Hubby was working on No. 6, then got chair

It was a bleak and bitter winter’s night as the car barreled along a lonely stretch of New Jersey roadway, but inside the vehicle was a serene scene of late-in-life love that could warm even the coldest of hearts.

Behind the wheel was a distinguished, impeccably dressed man of 60, slight and bespectacled and deep in thought. Cuddled next to him was a matronly, pleasant-looking woman in her 50s deep in peaceful slumber.

But the tableau of domestic tranquility was about to turn into an unspeakable tragedy.

Just before dawn on Feb. 23, 1929, as the couple neared the town of Cranford about 20 miles west of Manhattan, the man reached into his coat pocket, placed the barrel of a revolver against the top of her head, and calmly pulled the trigger.

The woman never woke up. The slug tore straight down through her body, killing her instantly with nary a trace of blood. The man drove a little further before pulling to the side of the road. He dragged the victim’s body out of the coupe and laid it on the snowy ground, then doused it in gasoline.

After striking a match and watching the gas-fueled flames consume the corpse, the man drove away into the dusk.

It was a particularly ghastly murder that made headlines nationwide as reporters, cops and armchair detectives alike theorized what kind of person could have committed such a dastardly deed.

Was it a madman with a heightened sadistic streak? A jealous lover or an angry love rival? Or was the poor woman a victim of vicious Prohibitionera gangsters looking to send a frightful message?

It would be six weeks before local police finally made some headway into the mystery of the torched traveler, and it came courtesy of some patient, old-fashioned detective work.

The first step was identifying the body, a difficult task considering she had been burned beyond recognition and the killer had removed the labels from her clothes to thwart any further attempts at identification.

But there was one clue he overlooked. Cops knew the woman’s shoes were manufactured in Missouri, but these had a distinctive characteristic. The right shoe had been resoled, and the cobbler had attached a metal clamp to keep the arch and heel from separating.

The tidbit was mentioned in the papers, and a store clerk in Pennsylvania came forward with the name of a customer who had similar work done on her shoes: Mrs. Mildred Mowry, 50, a Greenville resident who worked as a registered nurse.

The woman’s friends identified the charred body in the morgue as Mowry, and cops soon learned her sad story. She was a lonely widow who had recently married a doctor from Baltimore she’d met through a matrimonial agency, an older man named Richard Campbell whom Mowry’s friends said she hardly knew and they had never seen.

It had also been weeks since any of her friends had seen Mowry, who’d been living apart from her new hubby while he worked in New York City running a sanitarium.

But the long-distance arrangement didn’t sit too well with the new bride, friends told cops — especially since she had handed over $4,000 of her life savings to the good doctor, who told her he needed the money for the nice new house he was building for them in Baltimore.

The search for Dr. Campbell led police to the Baltimore address he gave on the couple’s marriage certificate. It was an empty lot — but the owner was named Henry Colin Campbell, and he lived in a Jersey town just a few miles from where Mowry’s burning body was found in the snow.

Cops who rushed to Campbell’s house had a huge surprise in store when they picked him up for questioning in his wife’s murder. Scrawny, with a pinched face, long teeth and bad eyesight, the 60-year-old Campbell was apparently quite the lover boy.

He already had another wife — a woman about 20 years his junior — and three young children.

He also had a loaded .32 revolver in his pocket. It took barely five minutes under the lights before the mild-mannered Campbell confessed to Mowry’s murder — followed by sordid revelations that the seeming milquetoast was actually a sinister, real-life Bluebeard who not only savagely slew one spouse but couldn’t come up with a good explanation for why several other wives had mysteriously died or disappeared.

Campbell’s real name turned out to be Henry Close, and his appearance was indeed deceiving. His rap sheet for forgery, fraud and other scams from New York to Nebraska to California went back nearly 40 years to 1890, when the 22-year-old flimflam man did the first of two short stints in prison.

It was in Nebraska that Close came up with his MO of courting older women with hefty bank accounts. At one point, he was engaged to five women at the same time, and later lived with three wives during his years in New York. At least two of his wives could not be tracked down by cops, and another was said to have died in Australia while visiting a sister.

Living with his sixth and current wife, Rosalie, apparently set him straight for a while, as Close — now going by Henry Campbell — set up a happy home in Westfield, N.J.

But when a morphine habit depleted his bank account, Campbell found an easy mark in Mowry, whom he illegally wed in 1928, and he went from bad-boy bigamist to lethal Lothario.

After he refused to live with her, Mowry traveled to Manhattan in February 1929 to convince him to come back — as well as find out what happened to her money. But the hospital address he gave her was just a rented office space on W. 42nd St., and the dejected woman went home.

After more pleading letters, he finally agreed to meet Mowry in Philadelphia, then carried out his grisly plan to rid himself of his pesky illegal wife as they drove near the home he shared with Rosalie.

Campbell was convicted of murder and gasped his last breaths strapped to an electric chair in a Trenton prison in 1930, his unlikely hold on the fairer sex never more apparent as his sobbing sixth spouse Rosalie swore to all who’d listen that her gentle, loving husband was an innocent man.

JUSTICE STORY has been the Daily News’ exclusive take on true crime tales of murder, mystery and mayhem for nearly 100 years.