Sunday Pastries With the Dead 6
The true horror story of a 1917 triple axe murder in rural New Jersey.
Gather ‘round the virtual campfire, gals and ghouls—for this very special Halloween-adjacent Sunday Pastries, I’m doing things a bit different. Instead of covering a whole cemetery, I’m narrowing the focus to just three people interred together in one. Those visiting their circa-1752 burial ground in New Jersey might stop at the headstones lined beside each other and wonder why William and Emma Queen and their daughter Eleanor died on the same day. The horrifying answer is a story that once dominated local and national headlines, though over 100 years later, it’s been largely forgotten.
Shortly before 11:00 p.m. on June 7, 1917, the sulfur scent of a sparked match cut through the thick, humid summer night in Mount Pleasant, New Jersey. Not long after, William Queen, 61, ran coughing from his family’s farmhouse as thick black smoke billowed from the windows, followed closely by his wife Emma, 52. Their daughter Eleanor, 24, emerged moments later in her white sleeping gown, her delay likely due to the search for a purse containing her life savings of $400. It was still clutched in her hand when neighbors found her dead in the front yard alongside the bodies of her parents, her dress soaked scarlet with blood.
One month prior, William’s brother John Queen, a former judge, sent 28-year-old Paul Maywoon (also known as Maywood and Maywoern) to work for William on his Holland Township farm. Maywoon, who stated that he was a farmhand, had been convicted of carrying a concealed weapon in Jersey City, and John—knowing his ailing brother needed help—believed the sentencing could be mutually beneficial. William knew right away that the arrangement was a bad fit—Maywoon’s attitude and work ethic were severely lacking, and he often swore in front of the women. On June 7, William finally had enough—according to reports, he either dismissed or severely reprimanded Maywoon.
In response, Maywoon set the Queen house and barn on fire, grabbed an axe from a nearby wood pile, and—as each family member emerged from the blaze—he struck them, then fled with the weapon in hand.
In 1980, Queen family neighbor Clarence Parker recalled his experience. Awakened by the church bells heralding an emergency (gruesomely, these same bells would eventually mark the family’s funeral services), he saw flames climbing from the nearby Queen farm. Upon arriving, he and two other stunned men dragged the bloodied bodies of William, Emma, and Eleanor away from the inferno. “Blood was all over our shoes and trousers,” Parker said. “It was the worst thing I ever had to do. It's something I'll never forget. Never.”
The murders made headlines across the country, and New Jersey residents lived in mortal fear while the killer was on the loose.
The manhunt for Maywoon lasted four days—and he didn’t get far. At 7:00 p.m. on June 11, just eight miles down the road from the scene of the crime, two men were fishing in the Musconetcong River by the now-shuttered Warren Glen paper mill when Maywoon emerged from the woods brandishing the murder weapon. A group gathered to trap him, and he was swiftly tried at the Hunterdon County Courthouse in Flemington, NJ. A local paper reported that during the trial, “Maywoon maintained an indifferent or stolid demeanor for the most part, except that now and then he would break out into a laugh for which there seemed to be no reason.” He was found guilty and executed via electric chair in Trenton, NJ that August.
The Queen family’s funeral was held at the church just a few doors down from their destroyed homestead, and they were buried in the cemetery across the street—there were believed to be as many as 1,500 people in attendance to pay their respects.
Today, the spot where the Queen farm once stood is thick with trees and those who lived to tell about their murders are gone; three identical death dates etched on weathered headstones are all that hint at the horror of what happened on June 7, 1917.
How many other harrowing stories do we breeze past, unnoticed, when we weave through the graves of our local cemeteries?