by Paul Collins
“The sleigh drove so near the wall, it was a wonder that it had not turned over,” Lewis marveled. “The sleigh appeared to have gone up towards the Balloon House—I thought that somebody had missed their way, for there was no road there.”
There was something else odd, too—something about the cover on Colonel Burr’s new well.
“I observed,” he said, “that there was one board off the well.”
And around that pried-open well, he added, there were footprints.
WHEN THE night-watch bell chimed softly outside the courtroom, it was an occasion for disbelief: Really? Midnight?
Criminal trials—even for murder—rarely lasted this long. The courtroom was now lit by candles, the flickering and unsteady light giving an uncanny pallor to the proceedings. Asked to cast their minds back to the darkness of a Manhattan street in December, the witnesses now needed only to gaze upon the darkened windows of the courtroom itself.
Approach the stand.
Three young boys came shuffling up in succession, all kept up far past their bedtime. This was like nothing anybody in the court had seen before: Colden was still calling up one witness after another, as if trying to damn Levi Weeks with the sheer weight of his neighbors’ testimony against him.
But now—children?
State your age to the court.
“Eleven,” said one.
“Thirteen,” vouched another.
This was most irregular. The court, as a matter of course, did not accept testimony from children under the age of discretion—that is, fourteen years old. This was considered the age of being fully able to discern right from wrong, and to comprehend the gravity of the mortal sin of false witness. Those unable to understand the spiritual import of their oath on the Bible were incompetent witnesses—a category one law tome helpfully described as “Idiots, madmen, and children.”
The first two boys were promptly dismissed. Colden then brought forward the third, a cartman’s son, William Blanck—who didn’t even seem to know exactly how old he was.
State your age to the court.
“About …” the boy started. Actually, it was a puzzling question. Some children did not know their own exact ages, or even their own dates of birth. “Thirteen?” he finally guessed.
A groan across the courtroom was warranted by now—it was unfathomably late, and this was who Colden had brought forward? But Judge Lansing gently led the boy through some crucial questions.
Can you read?
No, he could not.
Do you know what an oath is?
No, the boy hesitated—he didn’t.
Colden quickly called forth the boy’s father instead.
“Pray, sir,” he asked Andrew Blanck. “What is your son’s age?”
The father didn’t seem sure, either.
“He is … thirteen?” he ventured.
Colden, it seemed, was now going to have to rely on the father’s testimony instead.
“Go on, sir,” the judge harrumphed.
The father remembered his own visit to the well distinctly, not least because he had trod there through the snow on Christmas Day.
“My son brought home a muff which he said he got in the well,” he explained. “I went the next day to the well and looked in, but I saw nothing.”
He had noticed, though, a disturbance in the snow around the well itself.
“I discovered a sleigh track about eight or ten feet from the well,” he recalled, “and I saw men’s tracks to the well and about it. One man’s track I noticed from the well to the side of the road.”
Someone had been to the well—but who? And had it even been on that same night?
YOUR HONOR, came the plea from Levi’s table, perhaps an adjournment is called for.
The trial had now stretched to one thirty in the morning, and it was showing no sign at all of stopping.
I’m prepared to keep going, Judge Lansing replied, but a glance at the jury convinced him otherwise: After fifteen tense hours of sitting in judgment of another man’s life, they were simply exhausted.
Very well, the judge sighed.
If these prosperous citizens thought they were now to head home to their respectable homes and mansions, though, they were much mistaken. As jurors on a capital case where the public was calling for the defendant’s blood, they would simply have to be sequestered.
It is ordered, the judge announced, that the jury empanelled have leave to withdraw from the bar of this court, being well and truly kept by two constables duly sworn not to permit any person to speak to them touching any matter relative the trial. The same jury shall come to the bar of this Court at ten o’clock in the forenoon.
They could leave the jury box—but not the control of the court itself. No grousing by his wealthy jurors could change Judge Lansing’s mind. While judges did have some discretion in misdemeanor and felony trials to allow a jury to go home at night, a capital case was a very different matter. Jurors in a contentious life-and-death case like Levi’s were, one law text gloomily explained, “as it were, prisoners until they are discharged.”
So seriously did courts take the prisoner comparison that bailiffs traditionally denied jurors “food, drink, or fire” until they had reached a decision. Shivering and ravenous men were not, it seemed, inclined to dither endlessly over a case. But in the case of an overnight recess, the court was obliged to provide at least some minimal succor to their twelve unwilling guests. Finding accommodation for twelve men together was not easy, and sheriffs had been known to simply unroll mattresses in courthouses; jurors pleading to go outside for fresh air were told to go walk on the rooftop.
It was going on two in the morning, and every inn would be closed now. The exhausted jury followed the constables down the hallways and filed into what was to be their makeshift quarters for the night: the upstairs of City Hall itself. Blankets were laid out in the Portrait Room, a second-floor reception gallery whose paintings of Revolutionary heroes featured Trumbull’s famed portrait of George Washington. Now, though, the room was half sunken in darkness, its glories flickering in the dim light of the candelabras.
The twelve men settled uneasily on the floor, each alone in his thoughts about what he’d seen that day and what was to come in scarcely another eight hours. The tapers in the room were snuffed, and then, curled up against the cold, the jurors slumbered under the impassive painted gaze of General Washington.
THE CONCOURSE OUTSIDE CITY HALL STRETCHED BEFORE BROCKHOLST Livingston, empty of its crowds in the slumbering night—and yet for him, the place was haunted. As he considered the precedents for their defense, it was hard not to also be reminded of the fate of his client Henry Bedlow.
Bedlow’s case had unfolded in this very same courtroom in October 1793. Lanah Sawyer, a seventeen-year-old seamstress, claimed that she had been raped that fever-ridden summer by Bedlow, the rakish scion of a local landholder. The young man had gallantly saved her from local toughs in the street, and introduced himself under a false name—he said he was a lawyer named Smith—and later took her out for ice cream and a midnight stroll around the Battery shoreline. Walking home past a darkened street of brothels, Sawyer claimed that “Smith” had clamped his hand across her mouth, dragged her screaming into the notorious brothel of Mrs. Mary Cary, and brutally raped her. When Lanah tottered home the next morning, her parents and friends soon guessed what disaster had befallen her, and in the courtroom they lined up to roundly condemn the wealthy scoundrel who had soiled her hardworking family’s name.
Rape was a capital crime and a perfect charge to enrage the local poor: Bedlow readily admitted the false name and the brothel visit with Lanah. But he’d shown up at court with no fewer than four attorneys who, led by Brockholst Livingston, spent hours assailing the young girl’s honor—all to prove that she’d already known he was the infamous “Harry” Bedlow, and had willingly fallen for his dangerous charms. She was, Livingston had scoffed, “willing to be deceived”—and the “cloud of witnesses” t
estifying to the strength of her character was hardly any proof at all.
“Who are these witnesses?” one of Bedlow’s team sniffed. “An obscure set of people, perhaps of no character themselves.”
When outraged spectators hissed, Livingston remained unrepentant.
“Gentlemen, I stand here in defense of the prisoner,” he shot back to the gallery. “I will use every means in my power to detect the falsehoods that have been accumulated to deprive him of life, and neither hisses nor clamors shall make me swerve from what I conceive to be my line of duty.”
By the time Livingston’s team was done, it took the jury only fifteen minutes to find Harry Bedlow innocent.
Angry mobs rampaged in fury over the verdict, swelling with what one witness described as “Boys, Apprentices, and Negroes, as well as Sailors.” They leveled Mary Cary’s brothel, demolished the brothel of “Mother” Giles, and then even menaced Livingston’s own far more respectable house. By the time the tumult was suppressed, at least one man had been shot dead, and the mayor himself was injured. Nor did Livingston’s client escape unscathed: The wronged Lanah quickly sued Bedlow in civil court for seduction, and bankrupted the young man so thoroughly that he landed in debtor’s prison.
But it was all a lie.
The accusation, which had been as damning to Harry Bedlow as the charges against Levi were today, evaporated one fine morning five years later. A now-married woman racked with guilt, the former Miss Sawyer confessed what Livingston had suspected all along—namely, that her late stepfather had put her up to making the rape charge. The angry crowds in the streets, she admitted, had been wrong about Henry. They had been wrong about the whole affair all along.
CADWALLADER COLDEN couldn’t sleep.
The young prosecutor had just single-handedly led a sixteen-hour-long legal onslaught, and his nerves were jangled. Everyone’s were that night: Someone started shrieking Fire! Fire!, sending the citizenry piling into the street, only to discover it was a false alarm.
But at least the prosecutor had been free to go wander sleeplessly into the night. The jurors were confined to the Portrait Room with a bailiff keeping watch at the door—and, for them, it might not have been clear if they’d even be allowed to leave had the fire proved real. Legal precedent, a bit grudgingly, allowed that prisoners and jurors could flee from a conflagration—but not, perhaps, from a windstorm that might merely knock the building down.
As the sun rose, the jurors rubbed their stubbly faces, stretched painfully under the grand paintings, and looked out past the inaugural balcony into a cold and clear morning. On the street below, crowds reassembled. For anyone near enough to hear, the sentiments of New Yorkers about Levi Weeks remained the same: Hang him.
Colden was determined to see that they did.
With the morning sun streaming into the courtroom, the prosecutor called to the stand local grocer James Lent. The man who stood and strode up to the bar was, to anyone observing, immediately recognizable as one of the toughest characters in the room. Lent’s namesake father had fought alongside George Washington in the French and Indian War, and was still recalled as “a fierce old fellow, full of fight and full of fun”—and the young Lent had proven himself a chip off the old block by fighting through the entirety of the Revolution. These days, when not contending with troublesome Federalists or tending to his store, the ornery veteran occupied himself with horsebreaking.
And that, he recalled to the courtroom, was just what had brought him out to Lispenard’s Meadow on January 2, 1800.
“I, together with Mr. Page, had some business to do in breaking a horse, and we went up to Andrew Blanck’s,” he explained. “We dined there. Blanck insisted on it. While we were dining, two persons—Mr. Watkins and Mr. Elias Ring—came there to get hooks and poles to sound the Manhattan Well for the body of a young woman who was supposed to be drowned.
“We got the poles and nails,” he continued, “and went all together to the well, which we uncovered. Page took the pole first and said he thought he felt her; I took hold then and thought I felt her, too. I took the pole and hooked the nail in her clothes and drew her carefully up to the top of the water: As soon as Mr. Ring saw her calico gown, he said it was she, he knew the gown.”
In the dead silence of the courtroom, the crowd paused to envision the horrible sight—the men gathered around the snowy well, the body emerging from the darkness within—but Lent’s memory turned to their painstaking care in handling the young victim.
“I put a rope under her and drew her up gently. She slew’d around but there was not a thread of her clothes which touched either side of the well,” he explained. “We laid her on a plank, and she appeared in such a situation as if she had been murdered—”
“You are to tell what you saw,” snapped Hamilton. “Not what conclusion you made. That is for the jury.”
Lent, chastened, recalled just what he’d seen: namely, some scratches on her right hand and on her foot, “as if she had been dragged.” Except for her shoes, she’d been fully clothed, if disheveled.
“Did you examine her body?” the judge asked.
“I did not,” Lent said modestly. “The stockings, as far as could be seen without lifting up the petticoat, were whole and good.”
“Any bruises upon the face?”
“I do not recollect,” Lent hesitated. “There might have been.”
“Might you have injured the head with the pole?”
“Not at all,” he insisted. Even with all their tenderness, though, the body had been appalling to behold. “Her appearance was horrid enough—her hat and cap off, her hair hanging all over her head, her comb yet hanging in her hair—”
“Was she not a natural corpse?”
An old veteran like Lent knew all too well what both natural and violent deaths looked like—and yet this one was puzzling indeed.
“She looked as if she was asleep, seemingly,” he mused.
Amid all this, though, what struck Lent most was the extraordinary exclamation he’d heard when, accompanying a police officer, he’d tracked down Levi Weeks.
“He dropped his head,” he recalled, “and said, ‘Is it the Manhattan Well she was found in?’ ”
At this, the jurors leaned in carefully.
“Was there any mention made,” a juror interrupted, “of the Manhattan Well, in the presence of the prisoner, before he asked the question?”
One of the most damning and infamous public accusations against the young carpenter now hung in the courtroom, awaiting the horsebreaker’s reply.
“I did not hear any,” Lent said.
HAVING MADE some palpable hits on the defendant already, Colden was ready for his coup de grâce: the doctors. His first medical witness, Richard Skinner, possessed just the sort of theatrical flair that might impress a crowd; as the sort of fellow who would attire himself with a gold watch from Paris, a walking stick, and a scarlet cloak, he immediately stood out.
Skinner, though, proved curiously demure regarding his qualifications.
“Dr. Skinner,” the prosecutor began, “are you not a surgeon in this city, and did you not see the body of Elma Sands after it was taken out of the well? Pray, sir, inform the court and jury.”
“I follow a branch of surgery,” he replied, “but I do not pretend to be a professed surgeon.”
This was news to many in the crowd. For years Skinner had been advertising himself in local papers as a surgeon, boasting that he was “the only operator in America that sets artificial eyes”; he would also, in a pinch, install artificial ears, noses, and legs. But the only actual training that Skinner would aver before a judge was rather different.
“I am a dentist,” he explained.
Skinner had always been ambitious, though. As an unknown new arrival from London, he immediately tried hitting up Benjamin Franklin for a twenty-dollar loan, and proceeded to make a name for himself by picking a fight with George Washington’s dentist. And his sidelines in glass eyes and peg legs notwit
hstanding, Skinner had, in fact, built a respectable dental practice in the city, selling gold teeth at four dollars apiece, hawking his own patented dental tincture for a half guinea per bottle, and yanking out teeth at four shillings apiece in his Partition Street office—or, for his more well-to-do customers, for seven shillings on a house call.
His heart, though, had always belonged to the finer arts of the scalpel and the saw.
“I have made the subject of surgery generally my study,” he added; and it was such medical curiosity that had brought him to the Ring boardinghouse in January. “I saw the corpse of the deceased twice.”
The first time he viewed Elma was in the dim, hushed interior of the Rings’ house, where she had been laid out; the next time was in broad daylight, when her coffin was thrown shockingly open to the multitudes on Greenwich Street.
“I had but a superficial view, though, as it lay in the coffin, exposed to the view of thousands,” Skinner said with some regret. “I examined such parts as were come-at-able, such as her head, neck, and breast. I discovered several bruises and scratches—particularly a bruise upon the forehead and chin, and upon the left breast or near it.”
Judge Lansing knew enough of medical testimony that he quickly halted the witness.
“How long was this after she was taken out of the water?” the judge inquired.
“I do not know,” Skinner admitted.
This was an awkward admission, and the prosecutor quickly moved his witness back to firmer ground.
“Will you describe those marks more particularly?” Colden asked.
“I think that the mark upon the neck had the appearance of a compression, but not by a rope or handkerchief. The appearance on the breast was about as large as the circumference of a dollar. It was a small bruise, but it was more difficult to examine than the other,” the dentist said, pausing delicately to explain. “There were a number of women present.”