Page 38 of The Girl from Greenwich Street

What became of them after?

Levi Weeks’s reputation as a murderer followed him to Massachusetts.

Hounded out of first one town and then another, Levi wandered from South Deerfield, Massachusetts, to Cincinnati to Marietta, Ohio, to Lexington, Kentucky, before eventually settling in Natchez, Mississippi, where he found success as a cabinetmaker and architect and married a girl twenty years his junior, with whom he had four children before dying of an unspecified illness at the age of forty-three.

Whether Levi was happy in his exile is another question entirely.

In a revealing letter to his brother written in 1812, Levi describes life in parts of Ohio and Kentucky as “a life of penance”

and refers to various of his fellow Natchez citizens as “a great horde of vagabonds.”

Elias Ring and his wife, Catherine, had six more children together, but Elias took to heavy drinking.

In 1816, he was expelled from the Society of Friends “for the continued intemperate use of intoxicating spirits,”

despite having been “tenderly labored with for a considerable time.”

Elias died of yellow fever in Mobile, Alabama, in 1823.

Catherine Ring and her children eventually returned to her hometown of New Cornwall, New York, where Catherine turned her childhood home into a summer boardinghouse known fondly as Rose Cottage.

She lived to eighty-three, known for her good works and for the book she wrote about her father, the Quaker preacher David Sands.

Local lore recalls Catherine Sands proudly coming to church on Sundays trailed by no fewer than twenty-nine grandchildren.

Hope Sands also returned to New Cornwall.

In 1804, she married Charles Newbold, a New Jersey–born inventor who held the patent for a cast iron plow and predicted that someday “man would travel through the air and under water.”

By all accounts, they had a long and happy life together.

Newbold died in 1835; Hope in 1871.

Richard Croucher was convicted of the rape of Margaret Miller on the eighth of July, 1800.

Sentenced to life imprisonment, Croucher was granted a pardon on the condition that he emigrate.

Instead, Croucher made his way to Virginia, where he again fell afoul of the law, this time for fraud.

Exiled to his native England, Croucher was convicted and hanged for “a heinous crime.”

Legend has it that Catherine Ring cursed the members of the defense team and the chief justice.

The so-called Quaker’s Curse took its time and its effects were felt unequally.

Aaron Burr famously shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804, killing his rival and his own political career.

After his brief moment of glory as vice president, Burr lurched from tragedy to tragedy: in 1807, he was tried for treason; in 1813, his beloved daughter, Theodosia Burr Alston, disappeared after the shipwreck of the schooner Patriot, her fate still unknown.

Burr lived in exile and penury, eventually returning to New York and attempting to recoup his fortunes by marrying the wealthy widow Eliza Jumel.

Jumel divorced him in 1834—hiring Alexander Hamilton Jr.

as her lawyer.

Brockholst Livingston, however, appears to have evaded the Quaker’s Curse.

He not only survived but thrived.

In 1807, he was appointed to the Supreme Court, where law students will forever remember him as the author of the idiosyncratic dissent in Pierson v. Post.

Justice Lansing, who delivered the charge to the jury dismissing the prosecution’s evidence, became the subject of another unsolved crime.

In December 1829, he was staying at the City Hotel in New York.

He left to meet a friend for tea—and was never seen again.

Did he drown? Was he murdered? Theories have abounded over the years, but, like Elma Sands’s murder, there is no real proof.

Cadwallader Colden rose above his early defeats in both the courtroom and the polls to enjoy a distinguished career in law and public service.

Pleading poor health, he took his family on an eighteen-month tour of Europe.

Returning refreshed, he went on to serve as president of the New York Manumission Society, mayor of New York, a member of the New York State Senate, and a powerful proponent of canals.

(Law students will note that Cadwallader Colden argued for the defense in Pierson v.

Post.

He lost—although Brockholst, in his dissent, took Colden’s part.)

Elma Sands was buried in the Friends Burying Ground.

In death, as in life, Elma remains elusive.

The well where Elma was murdered still exists, beneath the basement of a clothing boutique at 129 Spring Street, but the Friends Burying Ground does not.

Since Quakers did not believe in the use of headstones, when the bodies were moved and reinterred in the nineteenth century, the exact location of Elma’s bones was lost.

The murder of Elma Sands has never been conclusively solved.