Duel with the Devil (23 page)

“The scarf skin of the face was scratched with gravel,” McIntosh continued, meaning that Elma had minor abrasions that might have come from the side of the well itself, as
scarf skin
was a term used for the outermost layer of skin, the epidermis. “
Near the instep there was a small spot like a blood blister. It seemed as if the knee had been injured by falling upon coarse gravel. There was a small spot on the breast, but there were no marks of violence upon the belly.”

The marks on her body were of the type that jury members themselves might have—and for McIntosh, who saw the results of both stumbles and fighting among his almshouse charges, the determination had been simple.

“I think there were not marks of violence sufficient to occasion her death,” he said.

But what of the row of spots seen around her neck: Surely that was proof of a strangling, was it not?

“I have been in the custom of seeing numbers of drowned people who have been brought to the Alms-House,” McIntosh responded. “And I have often seen livid spots of the skin, much as I saw in this instance.”

The courtroom was now so unsettled by this revelation that the prosecutor immediately began his cross-examination.

“Would that produce a row of spots round the
neck
?” Colden asked incredulously.

“Why, if the body was gangrened …” The doctor left the point unfinished. Elma’s body had, after all, already been dead for twelve days when it was brought to the inquest. “It would be no matter. It might or it might not.”

Judge Lansing, still troubled by the reports of scratches on Elma’s knuckles, quickly interrupted.

“If the hand had been hurt by a blow, would you have seen and noticed it?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Was there any water in the body?”

“A small quantity.” Dr. McIntosh shrugged it off. “But very little is sufficient to drown. There might have been a quart.”

“Would a spoonful drown?” a juror asked.

“Yes—unless it could be thrown up by the effect of a cough.”

“Suppose,” the juror added, “she had been killed first, and
then
thrown in the well? Would the body have any water in it?”

“It
might
,” the doctor admitted.

The inquest doctors, while not entirely discounting this possibility of murder, had favored drowning as a cause of death—and the lack of many bruises and scratches meant either a stealthy killer
or
suicide. But the coroner’s determination hadn’t mentioned the latter possibility, because
he had ignored the consulting doctors
.

This was one reason Elma’s inquest may have taken so long. Not only were the coroner and his jury liable to be men with little training in forensics, they had also faced the very real possibility of riots—just like in the Harry Bedlow case. With rumors spreading about Elma’s death, and Levi already arrested as a suspect, they had decided to note only
one
possible cause of death—the one that had been the less convincing explanation to the doctors themselves. And in agreeing with the darkest suspicions of New Yorkers, the coroner had left out the most important detail of all: doubt.

T
HERE HAD
been some doctors on the case worth ignoring, perhaps—just not the ones the coroner thought.

For one doctor, what was now happening looked all too familiar. Dr. Nicholas Romayne was one of the city’s leading physicians.
Formerly a trustee of Columbia, he’d gone on to run his own private medical school. Like many of the best American doctors,
he had
completed his training in Britain, where the medical profession had once been shaken by a disturbing murder case.

If Harry Bedlow was the precedent that haunted lawyers, then Theodosius Boughton was the name that Levi’s case called to mind for physicians. A baronet and a young wastrel, he had
died in convulsions on his genteel estate in Warwickshire in 1780; suspicions immediately fell on his brother-in-law, who stood to inherit a fortune. But in the trial that followed, it emerged that the victim’s body wasn’t exhumed and examined until two weeks after his death; the three local doctors who testified had found it too putrid to dissect, and after a brief visual inspection
supposed
that the brother-in-law had poisoned him with cyanide. The suggestion had come not from a coroner or from a consulting physician, but from the victim’s excitable mother—a woman who failed to note that her son was a hypochondriac, or that he made a hobby of mixing his own rat poisons. With little other tangible evidence, and
to the horror of medical professors around the country, the victim’s brother-in-law went to the gallows on inept and vague suppositions.

As far as Dr. Romayne was concerned, Colden was nearly re-enacting the appalling scandal: Once again, unqualified physicians were prepared to send a man to the scaffold based on brief, almost worthless visual inspections. As a young doctor, Romayne had seen the Theodosius Boughton case roil his profession after the more cautious testimony of Dr. John Hunter, widely regarded as Britain’s greatest surgeon, was passed over by the judge and jury in favor of the emphatic but less informed responses of the three other doctors in the case. Now Dr. Romayne was in the same position that Hunter had been in. Called to the stand by Hamilton, he was withering in his judgment of Colden’s doctors.

“An
experienced
person of good judgment might
perhaps
discover, upon inspection, whether the bruises made upon the body were done before or after death,” he warned. “A body which had been taken out of the water would assume a different appearance from what it had at first—and every day the
appearance
of injury done would acquire more visibility as it advanced in putrefaction.”

His words were a lancet, and they were particularly aimed at the one man in the room who should have known better: Dr. David Hosack.

The ambitious young
Dr. Hosack had once been among Romayne’s most promising students. For Hosack to join a dentist and a local hack in guessing the causes of death, on the basis of a brief viewing in the street two weeks later—it was unconscionable. The one medical jurisprudence text to emerge after the Boughton case, in fact, had warned of just this danger: that drowning and strangulation “
are chiefly discovered by the facts, rather than by any peculiar marks they make on the body.”

Shamed by his old teacher, Hosack was called back up to the stand. The defense lawyers proceeded gingerly—he was still Hamilton’s friend and personal physician, after all, and the man who had saved the life of the general’s son.

“
Is there any way,” Hamilton asked gently, “in which the testimony we have heard may be reconciled?”

“I think it may in either of two ways,” replied the chagrined doctor. “At first there may have been very little change of color in the injured part, but after some time it undergoes a very considerable alteration.”

The other possibility, he admitted, was that the injuries came after death—from the inquest doctors themselves.

“It occurs to me”—he paused—“that as it was supposed that the neck and collarbone were broken, when she was first taken out of the well, and as I did not see her until the day of interment—it is possible that the frequent turning and bending of the head, and the frequent examination of the neck to ascertain the injury done to the collarbone, may have produced the appearance on the neck I before mentioned. Especially as the body had been dead for several days, and the vessels had become tender. Very little violence might have produced an effusion of blood under the skin.”

So the injuries could have been caused by murder … or they might not have been.

As powerful as Levi’s alibi and Hosack’s recantation were, they
didn’t answer everything. The prosecution’s doctors and witnesses might have been slipshod, but they weren’t responsible for Levi’s arrest. He was jailed
before
the inquest, after all. Why, the defense team mused, had his name come up so quickly as a suspect? Where had the whisperings in the crowd come from, or the mysterious printed broadsides about ghosts haunting his boardinghouse room?

Someone
had tried to pin Elma’s death on Levi Weeks. But who?

A
ARON
B
URR HAD BEEN MAINTAINING HIS USUAL OPAQUE AND UNNERVING
silence. Hamilton himself had been frustrated by his rival’s sly lawyering in the past—“
at the bar he is more remarkable for ingenuity and dexterity than for good judgment or good logic,” he complained. But one of Burr’s old law partners observed that setting traps was simply what gave the colonel joy: “
He delighted in surprising his opponents, and in laying, as it were, ambuscades for them.”

The ambush Burr had planned for the Weeks trial would be one of the most remarkable of his long legal career—and this time, he’d mapped it out alongside General Hamilton.

We call upon Joseph Watkins as our witness
.

The blacksmith took the witness stand, his work-scarred hands and powerful physical presence a striking contrast to the lawyers and doctors around him. Watkins had been
hammering nails and tongs for New Yorkers for years, and as the immediate neighbor to the Ring boardinghouse, he’d been the first to join Elias in recovering Elma’s body. He knew the family and its boarders well—better, in fact, than anyone imagined.

“
Do you remember,” General Hamilton asked carefully, “any thing in the conduct of
Mr. Ring
that led you to suspicions of improper conduct between him and Elma?”

Things were not what they seemed in the reputable Ring boardinghouse—and hadn’t been for months before the disappearance.

“About the middle of September,” the blacksmith said, casting his mind back to the evacuations from yellow fever, “Mrs. Ring being in the country, I imagined one night that I heard a shaking of a bed and considerable noise there—in the second story, where Elma’s bed stood. I heard a man’s voice and a woman’s. I am very positive the voice was
not
Levi’s.”

For the jury, there was a shock of recognition—the inexplicable questions the defense had kept asking the Rings about the shared wall the between the houses now made sense.

“Could you hear through the partition?” an astonished juror asked.

“Pretty distinctly,” Watkins said. And what he heard, as one observer put it delicately, was a “
rustling of beds, such as might be occasioned by a man and wife,” by Mr. Elias Ring and Elma. “
It continued some time and it must have been very loud to have awakened me,” the blacksmith continued. “I heard a man’s voice, pretty loud and lively, and joking; the voice was loud and unguarded.”

What was more, he could tell whose voice it was—because Ring had a distinctly high-pitched voice, while Levi had a low and quiet way of speaking.

“I said to my wife,” he added, “
it is Ring’s voice
.”

Three months before Elma disappeared, as the boardinghouse proprietor, the young carpenter, and the beautiful niece tried to survive the fever season in the sweltering Ring house on Greenwich Street, the blacksmith could already see it would come to a terrible end.

“I told my wife,
That girl will be ruined next
.”

The courtroom was shocked—and doubly so when
an affidavit from Watkins’s ailing wife was read, attesting that she, too, had heard the noise. As Cadwallader Colden stepped in to grimly cross-examine the witness, it only got worse for him.

“When was this?” he demanded.

“A little after the middle of September.”

“How often have you heard this … noise of the bed?”

“From eight to fourteen times, in the time of the sickness.”

“Did you ever hear this noise after Mrs. Ring came from the country?” Hamilton interrupted.

“I never did.”

What he
did
hear later, though, was almost as remarkable. After Elma disappeared, in the days that Mrs. Ring now claimed to be agonizing over Elma’s alleged betrothal to Levi, she hadn’t made any mention of it at all to her neighbors. In fact, Mrs. Ring had gone out of her way to praise Levi.

“
I heard her say,” Mr. Watkins recalled, “the Thursday after she was missing, that he was very kind and friendly to all the family, particularly when sick—but not more so to this girl than to the rest—he was more like one of the family than a boarder.”