technically not UBC, since I've read it before: Kleiger, The Trial of Levi Weeks

The Trial of Levi Weeks: Or the Manhattan Well Mystery by Estelle Fox Kleiger

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is not a great book. Kleiger is good at pointing out inconsistencies in the testimony, but her writing style is flat and unengaging and she has no particular thesis. If you are going to have great wads of 18/19th century trial transcripts in your text, you need to have something to offset them, and Kleiger doesn't.

Gulielma Sands (guessing from various misspellings, her name was pronounced Julie-Elma--or, given how frequently her nickname Elma is transcribed as Elmore, Julie-Elmer) is yet another in the sad sisterhood of Helen Jewett, Sarah Maria Cornell, Grace Brown, and--I strongly suspect--Mary Cecilia Rogers: the women whose murders fall into the category I have flippantly labeled why buy the cow? Chester Gillette was executed, but Richard Robinson, Ephraim Avery, and Levi Weeks (leaving aside the mysterious murderer of Mary Rogers, who got clean away) were all acquitted, despite the evidence against them. (Crucially, I think, Gillette was only marginally of a higher class than Brown and had very little social capital to cash in, whereas Robinson, Avery, and Weeks were all much better connected than their unfortunate victims.)

Weeks' trial is notable for, aside from the wretched job done by the prosecution, the fact that his lawyers were Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, four years before Burr killed Hamilton in a duel. Burr and Hamilton bring all their rhetorical cannons to the task of persuading the jury that (1) Gulielma Sands was a young woman of ill morals and melancholic disposition, probably conducting an affair with her uncle; that even if, refusing to be distracted by the uncle, you think you need to inquire into her death anyway, (2) she killed herself (by beating herself up and throwing herself in a well); that even if you are so ill-bred as to insist that she was murdered, (3) their client is a young man of sterling reputation, about whom no one has ever said a disparaging word; that even if you are not convinced that that means he can't have murdered the young lady, (4) he has an alibi (supported by his brother! How can you doubt?); that even if you are skeptical of the alibi, (5) the witnesses for the prosecution are all lying or confused or just plain wrong, and most of their evidence is immaterial anyway (even if there was a horse, which learned counsel take leave to doubt, it certainly can't be proved that it was a horse belonging to Levi Weeks' brother--that same brother who is providing the alibi); and even if you persist in questioning Levi Weeks' innocence, (6) no one can prove Gulielma Sands left her house in his company; and (7) [triumphantly] therefore no one can prove he murdered her!

(Our definition of "prove" here is very very narrow, since on the evening that--Sands had confided to her aunt and cousin--Weeks was going to take her to be secretly married, shortly after Sands had gone upstairs to get ready to leave the house, Weeks left the sitting room, whereupon Sands' aunt heard someone descend the stairs (from the upstairs location of Sands' bedroom), heard considerable whispering in the hall, and heard someone(s) leave. Thereafter, neither Weeks nor Sands were to be found in the house. But that doesn't prove anything.)

And because the Assistant Attorney General was about as much use as a tennis racquet is to a duck, it didn't prove anything. Weeks was acquitted--although he was pretty bluntly found guilty in popular opinion, which may have been the reason for his leaving New York: he ended up a successful architect in Natchez: Auburn, with its absolutely astonishing completely free-standing spiral staircase, is the brainchild of Levi Weeks.

Levi Weeks died young, at 43, but it's still a better ending than Gulielma Sands got.



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