielow’s appeal. She stayed inside for three days over the July Fourth holiday and studied the case materials—all 1,450 pages—carefully reading the tiny, typed pages.
The facts were deceptively simple, yet they formed a story in her mind. Charlie Stielow was a down-and-out laborer looking for work. He met an older man named Phelps who looked at Charlie’s massive size and offered him work on his farm in East Shelby at a salary of four hundred dollars a year. Charlie, who had a wife and two children, thought he had won the sweepstakes. Charlie was given a small house, a cow, feed, potatoes, and fuel for his home. Shelby was a bleak plain of pine trees and melting snow, especially in March, but Charlie had only four dollars to his name and his wife had another baby on the way. So Charlie took the job. His mother-in-law, Mary Jane Green and her son, Nelson Irow Green, arrived from Royalton Center to help with the move and the coming baby.
On the night of Sunday, March 21, 1915, at 11 P.M., the Stielows were awakened by the sound of a woman screaming. Charlie ran to the front door, trying to listen. There was only silence. Charlie wanted to go outside, but his mother-in-law stopped him, saying that whatever was behind that door might excite his wife into giving birth too soon. Charlie stood inside the door, chafing at its surface, straining his ears to hear past the wood and into the darkness.
The next morning, at dawn, Charlie woke up, still dressed in his old blue overalls. He covered his head with his favorite black cap, which had a thin front bill. He put on his size 10 boots, their sloping heels just hanging on.
Charlie opened his front door and found Miss Wolcott, Mr. Phelps’s housekeeper, dead and cold on his doorstep. She had been shot under the left arm. A late, light snow had fallen the night before, coating her in white. Charlie followed a trail of swaying red spots all the way to the Phelps house, which stood directly across from him on the opposite side of West Shelby Road. Phelps’s large two-story house stood out against the withered sky. Charlie ran over and found Mr. Phelps dying just inside his own door with three shots in him. Charlie shouted for Nelson, and they started across the adjoining lots, trying desperately to find a neighbor. They found Mr. Jenkins, Phelps’s nephew, who took some bedclothes, wrapped up his straining uncle, and then called the police.
When the police arrived, they found very little evidence, except for the bullets themselves and Jenkins’s insistence that a pocketbook with several hundred dollars in it had gone missing from inside. Someone also noticed a single bullet in the back kitchen glass door. There were no weapon and no eyewitnesses except Mr. Phelps, who was in very serious condition. The sheriff quickly questioned Charlie, but only as a formality. No one believed he could be guilty of such terrible violence. He was just the unlucky one who lived on the property. Besides, there were two sets of tracks: one small and barefoot and another harder to make out. The sheriff called for Charles Scobell, of Oneida Castle, who arrived with his big, slobbering bloodhound. The dog snuffled around in the snow. He looked up, then plunked his way along the tree line in a circle toward the henhouse but eventually lost the scent. When Mr. Phelps died hours later, the police put up a $5,000 reward for any information on the crime. Mr. Jenkins asked Charlie to stay on and keep the farm going while they figured out what to do next.
Sometime after, as the snow melted, a private detective named George W. Newton swung into town from Buffalo. He had been hired by the county to solve the case. They already had a suspect by the name of Kirck Tallman, a former worker of Phelps’s who had left under unfriendly circumstances. But Newton had a different idea. He began to hound Charlie Stielow instead. Reading the report, Grace couldn’t see why. She was surprised, then, to read that on April 20, Nelson Green, Charlie’s brother-in-law, confessed to Detective Newton that he had helped Charlie kill Phelps for his secret heap of money.
Grace couldn’t understand how the next part happened, but apparently Newton was able to take Charlie Stielow, without a warrant, over to the county jail at Albion. There, Stielow was jailed for two days, after which Newton emerged with a lengthy confession, complete with an X at the end of it. Charlie Stielow had confessed to a story where he and his brother-in-law used a mop stick and a gun to kill and rob Phelps and his housekeeper. Meanwhile, Detective Newton’s men had found two .22 caliber guns in Charlie Stielow’s barn.