Stanley Blair, Ph.D., associate professor of English, will present on “The Infamous Long Branch Murder of 1860, Solved” at the West Park Recreation Center in Oakhurst, NJ, on Feb. 28 at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
Blair will discuss the killing that took place on Long Branch beach behind the Monmouth House hotel on Aug. 7, 1860, which resulted in a widespread investigation that was reported in dozens of newspapers across the eastern half of the U.S. Days later, a second related crime took place, and updates of the investigation rippled across the country, with one local paper in Freehold suggesting something like a “nationwide trauma” had occurred.
While the murder victim was never found and the perpetrators never identified, Blair’s presentation offers a solution. By examining author Henry Morford’s accounts of 1860s Long Branch in his book “Sprees and Splashes,” Blair uses the lightly disguised names of those involved to decode their true identities.