Duel with the Devil (24 page)

Others had the same puzzling recollection. Watkins’s young daughter,
Betsy, had heard similar sentiments from Mrs. Ring. Yet others—including
one of Levi’s own coworkers—had heard by that fourth day of Elma’s disappearance that Levi was suspected. If the Rings weren’t the ones feeding these whispers, then someone else had encouraged them to change their story. A person, perhaps, with a motive to implicate Levi—someone who knew that the Rings faced ruin if the husband’s adultery with the missing girl became public.

“
Did you ever speak of this noise which you and your wife heard in the night to anybody else?” Watkins was asked.

Why, yes, the blacksmith recalled—there
was
one other person he had told.

“Croucher,” he said.

T
HE GRAYING
cloth merchant, who was sitting among the crowd in the courtroom, now seemed to shrink back into the darkness of the falling night.

“
When did you first mention to Croucher what you heard in the chamber?”

“At the Coroner’s jury,” Watkins said. Quietly armed with the knowledge of Elias Ring’s adultery—the kind of knowledge that
could blackmail the Rings into changing their stories—Croucher proceeded to heap guilt on Levi for Elma’s murder. “The day she was laid out in the street, I saw him very busy in attempting to make people believe that the prisoner was guilty.”

Hugh McDougall, a Broadway glazier and sign painter, took the stand with a similar recollection of Croucher.

“
I have been acquainted with this
Mr. Croucher
for some time, but I never liked his looks,” he sniffed. “He used to bring apparel, such as shawls, to dispose of, but I noticed that he always managed to come
just
at dinner time. I told my wife that I did not like the man—and in the future, if he wanted anything of me, that
I
would call on him.”

Soon, though, McDougall found even more reason to dislike him. Croucher had already been spreading accusations from the moment Elma’s body was discovered.

“The day when the body was found,” the sign painter recalled, “he was extremely busy among the crowd to spread improper insinuations and prejudices against the prisoner—who was
then
taken.” That explained why Levi was arrested so quickly after Elma was raised from the well. What was more, Croucher had claimed that the seemingly upright carpenter was a thief. “Among other things, he told a story about his losing a pocket book. This conduct I thought unfair, and I told him so plainly. Oh, says he,
there’s the story of the pocket book
 …”

But Croucher couldn’t let the story go. In fact, McDougall mused, the fellow had visited him again just the previous week, interrupting him in his garden for no other reason than to claim that there was new proof of Levi’s guilt.

“
I told him I thought it was
wrong
,” McDougall snapped, “and highly improper that he should persecute Weeks in such a manner when he had a difference with him. For my own part, I wanted some further evidence before I should condemn the man.”

Croucher, though, did not need further evidence. David Forrest, a boardinghouse neighbor who ran
a Greenwich Street grocery, took
the stand and recalled how Croucher burst into his shop just before the trial, filled with malicious glee.

“
On Friday last, Croucher came running to the store and said, ‘What do you think of this innocent young man now? There is material evidence against him, and he is taken by the High Sheriff, sir, and carried to jail—he will be carried from here, sir, to the court and be tried—and from there he will carried back to jail, and from thence to court again, sir—and from thence to the place of execution, and there be hanged by the neck until he is dead.’ ”

There was no such new evidence, in fact. And the curious thing, Forrest said, was that Croucher didn’t even come into the store to buy anything—didn’t have any purpose at all, in fact, but attacking Levi Weeks.

For another grocer who also testified, that customer sounded curiously familiar. That same Friday, an utter stranger had also burst into
his
store and, without buying anything, had launched into the same attack on Levi Weeks.

Alexander Hamilton snatched up a candle from the table and thrust it though the gathering gloom, up close to the face of a startled member of the courtroom crowd.

Is this the man?

The grocer peered from the stand, and at the candlelight flickering over the countenance of Richard David Croucher.

Yes
, he said.
That’s him
.

L
EVI
’
S FELLOW
boarder was now the very picture of wounded innocence.

“
Did you ever publish the handbills about apparitions? Murder?” General Hamilton demanded.

“No,” Croucher vowed. “I never did.”

For the prosecutor, it was clear that the attacks by the defense had to be stymied. With the case now stretching past midnight for a second night in a row, Cadwallader Colden looked exhausted,
but he asked the judge for leave to call in an additional prosecution witness—his one last chance to implicate Levi Weeks.

The people call Matthew Musty to the stand
.

The cartman, now up appallingly late in a courthouse instead of asleep in his home by Lispenard’s Meadow, took his oath.

Tell us what you saw out by the Manhattan Well
, Colden urged.

“
I saw a young man, the week before the girl was missing, with a pole in his hand—”

“Do you know Levi Weeks?” Hamilton interrupted. “Should you know the person you speak of if you saw him?”

“I don’t know,” the cartman admitted.

Exasperated, the prosecutor grabbed up a candle. If Hamilton could resort to such tactics, then so could he.

“Take the candle,” he said, placing the taper into the witness’s hand, “and look round and see if you can pick him out.”

Given that the prisoner was at the bar, it was not quite a triumph of deductive skill. Musty dutifully held up the candle by Levi Weeks’s face.

That’s Levi
, he said.

“Will you undertake to swear,” Hamilton interrupted again, “
that
is the man you saw at the well?”

“I cannot …” he hesitated.

“Well, sir,” Colden snapped, “tell what you saw.”

Musty dutifully recounted his tale of the depth of the well being tested by a man—“he had on a blue coatee, red jacket, blue breeches and white stockings,” the witness helpfully recalled. There was just one problem: Levi didn’t own any clothing like that.

“If the court please,” the prosecutor slumped back down, “we give up this point.”

Hamilton, though, was not about to stop.

We call Ann Ashmore to the stand
.

As the widow whose house Croucher gave as his alibi for the night of Elma’s disappearance, her testimony was crucial. Though no longer in mourning—
she had lost her husband to yellow fever
back in the outbreak of ’98—she had been left to care for her young son.

“
On the 22nd of December,” she began virtuously, “being my little boy’s birthday, I invited some of my friends to come and sup with me, among the rest Mr. Croucher. Between 4 and 5 in the evening he came, and remained there till 4 or 5 minutes after 11.”

“Could he have been absent twenty minutes during the time?”

“No,” Ashmore insisted.

Several others from the party quickly offered the same recollection. But they were not witnesses of great public reputation—and when Hamilton laid out the simplest of pitfalls yet again for them, they went tumbling in.

Mrs. Ashmore’s birthday party—what day was that on, exactly?

On a Sunday, came the response. Yes—a Sunday—which was Christmas Day, said another. No, the party was after Christmas, said a third.

No further witnesses
, said Hamilton.

A
ARON
B
URR
sized up the room: It was obvious that the jury was exhausted. The midnight bell had softly chimed from the almshouse more than two hours before, marking the arrival of Wednesday, April 2, 1800. The trial was now about to run into an unheard-of third day—not because of the defense, but because of the prosecutor’s sprawling, almost uncontrollable succession of witnesses. But Cadwallader Colden had been guilty of much more than trying the jury’s patience.

The prosecutor had misled them.

In explaining to the jury the importance and acceptability of circumstantial evidence,
Colden had used an impressive quote from John Morgan’s
Essays
: “Circumstantial evidence is all that can be expected, and indeed all that is necessary to substantiate such a charge”—the beginning of a passage that seemed to give legal precedent for using an intricate chain of suppositions in a capital trial.

But that was not what Morgan’s essay meant at all. Colden had, in fact, left out the rest of the paragraph
preceding
his quote:

“Such a charge” in the original was not a capital murder charge, but maritime insurance fraud—specifically, a case involving
the fraudulent policy on a £110 cargo of oats. It was this standard of evidence, incredibly, that Colden had fobbed off onto the jury as a justification for sending Levi Weeks to the scaffold.

Catching the prosecutor on this point would have been child’s play for Burr, but whether the jury would understand Colden’s malfeasance was another question altogether. What they surely could understand, however, was the evidence that Hamilton had placed before them—and they also understood that Levi was a man whose moral character bore
testimonials by local worthies.

I now have a passage that I wish to read to you
, Burr announced, as he drew out a copy of Matthew Hale’s
Pleas of the Crown
.

“
In some cases, presumptive evidences go far to prove a person guilty, tho’ there be no express proof of the fact to be committed by him, but then it must be warily pressed,” Burr read to the candlelit chamber, “for it is better that five guilty persons should escape unpunished, than one innocent man should die.”

To this, the prosecutor scarcely had an answer—in fact, he had little answer to anything at all by this point, because in the process of exhausting the judge and jury, he had also managed to exhaust
himself.
It was now 2:30
A.M.
, and after battling the three more experienced defense lawyers, Colden was “
sinking under the fatigues he had suffered in the course of this lengthy trial,” as one observer put it.

From where he stood, even closer to both the prosecutor and the defense team, court clerk William Coleman was even blunter about the state of the prosecutor. “
Really,” he mused, “he had not the strength to proceed that night.”

Your honor
, Colden began,
I have not slept in forty-four hours
. If the defense were allowed the first summation, he complained, then he “
was obliged to at five or six in the morning to enter a reply.” He just couldn’t do it: The trial would need to adjourn and then enter a third day. Perhaps the jury could be sequestered in City Hall’s Portrait Room for another night, and everyone return to the courtroom in the morning?

The sentiments of the crowd did not bode well for this notion. The jurors were among the city’s most prominent and powerful merchants; several were older gentlemen, and
at least one was quietly teetering on the edge of insolvency. Another night spent sleeping on a courthouse floor, away from their homes and businesses, was simply an intolerable prospect.

Two nights passed in this manner might make some of them sick, and prevent a determination
, Judge Lansing admonished the prosecutor.

“
The examinations of the paintings must doubtless be very edifying and amusing to the jury on the former night,” one man in the crowd agreed drolly afterward, adding that they’d scarcely appreciate “a repetition of the pleasure.”

Sensing his opportunity, Hamilton pounced.

Your honor
, he interrupted,
if it please you,
we relinquish our closing argument. The merits of our case are such that they require no summation
.

Almost before Colden knew what had happened, his sprawling spectacle of a murder trial was over. The verdict, Judge Lansing brusquely informed him, was now to be decided by the jury—immediately.

F
OR THE
state’s chief justice and the mayor of Manhattan, and for the prominent men that stood on either side of this case, there was nothing left but to trust in their fellow citizens. Judge Lansing turned to the exhausted jury: The matter of the prisoner’s guilt or innocence had now arrived.