The Manhattan Well Murder

In early 1800, Levi Weeks went on trial for the murder of Elma Sands. Rumor had it that Weeks and Sands had been lovers, until something went tragically wrong. But at the trial, where Weeks was defended by Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, a much more complicated story emerged…

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
You are listening to History on Trial, a production of
iHeart Podcasts. Listener Discretion Advised. Welcome to History on Trial.
I'm your host, Mira Hayward. Every episode will go behind
the scenes of a famous trial from American history. We'll
meet the real people who make up the legal system,

(00:23):
from victims and defendants to lawyers and judges. Will follow
their stories as they duke it out in the courtrooms
of the past and learn how their cases irrevocally shaped
the present. Will watch the law as it evolves along
with the country, or as it fails to do so.
Every trial is a battle, and what we choose to

(00:44):
fight over and how we choose to do it can
be revealing. Trial by trial will gain new insight into
the story of America. This week The People v Levi Weeks.
On a cold January morning in Manhattan, a crowd gathered

(01:07):
to watch something strange. The spot where they stood would
one day become Soho, the fashionable New York City neighborhood
filled with clothing stores and expensive lofts. But on this day,
January second, eighteen hundred, the area was a sprawling wildland
called Lispynard's Meadow, nestled between the settled southern tip of

(01:29):
Manhattan and Greenwich Village. The meadow was more often the
site of courting couples or small hunting parties rather than
large crowds. But today was different. Today, at a well
in the southwest corner of the meadow, something was happening.
Half a dozen men were straining to lift a makeshift

(01:50):
net and its heavy cargo from the well. As they
heaved and grunted their burdens, slowly rose into view a
flash of white fab a mass of dark hair, too pale,
bare feet. It was a woman long dead. An onlooker
ran to fetch the police. When the constable arrived, he

(02:13):
found the woman's body laid out on a plank, her
head at an odd angle. The men who had lifted
her out explained how they had found her. The woman,
whose name was Julielma Sands, known to all as Elma,
had been missing for nearly two weeks since December twenty second.
Not a trace of Elma had been seen until her muff,

(02:35):
a tube of fabric worn as a handwarmer, had turned
up in the well. When Elma's landlord, Eli Ring and
neighbor Joseph Watkins heard of the discovery. They raced to
the meadow, sounding the well with poles. They felt the body.
Now with the question of where Alma had gone tragically answered,

(02:57):
a new question arose. She ended up in the well.
Someone in the crowd thought they knew Levi Weeks is
to blame. He's who she was last with. A man
called out to the constable. Levi Weeks. The crowd quickly
learned was a fellow boarding house resident of Elma's, and
the two were rumored to be romantically involved. Seizing the lead,

(03:21):
the constable and a group of men set out to
locate Levi. They found the young carpenter at his workshop.
When the Constable tapped him on the shoulder, Levi turned startled.
He saw the angry, confused faces of the men and
burst into speech. It is too hard, he started, before pausing.
Then is it the Manhattan well she was found in?

(03:43):
It was? The men shared a look. How could he
have known that Alma was found in a well? How
could he have known it was Manhattan Well? In particular?
None of them had mentioned it. Levi was placed under arrest.

(04:05):
It didn't take long for word to spread through New
York City that a beautiful young woman was dead, and
that a handsome young man was under arrest for her murder.
It was said that Levi and Elma had been courting
and planned to marry, but something had gone terribly wrong.
People spoke of the case in the streets, and journalists

(04:26):
wrote of it in the papers. One poet, Philip Freneau,
even wrote a poem about it. If thou injured Elma
had not fallen a prey to fierce revenge that sees
thy life away, not through the glooms of conscious night,
been led to find a funeral for a nuptial bed,
when by the power of midnight fiends you fell plunged

(04:49):
in the abyss of Manhattan. Well, but the media friends
you was only beginning. Soon, Levi Weeks would go to trial,
and thanks to his family ca connections, two of the
city's most prominent lawyers would be defending him. Their names
Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. In fact, if you're familiar

(05:11):
with the musical Hamilton, the name Levi Weeks might ring
a bell. The case gets a mention in the song
non Stop when Alexander Hamilton sings, this is the first
murder trial of our brand new nation. The liberty behind deliberation.
I intend to prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt,
our client, Levi Weeks, is innocent. The song isn't entirely

(05:35):
historically accurate. Levi Weeks's trial wasn't actually the first murder
trial in American history, but it is the first murder
trial that we have a complete transcript from, and that transcript,
published only weeks after the trial, gives us some amazing insights.
It lets us see the American legal system in its

(05:55):
earliest days, as it struggled to figure out just how
trials should work work. And it also reveals incredible parallels
between people two hundred years ago and people today, our
shared desire for justice, our interest in the darker sides
of human nature, our determination to get to the bottom
of things. But most of all, the transcript provides a

(06:19):
riveting portrait of one of the juiciest, most shocking trials
of the early nineteenth century. Because the story of Levi
and Elma may have seemed like a straightforward one of
love gone very wrong, but as everyone would soon learn,
this case was anything but simple. On January third, the

(06:44):
day after the discovery of Elma's body, the physicians Benjamin
Prince and William Macintosh conducted the post mortem examination. Elma
was long dead. The state of decomposition made it clear
that the body had been in the well for quite
some time, probably since the night she went missing, so
the doctors didn't expect to find much. The most pressing

(07:06):
question was whether Elma was pregnant or not. Newspapers were
already speculating that an unplanned pregnancy had been Levi's motive
for murder, but Princeton Macintosh found no evidence of pregnancy.
They found barely anything on the body at all, only
some slight bruising and scraping on the face and knees,
but decomposition made it hard to determine when or how

(07:29):
Elma had incurred these small injuries. Despite the lack of evidence, however,
the city coroner announced a verdict of murder. He likely
did so to avoid public outrage. New Yorkers had rioted
in the past over what they saw as miscarriages of justice,
and a finding of unknown cause of death might have

(07:50):
sent the city over the edge, and the public was
about to get even more invested in the case. After
the inquest, Elma's body was released to Catherine and Eli
ring Catherine and Elma were related, and the Rings had
been happy to give Elma a spot in their boarding
house when she arrived in the city from upstate New

(08:10):
York in seventeen ninety six. Now they opened their doors
for her body. The family was Quaker, and their funeral
practices were normally simple in private, but the Rings decided
that such a horrifying death warranted something different, and so
they set Elma's body in their living room, inviting neighbors

(08:31):
into mourn for her and bare witness to be evil done.
Two days later, on Monday the sixth, the body was
readied for burial, slipped into a simple wooden coffin, and
carried from the home. But as the coffin traveled through
the streets, the Rings, still reeling, were struck by an idea.

(08:53):
It wasn't enough for just their neighbors to see Elma.
They thought the whole city needed to understand the depths
of the tragedy. The funeral procession came to a halt
and the coffin was set down. The lid cracked open,
Elma's pale face and unseeing eyes peered out. A crowd
began to gather, soon numbering in the thousands, all shocked

(09:16):
by the sight. Death was not unknown in this disease ridden,
poverty stricken city. But something about the vision of this
dead young woman, taken too soon, laid bare for all
to see, struck a chord with New Yorkers. Levi Weeks,
they said, needed to pay. As the public gawned at

(09:39):
Elma's corpse, Levi Weeks languished in jail. Though conditions were
wretched in Bridewell Jail, Levi was luckier than most of
the inmates. He had a powerful brother who was working
tirelessly on his defense. Ezra Weeks was one of the
city's most prominent contractors, with no shortage of fun or

(10:00):
influential connections. One of those connections was Alexander Hamilton, who
just so happened to owe Ezra Weeks thousands of dollars
for construction done on Hamilton's summer home in Harlem Heights. So,
of course Hamilton would be happy to help Ezra's younger
brother with his legal troubles. Ezra had a connection to
Hamilton's longtime frenemy, Aaron Burr, as well. In seventeen ninety nine,

(10:26):
Burr had presided over the creation of the Manhattan Company,
a company with the stated goal of providing fresh water
to New York City. But the Manhattan Company was much
more than a simple utility. Because of clever corporate organization,
the company could also function as a bank of sorts,
which Burr and his Republican colleagues could use to fund

(10:49):
political candidates. To maximize the money the bank brought in, though,
the company needed to actually build water infrastructure, and so
they had hired Ezra Wheat to build and lay wooden
pipes to carry fresh water into the city. This fresh
water came from wells dug in Lisbernard's Meadow, including the

(11:10):
well that Elma Sands's body was found in. Having a
dead body turn up in your company as well is
bad publicity, and Burr wanted to control the narrative. There
was no better way to do this than to serve
as Levi Weeks's attorney. Plus Burr could use the work.
Like Hamilton, he was deeply in debt. Rounding out Levi's

(11:33):
defense team was h. Brockholst Livingstone, a political ally of
Burrs and a member of the Manhattan Company board. He
was one of the top lawyers in the city, known
for his sharp mind and quick temper. Hamilton, Burr and
Livingston quickly got to work getting Levi out on bail
and gathering evidence for his defense. They would have to

(11:56):
work hard. They were up against an ambitious young prosecutor
with something to prove. Cadwalader Colden, the Assistant Attorney General,
had recently suffered a major legal humiliation at the hands
of none other than Brockholst Livingstone. In October seventeen ninety nine,

(12:16):
a man named John Pistano had been convicted of the
brutal murder of his landlord, Mary Castro. The jury had
taken only minutes to sentence Pistano to death, unconvinced by
Livingstone's assertions that Pistano was not responsible because he was insane.
After all, insanity was not at that time a leal defense,

(12:38):
but as Livingstone had predicted, Pistano's insanity won him sympathy
the New York State Legislature and Governor John Jay, having
reviewed the facts of the case, found that quote at
the time of the conmission of the Act aforesaid he
was insane and is therefore a proper object of mercy.

(12:58):
As an aside, the Pistonano's story is wild. Both his
guilt and his mental instability are pretty well established. Take
for example, the story of his capture, which came when
Pistano was spotted at a public water pump holding his hat,
which he had filled with his victim's blood. The police
came quickly, and as they arrested Postano, he protested clumsily

(13:21):
in English, his second language, why you catch me, me
not do it, which would be a lot more convincing
if he wasn't holding a hat full of blood. But
in any case, Pistano was pardoned, his sentence commuted, and
he was deported to his home country of Portugal. Many
believed Pistano should never have been charged at all, given
his insanity. It was a devastating reversal for the Attorney

(13:45):
General's office, and Colden was determined to not let it
happen again. Colden also carried the weight of public opinion
on his back. The story of Elma Sands's murder had
traveled the whole Eastern seaboard. Seemed like no one spoke
of anything else. When the trial began on March thirty first,
eighteen hundred, hundreds of angry citizens flocked to watch the

(14:09):
proceedings at City Hall, packing the hallways and spilling out
into the street, and they were all convinced of one thing,
Levi Weeks's guilt. Colden could not fail his public. As
I mentioned before, New Yorkers loved nothing more than rioting
over legal matters, and Colden needed to maintain the peace
at any cost. So he had prepared tirelessly, tracking down

(14:34):
and interviewing witnesses, establishing timelines, and conducting research. When he
entered the courtroom that morning, he was confident in his
case and in Levi Weeks's guilt. All he had to
do now was convinced the jury. At ten am on

(14:56):
March thirty, first Court Clerk William Coleman called court to order,
with the Right Honorable John Lansing presiding as judge. A
jury was quickly selected, made up mainly of local merchants
at the time. Jurors had to be tax paying land
owning men between the ages of twenty one and sixty,

(15:16):
with property worth at least two hundred and fifty dollars,
the equivalent of a year's salary for a common man.
As Paul Collins puts it in his wonderful book on
the Trial Duel with the Devil, the jury box was
what women and the poor faced, not what they sat in.
With the jury seated, Cadwalader Colden took to his feet

(15:38):
to deliver his opening argument. He knew that his high
profile opponents were drawing attention, so he addressed them head on.
While the defendant might have clever lawyers, he told the
jury he had something more important, the truth. And what
was that truth? Here? Coldon laid out his theory of

(15:58):
the case, one that had been god in newspapers across
the region for the past few months. Levi Weeks was
a player. He was handsome as everyone in the court
could see, and charming, and he was fickle in his attentions.
He liked to flirt with the women in his boarding house,
and he had eventually fixed his sights on the naive,

(16:21):
innocent Alma Sands. We expect to prove to you that
the prisoner won her affections, Colden declared, and that her
virtue fell a sacrifice to his assiduity. Once he had
gotten what he wanted from Alma Sands, Colden continued, Levi
grew tired of her cleanness and affection and made a

(16:41):
plan to shake her off for good. Quote after a
long period of criminal intercourse between them. He deluded her
from the house of her protector, under the pretense of
marrying her, carried her away to a well in the
suburbs of this city, and there her here cold and

(17:02):
dramatically paused and seemed to lose himself. Then turned to
the jury and said, no wonder, gentlemen, that my mind
shudders at this picture and requires a moment to recollect itself.
He then laid out for the jury the path he
would take to prove Weeks's guilt, a path that would
now begin with the testimony of Levi and Elma's landlords,

(17:25):
Katherine and Eli Ring. Catherine Ring was now called to
the stand, a pale, blue eyed woman in her late
twenties with auburn hair tucked under a lace cap. Catherine
was a respectable Quaker woman, a good person for Coldon
to begin his case with. Unfortunately for the prosecutor, things
got off to a rocky start. Much of Catherine Ring's

(17:49):
testimony had to do with things that she had been
told by Elma Sands. Because Elma Sans had not made
these statements under oath, and because she could not now
testify to them in court being dead. Anything Catherine reported
Elma as having said was pure hearsay and thus an
admissible in court. When Hamilton objected on these grounds, Colden

(18:13):
tried to argue that these statements were allowed because they
showed Elma's state of mind. To support this argument, he
cited several legal cases. But here was the strange thing
about being a lawyer in early America. The country was
too young to have legal precedence of its own, so
lawyers had to rely on British cases, one vestige of

(18:34):
colonial rule that they still could not shake. Colden had
a few relevant British examples, but unfortunately he was up
against seasoned lawyers. Burrn Livingstone quickly replied that of the
cases Colden had cited, one argued against hearsay being admitted
in this fashion, and the other came from the Scottish court,

(18:55):
which had an entirely different legal system. Oops are quickly
ruled against allowing the testimony. Colden recovered, guiding Catherine instead
through her impressions of Elma and Levi's relationship. It had begun,
Catherine said when Levi's previous love interest, another boarder named Margaret,

(19:16):
went off to the country to escape the yellow fever
epidemic in the city. Catherine herself soon did the same.
Upon her return to Manhattan six weeks later, she observed
quote an appearance of mutual attachment between Levi and Elma.
After covering the events of the night of Alma's disappearance

(19:37):
December twenty second, coldon led Catherine through the following days,
during which she said she observed Levi acting strangely. On
Tuesday the twenty fourth, Catherine told the court she decided
to confront Levi with something. Alma had told Catherine on
the day of her disappearance that she and Levi were

(19:58):
to be married that very night. Levi had been shocked
by Catherine's revelation. I had not proceeded much further, Catherine
testified before he turned pale, trembled to a great degree,
was much agitated, and began to cry. Clasping his hands together,
he cried out, I'm ruined, I'm ruined, I'm undone forever

(20:20):
unless she appears to clear me. Catherine's suspicions only deepened
on Thursday the twenty sixth, when, during a discussion amongst
borders over Elma's fate, Levi declared missus Ring, it's my
firm belief she's now in eternity. How could he know that?
Levi explained that he believed Alma had committed suicide. The

(20:43):
whole house knew that she was frequently in poor health
and had more than once said that she wished to die.
But in Catherine's opinion, these were only the melodramatic statements
of an impressionable young woman. Her suspicions were not assuaged.
Now it was Hamilton's turn to cross examine. He went
easy on Catherine, only asking her general questions about Levi's

(21:07):
character and behavior, all of which she agreed were quote
very good. He also asked a peculiar question about whether
Elma's bedroom shared a wall with the bedroom of their neighbor,
Joseph Watkins. It did, Catherine said, but Hamilton moved on
before explaining why he cared. Catherine was dismissed. Eli Ring.

(21:34):
Catherine's husband picked up the story. He had once heard
noise in a vacant room, he said, and in the
morning had found the bed rumpled and Alma's clothes from
the previous day scattered through the room. The only people
in the house that night had been himself, Elma, Levi,

(21:55):
and Levi's young apprentice. Despite the seemingly damning nature of
Eli's testimony, Hamilton didn't press him much on cross only
asking him whether or not he knew that Levi and
Elma had been in bed together. Eli said he did not,
as in Catherine's cross examination. Hamilton asked Eli about their neighbor,

(22:17):
Joseph Watkins. Was he a clever man and a good neighbor?
Hamilton asked yes, Eli replied, and what was the wall
between the Rings and Watkins house made of wood and plaster?
Eli said again. Hamilton did not explain himself. He moved
on asking Eli if he had ever threatened Lee by weeks.

(22:40):
Eli denied it, saying I never threatened him that I
know of. I had a conversation with him in which
he asked me if I had not said certain things
about him, respecting Elma being missing, and he said if
I told such things of him, he would tell of
me and Croucher. Before Hamilton could act ask what things

(23:01):
Levi could tell about Eli and Croucher, Colden jumped in
with a question. Unlike trials today, where who can ask
questions and when is tightly regulated, things were looser in
the early nineteenth century. The transcript is littered with examples
of opposing attorneys, the judge, and even jurors jumping in

(23:21):
mid examination to ask the witnesses something. Colden's clever interjection
here changed the subject, and Hamilton did not return to it,
wrapping up his cross examination shortly after the next three
witnesses were all fellow borders at the rings. The first
said she had not seen any relationship between Levi and Elma,

(23:42):
the second said he had, and the third, Richard Croucher,
shocked the court by declaring that he had not only
seen Levi spend two nights in Elma's room, but quote
once too, at a time when they were less cautious
than usual. I saw them in a very intimate situation.

(24:04):
Unlike the previous witnesses, who had only insinuated or guessed
at a romantic relationship between Levi and Alma, Croucher had
actually seen it. But Hamilton had some questions about Croucher's credibility.
On cross he got Croucher to admit that he and
Levi had once argued and the argument had started over Elma.

(24:28):
Croucher said that he had once surprised Alma while running
up the stairs, and Alma had fainted. Levi appeared and
angrily declared that this was not the first time Croucher
had insulted Elma. Croucher in turn called Levi an impertinent puppy,
which is one of the sickest burns in history. So
Levi apologized to Croucher. Despite this run in, Croucher claimed

(24:51):
to bear Levi no malice, but added that I despise
every man who does not behave in character. After questioning
Croucher about his own where on the night of the
murder a birthday party, Croucher said Hamilton let him go.
Now that Colden had established a potential motive for Levi,
the desire to get rid of an unwonted lover, he

(25:12):
needed to establish opportunity. Levi had a relatively strong alibi
for the night of the disappearance. He had been at
his brother's house in the early evening, then returned to
the Ring house around eight pm. Thirty minutes later. He
had returned to his brother's house, according to the testimony
of Ezra, his wife, and his apprentice. The Rings next

(25:34):
saw him around ten pm. Assuming that the week's household
was being truthful, that gave Levi only thirty minutes to
kill Elma, who had been at the Ring House until
at least eight, and put her body in the well.
How could he have pulled it off? Colden had a
theory about that, and it involved a sleigh he now

(25:55):
called Susannah Broad to the stand. Missus Brod was an
elderly woman who lived across the street from Ezra Weeks.
She testified that on the night of Elma's disappearance, she
had heard a gate open and a sleigh come out.
The sleigh, unusually had no bells. Bells were a crucial

(26:19):
safety device, giving pedestrians warning to get out of the way,
so a sleigh traveling without them caught her attention. Why
was the sleigh trying to hide? The relevance of Broad's
testimony soon became clear with his subsequent witnesses, who all
testified to seeing a sleigh similar in appearance to Zbres

(26:40):
near Greenwitch Street, where the Ring Boarding House was, and
then traveling up Broadway in the direction of the Manhattan Well.
Colden painted a picture of how Levi could have committed
the crime. By borrowing his brother's sleigh. Levi could have
traveled back to Greenwitch Street, picked up Elma, and traveled
to the well relatively quickly. In fact, Colden had timed

(27:04):
it in a thoroughly CSI sounding move. He'd hired a
man to drive a horse from the Ring House to
the Manhattan Well and then to Ezra's house. The man
reported back that he had made the trip in only
fifteen minutes, without going faster than a trot. With both
motive and opportunity now established, Colden began introducing witnesses who

(27:26):
lived near the Manhattan Well. Several of these witnesses had
heard a woman crying out on that December night. Altogether,
Colden had called nearly twenty witnesses. It was one thirty am,
and he hadn't yet rested his case. The crowd was exhausted.

(27:48):
Most of them had expected a traditionally speedy trial. The
average length of a murder case in England at the
time was only thirty minutes. The defense called for an adjournment.
Judge Lancing wanted to continue, but the jurors, who had
now been watching proceedings for more than fifteen hours, needed
a break. Lancing agreed to the adjournment, but he wasn't

(28:11):
about to let the jurors go home where they could
be influenced by friends, family, and public opinion. He ordered
that they be sequestered or kept away from the public. Unfortunately,
at one point thirty in the morning, no inn in
the city was open to new customers, so the jurors
were taken to the second floor of City Hall, where

(28:31):
they passed an uncomfortable night in the drafty portrait Hall,
huddled on the cold floor. At ten am the next morning,
the trial resumed. After several more witnesses, Colden wrapped up
his case by addressing what he was sure was a
pressing concern for the jury, the circumstantial nature of the case.

(28:52):
Colden had no witness who could definitively place Levi and
Elma together after eight pm on the night of Elma's disappearance,
no smoking gun. But citing John Morgan's influential book Essays
upon the Law of Evidence, Colden argued that circumstantial evidence
could be just as, if not more powerful, than eyewitness testimony.

(29:16):
A positive allegation, he read aloud, maybe founded in mistake
or what is too common in the perjury of the witness.
But circumstances can't not lie brick by testimonial brick, Colden
had painstakingly built up a circumstantial wall of guilt around
Levi Weeks. Now it was up to the defense to

(29:39):
try to knock it down, and to do that they
had a very special weapon of their sleeve, a witness
with the secret to share. Aaron Burr now rose to
deliver the defense's opening argument methodically. He broke down the

(30:00):
prosecution's case, promising the jurors that the defense would rebut
Colden's arguments on every point in a case, depending on
a chain of circumstances. Burr said, all the fabric must
hang together or the whole must tumble down. The prosecution's
case was based on assumptions, Burr's opening implied, and all

(30:22):
of those assumptions were about to be challenged. Assumption number one,
Levi Weeks had taken a sleigh from his brother's home
on the night of the murder. The defense had actually
gone a long way towards disproving this assumption during the
prosecution's own case. The lynchpin of Colden's argument was the
testimony of Susannah broad Ezra Weeks's neighbor, who said she

(30:46):
had seen a sleigh furtively slip out of Weeks's yard
on the night in question. Without this evidence of Levi
having access to a sleigh, the testimony of the other
witnesses to a sleigh driving from Greenwich Street up Broadway
were irrelevant and on cross Hamilton had raised serious questions
about Susannah Brod's memory. Question when was this? What month

(31:10):
was it? Answer? I don't know the month I know
it was. So question was it after Christmas or before Christmas? Answer?
It was after I believe it was in January. Question
that you are sure of it was in January? You say?
Answer yes, I am sure it was in January. The

(31:32):
night in question was December twenty second. So Susannah Brod's
testimony was suspect and there was about to be another
blow to Colden's sleigh theory. The defense called Demus Mead
to the stand. Demus Mead was Ezra Weeks's apprentice. He

(31:52):
lived with the Week's family, and, among other duties, was
tasked with looking after Ezra's horse and sleigh. On December
twenty second, he was certain that he had locked the
gate around seven thirty pm and then put the key
on either the mantelpiece of the room he slept in
or in his pocket, just as he did every night.
Unlike Susannah Broad, he was a confident and reliable witness.

(32:16):
When a juror asked him, was this a weekday or
a Sunday, Demas quickly and correctly answered on Sunday. Further,
he testified that the horse's harness had bells tied to it,
that those bells would take some time to remove, and
that setting up the horse and the sleigh for a
journey took some ten to fifteen minutes. It was looking

(32:39):
less and less likely that Levi Weeks could have taken
his brother's sleigh, leaving him with little opportunity to commit
the murder. One assumption down on to the next. When
Levi Weeks was arrested, he had asked if Elma had
been found in the Manhattan well, but no one in
the arresting party had mentioned the well. Assumption number two,

(33:02):
Levi Weeks had no way of knowing the body's location
besides being the murderer. The next defense witness would put
this assumption to rest. Loreena Forrest, a neighbor of Levi
Weeks who ran a grocery store with her husband, testified
that at one o'clock on January Tewod, the day Alma's
body was found, Levi had visited her store. Missus Forrest

(33:26):
had updated him on something she'd just heard from Missus Ring.
Alma's muff had been found in a well near Bayard's Lane.
An hour later, Levi went to lunch at Ezra's house
and shared this news with his brother. Ezra testified that
upon hearing this, he'd told Levi, I suppose it must
be Manhattan well. Thus, when Levi was arrested later that afternoon,

(33:51):
his question of is it the Manhattan well she was
found in? Was not a slip of the tongue, an
inadvertent admission of guilt, but a natural follow up to
the information he had heard earlier in the day. Two
assumptions down, Now it was time for the big one,

(34:14):
the foundation upon which months of gossip news and the
very trial itself were based. Assumption number three, Levi Weeks
and Elma Sands were romantically involved, giving him motive to
murder her. For the prosecution, Cadwalader Colden had elicited testimony

(34:35):
from Eli and Catherine Ring about a romantic relationship between
Levi and Elma. In Cross examining the Rings, Hamilton hadn't
achieved much in shaking them from their stories, but he had,
if you'll remember, asked them strange questions about their neighbor,
Joseph Watkins and his house. And now the defense was

(34:56):
calling Joseph Watkins to the stand. Watkins had been among
the party who helped recover Elma's body from the well,
but the story of the discovery had been thoroughly covered
by the prosecution. What could he add now, Hamilton dove
right in. Do you remember anything in the conduct of
mister Ring that led you to suspicions of improper conduct

(35:20):
between him and Elma? He asked, shock rippled through the courtroom.
Mister Ring Eli Elma's landlord, who had testified only the
day before to hearing a couple in an empty room
and finding Elma's discarded clothing there in the morning, that
mister Ring Yes, him and Watkins had in fact noticed

(35:46):
many things in mister Ring's conduct to make him suspicious. Namely,
in the middle of September, when Catherine Ring had been
away in the country, he had heard noise coming through
his bedroom wall, a wall shared per Catherine Ring's own
testimony with Elma's bedroom. He heard the sound of a

(36:07):
bed moving. The noise was so loud and lasted so
long that it woke him up. He heard a woman's voice.
He heard a man's voice, and this man's voice he
was certain was not Levi Weeks's. Levi had a low,
soft pitched voice. Eli Ring, by contrast, had a high

(36:30):
pitched voice. Joseph turned to his wife on that September
night and said, it is Ring's voice that girl will
be ruined. He heard the same noises at least eight times,
possibly more, throughout September and October. Then at the same
time that Catherine Ring returned to the city, the noises stopped.

(36:55):
Watkins's testimony was stunning. The entire foundation that the prosecution's
case of the public suspicion was a supposed relationship between
Elma and Levi. But what if that relationship never existed.
What if Elma had instead, or additionally been engaged in
an affair with Eli Ring. This revelation might seem like

(37:19):
it served the prosecution. Jealousy of Elma's relationship with Eli
Ring could have given Levi a stronger motive to kill Elma.
But watkins testimony benefited the defense even more because it
discredited the Rings. Their testimony had been key to establishing
the relationship between Levi and Alma, but now it seemed

(37:41):
that they might have had ulterior motives. The rest of
Watkins's testimony and that of his daughter, who also testified,
further complicated the prosecution narrative. During their testimony, Eli and
Catherine Ring had implied that they had suspected Levi from
the moment of Elma's desay disappearance, but the watkinsons both

(38:03):
said that the couple had had nothing but good things
to say about Levi and had never mentioned a relationship
between Levi and Elma up until the inquest. That was
the Rings weren't even the ones who had first drawn
attention to Levi as a suspect. It turned out that
dubious honor went to someone else, Richard Croucher. Croucher was

(38:29):
the same tenant who had once gotten into a fight
with Levi and called him an impertinent puppy. A British
immigrant and cloth merchant, Croucher had a poor reputation with
his neighbors given his habit of dropping by unannounced at
meal times and overseeing his welcome but his behavior after
Elma's disappearance had been particularly galling. A neighbor named Hugh

(38:52):
McDougall testified that on the day Alma's body was found,
Croucher was quote extremely busy among the crew to spread
improper insinuations and prejudices against the prisoner who was then taken.
Croucher didn't stop there, dropping by McDougall's house a week
before the trial and telling McDougall, quote, the thing has
all come out, the thing is settled. There is point

(39:14):
blank proof, to which MacDougall replied that he quote thought
it wrong and highly improper that Croucher should persecute Weeks
in such a manner when he had a difference with him,
that for my own part, I wanted some further evidence
before I should condemn the man. Croucher's crusade was not
limited to McDougall. Several shopkeepers now testified to bizarre incidents

(39:38):
where Croucher walked into their stores, announced that Levi Weeks
was guilty, and then walked out without buying anything. His
sole purpose, it seemed, was to turn the public against
Leevi Weeks, and the Rings had been fully complicit in
this campaign. Further, defense witnesses confirmed what the Watkinsons has

(39:59):
said that despite the Rings claiming to have immediately suspected
Levi of murdering Elma, the couple had both spoken warmly
about Levi's comforting presence in the days after her disappearance,
and further that Eli Ring had organized a search of
the waterfront believing that Alma had committed suicide, But only

(40:19):
weeks later, Eli Ring was heard saying that if he
encountered Levi weeks in a dark alley, he wouldn't hesitate
to shoot him. So certain was he of Levi's guilt.
What had caused this abrupt about face? Again, Joseph Watkins
provided an answer. The only person besides his wife that

(40:40):
he had told of the possible affair between Eli Ring
and Alma Sans he revealed, was Richard Croucher, and he
had told Croucher about it at the inquest, the event
after which the Rings had suddenly begun accusing Levi. Could
Croucher have blackmailed Eli Ring into pinning the blame on

(41:00):
Levi weeks by threatening to reveal his affair, But why
would Croucher want to do this? He didn't like Levi?
Sure but that seemed like a thin reason to accuse
a man of murder. Why was he so desperate for someone,
anyone to take the blame for the crime. After all,

(41:21):
he had a strong alibi for the night of the murder,
a birthday party at one Anne Ashmore's house. The defense
didn't have any real dirt on Croucher, but his suspicious
behavior and the shocking evidence about the rings were certainly
damaging to the prosecution case, and that was on top
of all of the other gaps beginning to appear in

(41:41):
Colton's assumptions. Satisfied that they had done enough, the defense
rested with Burr reading a quote from Matthew Hale's foundational
legal text History of the Pleas of the Crown, to
conclude quote, In some cases, presumptive evidences go far to
prove a person guilty, though there be no express proof

(42:02):
of the fact to be committed by him. But then
it must be warily pressed, for it is better that
five guilty persons should escape unpunished than one innocent man
should die. It was now two thirty am. The jury,
running on a poor night's sleep and forced to focus
for more than sixteen hours, were exhausted so too was

(42:26):
kudwalad Or Coldon, who stated that he had not slept
in forty four hours and begged for an adjournment before
closing arguments, but Judge Lancing refused, saying that the jurors
could not be made to sleep another night in city Hall.
The defense quickly chimed in, saying that they were happy
to forego closing arguments and begin jury deliberations right away.

(42:48):
Judge Lancing agreed no closing arguments would be made. It
was a blow to Coldon he had no real chance
to rebut the defense case and what came next would
be worse. Judge Lancing now instructed the jury on their
duty quote to find the prisoner guilty if in their
consciences they believed him so from the evidence, and to

(43:11):
acquit him if they thought him innocent. He didn't talk
about the concept of beyond a reasonable doubt, which most
of us are familiar with today. This was a relatively
new legal idea at the time, which had only just
begun to appear in trials, but the idea of innocent
until proven guilty was well established. Legal authorities of the

(43:33):
time constantly stressed the same point that Burr had made
earlier it was better to find a guilty man innocent
than sentence an innocent man to death, which might explain
Judge Lancing's shocking final declaration to the jurors. In the
opinion of the court, he said the proof was insufficient
to warrant a verdict against the prisoner. From his seat,

(43:55):
Colden could only pray that the jury disagreed. He wouldn't
have to wait long time to find out. The jury
filed out, only to return less than five minutes later
with a verdict. In the case of the murder of
Elma Sands, they declared Levi Weeks was found not guilty.

(44:21):
The not guilty verdict came as a shock to many
New Yorkers, but the newspapers, who only days earlier had
been calling for Levi's execution, quickly changed their tune after
the verdict came down by evidence of the facts alone.
When an article in the New York Daily Advertiser on
April second, is this young man's innocence completely established. Not

(44:45):
a single doubt remains on the minds of any person
who was president at the trial, and soon even those
New Yorkers who hadn't managed to cram into the courtroom
could experience the trial for themselves because an unprecedented publication
was about to hit the shelves. On April fourteenth, a
ninety nine page pamphlet went on sale called A Report

(45:08):
of the Trial of Levi Weeks on an Indictment for
the Murder of Julielma SAMs on Monday, the thirty first
day of March and Tuesday, the first day of April
eighteen hundred, taken in shorthand by a clerk of the court.
Despite its less than catchy title, the pamphlet was a hit,
mainly because of its revolutionary contents. For the first time

(45:29):
in US history, a full transcript of a murder trial
had been published. William Coleman, the court clerk, had captured
the trial in vivid detail, including not just the words
spoken by the lawyers, but their actions too. When Lin
Manuel Miranda described Levi Weeks's trial as the first murder

(45:50):
trial in Hamilton, he was only slightly off. Levi Weeks's
trial was not the first murder trial, but it is
the first fully documented murder tree in American history. Never
before had such a complete account been captured and published.
There were two innovations that allowed for this new kind
of text. The first was the rise of shorthand, a

(46:13):
system of coded writing that allows users to quickly and
accurately capture dialogue as it happens. The second was the
rise of the adversarial trial system. In previous centuries, when
trials lasted only a matter of minutes and rarely involved
much testimony or conflict, a transcript would have been pretty boring.

(46:35):
But now drama was baked into the judicial process itself,
guaranteeing a riveting read. The transcript is also an invaluable
historical and legal resource. In eighteen hundred, America was still
in its infancy, and so were its institutions. The legal
system was still clumsily defining itself. You can see that

(46:58):
throughout the transcript, when Colden struggles to find legal precedents
to admit hearsay, when the jurors jump in to ask questions,
when the court is completely unprepared for a trial lasting
two dates. These problems weren't unique to America. In Britain, too,
the legal system had been radically changing in the past decades.

(47:20):
On both sides of the Atlantic. The trial process was
evolving into the adversarial system we know today lawyers became
more important to the trial process, the rights the defendant changed,
and so did the role of the judge. The transcript
of the trial of Levi Weeks let's us see these
changes in action, transporting us into the moment where our

(47:41):
modern trial system was born. It also lets us discover
surprising similarities between early nineteenth century Americans and ourselves. The
public's obsession with the Levi Week's case feels familiar. A
beautiful young woman killed in mysterious circumstances, perhaps by the
man she loved, is a classic of the true crime genre.

(48:05):
Writing about this cultural obsession, which is commonly called the
dead girl trope, the author Alex Segura describes an archetypal
TV example. The camera pans to capture the victim's face
for the first time. A young, beautiful, virginal woman slight
superficial wounds on her angelic, sleepy face. This is almost

(48:27):
exactly the scene that a pedestrian walking along Granite Street
in eighteen hundred would have seen when they stumbled upon
Elma Sands's displayed body. The film writer Meg Shields, exploring
how this trend dehumanizes victims, writes, the beautiful, young dead
girl is not allowed to exist as a complex, three

(48:49):
dimensional person with flaws, sins, and jagged edges. Instead, especially
in America, she's held up as a symbol DuJour of
innocence lost. This narrative is identical to the one that
played out at Elma's trial, with the prosecutor describing Elma
in his opening as a young girl who till her

(49:09):
fatal acquaintance with the prisoner was virtuous and modest. Burr
didn't cite the dead girl trope in his opening, obviously,
but he came close, describing how the public's obsession with
the case led to Levi's prosecution. We have witnessed the
extraordinary means which have been adopted to inflame public passions

(49:30):
and to direct the fury of popular resentment against the prisoner.
Why has the body been exposed for days in the
public streets in a manner the most indecent and shocking
to attract the curiosity and arouse the feelings of numberless spectators.
Such dreadful scenes speak powerfully to the passions. They petrify

(49:50):
the mind with horror, congeal the blood within our veins,
and excite the human bosom with irresistible but undefinable emotions.
As Burr's speech reminds us, tropes don't just exist in
books are on TV. They are derived from real cultural
trends and to have real life consequences. So let's step

(50:12):
back from the theoretical and return to the real people
at the heart of this trial. What were the consequences
for them? First up, Levi Weeks. Despite being found not guilty,
Levi knew that people were still suspicious of him, and
after several years he left New York, first for his parents'

(50:35):
home in Massachusetts. Finding small town life there too sleepy,
he headed next to Natchez, the capital of the Mississippi Territory.
A booming frontier town, it was the perfect place for
Levi to reinvent himself. Drawing on the carpentry and contracting
skills he had learned from Ezra, Levi became an architect.

(50:56):
His first client was a good friend of Aaron Burr's,
for whom Levi built a mansion called Auburn, which today
is on the National Registry of Historic Places. Levi married
and had four children before dying in eighteen nineteen. Ezra
Weeks continued to prosper as a developer. In the years
after the trial. Cadwalader Colden, despite his failure to secure

(51:19):
a conviction, also found success after returning to private practice.
He became the Mayor of New York City in eighteen eighteen.
William Coleman, the court clerk, became famous as the editor
of the New York Evening Post. Brockholst Livingston, the third
defense attorney, went on to be appointed to the Supreme

(51:39):
Court by President Thomas Jefferson, serving from eighteen oh seven
to eighteen twenty three. But not everyone involved in the
trial had such a happy ending. Judge John Lansing, despite
a long career on the New York Supreme Court, is
today best remembered for his mysterious disappearance. On December twelfth,

(52:01):
eighteen twenty nine, Lansing left his hotel room in Manhattan
to mail a letter and was never seen again. The
case is still unsolved. The rumours sworld that Lancing had
been killed by political opponents. Eli Ring, saddled with a
boarding house best known for hosting a murder victim whom
he may have had an affair with, lost his house

(52:23):
within a year of the trial. He soon went bankrupt
and turned to alcohol. He was kicked out by the
Quakers for his excessive drinking. In disgrace, Eli moved his
family to Alabama, but his new start in the South
did not go as smoothly as Levi's had. He ended
up dying of yellow fever. Catherine moved her surviving family

(52:43):
members to upstate New York, where they lived in relative
anonymity for the rest of their lives. And of course
there's the tragic fate of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton,
which we'll come back to in a minute. What about
the well? The Manhattan well are been largely out of
use by eighteen hundred, and after the murder, it was

(53:04):
completely abandoned. Lisbernard's Meadow was soon developed and built over,
and for the next two hundred years the wells location
was forgotten and then rediscovered several times. Today, a clothing
store rests on the remains of the well at one
hundred and twenty nine Spring Street in New York City.
The Manhattan Company survived much longer than its first, ill

(53:26):
fated well. You're likely familiar with its modern incarnation, JP
Morgan Chase, or as it was once known, Chase Manhattan Bank.
There is of course, no closure for one trial participant.
We still don't know who killed Elma sans we likely
never will, but theories are out there, and there's one

(53:48):
advanced by Paul Collins that I think deserves particular attention.
Remember Richard Croucher, the meddling boarding house resident who was
so involved in spreading accusations against Levi in the trial.

(54:12):
The defense hadn't tried to explain why Croucher had accused Levi,
or even put Croucher forward as a suspect. After all,
he had an alibi for the night of Elma's disappearance,
or did he. The birthday party Croucher claimed to be
at that night was hosted by Anne Ashmore, who it

(54:33):
turns out, ran a brandy distillery out of her house.
The parties she hosted there were notoriously drunken affairs. In fact,
at the trial, fellow attendees at the party couldn't even
consistently remember what day of the month they were supposed
to have seen Croucher at the party. A shaky alibi
doesn't imply guilt, of course, but there's more. Unbeknownst to

(54:58):
any of his New York City acquaintances. Croucher's testimony at
Levi's trial wasn't his first appearance in a courtroom. In
seventeen ninety seven, in his home country of England, Croucher
had appeared at the Old Bailey, this time as a
defendant accused of stealing a pair of boots. At his trial,

(55:18):
neighbors testified that Croucher, though once a respectable merchant, now
behaved so erratically and violently that he was widely known
as Mad Croucher. Due to his abuse, his wife and
daughters had received an order of protection against him. He
once threatened to shoot a neighbor. Drinking seemed to trigger

(55:39):
his rages, which was unfortunate because he drank heavily and often.
Croucher was found not guilty of the theft, but his
reputation was clearly damaged by the testimony, and he fled
to America, where he eventually washed up on the steps
of Eli and Catherine Rayne's boarding house, and three weeks
after the week's verdict, Crowchu with lapse into his old

(56:01):
despicable ways and commit a horrible crime. On April twenty third,
Croucher lured Margaret Miller, his thirteen year old stepdaughter, from
his second marriage into his room at the Ring House
on the pretense of needing her help to clean it.
Once he had Margaret in the room, he seized her
and threatened if you scream, I will kill you. Say

(56:25):
he brutally raped her. Margaret was so badly hurt that
she could barely walk home the next day. The abuse
continued for weeks. Two months later, Richard Croucher was back
in the court room at City Hall, charged with rape.
In an eerie echo of the week's trial, the prosecutor
was Cadwalat or Colden and the defense attorney was Brockholst

(56:47):
to Livingstone, but this time, aided by the brave testimony
of Margaret Miller, and despite Livingstone's disgusting efforts to portray
the thirteen year old victim as an eager and consenting party,
prevailed and Richard Croucher was sentenced to a life of
hard labor. He got out only three years later after

(57:07):
a pardon from the governor on the condition that he
left the country. Croucher, of course did not obey, and
instead snuck off to Virginia, where he resumed a life
of crime. His exact fate is unknown, but one of Alexander.
Hamilton's sons recorded that Croucher did eventually return to England, where, unsurprisingly,
he met his end on the gallows, executed for yet

(57:30):
another heinous crime. So Richard Croucher had no real alibi
for the night of Elma's disappearance. He had a pattern
of violent behavior, particularly against women, and he for some
reason seemed dead set on pinning Elma's murder on Levi.
Of course, this case against Richard Croucher is just as

(57:52):
circumstantial as the one against Levi Weeks. We will likely
never find out what happened to Elma Sands that night
at the Manhattan Well, never know the full story of
her short life and tragic death. But thanks to court
William Coleman, we know what happened at the trial of
Levi Weeks, giving us an amazing window into justice in

(58:12):
early America. That's the story of the people v Levi Weeks.
Stay with me after the break for a little more
on Hamilton Burr and the strange practice of socially sanctioned murder.
While we will never know for certain whether or not

(58:34):
Levi Weeks was a murderer, there is no doubt that
several once and future killers were present in the courtroom
during his trial, and I'm not just talking about Richard Croucher.
One of the strangest facts about this case is how
many of the lawyers and court officials involved killed people
in the years before and after the trial. Most obviously,

(58:57):
there's Aaron Burr. Four years after Levi Weeks's trial, Burr
and Alexander Hamilton faced one another pistols in hand, on
the banks of the Hudson River in Weehawken, New Jersey.
Despite their excellent teamwork on the week's trial, the animosity
between the two men had only grown, and they had
finally decided to settle their differences via duel. It would

(59:21):
prove tragic for both men. Burr fatally shot Hamilton, killing
not just his enemy but also his own reputation in
the process. And Burr was not the only one with
a dueling death on his conscience. In seventeen ninety nine,
Brockholst Livingston made a joke about a political rival, James Jones,
in a newspaper editorial. Jones responded by physically attacking Livingston

(59:46):
in the street while he was walking with his wife
and children. Livingstone challenged Jones to a duel and killed
him with a single shot. Livingston was not arrested. Court
clerk William Coleman also killed someon in a duel. In
early eighteen oh four, he shot the New York Harbor
Master Captain Jeremiah Thompson in a duel held in the

(01:00:07):
middle of a snowstorm. In the minds of most early Americans,
these deaths were not truly murders. Dueling was extremely common
at the time. The historian Joanne Freeman, who was written
extensively on the role of violence in American politics, records
at least ten other duels taking place near New York
City just in the time period around the Burr Hamilton duel.

(01:00:31):
Duels were used to resolve personal grievances, political squabbles, matters
of honor, and more. Certain words alone were enough to
spark a duel. Words like rascal, scoundrel, or even puppy,
the insult Richard Croucher had used on Levi Weeks seriously.
Several major duels were fought over men calling each other puppies.

(01:00:53):
There are some obvious differences between duels and the murder
of Elma Sans, of course. Elma was an unwitting victim
not a willing participant. But to my mind, the line
drawn between these dueling deaths and other crimes is a
blurry one. How do we determine when it's acceptable to
take a life? For many Americans, the answer to that

(01:01:14):
question would change after the bur Hamilton duel. The public
was outraged and horrified over the senseless loss of life.
The pall of the killing would haunt bur for the
rest of his life, and though he was vice president
at the time, he would never achieve his long hoped
for dream of the presidency. He died in eighteen thirty six,

(01:01:36):
broke and alone. However, dueling would not disappear from American
culture permanently. It would take the traumatizing bloodshed of the
Civil War for the public appetite for dueling to finally wane. Today,
dueling is illegal in most US states and prosecuted as
murder or assault, but in early New York it was

(01:01:56):
not uncommon to find an alleged murder being defended in
court by a confirmed killer. Thank you for listening to
History on Trial. The main sources for this episode were
William Coleman's trial transcript and Paul Collins's book Duel with
the Devil, The true story of how Alexander Hamilton and

(01:02:17):
Aaron Burr teamed up to take on America's first sensational
murder mystery. For a full bibliography, as well as a
transcript of this episode with citations, please visit our website
History on Trial podcast dot com. History on Trial is

(01:02:37):
written and hosted by me Mira Hayward. The show is
edited and produced by Jesse Funk, with supervising producer Trevor
Young and executive producers Dana Schwartz, Alexander Williams, Matt Frederick,
and Mira Hayward. Learn more about the show at History
on Trial podcast dot com and follow us on Instagram

(01:02:58):
at History on Trial and on Twitter at Underscore History
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