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By Root 289 0

who called the Monmouth County coroner in Freehold. Shortly thereafter the body was lifted easily onto the dilapidated dock from which Lester Stilwell had dived two days earlier. The small face was badly swollen but smooth and clearly belonged to Stillwell. The face was unmarked, but the rest of the boy was scarcely recognizable. The left side of the abdomen, the left shoulder, and the right breast had been eaten away. The left ankle had been chewed off. The flesh between the hip and the thigh had been mangled, and the stomach had been ripped open as if by giant claws. Authorities decided to bring the remains of the boy to Arrowsmith's Undertaking in Matawan. But first they carried Lester Stilwell to his home on Church Street to confirm his identity. Bill Stilwell must have been sleeping after his long nights at the creek, for his wife, Luella Stilwell, answered the door, and when she saw what the men had brought her, she screamed and collapsed. “The body had been horribly chewed by the sea wolf,” the Asbury Park Evening Press reported. “When it was taken to the Stilwell home, the lad's mother swooned. She was revived only to relapse into unconsciousness.”

As soon as Lester Stilwell's body reached Arrowsmith's that morning, the undertaker, alarmed by the “terrible” condition of the body, rushed to prepare the boy for burial, which took place that afternoon after a small service in the Stilwell home.

That same afternoon, most of the village gathered at Rose Hill Cemetery to pay their respects to W. Stanley Fisher. Standing by the open grave, the Reverend Chamberlain eulogized the tailor as a hero who had “immortalized himself.” According to the Shore Press, “Scarcely an eye was undimmed by tears. The whole town was in mourning, for young Fisher was known and liked by nearly every man, woman and child in Matawan.”

Numbed by grief, the shark hunters would return to the creek with their boats and guns and hooks that day and the next, trolling for the man-eater, but on the third day a carnival atmosphere prevailed. Extra-large charges were set to push white geysers dramatically high above the creek for the benefit of the newsreels. It was a fine, clear day for pictures, and with newspaper photographers lining the banks, the young shark hunters, cigarettes drooping from their lips, focused angry gazes at the camera lens instead of at the water. Women in day dresses posed grinning for photographers, while angling rifles toward their own toes instead of the creek. “It is to be hoped that she did not discharge this shotgun while holding it in this position,” read one photo caption. The earnest shark hunters seemed a ragged and quixotic bunch to the crowds from miles around that now appeared on the banks, for the shark and the suffering of the small town had become a novelty. “Society turned to shark hunting as the latest wrinkle in summer pastimes,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. “Almost 100 automobiles were packed along the bank of the creek today, and fashionably dressed women and girls from Jersey coast resorts tripped down to the water's edge to watch the shark hunters at work.”

That afternoon, as Stilwell and Fisher were eulogized, a newspaperman from New York City rode a motorboat down-creek to the mouth at Raritan Bay and inspected the steel nets erected to contain the shark. Shortly afterward, he reported that Matawan had lost its battle with the sea monster. A large hole had been chewed in the steel nets, and the chunks of meat set as bait were gone.

Intense with Need

The great white shark moved free in the wide curve of the bay between New Jersey and Staten Island. Matawan Creek was miles away.

Against considerable odds, the shark had survived battles with men, withstood and escaped the brackish, shallow creek, and sought the freedom of the sea. Yet the shark was weaker than it had been when it entered the creek, and hardly satisfied by five attacks on human beings. The bays below New York City were a great melting pot for the Atlantic seaboard, where freshwater and industrial flows from the city mixed