Duel with the Devil (21 page)

And that, he recalled to the courtroom, was just what had brought him out to Lispenard’s Meadow on January 2, 1800.

“
I, together with Mr. Page, had some business to do in breaking
a horse, and we went up to Andrew Blanck’s,” he explained. “We dined there. Blanck insisted on it. While we were dining, two persons—Mr. Watkins and Mr. Elias Ring—came there to get hooks and poles to sound the Manhattan Well for the body of a young woman who was supposed to be drowned.

“We got the poles and nails,” he continued, “and went all together to the well, which we uncovered. Page took the pole first and said he thought he felt her; I took hold then and thought I felt her, too. I took the pole and hooked the nail in her clothes and drew her carefully up to the top of the water: As soon as Mr. Ring saw her calico gown, he said it was she, he knew the gown.”

In the dead silence of the courtroom, the crowd paused to envision the horrible sight—the men gathered around the snowy well, the body emerging from the darkness within—but Lent’s memory turned to their painstaking care in handling the young victim.

“I put a rope under her and drew her up gently. She slew’d around but there was not a thread of her clothes which touched either side of the well,” he explained. “We laid her on a plank, and she appeared in such a situation as if she had been murdered—”

“You are to tell what you
saw
,” snapped Hamilton. “Not what conclusion you made. That is for the jury.”

Lent, chastened, recalled just what he’d seen: namely, some scratches on her right hand and on her foot, “as if she had been dragged.” Except for her shoes, she’d been fully clothed, if disheveled.

“Did you examine her
body
?” the judge asked.

“I did not,” Lent said modestly. “The stockings, as far as could be seen without lifting up the petticoat, were whole and good.”

“Any bruises upon the face?”

“I do not recollect,” Lent hesitated. “There might have been.”

“Might you have injured the head with the pole?”

“Not at all,” he insisted. Even with all their tenderness, though, the body had been appalling to behold. “Her appearance was horrid enough—her hat and cap off, her hair hanging all over her head, her comb yet hanging in her hair—”

“Was she not a natural corpse?”

An old veteran like Lent knew all too well what both natural and violent deaths looked like—and yet this one was puzzling indeed.

“She looked as if she was asleep, seemingly,” he mused.

Amid all this, though, what struck Lent most was the extraordinary exclamation he’d heard when, accompanying a police officer, he’d tracked down Levi Weeks.

“He dropped his head,” he recalled, “and said, ‘Is it the Manhattan Well she was found in?’ ”

At this, the jurors leaned in carefully.

“Was there any mention made,” a juror interrupted, “of the Manhattan Well, in the presence of the prisoner,
before
he asked the question?”

One of the most damning and infamous public accusations against the young carpenter now hung in the courtroom, awaiting the horsebreaker’s reply.

“I did not hear any,” Lent said.

H
AVING MADE
some palpable hits on the defendant already, Colden was ready for his coup de grâce: the doctors. His first medical witness, Richard Skinner, possessed just the sort of theatrical flair that might impress a crowd; as the sort of fellow who would attire himself with
a gold watch from Paris, a walking stick, and a scarlet cloak, he immediately stood out.

Skinner, though, proved curiously demure regarding his qualifications.

“
Dr. Skinner,” the prosecutor began, “are you not a surgeon in this city, and did you not see the body of Elma Sands after it was taken out of the well? Pray, sir, inform the court and jury.”

“I follow a branch of surgery,” he replied, “but I do not pretend to be a professed surgeon.”

This was news to many in the crowd.
For years Skinner had been advertising himself in local papers as a surgeon, boasting that he was “the only operator in America that sets artificial eyes”; he
would also, in a pinch,
install artificial ears, noses, and legs. But the only actual training that Skinner would aver before a judge was rather different.

“
I am a dentist,” he explained.

Skinner had always been ambitious, though. As an unknown new arrival from London, he immediately tried
hitting up Benjamin Franklin for a twenty-dollar loan, and proceeded to make a name for himself by
picking a fight with George Washington’s dentist. And his sidelines in glass eyes and peg legs notwithstanding, Skinner had, in fact, built a respectable dental practice in the city,
selling gold teeth at four dollars apiece, hawking his own patented
dental tincture for a half guinea per bottle, and
yanking out teeth at four shillings apiece in his Partition Street office—or, for his more well-to-do customers, for seven shillings on a house call.

His heart, though, had always belonged to the finer arts of the scalpel and the saw.

“I
have
made the subject of surgery generally my study,” he added; and it was such medical curiosity that had brought him to the Ring boardinghouse in January. “I saw the corpse of the deceased twice.”

The first time he viewed Elma was in the dim, hushed interior of the Rings’ house, where she had been laid out; the next time was in broad daylight, when her coffin was thrown shockingly open to the multitudes on Greenwich Street.

“I had but a superficial view, though, as it lay in the coffin, exposed to the view of thousands,” Skinner said with some regret. “I examined such parts as were
come-at-able
, such as her head, neck, and breast. I discovered several bruises and scratches—particularly a bruise upon the forehead and chin, and upon the left breast or near it.”

Judge Lansing knew enough of medical testimony that he quickly halted the witness.

“How long was this after she was taken out of the water?” the judge inquired.

“I do not know,” Skinner admitted.

This was an awkward admission, and the prosecutor quickly moved his witness back to firmer ground.

“Will you describe those marks more particularly?” Colden asked.

“I think that the mark upon the neck had the appearance of a compression, but not by a rope or handkerchief. The appearance on the breast was about as large as the circumference of a dollar. It was a small bruise, but it was more difficult to examine than the other,” the dentist said, pausing delicately to explain. “There were a number of women present.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think it would,” Skinner eagerly agreed.

No further questions for this witness
, Colden announced triumphantly.

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

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

There was a confused silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I am,” the doctor replied plainly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But had anybody actually seen Levi do it?

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

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