Mary (Brininger) Hartley was the daughter of a Civil War soldier and railroad repairman from Schuykill County. By the time of the murders, the eighteen-year-old Mary was living under several roofs, splitting her time with her father, with her brother Sam, who lived in the small collection of homes and businesses that comprised the heart of Troxelville, and with her lover, Emanuel Ettinger. During Jonathan Moyer’s 1880 trial, his attorney lingered on Mary’s living arrangements, likely trying to undercut her testimony by implying that she was morally corrupt. Over the objections of Mary’s lawyer, Jonathan’s counsel asked her with whom she went to bed on the night before the murders. Mary answered, “I think you all know it.”
It wasn’t the end of the tension between Mary and Moyer’s lawyer; at one point during the questioning, she refused to answer until her interrogator sat down. Her native language was German, but she spoke English well enough that John Bachman, a Snyder County justice of the peace, took her deposition mostly in English and followed up in German if he thought they weren’t understanding each other.
When Mary told her tale, it was one of shocking brutality and remorseless scheming. On the evening of Friday, December 7, Sam sent Mary to enlist Emanuel Ettinger’s assistance in butchering. Ettinger lived under the same roof as Jonathan Moyer, next to a saw mill and grist mill that Moyer’s family owned. After spending the night with Emanuel and following day with Jonathan and Ell, Mary said that she left Moyer’s at 9 PM on the night of Saturday, December 8.
Accompanying her were Jonathan, Emanuel, and Ellen Moyer. Their destination was Israel Erb’s house, to which they headed in order to get shoes measured for “Ell.” Along the way, in a cornfield a quarter-mile above Jonathan’s house, they picked up Uriah Moyer, whom the men convinced to accompany them to fit shoes. If that seemed like an unlikely quest for a cold December night, Mary soon discovered that the shoemaker’s cabin was not their true destination.
As the group of five approached the Kintzler property, which was on their way through the woods, they came across Israel Erb, who said he was out hunting racoons. At this point, Mary’s story moved quickly to much darker deeds. Suddenly, the four men had jumped the fence into the Kintzler property and told the two women to stay where they were (to avoid the Kintzler’s mean dog). Emanuel broke a window in the house, threw a bottle of chloroform in, and then proceeded to cut a hole in the door with an ax that he pulled from his vest. He used the hole to open the door from the inside, pushing against a round stick that the Kintzlers had used like a deadbolt.
At this point, Mary claimed, she jumped over the fence, followed by Ell, and made her way to the Kintzlers’ door. It was through the half-opened door, by the flicker of Israel’s pine torch, that Mary saw an incapacitated John Kintzler on the floor and witnessed Emanuel hit Gretchen over the head three times with a club that he had cut from a tree limb just a few minutes earlier. Of the four men, it was Israel who knew where the couple’s money was (under the bed). Mary said that they got the money, scraped up a pool of Gretchen’s blood in a crock that Emanuel had found outside, poured the blood in the grass, then tossed the crock into the woods, and went outside to divide up the money into two lots. Israel and Uriah left first, continuing on the northwest route toward the Erb farm. Jonathan and Emanuel started a fire in the house with leaves and wood. As the four of them fled back the way they had come, they heard John Kintzler’s gun discharge from the heat of the fire. The woods were lit up with the growing blaze. They were back to Jonathan’s house by 3 AM.
Jonathan Moyer’s attorney made it his goal in December 1880 to throw serious doubt on Mary’s claims. Given that she had testified at several hearings and trials, her story did not always line up. In particular, Moyer’s attorney seized on two aspects of her testimony: (1) how poorly lit the Kintzlers’ house was when she said the murders took place and (2) whether it was Emanuel or Jonathan who threw the bottle that broke the Kintzlers’ window. The first issue was significant because it spoke to how well Mary could have seen what she said she saw in the cabin. The second issue might show inconsistencies or uncertainty in Mary’s testimony.
Hartley’s story led to the immediate arrest of Erb and the two Moyers. Erb and Uriah Moyer were tried for the murder of John Kintzler and acquitted that winter. Given the result of those cases, the state’s attorneys decided not to prosecute Jonathan Moyer further…until Sallie Bingaman offered new testimony two years later.