Duel with the Devil (27 page)

W
HO KILLED
E
LMA
S
ANDS
?

The answer hinted at by the defense team in the trial—“herself”—never did seem satisfactory, and the case was still universally referred to as a murder. After all, Elma had left no note, nor made any comment in the day or week leading up to her death that could be construed as a sign of distress. Her occasionally melancholy disposition might not be considered a notable quality in an unmarried woman of twenty; nor even was her remark, made months earlier, that if she had a bottle of opiate she’d drink it. Probably most members of the courtroom, if they searched their own lives in the months preceding the trial, could imagine a gloomy day or half-joking comment of their own that could be held up as equally specious evidence of suicidal intent.

And for Elma Sands to kill herself in a well required that she not only kill herself, but that she do it
in a well
. New York’s records are rich with self-annihilation by pistol, by hanging, by poison, and by river. Suicide by water system, though, would constitute an altogether novel approach.
Murder
would not: In fact, not long before Levi’s trial, a young woman upstate was charged with fatally
precipitating a neighbor’s baby into a well.

There was another problem with suicide in the Manhattan Well: If Elma Sands had wanted to drown herself, all she needed to do was walk a few blocks from her boardinghouse and jump off a pier. This was why, fearing a possible suicide, Elias Ring quite sensibly ordered the river dragged at this spot:
“We swept near
Rhinelander’s Battery,” he had explained to the court, “because I thought it was the handiest place.” And while the depth of the failed Manhattan Well was uncertain—for all Elma knew, she might have found herself in four feet of muddy water—the efficacy of plunging into the icy Hudson River on a December night was beyond doubt.

Nor was the medical evidence in the trial much help. Though the defense team had convincingly thrown doubt on the shoddy evidence offered by the prosecutor, their own testimony by inquest doctors Prince and McIntosh could hardly be considered trustworthy. The state of medical jurisprudence remained primitive, and the body they examined had already been dead for nearly two weeks; moreover, the crime scene was not secure during that time. The inquest did ascertain that Elma was not discernibly pregnant, a crucial fact in ruling out possible murder or suicide motives. She had not been stabbed or shot. But beyond that, little entirely reliable information could be hoped for.

Curiously, the most suggestive evidence may have come from the humblest of witnesses: the cartman and his wife who lived on the outskirts of Lispenard’s Meadow. Lawrence Van Norden testified to hearing a woman’s loud cries for help out by the well, and that “
in a little time the cries stopped.” Their having stopped in a short time, rather than dying out, suggests the possibility of Elma’s strangulation, at least to the point of unconsciousness before she was dropped into the well.

The inquest doctors testified that Elma’s lungs indicated possible drowning, which suggests a likely explanation for all the evidence: that Elma Sands was strangled to the point of unconsciousness but not death. Believing her dead, her assailant then dropped her body into the Manhattan Well, where, just as the inquest doctors claimed,
she drowned without a struggle
.

But who would have done such a thing?

In fact, there
was
a person of suspect character living at 208 Greenwich Street—but it wasn’t Levi Weeks. The quiet boardinghouse had hosted someone with both the means and the motive to kill Gulielma Sands—someone who, unknown to Hamilton and
Burr or the prosecutor, was hiding a criminal past, and who had been known to be dangerously unhinged. Someone whose record, for more than two hundred years, has evaded detection in one of our country’s oldest unsolved murder cases—until now.

I
T IS
hidden deep
within the
Proceedings of the Old Bailey
for September 20, 1797, recorded on a blustery Wednesday at London’s fearsome criminal court. Below the case of
a woman sentenced to whipping for having pawned a stolen calico petticoat in Kentish Town, and
a young mute caught stealing silver buttons in a pub, another case appears. This one, from
a shoemaker’s shop by St. Paul’s, involved a well-dressed fellow absconding with a pair of boots worth twelve shillings. The shop’s apprentice chased him for blocks into King’s Head Court.

“I saw the boots in his hands, and hollered,
stop thief
!” he testified.

Dressed in a blue coat and with powdered hair, the thief was almost too genteel to be caught; one bystander in the street admitted: “Seeing him so much a gentleman, I let him pass.” When he was finally collared, the suspect proved to be no ordinary thief at all, but a respectable shopkeeper from Leominster.

“I am a musician at the Theatre Royal,” one neighbor testified. “I have known the gentleman at the bar twenty years.”

“Is he a man of decent situation in life?” the court asked.

“Very respectable indeed.”

“He has a wife, daughters grown up?”

“Yes,” the musician replied, before adding, “I think, from some circumstances in the last four or five years, he has not been collected in his mind.”

He recounted how the accused would suddenly fling his store’s money till upon customers’ heads, and how the man had cruelly abused his wife and daughters until they received a court order of protection against him. Another neighbor testified that “he is at times deranged,” and recalled that “he has threatened to buy a pair
of pistols, insisting that I should fire at him, or he would fire at me, for no reason upon earth.”

Atop the court docket is the name of this homicidal lunatic:

His neighbors knew him by a different name, though.

“I was coming down Holborn, and met the waggoner,” another witness testified. “I asked him if he knew Mr. Croucher, and he said—
what, Mad Croucher!
”

Croucher never denied stealing the boots, and indeed the court was scarcely interested in that question; the man was clearly insane. As such, Croucher was found not guilty. Yet instead of occupying a cell in the Bedlam asylum, he had managed to flee and secure a passage to Manhattan.

Nobody in the Rings’ boardinghouse—or in the courtroom at Levi Weeks’s trial—had any idea of the true nature of their new boarder. But had the jurors or lawyers known the Bowery a bit better, they’d have seen right through Croucher’s alibi for the night of Elma’s disappearance. He’d been at a
birthday party at the house of Ann Ashmore, he said. But who was Ashmore? Why, she ran
a brandy-making firm in her house:
Croucher’s alibi was a party in a distillery
. It was no wonder that the attendees couldn’t even remember what month they’d seen him there.

Croucher’s old neighbors in London could have warned of what was liable to happen next. “
I have seen him very often in liquor, and look as wild as he possibly could,” one testified. “In fact, he was not bearable when he had any liquor.”

If Croucher or anyone else had told Elma about the party that evening—and, though he held back from using it in the trial,
Burr claimed that Elma was known to sneak out at night sometimes—then an encounter between her and Croucher could have been disastrous. Burr and Hamilton already had their suspicions about Croucher, and after the trial one newspaper pointedly warned
“
those who have been instrumental and active in misleading public sentiment, and stirring up public indignation … Suspicion at length may fall on them.” But the task of Levi Weeks’s defense team had been to free their client, not to convict someone else. And so it was that Croucher was free after the trial to prepare to set up house with his new American bride—and her thirteen-year-old daughter.

Soon enough, New Yorkers would learn just how dangerous Croucher truly was.

C
OME HELP
me scrub my old room clean, so that I may move here
, Croucher told his new stepdaughter on the evening of Wednesday, April 23, 1800. Just three weeks had passed since the stunning Weeks verdict, but it was time for the cloth merchant to move on from his old life at the boardinghouse.
A forty-year-old man such as Croucher could hardly hope for much assistance in packing from
a slight, slender girl like Margaret Miller; still, it was not her place to object to a cleaning job.
Her mother had already been upbraiding her for sauciness, though
others hardly discerned much impertinence in the meek young girl. She dutifully followed her new stepfather out into Ann Street, and the two made their way toward Croucher’s old lodgings on Greenwich Street.

FALSE SHAME
! cried the ads for that evening’s theatrical production, while over at the street corner in Rhinelander’s brew house, the Federalist and Republican faithful argued over the following week’s election.
Peter Schermerhorn had just that day announced his withdrawal from the local Federalist slate; it was obvious that Hamilton’s party was now a sinking ship. Those tired of arguing politics had the competing accounts of the Weeks trial to discuss; Coleman’s had been out for scarcely a week.

I was there—at the trial
, Croucher boasted to the girl.
Shall I tell you how the young woman died?

Margaret had been learning her lessons at school, where pious and edifying readings were the usual fare, and hadn’t looked at any of the books about Levi Weeks. It was hardly proper reading for a
child. And at that time of evening, with the sun already down, there was little reading to be had anyway. The two stopped in front of the darkened boardinghouse at 208 Greenwich Street, and Croucher ushered her in through the crooked front door, through which, just a few months earlier, Elma Sands had last departed.

We shall pack and clean in the morning
, he explained, and they walked past Mr. and Mrs. Ring’s bedroom by the foot of the stairs, and then up the creaking steps.
Tonight, you’ll sleep in the servant girl’s room—it’s on the third floor
.

Margaret walked up obediently, and into the darkened hallway that locals had idly imagined to be haunted. There was scarcely any light at all up here, it seemed. Margaret walked into a room and heard the click of the lock on the door behind her.

Hands seized her in the dark, pulling her clothes off.

If you scream
, Croucher’s voice hissed,
I will kill you
.

T
WO MONTHS
later, Margaret Miller peered anxiously from
the same witness stand where so many others had testified against Levi Weeks back in the spring. Before her stood the very man who had questioned her predecessors: Cadwallader Colden. At the defense table there was another familiar face: Brockholst Livingston. But next to him sat a new prisoner: Richard David Croucher.

How old are you?
the prosecutor asked Margaret.

“
Thirteen,” she said.

Her faced flushed with embarrassment, and she began crying, the tears coursing uncontrollably down her cheeks. She scarcely looked her age to begin with, and now the grave gentlemen of the court found themselves flustered by an altogether unaccustomed sight in the City Hall courtroom: a terrified, weeping girl.

I know that it is difficult
, the judge comforted her.
But you must tell us what happened next
.

“He took me and undressed me and put me on the bed,” she said haltingly, regaining some composure. “Then he undressed himself, and came to bed …”

She burst into tears again. To face her stepfather across the courtroom while testifying had simply become too much; Croucher, one spectator remarked, bore “
every mark on his face of a crafty, unprincipled villain.” He seemed not at all discomposed that he was being tried for rape.

“
He used force,” the girl continued. “He did what he would, and hurt me very much, so that I could hardly get home the next morning. After he had done, he fell asleep, and I got up and sat on some wood till I could see to find the door.”

In the weeks that followed, Croucher had abused her terribly, calling the girl a whore in front of her mother. “
He whipped me, and turned me out of doors,” the girl testified, and finally broke down altogether into sobs.

Striding before the jury, defending lawyer Brockholst Livingston seemed as confident as ever: He was now a state assemblyman-elect, thanks to a Republican sweep of the elections back in the spring. And Colden, sitting grimly across the courtroom—well, he had lost. This rape charge against Croucher, Livingston genially announced, was
just like the Henry Bedlow rape trial all over again … which Livingston had also won.

“
If any thing of an improper nature has passed between them,
I
am inclined to believe it has been with her consent,” he mused thoughtfully. “
It is said, her youth renders it impossible she should have been a lewd girl. Who that is acquainted with the dissolute morals of our city does not know that females are to be found living in a state of open prostitution at the early ages of 12 and 13 years?”

Perhaps, he added helpfully, the real culprit behind her wantonness was “
our ill-judged mode of educating the sexes together in our public schools.”

This time, Colden was ready for him in his closing argument. Consent was legally impossible in a girl her age, he pointed out; and what was more, Croucher had plainly threatened her with Elma’s fate.

“She
knew
that a young woman had been cruelly murdered,” he reminded the jury. “She learned the particulars of that trial from
this
prisoner. The threats of the prisoner to murder her if
she
was not silent, must have had a greater influence than they would have at any other time.”

It took the jury just
five minutes to find Croucher guilty.

A MONSTER
, read headlines announcing his sentence of life with hard labor, and the word spread quickly to other cities as well. “
Every one must rejoice that the community is freed from a demon so artful and unfeeling,” the
Philadelphia Gazette
announced. And while Croucher’s threats to his stepdaughter stopped just short of a confession of Elma’s murder, they were enough for the
Gazette
and other newspapers to revive distrust of a witness “who was absent at a suspicious place that very evening, and pursued the suspected young man with the utmost malignity.” The brilliant and unlikely pairing of Hamilton and Burr in the defense of Levi Weeks had, it seemed, almost certainly saved the life of an innocent man after all.