Duel with the Devil

by Paul Collins

  As Levi watched, the prosecutor moved in for his most damning question.

  “Was the compression which you spoke of round her neck,” he asked expectantly, “such as might have made by the hand?”

  “My impression then was—and now is—that it was.”

  “Were the spots in a chain round the neck?”

  “There were several spots pretty much in a row round the neck,” Skinner agreed.

  Considering that he did not know how long the body had been out of the well, Skinner seemed eager to agree with Colden’s sly imputations—and for an experienced criminal lawyer such as Brockholst Livingston, such assertions beggared belief. The prosecutor had chosen not to call to the stand the two doctors at the inquest, who had seen the body shortly after its recovery, and had instead called up this—this dentist.

  Skinner quickly found himself caught in a cross fire of questions from the defense and the prosecution.

  “Do you say, sir, you are certain that the spots were in a ring round the neck?”

  “I cannot say they were in an exact circle,” Skinner faltered. “Not particularly. I think they were regular … but cannot exactly say.”

  “May such spots not have happened from a different mode than that of strangulation?”

  The dentist, who just moments before had been happy to impute the spots to a strangler’s hands, now claimed not to have made any such discernment at all.

  “I am incapable of judging how they might have happened,” he insisted.

  For Colden, it was clear that the wiles of the defense team were undermining another one of his witnesses, and he quickly stepped in to rescue him. It was critical that the jury’s attention be kept on the matter at hand: that Levi Weeks had strangled this poor woman.

  “Suppose, Doctor,” he interrupted, “a person had been strangled by the hand. Would it not leave such an appearance upon the body?”

  “I think it would,” Skinner eagerly agreed.

  No further questions for this witness, Colden announced triumphantly.

  FOR ONLOOKERS, the introduction of Skinner as a witness raised an obvious question: Where were Doctors Prince and McIntosh, who had handled the autopsy at the coroner’s inquest? Given the remarkably crude state of affairs in autopsies for criminal cases, perhaps Colden simply hadn’t trusted the two to provide any useful evidence on the stand. But his next witness—Dr. James Snedeker, a young doctor with a practice on Barley Street—certainly did sound like an expert.

  “There were many discolorations on the teguments of the skin,” Dr. Snedeker announced to the prosecutor. “There was a dislocation of the clavicle from the sternum.”

  There was a confused silence.

  “Be so good, sir, as to speak in less technical language, so that the jury may understand you.”

  “The left collar bone was broke,” the doctor sighed.

  Like so many New Yorkers, he’d looked at Elma’s body after it had been out of the well for two or three days—and like Skinner, he had noticed the telltale marks along Elma’s neck, as well as the bruise on her breast. “I saw a mark upon her breast as large as a dollar, black and blue,” Snedeker explained.

  But the most persuasive evidence would come from Cadwallader Colden’s crowning witness: Dr. David Hosack, the chair of Columbia’s nascent pharmacology department. A powerful public speaker, Hosack had only narrowly avoided a law career himself to become one of the most brilliant young doctors in the country. What was more, Hosack could hardly be considered partial to the prosecutor: Not only was he a friend of Aaron Burr’s, he was also Alexander Hamilton’s friend and family physician. Indeed, one time after saving the general’s beloved young son from scarlet fever and collapsing into a guest room with exhaustion, he’d awoken to find Hamilton kneeling by his bedside—the great man overcome with emotion and thanking God for the medical talents of “this ministering angel.”

  But Hamilton and Burr could only watch in dismay from the defense table as their friend laid out the grim evidence against their client.

  “Upon looking at the neck I observed three or four dark colored spots,” Dr. Hosack said from the stand. “Not in an exact line as if by a cord, but rather the effect of violent pressure. The largest spots, those near the wind-pipe, were about an inch and a half.”

  Like Skinner and Snedeker, he had noticed scratches on Elma’s hands, as well as the disturbing hue of her skin.

  “Could such appearances as you saw have been produced by suffocation merely?” asked Colden.

  “I ascribed the unusual redness of the countenance to the sudden extinction of life, and the exposure to air. For in many cases of sudden death—by opium, lightning, poison, or a blow on the head—the florid appearance of the countenance have that appearance.”

  “Are you not, sir, decidedly of the opinion that the livid spots you have described, were the effect of violence?” Colden emphasized for the benefit of the jury. To Columbia’s most esteemed physician, there was no doubt in the matter.

  “I am,” the doctor replied plainly.

  That still left open the question of self-violence, though; and the ads placed in support of Levi in the days after Elma’s discovery had, to the fury of the Ring family, raised that very notion. But if that was the last leg that Levi’s defense had to stand on, Colden was now ready to kick it out from under them.

  “Could any person, in your opinion,” the prosecutor asked Dr. Hosack, “have committed such an act of violence on their own person as to have produced such effects?”

  Dr. Hosack regarded the exhausted and yet keenly interested crowd in the courtroom before him, and the steady gaze of the accused Levi Weeks. Hosack had saved the lives of his friends, but today he could not save the life of their client. Their theory of suicide simply did not make sense.

  “I do not think it could be done,” he answered.

  THERE WAS little question that the strapping young Levi Weeks had the ability to overcome Elma Sands. But the crime had occurred out in the middle of a meadow and not in the lumberyard of Ezra Weeks or the boardinghouse of Elias Ring. Would the carpenter have had the time to get there to commit the deed?

  It was a question that Colden had prepared carefully for: Just as he had taken the unusual step of drawing up an architectural plan of the layout of the Ring household, the prosecutor had also taken the nearly unheard-of initiative of hiring a man to ride a horse from Ezra’s house and out to the well. Even with the bad roads, the trip had taken just fifteen minutes in one direction, and sixteen minutes coming back—and that was without ever breaking out of a trot and into a canter. It was a stunning form of evidence. While on rare occasions courtrooms had heard of rooms or distances in a backyard being measured, measuring the entire route of a crime was altogether more ambitious. And with hours having passed between Levi’s appearances at the boardinghouse, Colden’s point was clear: There was plenty of time for him to have committed the deed.

  But had anybody actually seen Levi do it?

  Much of the evidence seemed to point to the prisoner’s guilt, but there was no eyewitness and no exact murder scene. Dramatically taking up an influential legal text, John Morgan’s Essays Upon the Law of Evidence, the prosecutor thumbed to page 208 and read it aloud to the jury.

  “Circumstantial evidence is all that can be expected, and indeed all that is necessary to substantiate such a charge,” he recited.

  In a carefully hidden murder, Colden reminded the jury, circumstantial evidence was not only warranted but vital—because the victim herself could not give any testimony.

  “The prejudice entertained against receiving circumstantial evidence is carried to a pitch wholly unreasonable,” he read from Morgan. “In such a case as this it must be received, because the nature of the inquiry, for the most part, does not admit of any other; and, consequently, it is the best evidence that can possibly be given.”

  Far from being a weakness, he claimed, the circumstantial nature of his evidence was more damning to Levi Weeks th
an any eyewitness account.

  “A concurrence of circumstances—properly authenticated, otherwise they weigh nothing—forms a stronger ground of belief than positive and direct testimony generally afford, especially when unconfirmed by circumstances,” the prosecutor continued reading aloud. “The reason of this is obvious: A positive allegation may be founded in mistake, or, what is too common, in the perjury of a witness.”

  The prosecution was concluded, and the jurors would now almost certainly see the defense present a series of powerful alibis by powerful friends. And that, the assistant attorney general said, was just what Morgan and others were warning them of. Colden carefully enunciated a crucial line from Morgan before snapping the text and his case shut.

  “Circumstances,” he read, “cannot lie.”

  AARON BURR WAS NOT IMPRESSED BY THE CASE AGAINST HIS client.

  “Gentlemen of the jury,” he began, as he arose and solemnly paced the packed courtroom. “I know the unexampled industry that has been exerted to destroy the reputation of the accused, and to immolate him at the shrine of persecution without the solemnity of a candid and impartial trial.”

  Everyone there knew Burr was no stranger to attacks on reputation himself—attacks, in fact, that sometimes came from his fellow counsel Alexander Hamilton. But after the raking fire of General Hamilton’s cross-examination of prosecution witnesses, it was now Colonel Burr’s duty to begin the defense’s counterattack. Their strategies could not be more different: Unlike the passionate and eloquent Hamilton, Burr was known for speaking slowly and precisely in the courtroom, each word considered and emphatic, each sentence like a line of silk in a spider’s patient, ensnaring web.

  “Extraordinary means have been adopted to enflame the public against the prisoner,” Burr continued. “Why has the body been exposed for days in the streets in a manner most indecent and shocking? Such dreadful scenes speak powerfully to the passions: They petrify our mind with horror—congeal the blood within our veins.”

  Burr’s defense table was scattered with his careful notes and volumes of Pleas of the Crown—the very emblems of enlightenment and reasoned thought over bloody terror that stood in mute contrast to the multitudes outside who had rushed to judge the prisoner guilty.

  “Notwithstanding testimony of an intimacy between the prisoner and the deceased, we shall show you that there was nothing like a real courtship,” Burr emphasized. And the tales of nighttime sleigh rides, of marks upon Elma’s body, of guilty signs by the prisoner afterward? These, he assured jurors, would all fall apart under close scrutiny. The very slowness and care of Burr’s speech seemed to mark him apart from the prosecutor, with his wild barrage of accusations. “The story, you will see,” the colonel remarked scornfully, “is broken, disconnected, and utterly impossible.”

  And that was just the problem: Through an almost malicious sloppiness in prosecution, a good name could already be damaged. Everyone there knew too well how justice could catch the innocent and unwary in its gears.

  “Even in this city a case had occurred, not many years ago—a young man had been charged with the crime of rape,” Burr mused in grim recollection of the Harry Bedlow case. “It is yet fresh in the minds of everybody. The public mind was there highly incensed, and after the unfortunate man had been acquitted by a verdict of the jury, so irritated and enflamed were the people, that they threatened to pull down the house of the prisoner’s counsel.”

  The attention of the crowd turned to Brockholst Livingston at the defense table; they knew about his narrow escape, as well as his client’s destitution after the civil trial that followed. The gravity of this example had just the effect Burr had hoped for—“it was one of the most eloquent speeches we have ever heard” one onlooker remarked—for Livingston was a war hero who had nearly lost everything he owned to the public’s distrust of an impartial trial.

  “Now it comes out that the accusation was certainly false and malicious.” Colonel Burr paused to let the mournful realization sink in. “What remorse of conscience must a juror feel for having convicted a man who afterwards appeared to be innocent?” And this, he emphasized, was the heavy duty that fell upon those given mere circumstantial evidence of a man’s guilt.

  Aaron Burr’s final, most dramatic assertion was not directed at the prosecutor or the jury at all—but rather to someone else in the case—someone, perhaps, watching at that very moment from the courtroom gallery.

  “We shall show you,” he added, “that if suspicions may be attached anywhere, there are those on whom they be fastened with more appearance of truth.”

  Burr wasn’t just saying that their client was innocent—he was also saying they knew who might be guilty.

  THEY BEGAN with the humblest of witnesses: an apprentice.

  State your name to the court.

  “Demas Mead.”

  Alexander Hamilton had sat quietly through Aaron Burr’s stately opening argument—and it had been an effective one. But then Hamilton, as the brisk cross-examiner, took the stage again.

  “Do you live with Ezra Weeks, and did you the 22nd of December last?” the general asked the apprentice. “Relate all that you know.”

  “I live with Mr. Ezra Weeks, as an apprentice, and take care of his horse and sleigh,” Mead answered. “I lived with him December last. I remember perfectly well taking care of the horse that night, and I either left the key—after locking the gate as usual—on the mantelpiece, or I put it in my pocket. I can’t say certainly which.”

  One of the jurors, perhaps remembering the elderly neighbor’s hapless confusion over when she’d seen those gates open, tried the same gambit on the lad.

  “Was it a week day,” the juror asked, “or on a Sunday?”

  “On Sunday,” Mead answered flatly. “I lock the gate every night—I locked it that night a little after dark, and before 8 o’clock.”

  “Did you miss the key in the morning?”

  “I did not.”

  “Has the harness bells?” Hamilton asked.

  “It has eight, tied in four places,” the boy recalled.

  “How many minutes would it consume to take the bells off and put them on?”

  “Five or six.”

  The prosecutor was still thinking about the key on the mantelpiece, though, and he called out a question from his table.

  “If you had laid the key upon the mantelpiece,” Colden ventured, “and some person had taken it off and put it there again after keeping it for half an hour, might it not have been done without your knowledge?”

  “I don’t know—it might,” the apprentice hesitated. “But I don’t think it could, for I was only once out of the kitchen to fetch an armful of wood.”

  Crucially, the apprentice recalled hearing someone come in at about eight thirty; glancing into the room just before nine o’clock, he saw that it was Levi. When Ezra Weeks was called to the stand, his own recollection of the evening matched his apprentice’s account: Levi had left to go to his boardinghouse around eight, just as the Ring family claimed, and he had then come back alone in about half an hour. That also matched the Rings’ testimony, except that he was not with Elma. Nor did it give Levi time to also get over to Lispenard’s Meadow. Aside from the physical impossibility of it, Levi had simply been too busy that evening.

  “Levi came in to enquire about the business of the next day,” the contractor explained. “He had charge of the shop, understanding the business as well as myself. I took dimensions of work on a memorandum, and gave it to my brother in writing. His business was to give directions to the journeymen for execution.”

  Ezra paused to draw out a slip of paper.

  “Here is the eight doors on my memorandum, of different dimensions for Mr. James Cummings’s house, which he took down that evening on a piece of paper as I called them off,” he explained, handing the paper over to the court.

  Hamilton knew that still left one of the most damning allegations unaddressed: that Levi had immediately asked about the Manhatta
n Well when the body was found. And who but the killer would have known that?

  “Did your brother inform you that the muff and handkerchief were found prior to the arrest?” the general asked Ezra.

  “Levi told me that Mrs. Forrest had told him that the muff and handkerchief were found in a well near Bayard’s Lane. I told him that I supposed it must be the Manhattan Well.”

  At this, the prosecutor pounced.

  “How came you to mention the Manhattan Well?” Colden interrupted.

  For Ezra Weeks, it was a moment almost comic in its absurdity. Before him were two defense attorneys that he was building homes for; sitting by the judge was a city recorder who had helped approve his municipal contracts. How the city’s most successful contractor could identify the well by Bayard’s Lane was simplicity itself.

  “I had furnished the wood materials for that well,” he said.

  OF COURSE, one might expect an accused murderer’s brother to be good for an alibi—and for an apprentice to not contradict his employer. But testimony from Mrs. Forrest quickly confirmed where Levi had heard about the muff being found, and with both Ezra and his apprentice placing Levi in the house from 8:30 to 10 P.M., the prosecution still lacked any witnesses who actually saw Levi anywhere else during that time. At best, they had witnesses who saw somebody struggling by the well around 9 P.M.—just when Levi was apparently taking down door measurements in his brother’s house.

  Colden’s lack of direct witnesses to the murder meant that the prosecution’s case against Levi Weeks relied on a string of suppositions—that if one thing happened, then the next observation was likely part of a murder plot. “In cases depending on a chain of circumstances,” Burr reasoned, “all the fabric must hang together or the whole must tumble down.”

  But although they’d countered Colden’s case with an alternate scenario of how Levi had spent his evening, there was still a final link in the prosecution’s chain: the assumption that a murder had taken place. Since that was what the coroner’s report had claimed, it seemed like a safe assumption to make.