On Monday, December 23, 1799, the morning after Elma Sands disappeared, the death of George Washington dominated New York newspapers. Muffled church bells tolled continuously for an hour beginning at noon, as they would each day up to the former president’s ceremonial funeral in Manhattan a week later. To memorialize the general who liberated New York from the British on Evacuation Day in 1783 and was inaugurated in the city as the nascent nation’s first president six years later, marchers accompanied a symbolic three-foot-tall urn to a service at St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway, where Washington had worshipped after he was sworn in. “Every kind of business ceased, and every thought was employed in preparation for the melancholy solemnity,” according to one account. But by the following Monday, after it was reported that Washington had been buried at Mount Vernon, New Yorkers were already turning their thoughts to somebody else. Elma Sands was still missing.
Born as Gulielma Elmore Sands, she apparently came to New York City from the Connecticut Valley. Everyone knew her as Elma. The vivacious twenty-two-year-old had boarded since the previous July in a house on Greenwich Street owned by her married cousin, Catherine Ring, and her cousin’s husband, Elias. On Sunday night, December 22, Elma mysteriously vanished. Witnesses heard her in her room upstairs.
Supposedly she was preparing to elope. Her presumptive fiancé, fellow boarder Levi Weeks, was waiting in the sitting room, possibly with his brother, then stepped into the entryway. A whispered conversation was overheard. The front door opened and closed. A moment later a friend encountered Sands by chance on Greenwich Street, but her companion, whom the friend could not identify, pulled her away. As far as anyone knows, Elma Sands was never seen alive again.
Winter had only officially arrived the day before, but the season already had been lustily heralded: snow coated the narrow streets and blanketed the spacious and sparsely populated Lispenard’s Meadows, part of the old Anneke Jans farm between New York City and the village of Greenwich, where Elma Sands and her companion appeared to have been heading. The night was frigid, so bone-chilling that she had borrowed a fur muff from a neighbor before she left the house on Greenwich Street. Searchers dragged the Hudson River for her body but came up empty-handed. Two days later her muff was found about half a mile inland, near the fresh tracks of a one-horse sleigh and not far from a well recently commissioned by the Manhattan Company and built with lumber and other building supplies purchased from Levi Weeks’s brother, Ezra.