Duel with the Devil (18 page)

The wooden floors of the courtroom echoed the footsteps of the prosecutor.

“Levi Weeks, the prisoner at the bar, is indicted for the murder of Gulielma Sands. He is a young man of reputable connections, and for aught we know, till he was charged with this crime, of irreproachable character.”

For spectators peering at the defendant, that seemed fair
enough—Weeks was a handsome fellow, a hard worker, a man with an honest face.

“
His appearance interested us greatly in his favor,” one spectator mused. “We waited with anxiety for the testimony.” They would not have to wait for long—and, Colden warned, it would be damning, for the carpenter’s gentle appearance was deceiving.

“
He gained the affections of those who are now to appear against him as witnesses on the trial for his life.
The deceased was a young girl, who till her fatal acquaintance with the prisoner, was virtuous and modest—always of a cheerful disposition, and lively manners, though of a delicate constitution. We expect to prove to you that the prisoner won her affections, and that her virtue fell a sacrifice to his assiduity; that after a long period of criminal intercourse between them, he deluded her from the house of her protector under a pretense of marrying her, and carried her away to a well in the suburbs of the city, and …”

Colden stopped for a moment—“as if overpowered with his emotions,” the court clerk noted—and then gathered himself again.

“No wonder, gentlemen, that my mind shudders at the picture here drawn, and requires a moment to recollect myself,” he added weakly. The outrage over the ads placed by Weeks’s defenders—the claims that Elma had committed suicide—then revived his indignant anger.

“I will not say what may be your verdict,” Colden told the hushed room. “But I will venture to assert that not one of you or any man who hears this cause, shall doubt that the unfortunate young creature who was found dead in the Manhattan Well—was
most barbarously murdered
.”

T
HE FIRST
witness called was Elma’s cousin, Catharine Ring—the woman in charge of the boardinghouse itself. As a Quaker who refused oath taking, she solemnly affirmed her presence in the court. There was another presence, though, that was more problematic.

Your honor, that man needs to leave the room
.

The proceedings halted;
the defense was demanding that Elias Ring leave the courtroom during his wife’s testimony. In the searching looks of the crowd at the witnesses, the unspoken question hung over the moment: Why did Levi distrust Mr. Ring?

“
You have a right to it, of course,” Judge Lansing replied. Elias was briskly escorted out of the courtroom by the bailiffs.

Composing herself after the room had quieted down again, Mrs. Ring began her tale. She was, she explained,
twenty-seven years old—just five years older than Elma—and “
I regarded her as a sister.

“
In July last, Levi Weeks came to board in our family, soon after which he began to pay attention to Margaret Clark, till about the 28th of the 8th month, when she went in the country.” Their former boarder Margaret suddenly found herself under the glare of onlookers’ attentions, but Mrs. Ring pressed on. “About two days after her absence, Gulielma Sands asked me—”

Objection!

Colden’s first witness had been stopped by Weeks’s team scarcely two sentences into her testimony; Mrs. Ring, they insisted, was relating hearsay. Colden was ready for it: He pulled out his notes to
announce a whole a series of legal precedents for use of a murder victim’s speech, from
State Trials
and
Leach’s Cases
to
Skinner’s Reports
.

Wrong
, the defense shot back.
Has Mr. Colden actually read those cases?

Brockholst Livingston, reaching across the table for a copy of Leach’s
Cases in Crown Law
, thumbed through to one of the cases Colden cited. It was the trial of one
William Woodcock, accused in 1789 of beating his wife to death in a London lane. Her dying accusation against the man had been taken down—but not under oath, not by a jury, and with the wife herself apparently oblivious to just how near death she was.

“
His Lordship,” Livingston read from the thick quarto volume, “then left it with the jury to consider, whether the deceased was not in fact under the apprehension of death; and said, that if they
were under admission that she was, then the declaration were admissible; but that if they were of a contrary opinion, they were not admissible.”

Elma Ring was hardly dying back in July 1799; indeed, she was full of life. Far from backing his case, Colden had just cited one that contradicted it. Before the prosecutor could respond,
Aaron Burr leaped in: Was the prosecutor aware that another case he’d cited was, in fact, in a
Scottish
court—a different legal system—and not an authority for the United States? Or that in the Woodcock case—
Very well
, the judge announced.
Please proceed, Mrs. Ring, without resort to hearsay
.

“
Levi became very attentive to Elma, to whom I mentioned it, and she did not deny it,” she continued, choosing her words carefully. “After my return I paid strict attention to their conduct, and saw an appearance of mutual attachment, but nothing improper. He was frequently in the room when she was sick. One—”

Objection! … What’s he doing here?

The defense pointed into the crowd behind Mrs. Ring. There stood
Elias Ring, who had crept back into the courtroom to eavesdrop on his wife’s testimony.

Mind your behavior, sir
, the judge snapped.
Bailiff, you may escort him out again
.

Chastened on behalf of her own husband, Mrs. Ring began her testimony again.

“Not a day passed but convinced me more and more that he was paying attentions to her,” she insisted. “I often found them sitting and standing together, and once in particular I found them sitting together on her bed.”

It was not quite the decorous behavior expected in a prospective Quaker—“
I always thought her disposition rather too gay for a Friend,” Mrs. Ring said primly—and on December 22, 1799, she found
her niece seeming “much pleased” about something. The boardinghouse mistress recalled the evening carefully for the jury: Elma borrowing clothes and her neighbor’s muff to get dressed to go out, and Levi limping back, his knee bandaged, from his early
evening visit to his brother’s house. Just after Levi returned home, she recalled, “
I heard the clock strike eight”—and then, after retiring to her room with Mr. Ring, she heard Levi and Elma leave again within ten minutes.

Yes—she was
certain
that was what she had heard: two sets of footfalls coming down the stairs, and the voices of Levi and Elma whispering in the hall outside her room.

“Mrs. Ring.” Prosecutor
Colden dramatically unrolled an architect’s plan of the 208 Greenwich boardinghouse and exhibited it to the court. “
What kind of staircase is it?”

“It is a hollow, closed staircase.”

“Would not a person coming down such,” he ventured, “make a considerable noise?”

“Any person certainly would.”

The jury examined the drawing, seeing just how close in proximity Mrs. Ring’s eavesdropping had been.

“How near is your door to the stairs?” Colden asked.

“It opens against them.”

“How far is it from the foot of the stairs to the outer door?”

“Not more than four feet.”

Upon coming back home at about ten o’clock to find herself and his apprentice waiting up for him, she recounted,
Levi seemed “pale and much agitated”—and assumed a quizzical expression when Mrs. Ring remarked that she assumed Elma to be out as well. The next morning had passed with everyone slightly uneasy at Elma’s absence—but it wasn’t until that Tuesday morning, she testified, that she finally confronted Levi.

“I said,
Stop, Levi, this matter has become so serious, I can stand it no longer
.” And at that moment, she claimed, she’d confronted Levi with the very secret that Elma had revealed on the day she disappeared: “She came down stairs after being with thee, and told me, that night at eight o’clock you were going to be married.”

All the suspicion, all the anger of the city, had hinged on this one recollection.

“He turned pale,” Mrs. Ring continued, “trembled to a great
degree—and began to cry, clasping his hands together, cried out—
I’m ruined! I’m undone forever, unless she appears to clear me
.”

In the shocked silence, a droll inquiry came from the defense table: Elma said all kinds of things, didn’t she? Hadn’t
Mrs. Ring
also
heard Elma threaten to overdose on laudanum? The very hint of suicide had deeply upset the Rings before—the charge blackened Elma’s memory with a grievous sin—and now the raw emotion welled back up again.

“
Why Levi! How can thee say so?” she scolded. Being sick so often, Elma easily could have overdosed on opium tincture—“it was always easy for her to get that”—and to have her idle jest over a bottle of medicine perverted like
this
by Hamilton and Burr in the courtroom was infuriating to Mrs. Ring.

“It don’t bear the weight of a … single … 
straw
with me,” the grieving witness sputtered, and she turned her baleful stare upon the prisoner—on the man who once was to have married into her own family.

“Levi,” she spat, “I shudder to think I ever indulged a favorable thought of thee.”

H
OPE
S
ANDS
!
—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?