Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America's First Sensational Murder Mystery

by Paul Collins

Until 1701, British and American defendants didn’t even have the right to counsel or to call witnesses, because holding trials was considered necessary only when there was already overwhelming proof of wrongdoing.

The court, as a matter of course, did not accept testimony from children under the age of discretion—that is, fourteen years old. This was considered the age of being fully able to discern right from wrong, and to comprehend the gravity of the mortal sin of false witness.

While in the previous decade the notion of “beyond a reasonable doubt” had started to gain currency as a legal concept, men of Judge Lansing’s generation had been trained to believe that jurors were in danger of mortal sin if they convicted on insufficient evidence in a capital case.

In past centuries, before the adversarial system of trials allowed defendants to have lawyers, a murder trial was effectively a ceremony of laying out a person’s guilt and punishment.

With stenographers ready to take down dialogue, and an adversarial trial system to fuel the drama of the trial, all that was needed for the first true-crime mystery was, in fact, an unsolved murder—and the Elma Sands case had been the final key element needed to create an explosive new form of literature.

The Manhattan Company was turning into a full-fledged bank, just as Aaron Burr intended, with its old identity faintly evident in the middle name of a modern descendant: Chase Manhattan Bank.

Some rivalries, it seems, never will be settled.