Nestled in the basement of a boutique in the heart of New York City's SoHo neighborhood is a brick well that is so discreet, you might not notice it. The well is surrounded by $250 cashmere sweaters and vegan-leather Chelsea boots. There’s no placard that denotes the well's history, no rope asking people to stand five feet back. If you didn’t know better, it seems to be merely an architectural oversight.
But the history behind this well is much more important and sinister than it appears. It‘s where the body of 22-year-old Elma Sands was found in 1799. Her murder underscored the shady side of New York’s elite, and the sexist foundations of the American criminal justice system.
The Elma Sands case, the first formally recorded murder trial in the United States, pitted a young woman with no connections against some of the wealthiest and most influential men in America, including Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, who were lawyers for the defendant, Levi Weeks. But because so much of history has been written by the victors, Sands’ story has been all but forgotten.
That’s exactly what the podcast Erased: The Murder of Elma Sands hopes to reverse. The Lava for Good Podcasts production, created by writer and director Allison Flom, stars actors Allison Williams (Girls and Get Out) and Tony Goldwyn (Scandal).
Williams, who is also an executive producer on the show, is passionate about criminal justice reform — one of the reasons she was so drawn to this project. “[The story of Elma Sands] has been rendered to two lines in Hamilton,” Williams tells Teen Vogue. “And this well is just in the basement of a store. There's no marking.… Finding and uplifting a story that's been lost to history feels so vital. I love the mission of trying to amplify and elevate any story, no matter how big or small, and just say it is possible to bring it out of the dark into the sun.”
Here, Williams breaks down the importance of the Elma Sands murder trial, the story of Sands' cousin Catherine who refused to let only one side of the story be told, and the reason it’s so important to continue talking about it all these years later.
Teen Vogue: Why is it so important for you to help tell Elma’s story? What drew you in?
Allison Williams: She was just a normal girl living in that time, and people spoke very dismissively of her because she wasn't from one of the wealthy families that ran the country. She's just a nobody. The extent to which [her cousin] Catherine insisted on her mattering was very moving. Her story resonated with me because it's almost too exaggerated to be true, a kind of complete misapplication of this early justice system.
Without spoiling anything, [Elma Sands] was never going to become a name we knew. [The Weeks brothers] were going to bury it. They had all the power, they had all the privilege, they had all the access. It was so stacked against her. I'm not a punitive person. I don't love incarceration — I hate it. I think the system is so broken, but seeing how some of those broken places were just baked in from the very start is infuriating to me.
If you think about a fledgling, new justice system, you kind of have a choice. This is the first murder trial with the Constitution. If you had some really cool, open-minded, creative people in there, they might decide to put some stuff into the legal system that's more progressive and more creative and a little more open. Instead, they just baked all the same you-know-what into it, and that's heartbreaking, and you see it play out in real time.
TV: Throughout the podcast, we hear about so many women being discredited by Hamilton and Burr. Why is it so important to show the rampant sexism that took place during this trial?
AW: It's not that different from how women are communicated with today, especially in legal proceedings and stuff like that. You never know what kind of portrayal of that is going to hit the people who are in a position to wield power.
I think for women listening to it, it'll feel devastatingly familiar. Perhaps for men listening to it, it might give them an opportunity to hear themselves in this new way. Sometimes, when you take your own experience out of context enough, you might be more able to witness something you do more openly without feeling you're being accused of it.
I think it's really important [for people with power] to [lead] with a 360 understanding of what that encompasses and how much hurt you can cause just by using a word or speaking to someone dismissively or not making eye contact with someone, not including someone in a conversation. Catherine's decision to display Elma's body was against her faith and very much, obviously, against what one would customarily do at that time. Yet, it was like the equivalent of using social media of the time to just get the story out, to get people to care.
TV: How do you think the justice system failed Elma?
AW: In every way. It was alarming, honestly. Listening to it was kind of heartbreaking, because there are so many moments where no one really knows how to handle something because it's all new.
When I was younger, I voraciously read choose-your-own-adventure books; this court case feels like the worst version of that, where at every intersection, they just choose the version that you're hoping they're not going to choose. Where they're like, “Let's do the cruelest thing, let's do the thing that stacks everything against her in this moment, thus establishing precedent.”
I think the sickness is so deep, the illness is built into the system, and I think we feel the impact of it every day now. The lack of creativity from those people who set it up is part of what hurts so much. And every man who was in a position to decide Elma's fate after her death went on to be in charge of our country in some way or another, and they were all friends with each other. She never stood a chance.
TV: Do you think anything has changed since her case?
AW: It would be ridiculous to try to make the point that nothing has improved. It would also be ridiculous to make the point that nothing has gotten worse.
I think with time, with this system, what has happened is people have figured out how to exploit it for good and bad. People have learned how to improve it. A lot of the things, like the way that private testimony is given and all of that, I think have gotten better. But once you become really comfortable with a document like the Constitution, you realize it's kind of malleable and you can use it to whatever ends you want.
We've seen both versions of progress, depending on which side you root for, if it's bringing things back in time or pushing things forward. But I have no illusions about the fact that there was a big chunk of people in our country who thought things worked just fine back then. And that's another horrifying thought.
TV: As a criminal justice reformer, why is this particular mission so important to you?
AW: Sometimes it feels like if someone doesn't already think the system is broken, it's hard to get them with a new argument by pointing to anything that's happening today. I sometimes hit a wall and I'm like, “I don't know how to make this point to you.” I often think it's easier to have conversations about topics that can be hard when you remove them from a familiar context.
Perhaps if this podcast reaches the kind of people who think our justice system works — the good guys win, the bad guys lose — they might listen to this and be like, “Oh, my God, this is horrible! Nothing should work this way.” They'd be horrified to learn that a lot still works that way today, and that might make them think more critically about the justice system.
I think, in general, if you live a pretty charmed life, you can live a long time having no intervention with the criminal injustice system at any point. And it's often the most dangerous person who holds an opinion that it basically has been working. It's just quietly been protecting them from harm their whole life.
I just yearn for everyone to look at it more critically and holistically. It's very messy. There's no binary anywhere to be found. There's no way of isolating, this is good, this is bad. The whole thing needs to be picked apart and destroyed and put back together, in my opinion.
But before you can do any of that structural change, everyone needs to come to an agreement about the sliding scale of humanity. Everyone has a story. Everyone deserves a chance at life. Everyone deserves the ability to have a good life [and to be able] to defend themselves. And the people who don't have the loudest voice need bigger megaphones.
That's sort of the message of the story: If only Elma had had a megaphone that was equal in some way to the amount of power that the Weeks and Hamilton and Burr had put together. Maybe she stood a chance, but there's no megaphone big enough to do that. And we still see women in that position all the time.
TV: What do you hope listeners take away from Elma Sands' story?
AW: I'm always curious to hear what people take away from it because, I think, when something is good, a lot of people can come away with a lot of different things. I know what I have taken away from it. I've had so many conversations with people in my life that were sparked by this story. I hope the same is true for anybody who listens to it. I hope it creates further curiosity into Elma's life, about which there's shockingly little. Which is why telling stories like this is really important. I'm excited to hear other reactions because we come at this with different prisms.
Anyone out there who's like, “You know what? My grandmother dealt with some horrific bullsh*t. That is a story that I feel like people should know.” The answer is yes, and the answer is to get it out there in some shape or form. Please share it, because you just never know where people are going to find resonance.
I want to encourage people to tell their own stories, but often it's equally liberating to tell a story that feels generationally important. Especially with the advancements in studying generational trauma and inherited emotional experiences, I can imagine that lifting a weight in the telling of the story could be really powerful. So, if you feel safe to tell us your grandparents' stories and your parents' stories and your stories, just tell 'em. Put 'em in the light.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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