June 13, 2003

By John Conway
For the Times Herald-Record

The story began with a knock on a Monticello door in the wee hours of a winter morning and ended on the front page of The New York Times.

It involved one of the village's most prominent citizens, a scandalous love affair, a secret room, and a best-selling author. And it faded from public consciousness almost as quickly as it had come to light that December morning in 1913.

It was revived a few years ago by a free-lance writer who envisioned a major motion picture starring Paul Newman and Michelle Pfeiffer.

It is the true story of the "Hidden Woman of Monticello."

Shortly before dawn on Dec. 21, 1913, Dr. J.F. Curlette was awakened by a persistent knocking on the door of his Main Street residence, which also served as his office.

Curlette had rebuilt the building just a few years before, to replace the structure destroyed in the famous Monticello fire of 1909. He was the first in a succession of medical doctors to inhabit the building, which later served for many years as the home and office of Dr. Ralph S. Breakey.

Curlette opened his door that morning to find an unfamiliar middle-aged woman, scantily dressed despite the wintry weather. She didn't wait to be invited in.

"She muttered the name Melvin Couch," Craig Tomashoff wrote in the March 2000 issue of Biography magazine. "Couch was Dr. Curlette's brother-in-law, and the county's former district attorney. Few men were better known or respected around town than Couch, who still practiced law, though well into his 60s."

Indeed, Melvin H. Couch was well known in Sullivan County. He and his wife lived in a tidy brick home that still stands on the southeast corner of Main Street and Tannery Road (present-day Broadway and Spring Street). His law offices were in the Masonic Building on Bank Street, where he also attended meetings as a master mason in the Monticello Lodge.

He had served two terms as Sullivan County district attorney and had been an unsuccessful candidate for county court judge.

Unfortunately, his accomplishments were about to be overshadowed, at least for a time, by the bizarre events then unfolding.

Tomashoff spent more than a dozen years tracking down the details of the story and pitched it to several movie studios in an as-yet-unsuccessful attempt to get it on the big screen.

He says the woman who awakened Curlette ran off, with the good doctor in hot pursuit, ending up at Couch's office.

"And there he found his brother-in-law lying on a cot in his second-floor workspace," he wrote. "Curlette checked for vital signs, but it was too late. Couch was dead, and the woman who'd led him there had disappeared.

"Several hours later, after the sheriff had been called and the coroner had removed the body, Melvin Couch's wife, Janette, arrived. In a moment of grief, she went to a door inside the office that her husband never had allowed anyone to open. She turned the knob, but it was locked tight.

"As a police officer prepared to break down the door, a voice on the other side cried, 'I'll come out if you won't hurt me.' Then the knob turned and out stepped the ghostly woman who had pounded on Dr. Curlette's door."

The woman turned out to be Adelaide Branch, then 40, who told stunned authorities that she had been having an affair with Branch for the past 15 years. Three years ago, she said, Couch had constructed a secret room within his office so they could be close to one another.

"With divorce not an option in his small, conservative town, Couch told his wife a leg he'd injured years before had grown so painful he couldn't walk home every night," Tomashoff wrote. "Instead, he would live at the office and come home for dinner every Sunday. He neglected to mention that Adelaide would be living at his office with him in the special tiny room he'd partitioned out of space in his inner office.

"For the next three years, Branch would hide there during the day while he saw clients and then come out after business hours. She willingly went along with the plan until that fateful 1913 Christmas, when she and Couch argued over whether she would go home (to Hartwick) and see her family for the holidays. As they fought, Couch suddenly collapsed (the coroner later cited a broken blood vessel as the cause of death), and Branch ran for help.

"With Branch in jail while police investigated her account, news of the unlikely affair spread swiftly through town. Then it became national news, landing on the front page of the New York Times. Countless tabloid reporters rushed to the hamlet to report on the scandal and the figure they quickly dubbed 'The Hidden Woman of Monticello.'"

What finally hooked Tomashoff on the story, however, was his discovery that the young author Upton Sinclair had written to Branch during her time in jail, offering to help.

Tomashoff says no one seems to know what ever became of Adelaide Branch.

"Her end was as mysterious as her life," he wrote in Biography. "A therapist friend of Sinclair's who had been treating Branch sent the author a note saying Branch had begun to write her story. The letter also apparently contained some of her manuscript, which later vanished – along with its author. At the end, as during her clandestine affair, Adelaide Branch was 'The Hidden Woman.'"

John Conway is the Sullivan County historian and an adjunct professor of history at Sullivan County Community College in Loch Sheldrake. He lives in Barryville. This article was published in the Times Herald-Record on March 8, 2003. It is posted here with permission of the author.

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