Duel with the Devil (10 page)

Is she with child?
a juror called out.

It was the kind of question that haunted the entire field of medical jurisprudence. Criminal forensics scarcely existed yet: The
first two books in English on the subject, barely adding up to two hundred generously margined pages, had only just been issued in the past few years. But both were overwhelmingly about infanticide and abortion, a subject that all too often verged into death for the mother as well. “
It is murder in fact,” insisted one text, “and often a complicated crime of murder and suicide.”

Even among those intending no suicide at all, resorting to abortifacients like oil of tansy sometimes led to poisonings; doctors dissecting these perished women duly recorded irritated stomach linings, doughy and flaccid uteruses, and the unmistakable herbal aroma of
tansy wafting over the room as the corpses were opened up. Other women, who instead chanced piercing a fetus with a crochet hook, ran even more serious risks from hemorrhage and peritonitis. Medical texts insisted such women could not claim rape as an excuse for having risked the procedure: Pregnancy was seen as
a proof of willingness, for a number of doctors persisted in
believing that a rape could not produce a child. Other jurists and doctors, perhaps wiser in the ways of the world, had long and
pointedly disagreed with this notion.

But whether Miss Sands had kept her virginity, and willingly or not, was not of particular concern to Dr. Prince and Dr. McIntosh. The
signs of virginity that their texts relied upon had been obliterated by long immersion in water. Yet the presence of a fetus could suggest a clear motive, either for suicide by the mother or murder by the father. It might explain her death away with a single line in the coroner’s rolls. And so Dr. McIntosh carefully sliced into the uterus, opening it to the unsteady light of his laboratory’s lanterns and windows. He was looking for a white and pink pulpy mass inside, a sign of life sometimes scarcely identifiable to the untrained eye. The jury stared intently at the body on the table as the two doctors examined and then puzzled over what they found.

The mystery of Elma’s death, it seemed, was about to deepen.

“
A report prevailed injurious to her honor,” the new editor of
Greenleaf’s New Daily Advertiser
reported dryly of the autopsy. “For the satisfaction of lovers of virtue it is mentioned that this appeared totally groundless.”

So there was no fetus. But if seduction was not the reason behind her death, then what was? As prisoners and their keepers alike warmed themselves with rum against another freezing evening, the coroner’s jury solemnly departed from the almshouse. Elma’s family and neighbors at last received the coroner’s assessment.

“
A verdict of
WILFUL MURDER
,” one newspaper printed, “by some person or persons as yet unknown.”

T
HE WAGON MADE ITS WAY WESTWARD TOWARD
G
REENWICH
Street, the jostle of each rut and cobble passing unnoticed through the lifeless body of its passenger. For anyone who watched it roll by, the body laid out inside was well-known indeed—and the identity of her killer was no mystery at all.

HORRID MURDER
! announced one paper,
BY HANDS OF A LOVER
!

The story ricocheted across the city, and then beyond the mere bounds of the island in outbound carriages and mail; in a matter of days it would be up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Elma Sands seized the imagination of writers, who conjured a forbidden romance: The beautiful young girl dressed in bridal clothes, taken by a fatal love into the fields beyond the snowy streets of the city; the muff, found floating in the water by an innocent child and given as a gift; the body, hidden mere feet beneath Lispenard’s Meadow, suspended in the cold and dark well that was to have brought new life to New York.

“
She was that evening to be privately married to Mr. Weeks,”
Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser
breathlessly related to Philadelphians. “The young Lady dressed as a bride; but alas! Little did she expect, that the arrangements she had been making with so much care, instead of conveying her to the Temple of Hymen, would direct her ‘to pass that bourne, from which no traveller returns.’ ”

Levi had been wise to surrender to the constable; had the young carpenter sought refuge in his brother’s home, the place might have come as near to being torn down by crowds as Mrs. Murphy’s house
had the summer before. “
The city,” one local judge warned a relative in Albany, “is much agitated.” So agitated, in fact, that one of the great writers of the Revolution, Philip Freneau, was moved to write something that in recent days only the death of George Washington had coaxed from other Americans: tragic poetry.

But now her body was being moved more gently among the mourning men and women of the boardinghouse. The front door of 208 Greenwich, still creaking unevenly, groaned open: Her coffin bearers carried her in and set the body down upon the cold plank floors. Elias Ring and Richard Croucher
gazed at the cold and ashen features that would not be hidden beneath a nailed-down wooden lid for another two days. The warm glow of lantern light in the sitting room hinted at the life that she had left behind—the living presence that had disappeared just thirteen days before through that very same front door.

Elma had finally come home.

A
STRANGE
business to be attending to, a murder mystery: strange, at least, along the mercantile stretch of brokers and brick stables in the neighborhood. Before Cadwallader Colden had set up
offices at 47 Wall Street, the
building had served as a coffee merchant. On one side of his office was
a shop selling hogsheads of rum and porter. On
the other side, Major Leonard
Bleecker—a distinguished patriot who’d witnessed Cornwallis surrendering at Yorktown—was busily opening a stockbroker office.

Amid the bustle of old soldiers and new business, Colden cut a curious figure. The namesake grandson of a much-respected but Loyalist former governor, and scarcely seven years old when the Revolution broke out, Cadwallader had been spirited off to London for his education; upon his return, he’d wisely dispensed with the old man’s politics, but kept the elder Colden’s scientific and philosophical curiosity. At the founding meeting of the
local Tammany Society—a salon that Aaron Burr was now commandeering into a political brotherhood—the young Colden had raised a startling question for the debate portion of the evening. Were people, he wondered, inherently barbaric or noble?

“Is there implanted in the human breast by the Supreme Being,” he wondered aloud, “such a thing as
innate affection
?”

Colden’s job of late had certainly given him reason to consider the alternate possibility of innate depravity. His law practice, first
set up a few years earlier, had involved fairly ordinary jobs of conveyancing and notarizing. But soon the new attorney shared office space with the attorney general—his own brother-in-law—and when the post of assistant attorney general came up in 1798,
young Cadwallader got the nod. Instead of scrutinizing property lines and wills, he was now confronted with prosecuting every variety of thieving, banditry, dishonesty, and depravity that New Yorkers could offer.

They had certainly kept him busy that winter. After some “tolerably well executed”
counterfeit ten-dollar notes had been found in circulation—the coarser quality of the paper was the tip-off—forgers had raised the stakes by circulating genuine
five-dollar bills altered to look like twenties. Some miscreants preferred acquiring goods without any cash at all; a respectable-looking
shoplifting duo had been hitting fabric merchants along Pearl Street, usually by entering shops separately at nightfall, with one man distracting the merchant while the other stuffed chintz and cambric under his cloak. When the two were finally seized—they made the mistake
of hitting the same store twice in one week—they proved to be an
incorrigible pair known as Rap and Baker.

Others were harder to catch: A swindler named
Jacob Weiser had been making the rounds, leaving his marks sputtering that he was “a monster in human form.” The pugnacious French proprietor of the finest bookshop on Broadway promised a five-dollar bounty for “
the damn’d villain guilty of the theft … of a double-barrelled
GUN
” from behind his counter. Even Brockholst Livingston paused from arguing cases to
advertise a reward for over $1,200 worth of stock certificates that he had stashed in a trunk of clothes—a trunk which, alas, was then burgled from a house in Brooklyn.

It was the murder cases, though, that haunted Colden. Days before he and Livingston had faced off over the libel claim against David Frothingham, there’d been another legal battle between the lawyer and the attorney general’s office—this one over what anyone would once have assumed to be the most appalling homicide case of the winter. In that same courtroom in City Hall, a bewildered-looking Portuguese immigrant was brought shuffling up to the docket, under the gaze of an
immense crowd that filled the court and street outside to watch him. John Pastano, the jury was informed, had been a boarder in the home of Benjamin and Mary Castro, a pair of Portuguese cigar makers, only a few blocks away at 190 William Street. The two had taken him in for free, pitying their penniless fellow countryman. His time there went reasonably well, at first; thanks to the recommendation of a local pastor, the young man was set up in a job with a Broadway wine merchant. But soon Pastano got it into his head that Mr. and Mrs. Castro were whispering things about him, bad things—that he was a thief, a robber, that he was no good. He yelled at the frightened couple over dinner, where their denials only enraged him more: He
knew
they were out to get him.

At about three o’clock on the afternoon of October 1, 1799, while Mr. Castro was out of the house, John Pastano crept up behind Mrs. Castro in her kitchen and stabbed her three times in the neck.

The case seemed a straightforward one: The prosecutor brought
forward just four witnesses and read Sir William Blackstone’s definition of murder to the jury. Livingston tried rather harder: Because Pastano spoke little English, the attorney had as an interpreter Rabbi Seixas, himself the native-born son of a Portuguese family. Like Livingston, Rabbi Seixas carried the quiet advantage of being
considered a great patriot—one so dedicated that he’d moved his entire synagogue out of occupied Manhattan and down to rebel-held Philadelphia for the Revolution. For witnesses, Livingston called a respectable merchant and a local priest; both testified that Pastano behaved erratically. The man, Livingston argued, could not be held responsible for his actions.

The jury deliberated for just minutes—so quickly, in fact, that they did not even leave their benches:
guilty
. In the first week of January 1800, Cadwallader Colden could assure himself that Pastano was to die—to be hanged
that coming Tuesday, in fact—sentenced, in the judge’s declaration to the packed courtroom, to hanging and dissection.

Corpo pendurado
, Rabbi Seixas had patiently explained to the defendant.
Anatomização
.

And yet something unsettling remained about the notion of John Pastano as a willful murderer: the recollection, perhaps, that after murdering Mary Castro, he had filled his hat with her blood and wandered out into the street with it. When he was collared over by the Tea-Water Pump, broken English had spilled out from the man.

“Why you catch me?” he asked innocently. “Me not do it.”

H
AD
J
ANUARY
5, 1800, been a normal day, the morning’s gossip would have been about the
conflagration that Greenwich Street narrowly avoided the night before, after a servant had placed a scorching hot brick in her bed to warm herself against the bitter cold. But it was Elma that the neighbors thought of that Sunday. Her body had been on display in the boardinghouse the entire day; the house residents could hardly avoid her sightless stare even if they had wanted to. Nor, it seemed, could anybody else in the neighborhood:
Elias Ring had been simmering with anger, and steering passersby into the house to see what had been done to his cousin. Her
breasts, where chastely exposed, showed dark bruises.

“
Her fingers appear to have been scratched from the knuckles down,” one visitor observed. “There were many dislocations.”