Duel with the Devil (30 page)

Connah took liberties nonetheless, not least by
originating the popular story of Mrs. Ring’s curse on Alexander Hamilton. Not surprisingly, her grandfather’s adultery with Elma gets no mention; nor does the implication that Elma was a little fond of laudanum. Conveniently, in her account Levi is implicated in a melodramatic deathbed confession by an accomplice.

If parts of
Guilty, or Not Guilty
are fanciful, there is still something strikingly suggestive about the book. Unlike the court accounts and the newspapers of 1800, it describes the boardinghouse residents. Connah’s preface reveals that her great-aunt—Elma’s cousin
Hope Sands, a witness in the trial—was
still alive
in 1870. Out of print for more than a century and hidden in obscurity, Connah’s novel may be the closest we will ever get to an eyewitness description of the Rings, the Sands, and Levi Weeks.

In it, Mrs. Ring is fair and blue-eyed, with
“an abundance of
light auburn hair plainly arranged” under a lace cap. Hope Sands has short, dark hair, and a mischievous expression from “small, piercing, black eyes that sparkled with intelligence and fun.” Levi’s charms are even admitted, albeit a bit grudgingly.

“
He was tall, and well formed—what the world would call good looking,” Connah writes. “His hair was dark and long, worn, in the fashion of the day, tied in a cue. A casual observer would have said his eyes were black, the lashes were so long and dark, but a second glance showed them to be blue.”

Her most striking description, though, is reserved for Elma herself. In Connah’s account, we have a girl from upstate New York who arrives in the city to find herself behind others in her learning; her classmates dub her “
the little mountain maid.” Yet she proves a quick study, and despite her illness—“
she had been always a delicate child, unable to perform her share of household duties”—she retains a passionate fondness for
listening to the piano.

“
The eyes were dark—dark as midnight—and soft, and sad,” she writes of the doomed young woman, whose ringlets were “black, and the soft, glossy curls fell around the young face like a sable curtain.”

However true or fictive such recollections were, Connah could give readers one absolutely solid empirical fact: Her family still remembered, decades after it had vanished beneath the vaulting tenements of the city, where the old well was located.

“
Were you to ask me now to give you the exact location of this well,” Connah wrote, “I should tell you to go to the corner of Spring and Greene Streets, and, being there, you might feel assured that you were in the immediate neighborhood, possibly upon the very spot where the waters of the Manhattan Well rose seventy years ago.”

When it was published in 1870, though, this page of her novel contained a footnote—the only time, in fact, during the story itself that the author used one—because there had been a startling development.

“
Since the above was written,” she noted in amazement, “the exact location of the well has been discovered.”

T
HE WELL
is still there. It has
been
there all along—it becomes lost for a lifetime, found again, then lost for another lifetime still.

Its first rediscovery came just as Connah was finishing her novel. Under the headline “Old New-York,” the
New York Times
for April 18, 1869, reported: “
The old well, known as the Manhattan Well, down which was thrown the corpse of
GULIELMA SANDS
, murdered, as is believed, by her lover,
LEVI WEEKS
, some seventy years ago, and the locality of which had been forgotten, has been rediscovered.”

The occupant of
129 Spring Street had been digging out a flower garden when they uncovered the infamous relic. “It is of large diameter,” the reporter added, “and was covered over with large flat stones.” And the location—behind a building on the corner of Spring and Greene Streets—was just where Connah’s family had said it was.

New Yorkers had been going about their business in the spot for years without any inkling of its history. For a time the address had been that of
a pawnbroker; after that, it had been a mail order depot for “
O. Spotswood’s Antidote for Tobacco,” which promised relief from “the extreme nausea and disgust inflicted on many ladies by their male relatives and friends who persist in Chewing Tobacco.” In its latest incarnation, the building was
a German beer hall frequented by political radicals; it was there, carelessly walking over the maiden’s infamous murder scene, that
a Communist meeting elected Victorian firebrand Victoria Woodhull as a central council member.

Every few decades, a newspaper would recall the tragedy and visit the spot again; if they were in the mood for storytelling, like one
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
reporter, they’d also claim that “
on the anniversary of her murder the Quaker girl rises from her tomb and goes wailing through the house.” In 1889, another reporter was amused to note that the current occupant shared Levi’s old profession, if not any concern over the supernatural:
“a sturdy German
carpenter works above the well where she was murdered and never thinks about it.”

In 1957, the
Times’
top local reporter—Meyer Berger, a Pulitzer Prize winner—got the notion to go back again. He took a cab to “an untidy factory alley” one October evening and found a melancholy scene: “
Winds stir sooty papers in it and high walls hem it in. In twilight it has a sinister, brooding air.” With a dramatic flourish, he snatched up one of the discarded papers, fashioned it into a torch, and wandered down into the dark alley while the waiting cabbie asked what he was doing. “Just checking on a murder,” Berger explained, “a girl was killed here.”

And then it was forgotten again.

In 2010,
the owner of the Manhattan Bistro set about excavating his basement at the corner of Spring and Greene to make more space for his wine bottles and other supplies. He unexpectedly struck an expanse of brick in the dirt—a wall where there wasn’t supposed to be one. Only it wasn’t a wall—the brick structure curved, back and back, and then around—it was a
well
.

He had, for the first time since 1799, uncovered the very depths of the murder scene. The well now stands as a crumbling brick column, casting its shadow over the widened restaurant basement—and
the owners and employees like to trade stories about mysterious flying glasses, ghostly dropped bottles, and restaurant lights suddenly dimming.

But then, from the very day that Elma Sands’s body was discovered, her murder has evoked an impulse to tell stories—even among those at the center of the case. In the years after the trial,
it was said that Levi’s defense counsel became fond of recalling how he’d dramatically held up a candle to the face of Richard David Croucher in the courtroom, revealing him to a shopkeeper as the man who had been spreading falsehoods about Levi. But in the retellings, his unmasking of Croucher became more damning, and the story kept getting grander:

“
He used to say that he once saved a man from being hanged by a certain arrangement of candles in a court-room. As the trial
proceeded, suspicions arose against the principal witness.… He set forth the facts which bore against the man, and then seizing two candelabras from the table, he held them up toward the witness, and exclaimed,
‘Behold the murderer, gentlemen!’
”

The tale had a curious twist.
When Hamilton’s son recounted it, it was the late
major-general
who had held up the candelabras—but when Burr’s biographer told the story, it was the
colonel
who had revealed the murderer.

Some rivalries, it seems, never will be settled.

T
HIS BOOK SIMPLY COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED WITHOUT THE INSPIRATION
of my sons, Bramwell and Morgan, or without the love of my wife, Jennifer, who is the first reader of everything that I write.

Marc Thomas, as always, valiantly held down the fort while I was off poking around in musty ledgers. My many thanks also go to my agent, Michelle Tessler, and my editors, Rick Horgan and Nate Roberson—and a tip of the powdered wig to John Glusman for getting this project rolling.

I remain indebted to many librarians, particularly those at Portland State University, the New-York Historical Society, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the University of Oregon. A special thanks as well to Sally Stanley of the Friends of the Sands Ring Homestead, and to Ted O’Reilly of the NYHS, who drew my attention to their wonderful 1798–1803 diary of Joshua Brookes.

Finally, I’d like to thank my predecessors in this subject. Because much of this book derives from primary sources, later commentators on the case don’t show up too often. But it was the work of Julius Goebel, Jr., Mildred McGehee, and Estelle Fox Kleiger that kept the memory of the case and its participants alive in the past fifty years, and their earlier studies were helpful in pointing me toward some of those original sources.

While the competing trial accounts of David Longworth, James Hardie, and William Coleman were crucial for this book’s exploration of the death of Elma Sands, my portrayal of life in New York frequently draws upon the newspapers of the era. They are abbreviated in the notes as follows: