NEW YORK FOLKLORE QUARTERLY
Vol. XVIII, No. 3, September 1962

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THE QUAKER’S CURSE IN NEW YORK CITY’S FIRST “LOVE MURDER”
Charles A. Huguenin

DEEP down underneath the flagstones in an untidy factory alley in New York City lies a deep well, part of the water system used at the end of the eighteenth century. The alley is located a few doors up from Spring Street on the west side of Greene. Today high walls hem it in, and winds through its sinister, brooding confines waft captured, sooty papers about within its narrow environs. Time was when this section lay in the country on the edge of the Lispenard Meadows, and the well was a new project, recently dug by the Manhattan Company, which Aaron Burr had organized. It was then eighty feet deep with water varying in depth from five feet five inches to six feet. The famous reporter-columnist of the New York Times, Meyer Berger, set out in October, 1957, to locate the site of the old well. Using tapers made hastily from the discarded papers that he found in the alley at 89 Greene Street, he peered through the grated well cover. Satisfied that he had found the remains of the well, he returned to the taxi that he had hired to bring him to the deserted factory district after dark. The cab driver wondered what reason the reporter had for visiting the lonely spot in the alley.

“Just checking on a murder,” replied the reporter. “A girl was killed here.”

“I think I read about it a coupla days ago,” was the cab driver’s rejoinder

From this well on January 2, 1800, the body of twenty-two-year old Gulielma Elmore Sands was recovered. Miss Sands had lived with her uncle and aunt, Elias and Catherine Ring, in the upper part of Greenwich Street near Franklin when the population of the bustling metropolis did not exceed sixty thousand people. The distance from the boarding house of Mrs. Ring to the Manhattan Well by Greenwich Street was “79 chains,” or twenty-two yards short of a mile. It took a man walking the distance twenty minutes. A horse could negotiate the distance there and back in fifteen minutes, but the road in this early period in New York City’s history was “very rough and dangerous.” In one man̵s opinion, it was an impossible feat for a horse to draw a sleigh or carriage over it on a dark night.

On Sunday evening, December 22, 1799, three days before Christmas, Miss Sands left her home about eight o’clock, allegedly with one of the boarders, and was never seen alive afterward. Whether she jumped, fell, or was pushed into the Manhattan Well remains to this day an unsolved mystery. The idea of suicide was peculiarly repugnant to the girl’s relatives. Her aunt, a Quaker by religion, refused to believe that “Elma,” who had lived with her for three years as one of her family, could be guilty of such a reprehensible sin as self-destruction. Elma was not herself a Friend, hut her aunt probably entertained the conviction that the light of her own religion was within her niece. She preferred, therefore, to ascribe her niece’s death to murder and the commission of it to Levi Weeks, a carpenter who boarded with her. The case, which excited intense interest at the time, has been called “the first of New York’s so-called ‘love murders.’”

The sensational trial that lasted from ten o’clock on Monday morning, March 31, 1800, until 2:25 on Wednesday morning of a carpenter for the murder of a nondescript and not too circumspect young lady would probably long since have slipped unobtrusively into the limbo of the forgotten past if it were not for the fact that both Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr served as counsellors for the defense four years before their fatal duel on the heights of Weehawken. For the folklorist interested in the efficacy of curses, the trial of Levi Weeks holds speculative appeal. After the verdict of “Not Guilty” was pronounced, Mrs. Elias Ring allegedly turned to Alexander Hamilton, who had taken the lead in the legal battle to establish the innocence of the accused. Shaking her fist under his nose, she venomously cried in enraged tones: “If thee dies a natural death, I shall think there is no justice in heaven!”
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