Duel with the Devil

by Paul Collins

  “Not being acquainted with the art of stenography, I am incapable of giving verbatim what was said upon this solemn and awful occasion,” Hardie explained, before adding that his haste was all in the service of seeing justice done to Levi Weeks. Yet An Impartial Account, as he titled it, was indeed a serious work. Twice as long as Longworth’s “catchpenny,” it featured every major witness from the trial, identified all the members of the court and jury, and delved into the sordid revelations of Ring’s adultery and Croucher’s slanders. Hardie’s account was such an improvement on Longworth’s that when four days had passed without any sign of the court clerk’s long-promised book, few were likely surprised. The rest of the week passed with no sign of anything new in the window of Furman’s shop; surely Coleman had simply given up and dropped the idea.

  IN FACT, the court clerk had been writing like a man possessed. And when curious New Yorkers arrived in John Furman’s shop on Monday, April 14, 1800, what they found on offer for thirty-seven and a half cents almost defied description, even as the title gamely tried to cover it: A Report of the Trial of Levi Weeks: On an Indictment for the Murder of Gulielma Sands, on Monday the Thirty-First Day of March, and Tuesday the First Day of April, 1800. Taken in Short Hand by a Clerk of the Court. Transcribed and set entirely by hand in just under two weeks, the ninety-nine-page book was easily the longest murder trial account ever published in New York, not to mention the most painstakingly created.

  “When it was promised at an earlier day, it was not foreseen what degree of labor or painful attention would be required to render it correct,” Coleman explained. Rather than the customary summary of testimony with a few scattered quotes, Coleman had one-upped his competitors by including everything. The testimony, the cross-examiners’ questions, the scoffing interjections, the collaring of Mr. Ring from the courtroom and the candle held up to identify Richard Croucher—it was all there, in direct quotation.

  It was the first such transcript ever published in the new republic—the first fully documented murder trial in U.S. history. Without meaning to, his rivals had goaded William Coleman into pioneering a new genre. But there had been competing catchpennies for past murder trials as well; why had this trial created something new?

  One clue lay in the publication date: 1800. In past centuries, before the adversarial system of trials allowed defendants to have lawyers, a murder trial was effectively a ceremony of laying out a person’s guilt and punishment. The form of literature followed the trial’s function: crudely inked confessions and dying words on the scaffold, and execution sermons that hectored readers not to act like the woeful, condemned sinners. This remained a thriving genre, and readers could still amuse themselves with such gratifyingly moral and exhaustive titles as The Reprobate’s Reward; or, A Looking-Glass for Disobedient Children, Being a Full and True Account of the Barbarous and Bloody Murder of One Elizabeth Wood, Living in the City of Cork, by Her Son, as She Was Riding, upon the 28th Day of July, to Kingsdale Market. How He Cut Her Throat from Ear to Ear; as Also How the Murder Was Found Out by the Apparition of Her Ghost; the Manner of His Being Taken; His Dying Words at the Place of Execution: With a True Story of Verses Written with His Own Hand in Cork Jail, Being a Warning to All Disobedient Children to Repent, and Obey Their Parents.

  The adversarial trial system created an argument—a space for uncertainty in the unfolding of the story—and a narrative tension to take the place of old-fashioned sermonizing. It was a subtler form of storytelling, and one not unfamiliar to readers of the burgeoning new genre of novels. The era’s desire for vivid narrative also encompassed the use of quoted dialogue, which found its own curious reflection in another important clue within Coleman’s title: Taken in Short Hand.

  Court transcription was still a new art. Though stenographic systems had been around for two centuries, it was only within the past generation that they had found widespread use. The method of abstract geometric shapes that Coleman favored—known as Byrom’s New Universal Shorthand—had initially been developed by a brilliantly deceitful courtier as a method of writing in code. Now it served to reveal rather than conceal, as courtrooms and legislatures began adopting stenography. Full transcripts were published of Harry Bedlow’s rape trial in 1793, and readers had become accustomed to seeing complete parliamentary and congressional speeches in newspapers.

  The nearest precursor to Coleman’s achievement—a 1798 transcript of the Pennsylvania trial of four murderous conspirators against one Francis Shitz—also showed a level of detail that likely relied on shorthand. But unlike Coleman, that account’s author hadn’t thought to include the questions asked of witnesses, only their answers. In creating his account of the Levi Weeks trial, Coleman understood the electrifying effect of including both sides of such transcribed speech to create actual dialogue.

  With stenographers ready to take down dialogue, and an adversarial trial system to fuel the drama of the trial, all that was needed for the first true-crime mystery was, in fact, an unsolved murder—and the Elma Sands case had been the final key element needed to create an explosive new form of literature.

  NOT EVERYONE was happy with Coleman’s literary invention. Rival pamphleteer James Hardie pointed out in an open letter that Coleman’s book was riddled with misspelled names for the witnesses—a jab at the clerk’s pride that hurt all the more for being entirely true. Hardie’s harshest criticism, though, cut to the heart of the case itself: “Let me ask, what strict regard to the truth could be expected from a reporter who, though clerk of the court, has shewn himself to be actuated by prejudice against Levi Weeks, as to have repeatedly said that if he had been on the jury, he would have starved before he acquitted him!”

  Hardie was not alone in this suspicion. Coleman’s rumored antagonism toward Levi so worried Ezra Weeks that the builder had quietly tried to bribe the author into making America’s first complete trial transcript a little less complete, offering $500 to sweeten it or $1,500 to suppress it entirely.

  “Mr. Weeks,” Coleman rebuffed him. “You are not worth money enough, neither is the City of New York, to buy me.”

  Ezra Weeks was so impressed—an incorruptible writer in Manhattan!—that he and Coleman became fast friends. In fact, Ezra found he had little to fear from the clerk’s studiously noncommittal rendition of the facts. Coleman invited Ezra to read the manuscript before it went to press—and in a response to his critics, Coleman revealed that he’d consulted “Mr. Ezra Weeks, and the prisoner’s counsel, to whom the proof-sheet was particularly submitted.” Waiting for Ezra Weeks and Alexander Hamilton to read the transcript was part of what had delayed his release date, he explained. The revelation was a startling one, not least because it confirmed what everyone likely suspected: that Ezra was the real client behind Levi’s powerful defense team.

  AMID THE dueling trial narratives, locals had plenty else to distract themselves after the trial. A huge crowd watched the launch of a new frigate, the USS President, and loudly celebrated with newly penned songs such as “Huzza for the President.” For those less patriotic in their entertainments, the local theater was offering Ground & Lofty Tumbling, Posture and Equilibriums, in which a Signor Joseph Doctor would “go through a HOOP, with a PYRAMID of thirteen Glasses of Wine on his Forehead.”

  The lawyers, too, remained busy. Within days, Livingston and Hamilton were on one side of an insurance suit, with Burr on the other—while in another lawsuit, it was Livingston and Burr versus Hamilton. Their work was a lucrative courtroom waltz, though the stunning victory for Levi Weeks had not profited them. Instead, Burr took out another $1,500 loan, and Hamilton received a politely humiliating note from a cashier at the Bank of New York—the bank that Hamilton himself had founded—reminding him that his “account, by the former ones being charged, is now overdrawn $5300.” Yet Hamilton in particular was wise not to bill Weeks; he already owed so much to Ezra that he could be thankful simply for keeping out of debtor’s prison.

  More vexing to Hamilton was another migh
ty contest that led inexorably back to Lispenard’s Meadow, and to the sly banking scheme that Aaron Burr had slipped into the municipal water supply. With Thomas Jefferson the likely Republican presidential nominee, Burr was positioned to become vice president—and his new bank’s influence would pay off in Republican electoral votes for the country’s most crucial swing district.

  “It is universally acknowledged,” admitted a Federalist writer signing himself Marcellus, “both by Federalists and Jacobins, that the election of the President on either side, depends on the city of New-York—that is, if the Federal ticket for the state legislature is carried, a Federal President will be chosen; if the Jacobin ticket succeeds, Mr. Jefferson will be President.” Savvy New Yorkers could spot the pen name of the president’s ambitious son, John Quincy Adams, in Marcellus’s editorials—and they could also spot the increasingly dire rhetoric of the Federalist Party: “Mr. Jefferson, and of course the Jacobins at large, wish to destroy the Constitution of the United States.”

  Federalists, though, apparently wished to destroy themselves. By the time they caucused in the Tontine City Hotel on April 15, 1800, they were weakened by the party’s unpopular Alien and Sedition Acts, and by incessant bickering between General Hamilton and President Adams. Their resulting local slate landed with a thud: The list, one Republican aide smirked, consisted of “two grocers, a ship chandler, a baker, a potter, a bookseller, a mason, and a shoemaker.” The most prominent man willing to run was Cadwallader Colden; his fame, alas, was now for bungling the Elma Sands case.

  When advance word of the slate was delivered to Burr, he calmly slipped Hamilton’s list of hapless loyalists into his pocket.

  “Now I have him all hollow,” the colonel said coolly.

  Two days later he hit Hamilton with the most assuredly solid slate in New York political history: The Republican candidates included former four-term governor George Clinton and a raft of war heroes ranging from Major General Horatio Gates to none other than Brockholst Livingston. After campaigning as a party of law and order, Federalists now found themselves facing a wall of bona fide soldiers and prominent politicians.

  “What means these gigantic figures?” one Federalist editorial complained weakly. “Why this parade of Governors, Generals, and Senators for the lowest civil office?”

  Hamilton knew all too well why. The Republican faithful that he’d denigrated as mere anarchists had been whipped by Burr into a disciplined force—and the colonel’s Richmond Hill mansion had become an election war room, roiling with constant planning and sifting of voter information from each ward. “Committees were in session day and night during the whole time at his house,” one local merchant marveled. “Refreshments were always on the table, and mattresses were set up for temporary repose in the rooms. Reports were hourly received from sub-committees—and in short, no means left unemployed.”

  Burr had virtually invented modern electioneering—canvassing across the city, he fought Federalists house to house through the Sixth and Seventh Wards, which encompassed both the Ring boardinghouse and Lispenard’s Meadow. Even when the import of an election was nationwide, the impracticality of a traveling campaign in the far-flung nation meant that this savvy local groundwork was crucial. Yet Hamiltonians were bewildered that reputable men such as Aaron Burr and Brockholst Livingston would lower themselves to such vote scrounging. “Many people wonder that the ex-Senator and would-be Vice President can stoop so low as to visit every low tavern that may happen to be crowded with his dear fellow citizens,” puzzled one Federalist newspaper.

  But among those men in the taverns were grateful Bank of Manhattan customers—men whose votes could now reward their great benefactor.

  “The leaders of the aristocratic faction bewailed the establishment of the Bank of the Manhattan Company, as an institution whose well-timed liberality secured to the merchants a free exercise of their political principles,” one Burr editorialist explained. Not only had the bank allowed merchants to vote Republican without fear of reprisal from a monopolistic Bank of New York, it had also allowed the “middling classes” to start acquiring enough property to qualify as voters. “Merchants, mechanics, cartmen, men of all grades,” the editorial claimed, “are interested in preserving this important source of independence and prosperity.”

  The project that began in the hidden waters of Lispenard’s Meadow was ending happily for Burr. It was ending quite well, in fact, for a great many people—but not for the unfortunate young woman whose name was now so inextricably and mysteriously tangled up with its history. And for her mourners, a mystery remained to be solved.

  WHO KILLED ELMA SANDS?

  The answer hinted at by the defense team in the trial—“herself”—never did seem satisfactory, and the case was still universally referred to as a murder. After all, Elma had left no note, nor made any comment in the day or week leading up to her death that could be construed as a sign of distress. Her occasionally melancholy disposition might not be considered a notable quality in an unmarried woman of twenty; nor even was her remark, made months earlier, that if she had a bottle of opiate she’d drink it. Probably most members of the courtroom, if they searched their own lives in the months preceding the trial, could imagine a gloomy day or half-joking comment of their own that could be held up as equally specious evidence of suicidal intent.

  And for Elma Sands to kill herself in a well required that she not only kill herself, but that she do it in a well. New York’s records are rich with self-annihilation by pistol, by hanging, by poison, and by river. Suicide by water system, though, would constitute an altogether novel approach. Murder would not: In fact, not long before Levi’s trial, a young woman upstate was charged with fatally precipitating a neighbor’s baby into a well.

  There was another problem with suicide in the Manhattan Well: If Elma Sands had wanted to drown herself, all she needed to do was walk a few blocks from her boardinghouse and jump off a pier. This was why, fearing a possible suicide, Elias Ring quite sensibly ordered the river dragged at this spot: “We swept near Rhinelander’s Battery,” he had explained to the court, “because I thought it was the handiest place.” And while the depth of the failed Manhattan Well was uncertain—for all Elma knew, she might have found herself in four feet of muddy water—the efficacy of plunging into the icy Hudson River on a December night was beyond doubt.

  Nor was the medical evidence in the trial much help. Though the defense team had convincingly thrown doubt on the shoddy evidence offered by the prosecutor, their own testimony by inquest doctors Prince and McIntosh could hardly be considered trustworthy. The state of medical jurisprudence remained primitive, and the body they examined had already been dead for nearly two weeks; moreover, the crime scene was not secure during that time. The inquest did ascertain that Elma was not discernibly pregnant, a crucial fact in ruling out possible murder or suicide motives. She had not been stabbed or shot. But beyond that, little entirely reliable information could be hoped for.

  Curiously, the most suggestive evidence may have come from the humblest of witnesses: the cartman and his wife who lived on the outskirts of Lispenard’s Meadow. Lawrence Van Norden testified to hearing a woman’s loud cries for help out by the well, and that “in a little time the cries stopped.” Their having stopped in a short time, rather than dying out, suggests the possibility of Elma’s strangulation, at least to the point of unconsciousness before she was dropped into the well.

  The inquest doctors testified that Elma’s lungs indicated possible drowning, which suggests a likely explanation for all the evidence: that Elma Sands was strangled to the point of unconsciousness but not death. Believing her dead, her assailant then dropped her body into the Manhattan Well, where, just as the inquest doctors claimed, she drowned without a struggle.

  But who would have done such a thing?

  In fact, there was a person of suspect character living at 208 Greenwich Street—but it wasn’t Levi Weeks. The quiet boardinghouse had hosted someone with both the me
ans and the motive to kill Gulielma Sands—someone who, unknown to Hamilton and Burr or the prosecutor, was hiding a criminal past, and who had been known to be dangerously unhinged. Someone whose record, for more than two hundred years, has evaded detection in one of our country’s oldest unsolved murder cases—until now.

  IT IS hidden deep within the Proceedings of the Old Bailey for September 20, 1797, recorded on a blustery Wednesday at London’s fearsome criminal court. Below the case of a woman sentenced to whipping for having pawned a stolen calico petticoat in Kentish Town, and a young mute caught stealing silver buttons in a pub, another case appears. This one, from a shoemaker’s shop by St. Paul’s, involved a well-dressed fellow absconding with a pair of boots worth twelve shillings. The shop’s apprentice chased him for blocks into King’s Head Court.

  “I saw the boots in his hands, and hollered, stop thief!” he testified.

  Dressed in a blue coat and with powdered hair, the thief was almost too genteel to be caught; one bystander in the street admitted: “Seeing him so much a gentleman, I let him pass.” When he was finally collared, the suspect proved to be no ordinary thief at all, but a respectable shopkeeper from Leominster.

  “I am a musician at the Theatre Royal,” one neighbor testified. “I have known the gentleman at the bar twenty years.”