by Paul Collins
HOPE SANDS!—the clerk called.
Levi watched as Mrs. Ring sat back down, and her sister Hope walked up to the witness box. Today was a long way from that hazy summer day when he had visited the museum with Hope and Elma; and now, instead of the pleasant sense of being an upstanding boarder newly introduced to two charming young women, he faced nothing but accusation.
“After she was missing, he denied knowing any thing of her,” Hope accused, “though from his looks I was confident he did.”
She’d been onto Levi and Elma all along, she insisted. Why, she’d even taken their hint to leave Elma’s room once, and heard them quietly locking the door behind her. She’d loudly walked back down the stairs, and then—“I left my shoes at the bottom of them, and went softly up”—she’d put her ear to the door. Hope hadn’t quite heard anything, true, but she was sure that they were up to something. And that had made Elma’s disappearance most suspicious indeed.
“He soon began to use all possible means to convince me of his innocence,” she said disdainfully. “The Sabbath evening after she was missing, he came to me saying, Hope, if you can say any thing in my favor, do it, for you can do me more good than any friend I have in the world to clear me. He then pressed me very hard to go to the Alderman’s and see him.”
This was a revelation to raise some eyebrows: Levi’s Seventh Ward alderman, Richard Furman, was sitting in the courtroom as a spectator. Furman and his longtime assistant, the memorably named Mangle Minthorne, were better known for their tireless efforts to get local streets fixed than for being tangled up in murder cases. What Levi had wanted her to give to Furman, Hope claimed, was a signed statement that he’d written himself, claiming that “he paid no more attention to Elma than to any other female in the house”—and that he had never courted or been at all engaged to Elma.
“I refused,” Hope told the courtroom. “Levi, if I was to do it, thee knows it would be positive lies.”
The reason Hope was certain Levi was lying became apparent as soon as her brother-in-law Elias Ring took the stand. The inventor, spurned for his Manhattan Well proposal, now found himself staring across the courtroom at the very man who founded the company—and at a prisoner who had begun succeeding in the precise business where he himself had failed.
“Levi Weeks was a lodger in my house,” he began, “and in the ninth month—”
“What month is that called?” Hamilton interrupted.
“I don’t know it by any other name. Thee can tell,” he answered stubbornly. As a Quaker, he refused to use pagan names for months or days of the week, and Levi’s team was not above making him look foolish for it.
“At this time, when my wife was gone into the country,” Elias continued undeterred, “Levi and Elma were constantly together in private. I was alone and very lonesome, and was induced to believe from their conduct that they were shortly to be married.”
The boardinghouse, he explained, was nearly empty during the worst days of the yellow fever epidemic—and up in a room that lodger Isaac Hatfield had wisely vacated for a while, he began hearing someone creeping around at night.
“One night when Hatfield was out of town, I heard a talking and a noise in his room. In the morning I went up into the room and found the bed tumbled, and Elma’s clothes lying on the bed.”
“Did you see her in the room?” Hamilton needled.
“No, I saw nothing,” the inventor admitted. “But I have no doubt she was there. There was no other person in the house besides Levi and his apprentice, and Elma and myself.”
“Did you ever know that the prisoner and Elma were in bed together?”
“No.”
What had happened in the room, as far as Elias and others were concerned, hardly needed spelling out in the courtroom. But rather than press the point, the defense team seemed curiously distracted into mere trivialities about the home and blacksmith shop run next door by Joseph Watkins.
“What materials is the partition made of between Watkins’s house and yours?” Hamilton asked.
“It is a plank partition,” the bewildered witness answered. “Lathed and plastered.”
“Could you hear the noise of children through it?”
“No,” Elias answered warily. “Not as I could recall.”
“Is Mr. Watkins a clever man, and a good neighbor?”
“Yes—he is.”
For spectators in the benches, shuttling out to grab victuals as the trial continued into the evening, the defense’s descent into such trifles was simply too peculiar to explain to the crowds gathered eagerly outside. Hamilton, Burr, and Livingston might have been good and clever men themselves, but with the client’s life now at stake—what on earth were they driving at?
THE TALE told by Cadwallader Colden’s witnesses was only to become more damning to Levi. As the sky darkened outside, the cloth merchant Richard Croucher took the stand.
“May it please the court and gentlemen of the jury,” he said with a smile, his voice low and quick. “I was satisfied, from what I saw, there was a warm courtship going on. I have known the prisoner at the bar to be with the deceased, Elma Sands, in private frequently, and at all times of night.”
As a newly married man, Croucher’s very presence in the witness stand almost seemed to upbraid such wanton conduct.
“I knew him to pass two whole nights in her bedroom,” he continued. “I saw the prisoner at the bar come out of her room, and pass the door in his shirt only. Once, too, when they were less cautious than usual, I saw them in a … very intimate situation.”
More than the other witnesses, the cloth merchant seemed familiar with the usages of the courtroom: Along with formally greeting the court and the jury, he’d made a point of referring to “the deceased” and “the prisoner at the bar.” But to Levi’s team, it was Croucher himself who was the suspicious character in the courtroom.
“Where, sir,” Hamilton’s voice rang out, “were you on the night of the 22nd of December?”
He’d gone to the coffeehouse and then to a birthday party—at Ann Ashmore’s, on the Bowery—and had just missed crossing Lispenard’s Meadow that evening. “I wish I had,” Croucher sighed. “I might, perhaps, have saved the life of the deceased.”
“Do you know where the Manhattan Well is?”
“I do.”
“Did you pass by it that evening?”
“I did not.”
He couldn’t be sure of the route he’d taken—“I believe I might have passed the glue manufactory”—but with the weather bad and the moonlight scarce, he’d had to trek across whatever clear route down the streets and across the fields that he could find—he couldn’t remember which, exactly. What he did recall, though, was hearing Levi Weeks pace back and forth in his room all night—at least until four in the morning.
“I thought then that his brother had some great work on hand and that he was drawing plans,” he said scornfully. “But since I have accounted for it a different way.”
The defense team eyed him carefully, their skepticism easily a match now for Croucher’s.
“Ever had a quarrel with the prisoner?”
“I bear him no malice.”
“But have you never had any words with him?”
“Once I had,” Croucher allowed. He’d surprised Elma in a hallway—perhaps by more than just brushing by her—and Levi confronted him.
“I told him he was an impertinent puppy,” he sniffed. “I bear him no malice. But I despise every man who does not behave in character.”
Annoyed that Elma had taken the side of Levi in the argument, he never talked with her after that exchange.
“She thought,” Croucher sneered, “he was an Adonis.”
ONCE ELMA SANDS WALKED OUT THE FRONT DOOR OF 208 GREENWICH Street, it seemed as if she had simply vanished altogether—except, that is, to the woman who took the stand next. Her name was Catherine Lyon, and she had been some blocks north on a stretch of Greenwich Street that cold and snowy night.
/> “Being in Greenwich Street, at the pump near the door of the new Furnace, I saw Gulielma Sands a little after eight o’clock,” she testified.
Lyon had been helping up “a lame woman who was laying in the street”—for, as another witness had recalled, “the going was very rough that night.” The sidewalks were treacherous for anyone without sure footing, and the handles of the public water pumps were particularly notorious for catching and tripping the unwary on the city’s poorly lit streets.
“Elma came up to me alone, and asked who it was,” she continued, though who had sprawled on the ground was of less import now than who might have been walking with Elma that night. “There was a good many people passing, and I could not say if they was with her or not,” Catherine admitted.
She had, though, heard the briefest snatch of conversation.
“I heard someone say, ‘Let’s go,’ and the deceased bid me good night and went on.”
“Did you see the face of Elma?” Hamilton pressed.
“I did not,” the witness admitted. “But I knew her form and shape.”
So Colden’s witness had not exactly solved the mystery—and it was only to deepen further when he ushered Mrs. Susannah Broad up to the stand. She was, the court clerk noted, “aged and very infirm,” but Colden nonetheless interviewed her in his quest to trace Elma’s route that night.
“I live opposite Ezra Weeks’s lumber-yard,” she explained. “On the night when the deceased was lost, I heard a gate open and a sleigh or a carriage coming out of the yard, about eight o’clock.”
The gate, she dutifully recounted, was one that she never heard opened—and the vehicle had set out without any sleigh bells, as if on some secret errand.
Levi’s team was unimpressed.
“When was this?” Hamilton asked dryly. “What month was it?”
It seemed a ludicrous question to ask—everyone knew the crime had occurred on December 22, 1799; the court had just spent hours recalling the evening.
“I don’t know the month,” the widow snapped. “I know it was so.”
“Was it after Christmas?” they pressed. “Or before Christmas?”
“It was after, I believe. In January.”
For an agonizing moment, the prosecutor could only watch as Hamilton gently closed the net around his witness.
“You are sure?” the general asked. “It was in January, you say?”
“Yes,” she now insisted. “I am sure it was in January.”
For Mrs. Broad’s part, the whole thing seemed rather silly and irksome. War heroes or not, it seemed the men over at Levi’s table were almost sporting with her, a frail widow—asking her yet again if she’d really ever previously heard Ezra Weeks use that particular gate to his lumberyard.
“No, gentlemen,” she snapped at their impertinence. “Do you think I came here to tell a lie?”
It was not Mrs. Broad’s first experience of speaking under oath—she had, not so many years before, testified in the estate hearing of a late veteran of the Revolution—but the change that had come over the old woman, perhaps even since the night of the crime itself, was becoming painfully apparent.
“Her memory,” one courtroom observer put it delicately, “was not very tenacious on most particulars.”
FOR CADWALLADER Colden, any crime occurring on a Sunday night in the streets of lower Manhattan meant an unexpected source of testimony: Methodists.
Each Sunday evening their church, built just a few blocks east of Broadway, brought the fiery preaching of Dr. Joseph Pilmore. Sent by John Wesley in 1769 as one of two handpicked missionaries to the colonies, the indefatigable Pilmore was known for his marathon “watch-night” services, some of which could stretch to midnight. But on that snowy evening in December, he had parishioners heading home just after eight. One Margaret Freeman, it just so happened, had decided to walk home along Greenwich Street.
“I and my boy were coming home from Meeting,” she recalled. “I was holding my boy by the arm.”
In the midst of their careful trek up the slippery road, she’d noticed something rather unusual for a quiet Sunday night.
“A one horse sleigh overtook me, as I was walking in the middle of the road,” she described. “With two men and a woman in it, all talking and very lively—particularly the woman. I kept out of the way for it to pass.”
Like others, though, she could not be absolutely sure of the time.
“When I came in I ran up the stairs, and looking at the watch, I saw it was a quarter past eight,” Mrs. Freeman testified, before admitting—“the watch was rather slow.”
Instead of embarrassing her on the point of the time—which she had already admitted was imperfect—the defense gently approached from another angle.
“Did you ever see Ezra Weeks’s sleigh any where?” they asked.
Unlike the previous witnesses, Mrs. Freeman could not be drawn into looking foolish by claiming anything beyond exactly what she’d seen.
“I don’t know as I ever did,” she said plainly.
Another fellow parishioner, though, was quite sure that he did indeed know what Ezra’s sleigh looked like. A leather worker by trade, Berthrong Anderson was known to be civic-minded and reliable, for he’d served as an election inspector in his ward. Like Mrs. Freeman, he had seen a sleigh of merrymakers charging through the streets that evening.
“I had been to Mr. Pilmore’s church the Sunday night before Christmas,” he testified. “I went out of the meeting with company, up the Bowery, and down Broadway—on my return, I was overtaken by a one horse sleigh, about half past eight in the evening.”
That sleigh sounded curiously like the one spotted perhaps ten or fifteen minutes earlier on Greenwich—it “had two or three men or women in it,” Anderson said, though he wasn’t quite sure.
“I can’t say whether they were men or women,” he admitted, before helpfully adding: “The horse seemed to be dark-colored.”
Colden was ready for his opportunity.
“Have you not, sir,” the prosecutor said triumphantly, “seen Ezra Weeks drive such a horse, of the same size and color?”
“I have seen him drive one, I think,” the leather worker agreed, and two other fellow parishioners dutifully confirmed his testimony: Yes, they had seen the same horse and sleigh as well, and even hailed huzzah to it as it passed—“as is usual on such occasions”—but, they added, the mysterious sleigh had not returned their greeting.
Levi’s team could scarcely contain its incredulity at Anderson’s testimony.
“Do you pretend to distinguish the color of a horse in the night?” they scoffed.
“Not exactly,” the earnest parishioner fumbled. “But I know he was not light colored.”
But other witnesses could not be so easily jeered at—for not only had they seen the sleigh, they had also seen where its journey had ended.
Henry Orr was a cartman who lived on Broadway’s upper reaches—a man with the tight muscles and calloused hands of his hard work in the delivery trade—and he remembered that snowy December night well.
“On the 22nd of December, after dark,” he recalled, “I went from my house near Union Furnace, to a house near Mr. Benson’s.”
True to his profession, his directions were not by street name but by landmark: Benson was a local colonel in the New-York Regiment, and the Union Furnace was a large iron smithy on Broadway, where fires were kept continually roaring for the manufacture of “jambs, cog wheels, gudgeons, &c.” The heat and noise radiating from its doorway made it a vivid presence on a cold December night.
“I stayed there, I should judge, about an hour—and then came down,” the cartman continued, recalling his route home in rustic local landmarks once again. “When I got near Lewis’s fence, I heard a cry in the direction of the Balloon House.”
The house was an infamous local landmark, the site of a doomed attempt a few years earlier by a French aeronaut to launch Manhattan’s first aerial ascent. He’d needed to sell three t
housand one-dollar tickets for his grand plan, which included an amphitheater and a behemoth balloon sporting French and American flags—but before he could launch, his whole workshop was destroyed by a strong windstorm. What was left behind was perhaps best a quiet spot for getting drunk. That night, though, the area near the Balloon House gained a very different sort of infamy.
“It was,” Mr. Orr added, “the voice of a woman—towards the well, in distress. When I got nearer the well I heard another cry, but the second cry was not as loud as the first … but rather smothered.”
He had not, though, gone any farther to investigate.
“When was this?” the defense team asked quietly. “What time in the evening?”
“It was six or seven minutes before,” the witness hesitated, “or six or seven minutes after nine.”
He’d only heard what was happening by the well and hadn’t actually seen it—but someone else in the neighborhood had. Lawrence Van Norden and his wife, Arnetta, who had given the prosecutor such key recollections in his investigation, now took the stand. They patiently recalled how they’d heard cries of Oh Lord have mercy upon me! What shall I do? Help me!
“I got out of bed to see what I could,” the husband remembered. “I saw a man walking towards the well—and in a little time the cries stopped and I went to bed.”
Lispenard’s Meadow was not a place where neighbors asked too many questions.
“Did you go to the well the next morning to make any examination?”
“No,” Van Norden said bluntly.
But William Lewis, another cartman whose property line ran near the well, had done just that. Examining the ground along a property wall and fence the next morning, he found strange new markings in the snow.
“I discovered the track of a one-horse sleigh, about three hundred feet from the Manhattan Well, up the new road which Colonel Burr had built,” he said.
All eyes turned to Burr at the defense table. It was an uncomfortable reminder that the prosecutor could, if he chose, call upon Levi’s own attorney to testify. Burr couldn’t be compelled to discuss conversations with his client, but it was entirely conceivable that he could be made to pore over the well’s maintenance schedule and any visits by company workers to it that week. But for now, at least, the young prosecutor was keeping his attentions on the local cartmen around the meadow.