The Manhattan Well: How Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton United to Solve a Murder Mystery

Dylan Thuras: New York is always rewriting itself. It feels like a new city most of the time, but occasionally there are little places where the old and the new jam up against each other. And I am outside of one of them right now. I am down on—where am I? I’m in Soho on Spring Street and Green Street. And there’s a shop here called COS. It’s like an H&M extension brand. And they’ve got a little shop here in Soho. So I’m going to go in and cruise a little bit.

I think it’s mostly ladies clothes, so I am out of place. I’m carrying a big backpack. I look like I should not be in here. But there is something in this shop quite out of place. If I can find it, where is it? Hmm. Maybe it’s downstairs. Am I in the right store? I think so. Let me go down there and have a look. Ah, here we go. Menswear. Good. This is where I will be slightly less out of place. Okay, good. I’m down here. Okay. Let me keep going through here. Ah, okay. So here it is.

And along with this lovely sweater and shirts I’m looking at, very out of place is this brick well. And you might think of it just like, oh, they kept some old piece of architecture. But this is not some random piece of old architecture. It is in fact an infamous, infamous object, an old well at the center of a very infamous murder case in the late 1700s. And so in among all these stylish clothes, this is the site where a young woman was thrown into this well after being killed, presumably somewhere else.

I’m Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today, we learn who this young woman was, what events led to her murder, who did it, and how did this case, and this well in the bottom of a fancy clothing store in Soho, bring together none other than Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr? And trust me, you’re going to want to stay to the end here. It is a story with a surprising number of twists and turns.

This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

Dylan: On December 22nd, 1799, 22-year-old Elma Sands leaves her boarding house where she is living and never returns. Two weeks later, her body is found in what was called the Manhattan Well. Within hours, a young carpenter named Levi Weeks is accused of murdering her. Levi is arrested, and his well-to-do brother, Ezra Weeks, assembles a very powerful legal team consisting of a few historical names you might recognize. There’s a guy named Henry Brockholst Livingston. He was famous at the time, less so now, but also on the team is Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. And this murder trial ends up becoming the very first fully recorded murder trial in American history. Today, there is still a 99-page transcript of this trial.

Lauren Willig: I knew after reading that transcript, I desperately wanted to find out what really happened to Elma Sands that day.

Dylan: This is Lauren Willig. She is a former lawyer and now a historical fiction writer. She’s written more than 25 books, one of which is about this case called The Girl from Greenwich Street: A Novel of Hamilton, Burr, and America’s First Murder Trial.

Lauren: So here’s the basic story. Elma was the illegitimate cousin of the woman who ran the boarding house, Catherine Ring. Catherine and her husband, Elias, were Quakers. Catherine is the daughter of a very famous hellfire and brimstone Quaker preacher. Elma was this Quaker preacher’s, his much younger sister’s, illegitimate daughter. Elma had been raised in this household as the child of sin. She’s the unwanted family disgrace, and she moves to New York with her cousin Catherine and helps to run the boarding house and also a hat shop, which Catherine is running out of the same building. They say she’s rather too lively for a Quaker. She refuses to join the meeting, even though she is asked repeatedly to do so. She likes nice dresses and fine things, and she is very eager to get out of her station as a poor relation. And so that night on December 22, 1799, she tells her younger cousin, Hope—Hope is about her age and they hang out together—that she’s leaving that night to marry Levi Weeks. Hope goes and tattles to her older sister Catherine, who then comes to Elma and says, you’re eloping with Levi tonight. Wouldn’t you rather be married here? And for whatever reason, Catherine goes along with this plan. She ties on Elma’s gloves for her. She sends her out to borrow a muff from a neighbor, because it’s cold out that night, and sends her off to marry Levi. And then Levi comes back without Elma, and no one knows what to do. There’s a lot of questions about, did Elma actually leave with Levi that night? Was Elma actually leaving to marry Levi? The only source we have for that are Catherine Ring, and Hope Sands.

Dylan: Now, let’s talk about her suitor, and soon-to-be person of great suspicion. Tell me a little bit about Levi Weeks.

Lauren: Levi Weeks is a handsome young carpenter. He’s a bit of a lad. So his older brother, Ezra Weeks, has a prosperous lumberyard a few blocks away from the boarding house on Grant Street, and that’s actually why Levi is living there. So Ezra is a man on the make. They’re from Massachusetts originally. Levi and Ezra moved to New York, because New York was then, as now, a city of opportunities. But later on, Ezra is going to be incredibly prosperous and so on. But at this point, he doesn’t have enough room to house his family, his younger brother, and all the journeymen who work for him. So the boarding house at Greenwich Street is a really convenient place, and most of the people in the boarding house work for Ezra Weeks. But anyway, so Levi lives at the boarding house, and he is so delighted there are three attractive young ladies in residence. And then, of course, there’s Elma, with whom Levi, by all accounts, has a very close relationship. Although he tells—and this is one of my favorite lines from the trial—he tells his apprentice that if he sees him spending private time with Elma, it’s not for courtship or dishonor, but only for conversation. And you can take that “only for conversation” whichever way you like.

Dylan: There’s one more character I want to introduce into this: That’s New York itself, right? Like, when I was in Soho, it’s all bougie, fancy shops. It’s tourists, you know, getting very expensive clothes. It’s like a different universe. But, you know, 1799, the geography, the feel of this area would have been really different. So maybe you can kind of just describe what it’s like there. It’s not—you know, it’s dense, but not dense in the way it is now. It’s like a different kind of environment. So I think that would help set the scene.

Lauren: And that’s part of what makes it so hard to track Elma’s world onto our world today, because the topography was so different. The city was packed down at the tip of the island, and you’ve got fine brick houses further down on Broadway. But the city is growing rapidly. You’ve got houses springing up like mushrooms, pushing towards the edges of the city. And the area where Elma is killed is called Lispenard’s Meadow. It’s a massive water meadow that at that point serves as sort of the northern boundary of part of the city. But now to us, I mean, it’s way downtown. When they drain Lispenard’s Meadow in 1805, that becomes Canal Street. And so that area in Spring Street where that store is now, 129 Spring Street, there’s a row of houses that go up in 1817. So you can see sort of the city is growing bit by bit, street by street. And of course, you also have to imagine a world, of course, without cars. But this is winter. Everyone is taking horse-drawn sleighs. Can you imagine? I mean, we think of sledding and sleighs as a child’s pastime. This is a primary mode of transportation here.

Dylan: All right. So these are our main characters. What happened? What do we know about the actual case? You know, what is the discovery that kind of causes all of this? What do we know?

Lauren: Okay. So what we know is Elma does not come home on the night of the 22nd. Catherine apparently goes and listens at Levi’s door to see if Elma might possibly be there, but something prevents her from going in. The next day, she asked Levi if he knows where Elma is, and he’s like, why would I know? And why would she have been out so late? And Catherine tasks him with it. Elias Ring, Catherine’s husband—when Elma had been missing for about a week, Elias hires someone to dredge the river around Rhinelander’s Battery, mumbling something about how they think Elma threw herself into the river in a love fit. And this story about Elma committing suicide persists until around New Year’s. The word comes that a muff has been found floating in the Manhattan Well, and Elias Ring runs and gets a neighbor to come with him. And they go and they stick poles into the well, and they hook Elma by her dress. See, this is the muff that Elma went next door to borrow the night she disappeared. So it’s the muff that leads to Elma’s discovery, and they find her body, and everyone immediately points the finger at Levi. And a hue and cry is raised. Levi is arrested immediately. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Elma’s family puts her body on display in the front room of their house. And so people troop through the Ring sitting room at 208 Greenwich Street and examine Elma. So you have this image of the city wandering through. People are fondling Elma’s dead body, examining it for bruises. And there are so many people who want to see her that the Rings put her corpse on the sidewalk so that more people can look at poor, battered Elma and see what Levi has done to her. And so there’s a very strong predisposition of guilt against Levi at this point.

Dylan: So, before we move on to the trial, you know, what would Levi’s motive have been here?

Lauren: This caught the public imagination like crazy. And I think partly because the popular fiction of the time was full of evil seducers and wronged young women. So there was a runaway American bestseller that everyone was reading called Charlotte Temple, which is about a young woman who’s seduced and betrayed. And so everyone’s like, oh my god, Levi, the evil seducer, Elma, poor wronged girl, killed. And so the motive that’s making the rounds of the city is that Levi induced Elma to sleep with him under promise of marriage, got her pregnant, but he’s a young man on the rise. His brother has ambitions, he’s going to be an architect, and he’s going to need a sensible wife. His brother married very well. He married someone with timber interests. And the idea is that, well, Ezra, his very controlling older brother, probably has an heiress in mind for Levi as well. And the disgraced, illegitimate, no-dowry cousin of a Quaker family from New Cornwall, New York, is not at all what Ezra Weeks has in mind for his younger brother. So that’s the motive that’s making the rounds of the city. It’s a very comprehensible motive. They do, the coroner’s inquest does determine that Elma is not pregnant at the time of her death. Although the pregnancy story does keep circulating regardless, as rumors do, but she’s not pregnant. What I find fascinating is that no one considers the possibility that she might have been pregnant and then no longer pregnant by the time of her death. There is really fascinating testimony in the trial where I really believe that Elma, in fact, did sleep with someone, that someone may not have been Levi, and lost a baby in early December.

Dylan: Oh, interesting. Okay. All right, so let’s get to the trial. There’s a pretty high-powered legal team that this young guy gets. I mean, Hamilton and Burr, they’re already known quantities in a very real way. So how does, once Levi is accused and it’s kind of clear, all right, there’s going to be an investigation, how do things unfold from there? How do Hamilton and Burr get involved?

Lauren: Well, this actually, this is part of the story. So this is an insane legal team. There’s Brockholst Livingston. If I were up for murder in 1800, I would want Brockholst Livingston as my defense lawyer. He was vicious and ruthless. He had just gotten a guy off for rape a few years before. He’s gotten criminals literally standing there with the knife in their hand off for murder earlier that year. Aaron Burr doesn’t have that much criminal law experience, but as you say, he is a huge figure, both on the national and the local scene at the time. And he has a business connection to Ezra Weeks through that same Manhattan Well in which Elma was drowned, which is a much longer story. So I’ll put that to the side for the moment.

Dylan: Well, no, we should get it. So what is the connection to the well itself?

Lauren: Oh, gosh. Okay. Are you—brace yourself.

Dylan: Yeah. All right.

Lauren: So, New York was prone to horrible yellow fever epidemics. And Burr’s brother-in-law, Dr. Joseph Browne, had this idea for bringing clean water to the city from upstate via patent water wheels or something like that. So Burr goes to Hamilton and says, I’m putting together a water company, the Manhattan Company, to bring clean water to the city. And Hamilton’s like, yes, this is a great idea. And it’s like, Tom Sawyer, “don’t help me whitewash the fence.” Hamilton drafts the legislation for Burr. He lobbies the legislature. He puts his brother-in-law on the board of directors. But then right before the bill for this water company goes to vote, Burr sticks in the sneaky little clause enabling the Manhattan Company to use surplus revenue for investment. To loan out and so on. It’s not a water company he’s creating. It’s a bank. And only one person twigs to this, Judge Lansing, who is the judge on the Levi Weeks trial, because this world has 10 people in it, he votes against it. But the bill passes. Hamilton has lobbied so effectively for it that the bill passes, and he creates a bank deliberately designed to rival Hamilton’s Bank of New York and to be a piggy bank for both Burr, who’s heavily in debt, and Burr’s Republican Party, which Hamilton has been trying desperately to defeat. Anyway, because it was never about the water, Burr immediately cheaps out on the water plan. So instead of bringing water from upstate, the plan becomes to use the Collect, which is a pond in Lispenard’s Meadow and incredibly befouled, to feed wells that they will dig, using, again, because they’re cheaping out, not even metal pipes, wooden pipes, board logs. And one of these wells they dig as part of this Manhattan Company water plan is the Manhattan Well in which Elma is drowned, and the contractor who lays the pipes is Ezra Weeks. So that’s Burr’s—and this happens, I mean, really not long before this murder, and it’s fresh in everyone’s mind. Ezra Weeks’s brother then is hauled up for murder. He has a direct line to Aaron Burr, because they’ve worked together on the Manhattan Company and, you know, the Well.

Dylan: They built the well that Elma Sands is discovered in. Exactly. Like, this is their well. Okay, yeah.

Lauren: It’s insane. The weirdest one, though, on this legal team is Alexander Hamilton, because Hamilton does not do criminal law. This is not his thing. You can count on one hand the number of cases he’s done, and they’re mostly stuff like libel, not murder. And he’s also insanely, insanely busy. So he’s desperately working to run the army, pay the bills, and on top of that, keep Burr’s Republican Party from winning the local elections. He is slammed. And the story that’s told to explain why he bizarrely takes this case in a field in which he has no experience when he has no time is that he was in debt to Ezra Weeks, who built Hamilton’s country house, the Grange, and that Ezra calls in the debt and says, please defend my brother. It’s a great story, and yet does not work. Once you start digging—and it’s repeated over and over again as fact—but once you start digging into the background, it makes no sense because Hamilton does not buy the land on which the Grange is situated until August 1800, four months after the trial. We know he’s thinking of a country house as early as 1798. He tries to buy a plot of land near the East River in 1799, it falls through, but he can’t be in debt to a contractor who hasn’t done any work for him yet.

Dylan: Do you think it’s possible that it’s the other way around? He’s trying to get into the good graces of a contractor that he would like to hire for various projects?

Lauren: You are so good. That’s exactly it. Actually, there is one legal scholar in the 1950s who flagged this and was like, the story, it does not work. But Hamilton being Hamilton was probably thinking, huh, good contractors are really hard to get right now, and they still are. And if I get his brother off for murder, he’ll have to build me my house. And then on top of it, Hamilton knows this case is a media sensation. From the moment Elma’s body is found, all the papers pick up and carry articles immediately. Everyone’s talking about it. The spring 1800 elections are coming up, and he is not going to let Burr strut around that courtroom undisputed. He needs in on this. And so, it shifts the whole story. Instead of Hamilton taking this case as a favor, reluctantly, you’ve got Hamilton, and it’s so in character, inserting himself into the case for his own ends.

Dylan: How did they defend Levi and what happens in this trial?

Lauren: Well, the defense, it is like no defense you’ve seen before because you have these very disparate personalities. Burr, Brockholst, and Hamilton, they are all very different people. They’re very different lawyers. And so it’s not unusual—I was a litigator once—it’s not unusual to have multiple theories being mooted in a defense. But in this particular case, when you read the transcript, it’s not so much that they’re covering all the bases. It’s that you have two separate parties, Burr and Brockholst versus Hamilton, who are trying to argue separate things and sometimes interrupting or tripping each other up. It is the most shambolic performance because what I think if you track the trial transcript and figure out who’s saying what when, what happens is Burr and Brockholst, they’re heavily pushing the suicide theory. That Elma was melancholy, the she was melodramatic, that she flung herself in, nothing to do with Levi Weeks except maybe unrequited love or something like that. But that Elma was the driver of her own destruction. Hamilton is convinced someone else murdered Elma Sands and he can prove who did it. I know. It’s so Hamilton, right? Hamilton is Jessica Fletcher.

Dylan: What an unbelievable showboat. Yeah, he’s going to Matlock the whole trial.

Lauren: And he does! He really does. That’s what’s so incredible about it, and you can see from the line of questioning, he’s decided who he thinks did it and he goes after that guy. It’s just, it really is incredible theater. Oh, a side note to this I hadn’t mentioned before is that the lawyers did their own detective work. So I know it sounds crazy, but you’ve got Burr, Brockholst, Hamilton, and the prosecutor Cadwallader Colden running around New York City playing Miss Marple, you know, generations before Miss Marple, because there wasn’t a police force as we know it. There were night watchmen and there were constables, but their only job was keeping the peace. So if you were a drunken fishmonger, they could haul you in, but they didn’t investigate murders. Lawyers did their own legwork. And that’s one of those things that’s hard to get your head wrapped around. It sounds crazy, Hamilton as detective, but you really have Hamilton as detective.

Dylan: This would make such a good movie.

Lauren: I hope lots of people hear you say that.

Dylan: This would make such a good movie. This idea of like Hamilton, like going around and trying to solve this murder case, everything’s all mixed up. He’s in debt. You know, he’s way overcommitted. You see this sort of developing rivalry, this complicated relationship between Burr and Hamilton that’s already, you know, existed and continues to grow. This is just, there’s so, I mean, this is like a great, great thing.

Lauren: Oh no, it’s all of that. And it all actually happened, which is what makes it so amazing.

Dylan: After just two days of trial, which was actually quite a long trial back then, Levi Weeks is acquitted. No one is happy about this. Levi is hounded out of New York City. He’s pretty much hounded wherever he goes. He finally settles down in Nashville. As for Burr and Hamilton, we know how that story ends. Now this was all quite surprising, but Lauren had one more big surprise for me about this well in this fancy clothing store.

Lauren: So this is a horrible thing. Everyone has always said that was the well. People say they hear Elma there. They feel Elma there.

Dylan: Yeah, there’s all this like ghost legends about this well. I don’t want to hear this. Don’t tell me.

Lauren: Okay. I’m sorry. I feel like I’m telling you there’s no Tooth Fairy, but okay. I was talking to an amazing urban historian, Keith Taillon, who runs this wonderful site called Keith York City, and he told me that’s not the Well. That’s actually a cistern dating to when those houses were built on Spring Street in the 18-teens, that the actual well is probably somewhere under Green Street. So if you’re hearing Elma there, that’s not what you’re hearing.

Dylan: So what you’re telling me is when I was in the bottom of this store, communing with the spirit of Elma Sands, touching the bricks of this well, I was just at some random cistern unrelated to this case.

Lauren: It’s like a little holder of water. No, I’m arguing the exact same thing, and people actually swear they can hear Elma. But I feel like, you know, as we close, I feel like this is emblematic of this particular case is that there’s so much stuff we are told and that we think we know, and then when you dig, you find out it’s wrong. That is the Manhattan well murder and Levi Weeks trial right there in a nutshell.

Dylan: Apparently that was not Elma’s spirit that I was connecting with at the Soho well. You know, sometimes you just feel it, whatever. Anyway, you can see why Lauren wanted to make this into a historical fiction novel. It has so many twists and turns. And to this day, we truly do not know who killed Elma Sands. Lauren has her own theories, but to find out who she thinks killed Elma, you are going to have to read her book, The Girl from Greenwich Street: A Novel of Hamilton, Burr, and America’s First Murder Trial. See you next time.

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This episode was produced by Manolo Morales. Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Stitcher Studios. The people who make our show include Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Baudelaire, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tindall.