Duel with the Devil (22 page)

In a carefully hidden murder, Colden reminded the jury, circumstantial evidence was not only warranted but vital—because the victim herself could not give any testimony.

“
The prejudice entertained against receiving circumstantial evidence is carried to a pitch wholly unreasonable,” he read from Morgan. “In such a case as this it must be received, because the nature of the inquiry, for the most part, does not admit of any other; and, consequently, it is the best evidence that can possibly be given.”

Far from being a weakness, he claimed, the circumstantial nature of his evidence was
more
damning to Levi Weeks than any eyewitness account.

“A concurrence of circumstances—properly authenticated, otherwise they weigh nothing—forms a stronger ground of belief than positive and direct testimony generally afford, especially when unconfirmed by circumstances,” the prosecutor continued reading aloud. “The reason of this is obvious: A positive allegation may be founded in mistake, or, what is too common, in the perjury of a witness.”

The prosecution was concluded, and the jurors would now almost certainly see the defense present a series of powerful alibis by powerful friends. And that, the assistant attorney general said, was just what Morgan and others were warning them of. Colden carefully enunciated a crucial line from Morgan before snapping the text and his case shut.

“Circumstances,”
he read,
“cannot lie.”

A
ARON
B
URR WAS NOT IMPRESSED BY THE CASE AGAINST HIS
client.

“
Gentlemen of the jury,” he began, as he arose and solemnly paced the packed courtroom. “I know the unexampled industry that has been exerted to destroy the reputation of the accused, and to
immolate him
at the shrine of persecution without the solemnity of a candid and impartial trial.”

Everyone there knew Burr was no stranger to attacks on reputation himself—attacks, in fact, that sometimes came from his fellow counsel Alexander Hamilton. But after the raking fire of General Hamilton’s cross-examination of prosecution witnesses, it was now
Colonel Burr’s duty to begin the defense’s counterattack. Their strategies could not be more different: Unlike the passionate and eloquent Hamilton,
Burr was known for speaking slowly and precisely in the courtroom, each word considered and emphatic, each sentence like a line of silk in a spider’s patient, ensnaring web.

“
Extraordinary means have been adopted to enflame the public against the prisoner,” Burr continued. “Why has the body been exposed for days in the streets in a manner most indecent and shocking? Such dreadful scenes speak powerfully to the passions: They petrify our mind with horror—congeal the blood within our veins.”

Burr’s defense table was scattered with his careful notes and volumes of
Pleas of the Crown
—the very emblems of enlightenment and reasoned thought over bloody terror that stood in mute
contrast to the multitudes outside who had rushed to judge the prisoner guilty.

“
Notwithstanding testimony of an intimacy between the prisoner and the deceased, we shall show you that there was
nothing
like a real courtship,” Burr emphasized. And the tales of nighttime sleigh rides, of marks upon Elma’s body, of guilty signs by the prisoner afterward? These, he assured jurors, would all fall apart under close scrutiny. The very slowness and care of Burr’s speech seemed to mark him apart from the prosecutor, with his wild barrage of accusations. “
The story, you will see,” the colonel remarked scornfully, “is broken, disconnected, and
utterly impossible
.”

And that was just the problem: Through an almost malicious sloppiness in prosecution, a good name could already be damaged. Everyone there knew too well how justice could catch the innocent and unwary in its gears.

“
Even in this city a case had occurred, not many years ago—a young man had been charged with the crime of rape,” Burr mused in grim recollection of the Harry Bedlow case. “It is yet fresh in the minds of everybody. The public mind was there highly incensed, and after the unfortunate man had been acquitted by a verdict of the jury, so irritated and enflamed were the people, that they threatened to pull down the house of the prisoner’s counsel.”

The attention of the crowd turned to Brockholst Livingston at the defense table; they knew about his narrow escape, as well as his client’s destitution after the civil trial that followed. The gravity of this example had just the effect Burr had hoped for—“
it was one of the most eloquent speeches we have ever heard” one onlooker remarked—for Livingston was a war hero who had nearly lost everything he owned to the public’s distrust of an impartial trial.

“
Now
it comes out that the accusation was certainly false and malicious.” Colonel Burr paused to let the mournful realization sink in. “What remorse of conscience must a juror feel for having
convicted
a man who afterwards appeared to be innocent?” And this, he emphasized, was the heavy duty that fell upon those given mere circumstantial evidence of a man’s guilt.

Aaron Burr’s final, most dramatic assertion was not directed at the prosecutor or the jury at all—but rather to someone else in the case—someone, perhaps, watching at that very moment from the courtroom gallery.

“
We shall show you,” he added, “that if suspicions may be attached anywhere,
there are those on whom they be fastened with more appearance of truth
.”

Burr wasn’t just saying that their client was innocent—he was also saying they knew who might be guilty.

T
HEY BEGAN
with the humblest of witnesses: an apprentice.

State your name to the court
.

“
Demas Mead.”

Alexander Hamilton had sat quietly through Aaron Burr’s stately opening argument—and it had been an effective one. But then Hamilton, as the brisk cross-examiner, took the stage again.

“Do you live with Ezra Weeks, and did you the 22nd of December last?” the general asked the apprentice. “Relate all that you know.”

“I live with Mr. Ezra Weeks, as an apprentice, and take care of his horse and sleigh,” Mead answered. “I lived with him December last. I remember perfectly well taking care of the horse that night, and I either left the key—after locking the gate as usual—on the mantelpiece, or I put it in my pocket. I can’t say certainly which.”

One of the jurors, perhaps remembering the elderly neighbor’s hapless confusion over when she’d seen those gates open, tried the same gambit on the lad.

“Was it a week day,” the juror asked, “or on a Sunday?”

“On Sunday,” Mead answered flatly. “I lock the gate every night—I locked it that night a little after dark, and before 8 o’clock.”

“Did you miss the key in the morning?”

“I did not.”

“Has the harness bells?” Hamilton asked.

“It has eight, tied in four places,” the boy recalled.

“How many minutes would it consume to take the bells off and put them on?”

“Five or six.”

The prosecutor was still thinking about the key on the mantelpiece, though, and he called out a question from his table.

“If you had laid the key upon the mantelpiece,” Colden ventured, “and some person had taken it off and put it there again after keeping it for half an hour, might it not have been done without your knowledge?”

“I don’t know—it might,” the apprentice hesitated. “But I don’t think it could, for I was only once out of the kitchen to fetch an armful of wood.”

Crucially, the apprentice recalled hearing someone come in at about eight thirty; glancing into the room just before nine o’clock, he saw that it was Levi. When Ezra Weeks was called to the stand,
his own recollection of the evening matched his apprentice’s account: Levi had left to go to his boardinghouse around eight, just as the Ring family claimed, and he had then come back alone in about half an hour. That also matched the Rings’ testimony, except that he was not with Elma. Nor did it give Levi time to also get over to Lispenard’s Meadow. Aside from the physical impossibility of it, Levi had simply been too busy that evening.

“Levi came in to enquire about the business of the next day,” the contractor explained. “He had charge of the shop, understanding the business as well as myself. I took dimensions of work on a memorandum, and gave it to my brother in writing. His business was to give directions to the journeymen for execution.”

Ezra paused to draw out a slip of paper.

“Here is the eight doors on my memorandum, of different dimensions for Mr. James Cummings’s house, which he took down that evening on a piece of paper as I called them off,” he explained, handing the paper over to the court.

Hamilton knew that still left one of the most damning allegations
unaddressed: that Levi had immediately asked about the Manhattan Well when the body was found. And who but the killer would have known that?

“Did your brother inform you that the muff and handkerchief were found prior to the arrest?” the general asked Ezra.

“Levi told me that Mrs. Forrest had told him that the muff and handkerchief were found in a well near Bayard’s Lane.
I
told him that I supposed it must be the Manhattan Well.”

At this, the prosecutor pounced.

“How came
you
to mention the Manhattan Well?” Colden interrupted.

For Ezra Weeks, it was a moment almost comic in its absurdity. Before him were two defense attorneys that he was building homes for; sitting by the judge was a city recorder who had helped approve his municipal contracts. How the city’s most successful contractor could identify the well by Bayard’s Lane was simplicity itself.

“I had furnished the wood materials for that well,” he said.

O
F COURSE
, one might expect an accused murderer’s brother to be good for an alibi—and for an apprentice to not contradict his employer. But testimony from
Mrs. Forrest quickly confirmed where Levi had heard about the muff being found, and with both Ezra and his apprentice placing Levi in the house from 8:30 to 10
P.M.
, the prosecution still lacked any witnesses who actually saw Levi anywhere else during that time. At best, they had witnesses who saw
somebody
struggling by the well around 9
P.M.
—just when Levi was apparently taking down door measurements in his brother’s house.

Colden’s lack of direct witnesses to the murder meant that the prosecution’s case against Levi Weeks relied on a string of suppositions—that
if
one thing happened,
then
the next observation was likely part of a murder plot. “
In cases depending on a chain of circumstances,” Burr reasoned, “all the fabric must hang together or the whole must tumble down.”

But although they’d countered Colden’s case with an alternate scenario of how Levi had spent his evening, there was still a final link in the prosecution’s chain: the assumption that a murder
had
taken place. Since that was what the coroner’s report had claimed, it seemed like a safe assumption to make.

Or was it?

We call Dr. Benjamin Prince to the stand
.

The society physician walked up and took the oath. Unlike the “dentist-surgeon” that the prosecutor had called upon, Hamilton’s defense witness had an unquestioned role in the case.

Tell us, sir, what you saw on January third
.

“
I was called upon by a constable to attend the Coroner’s Jury on the body of Elma Sands,” the doctor explained. “When I came in I saw the body lying on the table before the Jury. I proceeded to examine it. I saw some scratches, and a small bruise on the knee. The body was then dissected.”

This was news to the jury, for they had not been told that Elma’s body had been manhandled and cut into for dissection
before
the prosecution’s doctors had seen it.

“
I
saw no spots about the neck,” Dr. Prince said pointedly. “No marks of violence. I saw no appearance but what might be accounted for by supposing she drowned herself.”

“If there
had
been any very remarkable spots,” Hamilton asked, “would you not have seen them?”

“I should,” the doctor replied dryly. “I examined particularly—I was called for that purpose.”

Why, then, had the coroner’s report claimed murder as the cause of death? The mystery only deepened when the next witness stepped up: the other doctor at the inquest, Dr. William McIntosh.

Tell us, sir, what you saw that evening
.

“
I was called together with Dr. Prince to attend a Coroner’s inquest on the body of Elma Sands,” the almshouse physician recalled. “I was desired particularly, by the jury, to examine and see if she was pregnant. There were no marks of violence—and we discovered, to the satisfaction of the jury, that she was not pregnant. It
was suggested by some of the jury that her neck was broke: I examined and found it was not. Neither was the collar bone dislocated.”

That directly contradicted the testimony of the prosecution’s witness, Dr. Snedeker—but that doctor had seen Elma body’s three days later, after it had passed through innumerable hands, not least of which had been those of Prince and McIntosh at the dissecting table.