The Trial of Levi Weeks

In January 1800, just weeks after the death of George Washington, the body of a young New York woman was recovered from the depths of Manhattan Well-so called because it had been dug by Aaron Burr's Manhattan Company. The woman was Gulielma "Elma" Sands, who on December 22 had left the boardinghouse where she lived, never to return. Suspicion immediately fell on another boarder, Levi Weeks, who according to Sands's cousin and landlady was to marry the victim the very night she disappeared. By the time Weeks went on trial for Sands's murder a few months later, the crime had become the talk of New York City. So many New Yorkers came to visit Sands's body before her funeral that her open coffin was displayed in the street, and crowds jammed the thoroughfares around the courthouse shouting for Weeks to be hanged. The fate of the accused lay in the hands of a defense team recruited by his brother, prominent builder Ezra Weeks, from the upper ranks of New York society. Weeks's team of star lawyers-which included both Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr-had to work together to defend a client whom all of New York seemed to have already decided was guilty. This book tells the full story of the trial of Levi Weeks and includes the entire transcript of the first American murder trial ever recorded. It is at once a riveting retelling of a true crime in which the voices of early New Yorkers come to us freshly from over two centuries in the past, and a riveting legal and social history of New York in the early years of the Republic.