by Paul Collins
Or was it?
We call Dr. Benjamin Prince to the stand.
The society physician walked up and took the oath. Unlike the “dentist-surgeon” that the prosecutor had called upon, Hamilton’s defense witness had an unquestioned role in the case.
Tell us, sir, what you saw on January third.
“I was called upon by a constable to attend the Coroner’s Jury on the body of Elma Sands,” the doctor explained. “When I came in I saw the body lying on the table before the Jury. I proceeded to examine it. I saw some scratches, and a small bruise on the knee. The body was then dissected.”
This was news to the jury, for they had not been told that Elma’s body had been manhandled and cut into for dissection before the prosecution’s doctors had seen it.
“I saw no spots about the neck,” Dr. Prince said pointedly. “No marks of violence. I saw no appearance but what might be accounted for by supposing she drowned herself.”
“If there had been any very remarkable spots,” Hamilton asked, “would you not have seen them?”
“I should,” the doctor replied dryly. “I examined particularly—I was called for that purpose.”
Why, then, had the coroner’s report claimed murder as the cause of death? The mystery only deepened when the next witness stepped up: the other doctor at the inquest, Dr. William McIntosh.
Tell us, sir, what you saw that evening.
“I was called together with Dr. Prince to attend a Coroner’s inquest on the body of Elma Sands,” the almshouse physician recalled. “I was desired particularly, by the jury, to examine and see if she was pregnant. There were no marks of violence—and we discovered, to the satisfaction of the jury, that she was not pregnant. It was suggested by some of the jury that her neck was broke: I examined and found it was not. Neither was the collar bone dislocated.”
That directly contradicted the testimony of the prosecution’s witness, Dr. Snedeker—but that doctor had seen Elma body’s three days later, after it had passed through innumerable hands, not least of which had been those of Prince and McIntosh at the dissecting table.
“The scarf skin of the face was scratched with gravel,” McIntosh continued, meaning that Elma had minor abrasions that might have come from the side of the well itself, as scarf skin was a term used for the outermost layer of skin, the epidermis. “Near the instep there was a small spot like a blood blister. It seemed as if the knee had been injured by falling upon coarse gravel. There was a small spot on the breast, but there were no marks of violence upon the belly.”
The marks on her body were of the type that jury members themselves might have—and for McIntosh, who saw the results of both stumbles and fighting among his almshouse charges, the determination had been simple.
“I think there were not marks of violence sufficient to occasion her death,” he said.
But what of the row of spots seen around her neck: Surely that was proof of a strangling, was it not?
“I have been in the custom of seeing numbers of drowned people who have been brought to the Alms-House,” McIntosh responded. “And I have often seen livid spots of the skin, much as I saw in this instance.”
The courtroom was now so unsettled by this revelation that the prosecutor immediately began his cross-examination.
“Would that produce a row of spots round the neck?” Colden asked incredulously.
“Why, if the body was gangrened …” The doctor left the point unfinished. Elma’s body had, after all, already been dead for twelve days when it was brought to the inquest. “It would be no matter. It might or it might not.”
Judge Lansing, still troubled by the reports of scratches on Elma’s knuckles, quickly interrupted.
“If the hand had been hurt by a blow, would you have seen and noticed it?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Was there any water in the body?”
“A small quantity.” Dr. McIntosh shrugged it off. “But very little is sufficient to drown. There might have been a quart.”
“Would a spoonful drown?” a juror asked.
“Yes—unless it could be thrown up by the effect of a cough.”
“Suppose,” the juror added, “she had been killed first, and then thrown in the well? Would the body have any water in it?”
“It might,” the doctor admitted.
The inquest doctors, while not entirely discounting this possibility of murder, had favored drowning as a cause of death—and the lack of many bruises and scratches meant either a stealthy killer or suicide. But the coroner’s determination hadn’t mentioned the latter possibility, because he had ignored the consulting doctors.
This was one reason Elma’s inquest may have taken so long. Not only were the coroner and his jury liable to be men with little training in forensics, they had also faced the very real possibility of riots—just like in the Harry Bedlow case. With rumors spreading about Elma’s death, and Levi already arrested as a suspect, they had decided to note only one possible cause of death—the one that had been the less convincing explanation to the doctors themselves. And in agreeing with the darkest suspicions of New Yorkers, the coroner had left out the most important detail of all: doubt.
THERE HAD been some doctors on the case worth ignoring, perhaps—just not the ones the coroner thought.
For one doctor, what was now happening looked all too familiar. Dr. Nicholas Romayne was one of the city’s leading physicians. Formerly a trustee of Columbia, he’d gone on to run his own private medical school. Like many of the best American doctors, he had completed his training in Britain, where the medical profession had once been shaken by a disturbing murder case.
If Harry Bedlow was the precedent that haunted lawyers, then Theodosius Boughton was the name that Levi’s case called to mind for physicians. A baronet and a young wastrel, he had died in convulsions on his genteel estate in Warwickshire in 1780; suspicions immediately fell on his brother-in-law, who stood to inherit a fortune. But in the trial that followed, it emerged that the victim’s body wasn’t exhumed and examined until two weeks after his death; the three local doctors who testified had found it too putrid to dissect, and after a brief visual inspection supposed that the brother-in-law had poisoned him with cyanide. The suggestion had come not from a coroner or from a consulting physician, but from the victim’s excitable mother—a woman who failed to note that her son was a hypochondriac, or that he made a hobby of mixing his own rat poisons. With little other tangible evidence, and to the horror of medical professors around the country, the victim’s brother-in-law went to the gallows on inept and vague suppositions.
As far as Dr. Romayne was concerned, Colden was nearly re-enacting the appalling scandal: Once again, unqualified physicians were prepared to send a man to the scaffold based on brief, almost worthless visual inspections. As a young doctor, Romayne had seen the Theodosius Boughton case roil his profession after the more cautious testimony of Dr. John Hunter, widely regarded as Britain’s greatest surgeon, was passed over by the judge and jury in favor of the emphatic but less informed responses of the three other doctors in the case. Now Dr. Romayne was in the same position that Hunter had been in. Called to the stand by Hamilton, he was withering in his judgment of Colden’s doctors.
“An experienced person of good judgment might perhaps discover, upon inspection, whether the bruises made upon the body were done before or after death,” he warned. “A body which had been taken out of the water would assume a different appearance from what it had at first—and every day the appearance of injury done would acquire more visibility as it advanced in putrefaction.”
His words were a lancet, and they were particularly aimed at the one man in the room who should have known better: Dr. David Hosack.
The ambitious young Dr. Hosack had once been among Romayne’s most promising students. For Hosack to join a dentist and a local hack in guessing the causes of death, on the basis of a brief viewing in the street two weeks later—it was unconscionable. The one medical jurisp
rudence text to emerge after the Boughton case, in fact, had warned of just this danger: that drowning and strangulation “are chiefly discovered by the facts, rather than by any peculiar marks they make on the body.”
Shamed by his old teacher, Hosack was called back up to the stand. The defense lawyers proceeded gingerly—he was still Hamilton’s friend and personal physician, after all, and the man who had saved the life of the general’s son.
“Is there any way,” Hamilton asked gently, “in which the testimony we have heard may be reconciled?”
“I think it may in either of two ways,” replied the chagrined doctor. “At first there may have been very little change of color in the injured part, but after some time it undergoes a very considerable alteration.”
The other possibility, he admitted, was that the injuries came after death—from the inquest doctors themselves.
“It occurs to me”—he paused—“that as it was supposed that the neck and collarbone were broken, when she was first taken out of the well, and as I did not see her until the day of interment—it is possible that the frequent turning and bending of the head, and the frequent examination of the neck to ascertain the injury done to the collarbone, may have produced the appearance on the neck I before mentioned. Especially as the body had been dead for several days, and the vessels had become tender. Very little violence might have produced an effusion of blood under the skin.”
So the injuries could have been caused by murder … or they might not have been.
As powerful as Levi’s alibi and Hosack’s recantation were, they didn’t answer everything. The prosecution’s doctors and witnesses might have been slipshod, but they weren’t responsible for Levi’s arrest. He was jailed before the inquest, after all. Why, the defense team mused, had his name come up so quickly as a suspect? Where had the whisperings in the crowd come from, or the mysterious printed broadsides about ghosts haunting his boardinghouse room?
Someone had tried to pin Elma’s death on Levi Weeks. But who?
AARON BURR HAD BEEN MAINTAINING HIS USUAL OPAQUE AND UNNERVING silence. Hamilton himself had been frustrated by his rival’s sly lawyering in the past—“at the bar he is more remarkable for ingenuity and dexterity than for good judgment or good logic,” he complained. But one of Burr’s old law partners observed that setting traps was simply what gave the colonel joy: “He delighted in surprising his opponents, and in laying, as it were, ambuscades for them.”
The ambush Burr had planned for the Weeks trial would be one of the most remarkable of his long legal career—and this time, he’d mapped it out alongside General Hamilton.
We call upon Joseph Watkins as our witness.
The blacksmith took the witness stand, his work-scarred hands and powerful physical presence a striking contrast to the lawyers and doctors around him. Watkins had been hammering nails and tongs for New Yorkers for years, and as the immediate neighbor to the Ring boardinghouse, he’d been the first to join Elias in recovering Elma’s body. He knew the family and its boarders well—better, in fact, than anyone imagined.
“Do you remember,” General Hamilton asked carefully, “any thing in the conduct of Mr. Ring that led you to suspicions of improper conduct between him and Elma?”
Things were not what they seemed in the reputable Ring boardinghouse—and hadn’t been for months before the disappearance.
“About the middle of September,” the blacksmith said, casting his mind back to the evacuations from yellow fever, “Mrs. Ring being in the country, I imagined one night that I heard a shaking of a bed and considerable noise there—in the second story, where Elma’s bed stood. I heard a man’s voice and a woman’s. I am very positive the voice was not Levi’s.”
For the jury, there was a shock of recognition—the inexplicable questions the defense had kept asking the Rings about the shared wall the between the houses now made sense.
“Could you hear through the partition?” an astonished juror asked.
“Pretty distinctly,” Watkins said. And what he heard, as one observer put it delicately, was a “rustling of beds, such as might be occasioned by a man and wife,” by Mr. Elias Ring and Elma. “It continued some time and it must have been very loud to have awakened me,” the blacksmith continued. “I heard a man’s voice, pretty loud and lively, and joking; the voice was loud and unguarded.”
What was more, he could tell whose voice it was—because Ring had a distinctly high-pitched voice, while Levi had a low and quiet way of speaking.
“I said to my wife,” he added, “it is Ring’s voice.”
Three months before Elma disappeared, as the boardinghouse proprietor, the young carpenter, and the beautiful niece tried to survive the fever season in the sweltering Ring house on Greenwich Street, the blacksmith could already see it would come to a terrible end.
“I told my wife, That girl will be ruined next.”
The courtroom was shocked—and doubly so when an affidavit from Watkins’s ailing wife was read, attesting that she, too, had heard the noise. As Cadwallader Colden stepped in to grimly cross-examine the witness, it only got worse for him.
“When was this?” he demanded.
“A little after the middle of September.”
“How often have you heard this … noise of the bed?”
“From eight to fourteen times, in the time of the sickness.”
“Did you ever hear this noise after Mrs. Ring came from the country?” Hamilton interrupted.
“I never did.”
What he did hear later, though, was almost as remarkable. After Elma disappeared, in the days that Mrs. Ring now claimed to be agonizing over Elma’s alleged betrothal to Levi, she hadn’t made any mention of it at all to her neighbors. In fact, Mrs. Ring had gone out of her way to praise Levi.
“I heard her say,” Mr. Watkins recalled, “the Thursday after she was missing, that he was very kind and friendly to all the family, particularly when sick—but not more so to this girl than to the rest—he was more like one of the family than a boarder.”
Others had the same puzzling recollection. Watkins’s young daughter, Betsy, had heard similar sentiments from Mrs. Ring. Yet others—including one of Levi’s own coworkers—had heard by that fourth day of Elma’s disappearance that Levi was suspected. If the Rings weren’t the ones feeding these whispers, then someone else had encouraged them to change their story. A person, perhaps, with a motive to implicate Levi—someone who knew that the Rings faced ruin if the husband’s adultery with the missing girl became public.
“Did you ever speak of this noise which you and your wife heard in the night to anybody else?” Watkins was asked.
Why, yes, the blacksmith recalled—there was one other person he had told.
“Croucher,” he said.
THE GRAYING cloth merchant, who was sitting among the crowd in the courtroom, now seemed to shrink back into the darkness of the falling night.
“When did you first mention to Croucher what you heard in the chamber?”
“At the Coroner’s jury,” Watkins said. Quietly armed with the knowledge of Elias Ring’s adultery—the kind of knowledge that could blackmail the Rings into changing their stories—Croucher proceeded to heap guilt on Levi for Elma’s murder. “The day she was laid out in the street, I saw him very busy in attempting to make people believe that the prisoner was guilty.”
Hugh McDougall, a Broadway glazier and sign painter, took the stand with a similar recollection of Croucher.
“I have been acquainted with this Mr. Croucher for some time, but I never liked his looks,” he sniffed. “He used to bring apparel, such as shawls, to dispose of, but I noticed that he always managed to come just at dinner time. I told my wife that I did not like the man—and in the future, if he wanted anything of me, that I would call on him.”
Soon, though, McDougall found even more reason to dislike him. Croucher had already been spreading accusations from the moment Elma’s body was discovered.
“The day when t
he body was found,” the sign painter recalled, “he was extremely busy among the crowd to spread improper insinuations and prejudices against the prisoner—who was then taken.” That explained why Levi was arrested so quickly after Elma was raised from the well. What was more, Croucher had claimed that the seemingly upright carpenter was a thief. “Among other things, he told a story about his losing a pocket book. This conduct I thought unfair, and I told him so plainly. Oh, says he, there’s the story of the pocket book …”
But Croucher couldn’t let the story go. In fact, McDougall mused, the fellow had visited him again just the previous week, interrupting him in his garden for no other reason than to claim that there was new proof of Levi’s guilt.
“I told him I thought it was wrong,” McDougall snapped, “and highly improper that he should persecute Weeks in such a manner when he had a difference with him. For my own part, I wanted some further evidence before I should condemn the man.”
Croucher, though, did not need further evidence. David Forrest, a boardinghouse neighbor who ran a Greenwich Street grocery, took the stand and recalled how Croucher burst into his shop just before the trial, filled with malicious glee.
“On Friday last, Croucher came running to the store and said, ‘What do you think of this innocent young man now? There is material evidence against him, and he is taken by the High Sheriff, sir, and carried to jail—he will be carried from here, sir, to the court and be tried—and from there he will carried back to jail, and from thence to court again, sir—and from thence to the place of execution, and there be hanged by the neck until he is dead.’ ”
There was no such new evidence, in fact. And the curious thing, Forrest said, was that Croucher didn’t even come into the store to buy anything—didn’t have any purpose at all, in fact, but attacking Levi Weeks.
For another grocer who also testified, that customer sounded curiously familiar. That same Friday, an utter stranger had also burst into his store and, without buying anything, had launched into the same attack on Levi Weeks.