In our last column, we wrote of an attractive, well-groomed young couple
who were sitting on the veranda of the former Alta Cliff Hotel, located
at the west end of Park Street in this village. They had just arrived
on the northbound train from Utica and were seeking accommodations, waiting
for owner Myron Newman to return from shopping in the village.
Mr. Newman, you may remember, was from New York, where his family ran
a highly successful jewelry business. He had moved to Tupper Lake from
Saranac Lake, where he had been seeking a cure for an asthma condition.
He had apparently hoped to turn what had been called the Globe Hotel,
a rambling three-story building owned by Barney Seigel, into a cure cottage.
Mr. Newman had changed the name to the more fanciful Alta Cliff Cottage.
Today, the third story has been removed and it survives as an apartment
building. Mr. Newman would later be quoted as saying that “he had been
schooled in the ancient Chinese art of feng shui” (pronounced fung shway).
He immediately sensed that something was amiss with this couple. The
vibrancy, the joie de vie that in classical fen shui terms (I am told)
should have been sending a ying (male) yin (female) balance just was
not present. Reluctant and suspicious, he nonetheless allowed them to
stay.
The young couple, it would turn out, were Chester Gillette and Grace
Brown (Chester had given false identities). They were star-crossed lovers
whose fateful story of romance and murder would soon be front-page news
throughout the nation and the world.
The story begins in Cortland, New York. The year is 1908. There, Chester
was learning the shirt business in this uncle’s plant. On the side, he
had also managed to become “intimate” with one of “the help,” a slender,
dark-haired beauty called by her friends “Billie” Brown. Their romance,
torrid at first, had soured and became complicated. Chester, the handsome,
preppy social climber, had tired of the relationship. Grace had become
a burden to his lifestyle and career. Grace, for her part, fiercely loved
Chester and, worse yet, she discovered she was pregnant.
You don’t often hear the expression today, but at that time and for years
to come, a girl who was unwed and pregnant was said “to be in trouble.”
It was a monstrous problem and it was, indeed, a big-time trouble. From
a historical perspective, it is perhaps difficult today to appreciate
fully the predicament in which Grace was trapped. Should her problem
become public knowledge, she would be treated as a social outcast.
With the threat of stigma hanging over her, she could confide in no one
— not her parents, who would feel outraged and hurt; nor her companions
at the factory, who were too casual with secrets; nor a counselor, for
in that day there were none. There was of course the clergy, but whether
Grace dared to share her secret with a minister is doubtful and, in any
event, he could offer as solutions only prayer and marriage.
Grace may well have resorted to prayer, but marriage was more elusive.
It appears there was no way Chester was going to marry this girl he had
“got in trouble.” That gave him several alternatives: run away to some
new place, refuse to marry her and accept the consequences, or deny the
relationship and blame the pregnancy on someone else. All of those options
only invited scandal and threatened his lifestyle and social standing.
The final option that could have occurred to Chester was to get Grace
out of the picture permanently.
Grace, at this July date, was now beginning to show signs of her pregnancy.
Chester was dating other girls and acting like nothing was wrong. Grace
was desperate and constantly in tears. She pleaded with Chester to go
on a holiday to someplace remote, like the Adirondacks, where they wouldn’t
be recognized, where they would have time together to resolve the problem,
and where she could hopefully convince Chester to do the proper thing
and marry her. Chester agreed, but while Grace was thinking marriage,
Chester was planning murder when they randomly picked out Tupper Lake
on a railroad timetable as their destination.
The train ride from Utica to Tupper Lake was considered one of the most
beautiful in the state, passing through largely unbroken wilderness.
Many of the stations along the way were really only platforms where gravel
roads bordered the tracks, and horse-drawn buggies arrived to greet each
train and take passengers to nearby camps and large hotels that were
splendidly isolated on the shores of beautiful lakes.
If Chester had thought that Tupper Lake was to be an isolated platform
station like Horseshoe or Sabattis, he was in for a surprise. In 1906,
Tupper was a rough and tumble lumbering center with a growing population
of around 3,600 people. “A frontier town where murder was committed in
the stable to save cleaning the barroom floor,” as noted in an article
in the New York State magazine, the Conservationist.
After talking his way into accommodations, Chester and Grace had dinner
and then went for a walk “into the main part of the village and up onto
a hill from which they could see the lake.” Whether it was because there
were too many people for Chester to carry out his murder plans or because
they didn’t like the view and the surroundings, they decided to leave
the next morning.
The hill that the couple climbed that evening is now the location of
the Judy Churco home (Tallman Hill). Today it commands an astonishing
view. Attractive Racquette Pond lies below, and the long ridge of Matumbla
Mountain dominates the landscape beyond.
What Chester and Grace saw that evening, however, was a Racquette Pond
full of stumps, deadheads, and downed timber. The smoke from the seven
boilers of Hurd’s “Big Mill” would have diminished any view. Small wonder
she was disappointed!
In retrospect, it was obvious that the relationship between the couple
was reaching a crisis. Clara Greenwood, the young local girl working
as a waitress at the Alta Cliff, would later testify in court that the
next morning, as they were getting ready to catch the southbound train
back to more remote Big Moose, Grace went to Clara and “threw her arms
around her and burst into tears.”
Once outside, they waited on the sidewalk for Dan McDonald’s livery carriage
to take them to the Junction Station. Across the street, young 11-year-old
Eddie Timmons* and his mother watched Grace follow behind Chester, crying
bitterly. Yes, things were not going well at all!
Conclusion of this article follow in the next Transitions column.
*Interview by Dr. Joseph Brownell, professor of geography at the State
University of Cortland, with Police Chief J. Edward Timmons, September
4, 1977.
The primary source for this article is “Adirondack Tragedy — The Gillette
Murder Case of 1906” by Professor Brownell and Patricia Waurzaszek, 1986,
Heart of Lake Publishing.